311: Mutually Assured Destruction

0:00:00Oh god. I mean, on the one side, a little sliver of me does feel ever so slightly bad,

0:00:06but 99% of me is like, "You f***ers deserve this."

0:00:09Yeah, we'll get to it.

0:00:11Oh god, just such, such obnoxious bastards.

0:00:15Save it, save it, save it. Save it for the show. This is the show we're about to do,

0:00:19including this topic.

0:00:20Save it. Save it. Save it. Save it.

0:00:21Well, because I promise I need to get the obnoxious bits out of my system so I don't

0:00:26say obnoxious s*** on the show.

0:00:28Oh god, it gets me so fired up.

0:00:31Wait, all this time, am I supposed to have been doing that instead of saying, "Oh, I've

0:00:34knocked your stuff on the show?"

0:00:35Well, you say it, then you just edit it out. You just edit out the things that you said

0:00:39that you didn't want to be in.

0:00:40Well, most of them.

0:00:41We should dive right in, and I need to apologize for all three of us, but particularly me.

0:00:48Last episode, we were talking about how the kids these days, the youths, have ways around,

0:00:54you know, or ways to accomplish what basically Instagram close friends does. And I was real

0:00:59smug last week because I knew about this, and I knew the name of this. And I forget

0:01:04exactly what I said, but spoiler alert, it was wrong. So anyway, so I forget what I called

0:01:08it. Maybe I called it fake Instagram or something, but what I was thinking of and couldn't actually

0:01:13emit from my body was Finsta, F-I-N-S-T-A, which does stand for fake Instagram. I can't

0:01:19remember what I called it last week. It doesn't really matter. But yeah, it's Finsta. That

0:01:24is the kind of like casual Instagram that all the youths are doing. And I don't know

0:01:28why I didn't remember that. And I was so smug about it because I was like, oh, I know this.

0:01:32Oh, Friendstagram. Thank you, Brian Mitchell. There's Friendstagram that I said, God, is

0:01:34that right?

0:01:35Well, Friendstagram actually makes sense as a name. Finsta and spam account, both are

0:01:40the opposite of what they mean because like a spam account, it's like where, well, I guess

0:01:44it depends on what you mean by spam, but I feel like it's your fake Instagram is the

0:01:47most real because it's the one where you are the least fake. The actual fake one is the

0:01:52one where you present your beautiful life and spam like implies bad. Yeah. I mean, maybe

0:01:59you're saying if I have a garbage picture, I put it on my spam account. It makes some

0:02:03sense and quantity. There's just a lot of it because you don't care as much to your

0:02:06point. But yeah, I'm with you. Friendstagram does make more sense. Why don't you try that?

0:02:10You can try to make that happen in case you know, it's, it's, that's going to happen right

0:02:13after fetch. Anyway, I apologize that we're all old men and we really screwed that up

0:02:17in this will teach me never to be smug about thinking that I'm not old because I am in

0:02:21date. I did not apologize for being old. I'm a little confused. So is the, is the finsta

0:02:26the one that you show everyone or the one that you show only your friends? No, it's

0:02:30the one you show only your friends. So it doesn't make any sense. But it stands for

0:02:33fake. Yeah, correct. I, yeah, I'm too old to understand this. Kids are dumb. We got

0:02:38to move on. We're, we're too old. I just wanted to apologize for being old. John, stop including

0:02:42me. That's just Marco and Casey are, have a, are self hating old people. I am not. I think

0:02:51it's just that I don't want to speak for Marco, but I'm still clinging to the thought that

0:02:53I have some amount of awareness of what the, what the kids are doing these days. And it's

0:02:57a, no, I don't, I really don't. I just need to embrace it. So anyway, moving on. We talked

0:03:01last week about this quote unquote stage light effect on Mac books and Mac book pros where

0:03:06there's like a series of spotlights. It almost looks like coming from the bottom of the display

0:03:12and anonymous person wrote in and said, I work as a genius at a very busy Apple store.

0:03:16And my colleagues and I triage and repair literally hundreds of Macs a week when there's

0:03:20a genuine manufacturing or design fault that affects a significant portion of devices for

0:03:24a particular model. It is very quickly and unambiguously obvious what it is and where,

0:03:29you know, the exact symptoms and so on and so forth. I'm paraphrasing here. For instance,

0:03:34the keyboard issues in the post 2016 Mac book pros were definitely a real problem. And the

0:03:40eventual, what is it? Repair extension program. That's what, yeah, yeah. Everyone kind of

0:03:45thought that was coming, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so this anonymous genius says, you

0:03:50know, all of us were really honestly baffled about the brouhaha about the stage lighting

0:03:56thing because they apparently have seen no pattern or increased symptoms from their customers

0:04:02and they see a lot of customers. And this individual is actually asked around and apparently

0:04:08nobody really knows what we were talking about last week. Now granted, we were just going

0:04:13off of the news reports that we had read. So maybe we got hoodwinked by some fake news.

0:04:18I don't know.

0:04:19Tim Cynova This type of, we usually don't have access

0:04:21to this type of information because it's not as if Apple has some sort of giant dashboard

0:04:25showing the prevalence of repairs that they're, you know, there's not public information,

0:04:29right? So when we see a story that says there's a problem with Apple product or whatever,

0:04:36the only things we have to judge it by are like how many people do we personally know

0:04:40who that happened to? And we know a lot of people who know a lot of people who use Apple

0:04:42products. So that's something and also the reputation of whatever, you know, website

0:04:47or is that is publishing the information. In this case, this, I forget where this was.

0:04:52Maybe it was Apple insider or something. It's very easy for just one person who has a problem

0:04:56to be angry about it and get it, put it online and make it seem like it's an epidemic. But

0:05:01the, obviously Apple knows for sure. But they're not talking. So having sort of leaks like

0:05:05this from anonymous geniuses, I think they carry a lot of weight, assuming they're actually

0:05:10good. Because, you know, to this person's point, a single store does see hundreds and

0:05:15hundreds of Macs a week. And so that's a pretty good sample size. And then they may not know

0:05:19other people who work in other Apple stores and the word kind of gets around like that.

0:05:23It's not, if there actually is a widespread problem, they are in the best position to

0:05:28know outside of the people who keep the spreadsheets back at Apple. So we'll see if we hear about

0:05:33this problem anymore or if it was just a thing that a few people got and were mad about,

0:05:37it is not an actual epidemic like the keyboard issues.

0:05:41John, you want to tell me about the silence of Siri and other Internet of Things information?

0:05:45Yeah, we got a lot of feedback about my little smart outlet and my experiences with Siri.

0:05:52One thing I was speculating about was I was asking if HomeKit knew what room it was in

0:05:59and if it was using that information to determine whether it talked back to me. Pretty much

0:06:03everybody said, yeah, it should know what room it's in. My HomePod actually is in the

0:06:09same room as the outlets. And in theory, if it's in the same room as the outlets and I

0:06:13ask the HomePod to turn the lights on or off, it shouldn't talk back to me at all. Some

0:06:19people had interesting theories about when HomePod decides to talk back to you. I didn't

0:06:24really test any of these and I'm not sure if they're based on documentation or just

0:06:28like a notion. One person, I think my favorite one, said, "If you're far away or if you

0:06:34yell, it will talk back to you to confirm."

0:06:38Oh, interesting.

0:06:40I don't know if that's true. Like, far away my voice would be faint, but yelling it would

0:06:45be loud? Very confusing. Most people agree, though, if you were in a different room. So

0:06:51if you asked it to turn off or on something that's not in the same room as the HomePod,

0:06:56it will talk back. All that said, my HomePod has always been in the same room as these

0:07:00outlets, and it has talked back to me occasionally. Why? I don't know. So there's this mystery

0:07:04still abound, but in theory, it should be able to do this.

