0:00:00It has been so long since we recorded.
0:00:02So since we last recorded,
0:00:05I have gotten the new MacBook Air,
0:00:07already did an entire three hour podcast about it
0:00:10with Jon Gruber, the talk show at 352.
0:00:12I DFU restored my 14 inch MacBook Pro,
0:00:15which I think has fixed most of its problems,
0:00:17and I went to two fish concerts.
0:00:19- You went to two fish concerts?
0:00:21Why were you going to two?
0:00:22- Yeah, we got a poll on that thread in a second,
0:00:24but since we're doing our quick updates,
0:00:26meanwhile, I went to Cape Charles for a week
0:00:28and Michaela got her second shot.
0:00:30So the List family is as vaccinated
0:00:32as we can possibly be right now,
0:00:33and I'm very excited about that.
0:00:34- All right. - John,
0:00:35what have you been doing?
0:00:36- I've been on Long Island just hanging out at the beach.
0:00:40I'm back now, though.
0:00:40My most exciting upcoming news,
0:00:42oh, I did get my M2 MacBook Air.
0:00:44Well, it's not mine.
0:00:45My M2 MacBook Air for my son,
0:00:47he's got that up on his desk,
0:00:48and he's using it as if nothing has changed
0:00:50from his M1 MacBook Air, so that's fine.
0:00:52But my exciting news is that my television,
0:00:55in theory, is arriving on Monday.
0:00:57(all gasp)
0:00:58- Did you prepare the way?
0:00:59- The way is not yet prepared.
0:01:00I just got back from vacation literally today.
0:01:02So I really haven't, I've just barely started unpacking
0:01:06stuff and plugging things back in.
0:01:08Oh, I had an ominous email for my Synology
0:01:10while I was gone too.
0:01:11- Saying what?
0:01:12- Tell me if you ever got this one.
0:01:14Let me see.
0:01:15Synology detected an abnormal power failure
0:01:18that occurred on drive two in volume one.
0:01:20- Oh, that doesn't sound good.
0:01:21- Are there normal power failures?
0:01:23- What is an abnormal power failure that occurred on drive,
0:01:26how can a power failure occur on a drive?
0:01:28Anyway, I didn't do anything to it yet.
0:01:31I went downstairs and looked at it
0:01:32and all the lights are on and none of the lights are angry.
0:01:35It says to, for more information, go to storage manager,
0:01:38storage, and check the suggestions
0:01:39under the corresponding volume.
0:01:40The suggestion probably is,
0:01:41hey, don't use hard drives for eight years.
0:01:43- I mean, that's a pretty good suggestion.
0:01:45- But anyway, I haven't looked into my Synology yet,
0:01:47but tomorrow, in theory, I will begin preparing the way
0:01:50for the television.
0:01:52- That's gotta be a big job.
0:01:54- So I was gonna ask, we don't have to go into the nitty-gritty
0:01:56but would you mind giving just like the briefest overview
0:01:59of what you expect preparing the way to look like?
0:02:01- So I have to rip everything out
0:02:03that's under my television stand thing now.
0:02:06So I've got a receiver, I've got a bunch of game consoles,
0:02:09I've got a TiVo, I've got a PlayStation 3.
0:02:11Let's see, Apple TV, there's a lot of crap back there
0:02:17across all the like plugs and surge strips
0:02:19and all that other stuff that it plugs into.
0:02:22That's all gotta come out
0:02:23because some of those game consoles
0:02:25either can't connect to my television or I won't be connecting to my television.
0:02:29The PlayStation 3 is just going into cold storage because I have a dedicated Blu-ray player and
0:02:35that's the only thing I was using that thing for. And then I have to get my plasma television off
0:02:40of the stand, leaving the stand empty. And then I have to repopulate the stand by sticking in my
0:02:45new receiver, putting in the game consoles that I'm going to continue to keep/use as decorative
0:02:51items. Some of the game consoles are going to become decorative items. I know I could buy an
0:02:57adapter to like you know connect these. I'm not sure what I'm gonna do. I have the component video
0:03:02cable for my you know GameCube and Wii and the Wii U with HDMI so I could get adapters for those
0:03:09things but it's not probably not worth it so I'll probably leave some of them in there as
0:03:13space fillers and decorations. But really the main task is putting the new receiver in connecting the
0:03:17the umpteen speaker wires to it and swapping an all new fancy 4k high frame
0:03:23rate blah blah blah whatever HDMI cables for the old ones which don't support any
0:03:29of the new fancy stuff and in theory fingers crossed I have all the things
0:03:34that I need I have the cables I have the receiver I have the blu-ray player that
0:03:39had a little minor surgery as we talked about in the past episode so the
0:03:42So preparing the way, if it all goes well,
0:03:46when the television arrives,
0:03:47there will be a television stand with all new equipment in it
0:03:50with no television on top of it,
0:03:52and they will just drop off the television
0:03:53and hopefully leave my house,
0:03:54and then I have to connect the third-party stand
0:03:56to my television, and we'll see how that goes.
0:03:57You'll hear about it in the next episode, I'm sure.
0:04:00(electronic beeping)
0:04:01- So how is your MacBook Air to pop the stack a little bit?
0:04:05- All right, so I did a much longer review on the talk show,
0:04:07but my gist of it here is
0:04:11It feels strikingly good.
0:04:13Like when you pick it up or move it
0:04:16or open it up to use it or close it,
0:04:18it just feels really good.
0:04:21It is really fast and it sounds like crap.
0:04:26- What do you mean it sounds like crap?
0:04:27- The speakers are garbage.
0:04:28But everything else-- - Oh, really?
0:04:30- Yeah, when you compare it to the MacBook Pro 14,
0:04:33most of the differences where the MacBook Pro
0:04:36is an upgrade, when you're using them side by side
0:04:39or when you switch between them,
0:04:40really notice them. The differences aren't that noticeable in the screen quality, the
0:04:46promotion, like I don't notice when promotion is not there really. I do very much notice
0:04:52the speaker difference. It is extremely obvious every time the computer plays any kind of
0:04:56sound. The MacBook Air speakers are pretty rough when you are used to the MacBook Pro
0:05:01speakers. They're good in absolute terms compared to other small inexpensive laptops, but compared
0:05:07to the 14 inch MacBook Pro it's no contest. The speakers on the MacBook Pro are both much
0:05:12much louder and much better sound quality in general. The MacBook Air speakers sound
0:05:16like small tinny speakers but everything else in its comparable category and like you know
0:05:22the PC market and stuff you know it compares very well to those but yeah compared to the
0:05:2714 inch it's no contest. However, the way it feels oh my god it feels so thin and light
0:05:34when you compare it to the 14 inch.
0:05:36And the difference on paper doesn't seem like
0:05:38it would be that much, but it matters a lot.
0:05:41It is extremely noticeable and it just feels fantastic
0:05:45when you have to pick it up or hold it or whatever.
0:05:48It's fantastic. - That's awesome.
0:05:49- So very, very happy with it.
0:05:52I'm already finding lots of various uses
0:05:54for now having three computers. (laughs)
0:05:57But I love it, it's great, and if you are at all
0:06:01on the fence on whether you might want a MacBook Air,
0:06:04Go for it. It's great. I did get silver. I think it is the generally the best color that's
0:06:09available I think right now. It is the most boring color. Well, I wouldn't say that. Space
0:06:14gray is the most boring color. But silver is certainly a close second in that regard.
0:06:21It is a boring color but I as I mentioned before I think the the new super dark blue
0:06:27in practice is very fingerprinty and usually looks just black and I don't I don't love
0:06:33and the gold I think is nice if you don't have
0:06:38any other silver aluminum on your desk.
0:06:42But if you have any other silver aluminum on your desk,
0:06:44it doesn't quite match it and it looks kind of wrong.
0:06:48So that's up to you whether that's a problem for you or not.
0:06:52But yeah, I love this thing, I think it's great.
0:06:54I did notice they moved the headphone jack
0:06:57back to the wrong side.
0:06:59- Oh did they?
0:07:00You know, from the 2016 dark days,
0:07:04we had the headphone jack move to the right,
0:07:06and of course, listeners heard me complain about that
0:07:09forever on this show, because headphones typically
0:07:12that have only one ear cup connecting to the wire,
0:07:15usually that's the left side of the headphone,
0:07:18and so it doesn't make a lot of sense
0:07:20to put the headphone jack on the right,
0:07:22because not only does it intrude into your mouse space,
0:07:24if you're a right-handed mouse user,
0:07:25if you have them next to the laptop,
0:07:27but then also, it has to then wrap around
0:07:29to the left side of the laptop,
0:07:30either crossing behind it or in front of it
0:07:32to get to the left ear cup of a left-wired headphone.
0:07:36So they moved the headphone jack back over to the left
0:07:40on the new MacBook Pros when they came out last year.
0:07:42But it's for some reason staying on the right
0:07:44for the MacBook Air.
0:07:45So eh, that's, you know, it's not great.
0:07:48- That's the same complaint about all the ports
0:07:50on the MacBook Air.
0:07:51Like it's got two, you know, the MagSafe
0:07:53and the two Thunderbolt ports or whatever,
0:07:54and they're all on the left side.
0:07:56And it would be nice if there was one port
0:07:58on one side and one port on the other.
0:07:59You can see that if they put them on one on one side one of the other people would complain they aren't both on the
0:08:03Same side, so there's no perfect solution there
0:08:04I understand that like we're just you don't see the other side of it
0:08:08But yeah the headphone port being over there seems to be the same
0:08:11Oh, no, I know it's not on the left is on the right it
0:08:13Well, so it's like it's part of that whole the left is occupied by all the other ports
0:08:17So the right is the place with space remaining to put stuff
0:08:20But it's kind of weird because if you look at the motherboard they they did the thing they've done for many years now and made
0:08:25the ports modular so if you break a port or something you don't have to replace
0:08:29your entire logic board you just you know they take off that little module
0:08:32put another one on but of course you've got to get all the traces and everything
0:08:35to the place where the thing is so yeah it's kind of a shame that they didn't
0:08:39flip the thing around but speaking of audio stuff that I missed the part where
0:08:42you compared the m2 MacBook Air to the m1 MacBook Air speakers I would if I
0:08:47still had that computer in my possession but I do not
0:08:50yes but based on your memory though because you're saying all the speaker
0:08:52sounds terrible.
0:08:53I would expect that they would sound worse than the much
0:08:56thicker, more expensive fancy computer,
0:08:58but I'm wondering how it sounds.
0:08:59I mean, I guess I have both of them in my house.
0:09:01I can check it out.
0:09:02I just honestly never use those speakers.
0:09:04My son always has his AirPods in or some other headphones in.
0:09:07But I'll check.
0:09:08I have both machines.
0:09:08Let's see if I can check back in next week if I remember.
0:09:11Yeah.
0:09:11I don't want to assign homework because I'm not allowed to.
0:09:14However, I would love to know that information from you.
0:09:16But I'm guessing it's probably-- I'm
0:09:18sure it compares well to its own predecessor
0:09:20and previous MacBook Airs.
0:09:22But yeah, in general, this thing,
0:09:25they're gonna sell an absolute ton of these things.
0:09:27And I think for the first time,
0:09:31well, I guess not the M1,
0:09:32you can say the same thing with the M1,
0:09:34but there's no longer a cheap but bad option
0:09:38in the Apple laptop lineup that you shouldn't buy.
0:09:40There's the 13 inch MacBook Pro that you shouldn't buy.
0:09:43But that's not that cheap.
0:09:46So whether you get the M1 MacBook Air,
0:09:50which is still being sold now,
0:09:51or whether you get this, they're both amazing computers.
0:09:54They've done such a great job with this.
0:09:56And man, the laptop lineup is in such a great place
0:10:00right now, like again, with the exception
0:10:02of that stupid 13 inch, which it's not a,
0:10:05it isn't a bad computer.
0:10:06There are just much better computers right next to it
0:10:08in the lineup, but with that sole weird spot,
0:10:12you really can't make a bad decision in this lineup.
0:10:14It's just, it's great, all of them are great
0:10:17and you get to kinda just pick what size and features
0:10:21and price you want, and it's a great place to be.
0:10:25And it's especially heartening after,
0:10:28we had so many kind of dark years there in the middle,
0:10:31and those times are now very, very well behind us,
0:10:35and it's a great place to be right now.
0:10:37- Well, I mean, the one bad decision you can make
0:10:39is if you get the base model of the MacBook Air
0:10:42or MacBook Pro M2, because the base models
0:10:44have slow SSDs with single chip,
0:10:46and it's probably not that big a deal,
0:10:49but you should probably get a bigger SSD anyway,
0:10:51So that's the bad decision you can make.
0:10:53Don't get ones with 256 gigs of storage
0:10:56for multiple reasons, but in particular
0:10:58on this round of things because it is slower.
0:11:00- I mean, it is, but again, I don't think that's a thing,
0:11:04really, that's gonna matter to almost anybody.
0:11:06Really, what you will feel is running out of space.
0:11:10So the real reason you shouldn't get 256
0:11:12is that it's just not enough space for comfortable use.
0:11:14Get 512, and if you can't afford 512,
0:11:17either wait until you can or get the M1 MacBook Air
0:11:20because it's still for sale, with that having 512.
0:11:22- I mean, the M1 MacBook Air is the problem here.
0:11:24It was like, if you, let's say you have an M1 MacBook Air
0:11:26and you wanna get an M2 because one is more than two,
0:11:28or two is more than one, maybe.
0:11:30(laughing)
0:11:31And you wanna do that upgrade.
0:11:32Well, if you get that upgrade and you make the mistake
0:11:34of getting the base model, it could be that some things
0:11:36that you do are actually slower on your fancy new computer,
0:11:38and that's a bummer.
0:11:39So, you know, it doesn't matter to the general public,
0:11:41but if you're going M1 MacBook Air to M2 MacBook Air,
0:11:43continue to be aware, do not buy the base model.
0:11:46It's too little storage, and the storage is slow,
0:11:48and they may affect your performance
0:11:50if you do anything that is somewhat governed
0:11:53by the SSD speed.
0:11:54- Yeah.
0:11:55- So going back up the stack, down the stack, whatever,
0:11:58across the stack, you went to two, not one, but two,
0:12:01count them, two Phish concerts over the last couple of weeks.
0:12:04Was this, were both of these in Jones Beach?
0:12:06- You're forgetting, I also DFU restored my 14 inch.
0:12:09- Oh yeah, that's right, I forgot about that.
0:12:10- That's quite an experience.
0:12:12So for those of you who don't know the details
0:12:14of all this stuff, so at some point you might have had
0:12:17to do this to an iPhone or an iPad.
0:12:19So there's this process called DFU,
0:12:20extension for device firmware update.
0:12:22And this is one of the things where if the OS
0:12:24on your iPhone or iPad gets really hosed,
0:12:28like to the point where like it's just,
0:12:30there's a major problem, it can't boot up
0:12:33and get updates or whatever,
0:12:34or where a more common reason you might have seen this
0:12:36is if you ever wanna downgrade from a beta
0:12:39back to the previous OS release.
0:12:41The way you have to do this is you have to put the phone
0:12:44in this special DFU mode, which basically involves like,
0:12:46you hold down the power button for a long time
0:12:48and then the screen turns black and it shows up,
0:12:52you have to connect it to a Mac and it shows up
0:12:54in the iTunes kind of interface and it says,
0:12:57this device is in firmware restore mode
0:13:00and you have to tell it to restore an update
0:13:02and the computer controls the whole thing.
0:13:04Well, the way that you can restore M1 and M2 based Macs,
0:13:09they basically have that exact same process
0:13:12available on them.
0:13:12Now this isn't the only way you need to restore them
0:13:15But the issues I was having with my 14 inch
0:13:19were so weird and seemed like it might be
0:13:21some kind of possibly like, you know,
0:13:23firmware level problems that I was having
0:13:25with some component of it maybe,
0:13:27I decided let me restore this in the most,
0:13:30to use a force realism, the most blow away way
0:13:33that I possibly can.
0:13:35So I looked up, you know, how to do this
0:13:37and the process is hilarious because it basically
0:13:40comes down to like, you know, you turn it off,
0:13:42connect it to another computer, like to another Mac
0:13:45with a USB cable and then you turn it on,
0:13:48holding down these keys and then holding the power button
0:13:49for a certain amount of time and you do the sequence
0:13:51with holding down buttons for a long time
0:13:53and then your laptop pops up as a DFU mode thing
0:13:58in the other computer you connected it to.
0:14:00So it's like a giant iPhone that you're restoring.
0:14:03The process is very, very similar
0:14:05and it actually worked surprisingly easily and well
0:14:09and so far, I've only had it this way for about a week
0:14:13but it seems like my problems may have been solved.
0:14:17Now, I was having two recent major problems.
0:14:20One was that I would plug it in sometimes
0:14:24and sometimes it wouldn't accept a charge
0:14:26from either MagSafe or USB-C
0:14:29until I shut it down and restarted it.
0:14:32That was a fairly recent thing.
0:14:34That seems to have been a software problem
0:14:36introduced in Mac OS 12.4
0:14:39that seems to be fixed in Mac OS 12.5,
0:14:42which came out recently.
0:14:43So I've heard from a lot of people who had this issue,
0:14:46if you had this issue where your computer,
0:14:48or your recent MacBook Pro wouldn't accept a charge
0:14:51until you shut it down, update to 12.5
0:14:54and that seems to be fixing this problem for everybody.
0:14:57So good luck with that.
0:14:59It has fixed it for me so far.
0:15:01But again, it's only been a week.
0:15:02And then my other problem was it would
0:15:04kind of not receive FaceTime calls and other weird stuff
0:15:08until it would restart it and it would work
0:15:09for a little while and then it would
0:15:10stop receiving stuff again.
0:15:12So far, that has been fixed as well,
0:15:14since I did the DFU blow away thing.
0:15:16So we'll see if that continues,
0:15:18but so far, so good on that.
0:15:20So that's it, it's restored, it's done.
0:15:22And the restore process, by the way,
0:15:23what I did was I just created a whole time machine
0:15:26back up to a USB drive, did the whole restore,
0:15:29had it restore from the time machine back up.
0:15:31So I didn't have to reinstall anything.
0:15:32It brought over all the passwords and everything.
0:15:34I didn't have to reset up anything.
0:15:36Everything transferred properly
0:15:37with that time machine round trip situation.
0:15:40And so far it's fixed.
0:15:42So I'm very happy about that so far.
