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402: Flat-Side Promoter

 

00:00:00   I want to start tonight with a thing about our election that's about to happen. And for our non-US listeners, I apologize, but this is important. And I feel like this is important enough that if we didn't say anything that we would be abdicating our duty as Americans. So I am urging all eligible US citizens to vote. And I want to talk to everyone here of every political persuasion.

00:00:27   You all know out there that we are pretty liberal, but I also want to talk to the conservatives right now as well, because I know we have conservatives in our audience you're listening to. And while we probably disagree on some particular policy positions, there's also a lot that we can agree on as Americans.

00:00:45   And you know, one of the fundamental things is that we can agree that our country is a democracy. And the fundamental nature of a democracy is that people vote to elect their representatives and their leaders. And to me, everything else is secondary.

00:00:59   All other policy decisions are a lower priority when the democracy itself is under attack. And it would be wonderful to have the luxury for conservatives and liberals to debate policies and laws, but that's only possible when the foundations of our democracy are solid and trustworthy. And right now, they are not.

00:01:22   The Republican Party at state and federal levels has consistently and systematically orchestrated massive voter suppression efforts for decades. And they've been alarmingly accelerating in recent years. And this is not a politically biased statement or argument. This is a fact supported by tons of reliable evidence from nonpartisan sources and lawsuits and court decisions going back many years.

00:01:48   There is specifically a Republican effort done to tilt elections in their favor. If you look for evidence of voter suppression by Democrats, you won't find anything substantial. Again, this is not a partisan slant. These are just the facts with tons of evidence behind them.

00:02:03   And as far as I'm concerned, anyone who tries to win by making people's votes not count is anti-American at the highest level, because that's a fundamental attack on our country. This is one of many fundamental attacks on our country that this administration and the recent Republican Senate have carried out.

00:02:24   And this is only getting worse. They are doing everything they can to shamelessly destroy fundamentals of the American democracy for their own gains. And we no longer have conservative and liberal parties. You know, a lot of you out there identify as conservative politically. You have no party right now. And many of us on the liberal side have felt that way as well.

00:02:44   The Democrats are mostly centrists that by most first world countries, political definitions would actually be somewhat conservative. And the Republicans are basically destroying our democracy while making almost no effort to actually govern.

00:03:01   And those are the only two choices we have right now. This is the general election. This is not the time for third party protest votes. That time is the primaries and we're past that now. If you don't like either candidate, well, you know, this is politics. Welcome to politics. This is not new. That's not an excuse to throw away a vote. Your job is to look at the two options we actually have and pick the one that you think will be the better leader.

00:03:23   And for those of you out there who are planning to vote Republican, I'd like you to really consider why. Consider whether the positions or issues that make you vote that way are more important than the foundation of our democracy that they are actually attacking.

00:03:39   Because conservatives, you and I might not see eye to eye on policy issues, but I hope that you can agree that the integrity of our elections and therefore the validity of our entire democracy is more important than any other issue.

00:03:54   And everyone, no matter how you vote, please, please vote. If you are on the side that you want to get Trump out of office, you absolutely must vote because the table's tilted. If we just win by a little bit, we still will lose. They'll steal it, I assure you. They have and they will. They absolutely will steal it.

00:04:15   So we can't just win by a little. The only way that we can win and have any chance of election integrity and a peaceful transfer of power is to win by a lot. It can't just be a little. We have to win by a lot for it to count.

00:04:31   So please, everyone out there, please do your civic duty, help defend the foundation of our democracy and vote.

00:04:40   And I'm going to go a small step further. Many of you out there have voted by mail and that's great. But we can do better. Check with your state. In many states, mail-in voters are also allowed to vote in person. They won't double count and they will prioritize the in-person vote if they receive both from the same voter.

00:04:59   For lots of horrible reasons, mail-in votes are at a very high risk of not being counted. So if you are able to, and that's a big if, I know, vote in person. This is a difficult position to try to convince people during a pandemic, I know, and it's a risk. And I'm not going to minimize this risk. Not everyone can or should take that risk.

00:05:19   And if you can't or won't or shouldn't, I completely understand. But if you are willing and able to vote in person, please go vote in person. You might have to wait in a long line. That's part of the problem. But that's also part of the fight.

00:05:36   Our grandparents fought in wars to defend our country. They put their lives on the line and they watched people around them die in horrible ways. War is horrible. If you haven't served in the military, as most people in our generation haven't, you are extremely fortunate to not know what it's like to have to put your life on the line for your country.

00:05:58   The least we can do is for the physically able among us to wait in line for a few hours to vote in an election where that's really under attack and that really matters.

00:06:11   So please, everyone, vote. And if you're able, vote in person. But regardless, you've got to vote. Every vote counts this time. We need all of you.

00:06:23   And I hope that we still have a functional country when we record next week because the election is before the next episode. And that is literally at risk. We desperately need everyone out there to vote.

00:06:36   A little follow up on Marco's thing here for the people who are going to say, "We're in a democracy. We're in a republic." You know what he meant. Let that one slide.

00:06:44   Of course, nerds. Come on.

00:06:46   Yeah, yeah, no, the people are going to say it, so I'm just prancing. For the mail-in versus in-person voting, at this point, due to the way the current administration has hosed the U.S. mail service, it's probably too late for you to put your ballot in the mail if you live in a state that demands that it arrive before election day.

00:07:04   But there's still a medium between voting in person and voting by mail. You can take your mail-in ballot in some states and bring it to a drop box, which is not a mailbox, but it's a place that says, "Put your sealed mail-in ballot in this box and you're done." It doesn't have to go through the mail service, so check with your state whether you can do that.

00:07:21   That's what I did.

00:07:22   And I have to give all these explanations of how you can successfully vote demonstrates how screwed up voting is in our country. What should be a simple thing that anybody can do very easily is this super-duper challenge, partially because of COVID, but mostly because of massive voter suppression efforts.

00:07:38   And in many states, if you have voted by mail, in many states you're able to go check the status of your vote on some kind of website that the Board of Elections has in your state. Do that. And if your status isn't showing by the time election day happens, go in person and vote somewhere. Again, if you're able.

00:07:55   And because our country is incredibly stupid, really it matters the most if the people in a few particular swing states, as we call them, if you don't know anything about our voting system and you're in another country, if you want to be horrified sometime, look up all this stuff.

00:08:09   But anyway, people in America mostly know, if you're in a swing state, it's super-duper important that you vote. If you're in California, I don't know how many of our list is in California, California is probably going to go blue.

00:08:20   You should totally vote, 100%. There's more on the ballot than just the President. You should totally vote, but you should super-duper totally vote. If you're in a swing state, please. Only we can save us and the odds are stacked against us.

00:08:33   Please vote.

00:08:34   Please.

00:08:35   I don't want to have to do another holiday party next week. Can we please not? Can we do a happy holiday party instead of an unhappy one? That'd be great.

00:08:42   I would love nothing more than to not have to devote ten minutes of next week's episode to politics. There's only one way that can happen. That's it. So, please.

00:08:54   If you don't want to hear more politics on ATP, vote.

00:08:58   That's it.

00:08:59   Vote. Please vote. And seriously, I dropped mine off in a drop box. I tracked it online. Again, every state is different. Look up what you need to look at your Board of Elections or whatever, but I didn't stand in any lines. I verified that the vote got there.

00:09:16   Not to say that Marco's wrong. I mean, going in person the day of is the best possible thing from a getting your vote counted perspective, but there are ways to do this in almost every state where you can do it feeling safe and you can do it without having to trust your vote to the U.S. Postal Service, which in and of itself I have no problems with, but lately has been having a little bit of trouble. So, please. Please go vote.

00:09:39   Iwillvote.com. We keep saying, "Oh, check your state. Check this. Check that." Government websites are usually terrible. Iwillvote.com. That's all you need to know. You live in the United States, start on that website. You can also go to like vote.org. But anyway, that's a URL you can go to to find out how you can do the voting thing. It's not hard, I swear. If you've never voted before, you will do it. It will work. It's fine.

00:09:59   And then after you vote and you're just riding high, feeling great about voting for all of the good people like Biden and Harris and everyone else. After you do that, what should you do? You know what you should do? You should check out ATP.fm/store.

00:10:20   Starting on the first of November, if all goes according to plan, the ATP store will be live. It will be at ATP.fm/store. I didn't open up the Google Doc because I'm a terrible podcaster with all the different things that we're going to offer. Maybe we'll just leave it as a surprise, actually. You should go check it out for yourself. But we will have some new stuff and a fair bit of old stuff.

00:10:42   So check it out starting on November 1 if all goes according to plan. ATP.fm/store. If for some reason things are not going according to plan, I will commit to putting something on that URL on that page to say, "Oh, we've been delayed," or "Oh, it's not going to happen."

00:10:57   But in theory, everything will be live on November 1, probably during the day, East Coast time. So if you're waking up in Asia or something like that on November 1 and it's not up yet, that's fine. Just give it a little time.

00:11:11   But ATP.fm/store on November 1, and it will last for two weeks. So first through the 14th. This is the time that we thought was as late as we could reasonably do while still pretty much guaranteeing Americans holiday delivery and at least a prayer for the Europeans and everyone else to have holiday delivery. No guarantees, no guarantees, but there's at least a chance, we hope.

00:11:33   We will be using the same vendor, Cotton Bureau, for all our stuff. So your experience before will probably be your experience now. But anyways, ATP.fm/store.

00:11:41   Yeah, we'll talk more about the new merchandise next week when we know what it actually is, but there is some new stuff.

00:11:47   Yeah.

00:11:48   Indeed.

00:11:49   I should maybe get a new pen. I have to, I had a backpack incident. So it turns out I have thoroughly ruined my Peak Design Everyday Backpack.

00:12:00   How did you do that if you're never traveling?

00:12:02   Before we go into the store, we forgot one more thing too. I got to put everything in the notes so we don't get to it. It's got to be in the notes. What's the one, what's the important thing that we forgot to tell people about the store? I'll do it and then you'll know.

00:12:14   Oh God, I completely forgot.

00:12:16   So if you are an ATP member, this is the time for you to shine. Every ATP member will get a discount code for, what is it, 15% off? I believe so. 15% off everything in the ATP store.

00:12:32   So if you want to get 15% off everything in the ATP store and you plan to pay enough money that 15% makes up for your membership, do it. Sign up for a month, get the 15% off, you know, get a coupon code, use it, and then unsubscribe.

00:12:45   It's free real estate. Don't pass it up. And if you're already an ATP member, thank you. If you just go to your member page once the sale starts, you will see a coupon code that you can copy and paste in the promo code thing during checkout.

00:12:58   Don't forget the code because that will be annoying to try to do retroactively through customer support, although they probably will do that for you. To get 15% off anything.

00:13:06   And order before the election. So you don't have, depending on how it turns out, you may be too depressed to buy merchandise or you may need retail therapy. But either way, if you order before the election, you don't have to worry about it.

00:13:16   Yes, thank you, Jon. I completely forgot to mention that. Like Jon said, wait until the store is up, then go to your member page and you can see your coupon code.

00:13:27   Alright, let's do some follow up. Hopefully turn this round upside down. I was trying terribly, terribly last week to figure out how to describe the way in which Peter Pan stood in many places but in Hook.

00:13:41   By the way, there are some people in my life that have been making fun of me for liking Hook.

00:13:47   Don't do it, Casey. You can just leave it there.

00:13:49   I can't. I can't.

00:13:50   Okay, alright.

00:13:51   I'm not going to say, I'm not going to name these names, but they're people that we all know. They're very mean about Hook. Very, very mean. It's not nice at all.

00:13:58   But nonetheless, anyway, the way Peter Pan stands and Hook and many other excellent films just like Hook, that can be described as arms akimbo, which is something I had heard but had no idea what it meant.

00:14:11   And several people wrote in to tell us that correction. So thank you to all of you. Arms akimbo. A-K-I-M-B-O.

00:14:18   Do you know what the heading on this follow-up item is a reference to? Either one of you?

00:14:22   No.

00:14:23   For the audience, it says, "We always stand in a Peter Pan stance."

00:14:27   That's one for the olds, you know, the people who don't like Hook.

00:14:30   Is this Destiny or...?

00:14:31   No, it is not. Moving on.

00:14:34   Alright, good talk.

00:14:36   5G upload speed. So I've seen a smattering of Anic data that has said that people who have functional 5G phones, I'm going to rant about this later.

00:14:47   People who have functioning 5G phones are getting actually slower speeds in some cases, or just not terribly impressive speeds on 5G as compared to LTE.

00:14:58   And Ian wrote in to tell us that 5G in currently deployed flavors is a downlink only technology.

00:15:05   All the upload is done via LTE, as is the voice and the control plane. Carriers will be deploying 5G standalone from 2021 on.

00:15:12   I presume that's US-centric, but nevertheless, apparently, especially when it comes to uploads, but even to some degree, perhaps with downloads, it is not going to be as fast as you might have thought.

00:15:22   This is an explanation of the terrible upload speeds that Gruber had in his review. It's not using 5G when it uploads, that explains it.

00:15:28   Although I still can't believe how good those download speeds were on UltraWide or whatever it's called.

00:15:34   That's still, you know, two weeks later is blowing my mind.

00:15:37   All right, can one of you tell me about Verizon's 5G lead, if you don't mind?

00:15:42   Last show, I was talking about how we had heard some people say, well, the reason Apple was promoting Verizon so heavily is because they're the only company in the US that supports UltraWideband and all Apple's phones come with UltraWideband.

00:15:53   So why are you going to sell a phone with an antenna that you can't even use? Nevermind that that antenna isn't even on a bunch of the non-US models.

00:16:00   But anyway, they said, oh, well, other companies will have the millimeter wave stuff coming out, but Verizon got there first.

00:16:08   So here is some more info on that. Verizon did beat the other carriers to market by about a year with millimeter wave.

00:16:14   Verizon used pre-standard hardware using a different technology, which they claimed they were replaced with standards-based equipment.

00:16:20   Kind of like how people used to deal with Wi-Fi routers, remember, like before the new Wi-Fi standard would come out?

00:16:24   Oh yeah, pre-N?

00:16:26   Yeah, you can buy equipment that it's like, well, the standard's not finalized, but once it is, there'll be a firmware updated and it'll still work.

00:16:33   And that is a time-tested strategy for getting to market before your competitors and Verizon used it.

00:16:38   All right, then we have some photos feedback. Of course we do.

00:16:44   Some useful stuff, though. A couple of people wrote in to point out that there is a mechanism by which you can have photos leave your files alone.

00:16:55   Kind of. So there is a checkbox in the Mac Photos app, it's labeled as importing, "Copy items to the Photos library."

00:17:03   And that's either checked or unchecked, which in and of itself sounds great, because if I could just leave the files where they were, perfect.

00:17:08   I mean, leaving the whole thing that Photos doesn't understand what a network share is, but leaving that aside, like so far so good.

00:17:14   But then you see the subtitle to that line, or the perhaps caption, if you will, "Only items copied to the library will be uploaded to iCloud Photos."

00:17:21   Wow. That's a pretty big asterisk on that.

00:17:26   Yeah, that is a huge asterisk.

00:17:28   Yeah, it's like, what's the point? Why even support that fee? It's so cruel.

00:17:32   Speaking of the Photo library, I forget if we linked to this last week, but a lot of people were asking, "Hey, Photos doesn't change my file names.

00:17:40   Yeah, it imports them into the library, but it leaves the file names alone." Yeah, it used to do that. No longer. In Catalina and later, they changed the library format.

00:17:52   And that's why I was saying in the last show, it will not preserve your file names, give up. It changes them entirely, scrambled nonsense file names.

00:18:00   Now, it still knows what the file names were, and there was actually a bug with this back in the day, where it would know what they were, but case insensitively.

00:18:06   So if you had file names that differed only in case, you'd import a file name that was lowercase, and when you told Photos to export it with the original name, it would export it in all caps, but they fixed that bug.

00:18:15   But anyway, Photos knows, probably in one of its SQLite databases, what the file name was, but it changes the file name on disk to giant UUID-looking scrambled stuff.

00:18:25   So yeah, the options for not mangling your files in Photos are not great, unless you don't even want iCloud Photos, in which way you... Anyway, it's a shame.

00:18:36   But these options change, and when they changed to scramble your file names in Catalina, there wasn't a big announcement about it. People just kind of discovered it on their own.

00:18:44   All of which gets back to what I was saying, which is like, you will not be able to hold on, just assume your file names are dead to you, and then you'll be... If you can become at peace with that, then move on.

00:18:56   But don't assume that you're going to find some sneaky way to symlink your way into putting them on a network share and getting Photos not to mess with it. Photos wants to own them.

00:19:04   Pete Ottery was the first person that we saw to write in with regard to image capture. I had said in the last show that my workflow is once a month I will create a brand new Photos library that's kind of just temporary, and I'll use that to suck in all of the pictures on either Aaron's phone or my phone, and then I will delete the library thereafter.

00:19:24   And the reason I did that was because that was the only way I knew how to get HEIC, HEIF, whatever they are, image files, the original image files, onto my Mac. As it turns out, if you change a setting on your phone, you can actually have it work with image capture.

