0:00:00I wanted to let the two of you know that I am sitting this episode out.
0:00:04Is the night pro out?
0:00:05No, no, God, holy crap, no. Don't even mess with my emotions like that, please.
0:00:10I made the mistake of starting but not finishing Merlin-style El Camino, which is the Breaking Bad Netflix movie.
0:00:18And I'm only about halfway through and I really want to finish it, so I'm just going to be quiet this one.
0:00:24I saw that the other day, too.
0:00:25Do I have to have seen Better Call Saul? Because I haven't.
0:00:28No, but you have to have seen Breaking Bad.
0:00:31Yeah, I've seen Breaking Bad. Not recently, like when it was out, I saw it.
0:00:34Same.
0:00:34You might want a refresher, because there's a lot of stuff in it that they don't really spend time explaining to you who this person is.
0:00:41You just have to kind of remember, so you might want to read a recap.
0:00:45So, not a joke. First of all, I have not seen Better Call Saul, and I've heard it's tremendous, but I have not seen it.
0:00:51Secondly, I also watched Breaking Bad most recently when it was ending, and I really wasn't sure how I was going to remember everything,
0:01:00because I can barely remember what I ate for dinner tonight.
0:01:02And what I thought to do, which seems so far to have worked out really well, is I went to Wikipedia.
0:01:07Don't laugh yet. I went to Wikipedia and went to Jesse Pinkman's Wikipedia page and read his character biography.
0:01:13And I feel like that reasonably caught me up.
0:01:16In the five minutes I spent to read this, it did a pretty good job of giving me the blow-by-blow and reminding me of all the things that he and Walt had gotten into.
0:01:26And so, I recommend doing that as a poor man's, a poor person's way of catching yourself up.
0:01:33Is this the movie that shows what happened to him afterwards, basically?
0:01:35Mm-hmm.
0:01:36Oh, okay.
0:01:37It's not a... I can't say I like it as much as I liked Breaking Bad.
0:01:42Although Breaking Bad... What a rollercoaster, man.
0:01:45Like, it was such a great show and I loved it, but it did not leave me feeling great most times.
0:01:51Oh, no, it was very heavy.
0:01:53It was like... It was such a just massively heavy show.
0:01:56Like, it was... Like, it was one of those things like, you know, I could... I really enjoyed it overall, but I could only watch like one or two episodes at a time.
0:02:03Like, it's like, "Alright, I'm done for the night. I need to watch something else."
0:02:06And then like, I think what happened was like, you know, in... Towards the end of 2016, the mood of the world took a negative turn.
0:02:16And ever since then, I haven't really been able to watch like heavy dark shows.
0:02:21I don't... I just don't enjoy... I don't want to feel more that way than, you know, we already do as a society.
0:02:28So, I just... I haven't been able to get back into shows like that yet.
0:02:31Yeah, I completely agree with you.
0:02:32Erin and I watched the first two or three seasons. I'm sure I've told the story before, but we watched the first two or three seasons together.
0:02:38And then at some point, she looked over at me after watching a particularly intense episode, which is hard to say because they're all intense.
0:02:47But we watched a particularly intense episode.
0:02:49She looked over at me and she just had this like kind of puzzled look on her face.
0:02:52I'm like, "Whoa, what's wrong?"
0:02:53And she said, "This doesn't make me happy. I don't think I'm going to watch this anymore."
0:02:57And that was that.
0:02:58And the funny thing about it was she was invested enough that she would ask me to give her like the extraordinarily quick summary of what happened as I continued to watch.
0:03:06But yeah, it is not a show that makes you happy, although it is definitely an unbelievable piece of filmmaking.
0:03:12And El Camino, which is the movie that they just released on Netflix a week or two ago, I definitely am enjoying it quite a bit.
0:03:21I'm definitely on the edge of my seat quite a bit.
0:03:23But I wouldn't say it's necessarily recaptured the magic 100%, but that's to be expected.
0:03:28Yeah, it's like a middle of the road, longer than usual episode of Breaking Bad, basically.
0:03:35It's definitely, it definitely didn't need to be a movie.
0:03:37You know, it's like an epilogue episode, but they had more time.
0:03:41So it kind of takes its time getting where it's going.
0:03:44Yeah, I don't know.
0:03:46I don't know if I could get back into that mindset.
0:03:48Like it was such a different time.
0:03:49Like it wasn't that long ago, but like it was a different time.
0:03:52Like things have changed a lot since then.
0:03:54What has Aaron Paul been up to?
0:03:55He was in that car or something.
0:03:57Was it Need for Speed?
0:03:58He was in some car racing movie that was actually surprisingly enjoyable.
0:04:02And then I haven't seen anything from him other than that.
0:04:06He's a great actor.
0:04:07I mean, I think one of the reasons why I kept, why I like stayed in that show as a watcher,
0:04:14even though it was awful, even at the time it was darker than I normally would have enjoyed.
0:04:18Because it was just so well made, it was so well written, and it was so well acted.
0:04:22Yeah.
0:04:23I completely agree with you, and I actually think it's very, very well filmed.
0:04:27I am not a good critic of these sorts of things.
0:04:29So for all I know, they're either using all the like rookie tricks in the book,
0:04:33or it's just saccharine that, you know, this is the sort of thing that an uneducated person would think is beautiful.
0:04:41But maybe, or maybe it's legitimately beautiful.
0:04:43I don't know. Maybe John can weigh in.
0:04:45But one way or another, I think it is a very pretty show.
0:04:48In the same way that like Top Gear, for all of the things that you could say that are terrible about Top Gear,
0:04:52most all of which are deserved, one thing I think you can't take away from it was how pretty it was.
0:04:58And Breaking Bad, and so far El Camino seems to be the same.
0:05:03Anyway, so I'm going to skip the rest of the episode. You guys have fun.
0:05:06John, tell me, if I had a TiVo, because I was clinging to 2002, how would I opt out of the pre-roll ads?
0:05:14It's not easy.
0:05:15I mean, the title of this article wants to make you think they're going to tell you how to opt out of TiVo pre-roll ads.
0:05:23But if you read the article, it's like, "Oh, none of these things sound like things I really want to do."
0:05:28I mean, the only one that makes some amount of sense is downgrading to the old version of their little OS,
0:05:34because the old version will not be getting pre-roll ads.
0:05:37So if you get involuntarily upgraded like I did, it is possible to roll back to the old version.
0:05:44If you don't mind losing all of your recordings. Which kind of sucks.
0:05:48And that's the best option. Another option is you can call them and beg, and apparently if you are persuasive,
0:05:57they will sort of opt you out, but it's unknown whether this is a permanent opt-out or just a peacing and angry cups to opt out.
0:06:03It doesn't seem like that's a scalable solution.
0:06:06And then the final option they list here is like, "Maybe we'll figure something out.
0:06:10Or you could, you know, piehole the DNS for the ad server. Who knows?"
0:06:15It's a grim situation, but in case you are one of the other 25 TiVo users left in the world and are wondering about this,
0:06:21we'll put the link in the show notes.
0:06:23Can I have a quick moment about pieholed? We did not talk about this yet on the show, did we?
0:06:27Nope.
0:06:28Okay, good. I didn't think so.
0:06:31A few months ago, or maybe it was a year ago now, a while ago, I discovered Docker.
0:06:37Yes, welcome to 2014, I'm aware.
0:06:39I still haven't, don't worry.
0:06:40See, thank you, Mark. That genuinely does make me feel a little bit better.
0:06:43But I discovered Docker and I discovered Homebridge.
0:06:47And I was aware of both of them existing, but I didn't ever think to put both of them together.
0:06:54And so my Synology, which I love very much, it has Docker support on my particular Synology,
0:07:00which is the same one that you two have.
0:07:02And so I put a Docker container of Homebridge on my Synology,
0:07:05and now I can control with some amount of reliability,
0:07:09I can control non-HomeKit stuff with HomeKit, which is really great.
0:07:14Well, I don't remember how I got it in my head, but one way or another, I decided recently,
0:07:19"Oh, you know what? I should try that piehole thing, because I've heard that's really, really good."
0:07:24And my very limited understanding, and jump in either of you when you're ready,
0:07:28is that this is a DNS server that's designed to be run on a Raspberry Pi.
0:07:35And so it's really lean and really, really quick.
0:07:37And the idea is you set your home network, or perhaps just one computer,
0:07:41to use the piehole as your DNS server, and then it will simply ignore or not resolve hostnames
0:07:49for things that they know are nothing but advertisements.
0:07:53So it's sort of a network-level ad blocker, which is really, really interesting.
0:07:57And sure enough, there's a Docker container for the Synology that lets you set up piehole.
0:08:02And it took me like five minutes, and then I tweaked my network such that the network is issuing
0:08:09the piehole address as the DNS server.
0:08:13And so far, about a week in, it seems to be working pretty well,
0:08:17and there's only been a couple of occasions that I've needed to temporarily disable it
0:08:21in order to get a website to work again.
0:08:23I am really, really pleased with it. I'll probably write it up on my website at some point or another.
0:08:27But if you're looking for a reason to get a Raspberry Pi, which I actually am,
0:08:33but I also already have a computer running all the time, and that's my Synology,
0:08:38you know, piehole in a Docker container, it's a pretty sweet setup, and it was not hard to set up at all.
0:08:44That's interesting, because I've never used any of the various network-wide ad blocker methods,
0:08:50usually which involve DNS-type things like this.
0:08:54Because I'm always afraid that it'll just break stuff, because every ad blocker I've ever used or written
0:09:01has always broken stuff, and I've always needed some kind of temporary disable thing.
0:09:08Now, with piehole, how much of a pain in the butt is it to temporarily bypass it?
0:09:13Okay, so here's where I'm going to lose everyone.
0:09:16Oh, no.
0:09:17Is temporarily bypassing it like just changing your DNS back?
0:09:21No, no, I suppose you could do it that way, but no, that is not the solution I use.
0:09:27Good.
0:09:28So the way that I have been doing it, which is perfect for me, but terrible for anyone else in the house,
0:09:37namely Aaron, is that it's actually got a really robust web interface that, among other things,
0:09:44lets you disable it for five seconds, 30 seconds, or basically until you decide to turn it back on.
0:09:54Let me see, I'm signing in now.
0:09:55Disable for 10 or 30 seconds, five minutes, a custom amount of time, or just straight up turn it off for a while.
0:10:02And I've got to say, this web interface is really, really, really good,
0:10:06and it works surprisingly well given how lean and mean this thing is.
0:10:11It shows, so I have 27 clients and 31,790 queries, of which 2,545 of them were blocked, which is 8%,
0:10:21and there are 113,447 domains on the block list.
0:10:25And it shows you pretty graphs and things of that nature.
0:10:27But the problem is you have to be able to log into this thing in order to disable it for a little while,
0:10:32and you're disabling it for the entire network rather than for one host.
0:10:35Now somebody on Twitter had sent me a workflow, or shortcuts shortcut, that you're supposed to be able to just run
0:10:44after you've plugged in your API key, if you will, and so on and so forth,
0:10:49and it would disable it via this shortcut, which would be perfect for me and Aaron, actually.
0:10:55But I couldn't get it to work in the brief amount of time I played with it,
0:10:57so I guess that's many words to say. There must be mechanisms by which you can do an easy temporary disable
0:11:05because there's APIs and things of that nature, but the one that I'm familiar with, I couldn't get to work,
0:11:11and I haven't really given it a real honest shake yet, so I need to go back and re-evaluate.
0:11:17But I am really, really pleased with this so far.
0:11:21Now the problem with this, though, is what happens when I'm outside my home network,
0:11:25because this is only providing DNS for my intranet. It does not provide DNS to the internet.
0:11:32And I suppose what I could do is expose this publicly, which seems like a terrible decision.
0:11:38So I think what for now I'm going to do is, if I'm really browsing the web remotely and really am getting annoyed by ads,
0:11:45I'll just hop on my VPN into the house, and then I will get that DNS server back,
0:11:50and then everything should work as it does in the house, in theory, although to be fair I have not validated that yet.
0:11:57But in general, whether or not PyHole is your thing, and I'm saying that not only to Marco but the listener,
0:12:04whether or not PyHole is your thing, I cannot say enough good things about Docker
0:12:08and how unbelievably easy it is to get some entirely complex software stack up and running in almost no time.
0:12:17So you're using Docker at work for actual work things, right? Or am I making that up?