0:07:08Same thing with the other devices, the Amazon Echo devices. They have room awareness. You

0:07:12can place things in a room and in general, they try to be silent or less verbose if you're

0:07:18doing something in the same room. If the thing you're talking to is in the same room as the

0:07:22devices. So that's good to know. In practice, it hasn't talked back to me for a while now,

0:07:27so maybe, I don't know, maybe it's just halting a grudge or it's giving me the silent treatment,

0:07:33but either way, I'm liking it.

0:07:35Moving on, but in the same vein, [bleep] wrote that he was involved in creating a technology

0:07:42known as Wireless Accessory Config, or WAC. This is an Apple technology that allows an

0:07:48app developer to basically load the current Wi-Fi information onto an external device.

0:07:55This was in the context of John saying that, "Oh, my smart outlet, just kind of by magic,

0:08:01figured out what my Wi-Fi information was, etc., etc." He wrote this mechanism, or was

0:08:07involved in this mechanism that does this, and he said, "Apple was sick of the Wi-Fi

0:08:11network dance that we had to go through for these accessories and decided it was a problem

0:08:16worth solving on the platform level. It's available to any MFI partner for both AirPlay

0:08:20and HomeKit accessories, and you can turn on the entitlement for your app in Xcode to

0:08:24allow it to find and configure these accessories as well," which I thought was pretty cool.

0:08:27And apparently, it does automate the whole drop off your Wi-Fi, connect to the device's

0:08:34Wi-Fi, upload the information, and get back on your regular Wi-Fi dance, which is what

0:08:38I had said that I had to do by hand with a lot of this stuff. I didn't realize, because

0:08:43I had seen this happen before, where it just works by magic and you don't have to go

0:08:46to settings and change Wi-Fi access points, whatever. Well, apparently, this is just automating

0:08:53that whole thing, and that was surprising to me. I guess I should have guessed, but

0:08:58I didn't realize it was just automating that whole dance.

0:09:01Yeah, he also provided links to some patents that are related to this type of technology.

0:09:07It's got a name, it's got an acronym, but as is the case with a lot of stuff in HomeKit,

0:09:11this is one thing Apple has been smart about with HomeKit, but it's also historically

0:09:15been a weakness of HomeKit. As far as you're concerned, it's just this one thing called

0:09:20HomeKit. It has been difficult for devices to get qualified with HomeKit either because

0:09:25you have to go through this testing and you have to buy a bunch of stuff from Apple and

0:09:28it can be expensive. They had all these problems in the beginning. If you got a HomeKit device,

0:09:34it had a good user experience, but there are far more devices from other manufacturers

0:09:38just because what they had was simpler or cheaper or less of a hassle to get done or

0:09:43all sorts of other things. Apple has been changing that slowly, but still, the idea

0:09:48that there's one thing you look for, this works with HomeKit. Under that umbrella, you

0:09:52get a bunch of stuff like this, the technology whose name nobody probably even knows or cares

0:09:56about that basically just makes the experience better is one thing that's attracting me

0:10:01to the HomeKit ecosystem. Despite the fact that the other Internet of Things ecosystems

0:10:05seem much larger and more diverse, I'm impressed with how much the core experience of HomeKit

0:10:12is polished. I know people say, "Well, you can't do as much with HomeKit as you can

0:10:14do with other things," and that's undoubtedly true, but I do like the fact that the main

0:10:21gameplay loop got – I don't know why I've been playing too much Destiny. The main gameplay

0:10:26loop in HomeKit seems to work well. I had a rough day in Destiny today.

0:10:34Do you want to talk about it?

0:10:35Well, maybe. We have so much stuff. Don't worry about it. Thank God.

0:10:39Oh, thank God. I mean, I'm sorry for your bad day, John.

0:10:41I can put it in that. It wasn't as bad as when I lost all my legendary shards, but don't

0:10:47worry about it.

0:10:48Well, I am sending good Destiny thoughts your way or something.

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0:12:34[Music]

0:12:37There's been some interesting things going on in the Apple ecosystem over the last, I

0:12:42don't know, 48 hours. This began, I don't know, like six months ago, a year ago, something

0:12:47like that, with this thing that Facebook created which was called Onavo, and I'm probably pronouncing

0:12:54that wrong, but Onavo Protect. And my recollection of this was that it was pitched as one of

0:12:59those VPNs that, like the ones that have sponsored this show, I believe in the past, but sleazy

0:13:06instead of the ones that have sponsored, which are not sleazy. And really the point of this

0:13:12VPN, if you peel back all the layers of the onion, was to be able to sniff all of these

0:13:18people's network data to see where they're going, what they're doing, who they're interacting

0:13:22with, etc. And this was called Facebook's Onavo Protect app. And once Apple got wind

0:13:29of what was really going on here, which again was like six months or a year ago, something

0:13:32like that, they forced Facebook to remove it from the App Store. And that did happen.

0:13:37Fast forward a few months, and it seems that Facebook re- like kind of white-labeled and

0:13:43to some degree rebranded the exact same app and started distributing it via Enterprise

0:13:50Deployment. Generally speaking, when you deploy to the App Store, you know, you give your

0:13:53binary to Apple and you've signed it with your developer certificate, and then Apple,

0:13:58you know, signs it again with their certificate and puts it on the App Store. And then in

0:14:01theory, anyone can download it. With Enterprise Deployment, it's kind of sort of a deliberate

0:14:07back door to that. It's a deliberate and blessed back door to that where you can ask Apple,

0:14:12"Hey, we would like to distribute some things internally." And internally is the key there.

0:14:17Let's say you work for Acme Widgets Incorporated and you have a company directory. Well, you

0:14:22don't want your company directory on the App Store, and it's probably useless even to put

0:14:26it behind like a login, you know, on the App Store. The writer answer, arguably, is to

0:14:32distribute it internally only to your own people. And so somewhere within your company's

0:14:37intranet, you would have a link to where you could install the Acme Widget Company directory.

0:14:43And in order to do that, like I said, you have to go to Apple and say, "Hey, we would

0:14:45like to distribute stuff internally." And they say, "Okay, sure. Here's a certificate

0:14:49with which you can use to do that." And then through some magic, if you give the person

0:14:54a link to the app, to the bundle, the IPA that is the app, they can install it and run

0:15:01it. Well, Facebook leveraged this in order to basically redistribute this Onavo Protect

0:15:08app outside of their internal people. So what they did was they signed basically the exact

0:15:14same app, but with their internal enterprise distribution certificate such that they can

0:15:21get around the App Store. Well, Apple found out about it and they got angry. But before

0:15:27we talk about that, does my quasi-summary of enterprise distribution, does that ring

0:15:31basically true to you guys or would you like to refine anything I just said?

0:15:35I think I'd add is that they, you know, as you said, like they reskin the app or redistributed

0:15:40it. A couple of people did like class dumps on it. And so they didn't even rename all

0:15:44the like ONV prefixed classes and functions. Like it was sort of the, I mean, what could

0:15:52they have really done? Like, I mean, the bottom line is the functionality of the app was going

0:15:55to get them controlled no matter what, but they didn't even make the most trivial effort

0:15:59to hide themselves. All they did was basically change the name of the app and maybe reskin

0:16:03it. But it was like literally all the same source code underneath. And it's sort of an

0:16:08amazing pattern of behavior where you get banned like with cause, like you're doing

0:16:14a thing you're not supposed to do. You get booted out of the App Store and you immediately

0:16:18say, "We need to find a way to distribute this outside the App Store. How can we do

0:16:22that?" Like you're not chastened. You don't think we have to find a new way to get the

0:16:26information we need or whatever. You just immediately switch gears and say, "How can

0:16:30we work around this ban?" Which is like, I feel like that's the instinct. You see this

0:16:36sometimes, I can't recall any specific stories, but like when it's a young, usually lone,

0:16:43inexperienced developer who gets a ban or some other ruling from the App Store that

0:16:49they think is unfair and their immediate reaction is to find a way to fight back, like to try

0:16:55to get around the ban, to try to circumvent it, to try to find like some way that they

0:16:59can find a loophole, right? And it ends up in this back and forth. And each time they

0:17:04go back and forth, Apple gets angrier and angrier and gets bigger and bigger bans until

0:17:08they are no longer a developer on the App Store at all. And then they like get a fake

0:17:12credit card. And like it just escalates in a way that you usually only see when it's

0:17:16just a petulant 20-something versus Apple only. This is not a petulant 20-something.