00:19:39   So I had said in the last show that image capture was only taking in JPEGs, which is not what I wanted. So Pete had pointed out to us that if you go to Settings, this is on your phone, Settings, Photos, transfer to Mac or PC, which is way at the bottom, and then you can select Keep Originals.

00:19:53   And if you do that, it will actually transfer HEICs to image capture and presumably in other cases as well, which is news to me. And a side benefit of that is it will actually speed up image capture because it's not doing all this transformation and transcoding, if you will, on the fly as image capture is downloading them all, which was cool. I didn't know that.

00:20:13   And then a quick piece of follow up. A lot of people have asked, understandably, "Hey, I use Google Photos. What do you mean it screwed everything up?" Well, I don't know unequivocally that Google Photos was the crux of my issues, but let me be a little more explicit about what I'm talking about from last show.

00:20:30   I still do use Google Photos, but I don't suck in or import any of my big camera photos. I only have it take things off the camera roll automatically from my phone. So that means I'm also missing all of Aaron's pictures as well, come to think of it.

00:20:44   But the part about Google Photos that fell apart for me was the Google Photos uploader, like two-ish years ago, maybe more than that. It went from, I think, my memory is real hazy here, it went from a specific Google Photos uploader to being like some generic Google uploader or something like that. Or maybe they just redid the whole thing. I don't remember. Maybe John does.

00:21:04   But one way or another...

00:21:05   It's called Google Backup and Sync or something now, whereas before it was called like photo photo uploader.

00:21:09   There you go. So that transition, it didn't work for crap when it came to network shares. Everything just fell apart with it. In addition to, I think it was Google, it may have been something else, but I think it was Google, started making duplicate folders all over the place.

00:21:24   So it would be like, I don't know, Casey's birthday, and then Casey's birthday, paren, one paren. I don't know, maybe like, what was the new DNS responder? What was it? Discovery D? Maybe Google Photos used Discovery D too much. I don't know. I'm joking.

00:21:37   Too soon.

00:21:38   I know, right? But one way or another, it was a combination of the uploader becoming straight trash. And maybe it's better now. I have no idea. But at the time it was straight trash. And I'm finding all these duplicates everywhere. So I just said, you know what?

00:21:50   I'm out. And I don't use any of the uploaders or anything like that. If you haven't noticed these problems, then keep on keeping on with Google Photos. I do love Google Photos. And honestly, if their uploader had never changed, I don't think I would even be batting an eye about iCloud photo library or anything else.

00:22:07   Because Google Photos was working really, really well. It's just when their uploader changed, it really screwed me pretty bad. So that was the backstory there. Marco, tell me, what is the Sonos Move?

00:22:17   So this is, we heard from a number of people who wanted to point out the existence of the Sonos Move after I was talking about my smart speaker changing last week. I was saying how I had Sonos 1s in a stereo pair because they had Alexa built in and AirPlay 2 support. And I was complaining they didn't sound very good.

00:22:37   And many people wrote in to tell me about the Sonos Move, which is basically an optionally battery powered, pick up and go portable speaker from Sonos that is kind of like a Sonos 1 with AirPlay 2 and Alexa but with a battery, like giant battery butt.

00:22:54   And in fact, I am ashamed to say that I did indeed already spend $400 on a Sonos Move. We already own one. I bought it earlier this year. And it's not very good if I'm honest. It does sound a little bit different from the Sonos 1, but not that different. I would suspect, I haven't researched this right this second, but I would suspect they probably have a lot in common actually.

00:23:15   And it's certainly, I don't think it's worth $400. It's not very good, honestly. Also, a few more little tidbits on this topic. I had said last week that I thought Sonos was the only way to get the combination of an Alexa powered speaker with AirPlay 2.

00:23:32   It turns out Bose also makes smart speakers, which was news to me. And the Bose smart speakers integrate AirPlay 2 and Alexa together. So that's another option. I don't know anything about them. I looked at them and frankly, I wasn't impressed by their industrial design.

00:23:47   I think Bose needs to hire some younger people to do some of their industrial design. And finally, some quick little follow up. I did indeed go back and get my HomePods since last show. I set them up and they sound almost as good as I remember. They sound a little bit better in my mind, but they're close. They're a huge upgrade.

00:24:09   I think the high ceilings in your place, I was just thinking that that's really going to show the speakers weakness.

00:24:17   Yeah, they're moving to a more open, large environment than they were back in the other place. So it's hard to compare really fairly, but they do still sound way better than the Sonos ones. In particular, I noticed for podcasts, the Sonos ones tend to have very boomy voice, whereas the HomePods have much more natural, intelligible voice without so much boominess, which is actually the opposite of what I would have expected. But regardless, they sound much better.

00:24:42   Anyone from inside Sonos wants you to know that it's kind of unfair that you're comparing a $350 HomePod sound quality to the sound quality of the less expensive Sonos one or whatever it is.

00:24:53   And that's totally fair, so I'll compare it to the Sonos Move, which is $400 and sounds like garbage compared to the HomePod.

00:24:58   It sounds like battery powered though, you said, right?

00:25:01   Yes, well, if what you want is a pick up and go battery powered smart speaker, one thing I did for years is you can just get battery bases made by third parties for Amazon Echos. And they usually stick on the bottom in some way and they're just little USB batteries basically that are made to power the Echo specifically.

00:25:20   And so you can have your Echo sitting in your kitchen, it has power pass through, and these things are like $30. Power pass through, you plug it in, most of the time you leave it there, but then whenever you want to pick up your Echo and go somewhere, you just unplug the power cord, pick it up and go.

00:25:33   And that works just fine for years, and the combination of that is like $130 and is just as beneficial, just as versatile, and sounds almost as good, honestly.

00:25:42   So if you want something in the Sonos Move category, I would recommend just an Echo with a battery base. But anyway, going back to the HomePods, one other tip that I came up with, when I first set them up here, I did the whole restore, start over thing, and they were working terribly in the hearing me and responding department.

00:26:02   You know, I would say something, and the little Siri blob on top would light up, and then immediately turn off halfway through and before even listening to me. And it took me about a few days to realize that what was happening was other devices had Hey Siri enabled.

00:26:18   And you have to turn, like the recipe for HomePod happiness, if you're going to be a HomePod family, the recipe for happiness is to disable Hey Siri on all of your other devices. Anything that is not the HomePod, disable it.

00:26:33   And for me, that was easy because I never intentionally use that. Like on the phone, I always have it off. I accidentally had left it on my iPad and on my watch. But the watch, I've been doing the raise to speak thing, and that works great on the Siri 6, and it worked pretty well on the Siri 5 as well.

00:26:48   So that's like, you know, raise to speak is fine. You can disable the Hey Siri response, but you can keep raise to speak on. And of course, you can always use the button on the watch. And so if you disable Hey Siri support on every other Apple device in your house, HomePods work amazingly.

00:27:05   Still slow to respond, because that's just Siri. But the the rate at which they recognize you is way better. And it's, it's a much better experience with all the other Hey Siri disabled. And if you leave any of them on that you're that are frequently around it, especially with your same voice attached to them, like your own personal phone or watch.

00:27:26   The HomePods work so badly that it almost seems defective. It wouldn't surprise me if they saw a big return rate, because people thought they were broken, because they kept cutting off their commands and not responding. Like that's how bad it is. If you don't do this,

00:27:39   it's not a ringing endorsement of the feature that Apple promotes, which is that your devices will negotiate with each other to determine which one is going to answer your head dingus query. See how nice I am listeners, I don't say the word. Yeah, I actually I actually have the opposite experience. I just have the one HomePod in my house.

00:27:56   And very often I realized early on that the credit I'm giving the HomePod for successfully hearing me is misplaced because I have had dingus on on all the devices. I don't wear a watch. So maybe the watch is a uniquely bad, which wouldn't surprise me because it's always, you know, historically has been slow and underpowered.

00:28:14   But when I say, hey, dingus lights out, like I'm almost always carrying my phone around with me, whether it's in my hand or in my pocket, as I you know, especially if I'm going upstairs for the night and I'm saying, hey, dingus lights out.

00:28:27   It's a lot of the time it's my phone that's hearing me and doing it like it's winning the race against the HomePod to hear the command and run it now. But I never noticed this because if I think I'm talking to the HomePod, if I look at it and project my voice in that direction,

00:28:42   then the lights go out on like, good job, HomePod. But actually what happened was the HomePod said, no, no phone, you take it. And I my experience has been with the hey, dingus on on all my devices. I haven't known. I mean, like you said, maybe like it's when it's slow.

00:28:57   I don't think it's because of this. But I don't know, maybe I would have a better experience if I turned it off. But right now I think I'm having a good experience in that I can say it and if my phone is closer to me, it will do it. And if my phone is not closer to me or sometimes the HomePod wins even when the phone is sitting on like the end table next to me and I'm sitting on the couch and the phone is still closer to me. I don't know how it decides, but somebody wins and somebody usually turns off the light, albeit with some kind of delay.

00:29:23   Yeah, this is actually something that possibly the U1 integration of the mini and of most devices going forward actually might make better because the U1 is able to calculate distance from other U1 things very precisely. So I don't know. Anyway, this is a thing to know if you're if my my endorsement of the HomePod is audio quality and the mediocrity of Siri is has gotten you to think about buying one.

00:29:51   And yeah, but otherwise I'm very happy with having transitioned back to being a mixed HomePod plus Alexa family. The one thing I kind of wish this is one of those areas where like Apple's way of doing things really gets in their way in a number of areas, but I wish that you could assign the HomePod a different name.

00:30:10   And what if you just said, hey, HomePod play this thing and if that would then never trigger any other device and you could have it never respond to Siri and you could just have it have its own name, which you can do with the Alexa ecosystem.

00:30:23   You can name different things among choices of like three or four different keywords and none of them are very good. But the point is, like, I wish you could just name it something else, even if it only had one, even if it was just, hey, HomePod as the option and there was no other option.

00:30:38   That would still be probably significantly better for a lot of people.

00:30:41   Yeah, that always amazes me that they didn't give an alternate. Now, granted, you could argue that the Amazon device kind of had to because some households have children with that name.

00:30:50   But hey, some households can have a child named Siri too. But either way, like we're not asking for, you know, an unlimited ways to address it, just a couple of options like anything.

00:31:02   And the Apple way to do it, I would imagine is, oh, you can change it. And when you change it, it changes everywhere. No, so close Apple.

00:31:09   So close. I mean, I understand why you want to do that. But it's like, look, I always want to call it this. And now I've changed it my whole life. That's good.

00:31:15   But like this is this is part of products maturing like Apple. When Apple comes out of the gate with a very simple, straightforward solution where they take care of everything for you.

00:31:22   That's great. But as the years roll on, it's time to consider the features that are lower down in the list. Right.

00:31:29   And one of those might be, hey, maybe a couple of years into Bone Pod, let's let you hail it with a different word, maybe two or three choices.

00:31:37   I don't think that's unreasonable. I don't think we're asking for incredible configurability and dip switches and, you know, plist hacks and be able to write your own.

00:31:45   We just, you know, simple, simple demands. That's how you can tell whether I feel like whether Apple is, you know, how it feels about its products.

00:31:53   Like maybe just thinks they're perfect. But like I always think of like they're not spending a lot of time developing that because there are sort of.

00:31:59   You know, obvious second and third tier features that, yeah, you don't have them in year one and maybe not in year two, but eventually you should get around to them.

00:32:06   Tons of those on the phone. How many things on the phone that we've talked about for years and years?

00:32:10   Eventually we got because, you know, Apple's attention has never wavered from the phone and they work their way down the list.

00:32:17   Right. You know, we'll get we'll get that watch face store eventually. But anyway, HomePod could use a little bit more attention.

00:32:25   And finally, for my follow up, I have laptop repair follow up.

00:32:30   So I mentioned a few weeks back that we had sent away Tiff's laptop that it just totally died and we got it repaired by Apple out of warranty for a lot of money.

00:32:40   So I wanted to specially thank Joe Aithman, Patrick O'Sullivan and Joe Shaw, who were the first ones to point out to me, hey, did you buy that laptop with a credit card?

00:32:51   Because many credit cards offer a free second year of warranty for electronics that you buy through them.

00:32:58   And it turns out my credit card that I bought it from did indeed offer this.

00:33:03   It was a 14 month old computer that had a 750 dollar repair and I went to American Express, filled out a bunch of forms.

00:33:12   And today they credited my account for the full repair price.

00:33:16   So Joe Aithman, Patrick O'Sullivan and Joe Shaw, you saved me 750 dollars.

00:33:20   And so thank you very much. That was awesome.

00:33:23   And so, yeah, anybody out there, if you have to do a warranty repair out of an out of warranty repair on something that is between one and two years old and you bought it with a major credit card.

00:33:32   Check with them to see if they have like purchase protection or something because you might not have to pay for that repair.

00:33:39   That's awesome. I'd forgotten that that was a thing as well. I don't have an American Express card, but I've been familiar with that in passing.

00:33:45   That's really great. And yeah, good job, the three of you for reminding us.

00:33:49   So Michael Luis Brown wrote that Peak Design, which we spoke about earlier, has a new Kickstarter where they're trying to combine MagSafe and mechanical fasteners.

00:33:58   This is related to our discussion of how strong is MagSafe and can use it for a car mount or a pop socket and a bunch of products that have been announced that were MagSafe pop sockets or MagSafe car mounts and how is that all going to work.

00:34:11   This is a Kickstarter by Peak Design.

00:34:14   You should check it out to watch the movie to look at their idea for how to make something that would be suitable for things like car mounts or camera mounts or situations where you really needed to be secure, but also be MagSafe.

00:34:29   What they've done is essentially a tiny, I don't know what you'd call it, a tiny little raised plateau on the back of your phone that isn't raised much, but it's kind of like a flat round rectangle that sticks out a little bit.

00:34:42   And that provides the mechanical fastening, but it's still MagSafe in that magnets suck the little thing that goes into that.

00:34:50   Actually it's not a raised plateau, it's a sunken indent.

00:34:53   Anyway, watch the video, it's hard to explain.

00:34:54   But it's magnets combined with a mechanical fastener, right?

00:34:57   So there's like a little peg and a little hole and they're both round ricks and they're very slim.

00:35:01   So it doesn't add much bulk to your case because this thing works with the case, right?

00:35:05   But the magnets are still there too and it makes it satisfying and easy to get it in the first time.

00:35:11   I think there's also some magnetic kind of fastener things gripping it as well so it's not just the magnets holding it on there.

00:35:16   But because it's a physical connection, if you put it in a car mount and you go over a bump, you don't need the magnets to keep it on the car mount.

00:35:24   If it's shaking up and down, the mechanical connection is going to prevent it from going up and down.

00:35:28   The only direction it can move is out.

00:35:30   You know, the sandwich opening force in Marcos parlance.

00:35:34   That's the only degree of freedom it has when it's in.

00:35:37   And in that degree there are magnets holding it but in general cars don't shake that much.

00:35:41   So I don't know how well this works. It's a Kickstarter.

00:35:43   I just looked at the video and I thought this is a nice compromise.

00:35:45   It's using magnets because magnets make everything cooler because when they align things for you and suck things in or whatever.

00:35:51   But it's also using a mechanical fastener.

00:35:53   But it's also not putting a giant thing on the back of your phone.

00:35:57   And there are whole ideas that will make this system and you can use it in a mount, in a dock, in a gimbal.

00:36:03   And attach it to the front of your helmet and put it on your motorcycle.

00:36:07   And yeah, the video is full of stuff like that.

00:36:09   But anyway, I thought this was a very clever design.

00:36:11   I think they've met their goal. They've raised 1.1 million dollars.

00:36:14   Who knows if it will ever ship but kudos for a good idea.

00:36:17   I mean they do have a history of shipping their project.

00:36:20   So I think it almost certainly will ship.

00:36:22   They have a pretty strong history.

00:36:24   And actually speaking of MagSafe, a quick plug for our good friends at Studio Neat.

00:36:28   They have a couple of new material docs that are specifically designed to work with MagSafe.

00:36:32   And I have not tried it myself but I have one of their original material docs.

00:36:36   And it is excellent. So I can only assume that this will be great as well.

00:36:40   John, can you tell me about units and battery specs and things of that nature?

00:36:45   A bunch of people gave this feedback but Justin Schultz was the first one I think.

00:36:49   In his opinion and the opinion of many others and it totally makes sense.

00:36:53   Watt hours is a better measurement than milliamp hours.

00:36:56   Because watt hours is a unit of energy that you can convert to joules.

00:36:59   And milliamp hours can be misleading because of the influence of voltage whereas watt hours is the right unit to use if you are not outright using joules.

00:37:05   So the reason we are always comparing iPhone battery capacity to milliamp hours is that was the only number we had.

00:37:10   And that is why we were so stymied about watt hours.

00:37:13   To get from watt hours to milliamp hours you had to divide by voltage and we didn't know what the voltage was and so on and so forth.

00:37:18   So ideally we would have the watt hour rating for every single iPhone battery and that is how we would compare them.

00:37:23   But I think it is mostly because iFixit would always show the little picture of the printing on the battery and that would say milliamp hours.

00:37:29   For all I know it said watt hours too and we have just been missing it.

00:37:31   But now we know if we would like to compare energy capacity watt hours is the preferable measure if we can get it.