0:12:21Yep, I am.
0:12:23Anything I've said wrong or anything you'd like to add in general?
0:12:26Something's about Docker annoying me, but I think it's true of anything you have to use for work eventually.
0:12:31You have to find all the things that annoy you about it, but it's fine.
0:12:35Jeff Atwood had an article about PyHole from a year or two ago.
0:12:40That was six months ago.
0:12:41He actually used a Raspberry Pi hardware, which was part of the fun project nature of it, to get a cute little computer next to his router with a little tiny screen on it.
0:12:49Anyway, if you're interested in another person's experience and kind of a setup guide, I'll put that link in the show notes too.
0:12:56And actually in that is a really good screenshot of the web interface that I was talking about.
0:13:02So if you go to Jeff Atwood's link in the show notes, it's codinghorror.com.
0:13:08If you scroll down a bit, you'll see the PyHole interface.
0:13:11I don't know, maybe I'm easily amused, but it's a very good looking and pretty easy to use interface for something that I believe is just an open source project that nobody's making any real money off of.
0:13:23So I just think that's super cool when a whole bunch of nerds can come together and do something nice.
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0:15:08Speaking of home networking stuff, I don't know if this is really a topic or not, but I...
0:15:15Yes, actually I didn't put it in the show notes. I meant to ask you about this. I'm glad you brought it up.
0:15:18What are you up to, man?
0:15:20So I just basically just upgraded all my home networking gear.
0:15:23All right, now can we pause? Can you just give a quick executive summary of what the gear was
0:15:28and then let's talk about what the new stuff is.
0:15:31Sure. So here I have a home network here. Originally I set this up about eight years ago.
0:15:37So I've gone through a couple of routers in that time, but the one I've been using for the last probably five years or so
0:15:43is the Ubiquiti Edge Router Lite 3.
0:15:46This little black $100 thing that has been rock solid, reliable, and really got me started on the Ubiquiti bandwagon.
0:15:53The switch has been this rock solid HP 18-something rack mount switch.
0:16:00I think 1815? I don't know. Some kind of HP 18 port or 24 port, whatever it was.
0:16:06You know, big HP rack mount switch.
0:16:09And those have been running rock solid, reliable for many, many years.
0:16:13And then for Wi-Fi I would plug in, in recent years basically, whatever the Ubiquiti access points were that were available at the time.
0:16:21And I started out with one and then went to two and then went to three as I identified various bad spots in my house.
0:16:28And this was all before modern home consumer friendly mesh stuff like Euro.
0:16:34Sponsor of our show frequently, I should disclose.
0:16:37But anyway, so, and I should clarify all of my Euro experience has been in other houses besides this one.
0:16:42So the beach, in-laws, stuff like that.
0:16:45So what drove this for me, what drove this upgrade was that once you have multiple access points,
0:16:51sometimes clients will do weird things with like whether they will roam between them properly,
0:16:57or whether they'll hold on to one bad connection rather than roaming onto the one better one.
0:17:02Most of the stuff is dramatically improved if you have newer hardware and newer software behind it and everything,
0:17:09like on the router end to be able to roam clients with these newer standards and things like that.
0:17:13I also just wanted a speed upgrade on my access points.
0:17:18And Ubiquiti does this weird thing where they require you to run controller software to set certain things up,
0:17:26to make certain changes, and to enable certain features.
0:17:29And you don't have to run it if you don't need to make certain changes or you don't need to enable certain features.
0:17:35And you have to run it on a computer or something.
0:17:39And I had long abandoned whatever computer was running this.
0:17:43I couldn't run it anymore on my Mac Mini because it required Java and all this crazy stuff.
0:17:48So I'm like, all right.
0:17:50And they have sold for years now these little things called cloud keys that are basically just little,
0:17:54Raspberry Pis that I pre-made to run this controller software on.
0:17:59And since then, they've also had this huge new generation of new switches and new routers,
0:18:06the security gateway line of routers.
0:18:09This all came out after I made my setup.
0:18:12I decided, you know what, let me just upgrade everything to all new stuff.
0:18:16I'll go all Ubiquiti this time, even though my HP switch has been rock solid and still works totally fine.
0:18:21I figured I'll get Ubiquiti switch because that'll save me a bunch of wires because now it has power over ethernet built in.
0:18:27So basically what I got was a 24-port power over ethernet switch, security gateway as the router,
0:18:34the security key too as the controller.
0:18:37So I got it all set up today.
0:18:39And this is still like, you know, the Ubiquiti line of things is still very much for nerds.
0:18:47However, it is way nicer now if you go all in the way I did with all the most modern stuff.
0:18:55It all supports power over ethernet to the newest standards.
0:18:58It all supports their software controller thing.
0:19:01So I didn't have to log into the router and the switch separately.
0:19:06I didn't have to log into every access point to configure it separately.
0:19:10All I had to do was log into the controller, the little cloud key thing.
0:19:15And it configured the router for me and all the APs and everything.
0:19:20You basically just log into one thing and it controls everything.
0:19:23It controls all their software updates, all their settings.
0:19:26It coordinates the Wi-Fi network between all the access points.
0:19:29It's so much easier now than it used to be.
0:19:32And so if you are in the market for very nerdy pro-grade networking gear,
0:19:40all the new Ubiquiti stuff is really nice and really awesome.
0:19:42I got it all set up, I got all my devices named in the control panel and everything.
0:19:45All fancy, got all set here. I'm very happy with it.
0:19:49Obviously it's only been like 12 hours, so maybe if things go wrong I'll let you know in a future episode.
0:19:54But I'm all Ubiquiti here at home.
0:19:57And it's certainly worth asking why this kind of crazy overkill setup
0:20:04instead of something like an Euro system.
0:20:06The reality is for most people the answer is just get something like the Euro system.
0:20:10Because you don't need something like this.
0:20:12And truth is, you know, need is a fun word in nerdom.
0:20:15I don't need this either.
0:20:17It allows a certain degree of flexibility, first of all.
0:20:19I don't need to upgrade the entire component system once now.
0:20:24As I've done over the last, I don't know, five years that I've been running Ubiquiti gear,
0:20:28as new standards come out for things like faster Wi-Fi,
0:20:32I can just replace the access points.
0:20:34And maybe not even all of them.
0:20:36Instead of having to buy a whole new router and a whole new system and everything like that.
0:20:40I can do certain cool things.
0:20:42Like I mentioned I have three access points.
0:20:44One of them is in my garage.
0:20:46And I can have a separate network that runs only on that one
0:20:51that my car can pull software updates off of.
0:20:54Because my car is not good at picking the best Wi-Fi network.
0:20:57And will often pick the furthest away access point in the house if it's on the same SSID.
0:21:02So you can do things like have certain SSIDs that only broadcast among certain access points.
0:21:08Stuff like that.
0:21:10There's an even greater level of control and nerdery and separation of concerns here
0:21:16than what you get with any kind of consumer system.
0:21:18That's the whole point of these enterprise systems.
0:21:20Not to mention reliability and capacity and ability to deal with interference and certain things.
0:21:26And certain traffic patterns better because they're made for way higher density and higher needs usage.
0:21:34Than what my house is likely to have.
0:21:36It's a really nice overkill setup.
0:21:38And if and when I eventually upgrade to KC's degree of Fios that is gigabit both ways.
0:21:44I'm going to be happy to have things like a faster router.
0:21:47More packet capacity and all this other stuff.
0:21:50So yeah I'm looking forward to hopefully never thinking about it again because that's what Ubiquiti lets you do basically.
0:21:59You set up your stuff and you have one fun nerdy day of figuring out how it all works.
0:22:04And then you can just forget about it.
0:22:05You never have to reboot anything.
0:22:07It's just rock solid.
0:22:08So I'm hoping all this new stuff is as rock solid as all my old stuff was.
0:22:12You know I've got that Fios too now.
0:22:14I think you've got the slow internet connection on the bus.
0:22:16Oh yeah look at that.
0:22:18Mine's only 150.
0:22:19150? Oh my goodness.
0:22:21That's awful.
0:22:22I don't know how you live.
0:22:23It was the fastest at the time.
0:22:24Well and that's when I got it like seven years ago that was the fastest they offered.
0:22:28It works perfectly.
0:22:30I never have problems.
0:22:32So the last thing I want to do is call Verizon over to change something.
0:22:35Yeah I know.
0:22:36I bit that bullet recently too.
0:22:38I think I had it for a similar length of time to you.
0:22:40Anyway mine maxed out at 75.
0:22:43So I was stuck at 75.
0:22:44I couldn't get any faster with the box I had.
0:22:47And eventually I just I had to do it and it turned out fine.
0:22:50It was ridiculous.
0:22:51They replaced my like original Fios box which was just massive.
0:22:55It was like the size of a I don't know like a Rebel Alliance backpack on Hoth.
0:23:02That's how big it was.
0:23:04It was huge.
0:23:05And they replaced that with a tiny box like you know maybe the size of a lunch box.
0:23:12And the only thing inside the box is a even tinier thing that looks like an eight port switch velcroed inside there.
0:23:19That's awesome.
0:23:21Like whatever it was before it was like this bespoke special custom thing with all these electronics.
0:23:26And it's just basically replaced by like some little thing that looks like you could buy it off Amazon.
0:23:29I don't know what it actually is but it's comical.
0:23:32Question about your your setup though.
0:23:35Is your garage climate controlled in any way?
0:23:39No.
0:23:40Because I'm wondering what like a safe operating temperature range is for that equipment.
0:23:44Right.
0:23:45And so and you know if you look it up it'll tell you it's something like you know five degrees to one hundred and something degrees.
0:23:50It never gets below five in your garage?
0:23:52No.
0:23:53So this is so this is as far as I know.
0:23:55So my garage is not insulated but it does close.
0:23:59And the walls are made of cinder blocks and it's it touches my house on top back inside.
0:24:07So like three of the you know I guess five surfaces that could be exterior exposed aren't there.
0:24:14They're you know attached to my house.
0:24:16So it has some degree of temperature isolation from the outside world.
0:24:21In my experience running this gear in my garage for the last you know eight years it has not been a problem yet.
0:24:27I even run my Synology out there.
0:24:29And part of the reason why is you know obviously just by being not outside and by being attached to a house
0:24:35and having a big thick you know old wood door that closes and everything like it's not going to get as cold as it does outside.
0:24:42You know if it's zero degrees outside unless it's been zero degrees outside for like two weeks straight my garage is going to be you know much much higher than that.
0:24:50It's not going to be warm but it's not going to be zero.
0:24:53You might need another internal combustion engine car to warm up that garage for you.
0:24:57And then also I figure like this gear operates 24/7.
0:25:02So it never really has a chance to cool down.
0:25:05You know like I'm not I'm not storing it in zero degree rooms off and then trying to power it on.
0:25:10Like so and so I think it also helps with things like condensation and everything.
0:25:14So I keep everything there for networking the switch the router.
0:25:19I have two UPS's for various reasons.
0:25:21I have and I have the Synology running all the hard drives in there 24/7 year round.
0:25:27And it hasn't been a problem yet.
0:25:29I haven't lost a single hard drive in the Synology yet. Knock on whatever wood this is.
0:25:32I haven't you know lost any networking gear to heat or anything.
0:25:36It seems fine.
0:25:38Well my second Synology had a bad disk.
0:25:41It wasn't bad yet but Synology does those disk health checkups and it would like email you and says hey I found a bad sector.
0:25:47And I've been like ignoring it for two years and eventually it's like you know I really found a lot of bad sectors on this disk.
0:25:52I'm like all right fine.
0:25:54So I just and it's the what those were the drives I ended up replacing because I just replaced both of them because it was just a two drive a little two drive Synology.
0:26:02They weren't the Western Digital Reds.
0:26:05They were just something else like just regular consumer hard drives.
0:26:08So anecdotal data for those you know designed for NAS BS over Bryce drives actually outliving the standard consumer models.
0:26:17I replaced them with Western Digital Reds.
0:26:20Well I am I'm jealous of your networking setup but not your connection to the rest of the world.
0:26:25So you win some you lose some.
0:26:27But it's rock solid.
0:26:29I don't doubt that. Truth be told and I don't think they're a sponsor of this episode are they?
0:26:33No. Truth be told my Euro setup has actually been very very good.
0:26:37I had a little bit of a hiccup with local host loopback.
0:26:41You know so if I if I went to a host name that resolved to itself there was a like month or two window a time where that was having some problems but outside of that which by the way since been fixed.