0:17:23It is a very large, very important corporation acting like a petulant 20-year-old.

0:17:27Which is of no great surprise. So Apple catches wind of this and this happened late Tuesday,

0:17:35is that right? We're recording this late Wednesday. And Apple caught wind of this and nobody really

0:17:40knew what they were going to do because Facebook has done a lot of really shiesty and shady

0:17:44stuff in the past. And it seems from an outsider's perspective that they've gotten some slaps

0:17:49on the wrist, some maybe harder than others, but mostly has been able to do whatever the

0:17:53crap they want because, hey, they're Facebook. So this morning, Wednesday morning, Apple

0:17:59decided to pull, if we understand things correctly, there was a little bit of debate about this,

0:18:04but it sounds like Apple decided to pull their enterprise distribution certificate. Which

0:18:08means that this rebadged Facebook or Navo Protect app did in fact go away. Because when

0:18:15all of these iPhones went to run it, presumably at some point or another, they would phone

0:18:19home and verify that the certificate is still valid and Apple would tell them, "No, it's

0:18:23not." And they wouldn't run this app. That in and of itself, okay, good. What I find

0:18:28fascinating about this though is it seems like they pulled the entire enterprise distribution

0:18:36certificate, which is I know what I just said. But what that means is all of Facebook's internal

0:18:41apps, like their Acme widget company directory, in this case the Facebook company directory,

0:18:47that stopped working. Apparently these poor, poor souls couldn't use their app in which

0:18:52they order food. They would have to actually get up and walk to the free restaurant and

0:18:59talk to someone to order their food. See, I'm getting angry again.

0:19:04- It's cruel and unusual. - Getting angry again.

0:19:05- And all their internal beta testing of all their apps. This is usually how big companies

0:19:10do internal beta testing, it's a lot easier than the other methods. And so it's a big

0:19:14deal. They lost all of their internal apps that they were signing with their enterprise

0:19:22certificate, which on a number of levels is the result of incredible brazenness and also

0:19:29stupidity. This is not a decision by Apple to interpret a rule differently or to punish

0:19:37Facebook because they don't like them. Apple is very clear with enterprise distribution

0:19:42certificates and the agreement that you agree to when you get one, it's very, very clear

0:19:48that it is for internal use by your own employees only. It is not for any kind of public distribution.

0:19:55They couldn't possibly be more clear about that. And so Facebook literally sending this

0:20:01out to people in the public brazenly because they knew they were Facebook, they're invincible.

0:20:07They deserve every single bit of this. Every drop of the inconvenience this causes their

0:20:12employees, every single minute of the wasted time that they're gonna have to spend working

0:20:18with this problem and then hopefully routing around it in some way for themselves. They

0:20:23deserve every single bit of this because they were literally blatantly, flagrantly violating

0:20:31the very clear rules of this. It's not even close, it isn't up for interpretation, it

0:20:35isn't Apple overreaching. It's a very clear cut and dry, Facebook knew exactly what they

0:20:43were doing. They knew exactly that they were violating this agreement completely both in

0:20:47spirit and in letter of the law and they violated it anyway and they got hit for it. I don't

0:20:52know how anybody at Facebook can possibly complain as a result of this.

0:20:56It's a double whammy too because remember the reason this was banned from the app store

0:21:00is because the app itself violates Apple's rules of collection and everything. So this

0:21:04was already, it got banned from the app store not because Apple was immediate but because

0:21:08the app was just collecting too much data or violating Apple's rules on how much data

0:21:12you're allowed to harvest from your users. So this is an app that wasn't allowed on the

0:21:16app store. The app itself by itself does sneaky gross things which is why Facebook is paying

0:21:22people to install it because who else has any motivation to install a thing that's gonna

0:21:25monitor every single thing you do and report it back to Facebook. And then on top of that,

0:21:31the way they get, the whole thing is we have this app and we're told that it violates the

0:21:35privacy rules for privacy or whatever. They don't come back and say is there a way that

0:21:39we can learn what we want to learn about our customers without basically watching everything

0:21:45that they do and violating their privacy. No, they say let's take the application as

0:21:50it exists and find a way to distribute it. So it's a double violation. It's doing a bad

0:21:57thing getting caught and then doing a bad thing by violating a different rule.

0:22:01- Yeah, on so many levels this is like, it is inexcusable, it is horrendous behavior

0:22:07by Facebook. They continue to be a completely appalling company. Like everything they do

0:22:15is appalling and this is no exception to that. - So I do have some sympathy for the employees

0:22:21who can't order their lunch though because in a large company, yeah, because in a large

0:22:25company those people who just want to order their lunch probably didn't even know this

0:22:29thing existed. Now at this point you could say well they didn't know this specific thing

0:22:33existed but they knew the kind of company they work for which is true which is why I'm

0:22:36not saying I have tons of sympathy for them but I have a small amount of sympathy. Maybe

0:22:41not for the lunch ordering thing or whatever but like.

0:22:43- No look, I will be very upfront with how I feel about this. I know people who work

0:22:48at Facebook. I know good people who work at Facebook. I think if you work at Facebook

0:22:53in 2019 you have decided to work for a company that is morally bankrupt and you've decided

0:23:01that's gonna be okay with you. Now I'm not totally, my hands are not totally clean here.

0:23:06I use Instagram. I like Instagram. Facebook owns Instagram. I don't feel good about this

0:23:11right now. There's never been a day where I've considered it more than today. I don't

0:23:16feel good about this but I think the company is abhorrent. I object to so much of what

0:23:21they do and have done but I continue to use one of their products. So I recognize my hands

0:23:25are not clean here but if you work at Facebook you have decided this company is horrible

0:23:32but I'm going to work there anyway and I think if you make that decision you have to accept

0:23:38the consequences that come with that.

0:23:41- So speaking of, I mean this is not the first and only bad thing that Facebook has done

0:23:46to say the least, right? In and of itself it might not be disqualifying or might not

0:23:53make someone decide not to work there but there's definitely a pattern of behavior.

0:23:56But speaking of pattern of behavior, another company that has some similar business models,

0:24:00Google where they make a lot of their money by knowing information about people who use

0:24:03their products, Google in fact had a very similar application that would monitor what

0:24:10you did and report back to Google so they could learn more about their customers and

0:24:14I believe, I don't know if they were paying people to install it but it was a similar

0:24:17type of thing. They wanted people to install this and were trying to motivate them somehow

0:24:21and they distributed this application under the Apple Developer Enterprise Program and

0:24:26they issued a speedy statement after Facebook got hit with the certificate revocation. This

0:24:32is what Google says. Their application was called Screenwise Meter. The Screenwise Meter

0:24:37iOS app should not have operated under Apple's Developer Enterprise Program. This was a mistake

0:24:42and we apologize. We have disabled this app on iOS devices. Very straightforward. We're

0:24:46sorry. We're doing it too. We're sorry. We totally stopped. We're not doing it anymore.