00:37:37   And if not we will go back to comparing milliamp hours.

00:37:40   We are sponsored this week by FlatFile.

00:37:44   This is a pretty cool tool.

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00:37:48   Many of you out there have probably done this.

00:37:50   You are building a web app and you need to have some kind of data import functionality.

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00:37:58   Did it work correctly the first time?

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00:38:02   Nearly everyone has dealt with formatting weird CSV edge cases or the complexity of excel files so that the data can be imported correctly into an app that you are building.

00:38:12   It is a huge pain.

00:38:14   And engineers aren't spared from this pain.

00:38:16   We are typically doomed to build data parsers from scratch and usually not even for the first time.

00:38:22   Because it isn't just a simple as CSV upload but it is also header mapping, data validation or even a UI component which really adds to the sprint of all this.

00:38:31   So as enticing as it is to build another custom importer compared to the fun core product features that you want to be working on.

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00:39:15   You can do all of that at get.flatfile.io/atp.

00:39:21   Once again that's get.flatfile.io/atp.

00:39:25   Thank you so much to FlatFile for sponsoring our show.

00:39:32   We have, some of us, two thirds of us have new toys.

00:39:35   And this is very exciting.

00:39:37   Sorry Marco this is what you get for getting a mini.

00:39:40   So you guys, actually I should ask, Marco, nobody in your household got a new phone is that correct?

00:39:45   Not yet.

00:39:46   Okay.

00:39:47   So I guess it's the John Casey show now and since I seem to have the floor I will start.

00:39:52   I wanted to tell a funny story, well maybe I'm the only one who finds this funny we'll see, but a funny story about the delivery.

00:40:00   So as with most years, certainly lately, my phone got delivered via UPS and it was due to come in between 11 and 3 which is actually quite early for iPhone deliveries.

00:40:12   Usually they're not until like 6ish at the earliest.

00:40:16   And typically I don't see our UPS drivers so I don't know if it's the same one every time or if it's a rotating band of merry men and women.

00:40:24   But one way or another, typically they just drop the thing off, maybe they'll ring the doorbell and then they'll bounce.

00:40:30   And this time I was almost done with doing an exercise with Aaron, not like that you gross people.

00:40:37   We were lifting weights and so I hear this like, I think the doorbell rang and then I heard like a very emphatic knock on the door.

00:40:46   Which is extremely unusual.

00:40:48   So I go to the door thinking well maybe this is the iPhone but that's weird that they want me to sign for it because they specifically said no contact delivery but whatever.

00:40:55   So I go to the door and the UPS guy is down at the bottom of our little stoop which was polite and kind of him.

00:41:02   And he said, "I'm sorry man, I just gotta ask, what is that?"

00:41:06   I was like, "hmm, it's odd that you don't know that but hey that's fine."

00:41:10   And I said, "oh it's a new iPhone."

00:41:11   "Oh it's that time again."

00:41:12   "Yep."

00:41:13   "Oh well I've had like 6 or 7 of those already and I was just wondering what it was."

00:41:16   And of course I'm thinking to myself, of the 6 or 7 iPhones that you've delivered today, you choose me, one third of the accidental tech podcasts to decide to strike up a conversation about, "hey man what's in the box?"

00:41:29   I should have said a human head if I was quicker on my feet, that's a reference John.

00:41:34   Anyways, so yeah we had this like, I don't know, 4 or 5 minute conversation about iPhones and deliveries and how bad it is for him and so on and so forth.

00:41:43   Would you like to guess whether or not I had the gumption to plug my podcast? I'll start with Marco.

00:41:48   Of course you did.

00:41:49   What is that supposed to mean?

00:41:51   Am I wrong?

00:41:52   I mean the way you said it makes us think you didn't but Marco's instinct that you would shamelessly do that is in character for you.

00:42:02   Not only did I plug the podcast, which he wrote down on his little notepad so if you're listening very very kind and enthusiastic UTS driver, I say hi yet again.

00:42:13   But not only did I plug the show, but I believe I was wearing the old Apple Watch Sport Edition ATP shirt at the time.

00:42:23   On brand in so many ways.

00:42:25   Yeah so I was extremely on brand, but I just thought it was hilarious that of all the houses that this guy decides to like emphatically knock on the door and ask what is in there anyway.

00:42:35   It happens to be mine.

00:42:36   And he's at home telling a story about how I was doing his delivery. I just wanted to know something about this box and this guy starts promoting his stupid podcast to me.

00:42:43   And he wouldn't let me go, he just kept talking and talking and talking. Oh man, sorry I just thought that was kind of funny.

00:42:50   One more thing on deliveries, weird COVID related delivery things.

00:42:54   I'm glad that they're changing it, doing contactless delivery and all that stuff like that.

00:42:58   But it does make me wonder what's the deal with all the signature required stuff.

00:43:01   Because Apple has been annoying/cautious in the past where you'd order like a $5 item but they don't sell anything less than $20.

00:43:10   But you'd order something really cheap and you'd have to sign for it.

00:43:13   And it was such a hassle when we were going into the office.

00:43:15   It's like, oh who's going to be home to sign for this and you miss a delivery and it's just an iPhone case, just leave it on the porch.

00:43:20   And then when the iPhones, and certainly big things like that, it's like oh yes of course you have to sign in blood for those.

00:43:25   But my iPhone, no signature this, chucked it up my porch.

00:43:29   And some other shipments I've had recently, I figured what they were.

00:43:32   But it was something that I was sure I would have to sign for.

00:43:35   So I was all ready to leap to the door with a mask on and all that other stuff, figuring I could sign and we'd be far apart.

00:43:40   And I get there and the package is on the stoop and the delivery person is walking away from the house.

00:43:46   And he's walking away to gain distance, this was early on in the pandemic.

00:43:53   And he's like 20 feet away and he says, "Hey do you want me to sign this for you?"

00:43:58   And I said, "Yeah, go for it."

00:44:03   Because all they need you to do is make a mark with their little, you know, like make an X or a line.

00:44:08   It's not like they compare your signature to anything.

00:44:11   I don't know if this is official policy or if the delivery drivers realize, look, this signature thing, all that matters is that some kind of mark is made with this electronic pencil thing and that constitutes a signature.

00:44:23   So maybe people in these delivery services are just signing for all the packages themselves now.

00:44:28   And this is to compare with the modern approach of the companies that are less mired in the past, let's say.

00:44:34   You know, Amazon does the creepy thing where they take a picture of it on your porch, right? And then mail that to you and say, "We totally delivered your package, here it is on your porch."

00:44:42   Which is not reassuring because when you come home and it's gone because someone stole it off your porch.

00:44:45   But nevertheless Amazon can say, "Hey, we did what we're supposed to do. We delivered it. That's your porch right there."

00:44:50   And then you can have long debates about that. Is that really my porch? Because how much of my house can you actually see?

00:44:55   Yeah, you know, just to get ahead of the follow-up, in years past you could go to your Apple online order status page thing and there was an official looking UPS or perhaps FedEx form that you could print out and sign and tape to your door that said, "Yes, I understand that I am not signing in blood.

00:45:15   Yes, I understand that means someone is surely going to take my phone off my porch. But please go ahead and leave it."

00:45:21   And I don't recall having seen that this year, I think because everything was designed to be contactless.

00:45:25   That used to be an option on all things. You get a little tag on the door and it's like, "We missed you. You weren't here."

00:45:29   And the options were, "You can check this checkbox and stick it back on your door." And this checkbox says, "You are absolving us of responsibility and we'll just leave it on your doorstep."

00:45:39   Or you can tell us to try again or we'll try again tomorrow or you can go pick it up at the depot or whatever.

00:45:46   And a couple of years ago or maybe from all I know because I'm old a decade ago, that option disappeared from all the slips.

00:45:52   There was no option that says just leave it. There was nothing you could do, nothing you could sign.

00:45:56   Now the case is a thing of like, "Oh, you go to the website and get the official form." Maybe that's what I was supposed to be doing.

00:46:01   But I was just sad when I saw, "Oh, I don't have that option anymore. I basically just have to be here or I have to go somewhere to try to pick it up myself."

00:46:09   So maybe I'll try that next time to go to the website. Although, what next time? We're all home all the time now anyway.

00:46:16   To be clear though, I was saying preemptively you go to the Apple order status page.

00:46:21   Before the first delivery.

00:46:22   Correct. I just want to make sure we're all on the same page.

00:46:24   Yep.

00:46:25   All right. So I got my fancy phone. I got the 256 gig Pacific Blue iPhone 12 Pro.

00:46:34   One of the first things I noticed was that in the box is a SIM removal tool.

00:46:40   And I cannot remember the last time that's happened. I didn't go spelunking into old boxes to see if that's the case.

00:46:45   But I remember early on every iPhone or darn near every iPhone came with a SIM removal tool.

00:46:49   And then I thought they stopped doing that, but this one did.

00:46:52   So maybe I'm making news out of something that isn't news.

00:46:55   But that struck me because I don't recall having seen a SIM removal tool in years.

00:46:59   It also may be because mine was bought without a SIM in it. So maybe that makes a difference.

00:47:05   But one way or another, I don't recall having seen them for a while.

00:47:09   And again, I could be lying to you about that.

00:47:12   Aesthetically, aesthetically this thing is friggin' beautiful.

00:47:17   I think this is probably aesthetically my favorite phone ever.

00:47:22   I love the Blue. I love the Midnight Green.

00:47:25   Or I shouldn't say I love it. I really like the Midnight Green a lot.

00:47:28   I love the specific Blue.

00:47:31   I do think it would be nice if there were louder and more vibrant colors on the Pro line, as many, many, many people have said.

00:47:36   But I do appreciate the more subtle Blue.

00:47:41   Even though in the same breath, I'll tell you, I also kind of wish there was a louder one.

00:47:45   But since I'm an ever-older man, I think this fits my persona a little better.

00:47:49   The sides, I think, look great.

00:47:53   They are aesthetically so much better looking to me than the rounded edges of the phones of the last few years.

00:48:00   Holding it in hand, I'm less convinced.

00:48:05   And I want to say it was on Upgrade, I believe, that Mike and Jason were talking about the same thing.

00:48:11   And they said something that occurred to me, I think, like the morning I listened to Upgrade.

00:48:17   Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but on the 4 and 5 era phones, didn't they make a big hoopla about chamfered edges at some point?

00:48:27   And let me make sure my own understanding is correct.

00:48:30   That was the 5.

00:48:31   Was it the 5? Okay.

00:48:32   What that meant was, to use layman's terms, they kind of rounded off some of it.

00:48:38   Not round, literally, but they kind of like...

00:48:40   The opposite of round, flat.

00:48:41   Sorry, yes.

00:48:42   What I mean to say is, they clipped off some of it to make it so that the edge was at a 45 degree angle.

00:48:51   Is that a fair description?

00:48:53   Remember back when the old laptops, like the first generation of MacBook Pros and the aluminum ones before that...

00:48:59   No, not the aluminum ones.

00:49:01   Anyway, the first generation of unibody MacBook Pros had a very sharp corner.

00:49:05   Remember that?

00:49:06   And I actually did a blog post with macro photography years ago.

00:49:10   Oh, I do remember that.

00:49:11   I was comparing, because sometime mid-cycle of that body style, they switched to a slightly sanded off edge.

00:49:19   And it made a huge difference in comfort.

00:49:21   I mean, it was always... They just increased the corner radius, right?

00:49:24   It was always rounded, but in the macro photography, you could see the radius used to be so small that it was sharp.

00:49:29   And they just cranked up the radius, so now it was rounded over more.

00:49:32   And they've stuck with that more rounded over radius.

00:49:34   If you look at any modern laptop, they've kind of dialed in how sharp they can make it.

00:49:38   Just keep the aesthetics without it being an actual danger or uncomfortable.

00:49:43   Although I would argue it's still a little bit uncomfortable, but it did way better than it was.

00:49:46   Yeah, so I actually went into the attic, and I didn't spend any time with them until just now, but I found either mine or Aaron's old 4S.

00:49:53   I found either mine or Aaron's old 5S.

00:49:56   And looking at the 4S, it does appear that you're correct.

00:50:00   It is not chamfered in any way.

00:50:02   I should note, I have actually turned on a light, so now I'm going to be up until three in the morning.

00:50:06   Thank you, gentlemen.

00:50:07   I have turned on a light in order to look at this.

00:50:10   To the best that I can tell, the edges, as you guys said, are not chamfered on the 4 or the 4S, strictly speaking.

00:50:18   But on the 5, it does look like they are.

00:50:21   What's interesting is my recollection of the 4S and 5 and 5S was that everything was flush as it is on the 12 Pro.

00:50:32   But looking at this in hand again, the back and the sides are kind of one unit of aluminum.

00:50:40   However, the display kind of pokes out taller than the side aluminum does.

00:50:46   So if you're looking at it from the side, if you're looking at, say, the volume switches, you can see the top of the aluminum.

00:50:54   And then a solid, like, I don't know, millimeter or two above that is the end of the screen.

00:50:58   So does that make sense? So it's not flush.

00:51:00   You're talking about the 4?

00:51:02   This is the 5S I'm looking at.

00:51:04   So the 4 was an ice cream sandwich, which is even more prominent.

00:51:07   Like, it had the metal band was the ice cream.

00:51:10   I'm sorry, yep, that's correct.

00:51:11   And then the top and bottom chocolate cookie layers were fairly substantial.

00:51:15   And not only did they sit proud of the aluminum, but they were inset from it as well, my recollection.

00:51:20   You have the phone in front of you.

00:51:21   But I'm kind of surprised to hear that the 5 screen poked out too, because my recollection was that it was flat.

00:51:26   But maybe that's what passed for flat in those days.

00:51:28   Right, and I think that's also part of it.

00:51:30   All of this, this is many, many, many words to say, that I, even though I don't find the 12 Pro to be extraordinarily comfortable in hand because of the flat sides,

00:51:43   I love the aesthetics so much that I think I would still make that trade-off either way.

00:51:49   But I really wondered, maybe it's all in my head, but I really wonder if they had chamfered the edges just a little bit.

00:51:55   And I can't believe I'm saying this non-ironically, but if they had chamfered those edges just a little bit, I wonder if just that teeny bit of,

00:52:01   I know it's not literally rounding, but figuratively speaking, rounding off, I wonder if that would have helped a little bit to make it a little more comfortable.

00:52:09   In terms of leaving aside the comfort, the size of it, I don't notice and haven't ever really noticed that it's bigger than the 11 Pro.

00:52:22   I have both in front of me. I don't. It's definitely the 11 Pro is way more comfortable in hand.

00:52:28   But in terms of size, I don't feel like it's any different. I understand that it literally is bigger, but in terms of the way it feels in my hand, it does not feel any different.

00:52:37   The screen does just feel bigger. I wouldn't say that I feel like I have more real estate. It just kind of feels bigger in a, just kind of gut way.

00:52:48   But I wouldn't say that I feel like all of a sudden I see more tweets or more emails or anything like that.

00:52:56   One of the things I was very interested in trying was the arms akimbo portrait mode, which is what started this whole arms akimbo thing in the first place.

00:53:04   And I don't have any pictures that I'd like to share, but I did take a couple of quick shots of like Aaron or the kids with their arms leaving that triangle of empty space.

00:53:16   And so far, I think I probably took like five of these pictures, and I think roughly four of them were done appropriately so that the empty space in between the arm and the body was blurred as one would expect.

00:53:32   And I believe that the one time that didn't work was when the empty space was very, very small.

00:53:37   Small enough that it wouldn't surprise me, and I am filling in some blanks here that may be incorrect,

00:53:41   but small enough that it wouldn't surprise me that the LIDAR just didn't detect that there was an empty space there.

00:53:46   I might be wrong entirely. Maybe the LIDAR isn't even used unless it's in dark mode.

00:53:50   I think the LIDAR is only used in low light.

00:53:52   Okay. That's what I'm not sure about.

00:53:54   Apple seemed to hint at that, but they didn't say outright. I don't know.

00:53:58   Exactly. So again, I might be filling you with baloney by accident,

00:54:02   but it did seem like in situations where I felt like it was more likely that the 11 Pro would fall down, in portrait mode specifically,

00:54:11   it did seem like it handled it better. That is absolutely anecdotal. I have not done like extensive testing or anything,

00:54:17   but it does seem a lot better at a glance, which I'm very, very excited about.

00:54:22   Also, the edge detection around like the top of heads and things like that is noticeably better.

00:54:28   And it's getting to the point that for me, not for Marco and probably not for Joe,

00:54:33   but for me it is getting closer to why do I have a big camera.

00:54:39   I don't think we're there yet, but it is noticeably better than photos I've seen on my 11 Pro

00:54:45   between the akimbo dead space and the edge detection.

00:54:49   I haven't tried anyone with clear eyeglasses. I think the only time I took pictures of the kids was when we were outside,

00:54:55   and so they have the transition lenses that make themselves dark automatically like sunglasses when we're outside.

00:55:01   So I can't speak to whether or not glasses are doing better, but again, arms akimbo seem better,

00:55:06   and the threshold, the edges seemed a lot better as well.

00:55:10   I have some other things to say, but Jon, did you do anything with regard to the camera or portrait mode specifically?

00:55:16   I'm going to have my whole say in my section when we get down to me.