0:26:52It's been pretty darn solid.
0:26:53I've been really happy with the Euro.
0:26:55So and you know they're not paying us to say that.
0:26:58So that's pretty cool.
0:26:59Like you know like I've used Euro in you know again my in-laws place and vacation houses and it's been totally great.
0:27:04That's why I keep using it for those places.
0:27:07Oh and one other thing to disclose on the Ubiquiti stuff.
0:27:11The rackmount stuff that I got has very loud fans.
0:27:15So in my garage this is fine.
0:27:17If you're looking for something for like a home office I mean you should be accustomed to the fact that one you rackmount stuff usually has very loud fans.
0:27:24But in this case that holds.
0:27:26It has very loud fans so you know use caution.
0:27:30We are sponsored this week by ExpressVPN.
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0:28:08Because you know you have things like HTTPS.
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0:29:02Thank you so much to ExpressVPN for sponsoring our show.
0:29:05(upbeat music)
0:29:08- Let's return to follow up that we were doing three hours ago.
0:29:12Folding phones and form factors.
0:29:15I don't know which one of you put this in the show notes but we should call out the most recent episode of Connected,
0:29:20265 entitled What Are You? A Dictionary.
0:29:23Which was great for a plethora of reasons but what's relevant right now is Mike decided to spend an obscene amount of money on the Galaxy Fold.
0:29:33And he spent about a week with it and did a really really good job of reviewing it.
0:29:36Particularly the hardware on that episode and it is worth listening to.
0:29:40So you should check that out.
0:29:41But I presume one of you, probably John, has thoughts about form factors.
0:29:45- Yep, I listened to that episode and it was interesting to hear what Mike thought of it.
0:29:48How he was using it, how it's holding up and the prospects for it and so on and so forth.
0:29:52And we talked about folding phones a while ago and then again with the most recent episode with the Microsoft Duo and the Neo thing and everything.
0:30:01And I had a thought that I think I failed to voice last time we discussed this.
0:30:05While listening to Mike talk about his Galaxy Fold thing.
0:30:10And in particular he was talking about how the outer screen was too narrow to be useful like in the folded form or whatever.
0:30:17It made me think of, you know, the context we were discussing last time was like, is the additional screen space worth the need to unfold your phone when you use it?
0:30:31And the outer screen, you know, in theory could let you not have to unfold it but Mike was saying that it was a little bit too narrow.
0:30:37But the flip side of that is rather than using folding technology to give you a much larger screen in a small package.
0:30:46I started to think about using folding to take existing sized phones and make them smaller in one or the other dimension while they're in your pocket.
0:30:57And it also kind of like, you know, if we could go back to the thinness race and start getting the phones to be thinner again.
0:31:05You could have a phone that was like the size of an iPhone 11 or iPhone 11 Pro but folds in one dimension or the other.
0:31:13I was also thinking of it for those really skinny phones from Essential.
0:31:17You know, they look super dumb.
0:31:19But if you could fold an iPhone 11 Pro, A, which way would you want to fold it?
0:31:26And B, would that be more useful or useful at all as compared to something that's even bigger that folds out to be basically a phablet or, you know, a little miniature tablet?
0:31:36What do you think?
0:31:39So I understand this right. So you're saying take my 11 Pro and make it foldable but there is an external screen on the smaller version?
0:31:49Set aside external screens for now.
0:31:51It's like just say if you could fold it, would you want to fold it like the long way so it becomes a long skinny like stick of gum or would you want to fold it so it becomes almost square?
0:32:00Or I guess you could fold it on an angle if you're feeling a little feisty but that makes no sense.
0:32:05I would think I would want it to fold such that it becomes a square but I'm not really sure why to be honest.
0:32:11I mean I'm also assuming that like you could save some thickness so it wouldn't actually be twice as thick because if you become a square it would be like a, what was that one?
0:32:19The Game Boy SP which was the Game Boy that was like square folded into a little sandwich.
0:32:27I know there was one but you're asking the wrong people.
0:32:29But regardless, yeah, it was a similar kind of thing.
0:32:32I don't know, I think I would go long stick of gum because a square wouldn't allow it to fit that much better in pockets that it wouldn't have fit in before.
0:32:42Whereas a long stick of gum would allow it to be like, you know, you only need the pocket to be big and one dimensional.
0:32:50You can put it in a deep pocket but not necessarily a wide pocket.
0:32:54That I think would be more useful in the real world.
0:32:56You could put it in that little change pocket where the i5 Nano was, remember?
0:33:00No we can't do that because that's where my AirPods go.
0:33:02Were those special pants that he had made for the presentation?
0:33:05Because I don't think, like I have lots of jeans.
0:33:08None of my jeans change pockets would actually hold an iPod Nano in a way that you couldn't see the top of it.
0:33:13I think it's plausible.
0:33:15Unlike most women's clothing, men's clothing tends to have actual pockets that are real and not, you know, like fake pockets that look like they're pockets but really don't go down anywhere.
0:33:25But I feel like that had to be custom pants because the change pocket, the width of it, that was fair.
0:33:31But I feel like he had to have a longer, like a deeper pocket made.
0:33:35Yeah, maybe.
0:33:37See, this is why we missed out on not having podcasts back in the day.
0:33:41People were amusing themselves about this but we could have actually tested it and said, "Alright, go get a pair of jeans and wear it to the podcast and try."
0:33:48I mean, I suppose they do it on YouTube as well.
0:33:51I was thinking, like, I like the idea of a long, skinny stick but I think I'd be frustrated by the unfolding.
0:33:57Like, again, you know, the benefit is, "Oh, I can fit it in smaller places. I can fit it in a smaller pocket."
0:34:03Maybe it's easier to take in and out because it's like a little stick instead of a wide thing.
0:34:07You know, sometimes they're, especially for the big phones like the Max size, you put it in like a front or a back pocket and if your pants are tight you feel like you can't really like squat down or you'll be bending the thing or whatever.
0:34:18Maybe it gets a little bit easier if it's skinny and it can slide. I don't know.
0:34:22But bottom line is, if you don't have any external screen, which you certainly wouldn't if it was skinny and probably wouldn't if it was square, you do have to unfold it to use it at all.
0:34:32And I don't know if the, again, the size benefit would be worth it.
0:34:36Getting back to what Mike said, he's all in on the idea of like, "I can do more with this more powerful device because I have so much more screen space."
0:34:44It was not just that there was more screen space. He talked about, you know, the Android being sort of laissez-faire about multitasking.
0:34:50It's like, "You want to have 20 apps running? Fine, have 20 apps. I don't care what you do with your screen. Just have 10 floating windows and three apps running and do whatever."
0:34:57Right? And that's powerful, especially when you have a lot of room for it. So he's using it as like a little miniature computer.
0:35:03He even said that like it felt less like a phone and more like a little miniature computer.
0:35:06So if that's what you're going for, certainly you're willing to tolerate the foldingness and the awkwardness or whatever because no other device can give you such a huge screen while being pocketable in any form.
0:35:18Because if that thing didn't fold, there's no way you could fit it in any of your pockets unless you wore like those really huge baggy tactical pants things or whatever with like the giant thigh pocket or something.
0:35:27Or unless you had custom_pocket in your clothing to hold your MacBook or whatever.
0:35:33Anyway, I just was thinking about it. I still, for the phone style purposes, using phones like we do today, I'm still struggling to see folding as a net win.
0:35:45But if you want a weird miniature computer that's not a laptop and not a tablet, apparently the Fold has at least one fan in mic.
0:35:54It might be the only one.
0:35:56But we'll see if that thing breaks. I mean, he's had it for like a week or whatever. So I still have a little faith in its durability.
0:36:02It has already been like this whole thing on Twitter of people posting about like the little dots appearing on the crease basically ruining the screen.
0:36:09Fun. Alright, Jon, tell me if you didn't want to get the chef's knife you were talking about last episode, what should you get instead?
0:36:18I'm not sure, but I referred to the knife as that it's like the Oxo Good Grips of chef's knives.
0:36:24Well, predictably, Oxo Good Grips does in fact make a chef's knife.
0:36:28And we'll put a link in the show so you can take a look at it. But I have to say, despite the fact that I'm sure the grip is very pleasing, it doesn't look as good as my knife for one reason.
0:36:40Like the bolster or whatever, the thing where the handle goes into the blade. On my knife, it's like plastic, squishy, grippy material all the way into the blade.
0:36:48Whereas this has like a fancier, more expensive looking metal bolster. And that's not great because I want it to be grippy everywhere.
0:36:54I don't want it to transition to slippery stuff. And the second thing is the bolster goes all the way down to the bottom of the blade.
0:36:59So like the back corner of the knife looks like it's not a cutting surface, it's just part of the bolster.
0:37:04And I don't like that either. I like to use the bottom part of my knife. Anyway, I like my knife better.
0:37:09But if you do want the Oxo Good Grips of knives, they make one and it's only $20.
0:37:13Alright, Apple apparently has rolled out Siri Audio Clip Grading Opt-in. And there's now an ability to request history deletion in the 13.2 and WatchOS 6.1 betas.
0:37:30And so this is in response to everyone rightfully losing their minds over Apple people, particularly contractors, listening to our conversations with Siri to evaluate and grade them and so on and so forth.
0:37:41So now things are a little bit different. Tell me, Jon, what's different about them?
0:37:46I put all the bullet points from the TechCrunch article in here, but I think the bottom line is you have to explicitly opt in and you can opt out at any time.
0:37:53So there's a bunch of other things about how they use transcripts and all the other stuff, but like giving the user control.
0:37:59Whereas before, there was no awareness and no control. Now, presumably, if you listen to tech podcasts, you are aware.
0:38:04And when these new versions of the OS come out, you actually have control.
0:38:08I think there are more details with like you can opt in on a per message basis or something like that.
0:38:12But anyway, as soon as these versions come out, which I think are probably going to be the first versions that we may feel comfortable recommending people use, well, maybe not the Mac OS version, but like 13.2 might be safe.
0:38:27So I'm running the 13.2 beta, of course, and I'm having issues with it, the kind of issues that you would have like in July during beta season.
0:38:38In beta 2, I would frequently have the volume HUD thing when you were just in volume like through a car or Bluetooth controls.
0:38:45The volume would come on screen and just stay there and you couldn't dismiss it. It would just be there forever.
0:38:50My more recent challenge with it is that Siri just stopped talking. That plays out in a few interesting ways.
0:38:59When you try to set an alarm, it responds to you with total silence, which is not confidence inspiring for your alarm to wake you up in the morning.
0:39:08Any time that Siri would speak a response or it should speak a response, it would just play that amount of silence basically.
0:39:16The UI would look like it was speaking and it would just be silent.
0:39:20That also meant that when I was driving using Apple Maps, it failed to use voice directions.
0:39:27It failed to speak to me to say turn right up here because whatever is using that same engine.
0:39:33Fortunately, I also had Waze, which has its own speech engine.
0:39:36These are the kind of bugs I'm facing in the 13.2 beta so far.
0:39:40These are totally new bugs compared to 13.0.
0:39:4613.1, my whole navigation bar bug that made me have to ship a very evasive version of Overcast to dodge around it, that was a new bug to 13.1.
0:39:5513.0 didn't have that bug during its betas and now the 13.2 bugs are new bugs entirely that the main 13 bit didn't have.
0:40:03As far as I'm concerned, Apple is still shipping rough beta quality software to all of its customers and 13.2 doesn't seem to be changing that.
0:40:14These are 13.2 betas. We have to wait to see 13.2 release to see how much better that is.
0:40:20I'm continuing to look at 13.0 release and 13.1 release and you can see why I'm a little bit skeptical.
0:40:26I know, but do you feel like .1 is better than .0? I think the trend is in the right direction at least.
0:40:32It's less horrible, but .1 still has pretty severe beta quality bugs.
0:40:40What's driving me nuts is at least 13.1 broke my app and lots of other people's apps as well in a way that all of our customers are seeing and blaming us for, understandably.
0:40:5313.2 seems to be okay on my apps but is now breaking the phone.
0:40:59I don't know what's worse. If you never use voice prompts and never adjust the volume, never need to just want your phone to speak you anything, maybe 13.2 is okay for you.
0:41:09Beta 3 came out today so I'll see if it's any different.
0:41:12Good luck.
0:41:14Anything else you want to talk about, Marco?