0:24:49Don't look at us. It's not our fault. Leave us alone. I bet Google has a lot of internal

0:24:53applications signed by their enterprise certificate that they probably don't want to stop working

0:24:58because they have a lot of employees and they probably have a lot of apps. The other angle

0:25:02on this by the way is setting aside these companies' weird business models and their

0:25:08questionable practices and so on and so forth. This came up in a couple of the slides we're

0:25:13in. This reinforces the idea that Apple controls what gets installed on Apple devices and I'm

0:25:21sure we're going to talk about this in a second about the appropriateness of Apple's punishment

0:25:25of Facebook if it goes too severe or not severe enough. But there is a power dynamic between

0:25:32all these companies here. One thing this can make companies think is, "Well, maybe we should

0:25:40stop making all of our internal applications iOS applications or maybe we should stop making

0:25:45iOS versions of our internal applications because it's a corporate risk." If the proper

0:25:51functioning of our company relies on these applications continuing to work and some other

0:25:55company that's not us and maybe isn't even friendly to us can at any time cripple our

0:26:00entire enterprise by turning off all of our internal applications, maybe we shouldn't

0:26:05make them on iOS anymore. Maybe we should make them on Android so we are masters of

0:26:10our own destiny. Imagine if Microsoft could turn off all your copies of Office remotely

0:26:14if for all I know they can these days because everything is subscription. That's one power

0:26:19dynamic at play here. Who is in the driver's seat? Can Facebook actually "afford" to

0:26:26not have iOS versions of our applications or would that make its employees revolt and

0:26:30say, "I don't want to use an Android phone." What is the power balance? In a lot of these

0:26:35situations, I don't think either party really knows who has the power. I guess we'll slide

0:26:43into the obvious question here. Could Apple have kicked Facebook off of the App Store?

0:26:49Who has the power in that situation? On the one hand, Apple certainly can. They control

0:26:53those in the App Store and say, "Guess what Facebook? I'm treating you like a petulant

0:26:5620 year old. You no longer have a developer account." Which is certainly what they would

0:26:59have done to a petulant 20 year old. Have the petulant 20 year old been banned from

0:27:03the App Store and then used an enterprise certificate or whatever.

0:27:06Let's be clear. If anyone else did this, if it was anyone other than a giant, very influential

0:27:12company, the entire developer account would have been banned. Facebook got off relatively

0:27:18easily by only losing enterprise distribution rights. Even then, we don't know that this

0:27:23could only be temporary.

0:27:24And they'll probably get them back eventually through some negotiation because these are

0:27:28giant stories. The same way that Netflix gets the better subscription rate. It makes everyone

0:27:34feel good to think that Apple is treating everyone the same, but realistically speaking,

0:27:38that's not how the world works and it's probably not even how the App Store should work. It

0:27:42never has worked that way. It's an illusion. It makes some kind of sense.

0:27:46Yeah, because ultimately Facebook has so much power here. If Apple actually removed the

0:27:52Facebook app from the iPhone, who do you think is going to get hurt more by that?

0:27:57That's the question. Both of these parties probably have a notion of who they think is

0:28:00in the driver's seat. But I think the accepted wisdom has been Apple can't afford to not

0:28:05have the Facebook app on its phone. That Facebook was in the power position. Because Apple can

0:28:12huff and puff, but they need Facebook more than Facebook needs them. I think that's what

0:28:17we've thought for a long time. But at a certain point, the iPhone installed base and the entrenched

0:28:24love for the iPhone maybe starts to tip that the other way. If you ask the world of iPhone

0:28:30users that you have a choice, you can either keep your iPhone but not have the Facebook

0:28:34app or keep the Facebook app but you got to get an Android phone. How would that turn

0:28:39out? I don't think either party wants to find out. It's like, "Who would win World War III?

0:28:43What do you think?" It's like, "Let's not find out." Because no one's going to come

0:28:48out 100%. There's no scenario in which 100% of iPhone users would stick with their iPhone.

0:28:55It's like World War III. There's not going to be a victor who's unscathed. No one wants

0:28:59to even try that. But the more I think about it, the more I'm thinking that I no longer

0:29:05accept that it's a slam dunk that the iPhone can't survive without the Facebook app. Partially

0:29:11because yes, people can still go to Facebook on the web but partially because of just the

0:29:15year of bad news of Facebook. I don't know what Facebook's numbers are like or whatever.

0:29:19All I know is that it has been relentlessly bad, deservedly bad news about Facebook. I

0:29:24feel like that has to be having some kind of effect.

0:29:26I think your World War III comparison is apt. I feel like this is kind of a mutually assured

0:29:34destruction scenario here that neither company can really afford to totally blow off the

0:29:40other one on their platform. That would be very bad for either company if Apple kicked

0:29:46Facebook's app off the platform. By the way, again, Facebook owns multiple things. If Apple

0:29:52actually revoked Facebook's entire developer ability, that would also include WhatsApp

0:29:57and Instagram. That would have a massive effect. Think about every single news report that

0:30:03would happen from this. Every single common, every single non-nerd out there would have

0:30:08the exact same opinion. Apple took away Facebook from my phone. Apple took away Instagram from

0:30:13my phone. Apple took away WhatsApp from my phone. They would 100% blame Apple for that

0:30:18and not in a good light. Apple can't afford that. They can't do that. I think ultimately

0:30:27Facebook holds the power in this relationship because if Apple were to ever remove Facebook's

0:30:32ability to ship their apps, all of the blowback would fall on Apple, not Facebook, from their

0:30:37actual customers.

0:30:38But I feel like at a certain point, because we all accept that as probably the way things

0:30:42are and I think Apple accepts it, at a certain point, Apple could find itself in a position

0:30:47where that is way less true than it used to be and they just don't realize it. This happened

0:30:51with web browsers a couple of times too where the power shifts but nobody noticed because

0:30:56the conventional wisdom is just so strong, like the conventional wisdom that IE is dominant

0:31:00and then eventually you wake up one day and it's like, "What the hell happened to IE?"

0:31:05You don't adjust your thinking.

0:31:07On the flip side of that, if the conventional wisdom still is true, which it probably is,

0:31:13if Facebook wants its enterprise certificates back, it's just like World War III, they can

0:31:17say, "Apple, you should probably give us enterprise certificates back or we're going to pull the

0:31:22Instagram and Facebook and WhatsApp apps from the iOS App Store," because Facebook can unilaterally

0:31:27pull its own apps from the iOS App Store. They can use some or all of the power they

0:31:32have or hold it as a threat to try to get what they want back, which is why in any kind

0:31:36of flare-up of PR and yanking the certificate or whatever, these two behemoths will probably

0:31:44talk to each other over the phone or in person and work something out, billionaire to billionaire

0:31:53and come to an understanding.

0:31:54In the same way as the Cold War did, no one wants to launch any of the nukes. Everyone's

0:31:59got enough nukes to destroy each other ten times over. No one thinks they're ever going

0:32:04to come at anything like that unscathed. They all just, in the end, just want to go back

0:32:07to making money. So I feel like they will come to some kind of agreement. Facebook will

0:32:11get its enterprise certificate back. They will not pull their things from the store

0:32:14and we will just continue to lurch forward.

0:32:16I don't know offhand how granular a big red button Apple has. So said differently, could

0:32:26Apple have turned off just this one app?

0:32:28Yeah, they can.

0:32:29Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. I suspect so, but I don't know. And on the one side,

0:32:34I feel like isn't that the rightest, most mature answer is to turn off this one app

0:32:39and leave everything else alone?

0:32:41Well, no, because they violated the terms of enterprise distribution.

0:32:45Yeah, the terms are for the certificate.

0:32:48And they were stupid enough to use their main enterprise distribution certificate for this

0:32:53app.

0:32:55But either way, it seems to me like I don't think that Apple turning off this app, whatever

0:33:03it's called now, it doesn't matter, turning off this sleazy VPN app...

0:33:06Oh, Notvo. It's not Ohnava, we swear.

0:33:09Yeah, exactly right. Fohnava. Instagram. Anyway, turning off the Fohnava app won't do anything.