0:15:44- Speaking of weird iPhone things
0:15:45that you do with your computer,
0:15:47when I got the M2 MacBook Air, I was setting it up
0:15:50and I was using Migration Assistant,
0:15:51I think we've talked about this before,
0:15:53how great that program is and how it transfers everything,
0:15:55how you can change transport method while it's running.
0:15:58And I did that.
0:16:00I mean, I connected the two things together
0:16:02with a Thunderbolt cable
0:16:04that I'm pretty sure was a Thunderbolt 3 cable
0:16:06'cause I think it came with like a Thunderbolt 3 peripheral
0:16:10that I bought or whatever.
0:16:11And I plugged it in and I saw the M2 change its connection
0:16:16and it said this connection has been sampled
0:16:18to transfer whatever umpteen gigabits per second
0:16:22that it lists for Thunderbolt.
0:16:23No, it's great, that's gonna work great.
0:16:25And then the donor machine, the M1 Macbook Air was saying
0:16:29like preparing documents and something or other, right?
0:16:33And it sat on that preparing step for a really long time.
0:16:37And I'm like, ah, give it a while.
0:16:38So I gave it like two hours, came back,
0:16:39it was still in that repairing step.
0:16:40I'm like, okay, this can't possibly be right.
0:16:43I'm going from an M1 MacBook Air to an M2 MacBook Air.
0:16:45They're both pretty fast.
0:16:47They don't have much stuff on them.
0:16:48This should progress.
0:16:50And I noticed that the M1 had a disagreement with the M2
0:16:53about how they were connected.
0:16:54The M2 said we're connected by a Thunderbolt
0:16:56and the M1 said we're connected by Ethernet.
0:16:58There was no Ethernet involved.
0:16:59There's no Ethernet involved anywhere in this thing.
0:17:02And so eventually I just had to give up and cancel
0:17:04and say, no, stop.
0:17:06That was a little bit tricky 'cause once you cancel,
0:17:08the M2 MacBook Air wants to continue
0:17:11through the setup process.
0:17:13Like I'm like, you know, do you want to transfer anything?
0:17:14No, I canceled the migration.
0:17:16It's like, okay, well let's keep setting this up.
0:17:17Like, no, no, I don't want to set up.
0:17:19And eventually I found some way to go backwards
0:17:22instead of forward, 'cause it just kept bouncing me forward
0:17:24to, you know, make a user account, do all this stuff.
0:17:27Like, no, no, I don't want to do any of that.
0:17:28I think I just restarted or whatever.
0:17:30Anyway, second time it worked, but just FYI,
0:17:32if you're ever, 'cause I Googled this while I was waiting,
0:17:35if you're ever doing a migration
0:17:37and it seems like it's stuck on some kind of step,
0:17:40there's no progress bar and it's preparing
0:17:41to do something for hours and hours,
0:17:43it's tough for me to say,
0:17:46"Oh, it's probably not gonna progress."
0:17:48You just kinda have to know,
0:17:49are there 17 million files in this
0:17:53and preparing should take three hours
0:17:55and I have to wait it out?
0:17:56Is it like Casey's Synology where,
0:17:58what was it, like resilvering the drive
0:17:59or migrating the content took some obscene amount of time
0:18:03'cause that's just how long it's gonna take?
0:18:05You have to kind of know in your gut,
0:18:06like back in the envelope, like is this a reasonable amount
0:18:09of time for the job that it's doing?
0:18:11Because you don't want to be like, well I waited two hours
0:18:12and if it hasn't progressed in two hours,
0:18:14I need to just, you know, cut it off and pull the plug.
0:18:17That might not be true.
0:18:18You'll never successfully do the thing
0:18:20if the thing is gonna take actually eight hours
0:18:22to get through the preparing step.
0:18:24But this felt like it shouldn't take two hours
0:18:27to do the preparing step, so I did a second try.
0:18:29And lo and behold, on the second try,
0:18:30everything went way fast, the preparing step was over
0:18:33in mere minutes and it transferred all the data
0:18:34and everything worked fine.
0:18:35So word to the wise there.
0:18:37And also it is possible to opt out of a migration,
0:18:42to cancel a migration job and not continue with the setup.
0:18:47Like what I didn't want to happen was,
0:18:49oh, continue with the setup and make a user account.
0:18:51And this is stupid and probably means nothing
0:18:53and probably has no effect on migration systems,
0:18:55but not behind the scenes.
0:18:56I'm like, oh, but I really want my son's account
0:18:58to be UID 501 or whatever,
0:19:00like the first number that it fixed.
0:19:01You know what I mean?
0:19:02(laughing)
0:19:03'Cause it's his laptop.
0:19:05- And if I make a new user account, like a temporary one,
0:19:10and then when migration assistant runs,
0:19:11it's gonna pick 502,
0:19:12and that's just not the way it should be.
0:19:14- Like an animal.
0:19:15- Yeah. - Oh my God.
0:19:16- Anyway, it is possible to just not create any user accounts
0:19:21and redo the whole thing.
0:19:22If it didn't, I might have to DFU update.
0:19:24I think the only time I ever did,
0:19:25I don't know if it was called DFU update,
0:19:27it was like, maybe it was one of my T2 based Macs,
0:19:31or maybe it was a work Mac or whatever.
0:19:32I use Apple Configurator 2.
0:19:34Is that the program you use to do the thing?
0:19:35- Yes.
0:19:37- Yeah, I love how it's called Apple Configurator.
0:19:39I don't know what happened to Apple Configurator one
0:19:40and why two was always in the name.
0:19:41But anyway, I did that to a T2 Mac and they--
0:19:44- It was Discovery D.
0:19:45- Yeah, and they were, it's not in parentheses.
0:19:48(laughing)
0:19:49And the T2 Macs were enough like the modern ARM Macs
0:19:53that this was the process.
0:19:55I've never had to do it in an ARM Mac
0:19:56and hopefully I never will, but fingers crossed there.
0:19:59I have been updating Ventura
0:20:01on my little external drive here.
0:20:03and the Ventura Betas supposedly do update
0:20:06the like Bridge OS version.
0:20:08So technically when I boot into my old safe Monterey,
0:20:12I'm using the new version of Bridge OS,
0:20:14but so far it hasn't hosed.
0:20:15I don't know, I haven't learned my lesson.
0:20:17Remember last time when I hosed myself by updating?
0:20:19Anyway, I do it for the show.
0:20:21I gotta get the latest Ventura Beta
0:20:23and get in there and see what's going on.
0:20:26- We appreciate your sacrifice.
0:20:27All right, are we finally at fish time?
0:20:29Because I am curious how you ended up
0:20:32seeing two concerts in the span of just a week.
0:20:35- All right, so, Fish, even though no one likes them
0:20:39except me, they somehow are able to sell out arenas
0:20:42and stuff really easily, and--
0:20:44- It's the same 3,000 people, you know.
0:20:47(laughing)
0:20:48I mean, you've gone to two concerts,
0:20:49now you're seeing how it works.
0:20:50Hmm, if I go to every concert, I become one of the 3,000.
0:20:53(laughing)
0:20:55- Anyway, so they were playing here at a local theater,
0:20:59Jones Beach in the Long Island region.
0:21:03I don't think it's actually on Long Island
0:21:04'cause I think it's on Cap Tree Island
0:21:07or Jones Beach Island, anyway.
0:21:09It's not on Long Island for whatever it's worth,
0:21:11it's a different island.
0:21:12(laughing)
0:21:13But anyway, they were playing two nights in a row there.
0:21:16And when Fish plays in,
0:21:20when they play multiple nights in one location,
0:21:23they don't repeat songs between those two nights.
0:21:24Like the two shows will be 100% different from each other
0:21:27in like what songs they play.
0:21:29Not to mention the fact that they're a jam band,
0:21:30so even if they would play the same song,
0:21:32it would be pretty different both times,
0:21:33but ignoring that fact, they always play different stuff
0:21:38on different nights in the same place.
0:21:40And I'd gone to two shows previously,
0:21:43one last year and one like 10 years ago.
0:21:45And in both of those shows, they were decent,
0:21:50but I didn't get a lot of my favorites played.
0:21:53And I thought, well, here I'm gonna be going to,
0:21:56'cause each of those that I went to before,
0:21:58Those were each three night runs
0:22:00that I was going to the middle night of.
0:22:03Well, this time I was going to two nights in a row
0:22:07of a two night run.
0:22:09So I figured my odds of hearing my favorite songs,
0:22:12or at least some of them, are way higher if I do that.
0:22:15So let's do it, what the heck?
0:22:17Let me see what it's like.
0:22:18I've never been to two concerts in a row,
0:22:19like two days right in a row.
0:22:22Never done that.
0:22:24Never been to Jones Beach at all anyway,
0:22:26and I heard it was a great venue.
0:22:27Tiff went there when she was younger and she loved it and everyone else said it's a great
0:22:31venue so...
0:22:32It is a great venue.
0:22:33I thought, "Let's do it, what the heck?"
0:22:34It wasn't that expensive and, you know, when I was arranging logistics, because there's
0:22:38a question of like, "How do you get from Fire Island to Jones Beach?"
0:22:42Yes, I asked you this in Slack and you ignored me, I guess, for this very moment.
0:22:46It looks like you could just kind of take a boat and just zip over.
0:22:52And theoretically one could do that and in fact I asked the water taxi company, "Hey,
0:22:56Can we just get a boat like all the way there?
0:22:58And the answer is yes, we could,
0:23:01except there's apparently a five mile an hour speed limit
0:23:03most of the way and it would take like three hours.
0:23:05- Oh cool.
0:23:06- So not an option anybody would actually want to do.
0:23:08And you can't drive there because A,
0:23:13you would have to drive over part of Fire Island,
0:23:14which you can't really do,
0:23:15and B, you really can't do it in the summertime.
0:23:17So even people with driving permits
0:23:20cannot drive on the island in the summer
0:23:21'cause there's too many people everywhere.
0:23:24So anyway, the way you get to Jones Beach from Fire Island
0:23:27is you have to take the ferry from Fire Island
0:23:30back to Long Island, that's a half hour on the boat,
0:23:34then have somebody, you or a car service,
0:23:37somebody drive you from there to the concert venue.
0:23:40Then eventually drive back from the concert venue
0:23:43back to the ferry terminal, but oops, it's too late
0:23:45because you get back at like 1230 at night
0:23:47and there's no more ferries.
0:23:48Then you just take a water taxi back to Fire Island.
0:23:51(laughing)
0:23:52So that's how you get there.
0:23:54And anyway, so when I was scheduling all that stuff,
0:23:57I just scheduled it to do two nights in a row.
0:23:59I'm like, hey, can you do this Tuesday and Wednesday night
0:24:01please at the exact same time?
0:24:02Yes, okay, good.
0:24:04So it was great.
0:24:05And I was very pleased.
0:24:07The two shows I saw, I think were very good shows.
0:24:12And I'm still in the process of listening back
0:24:14and kind of judging them with some distance
0:24:16compared to my previous shows,
0:24:18but I think they were my favorite shows that I've been to
0:24:21by a pretty big margin.
0:24:23They were great performances, this is a great tour,
0:24:25this is a great part of the tour,
0:24:27and my plan of seeing both nights of a two-night run
0:24:31did pay off, I did hear a lot of my favorite songs,
0:24:33and especially many that I hadn't heard
0:24:35in the previous two shows that I went to.
0:24:37- Good.
0:24:38- Yeah, so it was a great success.
0:24:39I'm now getting more accustomed to it.
0:24:41This was also, I was very impressed
0:24:45by Jones Beach as a venue.
0:24:46Like, I got kinda like the expensive old man seats,
0:24:50but in this case they were actually very good
0:24:52because they were very central,
0:24:54but it was like you had these little like boxes
0:24:56you could just walk out of and like walk down
0:24:59this open aisle to like this limited bathroom area
0:25:02and stuff so it was very convenient
0:25:03for like what old people actually want
0:25:04which is like I want a good amount of space around me
0:25:06and I want to be able to get in and out quickly
0:25:08and I need easy access to a bathroom.
0:25:10So it was great for all those things.
0:25:13So I was very, very happy about that.
0:25:15- I know why Billy Joel takes a helicopter.
0:25:18- To the bathroom?
0:25:19No, so to get to and from his Long Island home
0:25:23to Madison Square Garden.
0:25:24You read that article?
0:25:25Oh.
0:25:25He flies out to Madison Square Garden for his concert.
0:25:28He's a helicopter.
0:25:28He sings his song, makes whatever million dollars,
0:25:31and goes back on the helicopter to his house.
0:25:33None of that surprises me.
0:25:34I hadn't heard that, but I'm not surprised at all.
0:25:36Because you can imagine, like, if you're out there
0:25:37and you're a Long Island beach house,
0:25:39and you want to get to Madison Square Garden
0:25:40and back for one night--
0:25:41Oh, forget it.
0:25:42Yeah.
0:25:42Geographically, you look like, oh, that doesn't seem that bad.
0:25:45But logistics-wise, even if you have someone driving you
0:25:48in a fancy car or whatever.
0:25:49It's just a nightmare, but the helicopter's zoop real quick.
0:25:52- So how long did it take just ballpark to get there
0:25:56and then later to get home?
0:25:58- If I include the time on the water
0:26:00and then walking back to my house from the boat.
0:26:02(laughs)
0:26:03Let me see, probably-- - Like door to door.
0:26:05- Yeah, like 30 there, 40-ish there.
0:26:09Yeah, about an hour and a half each way.
0:26:10- I mean, that's not a short evening,
0:26:13but it's not a completely egregious trip.
0:26:16- No, it really wasn't that bad.
0:26:18- If you'll allow me, who did you go with?
0:26:22- I went with two different groups of people
0:26:23because I don't know anybody in my friend groups here
0:26:27who liked them enough to go to two nights in a row.
0:26:30So--
0:26:32- Can I just tell you for the record?
0:26:33- Yeah.
0:26:34- I do not think I would actively enjoy a fish concert,
0:26:38but if we lived closer,
0:26:39I would absolutely go to one with you.
0:26:41And maybe I would enjoy it, maybe I wouldn't,
0:26:42but I would go to one for sure.
0:26:44I mean, come on, you know, you gotta try it.
0:26:45But anyway, so who did you go with?
0:26:47Anyone that we would know?
0:26:49- Yeah, so night one I went with some local guy friends.
0:26:52And I told them, I'm like,
0:26:53"Look, don't listen to Phish beforehand."
0:26:55'Cause they were both familiar with them in a concept,
0:26:57but they hadn't been to a concert.
0:26:58I'm like, "Look, don't listen beforehand."
0:27:00So I'm like, "I know what's gonna happen.
0:27:01"You're gonna listen, you're gonna realize you hate them,
0:27:03"and then you're gonna cancel."
0:27:04(laughing)
0:27:05So don't, just don't listen beforehand.
0:27:07But fortunately, they both liked it.
0:27:10I don't know if they liked it.
0:27:11They certainly, I don't think,
0:27:12would have gone for two nights in a row,
0:27:13but they both liked it.
0:27:14and then the second night Tiff joined me
0:27:17with another friend as well.
0:27:19So Tiff even volunteered to come with me
0:27:23for one of the nights and had a good time.
0:27:27- See, that's what I'm saying.
0:27:28I bet, you know, it's like, as an example,
0:27:30I really don't care for baseball.
0:27:32It's just not my thing.
0:27:32I'm not saying it's bad, it's just not my thing.
0:27:34But going to an actual baseball game
0:27:37is an entirely different experience
0:27:39that is quite delightful.
0:27:40I would never seek out fish or a fish concert,
0:27:43I bet you I'd have a great time at a Fish concert,
0:27:45'cause why, how can you not?
0:27:46It's live music, it's hard to have a bad time at live music.
0:27:48And I am very pleased that Tiff seems
0:27:51to have had an okay time.
0:27:52- Yeah, and that's, I feel the exact same way.
0:27:54Like, I've, I'm not a sports person, as you all know.
0:27:57However, and I would never choose to watch sports on TV,
0:28:01or follow what's going on in sports,
0:28:03like on the internet or anything.
0:28:04However, if my friends are going to a sports game
0:28:07and they invite me to go with them,
0:28:09and the logistics can work, I will say yes.
0:28:11because I actually like live events sometimes
0:28:15and it's a totally different experience
0:28:18when you are there live, like in the sports circle,
0:28:21cheering on with all the other people
0:28:22about the sports teams, like that's all great
0:28:25and it's a big group energy experience
0:28:28and you pay attention, you get into it,
0:28:30eat the crappy food for the thousand dollars.
0:28:32Like it's the whole experience and I get the appeal of that
0:28:36even if it's an activity or a band or whatever
0:28:40that I wouldn't normally get that into
0:28:41or follow outside of that experience.
0:28:44So yeah, so most people don't listen to fish
0:28:48as much as I do when they're just working
0:28:50throughout their day, but if you bring most people
0:28:53to a fish concert and you provide them
0:28:55with enough chemicals to make their brain happy,
0:28:58they will usually enjoy it. (laughs)
0:29:00And there's a whole lot of people who listen,
0:29:03some of my friends are on it, I'll be playing fish
0:29:05and they'll be like, yeah, I would like this
0:29:07if I was high right now, but not now.
0:29:09(laughs)
0:29:10And like, okay, I understand that.
0:29:11If that's, you know, you don't have to like them
0:29:14as much as I do in order to enjoy them
0:29:16in that kind of context.
0:29:17But, you know, I happen to like them so much
0:29:19that I wanna listen to it all the time.
0:29:21- Yeah, and so since Tiff volunteered
0:29:24to go to a fish show with you, quid pro quo Clarice,
0:29:28what are you gonna do now?
0:29:30- I hope it doesn't come up.
0:29:31I offered to go to the Her Dave Matthews Show
0:29:33with her earlier this summer.
0:29:35- Oh, yeah, but she was smart and said no.
0:29:37- Well, yeah, fortunately there were enough other people
0:29:40in that group that my company was not required.
0:29:43But I would, look, I would do it, and you know what?
0:29:47I don't like Dave Matthews, but again,
0:29:49I would probably be fine at the concert.
0:29:52I can't guarantee that I would love it,
0:29:54but I would at least enjoy myself at a concert.
0:29:57- Yeah, and that's how I feel about Phish.
0:29:58Like, I don't know if I would go leave the event saying,
0:30:02holy crap, that was the night of my life.