0:41:16Oh yeah. There's one other thing. I wanted to give a quick promo for an app called Optimus Player.
0:41:23It's a really good app and the reason I'm promoting it is because the author of this app did me a massive favor and I wanted to try to pay him back in whatever way I could.
0:41:33He really helped me out a lot with my AirPlay 2 code.
0:41:38My AirPlay 2 feature is still not shippable. I still have a long way to go, but I had a huge roadblock and he basically helped me past it.
0:41:45I wanted to give his app a quick promo. It's called Optimus Player and it looks kind of like QuickTime Player but it supports all the different formats that you would normally have to use something like VLC for.
0:41:56And it's way nicer than VLC. Way nicer.
0:42:00It's very Mac-like. It has AirPlay 2, which is why he was able to help me. He used it.
0:42:06It has AirPlay 2 and on the Mac there's almost nothing that has AirPlay 2 so that's pretty impressive.
0:42:12It has proper color reproduction on the Mac, which VLC often doesn't.
0:42:16It's just very Mac-like, very Apple-like. So it's a great app. It's five bucks.
0:42:20OptimusPlayer.com and I thank the author very much for his help in my AirPlay 2 journey.
0:42:24I'm always looking for apps like this. I'm going to get this right now.
0:42:27Yeah, I mean five bucks. You can't go wrong.
0:42:29I also was pleased to see that it's just, well I shouldn't say just as though it's not a big deal.
0:42:34It is sitting on top of FFmpeg and as someone who knows FFmpeg more than most, I can tell you that you don't just do anything with FFmpeg.
0:42:44So yeah, this looks really good. I haven't tried it yet but I was glancing at the website when I saw this in the show notes.
0:42:50This looks really, really, really good.
0:42:51Yeah, like every use of FFmpeg requires a Google search first. At least one.
0:42:56And also, like, I honestly, like I have never had great experiences with VLC on the Mac.
0:43:03Like I recognize VLC's importance in like the open source community and the Windows world, but on the Mac it's always been pretty rough.
0:43:11And so to have something that can play like all those random formats that you might find that QuickTime player can't,
0:43:16to have something that can play that that's better than VLC is pretty valuable to me.
0:43:20Excellent. All right, let's do some topics. Is it time for us to talk about Apple in China?
0:43:26I mean I feel like it probably is.
0:43:28I mean if there's ever a time, like, this is a pretty big news week for it. Oh, God.
0:43:35How do I know I'm chief summarizer in chief. I don't even know how to summarize this. There's so many moving parts.
0:43:40So there seem to be like two or three different stories all happening simultaneously.
0:43:46And let me just start down this path and either one of you two, please feel free to interrupt me and save me.
0:43:51So at around the same time, there was some sort of kerfuffle with regard to Blizzard and like video game competitions wherein I think the winner of some event said something that was in favor of Hong Kong and the protests that are happening.
0:44:07Oh, that's it. We're banned in China.
0:44:08Yep, that's it. We're done. Sorry, guys.
0:44:11So they said something in favor of Hong Kong and Blizzard, I guess, like cut them off, rescinded this individual or this team's winnings and like fired some people or something like that.
0:44:25And there was all sorts of blowback because of it, which seems to me to be justified.
0:44:29Additionally, there was a general manager, if I'm not mistaken, for the NBA, I think the Houston Rockets, if I'm not mistaken, that said that issued a tweet that was pro Hong Kong and quickly rescinded it when it was quickly apparent that that really upset China.
0:44:46And guess what? China is a big market for both video games and basketball, actually.
0:44:50And then additionally, how did Apple get involved in this? What was the genesis on Apple? Oh, the app.
0:44:55The game app live.
0:44:56Thank you.
0:44:57So there was a or there is an app that somebody had tried to put on the app store, which I depending on who you believe and who you talk to, I guess the idea was to either try to help people not get accosted by the police or perhaps if you listen to certain people, it would help people accost the police.
0:45:18So there's a lot of different he said, she saids going on here. But all at about the same time, these three seemingly unrelated groups have run afoul of the people of the higher ups in China.
0:45:34And China seemed to be started, well, maybe not starting actually, but seemed to be more publicly than ever flexing their muscles and saying, we don't like this and it has to stop.
0:45:44And I guess before we move on as to why this is important or not, is that a reasonable kind of quick summary about all this?
0:45:52There's been tons of other incidents as well, but those three are the ones that are the top of mind for us in this in the week that we're recording this.
0:46:00And I have to call out, he is a friend of ours, but Ben Thompson's Stratechery was Tuesday, October 8th has a really, really good kind of walkthrough and summary about what's going on there and why it's important.
0:46:16And it is one of his weekly free articles. I cannot say enough good things about this article and really Stratechery in general.
0:46:25But I strongly encourage you to read that article because it is tremendous and it's a very, very good and in-depth, but not terribly long summary of what's going on.
0:46:34But I guess where this becomes relevant, particularly for ATP, is Apple's put themselves in a real crummy position.
0:46:45Because not only is China an incredibly important market for Apple in terms of sales, but pretty much all of their hardware, with the possible exception of your two new computers for the two of you, is made in China.
0:47:01And all of these iPhones are made in China, all these iPads are made in China. And that has left Apple very, very exposed.
0:47:10And for a company that prides itself on being more than a traditional company, a company that values the environment, that values LGBTQ people and their rights, that values things that just seem like the right thing,
0:47:30it also seems like the same company, Apple, is also doing a real good job of bending over backwards to make China happy.
0:47:38And in and of itself, I think that's fine. Just hear me out for a second. In and of itself, that is their prerogative, is a better way of phrasing it.
0:47:47If they want to bend over for Apple, then okay. But that seems incongruous with, "Oh, we're very forward thinking and we care about the environment, we care about doing what's right.
0:47:59Screw you FBI, you can't have our encryption keys. There will be no backdoors. Yay, we're the best!"
0:48:04Oh, by the way, if China says anything about anything, we're going to do it because we need to immediately.
0:48:09And that leaves a really gross taste in my mouth. And I don't, I'm torn because, you know, a lot of people on Twitter have said to me about various things over the last six months, you know,
0:48:22"How can you support whatever? They're terrible! How could you support those people?"
0:48:27And what's been made clear to me over the last six months to a year to two years to whatever is that pretty much any company, even one that most people seem to agree with and respect like Apple,
0:48:40pretty much any company, you can look at and say, "Oh, one time they did this deplorable thing that, and we should never support them again."
0:48:47Or, "This individual on their board is really, really gross and we should never support them again."
0:48:52And I am absolutely coming from a position of privilege here. I recognize that 1000%. But if I didn't do business with any of these companies that have Achilles heels and gotchas and so on and so forth,
0:49:04I would have to be in a van down by the river because I wouldn't be able to do business with anyone.
0:49:10So, I don't know, I've really, as we say to Declan or Declan sometimes says to us, I have mixed up feelings and I don't know what I think other than I don't like Apple saying out of one side of their mouths,
0:49:26you know, "We're the best. We're so forward thinking. We care. We care. We care." And then on the other side of their mouth saying, "Yes, China, whatever you need, whatever you need. Yes, of course, absolutely, whatever you need."
0:49:35So, what do we do?
0:49:37Well, before we dive into the Apple side of things, which I think is interesting and is a little bit more tractable, I think I want to start by big picturing this.
0:49:46Like, so Apple has a China problem. Lots of articles have been written with that, almost that exact headline.
0:49:52But the bigger picture is the world has a China problem. China is a problem for the world.
0:49:59It is a huge country with a very large population that has been growing in economic power for a long time and it's also an authoritarian state.
0:50:07And those things combine to make a problem for everybody. Why is that a problem?
0:50:13Well, in the increasingly global economy, having lots of people with an increasing amount of money to spend on things makes them an important market for you to sell your products into.
0:50:24Also, part of China's economic engine is their manufacturing ability, which Apple takes advantage of and many other people take advantage of as well, which makes them an attractive place for companies to have things made.
0:50:36As the rest of the world becomes increasingly economically entangled with China, there are pluses and minuses.
0:50:45The pluses are, in theory, we are all slightly less likely to nuke each other because we're all paying each other's money and China doesn't want to give up selling things to us and we don't want to give up selling things to China and China doesn't want to give up the manufacturing contracts and we don't want to give up building things there.
0:51:01And so there is some incentive to not blow each other up.
0:51:06But on the other hand, they're still an authoritarian state that does terrible things and we both have limited leverage to affect each other's behavior.
0:51:16We would like China to be less evil. China would like us to let them be evil.
0:51:22So we're kind of at an impasse. And this is so much bigger than Apple. It is literally a problem for the whole world.
0:51:29This has to come to a head eventually. The prevailing theory when I was a kid was that as China becomes more economically successful and as we export capitalism to them, it's inevitable they will become modernized and less authoritarian and so on and so forth.
0:51:44But practically speaking, China has basically used their economic growth and increasing technological savvy to become a more efficient authoritarian state using all the technology and money available to them.
0:51:56By the way, so have we.
0:51:59True. To more efficiently oppress their people. And it seems like, and it's hard to tell, I'm not a historian by any stretch, but it seems like in general authoritarian regimes rarely fade away peacefully, let's say.
0:52:16But violent rebellion in China, if it was successful, would be an incredibly tumultuous event. There have been violent rebellions and continue to be small violent rebellions all quashed by the giant that is China.
0:52:32And so from the perspective of the world, this is a problem if you don't want a gigantic powerful authoritarian state to exist. But on the other side, and this we'll get into when we start talking about Apple, complete isolation of China is probably more dangerous in the long run.
0:52:51Because they'll sort of fester and they already have nukes and they have a lot of people and a huge army. This is the tension that the Western world and the entire world in fact has struggled with.
0:53:07Total isolation and non-engagement, I feel like the ship has sailed on that. But on the other hand, if you get too entangled with them, they do have some sway over you. And we see it in every form of business of every country that does any business with China, whether it's manufacturing or selling things into it.
0:53:24There are interests there that motivate both parties to more or less make nice with each other, which sounds good. Oh, great. Everyone's making nice. I'm not going to get nuked. But when you make nice with an authoritarian state, what tends to happen if you combine two colors, you get something that's in the middle.
0:53:44And if your one color is what you think of as better or good, and you combine it with something that is worse, the combination will be worse than where you started necessarily.
0:53:55We hope that through the free world's interaction with China, they would become more free. And I'm not sure if they have become more free, but one thing is for sure, their export authoritarianism has affected the rest of the world in mostly small ways, but in actual real ways.
0:54:14So I just wanted to give that framing and that Apple, that's what the podcast is about, so on and so forth. But no matter what Apple does, the entire world has a problem of some degree. Is it a huge problem? Is it going to end the world? Or is it a small problem? Could it become a big problem? But it is a problem. And it is not a new problem. It has been there for a long time. And the world has not come up with a way to deal with it.
0:54:38And so this is, I feel like, I don't know if it's an increased awareness or just a flare up in our little world of exactly what a problem it is to have 1.3 billion people under authoritarian rule with huge economic and financial power.
0:54:51Yeah, and like, I don't, I mean, I'm, you know, your typical ignorant American. I don't know anything about any of this. I don't know anything about China. I don't know anything about all the various political struggles with various groups and countries and districts. I don't know anything about it.
0:55:11It is shameful how little I know about China and the various politics around it. So I apologize for anything that I'm trying to say here because I'm probably doing a terrible job of it.
0:55:24But in business, as in politics, the bigger you get, the more, like, kind of bitter pills you have to swallow that are just part of the nature of the game.
0:55:35To be running a massive multinational corporation, it becomes really hard for you to just tell the biggest market on earth, "Sorry, we don't want to do business with you because it's, you know, we don't like what you do."
0:55:49Like, that's really hard for, like, officers of a public company to do without getting fired or sued by their shareholders or whatever else.
0:55:58Like, I'm lucky, you know, in my business, like, China blocked Overcast years ago and I don't care, I didn't notice, I didn't have that many customers there, and I'm one guy, nobody can fire me.
0:56:05So, like, I didn't care. So, I, you know, it doesn't affect me at all. I can make the decision to say I won't play ball with them.
0:56:13Apple can't, you know, from the two different points of view, as I mentioned, like, from the manufacturing and from the, you know, selling into the market, Apple can't do that.
0:56:23They can't just say, like, it's like Tim Cook can't just say, like, "You know what, we're not going to play ball with you and we're going to let you ban our products and then we won't be able to make them anymore or sell them there."