0:33:18Like, it won't accomplish anything. Facebook's just gonna go trudging along because from

0:33:22an outsider's point of view, if there is anyone that has even more hubris than Apple, it's

0:33:29Facebook. Facebook seems to be pretty self-obsessed. And it seems to an outsider's perspective

0:33:37that Facebook thinks that Facebook can do no wrong. And so I think that I'm okay with

0:33:44Apple just completely turning off the enterprise certificate because it seems like to me, it

0:33:50seems like that punishment is commensurate with the crime committed.

0:33:53"Crime" isn't the right word, but you know what I mean. It just seems really frickin'

0:33:57gross. The offense. Yeah, thank you. That's a very good word for it. And it just, I don't

0:34:03know. I think I'm okay with this. And like one of you said earlier, I think it was John,

0:34:08you know, some of the slacks that we're in, we're going back and forth about whether or

0:34:11not this was fair and whether or not this is the right answer and whether or not Apple

0:34:15should have that kind of control. And I see the argument there that maybe Apple shouldn't

0:34:20be able to turn off, to some degree, the livelihood of another corporation. But I don't know,

0:34:26man, it's their swimming pool. And if you're choosing to swim in that pool, shouldn't you

0:34:30have to abide by the rules? I mean, if it's adult swim, shouldn't the kids have to get

0:34:33out of the pool? Yeah, I don't think anyone's arguing that.

0:34:35They were just getting back to the root thing that's been with the App Store the entire

0:34:39time that we don't like these rules. We gotta choke them down because being in the App Store

0:34:45is better than not being in the App Store. But the idea that there's a platform that's

0:34:49so tightly locked down with no sideloading at all, and even the sideloading that is allowed

0:34:54to enter our certificates is still locked down to, you know, like, I remember before

0:34:59Test Flight and everything, people were just so angry about the fact that they couldn't

0:35:02even just make betas and give it to people. Like, that is a developer experience question

0:35:06that has been with the App Store since its introduction and probably will never leave.

0:35:12It just comes up again in this context because this is a fairly high-profile example of Apple

0:35:17flexing those muscles. Like, they have the ability to do this. Everyone knows they always

0:35:22have it, but it's mostly academic until you see, you know, the, uh, oh god, I can't, I'm

0:35:27getting so old, people. I'm getting so old and I'm just thinking about my bad day in

0:35:30Destiny. Now I witness the power of this fully operational App Store. Close. Oh, wow. Wow.

0:35:37I'm surprised that didn't roll right off your tongue.

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0:37:18our show.

0:37:23Last night I tested this thing that let me spy on Erin. Now granted she was sitting three

0:37:28feet away from me and I told her exactly what I was doing, but Ooh, this FaceTime thing,

0:37:33not good, not good at all. So if you start a FaceTime video call with another person

0:37:42and then you do the little swipe up thing in order to add a person to that call. So

0:37:46say I was starting to call Marco and then I wanted to add John to the call. Well, instead,

0:37:51what I do is I call Marco, I swipe up and instead of adding John, I add myself. If you

0:37:57do that, suddenly Marco's phone with no intervention on Marco's part starts broadcasting Marco's

0:38:05microphone to me without Marco's permission. Then if Marco thinks to himself, Hmm, I know

0:38:11how to make this stop. I will hit the side button, whatever they call that, the lock

0:38:14button, the power button. I don't care. I'll hit the side button to silence this ring.

0:38:18I think it actually is called the side button now. Oh, is it? Okay. Um, and so I'll silence

0:38:23this ring and make it go away. Well, guess what? Now I'm looking at Marco's front facing

0:38:27camera without Marco's permission. And I tried both of these with Aaron. I, and honest to

0:38:33God, both of these worked like, well, they don't work if you know what I mean. But like

0:38:37these exploits accomplished what they set out to to accomplish. And Ooh, that did not

0:38:43make me happy. And it went around the internet fast and it makes sense because people were

0:38:49turning off FaceTime left and right until Apple distressingly slowly eventually turned

0:38:55off group FaceTime at the server level, which is the right thing to do. But it took from

0:38:59what I could tell several hours for that to happen, which I'm not keen on. So that bug

0:39:05is bad in and of itself. And I'll leave a chance to talk about that. But what's worse

0:39:09is apparently Apple has known about this for at least a week, which is really gross. But

0:39:14we'll talk about that in a minute. Gentlemen, thoughts about this bug and what it means.

0:39:19I mean, look, everybody ships bugs. Like I said, this on Twitter, I'll say it here again.

0:39:22Like I don't blame Apple for this bug existing. Like everyone ships bugs. What's important

0:39:30is how you respond when you have accidentally shipped a bug. All right. That's how that

0:39:34and it's when you have something that is a very severe security bug like this, one of

0:39:39the key elements is speed of your response. And on one level they did a really good job

0:39:47actually. Like the bug hit the press, you know, and then like within a couple hours

0:39:52of hitting the press, all group FaceTime was disabled server side, which effectively neutralizes

0:39:57the bug and makes it impossible to exploit again. So that alone, like that in itself

0:40:03was an adequate response. Like that was fine. Yeah, sure, I would have liked if it was less

0:40:07than a few hours, but it was hell, it was later that night. Like it was fine. Like that's

0:40:11fine. I give them full marks for that. But there is this other problem, which is a pretty

0:40:16big problem, which is that this was, this was reported to them like a week earlier through

0:40:21the official channel, through like security at apple.com or whatever it is, product security.

0:40:25Like they have an official channel to report security flaws in their products. And it was

0:40:29reported almost a week earlier and it was fully documented. And apparently the woman

0:40:36who reported it was told to file a radar. So she did, even though this was a security

0:40:41incident, this reminds me of the movie Die Hard, which got Mark, have you seen Die Hard

0:40:47please? Yes, it was my number one Christmas movie. We did it. We did it everybody. I just

0:40:53showed it to my son recently and there's a scene in Die Hard where I think it's Bruce

0:40:57Willis gets finally manages to call like emergency services or whatever and it gets on line is

0:41:02telling them like, you know, the building is under attack, whatever you got to come

0:41:05send the police or whatever. And the person on the other end of the line is like, this

0:41:09is a restricted channel. If you have an emergency, please call 911. Essentially saying, this

0:41:13is not the right way for you to report an incredibly severe security bug. File a radar.

0:41:19So Bruce Willis was having none of that. He's yelling and screaming. But this person, this

0:41:22poor person was like, I have to get a, I have to file it with a bug report. Like I'm talking

0:41:27to you now, you're apple, right? Like, look, this is severe. And like, nope, sorry. Wrong

0:41:31channel. Like this is not how you report bugs to us. Please do it through the proper channels.

0:41:35So the person did do it through the proper channels. But I was thinking the same way

0:41:38of like, if someone comes to you and is telling you there's an emergency, and your only reaction

0:41:43is to say, I'm not the person you're supposed to tell about emergencies. I'm not going to

0:41:48take any action on this. I'm just going to redirect you to the right channel. And then

0:41:51you go to the right channel, which is, you know, this signing up for an account and going

0:41:55through and filing radar or whatever. And still, it doesn't get to the right people.

0:41:59It's this is sort of the faceless corporation that we always complain about that there that

0:42:05we think of a company as this giant entity, but it's really this big group of people with

0:42:11very different incentives and motivations. There is no one consciousness that is Apple

0:42:17that you can talk to. So trying to get the cooperation writ large, to be aware of a thing

0:42:22in the world is very difficult when you are interacting with even the correct one or two

0:42:29people who are touching the outside world, which is why when things go to the press,

0:42:33the giant entity that is Apple becomes all of a sudden very conscious. And how does it

0:42:38work? Maybe the press is seen by people at the top, and the people at the top make everyone

0:42:44below them aware of it. But if you start it through the right channel, it's dysfunctional

0:42:48and baffling, but not actually a very rare occurrence that you can present what you would

0:42:58imagine is incredibly important critical information. And because it is presented alongside tons

0:43:05and tons of other information that's just garbage, that it gets lost in the shuffle.