0:30:04But it is okay to go somewhere, experience something,
0:30:07and say, that was fun.
0:30:08Maybe not something I wanna do every day,
0:30:10but that was fun.
0:30:11- Yeah, you probably wouldn't buy the poster.
0:30:12(upbeat music)
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0:32:06- Oh my word, well we have had an eventful couple of weeks
0:32:11for nothing going on in the world.
0:32:14So we actually don't have all that much follow up this week,
0:32:18which is extremely surprising to me.
0:32:19We could have recordings that are like two days apart
0:32:23because of odd scheduling conflicts or whatever,
0:32:24and have a mountain of follow up.
0:32:26We've had two weeks and we have almost no follow up,
0:32:28but let's power through.
0:32:29- Everyone's on vacation, that's fine.
0:32:31- Yeah, we're always on vacation in California.
0:32:33But anyways, Fletcher O'Connor's custom domain email.
0:32:36This was an Australian fellow that wanted to do, you know,
0:32:39some sort of custom domain for his email.
0:32:41And we were trying to figure out
0:32:42what can you do about that?
0:32:43And Mark Voss writes that the .au domain
0:32:48is now available for registration.
0:32:49And that namespace is not well polluted yet.
0:32:53Brendan Reagan writes, there's also .id.au.
0:32:56However, there are some rules there.
0:32:57To use that, you must A, match a person's legal name,
0:33:01first name or family name.
0:33:02B, have an acronym or abbreviation of the person's
0:33:05legal name, first name or family name,
0:33:06or C, be a nickname of the person.
0:33:08It seems kind of flimsy to me. - Wait, hold on.
0:33:10- This seems super flimsy, but that's the rules.
0:33:12- A nickname, that could be a lot of things.
0:33:14- Yeah, but here we are.
0:33:17And a lot of people wrote in and said,
0:33:18and I'm making up the specifics here,
0:33:20but oh, I am, you know, kclist.email or whatever,
0:33:24and apparently a lot of those weird top-level domains,
0:33:28like .email, for example, they can cause real big
0:33:31validation problems with forms, like online forms
0:33:33that aren't the best or aren't the most modern
0:33:36at doing validation.
0:33:37So using .email, I'm not even sure if that's a thing,
0:33:40I presume it is, using .email or an equivalent
0:33:43can be not so great because you might end up
0:33:45having to have a different alias that's at .com or something
0:33:49in order to just pass through form validation.
0:33:52- Yeah, that's one of the worst problems
0:33:53you can run into because at that moment,
0:33:55you wanna sign up for the thing,
0:33:57you wanna create an account on the system or whatever,
0:33:59and it says, please enter a valid email address.
0:34:02Assuming it's not trivial client-side validation,
0:34:07let's say you're not a web developer,
0:34:09assuming you can't get around it, what do you do then?
0:34:12You either have to have another address,
0:34:14like I said, I have another,
0:34:16what's the point of having your own domain
0:34:17if you have to have this second email address?
0:34:19Anyway, that's a mess.
0:34:20Or you're in the position where you're trying
0:34:23to contact the website somehow, get to a human,
0:34:26to say, hey, I'm trying to sign up
0:34:28for an account on your website,
0:34:29and it tells me my email address is not valued,
0:34:31but I assure you it is, I'm emailing you from it right now.
0:34:34That's like-- - Good luck with that.
0:34:37- Yeah, that's a super advanced level
0:34:39of corporate bureaucracy penetration.
0:34:41Trying to get to a human
0:34:42who is going to answer that question,
0:34:44there's no good website for that.
0:34:47Like, if you're trying to do a google.com,
0:34:49some Google property, forget it,
0:34:50you're never gonna get a human.
0:34:51And if you're trying to do some dinky little website
0:34:53that was made, you know, seven years ago by a teenager
0:34:56who has since moved on, you're not gonna get through that.
0:34:57Like there's no situation where I can imagine
0:34:59that going smoothly.
0:35:00And then you're just like,
0:35:01well I can't create an account of this thing.
0:35:03And it just makes you feel so bad about your, you know,
0:35:06your fancy custom domain that you were so happy about.
0:35:08Two seconds, I'm gonna have one address
0:35:10and it's gonna be a domain that I own
0:35:11and I'm gonna unify on and I'm gonna own my identity
0:35:13and I can't use it.
0:35:14Even if you can't use it on just two places,
0:35:16it really sucks.
0:35:18So please, people, fix your form.
0:35:20I mean, I don't know why I'm even saying this,
0:35:21we're still, how many decades into the web,
0:35:24we're still in a situation where they say,
0:35:25oh, enter your phone number here.
0:35:27Don't enter hyphens, we can't handle that.
0:35:28It's like, just remove the hyphens!
0:35:31Oh my God, that's still a thing.
0:35:32And every time I see that, I'm like, really?
0:35:342022, please enter digits only?
0:35:37Really?
0:35:38Absolutely boggles my mind.
0:35:41I mean, people who aren't programmers,
0:35:42maybe think that's just normal or whatever,
0:35:43but there never was a reason for that,
0:35:45and there continues to not be a reason for it,
0:35:47and yet it still exists.
0:35:48- Hey, by the way, have you noticed,
0:35:51I keep noticing this, I've occasionally recently signed up
0:35:55for some new website or whatever,
0:35:57using the Sign in with Apple option
0:35:59where it can hide your email address,
0:36:01where it sets up a forwarding alias
0:36:03and then it forwards to your real address.
0:36:05In, I think I've done this three times in the last few months
0:36:08and in all cases, all three times,
0:36:11right after the sign up form,
0:36:13the website has kicked me to a secondary form
0:36:15where it's like, all right, what's your real email address?
0:36:17- Oh, really?
0:36:18- And it won't let me proceed
0:36:19until I give it an actual email address
0:36:21that's not the relay one.
0:36:22It's like, well then what the heck did I just do that for?
0:36:23Like what's the point of all this stuff?
0:36:25Now they have two of my email addresses
0:36:27and I lose the, and now I have to figure out
0:36:30how do I ever log in here again?
0:36:31Like it's just, leave it up to the web to ruin everything.
0:36:36- Everything.
0:36:37- Speaking of ruining everything
0:36:38and web authentication and accounts,
0:36:40it's one of the things that struck me
0:36:42about the various passkey demos that Apple did at WWDC,
0:36:46right, 'cause they're showing the cool passkey things
0:36:48they were placing for passwords or whatever.
0:36:50And I think in all the demos that I've ever seen,
0:36:53They have a sample, a toy app,
0:36:55just to show what the authentication flow looks like.
0:36:58Since you don't have to pick a password,
0:37:01there is no account creation screen where they say,
0:37:03enter your password and then confirm to enter the password.
0:37:05That doesn't exist anymore.
0:37:07But there is still a place,
0:37:09at least in this demo application,
0:37:11where it says, enter, and they have on the demo,
0:37:14enter a username.
0:37:15And as we've discussed on past shows,
0:37:17no one should ever be prompted to enter a username.
0:37:20a username as in something that's not an email address,
0:37:23or maybe it is an email address.
0:37:25It's that situation where it's like,
0:37:27your username could be an email address,
0:37:29but it might not be, or it has to be an email address.
0:37:30But anyway, in the bad old days,
0:37:32they made you pick usernames,
0:37:34since you'd have to be like JSmith1234,
0:37:36you'd have to remember that you were JSmith1234,
0:37:39but if you forgot your username,
0:37:41the forgot password flow,
0:37:42they also had a forgot username flow
0:37:44where you'd put your email address.
0:37:45It's like, just use the email address as the username.
0:37:47Almost everybody got on that page,
0:37:48but still occasionally you have to pick a username.
0:37:50So anyway, in the Paskey thing, the demo they show,
0:37:53they keep showing enter a username,
0:37:54and the people would enter like a username
0:37:55with like their first name, space, last name.
0:37:57It reminds me of the original Apple ID system,
0:37:59where your Apple ID could be capital J, John,
0:38:03capital S, Smith, with a space between them.
0:38:06That could be your Apple ID.
0:38:07(laughing)
0:38:09My original Apple ID was not an email address.
0:38:11It wasn't, you know, my first and last name,
0:38:13but it wasn't an email address, it was just a string.
0:38:16It was a username, and eventually Apple forced everyone
0:38:18to change to email addresses.
0:38:19So even if we get to the mythical future of pass keys
0:38:22where no one has to remember passwords anymore
0:38:24and authentication's great, we still have the problem
0:38:26of okay, but who are you, right?
0:38:29Should I enter my email address?
0:38:30What if I wanna hide my email address?
0:38:32Like that all still exists, and the thing
0:38:33that Marco was encountering is like,
0:38:35oh, so you're signing with Apple
0:38:36and hiding your email address.
0:38:37Well, we can detect that you're doing that,
0:38:38and we don't like it, we want your real email address,
0:38:40so please enter that here.
0:38:41You know, people can do whatever they want
0:38:43on their websites, like their authentication flow
0:38:45can support whatever features they want it to support,
0:38:47And if they say, "Hey, you can't get through the flow
0:38:49"without giving us a real email address
0:38:50"and we can auto-detect ones that look like
0:38:52"they're the fake Apple ones,"
0:38:54then that's what they'll do.
0:38:54So I do kind of fear that even if we defeat passwords,
0:38:58the username monster is still out there
0:39:00waiting to eat us all.
0:39:01(laughing)
0:39:03- Well, for what it's worth,
0:39:04I will bring up Fastmail one more time.
0:39:07They didn't sponsor this episode,
0:39:08but hey, I would love some free Fastmail.
0:39:10- You should put your referral link in the show notes, Casey.
0:39:12- I should put my referral link in the show notes.
0:39:14- I feel like I should have a referral link
0:39:15for someday when I go off Gmail.
0:39:16(laughing)
0:39:19But anyways, they do a similar like massed email thing.
0:39:21And I will admit, it's not as straightforward
0:39:24as the way it works with Apple,
0:39:25where you just say,
0:39:26"Yes, I would like a massed email right now, please."
0:39:29But it's pretty straightforward to do it on their website.
0:39:32And that ends up giving you just like two random words
0:39:37that, and I think a numeral that you use as an email address,
0:39:41but it's at your domain.
0:39:43So it's like two random words,
0:39:44with a couple numbers @caseylist.com.
0:39:46And that's a lot less obvious, I suspect,
0:39:49to a vendor or whatever, to a website,
0:39:52than the Apple alias that basically everyone is sharing,
0:39:55or the same Apple alias format that everyone is sharing.
0:39:59So as an example, like one of them on mine
0:40:02is like fuzzy.koala1234, basically,
0:40:05you know, or something like that.
0:40:06- And then you can never remember what that is,
0:40:07if you ever have to go through
0:40:08the forgot password flow, right?
0:40:10- That's true, but first of all,
0:40:11I have all this in one password.
0:40:13And second of all, they have a, not a dashboard,
0:40:14They have a page in settings where you can look at all of them and it tells you whether
0:40:19or not they're active, when the last message was, three months ago, two months ago, yesterday,
0:40:23et cetera, and then you can go in and edit it and so on.
0:40:25So it really, really is pretty slick.
0:40:28So I will put my referral code in the show notes, but it's www.caseless.com/fastmail.
0:40:34Just for you, just to make it nice and easy.
0:40:38>> Make that URL shorter if you get off the triple W dot.
0:40:41>> Oh, would you stop?
0:40:42I don't want to hear it, Dad.
0:40:43Leave me alone.
0:40:44Oh, you stop it. I'm an old man. What do you expect from me? Anyway, moving right along,
0:40:50Chris Church writes with regard to BMW subscriptions, "If you paid 400" – this is pounds, that's
0:40:57fake money, right? That's not real, is it? It's weight. Anyway, "If you paid 400 bucks
0:41:01for heated seats at time of purchase, you would not need to pay a subscription to use
0:41:05them." BMW said this on the BBC, "Where heated seats or any feature available in the
0:41:10the connected drive store have been purchased
0:41:11when a customer vehicle is ordered,
0:41:13no subsequent subscription or payment is necessary."
0:41:16The subscription model enables customers
0:41:18to try these features later as opposed to paying upfront.
0:41:20This means that the hardware to facilitate these features
0:41:22will be built into all models,
0:41:23which makes sense from a manufacturing perspective
0:41:25as it makes for fewer hardware configurations.
0:41:28I still really wanna hate all of this,
0:41:30but it does make a little bit of sense to me.
0:41:34- Only for features that they can build in,
0:41:37like eating the cost.
0:41:38Like again, they're not gonna build in the V8
0:41:39when you pay for the V6 and you unlock the two cylinders,
0:41:42so that doesn't make any monetary sense.
0:41:44Apparently, seat heaters are cheap enough to include
0:41:46that it doesn't really add an impact,
0:41:47but for example, leather seats is not something like that.
0:41:52They put cloth over it, and if you pay extra,
0:41:54you can rip the cloth off underneath this leather.
0:41:56There's a narrow window of features that can work like that.
0:42:00I'm still not quite sure how it works
0:42:03in terms of reselling,
0:42:05and not having to pay for it upfront
0:42:08makes it feel a little bit better,
0:42:09But then I almost feel like, okay, well,
0:42:11if you want me to unlock it later,
0:42:13can't I just do the same thing as I would have done
0:42:15when I purchased it, as opposed to paying
0:42:17$12 a month forever so my steering wheel can be warm?
0:42:22I mean, maybe, again, due to the math,
0:42:24but I just feel like even if the math works out
0:42:26that it is actually less expensive to do that
0:42:27than to pay $400 for the heating steering wheel,
0:42:29it just feels worse to pay $12 a month
0:42:31for your heated steering wheel,
0:42:32which is separate from the $18 a month for a heated butt.
0:42:35- But the other nice thing about this is,
0:42:37So I buy presumably a white BMW and I decide I want to sell it to one of you knuckleheads.
0:42:45Well, that would never happen for many reasons, one of which being it being white.
0:42:49But nevertheless, in this fantasy world, can you imagine selling a car to John?
0:42:52No.
0:42:53Oh my God.
0:42:54No, I would.
0:42:55I don't need any more oil stains in my driveway.
0:42:56Thanks.
0:42:57No BMWs here.
0:42:58Oh, too soon.
0:42:59Actually, I don't think that ever leaked oil.
0:43:01That might be the only thing it didn't do.
0:43:02That's not true.
0:43:03Your BMW is leaking oil right now.
0:43:05There is no BMW that doesn't leak oil.
0:43:08It's one thing you learn from YouTube
0:43:09and car rebuilding channels, BMW's leak oil
0:43:12is impossible for BMWs not to leak oil.
0:43:16- I don't know if it leaked.
0:43:16They definitely spent oil by fuel.
0:43:18- I mean, maybe when it's brand new, it's not gonna leak,
0:43:20but eventually BMWs will get oil leaks.
0:43:22They leak oil from everywhere.
0:43:24- I mean, doesn't everything leak eventually
0:43:26on an infinite time scale?
0:43:27- I hope I don't.
0:43:29- No, but I think in the useful lifetime of a car,
0:43:32it's not a given that all the seals
0:43:34that are supposed to keep oil in will die
0:43:36and need to be replaced on like a frequent basis
0:43:39like they do with BMWs.
0:43:40It's the reason they have a reputation.
0:43:41I don't know what it is.
0:43:42I don't know why their gaskets don't work as well
0:43:44as other people's or whatever, but there we go.
0:43:48- Moving on.
0:43:49If I sold my hypothetical white BMW to anyone,
0:43:51it doesn't have to be, it doesn't matter who it is,
0:43:53let's pretend I'm selling it to Marco
0:43:54because of the two of you, that he's my only hope.
0:43:58I sell my BMW to Marco and because apparently I live
0:44:01in a place that doesn't have winter supposedly,
0:44:02even though that's not true.
0:44:04I didn't option a heated seats or heated steering wheel,
0:44:08but Marco living in a place that indisputably has winter,
0:44:11he would like those things.
0:44:12Well, what's nice about the setup is he can go
0:44:15and pay either a one-time fee or a monthly fee or whatever,
0:44:17and get the heated seats and heated wheel
0:44:19that I never bothered paying for.
0:44:21So there is something to be said for this.
0:44:23I think there is a way you can look at this,
0:44:26that it's not absolutely disgusting,
0:44:29but it sure feels a little gross
0:44:31the way it was originally presented to us.
0:44:33I don't know.
0:44:34- Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where like,
0:44:37some nerd somewhere made a good argument for this
0:44:40on nerdy principles in the company.
0:44:42Just like what we're talking about now.
0:44:44Here are some reasons that kind of academically
0:44:47seem justifiable, but at no point did anybody
0:44:50with any kind of like, you know,
0:44:52read the room kind of sensibilities
0:44:54get this idea passed then before it went out.
0:44:56Because, you know, this, yes, there are
0:45:00Some cases where you can say,
0:45:02well, that actually would be useful.
0:45:04But that is so far outnumbered by the negativity,
0:45:09or outweighed I guess by the negativity
0:45:12of this getting out in the world in the first place,
0:45:14and what we talked about last time of like,
0:45:16it's not a very luxurious experience
0:45:18that would be on brand with a luxury car company
0:45:21to feel like you're being nickeled and dimed
0:45:23for something that you don't have to be.
0:45:24Now that being said, if the option exists
0:45:26to pay the 400 bucks up front
0:45:28and not be nickel and dimed over indefinite time span,
0:45:31that is better, but this is still, I think,
0:45:34it's just, this is a PR fumble,
0:45:38that whatever they're gaining in utility or revenue
0:45:41is not worth the cost of the PR.
0:45:44- I do wonder also, I don't know the details of this,
0:45:46I'm sure we'll find out, but if you pay up front
0:45:48the $400 for the heated seats,
0:45:50and then you sell the car to someone,
0:45:52do the heated seats come with it,
0:45:53or does that person then need to begin a new subscription
0:45:56as if the heated seats weren't already in the car
0:45:58because that heated seat was tied to your purchase
0:46:01and your identifier, you know what I mean?
0:46:03The other thing about this is,
0:46:04like I said, there's a narrow range of features
0:46:07that this works for,
0:46:07'cause if they're gonna build it into the car anyway
0:46:09and just enable it later,
0:46:11you can do that with stuff that's basically software,
0:46:14and things that are cheap enough that you can include them
0:46:17and it's not too expensive, but that's it.
0:46:19There's tons of, almost all the options
0:46:21in the options sheet don't fall into that category.