0:56:32They could do that. I just want to, I want to, I want to reframe this to say that, like, I'm not presupposing, which is what part of the free animal was about, I'm not presupposing that saying to China, "F you," is actually the correct long-term move.
0:56:47We always frame it as, like, "Oh, if Apple was, you know, as free as Marco, they would do the right thing and tell China to go screw itself," right?
0:56:53But is that the right thing? From one perspective, from, like, the micro level, yeah, of course. The authoritarian government's telling you to, like, censor things and you shouldn't listen to them, you should say, "Screw you," and if they ban your products, then tough luck.
0:57:04It seems like the right thing to do. But big picture-wise, if everybody did that and you isolate China, it makes them more dangerous and it makes conflict more likely because you are less economically entangled.
0:57:15So that's what I feel like is a quandary. Like, I'm not willing to say that, like, big picture-wise, every company in the world should just say, "Screw you, China," because that leads to geopolitical instability with a gigantic, you know, powerful country.
0:57:31As someone who lived through the Cold War, that doesn't make me feel particularly comfortable. If that strategy was going to work, the ship has sailed in that. So I feel like continued engagement with China is not necessarily the wrong thing.
0:57:48That's why I'm wary about any framing that says, "Apple should do the right thing, but can't because of reasons x." The reasons x are totally real, but I'm almost not entirely convinced that just, like, so sort of teenage rebellion, "Screw you, China, I do what I want," is actually the right thing to do in all circumstances.
0:58:07So realistically speaking, what can/should Apple do here? And I don't think they should totally pull out of China. I don't think they can, first of all, and I don't think they should. There's lots of arguments that, you know, one of the arguments is that, you know, people in China should have access to relatively secure and good phones, even though, yes, all Chinese iCloud data is stored in Chinese government-run places.
0:58:35So, you know, there's certainly reduced freedom and security for iCloud users in China than there was anywhere else.
0:58:42But it's better than the alternatives in theory. Like, that's the sort of the mixing of the colors. If you're going to mix, you know, Apple with China and come up with something that is less authoritarian than China, even if only by tiny bit, that's the argument Apple has made. It's better for everybody if we are there, even if we are not as secure as we are in the US, at least we're more secure than the totally state-owned and run, like, totally infiltrated manufacturers where nothing is secret.
0:59:08Exactly. And that's, you know, that's a tough argument for me to take, honestly. I don't love that argument, but I understand it, and so, okay.
0:59:16And it's convenient, because you can make that argument, "This is why we have to be in this huge market, see? We're making China." You know, you're making China better, really, you're making a lot of money.
0:59:24Yeah, exactly. But I think Apple has to play ball with China to a large degree. That is just like one of the bitter pills, possibly the biggest bitter pill that Apple has to swallow as a business. Like, I truly believe that Apple's leaders are not bad people, they don't want to do bad things, they actually want to be overall social good while making ass-loads of money constantly.
0:59:47But they want to be overall social good. But China's a big area where they have to just kind of like quietly do what China wants much of the time, because Apple has a just ton of dependency on China.
1:00:04And so, I think in the same way that like, you know, the Tim Cook doctrine has always been like, to own and control the primary technologies that we need or whatever, I think they have broken that principle with the degree of dependence they currently have on China.
1:00:18The manufacturing angle, I think, is the biggest one. Like, they obviously, you know, to lose the sales of their products into China would be massive. It's a huge portion of their market, it's a huge portion of the world's market, it's slated to become an even bigger portion of the world's like middle class, and so that would be a huge problem to lose sales into China.
1:00:41But, Apple sells enough phones in the rest of the world, they'd be fine. Like, it would be tumultuous in their earnings and in their stock and everything else, you know, the leaders might get fired by the board or by the shareholders or whatever, like, you know, things would be bad.
1:00:55For most of Apple's customers, it wouldn't be a problem, like it would be overall like not a like company ending event if they couldn't sell their products into China anymore.
1:01:04But if they suddenly couldn't make their products in China anymore, that is a much bigger problem for them.
1:01:12And they make so many products at such incredible tolerances and specifications and qualities and most importantly volumes that the Chinese supply chain and manufacturing capacity and talent and just the entire manufacturing infrastructure there, Apple currently can't do without that.
1:01:35They have a couple of factories in different places around the world, like they have some manufacturing capacity outside of China, but it's nowhere near enough that they could absorb the loss of China without huge disruption and massive problems.
1:01:50And that to me, I think, like that is a direct violation, a direct risk exposure on that Tim Cook doctrine of like trying to own your primary technologies, like in as much as a company can be independent from risks of governments interfering, you know, that's always a big challenge for companies.
1:02:08And obviously, Apple's always going to be at risk of its own home country's government interfering with it. To expose yourself to a massive amount of risk of another authoritarian country with huge power over you, it seems like it's an improperly taken risk by Apple.
1:02:26And that's why I think, like, I'm not saying they should pull out of the Chinese market. I am saying they need to significantly diversify their manufacturing. And I know it's hard. I know there's not nearly the infrastructure in other places in certain ways that China has.
1:02:43I know that, but Apple's really big. They have a lot of money. They ship a lot of products. They have a lot of, you know, factories that they can, like, Apple could significantly help jumpstart this.
1:02:57And so to whatever degree Apple can build up manufacturing capacity elsewhere, this should be, if it hasn't already been, this should be a wake-up call that they are exposed to way too much risk with the amount that they depend on China right now.
1:03:12And so the easiest way out of that, and I use the term "easiest" here loosely because these are all very hard, very complicated problems that we don't understand, but the least horrible and least risky and least expensive way out of this is probably going to be to significantly build up manufacturing capacity elsewhere.
1:03:34As much as I hate to say it, some degree of conservatism was right in the sense that if you build it in our country, that does reduce your risk in certain ways.
1:03:43But I don't know enough about it to say whether that's even possible. But certainly, like, if anybody can do it, a company that has a massive amount of cash, that produces a massive amount of products and has huge manufacturing expertise in-house,
1:03:57Apple can figure out how to diversify its manufacturing, and Apple has the clout and the resources to move markets in major ways here.
1:04:07Like, Apple actually can create manufacturing infrastructure that can rival China's in some way.
1:04:14I know it's a huge long-term project. I know it's not going to be fast or easy or cheap, but to me, I see this as an existential threat for Apple if they don't do this. They have to do this.
1:04:28Because if stuff goes bad with China and Apple all of a sudden can't make their product there anymore, they not only won't be able to sell to China, they won't be able to sell to anybody.
1:04:39That is a huge risk, and the company needs to diversify to mitigate that.
1:04:45So Apple manufacturing China is a good example of engagement with China. You can imagine when this strategy was being formulated. It's not like Apple's manufactured stuff in China for ages, but in the beginning, it seems like a way that we can take advantage of an emerging cluster of manufacturing ability that is obviously less expensive than doing it at home and less expensive than doing it.
1:05:12It's inexpensive and highly skilled, and there's a synergy there where they want to build up manufacturing, we want to have things manufactured, they're very willing to do what we want for the amount of money we want to give them, and it's a symbiotic relationship.
1:05:27Apple, not single-handedly, but to a large degree, the story of Apple manufacturing elsewhere has been that Apple puts in a lot of money up front. You read all the stories back when the unibodies were coming out that they would buy all the CNC machines in the world and use them in all their factories and put the capital up front to build the factories.
1:05:46Apple didn't make China's manufacturing capability, but Apple put a lot of money into it. So what it has done in China is exactly what you were describing, which is put money in to make the kind of manufacturing capacity you want that didn't previously exist to the degree and the size that you needed it to.
1:06:07The thing is, Apple has undertaken that project for a decade now, or maybe almost two. They've put a lot of time and energy into building up that capacity, and they have been diversifying.
1:06:20But I think the main thing that makes me confident that they can do it is they can do what they did in China over the course of another decade. Lots of places in the world do not have the manufacturing skills and the worker base and all the supply chain and everything that China has.
1:06:38You will have to pay part of the money to make that come into being. The good news is that lots of other countries would love to have a huge infusion of US cash to build up manufacturing capacity, to build up high-tech manufacturing capacity that they can therefore then use to sell to other people.
1:06:55So there's no shortage of other countries that would love for you to build your stuff there and give you all those billions of dollars, but it does take a really long time, and you're not going to replace or catch up with China in a one or two year plan.
1:07:12It's going to be over the course of the next decade or so. I think that type of response, while it feels good to say, "Screw you, China. We're putting the Hong Kong mapping app back in the store. Go Apple. We're doing the 'right thing' all the time.
1:07:27We just give the middle finger to the authoritarian state." A hugely less satisfying, but perhaps in the long term more effective response is to accelerate plans to moon your manufacturing out of China.
1:07:46Accelerate means we're going to do it in the next decade instead of two decades from now. That is a response. That is sort of an economic response that is a thing. China will know that Apple is doing it.
1:07:59China will understand that we got this big of a contract last year to do this thing, and now we get less of a contract. You are remaining engaged with the authoritarian state, but you are tapering off your investment and giving it to other countries.
1:08:15Maybe even other neighboring countries. China sees that. This is the power of the incentives that we have. Our power is not, "We can say 'Screw you, China' at any point." We don't have that power. Apple doesn't have that power. The world doesn't have that power.
1:08:29But Apple and the world does have the power to say, "Maybe less of that. Less of China. Less of doing stuff in there. That's our power." If they want to say, "Hey, Apple, come back to China," then you can have a discussion. This is the sort of economic form of diplomacy.
1:08:46Actual geopolitical diplomacy, like blowing people up in wars and territory or whatever, is a different thing. Today, most of that happens over the course of who's going to get what contract to build what thing for what company. It's sort of a much more crass form of negotiation, but that's the way things are done.
1:09:04That is the power Apple and the world has. It is a more boring and much less satisfying and much more slow-motion form of power. In the meantime, China's power over the rest of the world is much more immediate, but not as powerful as it has been discussed in the week with discussing things with China.
1:09:27For most of our life, or for at least half of our lives, China has had a huge influence over the movies that get made in Hollywood because Hollywood wants to sell movies in China, and China doesn't want movies that make China look bad.
1:09:41So it's just been a thing for years and years. It used to be just a comical thing like, "Oh, you know, in this movie they did this thing because it plays better in China," or, "They took this out because China doesn't like that," or... And it seems kind of funny and weird, but eventually you're like, "This is not a great situation. Why is the media we're making in Hollywood being bent to the will of an authoritarian state in the outside of the world?"
1:10:04And it's like, "Well, so we can sell the movie over there because the international box office is huge and they have a lot of people who go to the movies," and that's the answer, but it's not a great answer.
1:10:12But that's an immediate thing, that China makes it known, "Hey, we're not going to show your movie if you say bad things about us or do things that we don't like."
1:10:23And that means immediately the people who are making a giant blockbuster movie for $200 million in Hollywood, China says, "Jump," they say, "How high?" It's small stakes, but it happens immediately, whereas Apple slowly transitioning its manufacturing to places other than China over the next decade or two, hugely less satisfying, way slower, not as dramatic.
1:10:44And in the meantime, Apple needs to explain why it's doing what China wants, try to come up with reasoning for its moves that fits in with the ethos that Casey was describing.
1:10:56"Hey, Apple, I thought you were the think different, do good things for the world" type thing. It's difficult to explain.
1:11:04And not only difficult to explain, it's not entirely sure that it's right. I was saying that I wasn't willing to say the total lack of engagement with China was the right answer.
1:11:12I'm not sure it's the right answer or the wrong answer. Apple could laboriously explain what I just described and it could end up being the wrong answer. No one knows exactly how things are going to go.
1:11:22The history of the world has showed us anything. It's not easy to predict how these things are going to go down. Often they hinge on very small, stupid things, including apps getting rejected and whatever is happening with Hong Kong and everything.
1:11:36So there are no easy solutions here, but I agree with Marco. I think I said as much when we first discussed this in Slack a couple weeks ago.
1:11:46And I'm sure neither of us are out ahead of Apple on this. Apple surely has known for a long time and certainly knows now that they should be finding alternatives.
1:11:58They made the original trash can in Texas or whatever. Obviously that's a silly low-volume thing.
1:12:06But they made all eight of them there.
1:12:07Yeah. But the fact that things like that exist, part of it is part of the US political system and all that garbage.