0:43:11You can't distinguish it from the 800 other cranks who emailed you that day and said,

0:43:14"I have a way to secretly destroy every iPhone by pressing a big red button." Tons of garbage

0:43:20comes into that same channel, and here is this tiny little gem that is a legit super

0:43:24serious security bug. In hindsight, we all say, "Why didn't they jump into action on

0:43:29this one big thing?" And it's like, "Well, you didn't see the 8,000 other radars that

0:43:32were filed that day, and you didn't have the millions of other things that got into that."

0:43:36So it's frustrating from the outside, and it's explicable on the inside, but it is a

0:43:39dysfunction. You want to design an organization such that if some well-meaning person is nice

0:43:48enough to tell you about a super-duper important problem, that that finds its way in less than

0:43:55a week to the collective consciousness of the company and that they take action on it.

0:44:00And you don't have to wait for it to go all over the press and come top-down through the

0:44:03executive suit and just make all their underlings have a giant fire drill about it.

0:44:10So first of all, I was about to insult the whole bug reporter radar system, but the funny

0:44:16thing is that wasn't the right channel for this. The right channel for this was product

0:44:20security. She went there first, and they told her, you know, a buzz off, basically.

0:44:24It sounds like some weird bug. You probably don't know how to use computers to file a

0:44:28radar. Yeah, right. So she went to the proper channel

0:44:31first, and they told her to go to the incorrect channel. Now, the incorrect channel she was

0:44:35directed to, which is the bug reporter/radar system, is horrible. The pipeline, whatever

0:44:42the process is that Apple uses to filter and respond to and close those bugs that get reported

0:44:51is horrible. Any developer who's ever filed bugs will tell you that most of the time it's

0:44:58a waste of your time to even bother with it. Most of the time you don't get a response

0:45:02at all. If you do get a response, it's basically them asking you to provide a simple project

0:45:07and syst-diagnose files. Both of which take a lot of time to gather and prepare. Both

0:45:12of which are usually not necessary for lots of the bugs that you report, and it seems

0:45:18like they request those things before they've actually really read what you wrote. It seems

0:45:24like Apple has, oh, and then every time there's a new beta released of anything, they will

0:45:31seemingly go through in bulk to all the open bugs that haven't been responded to yet and

0:45:36say, let us know if this is still a problem or we'll automatically close it in like a

0:45:40day. And what this leads to is a whole bunch of legitimate bugs either going back to the

0:45:48filer and asking for them to spend way more time on it when that wasn't necessarily, like

0:45:53when Apple didn't really pay enough attention to it to see whether it needed that or not,

0:45:58or a whole bunch of valid bugs being closed that are still bugs but that the person didn't

0:46:04get to in time to say, yes, it's still a problem. And so you have Apple over-filtering the inputs

0:46:10on that system dramatically. It seems, I mean, I don't know how this works internally, but

0:46:15it sure seems like there are people whose job it is to just close as many bugs as possible

0:46:21as like a performance metric and not anything about the actual outcomes of those things.

0:46:27So just, they find, they seem to find ways to just close them in mass, if you're lucky

0:46:32that they even close them at all. Most of the bugs that I report are just left open

0:46:35forever with, they never get a single response. But some of them do get these wonderful like

0:46:39mass closures that happen to them that, you know, the bugs are still there and nothing

0:46:44ever happened. And this is why when Apple employees tell us on Twitter, file a radar,

0:46:50it really helps, it really matters. I don't appreciate that very much because filing a

0:46:56radar from the outside, from our point of view, is a massive waste of our time, 99%

0:47:01of the time. Like the vast majority of bugs you file are a total waste of your time. And

0:47:06the way Apple deals with them and the people who file them, the message it sends us from

0:47:12the parts of it that we see, which apparently is very little of it, the parts of it that

0:47:15we see tell us we are wasting our time. Whether that's true or not, internally we can't

0:47:21see. But the part we see is you don't care about us, you are dismissive if you respond

0:47:26at all, and we are wasting our time doing this. So that's just a little rant about radar.

0:47:32But the fact is, for this story, the woman who was reporting this bug shouldn't have

0:47:36even been sent to radar in the first place because this wasn't that kind of bug, it

0:47:39was a product security thing and she emailed product security.

0:47:42Steven: Yeah, this makes me so angry that she was told, "Oh, just go file a radar."

0:47:47That is such a, it's such an--

0:47:49Steven (interrupting)

0:47:50It's dismissive and it shows that they weren't really reading things very closely. Exactly

0:47:54the same problem that happens with the radar bug screeners. It's exactly the same. It's

0:47:57like you ask us to file bugs, you ask people to report security problems, you ask us to

0:48:01do this, and those of us who take our time, and this doesn't take a small amount of time

0:48:06to do this kind of stuff, those of us who take our time to do it more often than not

0:48:10get dismissed in a way that suggests they didn't even read it.

0:48:13Steven (interrupting)

0:48:14Right, this is such a big "f*** you" to this poor lady who took the time to actually

0:48:20do this the right way. Rather than just find-- and my understanding is, you know, there's

0:48:24a series of tweets from a person with the Twitter handle @Beastmode, which I am quite

0:48:30impressed by. Anyway, John H. Meyer, who I guess got in touch with the woman whose child

0:48:37initially discovered the problem, and she apparently made a video of it, she sent like

0:48:42a whole write-up to Apple about it, and the response from them was, "Oh, go file a radar."

0:48:47How off-putting is that? How obnoxious and off-putting is that? It makes my blood boil,

0:48:53it's so ridiculous. It's just so obnoxious, and it makes me so angry.

0:48:58John H. Meyer, MD So the more charitable interpretation is not

0:49:00that there's any malice or dismissiveness there, but that the volume of stuff that comes

0:49:05in is such that they are overwhelmed with information, and their sort of first-pass

0:49:10filtering algorithm identifies this as probably just some person who has some kind of bug

0:49:14they want to report. And this person is the mom who reported this is a lawyer, and if

0:49:21you look at the letter, it's not lawyer-ese, but like, I mean, maybe if you saw something

0:49:25that was from a lawyer or looked like it was written by a lawyer, like, maybe that doesn't,

0:49:30you know, like, when you get a lot of input, when you get a lot of-- Apple sure gets lots

0:49:33of people telling them all sorts of things. You have to have some sort of way of filtering

0:49:38it. And in the letter, I think the person asked about like bug bounties, like a lot

0:49:43of companies pay people to find bugs. And I think one of the benefits of bug bounties,

0:49:48which Apple has, by the way, I think they just recently started a bunch of them, I think

0:49:50we were talking about an ATP a while back, is that if you have a program where you're

0:49:55going to pay people for finding bugs, I think the people at the other end of that fire hose

0:50:03of incoming information probably have slightly different incentives, because they're, like,

0:50:08the whole point of that program is to find the super valuable stuff, whereas the product

0:50:12security one probably gets way more, like, just random people with opinions about Apple

0:50:17stuff or, like, people who think that their phone is spying on them at night because it

0:50:23wakes up on a notification call. Like, who knows what kind of stuff they get? But the

0:50:26bug bounty ones, the only people who even know that that channel exists are people who

0:50:30are out there looking for bugs or think they found some super big security bug. So everything

0:50:34that comes in there, in theory, is like the sender thinks it's a super important security

0:50:39thing, whereas product security probably gets just, you know, who knows what kind of random

0:50:43stuff. So it's hard to tell from the outside whether it actually is sort of jaded dismissiveness

0:50:48or if it's we are not good at dealing with the volume and type of information that we

0:50:54have, or understaffed, we don't have good heuristics for figuring out, we have tier

0:50:58one, two, and three, I would get this impression like this, tier one, two, and three radar

0:51:01stuff before it ever even gets to a developer, it has to go through this sort of, kind of

0:51:05like the App Store used to be and probably still is to some degree, like a mechanical

0:51:09rules-based thing implemented by people who don't have any awareness and don't need

0:51:14to, by design, don't need to have any awareness of security or App Store rules or anything

0:51:19like that, and are just doing sort of a first pass, following whatever rules they've been

0:51:23told. And eventually you get down to a human who understands this is an application, this

0:51:27is for the App Store, this is what security is like, whatever. But, you know, as with

0:51:31so many things from the outside, we can't tell which one of those things it is, so it's

0:51:35just a black box that does the wrong thing.