00:55:19   The only thing I'll add to your thing is I saw one of the comparison tests on YouTube

00:55:23   where someone was taking the new iPhone and the latest Pixel and some other, whatever that big phone is that has the 5x optical zoom in it.

00:55:31   Anyway, they were doing comparisons and they were doing portrait mode tests,

00:55:34   and as good as, you know, you're saying the arms akimbo thing on Apple's phone is getting better in terms of finding where to artificially blur,

00:55:41   the Pixel destroyed it. It was like a picture of a cactus with a bunch of little leafy things coming off the bottom of the cactus,

00:55:49   and the iPhone erased the leaves entirely and the Pixel traced around every single leaf. I was impressed.

00:55:56   I still don't like portrait mode even on the Pixel, but the gap in smart edge detection and finding what you have to blur around,

00:56:04   I was shocked. I would have guessed that no phone could have detected these very thin, especially from a side view,

00:56:09   like a very thin leaf wrapping up around something. It was amazing what the Pixel did.

00:56:13   I don't even understand how they're doing it. It's got to be some kind of ML thing that understands it's a plant and is looking for those features,

00:56:18   but still a little bit of ways to go for figuring out what to blur, but I'm glad it's handling big triangles of open space better.

00:56:24   Yeah, that's been one area where, in the same way that when the iPhone 11 came out last year,

00:56:31   Apple came out with this night mode that basically embarrassed everyone else's night modes.

00:56:36   It was so good and I think remains the best night mode. But as good as their night mode is,

00:56:42   that's as good as the Pixel's portrait mode is, and that's not new.

00:56:46   The Pixel has always been ahead of Apple in the portrait mode thing because you're right, they do use,

00:56:51   I think it's entirely ML based. I think it's not optic at all. They just have way better results at edges of things.

00:56:57   I keep seeing these portrait pictures everyone's posting, "Look how great the iPhone 12 portrait mode is."

00:57:02   I still see ears getting blurred off and hair getting blurred off and stuff.

00:57:07   It's the same problems they've always had. It is getting better, it seems, over time,

00:57:12   but it still looks really unnatural if you start looking at the edges of people's heads.

00:57:17   Trying to use depth mapping for that, which is what Apple's doing, and depth mapping with multiple cameras,

00:57:22   depth mapping with the LiDAR, that approach has limits. I don't think there ever is going to be

00:57:28   depth mapping hardware sufficient to catch the flyaway hair going off the top of your kid's head.

00:57:34   Because it's a hair. It's literally a hair. Good luck trying to pick the right one.

00:57:40   Good luck trying to pick that out with your depth map. You could have just military grade LiDAR from 20 angles

00:57:47   and still have difficulty detecting a single hair. But if you have ML, and if that hair resolves at all,

00:57:54   as a series of pixels that stem from the head and are the same color as the rest of the hair, you've got a fighting chance.

00:58:00   Of course you could just use a real camera and not have to worry about this.

00:58:03   I was using my real camera earlier today when the kids were carving pumpkins.

00:58:07   Battle catch of the Harris. You know why? Because science.

00:58:11   Because science, indeed. So there were, to some degree remain, a handful of issues with my phone that I think are all software.

00:58:18   I don't think any of this is hardware. First of all, and I think this may all be traced back to iCloud maybe,

00:58:25   but what I did was a backup to my laptop and then restored it from my laptop to my phone.

00:58:35   I found that SMS Relay, so this is the feature where you can type text messages on your Mac or Macs, or iPad for that matter,

00:58:43   and have them relayed to your phone and then off to your cell carrier. That has been spotty for me.

00:58:50   I think I've got it mostly resolved after signing out of iCloud on my phone and signing back in,

00:58:54   but it's definitely not been as consistent as it had been. It had worked flawlessly for me for like a decade plus,

00:59:01   and it's definitely been a little bit wonky lately. Additionally, I've noticed even on the phone itself,

00:59:07   there have been some, I think it was actually strictly speaking MMS messages because they were group text messages,

00:59:14   which I believe are all delivered over MMS, but basically non-iMessages in groups where Aaron would receive,

00:59:22   and we're on the same conversation, Aaron would receive one and it just would never show up on my phone. Ever.

00:59:27   And still hasn't, like days later. And I've never experienced that before, or if I have it would be like one in a year,

00:59:33   or something like that. Like it's exceptionally rare that that's happened for me, and it's happened a couple times already,

00:59:39   which is very, very odd. And then finally, I've had some real struggles getting Apple Watch Unlock to work with my Macs.

00:59:48   So I've gotten it working with my MacBook Pro, which is funny because of the two Macs I want it less on a MacBook Pro

00:59:55   because it has Touch ID. But I still haven't gotten it to work on my iMac Pro, and I've tried various different troubleshooting things,

01:00:01   and I haven't yet cracked the code as to how to fix it on both. I've rebooted things, I've tried, like I said,

01:00:08   I tried signing out of iCloud and signing back in on my phone. I haven't tried that on my computers yet,

01:00:13   but I've tried a bunch of stuff, nothing's really worked. And this is the first time that I can recall in easily a decade

01:00:19   that I've done a phone upgrade and had as many seemingly software-related problems as I have,

01:00:28   which is a real bummer, and I'm not sure what I'm going to do about it. And this is where everyone says,

01:00:33   "Oh, just restore your phone, or restore it fresh, and blah, blah, blah." And I might do that, I don't know.

01:00:38   But it's been a damper on what is otherwise a really nice phone that aesthetically I friggin' love,

01:00:46   and I cannot say enough good things about. That's basically it for me. I have some complaining to do about AT&T

01:00:52   in a little bit, but let's focus on the phones. John, you also have a new toy. Tell me, how's your new toy?

01:00:57   One more question about your watch thing. Did you do the thing where you delete all the invisible entries

01:01:04   from Keychain on your Mac?

01:01:06   I did. I did try that. I think I did it on both machines, and that did seem to fix the MacBook Pro.

01:01:12   It did not seem to fix the iMac Pro, unfortunately.

01:01:15   Alright. Just wanted to check and to save you from my feedback. Alright, so I got, as I said in the last show,

01:01:21   a 256 iPhone 12 Pro graphite. And as I said in the other show, I didn't order a case because the leather one isn't out yet,

01:01:29   and I don't even know if I'm going to get that one for reasons I'll get into in a little bit.

01:01:33   So I'm like, "Alright, well I'll just use it without a case for a while." And I did. I used a better case.

01:01:38   So first impressions, I agree with Casey that this thing looks really nice. It also feels really nice,

01:01:44   it is very elemental. Aesthetically, it is marred by the asymmetry of the camera bump, but that's just the reality of smartphones.

01:01:53   It did make me consider for the first time, looking at the back of it, whether Apple ever will or should center the camera bump,

01:02:02   as many other camera manufacturers do. Because if you've got to have the bump, yeah, it's got to be a bump, fine.

01:02:06   Does it have to be asymmetrical? I mean, maybe there are advantages to being asymmetrical in terms of how you hold the camera in your hand,

01:02:13   but lots of other phone manufacturers do it centered, and there would be advantages to that.

01:02:17   I think that's why, right there. I think a centered camera bump looks like a Samsung phone, and I think that's why they don't do it.

01:02:23   I mean, it's not just Samsung. Lots of companies do it. But yeah, it could be S-tex. Either way.

01:02:28   The reason I'm thinking of that is because the rest of the phone looks like a piece of jewelry.

01:02:33   It is really nice looking in terms of tolerances and finishes. The stainless steel edge, like I know some people prefer the matte edge for grip,

01:02:41   and again, I'm not talking about ergonomics, I'm just talking about aesthetics. I love how the stainless steel edge feels.

01:02:48   I did not wish for chamfering, because the stainless steel edge is slightly rounded over, and a slightly rounded over stainless steel edge

01:02:55   looks and feels great on this thing as an object. It is a fun object to turn over in your hand and look at and have.

01:03:06   More so than any phone I can remember. The only one I can remember that was probably the equal or exceeded this is the 4 series,

01:03:16   because the 4 was so elemental, did not have a giant camera bump because those were earlier days,

01:03:21   and so committed to its simple aesthetic of glass, metal, glass in the ice cream sandwich mode, which I still think is great.

01:03:28   But this stainless steel is a new high for, I think, the look and feel of the edges of a phone.

01:03:33   Now, ignoring it as a piece of sculpture or art, what is it like as a phone? So I tried to use it without a case.

01:03:40   The flat sides, as I predicted on the previous show, and as I described on the previous show, rounded edges to the phone are slimming.

01:03:52   On the previous generation phone, I have a XS, but it's the same form factor as the 11 Pro and all that other stuff,

01:03:56   they make the phone seem thinner. And we know from the measurements that the 12 Pro is actually thinner than my XS and the 11.

01:04:07   But it doesn't seem thinner. When you go to pick it up, it's like, "Oh, this is the skinny phone." It's not. It's not skinnier.

01:04:16   And I even did the measurement, well, I'll get to that in a little bit, just perception-wise, this phone feels, it doesn't feel bigger, it feels chunkier.

01:04:29   I would agree with that.

01:04:30   It feels fatter.

01:04:32   I think I would agree with that, too.

01:04:33   In my mind's eye, when I pictured this phone, and keep in mind I'm using it without a case at this point,

01:04:39   in my mind's eye, when I pictured this phone in my head, I was picturing a beautifully, beautifully finished slab that was like taller in height than my iPhone XS with the case on it.

01:04:50   Like, my caseless 12 Pro, in my mind's eye, was taller. It is not.

01:04:55   If you put them on the table next to each other, you're like, "What are you talking about? It's way lower."

01:04:58   You know, I put my XS with the case, and then I put my 12 Pro next to it, and you can see, the 12 Pro is way thinner than that phone with the case.

01:05:05   What are you even thinking? It's because the sides are flat.

01:05:08   It feels chunkier.

01:05:10   The width feels exactly the same.

01:05:12   The height, maybe I can detect if you remind me that it exists.

01:05:17   And of course, if you put them back to back, you can see the height difference.

01:05:20   So if you're worried about the width, don't worry about it.

01:05:22   But it does feel chunkier.

01:05:27   Now, I used it without a case for several days, and that was all I could stand, mostly because of me.

01:05:34   There's a couple reasons I always want cases on my phone.

01:05:38   One is to be grippier so I don't drop it.

01:05:41   Two is because, for whatever reason, if I don't have a case on the phone, I put it down gingerly on surfaces.

01:05:49   Because, I mean, especially this phone. It looks so nice.

01:05:52   I don't want to just chuck it onto the table and have it go clatter.

01:05:56   I know people treat their phones that way, and that's fine.

01:05:59   But for whatever reason, I don't want to do that. I want to keep my phone looking nice.

01:06:04   It's probably stupid because a phone is there to be used, and who cares if the back has scratches on it?

01:06:09   And sometimes phones look cool when they have scratches all over them or whatever.

01:06:12   But for whatever reason, I find myself unconsciously putting it down gingerly on surfaces, and I don't like that.

01:06:19   But the final, and I think the most important reason that I want a case for this,

01:06:23   is because there's a camera bump on the back, and the cases that I like even out the camera bump.

01:06:29   So when I put my phone down on a surface, it is dead flat because the case is thick enough to account for the camera bump.

01:06:35   And that's what I'm used to. A phone that lies dead flat on the surface.

01:06:39   And I don't realize how much that affects my usage until I got a phone that is not grippy,

01:06:45   and not even has a big camera bump, and I put it on the arm of the sofa and it starts to skitter off.

01:06:50   And I'm like, "Nope, this cannot stand. I can't have this."

01:06:54   So I lasted all of like two or three days before I ordered a case.

01:06:58   Now, my leather one isn't available yet, so I ordered the Apple Silicon case,

01:07:03   knowing full well that the Apple Silicon case wraps all the way around all of the edges.

01:07:08   And including the bottom edge. Now, the previous cases on my iPhone XS, I have a leather case.

01:07:14   The bottom edge is like exposed. The whole bottom edge of the phone is exposed,

01:07:18   so you can see not only the lightning port, but you can see the metal with all the little holes in it for the speaker and microphone and all that other crap.

01:07:24   That whole bottom edge is exposed. That's important to me on these current round of phones with Face ID,

01:07:30   because swiping up from the bottom edge of the phone, it's great when that bottom edge is just naked.

01:07:36   Right? Especially on the XS and 11 where the bottom edge was, all the edges were rounded.

01:07:41   So I'd put my thumb on the bottom edge of the phone and just sweep up from the middle all the way up.

01:07:46   Like, that's how I unlock my phone. This is not an uncommon action.

01:07:49   Swiping up on your phone happens every single time you pick it up to unlock it,

01:07:53   unless you have a phone with Touch ID or something.

01:07:55   On the 12 Pro with the Apple Silicon case, the case goes around all the edges, which is beautiful and uniform,

01:08:02   but it also means that if you try to sweep up from the bottom edge, you're starting with your thumb touching the intentionally grippy silicone lip,

01:08:12   and then going down onto the glass and then going.

01:08:15   You can train yourself to don't start that far down. Instead, start on the glass.

01:08:19   And it works fine. You don't have to actually start at the very, very edge. You can start with your thumb just on the glass.

01:08:25   But old habits die hard and I don't like having to think about that.

01:08:28   So what I want for this going forward is a case that is grippy, that levels out the phone, and that has an infinitely exposed bottom edge.

01:08:38   Will that be Apple's leather case? The photos seem to indicate that it will not have an exposed bottom edge.

01:08:44   Instead, it will wrap entirely around, just like the Silicon case.

01:08:46   We don't know because Apple has been shy with product shots, but if you squint at the one that shows it from the back,

01:08:51   you're like, "Oh, it doesn't look like one of the ones that has a cutout." It probably doesn't.

01:08:54   So for now, I'm using the Silicon case.

01:08:56   Now, I mentioned height comparisons. Again, with the Silicon case, the Silicon case wraps around the back, levels out the camera bump,

01:09:03   and also the lip comes up higher than the screen just slightly.

01:09:07   So in my mind, I am thinking, "This was already a chunky slab-sided phone, and now it's got a lip,

01:09:15   it's got a case that goes farther down on the backside, and it's got a lip that sticks out on the frontside.

01:09:20   Surely this is like twice the height of my iPhone XS." Put them down on the table, they are exactly the same height.

01:09:27   Like down to the millimeter.

01:09:29   My 12 Pro in the Silicon case and my XS in the Apple leather case, you put them side by side flat on the table,

01:09:35   they both lay dead flat, you compare the height of the edges, they're exactly the same height.

01:09:39   It is an amazing physical illusion that the XS is thinner, because it's got rounded edges and rounded edges are slimming.

01:09:46   So it's amazing. I feel like my phone has gotten chunkier, but all actual measurements tell me that is just perception.

01:09:54   It is actually not any thicker than it ever was, it is just flat-sided.

01:09:58   All that said, the flat sides when it was a naked phone, I think did make it easier for me to grip it.

01:10:07   It felt more secure than the absolute bars of soap that were like the 6 and the XS as well.

01:10:13   Those ones have the matte glass on the back, which is very slippery, and they had rounded edges.

01:10:20   This one has shiny stainless steel on the flat sides, and shiny stainless steel is surprisingly grippy.

01:10:26   It felt more secure. It didn't feel secure enough for me to not get a case, and like I said, I'm mostly getting a case because I didn't want to have to put it down on things,

01:10:34   and because I wanted it to lay flat, and because I do want it to be slightly more grippy.

01:10:38   But it got me thinking, what do you actually want? Do you want the phone with the rounded edges that feels thinner even though it isn't?

01:10:47   In a grippy case or something? Or do you want the flat sides?

01:10:51   Everyone was talking about, "Oh, I can't wait until the flat sides come," because they have fond memories of the 4 and the 5, which were very different phones, very different size-wise than these things.

01:10:58   The flat sides certainly look cool. I enjoy the aesthetics, but they're less important to me than the ergonomics.

01:11:05   Where I came down on this is, ergonomically speaking, the flat sides give a benefit that I think is worth their chunkiness.

01:11:15   When I think about, when am I the least secure about my grip on my phone? When am I afraid that I'm going to drop my phone?

01:11:23   And it is always, for me personally, when I'm taking photos.

01:11:27   I'm holding my phone sideways with two hands. Sometimes I'm using the volume button as the shutter button, but sometimes, depending on the orientation and the situation, maybe I can't do that.

01:11:37   So then you do the thing, you see people do it, I do it myself, where you're gripping the phone with some set of fingers, but then you're using another finger to hit the shutter button, or to hold it down for burst mode or video or whatever.

01:11:48   And again, you're saying, "Why don't you just always use the volume button?" It just sometimes doesn't work out that way in the moment. You're trying to get a picture of your dog doing something cute or whatever.

01:11:56   So when I'm holding my phone by the edges with a small number of fingers, usually thumb on one side and a couple fingers on the other side, vertical or horizontal, that is when the rounded edge phones have always felt the least secure to me.

01:12:14   I've always been afraid that if I squeeze a little bit too hard, with the force not being exactly opposed from the two edges, that it will start to rotate and slip right out of my hand.

01:12:23   Flat sides make that way better, because you can press on two flat sides and be much more confident that if your force is slightly offset, it's not going to cause the phone to rotate in your hands because the edges aren't rounded.