1:12:13But they're increasing manufacturing in India. Apple is doing this already. Because it is unsatisfying and slow, you might think, "Oh, Apple needs to start right now and get out of China."
1:12:27I think they're already doing that as fast as they can. Just as fast as they can is really slow. And that's just a guess.
1:12:35And in the meantime, Apple has to put out press releases saying, "We're banning the app that shows you where police are because of reasons."
1:12:42And it's not satisfying and it doesn't feel good. But there's no easy solutions here. I wish I could tell you exactly what everybody should do.
1:12:51All I can tell you is what probably Apple's best bet is and probably essentially what they already are doing.
1:12:57And then we just have to cross our fingers and hope tanks don't roll into Hong Kong and the whole world blows up.
1:13:03And in the meantime, we've got to deal with authoritarian exports from China infiltrating our country to mix in with, as Marco pointed out, our own homegrown brand of authoritarianism.
1:13:14And we're back to Breaking Bad again, aren't we? This is a not too good episode.
1:13:19That's true. This geopolitical climate isn't making me happy, Casey.
1:13:24Let me ask both of you, and I'll start with Jon, if you could snap your fingers and you could either make Apple completely unreliable, no longer reliant on Intel at all,
1:13:39or you could snap your fingers and make Apple not reliant on China at all. And let's assume that it's magic.
1:13:44And I know you love these, Jon. It's magic and nothing else changes. There's no penalties that you can see.
1:13:51It's just you snap your fingers. Neither Intel is not a problem or China's not a problem. Which do you do?
1:13:56China, easy. Apple's barely reliant on Intel as it is. And within a few years, they'll be off of Intel entirely anyway.
1:14:02China, China is so much harder problem. Apple's basically already off of Intel for practically...
1:14:07Inside Apple, where things are five years ahead of where they are outside Apple, Intel is gone.
1:14:12That's a bold statement. Yeah, I'm with Jon on that one.
1:14:15Do you really think Intel's gone in five years from now, Apple? Yeah, I think so.
1:14:19I really hope so. Our freaking phone is faster than all their Macs. Come on.
1:14:23And maybe not totally 100% gone, but I think very few of their products will be left running Intel processors in five years.
1:14:30Yeah, I mean, they've done most of... We're talking about how hard it is to do the China thing.
1:14:33They've done most of the hard work for getting off of Intel. Where are they going to get their chips from?
1:14:39They're going to make them themselves. They own and control them. Are those chips good? Yes, they're really good.
1:14:44All that's left is the, "Okay, now we're transitioning and here's the transition strategy," which Apple has done before.
1:14:50The hard part was, if you had mentioned this before Apple had the iPhone, they had Intel Macs.
1:14:56They want to get off Intel. Who are they going to use for their chips and their Macs? AMD?
1:15:00And you're like, "Well, what if Apple makes their own chips?" And everyone would laugh and laugh.
1:15:04But we're way past that now. That problem is mostly solved. Whereas the China thing, you would really need a magic genie finger-snapping thing.
1:15:13Because Apple, I feel like, is just in the early stages of trying to deal with that.
1:15:19And in the meantime, I'm being optimistic and saying, "Of course, Apple wants to do the right thing."
1:15:24There are huge powers, as Marco pointed out, on the other side of this saying, "What are you doing? Don't get out of China.
1:15:30Just make the authoritarian state happy because they manufacture things really well and cheaply.
1:15:34And we want you to keep doing that because we're plutocrats who all we care about is our investment and we have billions of dollars in Apple stock.
1:15:41So don't do that." That exists. That's a real thing. As much as any individual leader at Apple may want to do the right thing,
1:15:49as Marco said, the board could ditch them and replace them with someone who's more likely to bend to China's will.
1:15:59Those forces exist within our country and have to be dealt with just like anything else.
1:16:06Also, first of all, a couple other quick follow-up items here. Number one, I think we are closer to dropping intel than we might think.
1:16:17Because look at how much stuff got removed from Catalina. Look at how much legacy cruft that the operating system has been dropping over the last couple of years,
1:16:26and especially this year. If you were doing an architecture transition pretty soon, you would want as little legacy stuff around as possible.
1:16:33You would want all the apps that you'd have to support being built using modern tools and things like that.
1:16:38So that's step number one. Item number two here is I think one of the exacerbating factors in the most recent dust-up with Apple in China,
1:16:49with the HTML Live app, is that we don't have sideloading in the app store, or in iOS devices rather.
1:16:57Part of that app's removal, and again, I'm sorry, I don't know anything about the politics behind any of this.
1:17:04I should, but I don't, and I'm sorry. But part of the problem with the app's removal is that you have no other alternative.
1:17:12Now, you do have their web app, and apparently I've been told their web app is pretty good, and so it's kind of moot that Apple removed the app from the app store,
1:17:20because the web app can still be used for the same purpose, apparently I've been told.
1:17:23But the fact is, we don't have sideloading on iOS devices, and I don't know that Apple will ever do that.
1:17:32I would consider it fairly unlikely, but that is one kind of relief valve that if they needed one, they could pull it.
1:17:40Where they could just start allowing sideloaded software with certain restrictions, maybe it's notarization, who knows what.
1:17:48But certain restrictions so that they could still do an expert type kind of blacklist thing, and blacklist obvious malware,
1:17:55but that they would not be running everything through the app store, and therefore not even be putting themselves in the position of having to block apps,
1:18:04for certain government requests. And sure, the Chinese government could then just go to the web host that was hosting the app and make them block it.
1:18:12Yes, that is true, but at least it wouldn't be on Apple. And so that is one relief valve again.
1:18:19I don't think they're ever going to pull it, but they have, by putting themselves in the position of being the gatekeeper to all software on iOS,
1:18:27they then also put themselves directly in the position of having to deal with stuff like this. And if they weren't the only gatekeeper for all software,
1:18:35they would remove themselves from the business of having to deal with a lot of this crap.
1:18:39Apple could, I mean Apple has, I imagine, been of two minds internally about this for a long time, but it's like a struggle.
1:18:47It's like, "Oh, the advantages are just too much, we can't allow sideloading." They could be "helped out" by, for example, the US government,
1:18:56adding that with these ongoing antitrust things, that they have to allow sideloading. And that kind of solves one of Apple's difficult problems,
1:19:03in that we never knew whether we could do it before, keeping everything closed was like a problem, and it put us in all sorts of binds,
1:19:09and now it's like, "Well, we don't have a choice." The US government says, "You can't do that, so we won't."
1:19:13And we get the benefits that you just described without having to make that difficult decision, which may or may not be the right,
1:19:21basically, if you're allowed to not have sideloading, it may actually be the right decision for Apple to not have sideloading.
1:19:27But if you're not allowed to forbid sideloading, Apple's problem is solved. It's like, "Well, we have no choice."
1:19:34And again, it's an American company, subject to American laws, you can do different things, but I feel like that would be somewhat of a relief for Apple,
1:19:42like taking that choice away. I'm sure they don't see it that way, I'm sure they don't see increased government regulation as the answer to any of their problems,
1:19:48but from the outside, and in general, in American corporate history, when companies get too large and powerful,
1:19:57government regulation is often the only way to make things better, because you can't rely on the companies to regulate themselves.
1:20:06Too many things are aligned against them being good at regulating themselves. That's the role of government.
1:20:13Whether we're at that point with Apple, we'll have a whole lot of discussion when these antitrust stuffs roll on,
1:20:18and whether or not we'd agree with any individual case that's going up against them, but I feel like part of the, and not just Apple, all the large tech companies,
1:20:26they're not going to solve these problems themselves. They are producing more and more difficult problems for themselves,
1:20:33because their path to power has led them in that direction, and they're not going to turn from it unless some other influence pushes them in that direction.
1:20:42And maybe dealing with China is not enough, but the US government is saying, "You can't do that anymore."
1:20:48Or like, "We can either break you up, or you can allow sideloading." Apple would be like, "Sideloading, sure, great, we'll do it."
1:20:54There's all sorts of scenarios in which Apple could be convinced that it is suddenly in their best interest to make a deal with the US government to allow sideloading.
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1:22:56Alright, let's do some Ask ATP.
1:23:01Chris Wright wants to know, "Will progress bars or time remaining estimations ever become broadly more accurate, linear, and consistent with smooth animation from 0 to 100%?
1:23:11And if not, would you care to explain some of the computational reasons why?"
1:23:15Oh, this is a good one.
1:23:18So, I mean, the computational... So the answer is no.
1:23:22The time remaining bars and progress bars will never be incredibly accurate on a broad scale.
1:23:28And the main reasons why come down to unpredictable tasks and lazy programmers.
1:23:36And neither of those are ever going away.
1:23:38So unpredictable tasks would include things like if you have to fetch something over a network.
1:23:45So, for instance, like a progress bar for loading a webpage.
1:23:48You have no idea how long it's going to take.
1:23:52Not to mention the fact that every new piece of data you fetch, like in a webpage, if you're loading a webpage progressively,
1:23:59every new thing that you load might then add something that needs to be loaded to it.
1:24:04So you might all of a sudden read in, "Oh, here's a script tag, let me load the script," and then that script tag adds other scripts,
1:24:10or adds images that need to be loaded or something.
1:24:12And so you don't know until you finish loading something whether you have more stuff to load.
1:24:18And you don't know how long it will take to load each thing because you're pulling it over the network.
1:24:22So there's that whole category of things that like, this is never going to be perfectly predictable.
1:24:27You can make estimates, but it's never going to be great.
1:24:32And then there's lazy programmers.
1:24:34The reality is, there's not a lot of both skill to do things incredibly right at a level like that, for a progress meter to be accurate,
1:24:46and there's also not a lot of economic incentive for project managers and bosses to allocate resources to engineering time to making the progress bars better.
1:24:59The reality is that all this stuff is dictated by time and economics and everything,
1:25:05and nobody's business is depending on those progress bars being accurate.
1:25:10And so the engineers will always have things that their bosses are telling them that they should do instead of working on that.
1:25:16And many of the engineers who would do things that would give a progress bar its percentage to show also aren't that good at estimating things,
1:25:26and might not have the skill to do it right in the first place.
1:25:30So the combination of lazy programmers or slash programmers who aren't given the power to do it right,
1:25:41and the unpredictability of many of these tasks, it's never going to be great.
1:25:47I think progress bars, as we see them now, not only are about as good as we're ever likely to see them again,
1:25:56but are actually worse than they used to be in some ways, because I feel like now we have even more tasks than ever that do network requests,
1:26:03or that do more complex things.
1:26:05And the era of mobile has introduced the era of the spinner, and the spinner is not a progress indicator, it is simply an activity indicator.
1:26:16It doesn't tell you how complete something is, it just tells you something's happening.
1:26:19And most people are fine with that.
1:26:22And as long as the spinner keeps animating, most people don't think it's a problem, like most customers are fine with that.
1:26:27And so we actually now have fewer operations that show progress bars.
1:26:32Most of them will just show a spinner until they're done, no matter how long it takes.
1:26:36I think there's two more things.
1:26:37First, I would give much heavier weight to unpredictability, because I feel like that is the real reason why you're never going to be satisfied.
1:26:42But there's two other reasons.
1:26:43One is user experience, and Chris said it in the thing, like the expectation of a progress bar, traditional progress bar, is that it's linear, consistent, smooth animation.
1:26:55One thing that violates that is if suddenly your progress bar goes backwards.
1:26:59You're like, "What do you mean, backwards? I was 10%, and now I'm 5%, this thing is broken."
1:27:04But as Marco pointed out, you don't know how far you are.
1:27:07You could be doing a thing and suddenly you have much more work than you thought.
1:27:10If you were to proportionally scale the new amount of work that you know you have to do, you thought you had to do 10 things, now you have to do 100, suddenly the progress bar goes backwards.
1:27:17People hate that.
1:27:18The second thing is impatient users.
1:27:21People want things to be done fast.
1:27:23The more work you do to get an accurate progress bar, the longer your task takes.
1:27:28There's no better example than this than doing any file operation in the Finder, where it tries really hard to count up all the things that it's going to have to do to give a better, more accurate progress bar.
1:27:38And you're like, "Oh my god, Finder, just start doing the thing. I don't care how many things there are."
1:27:43Look, let me tell you, it's millions. There are millions of things.
1:27:46Whereas if you go to the command line and do rm -rf directory,
1:27:50rm does not traverse the directory tree to find out how many things it has to delete to give you a progress bar, it just starts deleting crap.