0:51:37It's funny to me too, because all of us have friends within Apple and I'll talk

0:51:42to them about radar and they'll try to say, "Well, you know, oh, you don't understand

0:51:47the volume," which I think you're right, Jon, like that's true, and, "Oh, you know,

0:51:50there's this and there's that and there's this and there's that," and it just makes

0:51:53us sad that you guys always assume the worst of us. And that also kind of grinds my, I

0:51:57don't know why I'm so angry tonight, but that kind of grinds my gears too, because

0:52:01if you don't want us to think the worst of you, then talk to us. Tell us what's going

0:52:08on. Like, this is your fault. Not my fault. It's not my fault I'm assuming the worst.

0:52:13This is your fault for being so secretive. You can't have it both ways. You can't

0:52:18be so secretive about what's going on inside and you can't be so just a black box. You

0:52:24can't be such a black box and expect us to just assume it's roses and pansies and

0:52:28daffodils inside. Like, this is a self-created problem.

0:52:31Right. It's like Apple is saying, like, "You keep mispronouncing my name," and

0:52:35we're like, "All right, how do you pronounce it?" And they're like, "Ugh, I told you

0:52:37before."

0:52:38That's not what it's like at all, actually. They don't tell us, they would never have

0:52:47told us. I mean, so here's the thing, like, we want more transparency, and Apple, I think,

0:52:51has been more transparent than it has been in the past.

0:52:53Agreed, agreed.

0:52:54But for a large company like this, you don't want complete transparency, because that's

0:52:57just chaos. Like, the company does have to speak. Like, there's a reason PR exists.

0:53:01You can't have every employee in the company purporting to speak for the company or even

0:53:05for their little section of the company, because it's madness, right? But Apple still, when

0:53:10it comes time to speak with one voice about this type of thing, does probably the smart

0:53:16thing from a PR perspective, but that nevertheless leaves us in the dark, which is, "We're

0:53:21not here to explain to you exactly what happened here." Like, in this whole thing, they said,

0:53:27we had their statement, and you read part of it, like, "Google or Facebook did this

0:53:30thing with their certificates, it's against the rules, so we revoked their certificate,"

0:53:33blah, blah, blah. That's what they said. They didn't go into this whole sort of, like, post-mortem

0:53:37of like, "Oh, how do we miss this?" They didn't mention this person and her son and finding

0:53:42the security thing a week ago. They didn't even acknowledge that even exists as far as

0:53:46I know. Like, why would they? There is no, like, that's not as far, it's like, we're

0:53:50going forward. Like, it's the smart PR thing to do to say, "Here's the situation, here's

0:53:54what we did," boom. Not to say, "Oh, how do we miss this?" And have some sort of back

0:53:58and forth with the press about scolding Apple about how they should have found this and

0:54:02soul searching about how they, like, they'll do that internally, but they will never do

0:54:05that externally. And so, because of that, which I think is probably mostly the right

0:54:10thing to do, we are left with just, you know, an unknown, and then we're free to map all

0:54:16of our past experiences and prejudices onto it and think to the best of the worst about

0:54:20what's happening. But, I mean, honestly, it doesn't really matter whether it was malice

0:54:27or, you know, understaffing or whatever. The end result is the same as far as the company's

0:54:33concerned. They were not appropriately reactive to a very serious, very cleanly well-presented,

0:54:42helpful thing from the outside. So, it's not like an edge case. They really need to

0:54:46make systems that, in the best case scenario, where a conscientious, motivated person who's

0:54:51found a legit bug does everything you tell them to do, does all the right things, and

0:54:55still can't get you to pay attention for a week.

0:54:57Kind of makes you wonder what else they're missing.

0:54:59Yeah, well, those are the, I mean, that's the best case. The worst case scenario is

0:55:03people find tons of bugs and never tell Apple about them, because why the hell would you

0:55:06tell Apple? They'd either use them themselves or sell them on the black market. Like, that's,

0:55:09you know, that's why bug bounties exist, where you try to, like, pay more money than

0:55:13the bad people are going to pay to find out your bugs.

0:55:16So maybe we can talk about something a little happier. Just a couple hours before we recorded,

0:55:22Mark Gurman had a scoop at Bloomberg where he had a bunch of information about the next

0:55:27iPhone, about iPads, and about iOS 13. And it's hard for me to really get too anxious

0:55:35about this because, or maybe anxious isn't the right word, excited, I guess, about this,

0:55:40because it seems like Bloomberg can get some details right and a lot of things wrong. And

0:55:44I think Marco had summarized this best in saying, you know, he'll get the little specific

0:55:48things right, but then they'll try to put it in a narrative and it all falls apart at

0:55:51that point. But there's an article on Bloomberg, we'll link it in the show notes, where Gurman

0:55:59talks about all of this stuff. And one of the big features, apparently, of the iPhone

0:56:04vNext, I don't know if it's, you know, XT or whatever, is very much camera related.

0:56:12And there was no information about any sort of knockoff of Google's seemingly very impressive

0:56:17night shift. But apparently, Apple's starting to really angle toward, I shouldn't say starting

0:56:22to, is really angling toward augmented reality. And so what's being said in this article is

0:56:27that there's going to be a more powerful, longer range 3D camera, which is "designed

0:56:33to scan the environment to create three-dimensional reconstructions of the real world." Supposedly,

0:56:38it's going to work up to about 15 feet away from the phone. It uses a laser scanner instead

0:56:43of dot projection, because the dot projection, you know, goes to crap over long distances.

0:56:48And it got really, I don't think Gurman's a very good writer. It was very unclear to

0:56:53me what is or is not getting the third camera, because early in the article, he says there's

0:56:59a third, more advanced camera. Then later on, he says the third camera is only in the

0:57:04Max. And then immediately after says, "And other handsets could eventually come with

0:57:07the upgraded system." So...

0:57:08- Well, that's not, I don't think that's like, you know, a mistake. I think that's hedging.

0:57:13Anytime you see a rumor article like this, especially one from a publication that's,

0:57:18you know, edited like Bloomberg, not fact checked like Bloomberg, but edited, it's generally

0:57:26a result of they don't actually know for sure. And so they're offering, it's like, "This

0:57:32could come out this year or in the future." Like whenever they, you know, they write stuff

0:57:35like that. It's rumor articles that have, that they literally heard a rumor. They don't

0:57:40really, it's not really firm knowledge or, you know, they don't want to commit. So they

0:57:45use flexible language to give themselves an out.

0:57:49- Yeah.

0:57:50- So that, yeah, basically anything that is not very clearly stated and unambiguously

0:57:55and unequivocally stated in an article like this, you can assume they're just guessing.

0:57:59- And on the night sight thing, you said night shift before where you meant night sight.

0:58:02- Oh yes, thank you.

0:58:03- There is a thing about that with the multiple cameras in terms of like catching a wider

0:58:07field of view and more pixels, whatever. But for something like a night sight type feature,

0:58:13that is probably, I mean, there is a component of that that deals with the cameras, but it's

0:58:17very much a software thing. And the software is not going to leak from these same channels.