01:12:37   And that benefit of flat sides, it has nothing to do with me holding my phone or the aesthetics or whatever, merely the benefit of the flat sides making a more secure grip when I'm holding it away from me with one or two or three fingers to take photos,

01:12:50   makes me a flat side promoter. And even though it feels chunkier, I think the tradeoff is worth it. And there's also the fact that with actual flat sides, you can put it upright or on its side on a table and have it take video or photos that way.

01:13:02   Although honestly, if you put it upright like the Monolith, it doesn't take much to shake the table to knock it down. And that actually works better if you have a smooth table with a naked phone than with a case because the case adds a little bit of rounded and wobbliness to it or whatever.

01:13:14   But yeah, it's only been a week or so, but that's my take on the flat side so far. They make me think the phone is thicker with two Cs if you like, than the other phone, even though it totally isn't.

01:13:30   But I will take that tradeoff for the increased security when taking photos, which is super duper important to me. And so I like that.

01:13:39   Now, for the cases, I did this, I was going to do this on the show, but I figured I better get a jump on it. So on Twitter, I sent out the call, you know, I get trying to give my requirements as concisely as I could by showing two photos.

01:13:51   My photo showed, here's the Apple Clear case. It has an exposed bottom on the phone. Like if you look at Apple's clear case, if you look at the photos of it, you can see the entire bottom of the phone except for the corners, right?

01:14:01   Here is Apple's silicone case. It does not have an exposed bottom. It wraps all around and just has a cutout for the lighting board and then some little dotty holes for the speakers, right?

01:14:10   What I want is a case that is not clear, that is more like the Apple silicone case, but that has the cutout that the clear one does to allow the bottom to be exposed. Preferably leather, but I didn't specify that.

01:14:24   So I got tons of recommendations, you know, and me being super picky, it's like, well, that looks good, but the leather is a little bit too rough, or that one looks good, but the buttons are just leather bumps. Do you remember the leather bump buttons to either one of you?

01:14:35   I don't know if you get the leather cases.

01:14:37   I used to all the time, yeah.

01:14:38   Yeah, that was until, geez, probably like the iPhone 10 or so?

01:14:43   Yeah, it was like the iPhone 6 and 7 model year-ish form factor. Apple's leather case, it had buttons for the volume and the power, but they were just like leather lumps.

01:14:54   Like, it was like the leather went around and when you came to the buttons, it was another lump of leather, and it was less satisfying to click.

01:15:01   And then they changed to basically having sort of a secondary exposed metal button, that that metal button would press the real metal button underneath it, and that was way more satisfying because the buttons had sharp edges and they were cutout from the surroundings, and I like those much better.

01:15:16   Even Apple's silicone case has silicone buttons, but they're not just lumps that you press. There's little cutouts and then the silicone buttons sit within the cutouts, or if they're not cutouts, they're really doing a good job of fooling me because they feel like they have little sharp edges, and that's how I want them.

01:15:30   So anyway, I was looking for a case like that. I found two prospects. One has leather lumps and one does not. I will put them both in the show notes if you are also looking for something like this with the bottom cutout.

01:15:42   Lots of people ask me, "Why do you care about the bottom cutout?" I thought it might be obvious, but apparently not. Like I said, it's the swipe up from the bottom is the big deal for me, because swiping up from the bottom and hitting that little lip, it's not the end of the world.

01:15:54   It works fine, and you don't have to hit the lip. Like I said, you can train yourself to start higher, but I prefer not to have it that way.

01:16:00   The other thing that I realized about the cases that go all the way around is it makes your phone way more symmetrical than it was.

01:16:08   Many times, I have picked up my iPhone 12 Pro upside down. You can feel the volume buttons, and one finger swipes over the bottom edge and you feel the hole for the lightning port.

01:16:25   I have gotten far enough to the point where I have swiped onto a screen that was upside down. It's happened six or seven times in a handful of days. Would I eventually get used to it? Maybe, but I don't want to have to. I never thought about this before with my other phones.

01:16:39   I guess I was just doing it unconsciously when I see it somewhere and pick it up. You can tell which side is the bottom because the bottom edge is exposed.

01:16:48   You can see that from pretty much any angle. You can see it from the back because the cutout exposes the little thing sticking out, and you can see it from the top because the perimeter doesn't go around.

01:16:57   I think the one that is closest to my requirements is from DecodedBags.com. It's their new iPhone 12 cover. It is a leather cover with their own independent buttons that aren't leather lumps and the bottom cutout.

01:17:12   I didn't buy it because I'm still waiting to see the Apple case finally say that the Apple case wraps around. Chances are very good it's going to wrap around because all indications of all their other cases and all the photos that I've seen indicate that it does wrap around.

01:17:29   But frustratingly, Apple doesn't actually have a shot of the bottom of the iPhone case. To add to that frustration, with all these iPhone cases people have thrown around on Twitter, you'd be amazed at how many websites, like the manufacturer's website, the company that makes the iPhone case.

01:17:45   You go to the product page for the case and it has one or two photos of the case and all of them are from the back. It's like, I want to see the top, bottom, left and right edges. I can't tell what your buttons look like when I'm just looking at the back of your case.

01:18:00   It's like you had one job. Make a product page for this iPhone case. Should we have photos? Yeah, people like to see what they're buying. Should we have photos from different angles? No. Just one photo is fine.

01:18:11   Come on, you have one job. How many edges are there? There's only six edges. Or they have a photo from the back and then a photo from the front.

01:18:21   So you can see a design they have on the inside of the case that you're never going to see. And then you have to squint at it and say, "from this angle, does it look like the bottom has a cutout?"

01:18:32   The iPhone case had this moody, dim lighting, everything shrouded in shadows and you're zooming in and turning up the contrast in Photoshop. Is that a cutout or is that just a shadow? I can't tell.

01:18:43   Come on, case manufacturers. Just show your products from all angles. Amazon and other sites like that do a good job because users upload photos or YouTube. Yay, YouTube. Someone will take it and hold it in front of a camera and rotate it and you'll be able to see all the edges.

01:18:55   Maybe they only have a flatbed scanner. Maybe. Although it's hard to tell. They look like they're very nicely lit shots.

01:19:04   Oh, and so I guess the final thing is actually the first thing. Phone setup. Before I could even do any of this experiencing of the phone, I had to get it set up.

01:19:12   I did get a SIM removal tool. The mystery of which option I chose when setting up the phone, the mystery remained. I'm setting up my phone, I turn it on, it's like, "do you want to transfer stuff from your phone or do you want to do it from iCloud?"

01:19:28   I did the phone transfer, I think that's what I did last year too, where you sit them next to each other and they transfer directly rather than going from iCloud. Prior to this, I had done all the backups on the other phone and everything so it's all fresh.

01:19:39   I did the transfer and I just sat them next to each other for a really long time. Both of them plugged in and they did all the transfer and everything transferred over.

01:19:46   Something that only comes up for developer nerdy people is that all these transfer techniques, I believe all of them, both iCloud and I think maybe also restore from iTunes backup/finder backup, but I'm not sure.

01:19:59   I'm pretty sure iCloud and phone transfer, they don't give you back your beta apps. I don't know if that's been your experience. I have a surprising number of beta apps including on my home screen, so when the thing is "done transferring" my home screens look different because they're missing icons.

01:20:15   So you have to go back into TestFlight and re-download the betas and put them back where they were. I think it actually remembers where they were because I think if you just tell TestFlight to install them it puts them back in the right place, which is nice.

01:20:35   I'm assuming this is because of the weird way TestFlight came up where they have the UDID for each phone and I'm guessing the way TestFlight works behind the scenes is still based on that.

01:20:47   Apple is just automating it and raising the limits of things, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if that's how it still worked. There's probably no good way for them to actually transfer over beta apps between any two devices in any method unless they would integrate these two very different parts of their backend, which Apple is not good at.

01:21:06   I didn't expect it and it's not a big deal and most people don't have beta apps or whatever and it's pretty easy to fix. All I have to say is I get the two phones, they're done, they look a little bit different, I say "oh yeah TestFlight" and I go download a bunch of TestFlight stuff and they look the same. I'm like "great, I'm in business now" and it had a little white dialog box that comes up that says "we're trying to activate your phone, this may take a few minutes" or whatever and then I make sure I go near a window or whatever because my house has terrible signal and I don't want activation to fail because signal, but of course activation does fail.

01:21:35   And it's like "oh, fail to activate, if this problem persists, go talk to your carrier" and I'm like "oh maybe I was just not in the right place at the right time, how do I make it activate again, reboot the phone, whatever, you can go to the second floor of the house, go near the window that has the strongest signal, we're activating your phone, dot dot dot, if activation failed, if this problem persists, please contact your carrier."

01:21:57   So I'm like "well this isn't good, ostensibly the setup process is done, I have all my apps, but I can't get the phone to activate and be my actual phone."

01:22:09   So then I was thinking back to those options, which option did I pick when I ordered the thing?

01:22:13   Well so hold on, did your phone have a SIM in it or not?

01:22:16   Uh huh, that's what I get to, that was the question I asked myself, does my phone have a SIM? Now I went to the info page and you see the IME ID or whatever, all that stuff, and I was like "that must mean I have a SIM in it, right?" Because all these numbers mean, but I don't know anything about phones, like maybe you only think that's what it means, or maybe it's an eSIM, so I went and got the SIM removal tool, which came with my phone.

01:22:34   Because I felt so dumb, like I need to physically check whether this thing came with a SIM, because through the software I can't tell because I don't trust my knowledge of how phones work, so I used the SIM removal tool, popped out, sure enough there was a SIM in the phone.

01:22:47   Alright, well that question is solved, so I pushed the little SIM tray back in, and now I'm like "well now what do I do to activate this phone?" I think I might have tried it one more time, and of course it failed, it failed pretty quickly.

01:22:57   Then I had to do what the thing said, which is call my carrier, and that's never, never a thing that you want to do, especially on iPhone day, because this is day one order, October 23rd I think is the earliest ship date, right?

01:23:09   So, I called my carrier, Verizon, and I penetrated the labyrinth of their support maze.

01:23:18   Was it faster because you were on Verizon's 5G network?

01:23:21   Ah, nice, I missed it, darn it!

01:23:23   Well, obviously I can't be on Verizon's 5G network because my phone isn't activated.

01:23:27   So, I get through the thing, and they're going through the wait times, blah blah blah, and honestly the wait times didn't sound that bad.

01:23:34   I'm like "okay, well it could be worse, it's not like they said it was a one hour wait time."

01:23:37   And then they have this option of like "you know, we can call you back so you don't have to sit on hold listening to this terribly over-boosted, clipped, fuzzy, 8 kilohertz Muzak."

01:23:48   I forget what song it was, I think it was like a Muzak version of like, I don't remember, some hit from like 10 years ago.

01:23:57   It was very strange and mildly inappropriate. Anyway, I'm like "yeah, sure, let's do that thing where you call me back so I don't have to sit on hold anymore."

01:24:06   So, I go through the process of doing that, first they ask you like "are you calling from the phone, do you want to be fixed?"

01:24:13   And then "what number do you want me?" and I'm like "type in the number, it's the number I called you from, just use that one."

01:24:18   But they're only a phone company, they can't tell what number I called them from.

01:24:21   Anyway, I type in my phone number, this is my landline I'm calling them on because we still have one of those at home.

01:24:25   I type in my phone number, I tell them to call me back, and then I hang up.

01:24:29   And then you get an email and a text and it's like "yep, we'll totally call you back, we've got your spot in line, blah blah blah blah blah."

01:24:35   I'm doing other things, the phone rings, I'm like "that must be Verizon calling me back."

01:24:40   I get up to go over and get the phone, but it doesn't ring a second time.

01:24:44   And Verizon's home phone thing has a feature where it will, this is their like spam caller feature.

01:24:51   But rather than just sending the spam callers directly to voicemail or blocking them, it says, I don't know why we thought this was a good idea,

01:24:58   but the feature is that if it only rings once, it's spam.

01:25:03   Which is kind of nice, ringing zero would be better, but if you're sitting on the couch watching TV and the phone rings but it doesn't ring a second time,

01:25:09   you're like "oh, that was a spam call, so it's good that I didn't get up."

01:25:12   But it's good that it didn't even turn my head to look what the caller ID said to see if it's someone I care about, right?

01:25:16   So, Verizon calls you back, or I think Verizon calls you back, I get up to go get the phone, I look at the caller ID and it says Verizon,

01:25:23   but the phone doesn't ring a second time. So I quickly grab the receiver and pick it up and say "hello," dial tone.

01:25:29   Because not only does it only ring once, but I think it just either sends them to voicemail or hangs up.

01:25:35   So I had lost my spot in line. And so I called Verizon back, and they said "would you like us to call you back?"

01:25:42   And I said "no, because apparently Verizon, your own spam filtering software system thinks that when your support line calls me back, it's a spam call.

01:25:52   And if I don't get there on the very first ring, I miss the call."

01:25:55   So, the wait times, as you can imagine, had changed in the intervening 30 minutes or whatever I'd been waiting for this call,

01:26:02   and I stayed on hold for a very, very, very long time.

01:26:07   Eventually I got through to a very nice person, who I gave a 10 rating on the obligatory, like, you know, call, thing, whatever, right?

01:26:14   And I explained the situation, because I got a new phone, it's got a new SIM in it.

01:26:18   Person on the phone, again, I can't say whether this is actually true, I'm just telling you what the person on the phone said,

01:26:23   but the person on the phone said "it's good that you got a new SIM in your phone, because that's what you need to do for 5G."

01:26:29   Is that actually true? It depends on the carrier, I believe.

01:26:32   I think it depends on the carrier, but I'd seen somebody talking maybe to you on Twitter saying the exact same thing,

01:26:38   so that doesn't mean it's true? People said everything to me on Twitter, right.

01:26:42   Well, that's fair. It's definitely true if you had a super old phone with the wrong SIM form factor,

01:26:47   like if you had a micro SIM instead of a nano SIM, that is definitely true,

01:26:51   although I have heard of people cutting down a micro SIM with actual scissors to get it to be a nano SIM or whatever.

01:26:56   There's like punch out tools you can get, but I think even that doesn't work for 5G, and I believe it's actually documented somewhere.

01:27:03   One of the reasons my intention was to choose the option that comes with the SIM in the phone was because I'm like,

01:27:10   "Well, better safe than sorry, and if it comes with a SIM and it's a 5G phone, I know for sure that that SIM is going to work with 5G, because duh."

01:27:16   So, sure enough, my phone did come with the SIM, and they were like,

01:27:19   "And the guy on the phone said, 'It's good that you got the phone with the new SIM.'"

01:27:22   I was like, "Great, we're in business." And then I had to read a series of very long numbers over the phone to this very patient person.

01:27:30   The IME ID is like whatever that one is. That's nothing. It's the other one. I don't remember the acronym.

01:27:35   The other one is like 27 digits long. Oh, it's killing me, right?

01:27:40   And mine has a string of zeros in the middle of it? Oh, counting zeros is the worst, because I was trying to do it in groups of like three,

01:27:47   but there was a run of like more than three zeros, and it wasn't four. It was like seven or eight zeros.

01:27:54   I was like, "Oh, zero. I'm counting them with my finger. I'm using my fingernail."

01:27:58   I'm like, "How many zeros are there?" I get done with the whole thing, and I'm like, "I'm going to count those zeros again. Stay with me here."

01:28:03   Because you know if you screw this up, you just wasted, like you've got to go through the whole process again.

01:28:09   I went through this whole thing, and it's like, "Okay, turn off Wi-Fi on your phone."

01:28:14   I was asking during the whole call, I always ask the poor people this. I feel so bad.

01:28:18   I'm like, "What could I have done to not be talking to you right now?"

01:28:22   Because there's something I could have done on my end instead of calling my carrier.

01:28:26   Because he was saying, "Make sure your other phone is off." I'm like, "Was that it?

01:28:30   Is that all I needed to do to activate my iPhone was get my previous phone off the network?"

01:28:33   And it's like, "Yeah, you should totally get your previous phone off the network."

01:28:35   But again, anything someone says on one of these calls is like, "Is that true, or is that just something they tell people, or does it make it easier?"

01:28:40   But next year, or two years from now, I will try this, which is turn off the other phone and get it off the network,

01:28:47   the one that currently has my number, before trying to activate the new phone with my number.

01:28:51   I think that would have helped here. But he was like, "Well, maybe, I don't know, blah, blah, blah."

01:28:55   Anyway, so we turn off the other phone, do the thing, and he's like, "Okay, well now we're activating your phone.

01:28:59   Now try to give me a test call. Of course it doesn't work.

01:29:02   Turn off your phone again, reboot it, try different places in the house."

01:29:06   It didn't work on the first, second, or even the third try.

01:29:11   Why didn't it work? What was he doing on his end? He was doing something.

01:29:14   He put me on hold a lot. He was doing a lot of things.

01:29:16   And I was like, "Oh my God, did I read the numbers wrong?"

01:29:19   Eventually, the phone activated.

01:29:21   It activated after the fifth time of doing literally the same thing.

01:29:25   On my end, I was doing the same thing every time, following the instructions.