1:27:56Which is why the Finder, one of the many reasons the Finder takes a really long time to do operations on large amounts of things,
1:28:00it's spending time to try to give you the best progress bar you can get.
1:28:04People don't want that.
1:28:06They want the thing to take the smallest amount of time.
1:28:09They also want a progress bar, but as Marco pointed out, if you give them a spinner and do the task twice as fast, it's way better than spending half your time figuring out all the work you're going to have to do,
1:28:19like preflighting it all to get an accurate progress bar and then marching it through.
1:28:23That's not worthwhile.
1:28:25And the other thing, someone in the chat reminded me of the original Aqua progress bars, which I thought were a fairly, like many things in Aqua, they were a fairly ingenious innovation.
1:28:35People might not remember these because things are no longer candy and lickable, but they were a typical progress bar, like a horizontal bar that fills, it would fill with this blue candy colored looking cylinder thing.
1:28:45But inside the blue candy colored cylinder was like a wavy pattern that scrolled within the cylinder, which was a nice example of a single element, a progress bar going from left to right,
1:28:59that also incorporates the spinner thing saying, is my computer frozen? Is this job still going?
1:29:05Because the progress bar isn't getting any bigger, but because that texture is animating, it communicates to the user, don't worry, even though it's a lie most of the time, don't worry.
1:29:13The thing that you wanted to do, we're still trying to do it.
1:29:17It's just even though the progress bar isn't moving, the computer is still working.
1:29:20It's basically a user reassuring idle animation, lets them know that it's progressing and not frozen, even though again, that texture animation probably just happens automatically.
1:29:30For all you know, the job could be frozen. I thought that was a clever innovation.
1:29:33Our progress bars today on the Mac and elsewhere tend not to do that.
1:29:37But anyway, yeah, it's never going to be good because you can't predict the future and you don't want it to be good.
1:29:42Trust me, just try deleting a folder with a million files in it in the finder and you'll wish for no progress bar or a progress bar that starts at zero and goes to 100 when it's done.
1:29:50Those really were beautiful progress bars though.
1:29:52They were likable.
1:29:54Charles Clements writes, I'm curious as to your app of choice for composing the written word for things like blog post reference notes and other persistent writing.
1:30:02Also, do you tend to write using markdown, regular plain text, rich text, or heaven forbid, Microsoft Word.
1:30:07Lastly, do you always use a heavy device for your writing like a Mac laptop or desktop or might you use an iPad on occasion.
1:30:12This and the next question are the continuation of John putting in Ask ATP things that I thought I could answer very quickly via email or tweet.
1:30:21So this I have already answered for Charles, but I will answer for everyone.
1:30:25When I write blog posts, I do it in Visual Studio Code, which probably strikes a lot of people as really weird.
1:30:30But it's a really good IDE for JavaScript and my website is Node and it also is very good at markdown and the blog posts are all written in markdown.
1:30:41Generally speaking, if I'm doing anything except Apple Notes, I'm using markdown and I'm generally doing it in Visual Studio Code on my computer or a working copy, which is a really excellent Git client on the iPad.
1:30:53And that's usually where I'm doing that sort of thing and my long term storage, if not my website, is typically Apple Notes.
1:31:00Marco, how about you?
1:31:02Anything that is code that is not an Xcode, so obviously I write my source code for my app in Xcode, but like code, other types of code, blog posts, anything that I would have to write in markdown, that I will almost always do in TextMate on a Mac, whether it's desktop or laptop.
1:31:18Although I don't do a lot of blog posting anymore, but you know, when I do, it's almost always TextMate.
1:31:24When I'm writing other things, I'm usually using Apple Notes and that I can and often do edit on other platforms.
1:31:33I often will use my iPad to write out a big note or my phone and it's nice to have that synced and everything.
1:31:39I never got into the various, that whole category of Merlin Dropbox text editor apps, that you would have a folder in Dropbox and it would sync all your text documents and you'd be able to edit them on iOS and the Mac and everything.
1:31:54I never got into any of those that heavily. It never made it a part of my workflow.
1:31:58I never had a synced text base before until I got really into Apple Notes. Apple Notes is my main home for most text and it's only when I have to get into either server-side code stuff or writing markdown that I dropped to TextMate now.
1:32:16And then therefore, that allows me to be more device agnostic and having everything synced everywhere is really useful.
1:32:22John? The answer is boring. It's actually kind of like Casey's. I use BBEdit for everything.
1:32:28Everything I've ever written on the web has been done in BBEdit. All my programming is done in BBEdit for the most part.
1:32:33I don't like or use markdown. I write in plain text or for when I'm making something that's going to be HTML, I actually write it in HTML.
1:32:44It's horrifying how that is for modern people. That's what I do.
1:32:48I think the last time I used Word was like writing papers for school. I didn't write them in BBEdit because I had to print them in a proportional font and have all that stuff.
1:32:58I will not write on an iOS device if I could possibly help it. I don't have a keyboard for my iOS device. I'll write on the iPad on-screen keyboard, emails and stuff like that.
1:33:09I would never choose to write anything long form there and I would avoid writing anything long form if I could possibly help with them. I think the most writing I've ever done on an iPad was when I used to go to WWDC and I would bring a Bluetooth keyboard with me.
1:33:20Back before iPads had fancy keyboards, I would just bring an Apple desktop Bluetooth keyboard and that's what I would type on. But a laptop is a better solution for that.
1:33:29I don't recall ever having seen you do that. That must have looked pretty funny. I saw it. The ones that took the AA batteries, the tube Bluetooth.
1:33:41I don't recall having seen you do that. I'm sure I did but I don't remember it. Can you summarize before the internet yells at you and I'm one of them? Why don't you like Markdown?
1:33:52I don't like having to write and then transform. I don't like the transformation compilation stuff. I grew up writing HTML. I wrote HTML from almost the earliest time that anyone was writing HTML. I'm very comfortable writing HTML.
1:34:11I don't have to write it all manually. Bb edit has lots of tools and keyboard shortcuts to make it easier. I don't mind it and it is exactly what I want it to be. I'm not a fan of writing a weird, funny syntax that gets transformed into HTML.
1:34:28I find it more mentally taxing and more work than doing it the other way. I wouldn't be using Markdown for its intended purpose. Markdown's intended purpose is that you can write it in Markdown and it's perfectly fine looking at it as is.
1:34:44You don't have to transform it into something else. The idea is you write it in Markdown, it's human consumable already. But that's not a use case that I have. I don't have a use case where I want to write "styled organized text" that is consumable as is.
1:34:58Everything I'm writing is going to be viewed in a web browser, in which case I need it to be HTML, or its code or something like that. So when I did all my writing, I would write it in HTML, which I find perfectly natural. I would proofread it in HTML with Bb edit's live preview window.
1:35:14You can get a window right next to your text window that's showing you what it looks like rendered in the website template with all the styling. It's not like I'm staring at Ahref and trying to parse out the stuff like that. I can see it's like a wussy wig editor, but you do all your editing in the other window.
1:35:30Anyway, my workflow for Bb edit works with me and I don't have a place in it for Markdown.
1:35:38Whatever works for you, man, that just strikes me as totally bananas. But you do you. Let people like things. Tom Hartnett writes, "We are considering getting an iMac to be a family computer. We're not planning to use it for Plex or any other server, etc. Do we really need a UPS? I would use a decent search protector."
1:35:56In replying to this tweet, I basically said, "It's under $100. Why the hell wouldn't you?" And I think, if I recall correctly, Tom had said he didn't realize that they were that cheap. And I think that was kind of the end of the conversation.
1:36:10But I absolutely say, you don't have to get a super fancy UPS. It doesn't have to last, or at least if you live in most modern areas where power doesn't fail that frequently. If you live somewhere where you just need to be able to hold your computer over for 5 to 10 minutes, I don't know why you wouldn't.
1:36:30Most decent UPSs you can hook up via USB to your computer and if you install the appropriate software, it'll actually tell the computer, "Hey, I'm running out of battery power." You might want to shut yourself down.
1:36:42And then the computer or Synology, for example, will shut itself down when the UPS is running out of battery power.
1:36:49Marco, how do you feel about this? Do you have a whole house generator in New York? Or what are you doing in order to keep your power supply uninterruptible?
1:36:59We don't have any kind of backup power or anything, but I do have UPSs on desktops. So that's kind of my rule. Any kind of desktop or important server infrastructure, I put a UPS on.
1:37:11Not because it's super necessary, but just because it's really annoying if your computer just all of a sudden turns off while you're working on it and you have unsafe stuff and you lose your work.
1:37:20And as you mentioned, UPSs are not very expensive, especially compared to the price of the computers that they are plugged into. They also happen usually, if you get a good one, which is more than $100, but if you get a good one, you can get some fancier power filtering and power protection circuitry than you might be able to get out of a basic circuit strip.
1:37:41So you do have a little bit more protection there from risks, but I don't think it's the kind of risk that most people have. So it's mostly just for convenience. Like with a laptop or an iOS device, if you're having a big windstorm like what's going through here right now, and the power goes out for a split second, you don't need the UPS to last an hour, but it would be nice if it lasts two minutes.
1:38:06I think most power outages in most places are not long, but you might have a blip or 30 seconds where it's out or something like that. So it's really nice to have some things so you don't just lose your work.
1:38:21And because they're relatively inexpensive and last relatively a long time, eventually the batteries wear out, but they last relatively a long time, then it's generally a good idea for desktops. And I feel like most people don't even face this problem because most people are using laptops and iOS devices, but if you're using desktops, it's nice.
1:38:40So I put all of our networking gear on it as well. So I mentioned earlier when I'm talking about my network upgrade, I have all of the router, the switch, the Fios modem, and all my wireless access points, all of them are on the UPS, or on a different UPS than my computer obviously, but they're all on a big one in the garage, the Synology.
1:39:04So that way if there is a power outage, as long as Verizon also keeps their service up optically, I still have an internet connection, which is nice.
1:39:12John?
1:39:13I just replaced the battery in my Synology UPS. Yeah, the answer is get one for your desktop stuff. They're a little bit of a hassle in that they do have batteries and you do need to replace them when they wear out and eventually the UPS surge protection stuff in it will also wear out, but they're so worth it.
1:39:29I mean, depending on how stable your power is, my power is very stable. Once every few years we get a flicker, but a flicker will take out what you're doing.
1:39:37And not to mention like sort of brownouts and undervolts like this electronic equipment tends to be finicky.
1:39:44And even if it's something as simple as, you know, playing on your PlayStation, that's not hooked up to a UPS and the power dips just long enough for it to, you know, blip off or something like it's it ruins your day.
1:39:58There's also the theory, I think Marguerite pointed out, that you're conditioning the voltage, you can get a fancy one that tries to make your power cleaner.
1:40:05And honestly, the power supplies in your devices help with that as well.
1:40:09Yeah, it's no brainer. They're cheap. Get one. It is difficult if you're getting a big fancy computer, have lots of stuff hooked up to size it correctly, because if you do the math, it'll be like, I need to buy the super expensive UPS.
1:40:20That's true, but I've gotten by for many years with a massively undersized UPS that gives me just enough time to panic shut down.
1:40:29It's like, it starts making this noise like, oh my God, I got to shut down. I got to save. Like it's all you need is a couple seconds to save and shut down.
1:40:36And as for OS integration, Mac OS has integration at this point where you don't need to install any software.
1:40:41Most UPSs you get that have a USB connection, you just hook it up and the Mac will understand it's UPS and you can configure it to shut itself down.
1:40:49As case it's Synology to the same thing. I didn't realize that.
1:40:53If I lose power on my Mac Pro that's sitting on my desk right now, my UPS will scream bloody murder.
1:41:01My Mac will immediately shut down and I will have just enough time to shut down because it is not like my power supply in this thing.
1:41:07What is like 450 watt or something? And my new Mac Pro, I'm going to have to get a new UPS, by the way.
1:41:12Like it's a thing like surge protectors also wear out over time as well.
1:41:16So a good rule of thumb is when you get a new computer, especially if you waited 10 years, get a new UPS, get a new surge trip.
1:41:23I've actually gone through several UPSs. They don't last as long as my computer apparently.
1:41:28Nothing lasts as long as your computer.
1:41:31That's true. Yeah, anyway, get a UPS. It's worth it.
1:41:36Yeah. And it is very important what you just said that surge protectors don't protect forever.