0:46:23They're the type of thing that someone needs to pay for
0:46:25and they're not just gonna give you for free
0:46:27and it's not possible to unlock them.
0:46:29Better brakes, better wheels, the leather interior,
0:46:31the wood trim, right?
0:46:33Even things like that, the nicer headlights,
0:46:35those are hardware things.
0:46:37I know Tesla's done it where they've given you
0:46:39the bigger battery 'cause they couldn't get
0:46:40the smaller ones in stock and the software
0:46:42locked out the battery.
0:46:43You remember when they were doing that with the 3s?
0:46:45- Yeah, but that's not a common thing.
0:46:47That's a temporary operational shortage kind of thing.
0:46:50That's not something that's a feature.
0:46:52- Right, but it made people cranky about it
0:46:54because it's like, well, I know you, you know,
0:46:55I didn't pay for the, you know, 100 kilowatt, whatever.
0:46:59What are the batteries measured in?
0:47:01- Yeah, it doesn't matter.
0:47:02- Yeah, anyway, I didn't pay for the 100.
0:47:03- Chigawatt.
0:47:04- Yeah, I paid for the 60,
0:47:06but I know you had to put 100 in
0:47:07'cause you didn't have any 60s, but like, whatever.
0:47:10You know, in some ways, like, well, okay,
0:47:11well now I'm getting worse mileage.
0:47:14Now I'm getting less distance on a charge
0:47:16'cause I'm hauling around this big battery
0:47:17that I can't use all of, but it doesn't feel good.
0:47:20This is a story with some person who got the 100,
0:47:23Look this up, it's really annoying.
0:47:25What is the unit?
0:47:25Kilowatt hour, I believe.
0:47:27- They had the 100 unit, or excuse me,
0:47:29they had a car with a 60 unit battery,
0:47:31and because of Tesla, it got replaced
0:47:34with a 100 unit battery, and at the time,
0:47:37I guess Tesla did not lock them out,
0:47:39and I think they was--
0:47:40- Yeah, there was a mistake on Tesla's part.
0:47:41They didn't do the lockout.
0:47:42It's kilowatt hour.
0:47:43They got the 100 and it wasn't locked out, right?
0:47:45And so like, oh well, you know, whatever.
0:47:47A bank makes a mistake in your favor,
0:47:49collect $200, right? - Yep, yep, yep.
0:47:51And then this person drove the car like this for some substantial period of time.
0:47:55And then Tesla realized his mistake and said, "Oh, never mind."
0:47:58And then the software updated it back down to 60.
0:48:02And that just doesn't feel good.
0:48:03Oh, that's a terrible move.
0:48:04Right.
0:48:05So this is an example of brand management.
0:48:07If you want to manage the brand to make people feel good to have a Tesla, if you make this
0:48:12mistake as Tesla, "Oh, we forgot the software, lock it out," just eat it.
0:48:15Just let that person have the 100 kilowatt hour battery for the rest of the life of their
0:48:18car.
0:48:19but just eat it because the ill will,
0:48:23even just from that one customer,
0:48:24the ill will that that customer's gonna feel,
0:48:26let alone like when the person puts their story on the web
0:48:29and people talk about it on podcasts or whatever,
0:48:31it's not worth it.
0:48:31You already lost the money on that battery.
0:48:34You already put a bigger battery in there.
0:48:36That bigger battery costs you more money
0:48:37and you had to put it in there
0:48:38because you didn't have any smaller ones.
0:48:40Just eat it.
0:48:41Like I don't understand why these companies don't,
0:48:44like it's not as a policy.
0:48:46It's the same thing with the Mehears story
0:48:47as the Apple store.
0:48:48A good Apple store and a good person in charge
0:48:51of whoever makes decisions on Apple,
0:48:52or knows when to just eat it, right?
0:48:54To just make the customer happy and just eat it.
0:48:56It's not policy, it's not tell all your friends
0:48:58you can come in and get this cool thing done.
0:49:00Tesla will replace your battery
0:49:01and forget the software cap,
0:49:02but like, that's not, you're not changing your policy,
0:49:04but on a one-off basis, no one to just say,
0:49:08our bad, let's make it right for you.
0:49:11This is not a new policy,
0:49:12we're making an exception in your case.
0:49:14The person will be happy,
0:49:15and you haven't bankrupted the company
0:49:16by causing a flood of people to come in
0:49:18and try to get the batteries replaced.
0:49:20- Do you remember when Amazon displayed to the world
0:49:25that they had a remote delete capability for Kindle books
0:49:28and which book they deleted?
0:49:30- No, I don't remember this at all.
0:49:31- This was amazing.
0:49:32So there was--
0:49:34- Oh, it was 1994, right?
0:49:35- Yes. (laughs)
0:49:37In 2009, Amazon, there was a copyright issue
0:49:40with the copy of 1984 that they had
0:49:43and they remote deleted it from Kindle's.
0:49:45- Oh my gosh.
0:49:46- Of all books, that one.
0:49:48- That's why you should always DRM crack all your eBooks.
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0:51:10(upbeat music)
0:51:12Moving right along very, very quickly,
0:51:15I spoke about last week the Mophie three-in-one charger
0:51:20thing that I was planning to bring on vacation,
0:51:22which I did, it worked well.
0:51:24And I lamented the fact that it's 150 bucks
0:51:26for each of them.
0:51:27Steve Stutz, Stutz, Stutz, wrote that you can actually
0:51:31get these from Zag, which is in contrast
0:51:34to what Apple says on their website,
0:51:35which it says only at Apple.
0:51:37But anyway, you can get it from Zag,
0:51:38and if you're willing to sign up for their email newsletter,
0:51:40then you can save a whole bunch of money
0:51:42and get like a coupon code or whatever
0:51:43for a whole bunch of percentage off.
0:51:44So if you're looking to get something,
0:51:47specifically this three-in-one thing,
0:51:48I will put a link in the show notes,
0:51:49you might wanna check that out.
0:51:50Moving right along, Vern Johnson writes,
0:51:52"In your most recent episode,
0:51:54"you talked about EU regulations mandating USB-C
0:51:56"for all phones and covered it well, thanks.
0:51:58"What I haven't heard anybody online discuss
0:51:59"is how this will keep Apple from selling
0:52:01"fewer expensive previous year models of phones in Europe
0:52:04"once the requirement goes into effect.
0:52:06It seems that this might adversely affect consumers by giving them only the choice of
0:52:10the newest phones that include USB-C. Your thoughts?
0:52:12I thought it was a very interesting point. I still don't see a way in which this is definitely
0:52:18going to be the case. Like, I just don't see Apple being coerced into putting USB-C in
0:52:24iPhones. Now, they may say, "Oh, we have decided now that the iPhone will be USB-C," and mean
0:52:30but I really don't see them not fighting this
0:52:35or including like a stupid adapter thing
0:52:37like they did years ago for I think micro USB.
0:52:39I don't know, do you see this happening?
0:52:41- I mean this is flying in the face
0:52:43of the real Tim Cook doctrine,
0:52:44which is keep selling the same products
0:52:46so as long as you possibly can.
0:52:47But I think, I mean I don't know the details of the law here
0:52:50but it's plausible that it won't apply to them
0:52:52because they're not new models, right?
0:52:54So the thing will be like all new models
0:52:56introduced after such and such a date.
0:52:58- That's a good point.
0:52:59- Interesting thought experiment that changes in regulation
0:53:03that especially that have to do with hardware
0:53:06could be written in such a way that it thwarts
0:53:10Apple's ability to do what it loves to do,
0:53:12which is make a product and then just continue to sell it
0:53:16and move it down market, down market, down market
0:53:18until it becomes the cheapest one to sell.
0:53:20The same thing, manufacture the same thing for years
0:53:22and years, it makes sense from a being counter perspective
0:53:25because you've got really good at building whatever it is,
0:53:27the iPhone, I was gonna say the iPhone 6,
0:53:30but that's a little bit too old, but right.
0:53:32The iPhone 11 or the XR or whatever,
0:53:36you really get the manufacturing process down,
0:53:38you got the parts available, the quality is really good,
0:53:40and you can just keep making that same phone
0:53:42until it just becomes an unviable product.
0:53:44And during all those years, it's pure profit
0:53:48because you've already recouped the cost
0:53:50of all the tooling and all the other stuff, right?
0:53:54But if they ever did require some change
0:53:56that had to be across the entire line,
0:53:59that would really mess up their strategy.
0:54:00It would be the old Steve Jobs strategy.
0:54:02What he loved to do was say,
0:54:03"We have a new idea," and it's, you know, whatever it is.
0:54:06It's that our laptops are made of aluminum.
0:54:08And now, starting today,
0:54:10the only laptops we'll sell are aluminum.
0:54:12And those plastic ones, forget it.
0:54:14We're not gonna continue to sell those
0:54:15for the last three years.
0:54:15You're never gonna see them again.
0:54:16We erased them from our website.
0:54:18We pulled them off our store shelves.
0:54:19It's all aluminum.
0:54:21That is not the way Tim Cook operates,
0:54:23But I think the EU thing won't affect Apple in that way.
0:54:27Right, and you also have to figure,
0:54:28if Apple really sees this as something that is inevitably
0:54:32coming down in the future, they probably
0:54:35have some idea of a time scale of when they might really
0:54:38100% have to commit to it.
0:54:40And so if the iPhone--
0:54:42let's see, what are we on?
0:54:4314 now-- if the iPhone 15 next year comes out,
0:54:47and that's the one with USB-C, they
0:54:48might be thinking, all right, well,
0:54:50we'll start USB-C next year.
0:54:52And we won't really have to do it for a few years,
0:54:54so that'll give us enough time for it
0:54:56to filter through the lineup.
0:54:57They also might be thinking, you know,
0:54:59if something happened where the old model of phone
0:55:04couldn't fill its role as being the cheaper one
0:55:08for a little while, that's already happened once before.
0:55:11That happened with the iPhone 5.
0:55:13And the reason why the iPhone 5C came to be,
0:55:16or at least one reason the iPhone 5C came to be,
0:55:19is that the iPhone 5, when it was like the new model,
0:55:22it had that dark gray color that was like almost black.
0:55:25And remember it chipped along all the edges
0:55:27and it really did not age well.
0:55:30So what we heard from a bunch of different rumor sources
0:55:32was that one of the reasons the 5C existed
0:55:35is that that finish on the iPhone 5 was just,
0:55:38it turned out to be so expensive and not durable enough
0:55:41that they couldn't use that really effectively
0:55:44to beat the cheap phone in subsequent years.
0:55:46So one of the reasons they made the 5C was because
0:55:50their flagship phone of year X really wasn't gonna be
0:55:54a good cheap phone in year X plus one and X plus two.
0:55:57So they just designed a new phone that had cheaper specs
0:56:01and that was it.
0:56:02So if they really had to do something like that today,
0:56:05they could.
0:56:06Worst case scenario, if there's a mandate,
0:56:08they have to move everything over to USB-C
0:56:10in a couple of years, well the iPhone 15,
0:56:13whatever that comes out with USB-C will have
0:56:15a certain case design that will accommodate that port,
0:56:18and they can always just make a cheaper version
0:56:20of that case design with cheaper guts
0:56:22and sell that as the new, cheaper model.
0:56:25So there are different ways around this.
0:56:27They probably won't need to do any of those things.
0:56:29They probably can just wait it out
0:56:30and just wait 'til USB-C flickers throughout the line
0:56:33and it'll kinda just solve itself.
0:56:35But they certainly have options if they need them.
0:56:37- Yeah, I don't think they've forgotten
0:56:38how to make new products.
0:56:40They just tend not to do it unless they really have to.
0:56:42Although the story you're saying about the,
0:56:44Was that the one with the chamfered edge?
0:56:46- Yes, it was the first one with the chamfered edge.
0:56:48- Or as Johnny I would say, what did he say, chamfered?
0:56:51- Yes. - Instead of chamfered.
0:56:52Anyway, it reminds me of one of the,
0:56:55well I don't remember which one,
0:56:56one of the Johnny I've, like,
0:56:58Love from Apple divorce articles or whatever,
0:57:01or maybe it was the Tripp Knuckle book.
0:57:03Anyway, there was a bit where someone was telling a story
0:57:06about being in the design studio
0:57:07and someone was presenting a design
0:57:09and someone in the meeting brought up
0:57:11how expensive it would be to manufacture
0:57:14the design that was being shown.
0:57:16And they got chastised and got evil looks
0:57:18from the design group because it was basically like,
0:57:20under the Johnny Iverzine,
0:57:22that's just not something you did.
0:57:23Was like, during the design process,
0:57:25you didn't bring up unseemly things
0:57:27like how much it's going to cost to manufacture
0:57:29or how difficult it would be to do it
0:57:30with precision and quality control.
0:57:32And that's how you end up with--
0:57:33- Why not?
0:57:34- A thing.
0:57:35Yeah, and that's how you end up with a phone
0:57:37which has like that chamfered edge that Johnny really loved
0:57:40and you talked about it so much in that presentation.
0:57:43And it turns out to be one of those type of,
0:57:45I don't know the details, but apparently if this,
0:57:48one of those manufacturing details that
0:57:50even after you've been making the phone for a year,
0:57:53it's still expensive and hard to do.
0:57:54Like it doesn't, it's not like it was one of those things
0:57:57where you, oh, we'll get the hang of it,
0:57:59we get the machine set up right,
0:58:00and then it's just, we bang them out after that, right?
0:58:03Or like, no matter how we manufactured,
0:58:05it's just not durable, whatever the problem may be.
0:58:07But like, when I read that, I was like,
0:58:09the idea that you'd be in a design meeting
0:58:12and someone would bring up something unseemly like money
0:58:15and they would get, you know, dirty looks.
0:58:17Like I understand there could be like a brainstorming part
0:58:19where it's like there's no bad ideas,
0:58:20let's just talk over this through or whatever,
0:58:21but I feel like when you say design,
0:58:24you have to include all the factors.
0:58:26And you know, two of those big factors
0:58:28are manufacturability and cost.
0:58:30I'm not saying they should drive everything,
0:58:32I'm not saying those should be dominant
0:58:33otherwise you're just making a bunch of ugly plastic crap
0:58:35and I would not include the iPhone 5C in that
0:58:37because the iPhone 5C was an amazing phone
0:58:39on the outside anyway, the insides were kind of crappy.
0:58:42But that's the challenge of design.
0:58:44If you say, okay, well I'm gonna make an amazing thing,
0:58:47but I don't want anyone to talk to me
0:58:48about money or manufacturability,
0:58:50you're not a designer.
0:58:51And I'm not saying Johnny Ive does that.
0:58:53Like he does care about manufacturability
0:58:54and how things will be put together or whatever.
0:58:57But if that story is to be believed,
0:59:00the idea that the design group didn't wanna hear
0:59:02about money in any stage of the design process,
0:59:05I feel like that's kind of ridiculous,
0:59:07because we're gonna put diamonds along all the outside
0:59:10and someone brings up money and they say, shh,
0:59:11We're in the brainstorming phase.
0:59:12No one talks about it.
0:59:13There's no bad ideas here.
0:59:14I'm like, no, diamonds around the outside is a bad idea.
0:59:16(laughs)
0:59:17You need to include that.
0:59:19I mean, in theory, they have so much expertise.
0:59:21That's why that person is in the room,
0:59:23the manufacturing expert who says,
0:59:25here's why that would be expensive to make.
0:59:27And the other thing about that,
0:59:29with all these stories from the innovations
0:59:32that Apple's done in manufacturing,
0:59:33is very often that person will be in the room and say,
0:59:35you can't do that, it's too expensive, right?
0:59:37And then the job of Apple as a business is to say,
0:59:39okay, let's find a way to make it economically feasible
0:59:44to do unibody aluminum CNC machined cases.
0:59:49I know it's too expensive now,
0:59:51what would it take to make that not expensive?
0:59:54Let's now solve that problem.
0:59:55Let's put millions of dollars into a company
0:59:57that builds these tools.
0:59:58Like, can we get on the other side of this
1:00:00after a decade of making these things or whatever,
1:00:02where we become experts at it where it is,
1:00:05we can do it in a way that doesn't break the bank
1:00:08Also, we get the design things that you know
1:00:10That's why it has to be part of the conversation and you have to listen to that person when they tell you it's too expensive to
1:00:15Do you have to say okay now here's another problem. We have to solve it apparently with the chamfered edge
1:00:19They didn't do that
1:00:20They said we're just gonna do it anyway
1:00:22And it turned out it was either more expensive or not as durable or both and then they had to retreat from it
1:00:27That's that's not a win in my book
1:00:29Soluble apps rights you asked whether the order of addresses and contacts matters it definitely
1:00:35Does when you send email to a group in mail as the first address is always chosen
1:00:40I had to add a feature to my app to change the first address. That's bad
1:00:44Going through contacts and deleting all the emails and then re-adding them in the right order like you can't reorder them
1:00:52But apparently the first one is important. This is really bad. Like maybe this is not Apple's fault
1:00:58Maybe it has to do with whatever that vCard spec is doesn't include this but hmm
1:01:02Just I don't know how you get into like the vCard spec
1:01:05version 2, let alone version 3 or 4,
1:01:07whatever the heck number we're on,
1:01:08and not think about the fact that you support
1:01:10multiple email addresses but don't
1:01:12support any kind of prioritization or ordering,
1:01:14or sort of stealth do.
1:01:15But I don't like it.
1:01:18I know we're talking about features being added
1:01:21to contacts.
1:01:21It's not an exciting feature.
1:01:23But I would like that sometime in the next decade or so,
1:01:26now that we've got shared photo libraries.
1:01:28This is going to be my new thing.
1:01:31prioritize multiple elements in contacts.
1:01:34- Then Sharif Hasabo writes,
1:01:36"The preferred target when you message someone
1:01:37"is actually based on how the message thread was created.
1:01:39"If the thread was originally sent to the iCloud address,
1:01:42"it will suggest that first."
1:01:44- This is not a happy solution.
1:01:45I heard from a couple of people who said,
1:01:47"Yeah, I had the same problem.
1:01:48"My solution was I deleted the thread with the person."
1:01:51So if you go to messages and you see your spouse,
1:01:55their face, and the thread that you have ongoing with them,
1:02:00if this is to be believed, if that thread was started
1:02:04by you sending a message to your spouse's phone number,
1:02:07forever, when you type your spouse's name in an auto-complete
1:02:11it will auto-complete to their phone number.