01:29:28   And on his end, he was doing something.

01:29:31   Eventually, it worked. This person was very patient. I was happy to get my phone work.

01:29:35   This is many hours into my phone setup process at this point.

01:29:38   But I'm not done. Because I'm like, "Great, I've got my phone. It's all set up now.

01:29:44   It's set up with Verizon 5G."

01:29:46   I quickly determined that no, there is no 5G in my house.

01:29:50   I get one and a half bars of LTE is what I get.

01:29:53   And I like it. And of course, I don't go anywhere else.

01:29:56   So I haven't actually been on 5G, so I have no idea what the speeds are.

01:29:59   I'm like, "Well, at least my phone setup is done."

01:30:01   But then I go through the thing of, "Let me just launch all my apps and make sure I can log into all of them."

01:30:05   And then, something must have happened in the past two years.

01:30:08   I have vague memories of this for two years ago, but if there's a curve where you could graph

01:30:13   how many things I use for two-factor authentication and how many two-factor authenticated accounts I have,

01:30:20   that curve has gone hockey stick in the last couple of years.

01:30:24   Because I'm like, "Oh, well, let me just…"

01:30:26   I use Google Authenticator as my main two-factor app.

01:30:29   And through some mysterious process, when you get a new phone, Google Authenticator isn't empty on the new phone, but it's not full.

01:30:42   I have a huge scrolling list of Google Authenticator things on my good phone, right, on my actual phone.

01:30:48   On the new phone, I had some entries in Google Authenticator.

01:30:52   And they weren't just Google. There were other services that my 2FA things were there for.

01:30:58   I had a vague recollection that, like, "Oh, if you just let it sit there for a while, iCloud-style, it'll sync all of them."

01:31:05   But I don't think it ever would have because it was sitting like that for a long time.

01:31:10   So I'm like, "All right, I've got to go re-add the two-factor stuff for everything in Google Authenticator."

01:31:15   And then that's when I realized how long the list is.

01:31:17   And it's so painful. Every website has a different way of doing it.

01:31:21   Can you just add a new device? Do you have to disable two-factor?

01:31:25   If you disable two-factor, how many hoops do you have to jump through to that?

01:31:28   Often to disable two-factor, you have to still have two-factor.

01:31:31   So it's super important that I knew this going in, that I keep my good phone with all the 2FA stuff still on it.

01:31:38   I need that to get it onto my other phone.

01:31:41   Like, if I had just thrown this phone in the ocean and gotten a new phone, I'd be screwed out of a lot of these things.

01:31:45   I'd have to go to the backup codes, right, where they send you these one-time codes that they tell you to print out and everything.

01:31:50   Every website is different. Every technique is different.

01:31:53   Some of the websites were broken, like Slack's website was super broken.

01:31:57   You would go to, like, add two-factor, and it would say, "Scan this QR code," and then it would have a broken image on the webpage.

01:32:03   It's like, "Come on, Slack." But then you're like, "Aha!"

01:32:06   But there's another way you can add it besides QR code. That's just an encoding of a string or whatever.

01:32:11   There was a little link that says, "Can't scan the QR code?"

01:32:14   "Yes, Slack, I can scan the QR code."

01:32:16   Click this link here, and it expands this little thing. It says, "Just enter this string into your two-factor app,"

01:32:21   and it's a bunch of letters and numbers, and I enter the bunch of letters and numbers into my two-factor app,

01:32:25   and it adds it and says, "Now, finally, at the bottom of the page, test that your two-factor thing works by entering your six-digit code."

01:32:31   I entered a six-digit code, and it doesn't work.

01:32:33   I tried this so many times. Am I mistyping it?

01:32:36   Do I have to type in the new code within the time window of the two-factor because it's a time-based thing for Slack?

01:32:42   Eventually, I just contacted Slack, or I was complaining about it on Twitter,

01:32:47   and Slack's corporate support thing contacted me and said, "Oh, if you're having problems, send some email."

01:32:53   So I sent them an email halfway through me writing the good, dutiful, detailed email

01:32:57   of what the problem with their web page was, including a screenshot showing a QR code that doesn't exist,

01:33:01   and telling them, "Yes, I see the part where I don't need to use a QR code. No, that part doesn't work either."

01:33:06   I eventually figured out the workaround, which is disable two-factor entirely.

01:33:10   Now, I couldn't disable two-factor entirely because this particular Slack -- and we are all on this Slack,

01:33:15   and I'm not going to name and shame it -- but the particular Slack does not allow you to disable two-factor.

01:33:20   But I could change two-factor to be SMS briefly.

01:33:24   So I change it to SMS, two-factor my way in to the thing, use that as two-factor to get the new two-factor thing on that,

01:33:30   and then change it back to the -- when you go to add it again, it doesn't show you the broken page with the QR code.

01:33:36   It sets it up as a new device because you had previously turned off -- you know, you'd use two-factor in SMS,

01:33:41   which doesn't have the QR code authenticator app thing.

01:33:44   Anyway, I eventually got it to work. God, I have so many two-factor things.

01:33:48   I have, I think at my count, five different apps, each of which has multiple things in it.

01:33:54   Why do I have five different apps? That's not my choice.

01:33:57   Work alone has multiple two-factor systems, right?

01:34:01   And then I have two-factor things for, you know, things like Slack or related to podcasts or, you know,

01:34:07   Discord things that I'm on and all, like, and tons of Microsoft stuff which has their own app.

01:34:12   It just -- oh, my God, setting up this phone took so long.

01:34:16   And it's not -- everyone kept saying, like, what did you use? Did you use the Apple Transfer? Did you use the iCloud?

01:34:20   That's not what took all the time. That was fine. That ran fine, right? It's two-factor.

01:34:26   Now, everyone's going to tell me, you should use Authy.

01:34:28   You should use a certain name of your favorite app here because it does cloud syncing.

01:34:31   You should use 1Password because it'll do all this stuff for you.

01:34:33   Well, A, that's not true because I can't choose what apps I use for work,

01:34:36   and I can't choose what apps are used by, like, these companies that I work with and all this other stuff, right?

01:34:41   Sometimes you just don't have a choice, and you have to use the apps they tell you to do.

01:34:45   Sometimes you have to talk to corporate IT to get the new thing on the thing, and they won't do it over mail,

01:34:49   and they have to, like -- sometimes you just can't avoid that.

01:34:52   But B, for the things I can control, now I'm going to be the Casey of this episode and say,

01:34:56   I find some vague comfort in the idea that my two-factor things are not cloud synced,

01:35:03   that they're literally only on the device, and the only way to get them to another device is to copy them directly

01:35:07   or go through a computer backup or whatever, right?

01:35:10   Because I feel like for two-factor, yeah, the convenience of it syncing is great,

01:35:15   but that also means it's probably in a cloud somewhere, and that does not make me feel good

01:35:19   because the whole point of two-factor is something you know and something you have,

01:35:22   and what I have is my phone and a bunch of backup code somewhere, right?

01:35:26   But if it's not something you have, if the information required to reinstantiate your two-factor stuff

01:35:33   is in a cloud account somewhere, because then if you crack that cloud account,

01:35:37   you get all the two-factor stuff and you just download it to any phone you want,

01:35:40   and now you can get it as two-factor if you know my password and yada, yada, right?

01:35:43   So there is some comfort in that, but in like hour three of my two-factor setup,

01:35:48   I'm like, maybe I should use a cloud sync one, or maybe I should use one that lets me download it in the back,

01:35:53   because there's a bunch of ones that will just save their stuff in the iTunes backup,

01:35:57   and yes, to answer your question, I did do a complete encrypted iTunes --

01:36:02   nah, I keep saying iTunes backup, but you know what I mean --

01:36:04   encrypted backup to my Mac and a complete restore of that backup to my phone?

01:36:09   Google Earth don't care. Same deal. It comes back up, it's like,

01:36:13   here's some set of your two-factor. It's not all of them. Not by a long shot.

01:36:17   Did that work, by the way, for you without rebooting the computer?

01:36:21   Did the backup and restore work without rest-- yeah.

01:36:24   Yeah. And you're on Catalina, right? Because you're on the Orion Pro, I assume?

01:36:27   Yeah, yeah. I mean, it took forever, but yeah, and the progress was just like a tiny pie circle

01:36:32   next to the device in the sidebar. Yeah, I've been doing that recently.

01:36:36   I had to send out Adam's iPad for repair, and so I backed it up to my computer,

01:36:41   because Minecraft data is not backed up to iCloud, and so that's basically

01:36:46   the primary application of this device. So that's with my computer.

01:36:51   Temporarily, it restored it onto my iPad, which I had backed up to my computer first,

01:36:55   and then he used that for a week while I waited for his to get shipped out and come back

01:37:00   and then do the whole thing in reverse, so two more restores, and every time

01:37:05   I had to do this, I would plug in the iPad and look at Finder, and it doesn't show up at all.

01:37:10   And at first I'm like, am I doing something wrong? Did I miss the permission dialog somewhere?

01:37:15   And eventually I would search, and I found this Apple support document that says,

01:37:20   "If it doesn't appear, reboot both devices." And sure enough, that did it every time.

01:37:25   Great, software quality, here we are. I did have that problem.

01:37:30   I plugged in my new phone, and I'm like, this is the first time I'm doing it in the Finder.

01:37:33   Actually, I think it happened with both. I plugged in my phone when I was doing the original

01:37:38   iTunes backup. I keep saying iTunes. The Finder backup of my old phone. I plugged it in,

01:37:43   and I'm like, so this is supposed to be in the Finder, right? So I go in the Finder, and I'm like, oh, I guess I have to make a window with a sidebar.

01:37:48   So I do. I'm like, it's supposed to be in the sidebar, right? And I look in the sidebar, and it's not there.

01:37:53   I plug in my own phone. Nothing happens. But having done that giant saga of hardware debugging with my computer before,

01:37:58   I just jump immediately. I plugged it in, and plugged it like two times until I immediately jumped to,

01:38:03   no, plug it directly into the computer. That's always the solution with USB.

01:38:08   Do not pass Go. Do not use a hub. Do not plug it into your monitor. So I went over to my actual computer,

01:38:13   unplugged my podcast microphone USB that I'm talking through right now,

01:38:18   and plugged the phone with an Apple cable directly into the back of my computer. And wouldn't you know it? It showed up in the sidebar.

01:38:23   So the next time you have this problem, I suggest if you're not already doing it,

01:38:28   connect it directly to your computer. Bad news. I was already doing it with an Apple cable directly to

01:38:33   a USB-C port on the back of my iMac Pro. Oh, USB-C. Maybe that was the problem. I did USB-A.

01:38:38   That's why yours took forever, because that's USB 2. Yeah. I don't have,

01:38:43   I should have thought of that. I should have thought of that. I couldn't have, because I didn't have the phone yet.

01:38:48   So I didn't have the lightning to USB-C cable yet to do the backup of the original phone.

01:38:53   When I went to restore onto my new phone, that's when I should have done it, and that was a mistake.

01:38:58   Yeah. For anybody who doesn't know, the USB-C cables that Apple supplies are USB 3.

01:39:03   The USB-A lightning cables are USB 2. Yeah. And for anyone who doesn't know on their

01:39:08   monitor, USB 2.0. Actually, no, wait. I have display screen compression now. They should be up to three

01:39:13   speeds. I should test that one time. See many past episodes about this detail.

01:39:18   It's weird. But when I plugged in the new phone, I had to do the thing where it like, make this phone trust this computer,

01:39:23   and even that was a little fidgety, because it's one of those things where if a prompt appears and you

01:39:28   miss it, or it doesn't appear, like, how do I make that prompt come back to let me do the thing, right?

01:39:33   But eventually I got it to work. All that is to say, restoring the iTunes/Finder

01:39:38   restore of my encrypted backup did not improve my two-factor situation.

01:39:43   And many of the two-factor things, like, there are levels of orneriness. Sometimes it's like, well, we won't

01:39:48   cloud sync, but if you do an encrypted backup, you get the thing back. Sometimes, like the Google one, we will give you some

01:39:53   apparently random assortment of your two-factor, but like, not nearly like a fifth of them, right?

01:39:58   Some of them won't give you anything, or will, you know,

01:40:03   or will seemingly give you everything, but when you try to use one, it'll be like, well, you need to do this extra step

01:40:08   or this extra authentication thing and send you back to the website. My worst one was like, it was a work thing,

01:40:13   and it was like, yeah, we remember that you had this two-factor thing, but the actual message

01:40:18   was your work has a policy set that you're not allowed to set this up on a new device without actually talking to

01:40:23   a human or whatever, so, you know, whatever. Work bureaucracy.

01:40:28   Eventually, it seemed like it took a full day. A full day from, hey, my phone is here, to

01:40:33   now my phone actually has all the apps on it, including all my two-factor stuff, and they all actually work.

01:40:38   And it was a fraught day, because if you've ever messed with two-factor stuff, you're like, please don't let me get locked out.

01:40:43   And every time you disable and re-enable a two-factor, by the way, most websites give you an entirely

01:40:48   new set of backup codes, and I'm assuming they invalidate the old ones, so I was printing out backup codes

01:40:53   like crazy, right? And then trying to organize them, and it's just... You print them out?

01:40:58   That's what you're supposed to do. I don't want, they're not, I don't store them on the computer. The whole point is they're not on the computer.

01:41:03   If you break into my computer, I don't want you to, here's a single key that can get you into all, you know,

01:41:08   for each one of my accounts, here's a thing that you need, a single factor that will get you in, because that's the point. The backup code is like,

01:41:13   if you lose your phone and you don't have the two-factor, I don't even cut them or copy them or paste them.

01:41:18   It's like, print only. I print, and then, like, just, you know, because they usually give you a screen that says print this screen.

01:41:23   I don't even save it as a PDF. I just literally print it, and it goes down into a piece of paper, and then you have to organize the paper.

01:41:28   It's a whole physical organizing mess.

01:41:31   Do you tape the pieces of paper to the bottom of your keyboard?

01:41:34   Yeah, I stick them on my monitor.

01:41:36   No. The pieces of paper are kept in a physical secure location. They will not be disclosed.

01:41:41   But, yeah, so anyway, a whole day of setting up my phone, and then I got to experience all the stuff that I described about the cases and everything.

01:41:49   I tried out the camera a little bit. I don't have enough experience with it to say anything other than it is way better than a 10S camera, but you know, you already knew that.

01:41:57   No big surprises there.

01:41:59   We were sponsored this week by Backblaze. Unlimited cloud backup for your Macs and PCs for just $6 a month.

01:42:08   I love Backblaze. I mean, first of all, I love the idea of cloud backup.

01:42:14   This eliminates so many risks and hazards that could happen to your data if it's only in your house or your office.

01:42:20   But Backblaze and cloud backup services in general save you from yourself and save you from a whole bunch of possible threats.

01:42:27   Things like fires, floods, data loss, theft, all sorts of stuff that could happen to every copy of your data if it's only in your house or your building.

01:42:35   And among all the cloud backups I've tried, believe me, Backblaze is the best. It's not even close. It is by far the best.

01:42:43   So here's the thing. You can backup your entire Mac or PC for $6 a month and any external drives that are connected to it.

01:42:52   Unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited speed. It's that simple.

01:42:57   When you want to restore files, you can just restore like one file.

01:43:01   So for instance, if you're on vacation somewhere and you left a file on your home computer, you can do a one file restore right in their app on your phone or on their website.

01:43:10   Or if you have a big data loss, you can do a restore, of course, on their website. You can make a giant zip file and they have a downloader to help you download it quickly.

01:43:17   Or you can have them ship you a hard drive. They will overnight you a hard drive with your data on it.

01:43:22   And then after you're done, you can return the drive and they'll refund the cost of the drive to you.

01:43:27   So it's a wonderful service. Backblaze recently saved our butts. I talked about on this show how Tiff's laptop basically totally died at a time when I had no time machine backup for it.

01:43:38   So we would have been totally hosed, but Backblaze saved our butts. And as the CTO of the family, Backblaze saved my butt, let's be honest.

01:43:47   It saved us because it had a copy of everything. And so we got the laptop fixed, we got it back from Apple, of course it's wiped.

01:43:53   And we were able to download everything from Backblaze, do a full restore, 200 gigs of data restored from Backblaze.

01:44:00   I love Backblaze. Check it out today. It saved our butts. Maybe someday it will save your butt.

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01:44:21   Thank you so much to Backblaze for sponsoring our show.

01:44:23   A piece of real time follow up, I was digging around on the Verizon coverage map.

01:44:32   And interestingly, their nationwide 5G seems to stop at the Connecticut state line.

01:44:39   So it's all in Marco's neck of the woods and then the rich people section of Connecticut, so like Greenwich and Stanford and that area, you know, all the New Yorkers effectively.

01:44:49   And then that's about it. And it appears that it is nowhere even vaguely close to you, John.

01:44:55   There is some, there is some ultra wide band relatively close to you. And I don't want to disclose anything.

01:45:00   In the city, I think there's an actual Boston proper. I think there's a couple of streets that have it, right?

01:45:05   Where's Alston? Because in North Brighton, those are areas that have a fair bit of ultra wide band, actually.

01:45:11   That's kind of surprising. But yeah, it'll take a while to roll out. Honestly, I just, I just want a better signal at my house. I don't care what the speeds are.