1:41:41There is a thing in them that basically it gives itself up to protect you.
1:41:47And then after that you have no more protection.
1:41:49A good surge protector will actually stop the power going through it if that thing ever wears out.
1:41:55I'm sorry, I don't know the details of what these things are called.
1:41:58But like the good ones will actually, you know, most of them will have like a light that's like you currently have protection if this light is on, but you never look at it, right?
1:42:06So the good ones will actually cut off power if the protection ever fails to protect you.
1:42:11That way you know, "Oh, this stopped working. I need to replace it."
1:42:15That's a good thing to look into.
1:42:16Oh, and when I said scream bloody murder, some of them will actually make noise.
1:42:19Like that's how I knew my UPS battery downstairs was bad because the UPS was screaming.
1:42:24Screaming with the warning light that says, "My UPS battery is bad."
1:42:27Like and the battery, replacing the battery in the UPS is way cheaper than buying an entire, like there's like 30 bucks or something.
1:42:32I replaced them. They're these little square lead acid things.
1:42:36So they're, it's decidedly low tech and silly, but worthwhile and again much cheaper than having to buy a new UPS.
1:42:42Yeah, it's basically little car batteries for you.
1:42:45And yeah, I will put a link in the show notes.
1:42:47I, after a while, I'm getting like the big APC brand ones.
1:42:52I've had a lot of very good luck in recent years with CyberPower.
1:42:56I'll put a link in the show notes to the line that I keep buying.
1:42:58I've now bought I think three of these or four of them over the last four years or so and they've been wonderful.
1:43:04So I'll put a link in the show notes.
1:43:05Thank you to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Casper, and ExpressVPN.
1:43:09And we will talk to you next week.
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1:43:47E Y L I S S so that's Casey List M A R C O A R M N T Marco Arman S I R A C U S A
1:44:00I thought of this too late because it's in the after show we can't use the title but
1:44:19what I should have said with the phrase what I was looking for when talking about China
1:44:22was mutually assured consumption. Nice. That is very good. And it was right on the tip
1:44:28of my tongue but I couldn't pull it out so I just moved on. So what you're really trying
1:44:32to say is you're trying to challenge Marco to make that work somewhere just drop that
1:44:36in somewhere in the episode. No I gotta Google that someone already must have thought of
1:44:40that that seems like an obvious thing. Did you mean mutually assured destruction? No
1:44:46Google I didn't. How was that? Do I have to put it in double quotes? Let's see. Google
1:44:53on I O S if you go to the Google web Google dot com I O S in the browser there is a and
1:45:00it happens if you just type in the address bar and like mobile safari you just type a
1:45:03search phrase there you end up at a Google search results page right. Whatever you typed
1:45:07in the address bar like I just typed mutually assured consumption ends up in this little
1:45:11rounded Google search field within the web page you originally typed in the address bar
1:45:17maybe it's still in the address bar I forget but that text is also in the little rounded
1:45:21search area on Google dot com right. That little rounded search area I cannot figure
1:45:27out how to use. I want to like fix a typo or add a word and for whatever reason like
1:45:35I'm like my hands and fingers and brains are on autopilot and I'm just trying to like you
1:45:41know like I'm not thinking you know when you edit text in I O S you're doing for so long
1:45:44you're not thinking like take your finger put it on the screen put the insertion like
1:45:50you just do it what you're thinking is oh I need to add ed to the end of that word so
1:45:53you you initiate the add ed to the end of that word I O S macro and what happens instead
1:45:59on the Google dot com page is it like does another search or searches for the first auto
1:46:04completion or like it doesn't behave like a text field and so that happens it does some
1:46:09weird thing like it auto completes to the first guess on what I meant and goes off and
1:46:14does it and I noticed that it does it and I hit the back button and then I really concentrate
1:46:18and I said now engage your brain whatever it did before make it not do that and add
1:46:24the ed to the end of that word and very often I can't figure out how to do it I'm like what
1:46:27does it want me to do can do I tap and hold do I tap once how do I edit the text in this
1:46:34search field and I get so frustrated with it and I fail and what I end up doing is making
1:46:39a new tab and typing the correctly typed thing into the address bar mobile safari again I
1:46:45feel like I should spend time and like decode how that thing's supposed to work like it's
1:46:49obviously thwarting something that I'm either consciously or unconsciously doing I can't
1:46:54friggin figure out how to edit text in that thing I mean I gotta say I never see this
1:46:58problem yeah cuz I I use duck duck go by default everywhere and also when I have to edit a
1:47:05search or refine what I typed I just go back to the address bar and do it there like to
1:47:10me like the address bar is my search box even after the fact I never go to the one on the
1:47:16page and either Google or talk to and edit it there I always edit in the address bar
1:47:20they'll try it one of these days like see I may be the only person who tries to edit
1:47:24maybe it's not editable like it like there's this confluence of like fake text field auto
1:47:30correct auto assumption plus the the locality of the X thing to clear yeah it could just
1:47:37be a lag thing cuz I know that I'm doing it in a particular thing it's like it works fine
1:47:40what's the problem like something happens where like it's not responsive or it's loading
1:47:45something or I hit I tap in the wrong spot with my fat finger and I get into this frustrating
1:47:50loop that I can't figure out anyway that's my complaint about Google for the day mutually
1:47:57assured consumption did I spell it goes spell it right and I'm on the desktop I can edit
1:48:05things easily well like it's not like iOS or iOS web browsers have problems with text
1:48:12fields I'm sure it's the Google has overrode this with a thousand lines of JavaScript to
1:48:16do all sorts of crazy crap yeah it is not a standard search field yeah so the phrase
1:48:21definitely appears in many things they probably reinvented typing freaking Google remember
1:48:26the JavaScript scrolling those were the days they still do that like scrolljacking like
1:48:30that's still a thing Apple no that's GPU accelerated so it's yeah right yeah Apple's product pages
1:48:36always do scrolljacking it drives me nuts like what was wrong with web pages we had
1:48:41like so much of the web today like I was using a thing earlier and it was like it was some
1:48:47like you know Ajax progression through states of a form instead of just using forms and
1:48:52you could tell by the browser activity that it was loading almost instantly but I had
1:48:56to wait for an animation of the page to fade in on each step and just like we have gone
1:49:02backwards here this is this is not better we have all the technology in the world now
1:49:07all the networks are super fast now and we're just wasting it all on superfluous animations
1:49:14and loading massive like you know 10 megs of JavaScript you do all sorts of crazy crap
1:49:18it's like the web sucks right now like it's terrible so much of web design is just awful
1:49:25and it's not the fault of the technology it's the fault of the people like the technology
1:49:30is there to make great website experiences super easily super lightweight but people
1:49:36aren't using it that way because that's not like what's currently in fashion what's currently
1:49:39in fashion is to waste as much as possible and make fancy things that don't work well
1:49:44and suck up tons of power and take time and break half the time like what was wrong with
1:49:49just web pages they were great why did we have to mess them all up we have the same
1:49:54discussion back when like the first of apples scrolljacking product pages appeared remember
1:49:59that I don't remember what the product was but like I think it was the 2013 Mac Pro was
1:50:04it was that the first one that was certainly one of the bad ones it was probably definitely
1:50:07probably I mean the curse certainly the current Mac Pro all the product pages do it now and
1:50:10the thing is for those type of things I've come around to the idea that as a sort of
1:50:17brochure cool visual experience it's a fun thing for me I still think it's wrong for
1:50:22almost everybody because normal people are not appreciating the fun visual thing they
1:50:28just think this web page doesn't work like a normal web page therefore it seems broken
1:50:32and I'm confused about what to do which is why it's the wrong decision to do for a public
1:50:35facing web page but the people making it are I think in the same mindset as me is that
1:50:41you know it is a cool wizzy thing and if you are not confused by that it can make a an
1:50:47appealing visual presentation you still hope that there's a normal page somewhere with
1:50:51actual text on it for you to find the information you want but for sort of like a you know for
1:50:56as an advertisement it worked but I feel like it's the wrong move because nobody like your
1:51:01web page works different than every other web page I don't like your web page like yeah
1:51:05but doesn't it look cool it's like yeah but I'm confused about how it works or what it
1:51:09does or is there more of the page or I would never have guessed that by scrolling more
1:51:13this thing would be revealed and popped up and is the top of the page gone now it's like
1:51:18it breaks people's mental model of how the web works and if enough of those things come
1:51:22along people just throw up their hands and we're back to like flash all over again where
1:51:26everything is an unpredictable you know custom UI in a square in the middle of a web page
1:51:30and you have no idea what you're gonna get I feel like we're already there like like
1:51:33you know like when when flash intros became a thing like in fact forever ago they very
1:51:39quickly went out of style because we all recognized this is just a waste of people's time and
1:51:44bandwidth nobody wants to sit around and wait for this just give me the information we don't
1:51:47need to be brought on a ride and I feel like that should have happened with all the scroll
1:51:54jacking stuff five years ago and just hasn't and I don't know why it hasn't but for some
1:51:59reason this is all still common and acceptable remember when flash like we got rid of like
1:52:04the the entry whatever I forget there was there was a word for them like the splash
1:52:08screen but like anyway we got rid of that but still they persisted essentially entire
1:52:13websites that were themselves custom-made flash applications like there was no waiting
1:52:17to get to it where you got to was this inscrutable weird flash doohickey right that's where we
1:52:23are with the web stuff is very often like you're not asked to wade through something
1:52:27to get to something the thing you're trying to get to is itself a weird nonsensical sort
1:52:33of it's not nonsensical but it's like it's it's unlike what we expect as a web page and
1:52:37also mostly there's never any never anything for people to hang their mental hat on like
1:52:47this reminds me of a thing that I understand therefore even though it's different than
1:52:51other web pages because it's like other thing that I understand it's tractable and normally
1:52:57the other thing that I understand is if there's some kind of not normally but like one of
1:53:01the common ways you can give somebody something to hold on to is if there's a physical analog
1:53:07if I can make sense of this here comes spatially and physically speaking oh I see it's kind
1:53:12of like three layers moving past each other and like if you can make heads or tails of
1:53:16it in that way it's still not great but you can figure it out but the problem with mostly
1:53:20scrolljacking pages is there's no real world counterpart with which you're familiar that
1:53:26you can say oh I get it it's just like X right for to give an example carousels named after
1:53:33a thing that has a physical reality and in general even though they're weird in page
1:53:38carousels make sense to people it's left or right a series that you can envision it as
1:53:43either a circle or as a long horizontal line of pictures and many many websites especially
1:53:47if they have lots of photos have carousels I think people accept those it's not like
1:53:52a page it's a it's a different internal element but there is a real world analog that people
1:53:58understand and we accept them but that's scrolljack mac scrolljack mac pro page try explain to
1:54:05me what those layers are and how they interact with each other and you see it in New York
1:54:08Times stories all the time people always like ooh and ahhing over them like this makes no
1:54:11sense I have no idea how much movement on the scroll bar results in how much movement
1:54:16of which elements and how they transform and fade into the foreground and background and
1:54:21twist and turn like all the stories that people like that shows the statistics one screen
1:54:25at a time it's like you've just made the world's most fancy PowerPoint transition with a scroll
1:54:30bar control which I don't I don't think is an upgrade I mean I guess I guess we're saying
1:54:35oh you know I guess some people still do like them but I feel like if I sent that web page
1:54:40to any person who was not into technology or web design they would just consider it
1:54:45a slightly broken and weird web page I know the New York Times infographics can be really
1:54:50good like wasn't the overcast was in one of them recently that I thought was pretty well
1:54:56done and I'm looking at the mac pro page now god help me and it does scrolljack in a few
1:55:03places but it's not nearly as aggressive and obnoxious as it was on the original trash
1:55:08can mac pro because I remember that being bad or am I thinking of the actually the 5k
1:55:13iMac there was something that like you zoomed into a 5k iMac did it too yeah yeah I'm not
1:55:19sure which one was the trash came out first that's totally yeah yeah but one of them like
1:55:23I remember you zoomed into like the disorder maybe zoomed out of the display or something
1:55:27like that and it was just it was clever the first time I saw it but then it was just annoying
1:55:32and I feel like Apple has toned it back a lot which I appreciate because it used to
1:55:36be really really aggressive in years past and now it there's a couple of times where
1:55:42it's a little bit frustrating but generally speaking I don't think it's too bad it's pretty
1:55:46bad
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