1:02:13And so you can fix that by just deleting the thread,
1:02:16but I don't wanna delete a literally years long thread
1:02:18with like my son to just to delete,
1:02:21lose all those messages, delete entirely
1:02:23and start a new one with his Apple ID.
1:02:26But apparently that is the only solution
1:02:27that people have told me that they tried
1:02:29and actually worked.
1:02:30So Apple, get on that.
1:02:31We are sponsored this week by Linode,
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1:03:54and that's one of the biggest reasons
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1:03:57because I don't know how they offer what they offer
1:04:00and why no one else does,
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1:04:17Once again, linode.com/atp,
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1:04:22Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all my stuff
1:04:24and for sponsoring our show.
1:04:26[ Music ]
1:04:28All right, that's it for follow-up,
1:04:30and since not all that much is going on these days,
1:04:32we thought we'd clear the decks with some Ask ATP.
1:04:36Bell Demose writes, "I've had a jobby job
1:04:38as an iOS developer for a while now
1:04:40and recently started thinking about creating my own app
1:04:42on the side. I frequently listen to podcasts
1:04:44and use Reddit and Twitter. As such, the types of apps
1:04:47that seem most interesting for me to build are Twitter clients,
1:04:49podcast players, and Reddit clients.
1:04:51However, it seems like it's next to impossible to compete
1:04:53to compete with the likes of Tweetbot, Overcast, and Apollo.
1:04:57These apps have been in production for years.
1:04:59As such, they have numerous complex, competitive features that would take new developers several
1:05:03years to build.
1:05:04By the time said features are built into the new apps, the existing apps will have gained
1:05:07even more new features.
1:05:08Assuming that the new apps can even catch up to their competitors in terms of features,
1:05:12then they need to be marketed differently before seeing any downloads.
1:05:14Is it too late to have a successful indie app as a new entrant to a market with well-established
1:05:19indie apps?
1:05:20And should iOS developers instead focus on advancing their careers and their jobby job?
1:05:23I actually went back and forth with Abel on this a little bit, and I pointed out, I don't
1:05:28remember, I want to say it's Aviary, which is a new-ish Twitter client, and I believe
1:05:35there was a new version that just came out in the last week or two.
1:05:38I have not personally used it, but it seems fairly impressive from what little I've seen
1:05:43of it.
1:05:44And that's just come out in the last year or two.
1:05:46So that is an example of something where you could make something brand new or have a different approach to something old and
1:05:53And it might work, but I do understand the general gist of what what what is being said here
1:06:00I mean Marco when you wrote overcast there were plenty of podcast players in the world and yet somehow you made it work
1:06:06Yeah, I mean certainly, you know, there are different times and there are different different times when it's easier or harder to get these markets
1:06:12However, it's worth remembering that Apollo
1:06:16was not the first Reddit app,
1:06:18not the first big Reddit app.
1:06:21Tweetbot was not the first big Twitter client,
1:06:24and Overcast was not the first podcast app.
1:06:27And there were many apps in these categories
1:06:30before each of these three examples were present.
1:06:34Whatever you use might seem dominant to you now,
1:06:38but I don't know what Tweetbot has as market share
1:06:42relative to every Twitter user.
1:06:45I don't know what Apollo has in terms of market share
1:06:47and relevant to everyone who uses Reddit,
1:06:49but I can tell you that Overcast's market share
1:06:51among everyone who listens to podcasts
1:06:53is something like 1.5%.
1:06:56So that's 98.5% of everyone who listens to podcasts
1:07:01who could be looking for something else.
1:07:04Yes, it's hard to get a lot of this market,
1:07:10and marketing is difficult and expensive now
1:07:13because there's so much competition.
1:07:14But when I started Overcast,
1:07:18before I wrote a single line of code,
1:07:20I made a notes document,
1:07:23which I think it wasn't even in notes at the time,
1:07:25I think it was in task paper,
1:07:26'cause Apple Notes was not the way we know it today,
1:07:28it was the old version that sucked with the Markerfelt.
1:07:30And what I've, I sketched out like other big apps
1:07:35at the time, Apple Podcasts, I believe Downcast,
1:07:39which is what I was using at the time,
1:07:40Pocket casts, I think that might be it.
1:07:43Oh, and Instacast, those are the four
1:07:45that I considered the big podcast apps at the time.
1:07:49Well, Instacast doesn't even exist anymore.
1:07:52To tell you how much this market can change
1:07:54in not that much time, and the dynamics certainly,
1:07:59right now, if I were making that list today,
1:08:01Apple Podcasts would still be there,
1:08:03but my biggest competitors are not Instacast
1:08:06or Downcast or Pocket Casts.
1:08:08My biggest competitors are Apple, Spotify,
1:08:10and Google podcasts.
1:08:12So things change over time.
1:08:14And anyway, so what I did when I made this list
1:08:16was I wrote down each of these apps, what their advantages were
1:08:22over what I was going to build, what their disadvantages were,
1:08:25and why somebody might choose their app instead of mine,
1:08:29and why somebody might choose my app instead of theirs.
1:08:32And I went through and I took screenshots of all these apps.
1:08:33And I had these folders that had like,
1:08:35here's each of these apps, their list screens,
1:08:38They're now playing screens, they're podcast view screens,
1:08:41they're directory screens.
1:08:43And I did some basic, just market surveying,
1:08:46market research of like, what's out there?
1:08:49And then that helped me figure out,
1:08:51first of all, do I have a chance here?
1:08:53Are there any openings here to do things differently?
1:08:56And can I do that?
1:08:59And how will my app differentiate itself?
1:09:02And how can I market that?
1:09:03Where can I reach people?
1:09:05If you have good answers to those questions,
1:09:08there is still room for new stuff.
1:09:11I think what you have to realize is that
1:09:14everyone wants things a little bit differently.
1:09:16This is why, I mean look, there's a to-do app
1:09:20that ships with every platform of everything
1:09:22for the last very long time, and yet,
1:09:25to-do apps are a healthy category of products.
1:09:28And the reason why is because everyone is only ever
1:09:31about 75% satisfied with their to-do app,
1:09:33and everybody wants something a little bit different
1:09:34everybody else. And so there's basically an infinite market for to-do apps. See also
1:09:39weather apps. There's certain categories, note-taking apps, there's certain categories
1:09:43where people just want different things and they have different priorities and if you
1:09:48can make something that appeals to some people, that's enough to differentiate you.
1:09:53Now in cases of these specific categories, you know, I'll address Twitter and Reddit
1:09:58first. I would say don't make a Twitter app because Twitter as a company is all over the
1:10:03of the place with its relationship with developers,
1:10:06and the feature set of what people expect
1:10:09from a Twitter client is just massive.
1:10:12So I would not, I would stay away from that if I were you.
1:10:15Reddit, you still have a pretty large feature set.
1:10:19I've heard from Christian Selig who makes Apollo
1:10:21on a podcast recently, I forget which one, sorry,
1:10:24but I've heard that Reddit's actually pretty good
1:10:27with its API and it's pretty good towards developers,
1:10:30so that's something worth looking at for sure.
1:10:33And podcasting, I think there's so many different ways
1:10:37people want to listen to and organize
1:10:40and discover their podcasts.
1:10:42And I get feature requests and design complaints
1:10:46all the time that I'm not gonna do
1:10:49because it doesn't fit within my vision
1:10:51or it wouldn't work well in my app or whatever.
1:10:53And so there is a lot of room there
1:10:55for doing things a little bit differently.
1:10:58And one of the best examples of that is Castro.
1:11:02If you look at what Castro did, they still are operating.
1:11:06I don't know if they're super active anymore,
1:11:07but they still are operating.
1:11:10And Castro had a totally different take on organization.
1:11:14It was more of this kind of like inbox queue kind of system
1:11:17with this triage mechanism.
1:11:19And that's something that I still get feature requests
1:11:22every week or so from somebody who used to use Castro,
1:11:26is now using Overcast for some reason,
1:11:27and wants more of those features to be in Overcast.
1:11:31And some of that kind of fits with what I'm doing.
1:11:33A lot of it doesn't.
1:11:34Some of it I will never do as well as Castrated
1:11:36because you kind of have to like specialize your app design
1:11:38to do that really well.
1:11:40So there's all sorts of different ways
1:11:41people might choose to use this.
1:11:42Now, on the technical side, by starting new,
1:11:47you have a number of major advantages.
1:11:50So first of all, you can learn from everyone else's mistakes
1:11:53in the past.
1:11:54There are certain things that other apps have done
1:11:57that their developers probably have talked about
1:12:00somewhere before that weren't worth the time
1:12:03or that ended up being big headaches down the road.
1:12:05So you can learn not to do those things.
1:12:08There are certain things that you can just do
1:12:11in much less code than the previous entrants did
1:12:14because the APIs are different now.
1:12:16There are newer, easier APIs to use.
1:12:19And then finally, you have no legacy.
1:12:22You have no existing audience
1:12:24and you have no legacy code base.
1:12:26If I were to start a brand new podcast app today,
1:12:30I wouldn't just rebuild everything that's in Overcast
1:12:33exactly the way I built it the first time.
1:12:34I would do things differently and I would do fewer things.
1:12:38There are certain features I wouldn't do at all.
1:12:41- Such as?
1:12:42- Streaming I wouldn't do.
1:12:44It causes a lot of weird issues.
1:12:47In this era of dynamic ad insertion, it's even weirder.
1:12:50I would not do streaming at all.
1:12:52There are certain kinda like back end changes
1:12:55I would definitely do differently.
1:12:57I might not even do sync.
1:12:59I wouldn't do a website.
1:13:01I would probably not even run servers.
1:13:03There's a lot of things I would do differently.
1:13:06There are certain options I wouldn't have.
1:13:08I wouldn't have the dark mode override.
1:13:10That's a massive pain in my rear end.
1:13:12Certain things I just wouldn't do.
1:13:14But if you're starting new, you can do only the easy things.
1:13:19You can cherry pick.
1:13:21You can use AVPlayer and not do all my sound processing stuff.
1:13:25And that saves you a ton of time.
1:13:26You can use SwiftUI, and Swift is the back end,
1:13:29and Cloud Kit, Cloud Kit didn't exist when I started.
1:13:32I probably would have based it on Cloud Kit if it did.
1:13:35There are so many advantages you have by starting new
1:13:39and because you don't have an existing audience
1:13:42that have been using your app for all this time,
1:13:44nobody will complain about some feature not being there
1:13:48that they just got taken away from them
1:13:50because you're starting fresh.
1:13:51So you can start with iOS 16,
1:13:53you can start with a basic feature set
1:13:55and you can add from there
1:13:56and you can differentiate in ways
1:13:58that the other entrants in the market can't or won't do.
1:14:01So for instance, a pretty big part of Overcast
1:14:05is its playlist organization system.
1:14:08And you can have multiple playlists.
1:14:10One of the reasons Castor was able to do what it did
1:14:13with its triage system is that it didn't have that.
1:14:15It had like this one main inbox kind of thing,
1:14:18or this one queue thing, and forgive me
1:14:20if I'm getting details where I never actually
1:14:22really used it myself,
1:14:23besides just looking at it for two seconds.
1:14:25but they were able to structure their app in a way
1:14:28that I literally can't do that in Overcast
1:14:31without massive structural changes.
1:14:32So there's stuff like that, that you have freedom
1:14:38when you're starting new that existing entrants won't do.
1:14:41Other things, so for instance,
1:14:42I am not in the Reddit community, I don't use Reddit.
1:14:46I don't use TikTok for much except occasional viewing.
1:14:51I barely use Instagram.
1:14:54If you can integrate with these services
1:14:56in ways that I can't,
1:14:58you have a differentiating factor there.
1:14:59You can do social features that Apple would never do,
1:15:03or that I would never do.
1:15:04So there's lots of room to address these problems
1:15:09in ways that the other entrants
1:15:12either can't, won't, or at least haven't.
1:15:15And so there's always room for that.
1:15:17There might not be a ton of room,
1:15:19there might not be a ton of money to be made there,
1:15:21But when the markets are this big,
1:15:24even a very small percentage of it, that can be a business.
1:15:29- The difficult part of all this is kind of like,
1:15:31I want to make an app that's like the apps that I like.
1:15:36So I listen to podcasts and Reddit or whatever.
1:15:38You have to really kind of be honest with yourself
1:15:41about expectations, right?
1:15:43How many apps have you made?
1:15:44How complicated an app have you ever made before?
1:15:49do you think you can make an app that will be good enough to get any percentage of the
1:15:55market in a very crowded market in a complex problem space?
1:15:59Not that these are particularly complex, but let's say, pick a Mac where it's easier to
1:16:04pick an example.
1:16:05I'm going to make a Photoshop competitor.
1:16:06Boy, that's tough.
1:16:09There's a lot of graphic editor apps, and there are ones that are less complicated than
1:16:12Photoshop, but even the less complicated ones are pretty complicated.
1:16:15Image editing is not simple.
1:16:17If you do make a simple image editor that's basically like the equivalent of MS Paint,
1:16:20I'm not sure there's a market for that or if there is, it's a different market than
1:16:23Photoshop.
1:16:27Just because I love using Photoshop, I love using Pixelmator, I'm going to make an app
1:16:31like that.
1:16:32I've never made an app before, I'm going to try it.
1:16:34Be careful about, I like watching baseball, therefore I'm going to be a major league basketball
1:16:38player.
1:16:39Be careful what you choose to build and be honest with what you can expect to make on
1:16:45your first outing or second outing or whatever.
1:16:48Because it's not easy.
1:16:49You only hear from the successful people.
1:16:51You don't hear from Marco and his podcast app.
1:16:53You don't hear the 50 people who tried to make podcast apps
1:16:56and did and put them on the app store
1:16:58and you can use them to subscribe to an RSS feed
1:17:02and hit play and make a playlist
1:17:04and no one hears about those apps
1:17:05because they did what they did just fine
1:17:07but they didn't have anything to differentiate them
1:17:09and it just ends up being too much to add all the features
1:17:13that would differentiate them.
1:17:15So yeah, especially when you're looking at like,
1:17:19all these things that interest you, like pick one.
1:17:22Don't try to make a podcast Reddit Twitter client, right?
1:17:27It's too much in a single application.
1:17:29Even just doing one of those is very difficult.
1:17:31And then when you do the market research,
1:17:33like Marco described,
1:17:34like looking at what the competitive landscape is
1:17:36and thinking about what you have to offer there,
1:17:39that should give you an idea of like,
1:17:42All right, if I did this successfully, could it work?
1:17:45And now let me look at what I've signed myself up for.
1:17:48Okay, so I'm gonna make an app that's like X, Y, and Z.
1:17:50Oh, and by the way, it has to look nice and be nice
1:17:52and be bug free and have good performance.
1:17:53And it's tall.
1:17:55I don't wanna be discouraging,
1:17:57but I feel like in some ways it's easier to make,
1:18:01an app for organizing your model train parts
1:18:04than it is to make a Twitter client, right?
1:18:06Or a Reddit client even.
1:18:08Because how many apps are there
1:18:09that organize model train parts?
1:18:11probably not that many.
1:18:13And if you're super into model trains
1:18:14and you have a really good idea about how
1:18:16you would like to organize your parts,
1:18:18you have unique insight and you have a market
1:18:23that doesn't have as many competitors.
1:18:25And even if your app is a little bit janky,
1:18:27it could be one of two or three model train part
1:18:32organizing applications in the entire app store
1:18:34and the other two haven't been updated in five years.
1:18:36And that gives you a big advantage right out of the gate,
1:18:39as opposed to a Twitter client or a Reddit client
1:18:42or a podcast player where there is tons more competition
1:18:44and that competition is active and experienced
1:18:47and the ones that are left alive are probably pretty good.
1:18:49- Yeah, I would say too, building on that a little bit,
1:18:52you said that on the Mac that a Photoshop replacement
1:18:56is a pretty complex thing and that's true.
1:18:59And even the market for those already has,
1:19:02you have Acorn, you have Pixelmator,
1:19:05you have whatever that one is, all the designers--
1:19:08- Affinity Photo.
1:19:08Yeah, you have very strong entrants already.
1:19:11That's a lot of competition, and those are very big apps.
1:19:14But two apps that I use, one app that I use all the time
1:19:18is called PaintCode.
1:19:19And PaintCode is in some ways a replacement
1:19:24for Adobe Illustrator, but it's so programmer specific.
1:19:28It's like a programmer's, specifically an Apple programmer's
1:19:33vector drawing app, because it can export source code
1:19:36to draw these things.
1:19:37And even when I'm drawing something
1:19:39that doesn't need to be represented in source code,
1:19:42I still will often use Paint code because I know it.
1:19:46And it's simpler and it fits my view
1:19:47of how these things should work very well.
1:19:49Whereas something like Adobe Illustrator,
1:19:51I never really learned and it's very big and complex
1:19:55and intimidating for me.
1:19:56Another good app is MonoDraw, we talked about it before,
1:19:59is an app that specializes in making ASCII art.
1:20:02It's basically a drawing app on the Mac for making ASCII art
1:20:05And the author of this app did an incredibly high polished,
1:20:10amazing job for this extremely nerdy specialized app.
1:20:14And there are lots of areas like that where,
1:20:17you know, if you, I mean, we've all had this experience,
1:20:21you are on your phone somewhere,
1:20:23you don't have your computer nearby,
1:20:25and you have some need.
1:20:26Oh, I need to put a few images together,
1:20:28or you know, crop something, or remove a splotch from the,
1:20:31you know, you have some need
1:20:32that you have to do on your phone.
1:20:34and you search the app store,
1:20:36and there's 10,000 garbage apps to do it, and that's it.
1:20:39There are so many examples of that
1:20:42that we've run into as just iPhone users,
1:20:45that every one of those could be,
1:20:48you know what, I could just make a really good version
1:20:50of this in two weeks and just put it up there.
1:20:53And I think there's a lot to be said
1:20:56for the underscore David Smith approach
1:20:59of just start making stuff whenever you see an opening.
1:21:02Just make something and get it to a reasonably
1:21:06usable, sellable level and just put it up there.
1:21:10And throw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall
1:21:12and see what sticks because eventually
1:21:14stuff does start to stick.
1:21:16And there are so many areas where there is underserved
1:21:21or unserved demand and all that's out there is crap
1:21:26because computer nerds like us weren't paying
1:21:27that much attention to it.
1:21:29We have tons of great podcast apps and Reddit clients
1:21:34and Twitter apps because all of us nerds use those
1:21:36and pay attention to those areas.