01:45:17   Well, you know, it's funny you bring that up. And you know, I'm looking at some of the Virginia coverage in Verizon's coverage map, which I think I complained about this last week.

01:45:27   Verizon's coverage map is excellent in terms of functionality. AT&T is such an utter disaster, it drives me nuts.

01:45:33   However, I will say that there is a large swath of semi no man's land that is on the West Virginia-Virginia border.

01:45:40   There's like probably a couple hundred square mile area that is just completely barren on Verizon. Like, nope, sorry, no service.

01:45:48   Not even just a teeny bit, just none. Nope, you don't need it.

01:45:51   Which is somewhat enlightening because this is the moment in which I was going to start, oh, I am jumping ahead. No, I'm not jumping ahead.

01:45:57   Even if I am, I don't care. I was going to complain about AT&T because, unbeknownst to me, my AT&T plan, which is, I don't know, I think we jumped onto this plan like three or four years ago now.

01:46:09   It's one of the data rollover plans. We get something like 15 or 30 gigs a month, of which we never use that much, and then the data rolls over between months.

01:46:18   So, you know, if I use, I think I call it 30 gigs, if I use 10, then the next month I'll have 50 gigs because I have the 30 from that month and the 20 from the month prior.

01:46:28   And it only rolls over for a month. It's actually a really nice setup. I have, you know, hotspot tethering, whatever you want to call it.

01:46:34   And it works out pretty well. I've been pretty pleased with it, actually. But I go to look around at AT&T's god-awful coverage map to try to figure out if there's 5G anywhere near me and there's really not.

01:46:45   And then I was in a different section of Virginia where I thought there was 5G nearby, and so I start trying to look into this.

01:46:51   And then I come to figure out that as I'm looking in the settings and, like, setting cellular and then I think cellular data or something like that, there's no mention of 5G.

01:47:00   I thought, huh, that's funny. So I started poking about and asking people, I think mostly on the RealLife Slack, and I was told that A, you may or may not see that on an AT&T plan, like the whole, you know, use 5G always, use 5G sometimes, etc.

01:47:15   And B, by the way, if you're not on one of AT&T's quote-unquote "unlimited plans," you don't get 5G in the first place.

01:47:22   That's fantastic.

01:47:25   Wonderful.

01:47:26   That's such an AT&T thing.

01:47:28   It's such an AT&T thing.

01:47:30   So, great.

01:47:31   I would have really loved to have known this up front because I very well may have just bought this phone, like, with a Verizon SIM in it straight away.

01:47:40   Because at this point I'm starting to wonder, well, should I just switch to Verizon?

01:47:44   And up until the moment where I started looking at this vast swath of no coverage in Virginia, I was going to tell you I am absolutely without a shadow of a doubt planning on switching.

01:47:52   Now I'm slightly less convinced. But nevertheless, I go digging into this and wondering, okay, well, you know, can I get a reasonably comparable 5G compatible plan on AT&T?

01:48:03   And I can, but it's like 10 bucks more a month, which in the grand scheme of things is like effectively nothing.

01:48:09   But it's frustrating, right?

01:48:11   Like, I don't want to change my plan just for this arbitrary thing that actually isn't even near me anyway on AT&T anyhow.

01:48:17   I mean, you could get like two and a half additional boxes of macaroni and cheese each month for that.

01:48:21   Right, exactly. Think about how much bigger my waistline would be if I didn't have to do that.

01:48:27   So anyway, I'm just in principle, I'm really annoyed.

01:48:32   And so of course, what do you do when you're really annoyed by something and you want to get a corporation to pay attention to you, gentlemen?

01:48:38   Oh, no, you complain on Twitter.

01:48:40   Oh, absolutely, I complained on Twitter.

01:48:42   So they do the whole DM us and we'll be happy to talk to you.

01:48:47   And then I said a very nice person, I don't remember what their name was, but a very nice person gets me on like a chat on the computer, which actually worked out very nicely.

01:48:55   And I said, I don't remember the exact numbers, but it's something along the lines of I pay $130 a month all in taxes ever, et cetera.

01:49:03   Maybe it's 140, doesn't matter. Call it $140 a month taxes all in, you know, Aaron and me, my watch, et cetera.

01:49:08   But you just said $10 matters.

01:49:10   Well, it's the principle.

01:49:14   Touche, sir. You're ruining my story. You're ruining my story, but you're not wrong.

01:49:18   So anyways, so I say, oh, you pay $140 a month.

01:49:23   I would like to have 5G service, but I do not want to pay, you know, even more.

01:49:28   And typically, like, for example, with Verizon FiOS, this is the moment where they say, oh, as it turns out, we have this special deal just for you and it's half as much as we claimed it was.

01:49:36   You know what I mean?

01:49:38   And they basically said, well, for $160 a month, you can do this.

01:49:42   For $170 a month, you can do that. And for $190 a month, you can do this.

01:49:46   What? I told you I want to pay less than $140 a month.

01:49:51   I wasn't aware that modern cell phone plans were negotiable, like used car deals.

01:49:55   Well, as it turns out.

01:49:57   Is this actually a thing?

01:49:58   If you have, if you have like Cable Town, I guess Verizon, not Cable Town, but these companies do everything now.

01:50:04   So yeah, Casey's right to think like when you talk to Verizon about your FiOS and say you're thinking of changing to Comcast, they will try to give you a better deal.

01:50:11   Maybe it works that way with cell phone plans. I don't know. I did.

01:50:14   Yeah, I knew that about like cable companies, but I didn't know that this was a thing we could do with our cell phone plans.

01:50:18   But it's the same company. Like, like if it's Verizon, it's the same company.

01:50:21   And AT&T also provides television as well. So I just only the television part of AT&T negotiate.

01:50:26   But either way, when I was on the phone with the nice person from Verizon who was very patient with me,

01:50:31   during the many bouts of downtime as we waited for a computer to do things, I did actually ask, hey, and by the way,

01:50:37   do I have to do anything to get 5G or is that part of what I already pay for?

01:50:42   And he looked and said, you get 5G, whatever it is you're paying for now, there's no increase in price.

01:50:47   You just get 5G. So that was nice to hear.

01:50:49   Of course, I'm waiting for the bill to come with my quote unquote activation fee.

01:50:52   I didn't ask about that because I'm just already resigned to eating it.

01:50:55   But I honestly have no idea if it will ever appear.

01:50:57   Yeah, that's fair. So anyway, so I talked to this AT&T person and I was like, OK, no, really, like,

01:51:03   I'm going to go to Verizon if you guys can't make a deal for me.

01:51:07   And they were basically like, tough nuggies, have fun. And so, OK.

01:51:12   And so I started digging in on Verizon. Nobody really cares about the particulars of what I found.

01:51:16   Other than to say that if you are also a Verizon Fios user, you can get a sum total of $20 a month off

01:51:25   between the two of them. They'll give you, you have to like sign up for something in the sense that you have to tell them

01:51:30   like, hey, this Verizon wireless account and this Fios account, which are at the same friggin address, but whatever.

01:51:36   Oh, we would like the discount, please. And then you can get $10 off Fios and $10 off your wireless account,

01:51:43   which is 20 bucks off in total, which was something I was not aware of.

01:51:46   And I don't think that's a temporary thing, but check my math on that.

01:51:50   So anyway, I came to find out that, of course, you know, AT&T is trying to bundle like HBO, whatever,

01:51:56   whatever, whatever, because it's free for them and for all intents and purposes.

01:52:00   Interestingly, though, some of the plans on Verizon bundle Disney Plus and/or Apple Music,

01:52:07   which I was not aware of. Maybe this is old news to everyone else, but I did not know that.

01:52:11   And so if you consider the fact that we are Disney Plus subscribers and, you know, some of the discounts for Fios

01:52:18   and so on and so forth, it is actually a little bit cheaper for us to switch to Verizon and get, you know,

01:52:24   fancy 5G service. And I think I mentioned last episode I might have that there's a park that in the before times

01:52:31   I would sometimes like to go and do work in that actually seems to be covered by their ultra wideband,

01:52:36   which would be super cool. So I'm not, having seen this coverage map, I'm now a little bit worried,

01:52:41   which is funny because, you know, when I switched from Verizon to AT&T in '08, AT&T was nowhere and Verizon was everywhere.

01:52:48   Now it almost seems like it might be the reverse. But anyways, I'm probably still going to switch to Verizon

01:52:54   for the family in no small part to save a little bit of money each month. But it's so frustrating how not transparent

01:53:03   this stuff is. And I wish, to some degree, I wish Apple had said, hey, you know, if you're an old AT&T user,

01:53:10   which they should somehow know about me, I would think, you know, just FYI, this ain't going to work with 5G unless

01:53:16   you switch your plan. And oh, by the way, the plans are kind of crummier in some ways and better in others.

01:53:21   I don't know. It's just, I feel like this whole experience for now, both Jon and me have been really not as,

01:53:28   as slick and easy as they have been in the past, which really, really kind of bums me out. And granted, I mean,

01:53:34   this is the first worldiest of first world problems, but I don't know. I wish, I wish this wasn't the case.

01:53:39   And I wish we weren't getting nickel and dimed about everything.

01:53:42   I should have given context, though. I have had to call the carrier for most of my iPhones.

01:53:47   Like it's, I don't know if I did last year, but yes, I don't know if it's because I have bad signal on my house

01:53:53   or I just don't know how to activate a new phone. Sometimes it's worked perfectly. I bought it, like I said,

01:53:57   I think of this 10S. I ordered it with my old phone. I said to replace the new phone. It came, it took out of the box,

01:54:03   and I was off to the races, right? This time I had to call the, calling the carrier. I don't know what explains that.

01:54:08   Who can say, right? But I don't blame Apple for that because Apple has no control over that. They're not the carrier.

01:54:13   And for me, all of the pain of my setup process was crap that has nothing to do with iOS or Apple.

01:54:20   It's two factor stuff, right? And I, maybe...

01:54:22   Well, but you made that bed yourself because...

01:54:24   Right, that's what I'm saying. Like I have obviously gotten two factor religion and enabled two factor on every single account I have,

01:54:32   which I think is good and people should do, but I just didn't, I didn't understand the repercussions for that.

01:54:37   Visceral, intellectually I understood them all. Because like I said, last phone I had to reset up my two factor too,

01:54:43   but I think I had two factor on like five accounts when I got my 10S. Now I have two factor on like every account.

01:54:48   And so it is a problem. I don't know if I'm going to do anything about it. I'm not going to go to, like I said,

01:54:54   Cloud Sync or Authy or whatever. But honestly, I don't blame the phone or the product or Apple or even Verizon for that

01:55:00   because that's just a thing that I did. I feel like, though, if like, if I'm ahead of the curve and if

01:55:06   best practice will eventually be for everyone to have two factor, then we need better solutions.

01:55:11   Because I cannot imagine like a non tech nerd tolerating what I went through.

01:55:17   I don't think a non tech word will even tolerate, will even tolerate someone doing it for them.

01:55:21   Because they'd be like, when do I get to use my phone? I'd be like, you get to use your phone eight hours from now.

01:55:25   Just give me some space. Right. By the way, I might accidentally lock you out of all your online things and lose everything

01:55:31   because this is a very fraught process. And I really hope you still have your old phone with all this stuff in it.

01:55:36   Right. Now, maybe the solution to that is, you know, sign in with Apple type things or face ID and touch ID on the web,

01:55:44   which is a cool thing that Apple has. They have a bunch of videos on it from WBC you can check out where if you have a website

01:55:51   that you want people to be able to sign into your website using face ID or touch ID, they can do that,

01:55:56   which is super convenient and that, you know, biometrics have their own limits because obviously you can't change your face

01:56:01   or your fingerprints easily, but you can get a new two factor thing. So all this is very fraught.

01:56:05   But if we want people's security to increase, it's almost like there needs to be a first party solution for two factor.

01:56:11   But even that won't solve the problem because, you know, if Apple comes up with a first party thing for two factor that is like on device

01:56:18   and, you know, does the finder backups and does all that stuff. That doesn't help me with my work stuff or my semi work stuff

01:56:24   or like other people's random servers where they require their specific two factor app. I'm being cagey about what these specific ones are

01:56:30   because it's all part of the security thing, you know, OPSEC, whatever as Merlin would say.

01:56:34   But this is one of the solutions where one of the situations where you can't just come in with one unified solution

01:56:40   because the whole problem is that it's fragmented. Right. And that you have to deal with multiple different security protocols.

01:56:48   And I think I'm overkill. I think I have too many accounts. I disabled two factor on some of my less essential things about a year ago.

01:56:56   And I'm glad I did, because I noticed those two factor things still on my old phone. But then I realized when testing them.

01:57:03   Oh, I must have disabled two factor because I don't need to use it anymore. Like for sort of non essential, no personal information, not connected to anything type of things.

01:57:10   And that I think is going to be my policy going forward. Only enable two factor if you care if anyone breaks into it.

01:57:16   But if it's just some random website that you tried once, don't reflexively enable two factor because you're just going to cause yourself work later.

01:57:22   I don't think we have time for Ask ATP, do we? No, but I want to do this MagSafe thing because I think a lot of people are talking about this.

01:57:28   I think it'll be relatively quick. It's just an interesting an interesting quirk.

01:57:32   Right. So you may have seen some stories going around the web about the new Apple's MagSafe charging puck, which will charge your new iPhone at 15 watts.

01:57:43   If you buy the puck, as I did, it comes as a little puck with a wire attached to it, which is kind of a shame that the wire is attached because if you screw up the wire, you can't just replace it because it's like physically attached on one end.

01:57:53   But anyway, there's a puck and then a wire and then a USB C connector.

01:57:57   And Apple says if you take that USB C connector and plug it into their new small 20 watt thing, which is not as small as their old five watt, but it's not super big either.

01:58:06   It's just a plug with a little USB thing, USB C connector on the bottom. If you use that to plug it in, you can charge your phone at 15 watts, which is faster than the old 7.5 watts that the old phones used to charge on QI charging.

01:58:18   And people have been testing this puck and they're saying, all right, well, I've got the puck, but I don't have the little Apple 20 watt thing, but I'll just plug it into the other USB C power adapter thing that I have.

01:58:27   And then they were measuring the power and saying, huh, if I plug it into this other little brick, it's not charging at 15 watts. I'm getting less. I'm getting 7.5 or I'm getting five watts or whatever.

01:58:38   I don't know what it is. Let me try a bigger adapter. Let me try like a 60 watt MacBook adapter. Huh, still not getting 15 watts. Let me try a 96 watt adapter. Still not getting 15 watts.

01:58:50   And then they try the Apple 20 watt adapter and it gets 15 watts to the phone. It's like, well, wait a second. What the heck is going on here?

01:58:59   Why can an ostensibly more powerful charging brick not get 15 watts to go into my phone?

01:59:06   But the Apple 20 watt one does. And Apple used to sell a brick that looked the same as the 20 watt, but it's actually 18 watts. That one also can't put 15 watts into the phone.

01:59:15   So we'll link to the MacRumors posts about this and be like, oh, it's some proprietary thing. You need the special Apple one or it's a negotiation protocol because the puck senses the temperature of your phone and adjust the output.

01:59:27   But the other ones don't. So it goes down to lower power. It's a very strange situation.

01:59:33   If you don't care about the details and you just want to be sure, absolutely sure that you'll be able to charge your phone wirelessly at 15 watts, get the Apple adapter.

01:59:42   They actually reduce the price for once. It's only 20 bucks or whatever. And that'll work for you.

01:59:47   But we'll also put a link to Alvin Lim's video on YouTube where he does a bunch of testing with a bunch of other comically large USB C power bricks and a whole bunch of them that are not Apple's 20 watt adapter have absolutely no problem putting 15 watts or more into a phone.

02:00:04   Now, there is obviously some adjustment of power going on. Supposedly it's temperature related. It's hard to confirm that without knowing the mechanism.

02:00:14   But experimentally, phone gets hot, power goes down. You can see that happening in the video because he's got an IR camera on the back of the phone and seeing when it gets hot, the power goes down.

02:00:23   But he demonstrates a whole bunch of adapters, including Apple's, pumping more than 15 watts into the back of a phone or at least more than 15 watts over the wire, whether it actually gets into the phone, obviously, is going through the Qi charging thing and losses for heat and all that other stuff.

02:00:38   But this is a weird situation where your intuition about what might work and what might not, for example, let me just use the giant power brick that came with my MacBook Pro. Surely that will be able to drive my puck. It won't.

02:00:51   But I think the more interesting part of this story, until we figure out what the whole deal is here and there, a bunch of very prosaic explanations that aren't very exciting, but the more interesting part of the story is if you are not a tech nerd and did not see this Mac rumor story and did not see it flying around Twitter and just plugged your Apple puck in to your phone and you weren't getting 15 watts, I'm not sure how many people would notice.

02:01:16   Because if you want your phone to charge fast, plug it in with a lightning port. We all know that, right? Wireless charging is slower. You get more losses to heat, right?

02:01:25   So is someone trying to charge their phone in a hurry with the wireless puck and being disappointed that it's not faster? If you're in a hurry, you plug it in.