1:21:38Meanwhile, look at anyone else's phone in your life
1:21:41and see the apps they use and you'll find
1:21:45at least some crazy, stupid subscription scam based app
1:21:49that they only have it to crop an image
1:21:52and they're paying two bucks a week for it
1:21:53because of some stupid scam.
1:21:55There's so much out there that's being badly served
1:21:57underserved. And so even if you don't get like the high profile, you know, big popular
1:22:03nerd app categories, there's a lot of other stuff out there that you can try for and a
1:22:07lot of that stuff you can make an app in two weeks or less and just stick it out there
1:22:11and see if it works before you invest more time into it and just place a bunch of bets
1:22:15on the table and see which ones pay off.
1:22:16All right, moving right along. Russell Bernau writes, "I remember hearing you advise people
1:22:21to stick with battle-tested, well-supported languages instead of chasing the newest ones,
1:22:26But you don't follow your own advice.
1:22:27Now that you've felt the pain of switching
1:22:28to Swift and SwiftUI, have you considered
1:22:30trying to learn a battle-tested cross-platform language?
1:22:33Or maybe even a middleware instead.
1:22:35If you're committing to learning something brand new anyway,
1:22:36why not take the opportunity to ship on all platforms
1:22:39instead of being limited to just apples?
1:22:40Before anyone answers this,
1:22:43let me give a little more context,
1:22:44'cause I also exchanged emails with Russell a little bit.
1:22:47Apparently I save all my good stuff for email
1:22:48instead of bringing it to the show,
1:22:49because I'm a professional.
1:22:51I exchanged emails--
1:22:52- What's your fast mail credit link there, Jason?
1:22:53- Right, seriously.
1:22:55How are you storing all this email and sending it?
1:22:57- Exactly right.
1:22:58Caselist.com/fastmail.
1:23:00But anyways, it turns out that Russell is a developer,
1:23:03but develops against, I think it's Unity,
1:23:07one of the cross-platform game engines,
1:23:09which is a very, very different scenario
1:23:12than like a React Native or something like that.
1:23:14And so, once I discovered that,
1:23:16everything clicked into place,
1:23:18because using a cross-platform thing like React Native,
1:23:22I haven't fiddled with it barely at all,
1:23:24but I have heard universally bad things
1:23:27from many, many different people that I trust and respect.
1:23:31And so the reason we don't use something like a React Native
1:23:35is because you're always beholden to the React Native crowd
1:23:39to update and to do the things you wanna do
1:23:42and make it better and do it in a timely fashion.
1:23:45And almost universally,
1:23:47when you use something like a React Native,
1:23:49it ends up being pretty obvious pretty quickly
1:23:52it's not true native and it's garbage or even if it seems native you can't use the latest and greatest
1:23:59stuff because react native hasn't updated to the you know new APIs for iowa 16 or what have you
1:24:04this is quite a bit different though with something like unity which i mean john jump in when you're
1:24:10ready but unity and what's uh unreal engine is the other one that i'm thinking of um both of those
1:24:16as far as I understand, are like best in class, there is no really good equivalent offered by
1:24:23Apple or Google game engines. Like these are the best of the best and it is in their best interest
1:24:30to be the best of the best everywhere. Like that is the entire point of these engines and so I
1:24:35don't really think it's a very fair comparison to compare Swift and SwiftUI to what it turns out is
1:24:42like a Unity or an Unreal Engine or something like that. Also, for all of Swift's problems, of which
1:24:48there are many and more as time goes on, I still personally like it quite a lot and prefer it to
1:24:54Objective-C. There are ways that Objective-C is better, full stop. I'm not saying that Swift is
1:24:59better than Objective-C, but in a lot of ways I still prefer it to Objective-C. It feels,
1:25:04it felt better in this regard years ago, but it still feels to me, I don't know if "light" is the
1:25:11is the word I'm looking for, but maybe more modern
1:25:13is the best way to describe it.
1:25:15But there's a lot to like about Swift.
1:25:17And Swift UI, when you are within the guard rails,
1:25:21as we've said, both Marco and I particularly
1:25:22have said many times, when you're within the guard rails,
1:25:25it is great, it really honestly is.
1:25:27It's just that those guard rails,
1:25:29as I think I said last week, are humongously tall brick walls
1:25:31and when you try to get around them, it is painful.
1:25:33So, I don't know, that's my two cents about all this.
1:25:37Let's start with Jon this time.
1:25:38Jon, what are your thoughts here?
1:25:40- And the whole thing about sticking with
1:25:41battle-tested stuff instead of chasing new stuff,
1:25:44I think as Marco talked about on a past show,
1:25:45this is exactly what he's done.
1:25:47If anything, he's been a little bit late.
1:25:48Like when it comes to-- - A little bit.
1:25:50- Yeah, when it comes to app development,
1:25:52we're taking our cues from Apple, the platform owner, right?
1:25:55And so it was clear that Apple was pushing Swift,
1:25:57but Marco waited many, many years
1:25:58before he jumped on that bandwagon.
1:26:00Same thing with SwiftUI.
1:26:01It existed for a while until Apple had to put a slide up
1:26:04and say, "Look, it's SwiftUI, just FYI.
1:26:07"We will continue to support the other ones,
1:26:08"they're great or whatever,
1:26:09where we're putting all of our efforts behind SwiftUI.
1:26:12That is not jumping on the new thing in a second,
1:26:15waiting for it to be quote unquote battle tested.
1:26:19Now it doesn't mean it's gonna be perfect
1:26:20or even fit for all the purposes that you need it for
1:26:23because the old stuff still exists.
1:26:24But waiting that long is sort of on the trailing edge.
1:26:28We're not on the bleeding,
1:26:29if you're going to Swift and SwiftUI in 2022,
1:26:31you are not on the bleeding edge.
1:26:33You are not chasing the newest hotness.
1:26:34You are merely doing the minimum necessary
1:26:37to keep up with the clear direction of the platform owner.
1:26:40Now with game stuff and engines,
1:26:42there's so much more sort of middleware,
1:26:45like for, we're talking about like React Native
1:26:49or even like RxSwift, just stuff like that.
1:26:51When you're building on top of a platform
1:26:54that builds on top of a platform,
1:26:55there's just much more stuff involved,
1:26:56but the gaming middleware does so much for you.
1:27:01It's not just like a thin wrapper around existing APIs.
1:27:05It is an entire world unto itself,
1:27:07and games in particular tend not to have,
1:27:10much to Apple's chagrin, very big platform tie-ins,
1:27:14like what makes a game a Mac game versus a PC game
1:27:17versus a Nintendo Switch game.
1:27:19Like, games do their own UI, they have their own backends,
1:27:23there's nothing about them in most cases
1:27:25that reveals anything about the platform that they're on
1:27:28with the exception of maybe integration
1:27:29with like voice chat on the consoles or whatever,
1:27:31but like Apple wants you to use Game Center
1:27:34and to be able to sign in with your Apple ID
1:27:36to share your scores in iCloud and it's like no.
1:27:39That's all Apple specific work
1:27:41that has no purpose anyplace else.
1:27:42So if your goal is to sell a game
1:27:44on more than just Apple's platforms,
1:27:46doing stuff the Apple way is a big money and time sink
1:27:51and that's where Unity and Unreal Engine come in
1:27:53where you're like I have to sell this game
1:27:55in as many platforms as I can.
1:27:57Any moment I spend doing something Apple specific
1:28:01is wasted time because the players don't care about it
1:28:04and it doesn't benefit me in any of my other platforms
1:28:07and it probably has nothing to do
1:28:08with what's going on in Unreal and Unity.
1:28:11And that said though, speaking of,
1:28:13for the previous question about market opportunity
1:28:15or whatever, Unity and Unreal themselves
1:28:18are gaming middleware that replace
1:28:21older, creakier gaming middleware
1:28:23and surpass them in ability and scope, right?
1:28:26And both of, basically any kind of modern game stuff
1:28:29that continues to use C++, it's the cutting edge,
1:28:32it's what you should be using right now,
1:28:34but everyone hates C++ and has memory problems, right?
1:28:37And so who's going to be the next big middleware engine
1:28:41that does game level performance with a safer language?
1:28:45I don't know the details of Unreal and Unity.
1:28:46Maybe they have a Rust thing,
1:28:48maybe they have a safe mode in C++.
1:28:50I don't actually know if they've already done this,
1:28:51but I'm not suggesting that an indie developer
1:28:54take on this task, but some multi-billion dollar corporation
1:28:57there is a market opportunity to be the first game engine
1:29:02to try to compete with Unreal and Unity,
1:29:05but in a more memory safe way.
1:29:07Because there's, you know, games by their nature
1:29:10care about performance much more than other kinds
1:29:12of applications.
1:29:13And so they tend to stick with less safe, more
1:29:19problematic technologies.
1:29:21They give them the speed they need
1:29:22at the cost of pain and suffering of the developers who
1:29:25make them.
1:29:26It's an incredible black art.
1:29:27Like, if you ever look at-- go to GDC and see, like,
1:29:30What does it take to build a modern game?
1:29:33I'll just pick Destiny, but anything like Call of Duty,
1:29:35any of those type of games.
1:29:37Under the covers, those things are terrifying.
1:29:39And the people who can build those engines,
1:29:41there's a small group as in probably hundreds
1:29:43or thousands of people on the entire planet
1:29:46who have the brain capacity and skills and experience
1:29:49to build those type of things because they are so weird.
1:29:53They look nothing under the covers like an iOS app
1:29:56or Photoshop or Microsoft words.
1:29:59and they're incredibly complicated
1:30:01and just their whole world's unto themselves.
1:30:04That's before you even talk about the things
1:30:06they're running on top of like Unreal or Unity,
1:30:08before you even get to all of that.
1:30:09It's ferociously complicated and very difficult to do
1:30:14and that's why you have to hire these huge teams
1:30:16and spend millions and millions of dollars
1:30:18to have huge QA departments
1:30:20because you're asking people to do this Herculean task
1:30:23with languages where one false move
1:30:25gives you memory exception
1:30:27and kills your entire application.
1:30:28Now you gotta do it multiple threads and over the network
1:30:31and on top of multiple platforms.
1:30:33I know by the way, it has to be fast, right?
1:30:35So that's a big ask.
1:30:36And I feel like there's a market opportunity
1:30:39for a middleware that is more modern than the existing ones,
1:30:43just as they replace whatever things came before them.
1:30:47Like if you had sent this question back in the 80s,
1:30:49it was like, why are you considering
1:30:50using some kind of middleware thing
1:30:52when you could just be writing the engine yourself?
1:30:54Writing the engine yourself is battle tested or whatever.
1:30:56But it's like, time marches on
1:30:58and eventually people realize that there is a new,
1:31:00better way to do things.
1:31:01And so I think that's what's happening with Swift
1:31:05and SwiftUI, it's the clear new and better way
1:31:08according to Apple and they own the platform
1:31:10and so you better get on board that bus.
1:31:13There's a dividing line between I don't want to be too early
1:31:19and I don't want to be the stick in the mud
1:31:21who's using Objective-C until they turn out the lights.
1:31:24- Yeah, and I would say too,
1:31:25there's a lot of context around certain areas
1:31:30of these choices that matters a lot.
1:31:32So for instance, in the context of this question,
1:31:35where Casey discovered through his email,
1:31:37but you can get to it at caseylist.com/passphillism,
1:31:42that this was about a game.
1:31:44- About the triple W.
1:31:45- Right.
1:31:46- Yes, Dad, sorry, Dad.
1:31:47- When you're making a game,
1:31:49that's a very important context
1:31:51that's different from making other kinds of apps,
1:31:53'cause the needs and priorities and environments
1:31:55are very different.
1:31:57When I've talked about sticking with battle tested languages
1:31:59and platforms and tools in the past,
1:32:01what I'm usually talking about is the server side of things.
1:32:04And that's a whole different ball game.
1:32:07And on the server side, what you're usually doing
1:32:12is fairly boring stuff of moving data around
1:32:15in some kind of scalable, affordable, useful way.
1:32:18And you're doing it on a very stable
1:32:23and pretty unmoving platform of Linux
1:32:26or whatever virtualized thing you're doing.
1:32:30That platform barely changes it all over time.
1:32:33And so if you stick on top of it,
1:32:36other boring battle-tested tools,
1:32:38you're in for probably very easy time
1:32:41and a very stable server situation.
1:32:43The client side where, again,
1:32:46if you're developing for a PC,
1:32:49that doesn't change that much these days,
1:32:51Apple's platforms do change though,
1:32:53and not super aggressively.
1:32:56I mean, Swift is eight years old, in public at least.
1:33:00Swift is eight years old.
1:33:01Swift UI is three years old.
1:33:04These are not, I would say Swift is not cutting edge anymore.
1:33:08Swift is, I mean, they keep modifying it
1:33:10because they can't sit still for some reason,
1:33:12and they keep adding more and more garbage on top of Swift,
1:33:14some of which is useful, much of which is not.
1:33:17But the language itself, the core of Swift,
1:33:20is no longer the new hotness,
1:33:21it's just what you're supposed to use, like period.
1:33:24That's like what, Swift is the correct language
1:33:27to use for Apple platform apps, that's it.
1:33:30I'm not using Swift on the server
1:33:31because that seems a little fringy
1:33:33and less likely to be super well tested
1:33:36and things like that.
1:33:37But on the client side, Swift is it.
1:33:40That's what you should be using.
1:33:42And any code you write that's not Swift
1:33:44for Apple platforms is technical debt.
1:33:47It's simple as that.
1:33:47And I say this as somebody whose app
1:33:49is mostly Objective-C, but that's the reality.
1:33:51The reality is you should be using Swift.
1:33:54SwiftUI is, again, it's three years old.
1:33:57There are still a lot of shortcomings to SwiftUI,
1:34:00and frankly, there's just bugs.
1:34:02And some of those get fixed by the releases,
1:34:05some of them don't, and that's just the way it is.
1:34:09And SwiftUI, I still do consider somewhat cutting edge.
1:34:13And while I'm writing this little prototype thing
1:34:17using SwiftUI, I'm not rewriting my whole app in it today.
1:34:22You know, I'm writing this prototype to see
1:34:24how much can I get written in SwiftUI,
1:34:27and my eventual goal is to rewrite the whole UI in SwiftUI,
1:34:32but that's not gonna be releasable,
1:34:36at least until I can require iOS 16.
1:34:39And maybe, if I run into problems
1:34:42that are just insurmountable,
1:34:44Maybe iOS 17 or later or never.
1:34:47So right now SwiftUI,
1:34:48I'm still considering kind of experimental.
1:34:51I'm kind of doing it in parallel with my main code base.
1:34:56But that's still an experiment.
1:34:58But Swift itself is--
1:35:00- Well, it's like Objective-C though.
1:35:02Like every line of UI code you write now
1:35:05is also technical debt,
1:35:06unless something catastrophic happens
1:35:08with Apple's stated strategy, right?
1:35:09It's not that it's bad or it's broken or whatever,
1:35:11but you basically know you're writing dead end code, right?
1:35:14'cause Apple has signaled SwiftUI is the future
1:35:16and maybe you have to.
1:35:17You have to use UI kick,
1:35:18SwiftUI just plain can't do it, right?
1:35:20But you know when you're writing that code,
1:35:23I will eventually have to change this probably.
1:35:26- Right, and in the very first year of SwiftUI,
1:35:30maybe that's a big risk.
1:35:33After one year, maybe they would say,
1:35:35"You know what, this strategy's not working out so well."
1:35:38See, combine. - Combine, yeah.
1:35:39- And they would just kind of quietly walk away.
1:35:42That happens all the time with tech companies
1:35:44when they launch new stuff.
1:35:45They throw something out there, some new initiative,
1:35:48doesn't work the way they want to
1:35:49or doesn't get enough traction
1:35:50and they walk away from it slowly over time,
1:35:52or abruptly in the case of some other companies.
1:35:55But with SwiftUI being already three years in
1:36:00and with it getting tons of updates
1:36:03on each of those three years
1:36:04and having lots of steam behind it
1:36:06and lots of people using it
1:36:06and Apple putting a lot of, what is it,
1:36:09wood behind the arrow, is that the metaphor?
1:36:12That doesn't make a lot of sense.
1:36:13Anyway, 'cause aren't Air supposed to be like--
1:36:16- One behind the arrowhead, do you feel better about that?
1:36:19- Maybe, but aren't Air supposed to be like really light
1:36:21so that they can-- - Oh, concentrate, concentrate.
1:36:23- Anyway, so Apple's putting a lot of effort into SwiftUI
1:36:27and supporting it very well.
1:36:28The community is picking it up
1:36:30and lots of people are using it just fine.
1:36:32So I think SwiftUI has probably crossed the threshold
1:36:37where its future is pretty safe.
1:36:40I think it clearly has a strong future.
1:36:43It might even be pretty safe to say
1:36:46that it will be where everything is going.
1:36:49It's certainly on the way to that.
1:36:51And I think at this point you can start making that call.
1:36:54And so at this point, it's very important
1:36:58for Apple platform developers to start familiarizing
1:37:01ourselves with SwiftUI.
1:37:03Maybe not jumping 100% into it yet
1:37:05if you're not ready for that, but again,
1:37:07going back to the earlier question from Abel DeMaz
1:37:09about writing a brand new podcast or Twitter app,
1:37:12if you're writing a brand new app from scratch today,
1:37:15you should definitely do it in SwiftUI.
1:37:17Like no question, definitely use SwiftUI from scratch.
1:37:20The only reason not to is if you've run into
1:37:22some weird edge case that it doesn't support
1:37:24and you have to wrap a UI kit control or something.
1:37:27But even that, that should be done very sparingly.
1:37:30And so the only question is whether those of us
1:37:34who haven't used SwiftUI yet,
1:37:37who have existing code bases,
1:37:39when and whether we should start adopting it ourselves
1:37:42and starting to replace our UI kit code with SwiftUI.
1:37:45And that's a separate question,
1:37:46there's again separate factors that go into that,
1:37:47but it's definitely the correct language to choose
1:37:52when you have that choice today.
1:37:54And sometimes in tech we have the luxury
1:37:57of picking the safe old thing.
1:38:00Again, on the server side, we have so many great options
1:38:03for safe old boring languages and tools and databases
1:38:06and stuff like that, tons of great options for that
1:38:08on the server side because the server doesn't change
1:38:11that much over time.
1:38:11- And it's also the platform that nobody owns though.
1:38:14Like that's the web is the platform nobody owns, right?
1:38:16So the reason we can do that on the web on the server side
1:38:18is there is no like dominant,
1:38:20imagine if Microsoft owned the server and it's like,
1:38:22well, Microsoft decided this year that the new extension
1:38:25to IIS whatever is how we're gonna do web development.
1:38:27We'd have to be chasing the platform owner,
1:38:29but there is no platform owner on the server side.
1:38:31It's basically Linux as close as you can get
1:38:33and they're pretty agnostic.
1:38:34And so you can stick with PHP forever
1:38:36because no one's going to stop you
1:38:37and no one's going to move on and say,
1:38:39oh, every line of PHP you write, that's legacy code,
1:38:41'cause pretty soon PHP's not gonna run anymore.
1:38:43No, what's gonna stop it?
1:38:44As long as people still are using PHP
1:38:46and they keep developing it, it will be supported.
1:38:48But that's not true of developing an iOS app.
1:38:50What Apple says is what's gonna happen.
1:38:52- Yeah, I guess that's true.
1:38:53I mean, I guess the same reason why, you know,
1:38:55email doesn't change that much over time,
1:38:57because there kind of is no, you know,
1:38:58platform owner for email, although Google's getting close.
1:39:01But anyway, there's, yeah, so, you know,
1:39:05different conditions, different factors that play into it,
1:39:08but on the client side, you have to follow
1:39:10your platform vendor when there is one.
1:39:12And you have to follow what Apple's doing
1:39:15on the client side in order to be competitive.
1:39:17And as for like, why don't I learn
1:39:20some cross-platform thing?
1:39:22Again, in the games market, this makes way more sense.
1:39:25In the app market, as Casey was saying earlier,
1:39:27those have so far proven to be pretty painful
1:39:29for people who use them.
1:39:31I have yet to hear anything positive enough
1:39:35about a cross-platform app framework
1:39:37that makes me want to use it.
1:39:39They also seem to change very frequently.
1:39:42Like, you know, people say, oh, well,
1:39:44why don't you learn this new thing?
1:39:45Well, because if I learn SwiftUI and Swift,
1:39:48that knowledge is probably gonna last me 10 years.
1:39:51Whereas if I learn React Native,
1:39:54is that really gonna still be the dominant thing
1:39:56in that market in 10 years?
1:39:57Probably not, if I had to guess.
1:39:59That's very unlikely.
1:40:00'cause stuff like that tends to change much more often
1:40:03in those areas.
1:40:04And then finally, the whole idea of this would be like,
1:40:07then I can capture people on Android.
1:40:10You know what?
1:40:12I don't want people on Android.
1:40:14Like, I really don't, and there's lots,
1:40:15this sounds slightly dismissive,
1:40:17it sounds very dismissive.
1:40:18I mean it only slightly dismissively.
1:40:20Frankly, I don't have a market on Android.
1:40:24There are podcast apps there, they do well,
1:40:27they can have that market.
1:40:28To serve Android, you have to be involved in Android.
1:40:31You have to have Android testing, Android test devices.
1:40:34You have to know how to make stuff good on Android.
1:40:37You have to integrate with Android stuff
1:40:38and Android features that Android people like to use
1:40:40on their Android phones.
1:40:41I'm not in that world at all.
1:40:43So I really can't make a good Android app
1:40:46and the language is not what's holding me back.
1:40:48It's everything else about the platform
1:40:50that's holding me back.
1:40:51And frankly, a podcast app has a much better market
1:40:54on iOS than on Android anyway.
1:40:56whatever Android people think their market share is,
1:40:58first of all, those numbers are a little bit,
1:41:00there's a lot of asterisks on those numbers,
1:41:02but second of all, when you look at
1:41:03podcast listeners specifically,
1:41:05iPhones are way more dominant in podcast listeners overall
1:41:10than Android phones.
1:41:11So my market is just not very strong there,
1:41:13even if I knew how to address it,
1:41:15which I very much don't, and the language isn't the problem.
1:41:19- Interesting thing about games is
1:41:20it is often the path of least resistance to use
1:41:23Unity or Unreal or whatever,
1:41:25even if you decide I'm only ever going to make this
1:41:28an iOS app, and even if you decide,
1:41:30I'm gonna make this an iOS app,
1:41:31and I'm gonna do integrations
1:41:32with all the weird Apple stuff too.
1:41:34I'm gonna do all the Apple stuff,
1:41:35I'm gonna support Game Center,
1:41:37I'm going to have Apple ID logins,
1:41:39I'm going to integrate with all Apple, Citrus.
1:41:41Still, still, even if that's what you decide to do,
1:41:44the game engines do so much for you,
1:41:47in terms of like, that is the real platform
1:41:49you're writing on top of it, still worthwhile to do it.
1:41:50And then if you do that, and since games, again,
1:41:53don't have any, usually don't have many ties with the platform, you might think, hmm, I
1:41:59look at this app sideways, I could probably get this thing running on a PC or on an Android
1:42:06phone because I did use Unity and most of this game will work fine anywhere else, just
1:42:12those platform specific bits I did for Apple, I could just remove them or replace them with
1:42:15Android equivalents or whatever, but still, there's plenty of games that we know, games
1:42:19that we know and love that start off on the iPhone and spend, sometimes spend years on
1:42:23the iPhone before they go to any other platform.
1:42:25Some great games never leave the iPhone.
1:42:27They just live their entire life on the iPhone in the current warehouse because they're made
1:42:29by one developer who, you know, there's only so much a single person can do.
1:42:33To expect a single person to make a complicated iOS game, that's hard enough.
1:42:39To say also you should support multiple platforms and have this game available on every platform,
1:42:44you can't ask that much of one person.
1:42:46Not everyone wants to start a multi-person company.
1:42:48So it is a perfectly valid choice to say,
1:42:51I am just going to make this an iOS app,
1:42:53and I am just going to do what I want to do on a platform
1:42:58that I'm most comfortable, that I'm familiar with,
1:43:00and that's all that I can do as an individual developer,
1:43:03even as a small team.
1:43:05All right, Gilherme Aliz writes, on episode two
1:43:07of Hypercritical, John said that Time Machine
1:43:10was the best feature ever implemented for the Mac.
1:43:1211 years later, do you guys believe that Time Machine
1:43:15has found a worthy opponent?
1:43:16is it still the best feature of the Mac?
1:43:18I don't even know what I would call the best feature,
1:43:20but John, is it still the best feature?
1:43:22- Document proxy icons?
1:43:23- Yeah, I wish I could remember 11 years ago
1:43:28if this feature existed, but now today,
1:43:32probably what I would say is iCloud photo library.
1:43:35- No, that's a pretty good one.
1:43:37- Just because it's, I mean, the bad thing about it
1:43:39is you basically still have to pay money for it,
1:43:41but you know, whatever, you can't,
1:43:42server resources aren't free,
1:43:44But what do people do with their computing devices,
1:43:47with their phones?
1:43:48Let's face it, they take pictures.
1:43:49And I guess this is kind of similar to a time machine.
1:43:53They take pictures, and before the advent
1:43:55of iCloud Photo Library, it was too easy for people
1:43:58to lose those pictures.
1:43:59And iCloud Photo Library basically
1:44:00does what it is intended to do and pretty much mostly works.
1:44:04And it makes it so that you can take pictures with your phone,
1:44:07and you won't lose them if you drop your phone into a lake.
1:44:10And that is super important, because pictures
1:44:13are meaningful and not particularly replaceable.
1:44:17And in the same way that Time Machine,
1:44:18the reason I said it was the best feature
1:44:19is 'cause people had computers
1:44:20and they kept putting more and more stuff
1:44:23that is important on their computers.
1:44:24Computers became a bigger and bigger part of people's lives,
1:44:26especially with the advent of the internet,
1:44:28that the stuff on people's computers had tremendous value
1:44:32and asking people to protect that stuff,
1:44:35using third-party tools or through their own devices
1:44:40was just too much to ask, nobody did it, right?
1:44:42So you had to build it into the operating system,
1:44:44and it had to be easy enough that regular people could do it.
1:44:46And Time Machine did that.
1:44:47And I feel like iCloud Photo Library is a more narrow
1:44:49version of that.
1:44:50Maybe in 10 years time, I'll be able to say,
1:44:53oh, you know, iCloud backups for everything.
1:44:55'Cause Apple does it for phones.
1:44:56Hey, you can back up your whole phone to iCloud, right?
1:44:58They'll take care of everything.
1:44:59Obviously your photos is a separate thing or whatever.
1:45:01But like, for Macs, we've still got Time Machine,
1:45:04but there is no iCloud backup for Macs.
1:45:06You know, frequent sponsored back players
1:45:08probably wouldn't like that,
1:45:09but honestly this is a thing that Apple should create.
1:45:12It's been a third party opportunity long enough.
1:45:15We've got Time Machine which predates most of the
1:45:17cloud stuff and we've got all of our iOS devices
1:45:20being updated, backed up in iCloud.
1:45:24iCloud backup for your Mac would be
1:45:27probably the new, maybe the super seasonal previous ones.
1:45:30Time Machine, iCloud Photo Library,
1:45:32and then eventually iCloud backup for Mac.
1:45:34So there's my top three features,
1:45:36two of which exist and one of which hopefully will someday.
1:45:39- I mean, I would say that the photo backup
1:45:41was even better than Time Machine
1:45:43in the sense that way more people
1:45:47have internet connections and three bucks a month,
1:45:50or whatever it is for the basic one,
1:45:53than who have external drives
1:45:55that they plug their stuff into regularly.
1:45:58And the idea, Time Machine made way more sense
1:46:01when computing was more stationary.
1:46:04When you had desktops or you would always use your laptop
1:46:07like on one desk and that was it,
1:46:08and you'd plug into everything and basically
1:46:10use your laptop like a desktop.
1:46:11And I don't think that's true of today's world anymore,
1:46:14and we have the whole multi-device world today.
1:46:18So you can take a photo on any of your Apple devices
1:46:22that have cameras, and they show up
1:46:24on every other Apple device, including the ones
1:46:26that don't have cameras.
1:46:29Not only does it back up things from one device,
1:46:33but it merges all your data and keeps everything
1:46:36in sync across all of your devices.
1:46:38and that is such a more modern useful thing
1:46:42and it doesn't require people to have expensive hardware
1:46:45that they have to manage and don't forget to eject.
1:46:48So Time Machine was great for its time,
1:46:51but the Photo Library model of doing things
1:46:54is so much more modern and has so much more
1:46:58broad and accessible utility.
1:47:01- That's what iCloud Drive was supposed to do by the way,
1:47:03but iCloud Drive is like, so,
1:47:05so iCloud Photo Library is so clearly narrowly focused,
1:47:07is literally the photos application.
1:47:09Like it doesn't care about any pictures anywhere else
1:47:11on your disk, it's just the photos application, right?
1:47:13And that's fine, that's where all the photos go.
1:47:15Your camera takes them, they go there,
1:47:16they're in photos app, like makes sense, right?
1:47:18Time machine is everything on your machine.
1:47:21And then when they did a cloud version,
1:47:23they didn't do cloud version of time machine,
1:47:24they didn't do iCloud backup for your Mac,
1:47:26and so they said, oh, iCloud Drive,
1:47:28and documents can save their files,
1:47:30applications can save their files into iCloud,
1:47:32and also your documents folder and your desktop
1:47:34will be in iCloud or whatever.
1:47:36But two things, one, iCloud Drive and that whole thing,
1:47:39in my experience, is way less reliable than iCloud Photos,
1:47:41and two, that's not your whole Mac.
1:47:42You can put things in other places, right?
1:47:44So still, that gap remains.
1:47:46And so, you know, and again, Time Machine is from an era
1:47:49when the idea that people would have the upload bandwidth
1:47:51to back up their entire Mac across the internet
1:47:54was not a safe assumption.
1:47:55But now, I think we're probably across that threshold
1:47:58or at least getting close to it.
1:47:59So I really hope someday we get iCloud backup for Mac.
1:48:02And I don't know what they're gonna do with like,
1:48:04well then how do you deal with documents and desktop
1:48:07in the cloud or in iCloud drive?
1:48:08How do you deal with that?
1:48:09I don't know, figure it out.
1:48:10But they've never been,
1:48:11I've never had a lot of confidence in them.
1:48:13So I hope they give it to whatever team did,
1:48:16you know, iCloud photo library.
1:48:19- All right, Mark Voss, who we mentioned earlier,
1:48:24writes, "I have an LG 77-inch OLED CX TV.
1:48:29"The LG firmware automatically dims scenes
1:48:31"that aren't dynamic and relatively static in nature,
1:48:34despite it still being a moving talking scene, it's more that the camera doesn't pan, it's
1:48:39in a fixed position for a long period of time, etc.
1:48:41This auto-dimming is to protect the TV from burn-in.
1:48:43LG also has an additional option where it detects a fixed logo displayed on screen,
1:48:47such as for sporting events or your HUD on, not Halo, Destiny.
1:48:52And to auto-dim that part of the display only, the HDTVTest YouTube channel is shown how
1:48:56to disable these two things using the service menu.
1:48:58Note, you have to buy a special remote purely meant for the official LG technicians just
1:49:02to get into the service menu.
1:49:04So just by entering the service menu,
1:49:05you can void your warranty as each TV logs the fact
1:49:08that the service menu's been entered into
1:49:09and also what changes were made.
1:49:11So John, if it were you,
1:49:12would you disable these auto-dimming features
1:49:14given that they do irritate, well, in this case, Mark,
1:49:17but I'm assuming they would irritate you too,
1:49:18and Mark says, "I do notice the TV auto-dim,"
1:49:22or would you leave them enabled
1:49:23for the very reason that they've been implemented?
1:49:25Another way of asking, what is the real likelihood
1:49:27that the TV would get burn-in from watching shows and movies
1:49:29with those features disabled?
1:49:32- Well, obviously the answer for me
1:49:33I would wait until I could buy a television that doesn't auto dim.
1:49:36Like that was one of the first tests that HDTV Test did on the television that I ordered.
1:49:41They had it next to one of the modern LG ones and they were showing like a movie or something,
1:49:45like not some exotic test footage or whatever, just like real footage.
1:49:48And the other television would auto dim because it's basically like the average brightness level.
1:49:54Like if you have a scene where they're just like in a room and the brightness doesn't change a lot
1:49:58because like they're just showing people talking in a room and one person, the other person,
1:50:01but the overall average picture brightness stays about the same.
1:50:05The TVU auto dimmed because it doesn't, you know, it's trying to defend against
1:50:08burn-in by saying "oh it seems like you might be showing a very similar image on
1:50:11the screen for a long period of time and so if this room is like
1:50:13bright over here and dark over here I don't want to leave this playing for
1:50:16five minutes because then you know you might get
1:50:18image retention for the bright area that's up in the corner."
1:50:21And the new television that I got with the
1:50:25the Quantum.OLED screen, one of the advantages of Quantum.OLED is you
1:50:30you could make the thing brighter,
1:50:31but instead of making it brighter,
1:50:32what they did was made it less prone to burn-in
1:50:36by turning down the brightness.
1:50:38Like it's trying less hard, right?
1:50:40So the WRGB OLEDs are as bright as they can possibly be
1:50:45without washing out the picture.
1:50:46And the QD OLEDs, they have enough headroom
1:50:49that they can sort of run them at 70%
1:50:52and still have the same brightness as the other ones.
1:50:54And they also have a heat sink behind them
1:50:55to dissipate heat better.
1:50:57And so it doesn't need to auto dim.
1:50:59It says, I can run this scene all day,
1:51:02and I'm not afraid of burning.
1:51:03At least that's the theory, and that's the warranty
1:51:05that's been behind some of the QDOLED screen
1:51:08seems to indicate that the manufacturers think
1:51:09that these screens will be less susceptible to burning.
1:51:12So my answer to this question is,
1:51:15if you can't get rid of your fancy new TV
1:51:18and get an even fancier newer one,
1:51:21is you should use the protection features,
1:51:22because they're not there for the hell of it.
1:51:24If these manufacturers could get rid of the features,
1:51:27they would, because they know they get dinged for it
1:51:28reviews. And they get things for users, right? They would not enable these features if they
1:51:34thought they didn't need them. But you do need them. So how much do you need them, right? Well,
1:51:38there's the famous artings.com OLED Burn-In test, and they did a multi-year Burn-In test.
1:51:44Their test ended in 2019, so it's not relevant to modern televisions. Although the CX or CX,
1:51:52I don't know how you're supposed to pronounce it, but it is the 10. It came after the C9.
1:51:56that is not that much newer.
1:51:59I think it's a 2020 or 2021 television.
1:52:01But yeah, OLED burn-in is definitely a thing.
1:52:04And if you wanna see it, go to that Artings page
1:52:06and look in horror at what can happen to your television
1:52:09if you watch MSNBC or something with a ticker
1:52:12or watch sports, right?
1:52:13And so, you may not like that little thing
1:52:16that dims the logo or that dims your entire screen,
1:52:19but the alternative is probably worse.
1:52:22Now, all that said, you wanna live dangerously,
1:52:26You say, guess what, I've decided in two years
1:52:28I'm getting a new TV no matter what,
1:52:29so go hop into that service menu, disable the feature,
1:52:32and then if you get burned in the end of two years,
1:52:33oh well, you were gonna buy a new TV anyway.
1:52:35That is also an option, but it's not like they're,
1:52:38you know, this is how they get you.
1:52:39They put the auto-dimming in,
1:52:40and you have to know the secret code to get in.
1:52:42No, they're trying to protect your television,
1:52:43so it's like, you know, what kind of content do you watch,
1:52:46and do you care about burn-in?
1:52:49And then you can decide based on that,
1:52:50but don't think that, you know,
1:52:52that you can enable this feature
1:52:54and not face any consequences.
1:52:56There will be consequences.
1:52:57They just may be acceptable consequences.
1:52:59Just decide that ahead of time.
1:53:01- And Brian Lazars writes,
1:53:03has John decided on a backup strategy for a dorm environment?
1:53:06My daughter is heading off to college in the fall.
1:53:09It's not like I can send her to school with a Synology.
1:53:11Why not?
1:53:12(bell ringing)
1:53:12And I'm not sure she's going to be diligent
1:53:14about backing up to an external drive.
1:53:16- Yeah, I mean, the strategy for dorms
1:53:18is the same strategy we should be.