02:01:35   But if you're just putting it on your nightstand overnight or wherever you charge it, you don't care that it's charging at 7.5 watts because you're using the 18 watt adapter or because you're using a 96 watt powerbook adapter but it's charging your phone at 7 watts.

02:01:49   You don't care because when you wake up in the morning, it's charged. And slower charging in general is better for your battery health. So I do wonder how much of an issue this actually is versus tech nerds flipping out about it.

02:02:00   The more prosaic explanation is that it is a precise combination of volts and amps that is detected by the device to decide that it can charge at the higher rate.

02:02:09   And if you don't exactly match those values, it won't do it. We will put a link in the show notes to the Wikipedia page on USB power delivery and you can see this big chart of volts and amps and the various combinations that are valid.

02:02:22   But of course Apple has their own thing going on. Marco did a bunch of research on the exact power delivery capabilities of a bunch of Apple's adapters.

02:02:33   And you can correct me if I'm wrong Marco, but do any of them exactly match the 9 volts at 2.2 amps that the 20 watt adapter uses?

02:02:42   No, they are higher. The big bricks for the laptops will do 9 volts at 3 amps, which is more than what this needs. Most of the time when things specify a certain amperage output, usually you can draw less and it just works. It's fine.

02:03:02   I don't know the specifics of the USB PD spec to know whether that's okay here, but I have to imagine that that's not the reason.

02:03:09   If you look at Al Lim's video with his measurements to 6 decimal points or whatever this little device he's using, which who knows how accurate the device is, but you can see wide variances as the power draw fluctuates no matter what adapter he's using.

02:03:23   He uses the Apple one, uses a non-Apple one, uses 20 watt, 18 watt. The volts and amps are all over the place. The USB CPD power delivery spec thing has a bunch of specific values that you're supposed to target.

02:03:39   This many volts or this many amps from this power device, so on and so forth. But obviously the actual draw from any given device at any given time varies based on the load the device is putting on it.

02:03:49   I would like to see iFixit tear one of these apart to see what kind of smarts are in the puck. We've heard reports of the temperature sensing, experimental evidence shows that happening.

02:03:59   How does that work? Is that entirely hardware side on the puck? Is there some kind of data communication? Surely not, but who knows because nothing will surprise me after seeing the tiny iOS computer with an H.264 decoder chip in Apple's HDMI to whatever was lightning connector.

02:04:16   It's like a tiny computer that would boot up every time you plugged it in and run a little version of, I think it was iOS, I forget, run a tiny little operating system and pipe your video through a hardware H.264 decoder and that was in an adapter.

02:04:29   Something that you would think is passive. I'm not willing to speculate on what is inside this puck, but iFixit will surely tear it apart and let us know.

02:04:37   But all this is to say is if you really really really want that full 15 watts, just buy the Apple 20 watt adapter. It's a little bit bulky for what it gives you.

02:04:47   I don't like that it's bulky and that it blocks other outlets if you have it in an outlet strip that's oriented a certain way.

02:04:55   But it's a fine product, it's 20 bucks, if you just want to be sure you're getting the maximum then fine.

02:05:00   But I would instead recommend that you don't worry about how fast your thing is charging, it's better to charge more slowly. If you're in a hurry, use a cable connected to a powerful adapter.

02:05:09   But if you're not, just accept whatever your wireless thing is giving you. I didn't even mention the wireless thing. I have the puck.

02:05:16   As you can gather from me telling you that I always want to put my phone down gingerly on surfaces, I did not like the idea of a metal thing magnetically snapping against the bottom of my nice phone.

02:05:28   I know the back is glass and the metal is smooth and flat and I'm sure it will be fine. And it's a story that we'll talk about probably next week about chargers leaving circular imprints on cases and everything.

02:05:38   But I just didn't want that puck connecting to the naked back of my phone.

02:05:44   And then once I got the case, I'm like, you know what, I don't want that case connecting to the back. I don't want that puck connecting to the back of my case either.

02:05:52   So I'm just going to continue to plug my phone in. But I did find a very good use for that puck, which is in my little nightstand charging setup.

02:06:00   I never had a good, I had a place to plug in my AirPod case, but it was always annoying because the case is so small and I didn't want to plug it in.

02:06:08   But now I just, I chuck my AirPods in that. So now that very expensive $40 Apple charging puck.

02:06:14   It is my designated AirPod charger and the AirPods fit on it perfectly and the magnets in it actually even kind of make the AirPods like a line a certain way.

02:06:22   So that's what I'm doing with that.

02:06:24   Now just to be clear, there is an iFixit teardown for the MagSafe charger. Is that what you were referring to or were you referring to the puck, the brick?

02:06:33   The puck. I wanted to know if there's anything inside the puck, any electronics in there?

02:06:37   Okay, that I'm not sure about. I haven't clicked through to figure that out.

02:06:41   More next week if it's interesting. If not, just assume there's nothing interesting in there.

02:06:45   Go team.

02:06:46   Alright, thank you to our sponsors this week, Backblaze and FlatFile. And thank you to our members who pay us directly for supporting the show.

02:06:54   You can join at ATP.FM/join. Keep an eye out for our merchandise sale starting in a few days.

02:07:00   And please, once again everybody, please, please vote. Thank you and we'll talk to you hopefully next week.

02:07:08   Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin. Cause it was accidental. Oh it was accidental.

02:07:20   John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause it was accidental. Oh it was accidental.

02:07:31   And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM. And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.

02:07:45   That's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T Marco Armin S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-S-A. It's accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental.

02:08:05   Tech podcast so long. I actually, I didn't want to interrupt you guys during your iPhone reviews, but I actually did go to an Apple store in the meantime.

02:08:18   And I actually got to play with all these phones and handle them and see them in person. I don't have much to say it cause I was in there for 10 minutes.

02:08:28   But I happened to, I was doing, as part of my new life here, I have to periodically go back to civilization and get like an allergy shot or get my dog serviced or whatever.

02:08:43   And so I was, I happened to be walking past an Apple store on iPhone day, like right as they opened up. And because they're, you know, because we are in the time that we are in, there's almost nobody there.

02:08:58   And I didn't have any kind of reservation or anything cause you know, I don't have anything to order yet.

02:09:03   But I figured, let me go, if now that I'm here and there's no one in there, let me see if I can just go in and see the colors in person. Cause I was concerned about what color I would get.

02:09:14   The red didn't look very red and all the review videos and everything. So I, they let me in like, because I wasn't looking to buy a phone.

02:09:22   I basically walked right in. Like I asked the, you know, the people who were doing crowd control, you know, for the little tiny bit there was, you know, Oh, you walked on this lane, then you walk through this lane and Oh, you don't, you don't, you're not looking for a phone.

02:09:34   I'm like, yeah, I just, I wanted to buy some magsafe pucks. Let me, let me get a couple of magsafe pucks. Like, okay, sure. They walk right in.

02:09:39   So I'm, I get my magsafe pucks and I'm like, Hey, you know, while I'm here, you mind if I look at the iPhone table and, and you know, just look at the colors and everything.

02:09:46   And of course the person was very friendly. Yeah, sure. Of course. And, uh, I gotta say, I think I'm still going red.

02:09:54   Even though it is definitely very like salmon-y or slash coral color in person. And I, I really don't care much for the color of the back of it, but I love the color of the sides.

02:10:09   And when I looked at every other option, including the pro colors, frankly, I, I didn't think the pros looked that nice because it was just immediately was covered in fingerprints on that sideband.

02:10:23   And how much are the fingerprints a big problem for you so far in, in practice, I've seen a lot of complaints about the fingerprints and I've seen the sort of, you know, horror shot photos of like the gold one with a million fingerprints. Right.

02:10:36   But, you know, anything that shiny is going to be like that.

02:10:41   And it doesn't, it doesn't bother me because the whole point is like, it's stainless steel. Like, you know, any, any kind of polished stainless steel, anything that you have.

02:10:51   Yes, it will have fingerprints on it. But yes, you also know that they will rub out really easily because it's stainless steel. It is a very smooth surface.

02:10:58   So in my experience, I guess they got fingerprints all over it, but I never noticed like it's not unless you're actually, it's kind of like if you're, if you're taking shots, like say you're trying to say, I was trying to do a review, like a product review, or even just make a YouTube video.

02:11:13   That is the worst case scenario. So it doesn't, it kind of doesn't surprise me that reviewers are freaking out about the fingerprints because when you try to take the glamour shot of your phone for your, you know, for your review in the verge or for your YouTube video or whatever.

02:11:26   You don't want the fingerprints on it. So you're constantly polishing them off, but Oh, I touched it to polish it off and it's a pain. But in real life, I just, I mean, me personally, I never even noticed that they exist.

02:11:38   I know they're there, but I mostly was enjoying when it was a naked phone, the feel of the stainless steel, the slight rounded over edge, the fact that it was like sometimes cool, that it was very smooth, that it was very hard and that it was shiny.

02:11:53   And did it have fingerprints all over it? Sure. I mean, maybe the graph I want hides a little bit more than perhaps the gold or the pure silver, but it wasn't a big issue for me. I can understand if you're looking at them to just look at aesthetics, especially with other people's fingerprints, it could freak you out a little bit, but I don't know how much of an issue it's going to be for people using the phone as a phone.

02:12:14   Yeah, I agree. I haven't really noticed the fingerprints at all. Not to say they're not there. They're definitely there, but I don't really notice. And actually, I apologize, Marco, for interrupting your review here. But John, that made me think of, again, I believe it was on upgrade that they were talking about particularly Jason, that he really didn't like the graphite.

02:12:32   Now, I've not seen it in person, but as someone who I think you've pretty much always had black phones, right? So how do you like it in comparison to like space grays of years past?

02:12:41   Like I said, I would prefer that it actually be black on the back and pure silver on the sides. But yeah, it's gray. I've heard people say it's like the most boring gray. I think it is equally as boring as every space gray. Like, I don't find like it's gray. I think it's a nice gray. It's got a little bit of character in my opinion.

02:13:02   Even the gray stainless steel, I was afraid that the graying of the stainless steel would take away from its shiny stainless steelness. I don't think it does. It does a little bit versus just pure silver stainless steel.

02:13:15   But I think it's still, I was surprised by how shiny, it's one of those things, you know, when you have something that's shiny and gray, depending on the photo, it can look very dull. But also you could be like, wait, is that gray or is that just pure silver stainless steel?

02:13:27   I was surprised at how stainless steel it looked and how happy I was with it. Not that I'm ever going to see that because it's going to be inside a case. But for me, it's a gray phone. It fulfills its job to be a gray boring phone. I'm never going to see it anyway. I would have preferred black and silver, but I have no regrets about choosing the one that I picked.

02:13:44   Things like the Pacific Blue, for me, I'd rather just be color neutral or be very bold, like the red or the blue of the non-pro. But graphite, I mean, it is what you expect. If you don't want a phone that is entirely gray, don't get this one.

02:14:00   Don't get the one that is entirely gray.

02:14:02   Yeah, there's no other character to it.

02:14:05   I saw the pros and I saw the regular 12s and I handled them both. And the pros, I thought, this is great for people who like blue because the blue is a nice new color and it's fun. None of the rest did anything for me. And it just felt no different than my 11. And I think the colors could use some work on the pros.

02:14:27   On the regular 12, I thought, again, the blue looks pretty nice. The red, I don't know, the red made me excited, even though I don't like the color of the back so much. The color of the sides and what it looks like when you are handling it. Because I almost never see the back color of my phone. Whereas I see the front of it all the time and the sides.

02:14:48   Wait a second. My impression from the photos is that the red of the 12 is different than the red of the 12 Pro, especially the back.

02:14:59   There is no red 12 Pro.

02:15:01   There is no? There's not a product red 12 Pro?

02:15:03   No.

02:15:04   Oh, alright. Well then never mind.

02:15:06   Yeah, the regular 12 has a pistachio green and a coraly red. And even the blue, white, and black are different from the blue, white, and black of the Pro line.

02:15:22   So anyway, the 12 I think looked way better and it also felt way better. Because not only do the colors, they're just better colors. They're more bold. And I think the polished, or rather I think the brushed metal aluminum edge, I think it looks better than the super polished stainless steel.

02:15:45   I know what they're going for with the polished stainless steel. In practice, I think the aluminum just looks and works and feels better.

02:15:52   And sure enough, as we expected and as some of the earlier reviews pointed out, the back glass finish being like a textured finish on the Pros and being a flat glass on the non-Pro 12s, the flat glass is easier to hold.

02:16:08   So overall, it just was much more pleasant in the hand to hold the 12 than the 12 Pro. And then finally, the 12 is noticeably lighter.

02:16:18   And so you pick up one side by side with the other and it's no contest. The 12 just feels better. So to me, it looks and feels better.

02:16:27   So I'm actually, I'm excited to get my mini. Like whenever that actually can happen, God knows when, but whenever that can happen, I'm going to be excited about it because I was, I picked up this phone and I, and honestly, I had most of, I think the same opinions as you about the size of it, which is, you know what, this is a bit big and it's a bit chunky.

02:16:47   And even though the straight sides look better, I think they felt slightly worse at that size for me, but I think at the smaller size of the mini, it'll be overall great.

02:17:01   So I'm expecting, I'm going to be right about this. I think the mini is going to be awesome. I think it's going to feel fantastic to use because it's going to be so much smaller and so much lighter, and it's going to have the better feeling back and the better feeling sides.

02:17:16   I bet we're going to see a lot of people going my way on this, going for the mini.

02:17:21   The original SE was too small for me. I don't want to go back to that size. But the new, the mini being bigger than that, if they ever make a mini pro with like all the pro features, but in the mini size, I might strongly consider that because I, like I said, when I got the 10S, the 7 was kind of my max size.

02:17:41   The 10S was bigger than that, and now the 12 is ever so slightly bigger still. So I would definitely consider that smaller size because I'm looking basically I'm looking for a replacement for my 7.

02:17:54   Make me a roughly 7ish size phone with edge to edge screen and face ID and all that other stuff, and I will check it out.

02:18:01   I think also for the first time in a long time, given the square sides and if Apple sticks with this for a while, for the first time in a long time, I would actually appreciate physically, if not in any other way, the phone's getting thinner.

02:18:15   Right? Because again, perception. This is actually thinner than my other phone, but it seems thicker. Right?

02:18:22   So if you could take the current 12 Pro and make it thinner, I think it would feel it would get more of that mini slash iPhone 5 feeling of having squared edges, but it's not such a big deal because the thing is thinner.

02:18:34   The glossy edges versus the matte back. The matte back is not good for grip, but I think the glossy edges are better for grip than the matte edges.

02:18:43   Not having felt the matte edges, but I appreciated the grippiness of the stainless steel. Both the squareness of having the squares kind of cut into your hands to give you that positive friction feeling, but also that it was grippy.

02:18:57   And then aesthetically and as a piece of sculpture, the increased weight of the 12 makes it feel more like a heavy expensive object of sculpture, object, or whatever, piece of jewelry.

02:19:14   None of which is good for being a phone, as I went through earlier, but it really does make it seem like, wow, like people saying it makes it feel expensive. It's the old trick of like, if it feels dense, if it feels heavy for its size, and it is very solid and it is also shiny, it feels expensive and it totally does.

02:19:30   But I fully agree having never picked one up with the 12 being lighter and being glossy on the back, that's got to be the better experience as a thing that you hold in your hand and use as a phone. It's just a shame about the cameras.

02:19:45   Yeah, and that's like, it's funny, like ever since I've made the decision to go mini, but I don't have it yet. Every time I use the telephoto camera now, I'm like, oh no, you're always 2x saying your goodbyes. Yeah, exactly.

02:20:00   I didn't do it last time of checking how many 2x do, but I think I use it like crazy. I should do run one of those scripts to grind over my things or do a search and see how many times I use the 2x. I think I might beat Marco 16%.

02:20:11   Don't you use iCloud Photo Library? Just do a search thing. Do the smart album thing.

02:20:15   What do you have to search for? I don't even know the search query.

02:20:18   You basically search for iPhone 11 6mm and that's it. If you search for lens name contains 6mm, that'll be it.

02:20:25   Alright, there should have been a follow up, but I skipped it. Lots of people were saying, oh, you can search by date in Apple Photos. I didn't want to go into all the stupid details, but the way it does it is infuriating. Because yes, you can do a search, and it's like a search result of your main photo view, but the second you click on anything else, it forgets that search ever exists.

02:20:46   The iPhone way to do it was you could persistently filter with a bunch of controls. The old iPhone used to have actual controls in the toolbars. Remember when Apple used to do that?

02:20:57   Instead of just having a giant, black, expansive grey, there would be actual toolbar items. Sometimes there was a second toolbar on the bottom with more buttons and things. Anyway, you could filter persistently.

02:21:08   The alternative is to manually create smart albums for each year, and that is so tedious. That's basically what I want. A quick, persistent filter so I can switch back and forth between albums and other things and filter by date.

02:21:23   I think the original iPhone had a calendar pop, and you could just pop up the calendar, click on the month and the year, and boom, you were filtered.

02:21:31   Now you can go to the text field and you can type it and you can hit return and you can click on the show all photos because it doesn't initially. And then, never change your view again because if you click on anything else in the sidebar, it forgets that search ever existed and that's why photos annoys me.

02:21:44   (beeping)

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