1:53:19For everyone, where possible,
1:53:21is just do everything in the cloud, right?
1:53:22The internet connections are fast enough these days,
1:53:25especially for someone who's in a dorm
1:53:26or you can't have any expectation
1:53:29of having any kind of redundant local storage,
1:53:31like you're just trying to get the kid
1:53:32to not break their laptop or lose it or whatever.
1:53:36Cloud storage for everything.
1:53:37And from what I've seen from my kids' education
1:53:40having been forced to use the Google tech,
1:53:42been forced, been allowed to use the Google technologies
1:53:46for all their education,
1:53:47does everything in the cloud anyway.
1:53:48They don't have any concept of saving.
1:53:50You know, my daughter got this
1:53:51screenplay writing application, I forget which one.
1:53:53It might have been Highline, or I don't remember.
1:53:57Some Mac native screenplay writing application,
1:53:59I had to show her how to save.
1:54:01She was just so used to it.
1:54:02You just go to Google Docs and you just type.
1:54:04And you don't ever have to worry about saving.
1:54:06And where is it saved?
1:54:07Oh, it's in Google Docs.
1:54:08Where is Google Docs?
1:54:09I don't know.
1:54:09It's everywhere.
1:54:10It's on my Chromebook.
1:54:11It's on my Mac.
1:54:13Cloud saves.
1:54:14That is literally the only way that most young people can
1:54:17keep track of anything is it is just in this place.
1:54:19And this place that exists, this place is not on my phone.
1:54:22this place is not on my iPad,
1:54:23this place is not on my Chromebook,
1:54:25this place is not on my laptop,
1:54:26this place is somewhere else, it's in the cloud.
1:54:28That's where everybody's stuff should be.
1:54:29That is the only viable quote-unquote backup strategy
1:54:34for our college environment, I feel like.
1:54:36Obviously, in college you may get into a situation
1:54:39where you have large data files
1:54:40that you're doing in some lab in a class or whatever,
1:54:41and then you will have to deal with file storage,
1:54:43and there's no avoiding it
1:54:45'cause it can't fit in the cloud.
1:54:46But even then, they probably have a Google Drive
1:54:49for the class that has tons of storage
1:54:51you can put the stuff in, right?
1:54:53Don't try to put a Synology in a dorm room.
1:54:55Don't even bother with external--
1:54:56- Aw, poo.
1:54:57- Don't even bother with external time machine drives.
1:54:59It's just not gonna work out.
1:55:01They're just gonna spill a drink on it.
1:55:02They're gonna unplug it when it's mounted,
1:55:04and it's just, yeah, cloud storage.
1:55:07- Thanks to our sponsors this week,
1:55:09Linode, Instabug, and businesscards.io,
1:55:12and thanks to our members who support us directly.
1:55:14You can join at atp.fm/join.
1:55:17We will talk to you next week.
1:55:19Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin
1:55:26'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental
1:55:32John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him
1:55:37'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental
1:55:42And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm
1:55:47And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
1:55:56So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M
1:56:00Auntie Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C
1:56:05U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A
1:56:08It's accidental (it's accidental)
1:56:11They didn't mean to accidental (accidental)
1:56:16♪ Tech, why'd it cost so long ♪
1:56:20- I went on vacation last week,
1:56:24and I had the strangest home kit experience,
1:56:29which is weird because I was on vacation and not at home.
1:56:35So I have to set the stage,
1:56:36and I am already regretting bringing this up,
1:56:40and you haven't even figured out what I'm gonna say,
1:56:43but a while ago--
1:56:44- I'm wondering how you had a home kit problem
1:56:46when you weren't in your home, but go ahead.
1:56:49- Yes, so it starts with me deciding
1:56:52that it would be convenient to have one of our Apple TVs
1:56:57in the vacation place with us,
1:56:59'cause we're gonna be there for a week.
1:57:00It would be nice to be able to watch some TV in the evening
1:57:03and not have to hook up a computer or an iPad
1:57:05or anything like that.
1:57:06I have the 1080 Apple TV that I use in the bedroom
1:57:11every great once in a while, very rarely, but it's there.
1:57:14So I can easily unplug that and bring it
1:57:17and that's what we did.
1:57:18And I noticed, I don't remember exactly when it started
1:57:22during the week that we were gone,
1:57:24but I noticed that I was periodically getting
1:57:29the notification that I get when I leave the house
1:57:31saying yes, the garage door is indeed closed.
1:57:33So what am I talking about?
1:57:34So I set up an automation in HomeKit
1:57:37that will, by a very convoluted series of steps,
1:57:42will send me a push notification and say,
1:57:43either the garage door's closed, you're good,
1:57:45or oh my God, turn around, the garage door's open.
1:57:47And it does this when the last person leaves the house.
1:57:49So if I leave and Aaron's here, doesn't do anything.
1:57:51If Aaron leaves and I'm here, doesn't do anything.
1:57:53But if both of us leave,
1:57:54even if we don't leave at the same time,
1:57:56it will say, you know,
1:57:57here's the status of the garage door.
1:57:59And I'm getting these notifications
1:58:01while I'm at the beach a couple hours away from my house.
1:58:06And I'm getting them every great once in a while.
1:58:09And I come to find out,
1:58:10I mostly think that it started happening
1:58:14when I left the beach house.
1:58:17So somehow HomeKit has decided
1:58:21that home is not where the heart is.
1:58:24It is not where my home is.
1:58:26It is instead where the Apple TV
1:58:28that I happen to bring with me is.
1:58:31(laughing)
1:58:32- I had a similar situation on my vacation
1:58:34because every time I left the house that I was staying at,
1:58:38it would say, "Oh my God,
1:58:39Did you realize you left your AirPods behind?
1:58:41Oh my God, did you realize you left your iPad behind?
1:58:43- Yep, yep, yep.
1:58:44- 'Cause I'm leaving a place that is not my home
1:58:46without my devices.
1:58:47And I was thinking, I was thinking that I wish I did
1:58:50the opposite of what Casey's saying.
1:58:51Casey's saying, why do you think this is my new home?
1:58:53I was thinking, I wish I could tell HomeKit or whatever,
1:58:57this is not my new home, but for the week, this is my home.
1:59:00So every time I leave, don't tell me I've left my AirPods
1:59:02behind because it's fine.
1:59:03- Yep, I could not agree with you more.
1:59:05I had the same thought.
1:59:06But it took me quite a while to figure out what is going on.
1:59:11And I think what happened is the Apple TV in the bedroom, despite being an older Apple
1:59:16TV, because we have a 4K Apple TV downstairs, and remember we don't have any HomePods in
1:59:20the house, so the Apple TVs are our HomeKit hubs, I think that the primary HomeKit hub
1:59:28was the bedroom Apple TV that was with us in Cape Charles.
1:59:32And so it suddenly decided that home, again, is not my actual address, but rather wherever
1:59:37that Apple TV is.
1:59:40This was sort of kind of confirmed to me, I think, because when I got back home, you
1:59:45remember that I have the little dongle that gives me wireless CarPlay, so I'm basically
1:59:49always on CarPlay in my car.
1:59:51And what's cool, one of the cool things about CarPlay is when you approach your house, if
1:59:55you have a garage door set up in HomeKit, on that like multi-tiled, or the tiled version
2:00:01of the CarPlay screen, it will pop up a little button that says, "Oh, your garage door is
2:00:06closed," so you can tap on it and it'll open the garage door for you. Well, that just stopped
2:00:09appearing. And I thought to myself, "I wonder if it's because my home is still in Cape Charles,
2:00:16despite the fact that the Apple TV is back at my actual freaking house. I think my home
2:00:21might be Cape Charles. So what do I do about this?" So what I decided to do...
2:00:25Move to the beach full-time.
2:00:26Oh, yeah, not all of us have that luxury, Marco. Not all of us have that luxury.
2:00:30So I decided, okay, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna turn off the HomeKit features or hub or
2:00:36whatever in the Apple TV in the bedroom, which I did. And then it appeared that the Apple TV that
2:00:44has always been in the family room just didn't feel like taking over. So, okay. So I tried
2:00:51disconnecting it from the home and reconnecting it. That didn't seem to work. So what do you think
2:00:56it took to get the downstairs Apple TV to wake up and reconnect to the house appropriately.
2:01:01What is the one way you fix all Apple problems these days?
2:01:05Unplug it and plug it back in?
2:01:07Yeah, I rebooted it. Yeah, so I went to settings and rebooted it,
2:01:10and then it seemed to come back to life, and I'll give you one guess what showed up in CarPlay as
2:01:14soon as I did that. My garage door is back in CarPlay now. So I don't know what I was supposed
2:01:22to do about this? Like I can't, I don't even know if I'm upset about this
2:01:27because like I understand I think why this happened but I don't want this to
2:01:34happen. What I want is to be able to bring an Apple TV somewhere else, have it
2:01:39understand that my home is not there. I mean I do have a contact card that is me.
2:01:46I've marked it as me it has a home address in it and
2:01:51Got to assume via like you know IP geolocation if nothing else the Apple TV realized it was no longer at home
2:01:56Certainly wasn't on the same network as the rest of my darn home kit thing your devices
2:02:00So it should have I think been smart enough to figure out that it was in some sort of satellite mode
2:02:07And I wish I could have told it your and what I've done is just disabled homekit
2:02:11you know, home kit hub features on it entirely,
2:02:15but I wish there was a way for it to be smart enough
2:02:17to figure out, oh, I should not be a hub right now.
2:02:19And I concur with what John said, you know,
2:02:21I kept getting notifications,
2:02:22oh, your AirTag that's in your laptop bag,
2:02:24you left it, you left it, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,
2:02:25oh my God, you left it, ah!
2:02:27And I wish there was a way for me to say,
2:02:29people, just for a week, not a year, not a month,
2:02:34just for a few days.
2:02:35Or imagine this, imagine I had the option to pick
2:02:39when I wanted this thing to end,
2:02:41But for some duration of time, don't alarm me,
2:02:44don't alert me if I have left the house without my stuff.
2:02:48Just for a few days.
2:02:50That would be very nice, please and thank you.
2:02:52Anyway, I bring all this up just because
2:02:53it was such a weird scenario
2:02:55that I never would have expected.
2:02:58And last year, when I think I had
2:03:00all of this notification BS set up,
2:03:02I don't remember any of this happening last year.
2:03:04So I don't know why it didn't,
2:03:06but I feel like I think I had both Apple TVs at the time,
2:03:09I think.
2:03:10and I don't recall any of this being a problem.
2:03:13So it was very weird, and if you've lived through this
2:03:16and have tips, please write me some way somehow.
2:03:19- Well, I will say that the Find My alerts,
2:03:22you can set a location and say,
2:03:25don't remind me about leaving things at this location.
2:03:27- Agreed, but I didn't want that forever.
2:03:29- Where is that feature?
2:03:30'Cause I didn't look for it.
2:03:31- It's in the Find My app.
2:03:33It's in one of those drawers from the bottom.
2:03:35You gotta pull it up somewhere in there.
2:03:37- I thought you could do that
2:03:38on the notification itself, too.
2:03:40I thought I might be wrong about that.
2:03:42Or like customize it or something like that
2:03:43when the notification comes up.
2:03:44- You might have to do it per item.
2:03:47I think you have to do it per thing in Find My.
2:03:50But if you go to Find My and you go to the things tab,
2:03:53there is an option on there to say
2:03:55don't remind me about this location, basically.
2:03:58- Yeah, I'm not seeing, I know what you're thinking of
2:04:00and I have done that for my house.
2:04:02But for the life of me, I don't know where it is
2:04:04off the top of my head.
2:04:06But yes, I know there is a way to do that.
2:04:08I just don't know what it is.
2:04:09But I mean the rest of it, things with like
2:04:11home detection and home hub selection and failover,
2:04:16that is mostly a mystery to me.
2:04:19It's one of those areas where Apple tries to be
2:04:21just smart and do the right thing.
2:04:23And what that means is it works fine in the common case
2:04:28for most people most of the time.
2:04:30But when it doesn't work, you have no idea,
2:04:33no recourse, nothing you can really do
2:04:36except these random incantations that may or may not
2:04:39result in the problem eventually, gradually,
2:04:42in some weird way being fixed.
2:04:44- You just want a screen where you can see,
2:04:46Apple devices, what do you think is the deal?
2:04:48Show me, show me, I think my home is here,
2:04:50and I think this is it, like just, you know,
2:04:52part of it might be just the data model,
2:04:54we talked about this before,
2:04:55about like what is a decent data model for music,
2:04:57which is a surprisingly complex subject.
2:05:00What is the data model for HomeKit?
2:05:01Like, does it incorporate the idea
2:05:03that people might be at some place other than their home
2:05:06for extended periods of time?
2:05:08You know, how many homes can you have?
2:05:10What is the concept of a home?
2:05:11Is there a concept of a location?
2:05:14You know, that when you leave there,
2:05:16it's okay for you to leave your devices behind
2:05:17because that's, you know, like,
2:05:19I don't know what kind of vocabulary
2:05:20they have to describe that, but either way,
2:05:24whatever the vocabulary is, there should be something
2:05:26you can go to and says,
2:05:27"Here's how we think the world exists right now."
2:05:30Even if you can't edit it, at least that would help,
2:05:32but then ideally, what you'd see there is, you know,
2:05:35how many homes do you have, or like in context,
2:05:36If you have multiple homes, what order are they in?
2:05:38Are you at them for a certain duration or whatever?
2:05:41It seems like their data model should support this,
2:05:44and once their data model supports it,
2:05:46they shouldn't just try to do like,
2:05:47we'll use machine learning and prediction
2:05:49to do the right thing.
2:05:49All right, fine, maybe do that,
2:05:51but also still have a screen where you can actually say,
2:05:53I will be at this address for the next week.
2:05:56I think that's all you need to tell it,
2:05:58and it just needs to be a UI,
2:06:00someplace in the interface that we can find.
2:06:02I just looked and find mine.
2:06:03I couldn't find it in two seconds.
2:06:04- Yeah, I couldn't either,
2:06:05but I know it's there somewhere.
2:06:06- It should be more prominent.
2:06:07I should be able to say, for any HomeKit type things,
2:06:10where do you think my house is, HomeKit?
2:06:12What device are you using as a hub?
2:06:14- Well, that you can see.
2:06:16So if you go to Home Settings, which is buried,
2:06:20but it's under the house icon in the Home app,
2:06:22you go to the Home screen,
2:06:24then go to the house icon in the top,
2:06:26then there's a Home Settings thing,
2:06:29and there's, under there, you can see Home Hubs and Bridges.
2:06:32And in my case, I have eight.
2:06:34Now I love this screen so much
2:06:35because it purports to be useful but isn't.
2:06:37So Home Hubs and Bridges, right now I have various home pods
2:06:42and something called living room Apple TV
2:06:46and then something called downstairs downstairs.
2:06:48- Nice.
2:06:49- I assume that's the Apple TV
2:06:51that I renamed the AirPlay target to downstairs,
2:06:54but it's called downstairs downstairs
2:06:55and that says connected
2:06:58and all the other ones say standby.
2:07:00So you would think maybe on this list
2:07:03of home hubs and bridges that tells me
2:07:04which one is connected.
2:07:05- You can tap on them surely, right?
2:07:07- Maybe you could select one to be the one that's connected.
2:07:10Or maybe you could delete one.
2:07:13You can do neither.
2:07:14This is simply a passive list.
2:07:16All you can do is look at it and smile.
2:07:18So I would love, for instance, to say,
2:07:21prioritize the two Apple TVs,
2:07:24because they are hard-wired to ethernet.
2:07:27They are AC-powered.
2:07:29They are guaranteed to always be online and ready to go.
2:07:32Home pods are flaky pieces of crap.
2:07:36(laughing)
2:07:37And I don't want my entire home automation strategy
2:07:41to be resting on the reliability of a home pod
2:07:44when I have these perfectly good Apple TVs
2:07:46that can do the same job, slightly more reliably probably.
2:07:49And I would love to be able to say, hey, this thing,
2:07:52make this thing the preferred home hub.
2:07:55Nope, can't do it.
2:07:56All I can do is look at this list
2:07:57and wonder why I can't do the things
2:07:59that seem so obvious on it.
2:08:01Maybe you could add home, like that's in the home app.
2:08:03See, that seems wrong in terms of data model.
2:08:06I'm going to be at this vacation house for a week,
2:08:07so I'll add it as my home.
2:08:08But that seems too heavyweight.
2:08:10It's not your home.
2:08:11You're just at a place where you're a hotel.
2:08:13This hotel is now my home for a week, kind of.
2:08:16But it seems too much.
2:08:19I feel like this use case is something they should work on.
2:08:22Because I know we have been doing a lot of travel
2:08:24with the pandemic and everything.
2:08:25But what about business travelers?
2:08:27They go somewhere, and they leave their iPad
2:08:30and their AirPods in the hotel room when they go out to eat,
2:08:32they don't need seven notifications telling them,
2:08:34oh, you left your stuff behind.
2:08:35It's like, yeah, it's in my hotel room.
2:08:37- I mean, in all fairness, though,
2:08:38I do think that the main weirdness of this
2:08:42was probably a result of Casey bringing one of his home hubs
2:08:47to a hotel room outside of his home and connecting to it.
2:08:52And that's probably a situation
2:08:54that Apple has not really designed for,
2:08:56that they probably assumed what kind of weird nerve
2:09:00would bring an Apple TV to a hotel room.
2:09:02- Which is fair.
2:09:03- I do it, Casey does it.
2:09:04Like when I went on vacation,
2:09:07I'm visiting other family members.
2:09:08My brother brought his Apple TV with him
2:09:10for the same reason I brought mine, right?
2:09:12And although we passed the milestone this year,
2:09:14the television in the rental place already supports AirPlay.
2:09:18So it's like when we were in AirPlay too,
2:09:20you could say AirPlay to the Apple TV that's connected to it
2:09:22or AirPlay just to the television, right?
2:09:24So maybe we're getting close to a point
2:09:27where we won't have to bring Apple TV pucks with us
2:09:29so we can just assume that the television is there.
2:09:32Just like they all support Netflix now
2:09:33and have a giant Netflix button on their remotes,
2:09:35that they'll also have an Apple TV plus button
2:09:37that you'll somehow be able to sign into
2:09:40to see all your kids' shows.
2:09:41I don't know how it's gonna work,
2:09:42but at least you can airplay it to the TV
2:09:43so there's some progress.
2:09:45(beeping)