0:58:21Like that's the thing that you have the most difficulty finding out because that is just

0:58:24kept in Apple, you know, in Apple proper. It's not, there's no manufacturing or parts

0:58:29or any other places where that can leak. So we tend not to know as much about the software

0:58:34and what we do know comes much later. So it doesn't surprise me there's no mention of

0:58:37a predominantly software only feature. All they have to go on is probably a bunch of

0:58:41parts leaks or drawings or whatever of phones with a bunch of different cameras on the back

0:58:46and information about them. So I am still optimistic that Apple will copy that feature

0:58:53to some degree and they'll do it in software and we'll find out about it like, you know,

0:58:59the day before the keynote or the keynote.

0:59:00Yeah, we'll see. I sure hope so. But it was interesting. They also had a couple other

0:59:06tidbits. The third camera, which may or may not only be on the max, has a larger field

0:59:11of view and a wider range of zoom. It will also, and this is now a direct quote, it will

0:59:15also capture more pixels so Apple software could, for example, automatically repair a

0:59:19photo or video to fit in a subject that may have been accidentally cut from the initial

0:59:23shot. Finally, enhanced live photos, which they say is basically just doubling the time

0:59:27from three seconds to six seconds. There will be updates for the XS, XS Max, and XR. And

0:59:35then this is another thing that seemed contradictory to me, but maybe my reading comprehension

0:59:39is bad. They said that the laser powered 3D thing could debut in an upgrade to the iPad

0:59:44Pro in spring 2020, even though they started talking about it in the iPhone, whatever.

0:59:49They also apparently are testing, Apple is testing an iPhone with USB-C, which I think

0:59:54I'm pretty excited by. I think I would like to go all USB-C now.

0:59:57Well, see again, that's not information. They are testing it. Well, of course they're testing

1:00:02it. Like that doesn't mean anything. Chances are by now, I would assume based on like the

1:00:07iPhone production scale and everything, they have probably already decided whether the

1:00:112019 iPhones will be USB-C or Lightning. And so by Grumman saying that they're still testing

1:00:17it, like that just means he doesn't know yet.

1:00:20The iPad thing actually makes some amount of sense to me because this is kind of a coincidence

1:00:24that yesterday in a different cycle, I forget about the context that we were talking about.

1:00:28I forget that we were talking about it. I made some joke about just wait until you get

1:00:32your Apple AR glasses. You'll just walk around the house and look at all the rooms and it

1:00:35will make a 3D map of your house. I think it was you Casey asking about like CAD application

1:00:38or talk about linear, making floor plans and stuff. And so here we are with this rumor

1:00:43a day later about basically a way to get a 3D image of the stuff around you at a longer

1:00:50distance at basically room distance, like 15 feet-ish or whatever, rather than face

1:00:54ID distance, which is a foot or two.

1:00:58On an iPad, you're like, well, iPads, people don't carry around iPads as cameras for the

1:01:02most part. They usually have their phones with them, despite the fact that we see people

1:01:04taking pictures of iPads. But if you wanted to do some kind of AR thing and scan your

1:01:09whole room and then manipulate it, an iPad is a perfect device. You're in your house

1:01:12already. You've got your iPad. Hold it up, show it all the walls of your house, and then

1:01:16you have a nice big screen on which you can move your furniture around in AR or whatever.

1:01:21It makes sense as an iPad thing. Not that it gives me any more stake in any of these

1:01:27rumors because they take every side of everything, even on the USB-C thing. They're testing a

1:01:31phone with the USB-C, but they might not include it in this phone.

1:01:34So you've offered no information. USB-C could be there, but it might not. Great, thanks.

1:01:38I mean, VGA could be there. It might not.

1:01:41Right. Well, it's not that bad. But anyway, the iPad Pro thing, I would actually be excited

1:01:47about an iPad Pro that had the laser camera thing on it because the iPad, in many contexts,

1:01:53is a better device for AR because it has a bigger screen for you to, you know, a bigger

1:01:58window into the world to see through than the tiny little porthole that is your phone.

1:02:04Even if you have one of the really big phones. So I think that would be neat. Although it

1:02:07coming out ahead of the phone is a little bit weird. Like, that's what they were saying.

1:02:11Like, that they would ship new iPad Pros with this new camera. It seemed like it would steal

1:02:17a little bit of the iPhone's thunder because they would demo this camera. "Look, it's got

1:02:20lasers and it does all these things. Isn't it amazing?" And then when the new phones

1:02:23came out, they're like, "Yeah, it's got that camera too." It's kind of underwhelming. So

1:02:27I don't know how they would deal with timing of that, but I fully endorse an iPad with

1:02:33this 3D scanning laser thing on the back of it.

1:02:35Yeah, me too. I was just confused because it seemed like early in the article they were

1:02:39saying, "It's coming to the phone next!" and "Oh wait, it's coming to the iPad next." Alright,

1:02:43weird. Whatever.

1:02:44Look, they just got a bucket of parts, Casey. They just take a bucket of parts, you dump

1:02:48it on the table, like, "Can you make an article out of this?" Like, "Yeah, I can give it a

1:02:51shot."

1:02:52Why not? They also had some other interesting news. Apparently there's going to be an updated

1:02:56lower-cost iPad with a 10-inch screen and lightning. And what would have been of interest

1:03:01to me, although now I think I've converted myself to the large-ish iPad world, a new

1:03:06cheaper iPad Mini. And I was a devout Mini fan up until I got this brand new iPad a couple

1:03:11of months back, and now I really love this iPad. But a new iPad Mini sounds very cool.

1:03:17I would love to see that come back.

1:03:18And then finally, iOS 13 apparently will have dark mode. It will have improvements to CarPlay.

1:03:23I actually am a fan of CarPlay. I think CarPlay's pretty good. It's not fantastic, but it's

1:03:27pretty good. And I'm curious to see what "improvements" means. Apparently there's going to be a new

1:03:34iPad-specific home screen. So I don't know if that means -- I think Steve Trout and Smith

1:03:37kind of implied this. I'm not sure if that means that instead of Springboard, there would

1:03:42be some equivalent to Springboard that is not the exact same, you know, some different

1:03:46home screen app, if you will. I think that could be very cool, because certainly the

1:03:50home screen on the iPad seems like a place that it could be treated very differently

1:03:54and a lot more done with it. And then a couple of direct quotes. "Ability to tab through

1:03:59multiple versions of a single app like pages in a web browser." That's not something I

1:04:04feel like I need right now, but I bet you once I have it, I'll say, "Oh, this is amazing.

1:04:07I can't believe I didn't have it before."

1:04:09What do you think that means, before we move on from that? Like, again, with the vague

1:04:13writing. "Ability to tab through multiple versions of a single app like pages in a web

1:04:18browser." There's a lot going on in that sentence, right? So some people may read that and think,

1:04:23"Do they mean, like, Command-Tab?" Because you don't use Command-Tab on a Mac to go through

1:04:28multiple versions of a single app like pages in a web browser. You do Command-Tilde for

1:04:34multiple windows, and it's a different keystroke, usually Command-Shift-square-bracket or whatever,

1:04:38to go through multiple tabs. Or do they mean tab through multiple versions of a single

1:04:42app as in tabbed windows? Where there's a really hard way if you wanted to have multiple

1:04:47versions of an application running, like, the tabbing would be the sort of the windowing

1:04:52interface, kind of like Safari tabs. It's so confusing. It's basically a sentence that

1:04:57says almost nothing other than the fact that there would be some new way to handle multiple

1:05:01versions of something that there are not currently multiple versions of. I don't know. How do

1:05:06you guys interpret tab? Do they mean the tab key as an analogy to what you do on a Mac,

1:05:10or do they mean tabs as in Safari tabs?

1:05:12Steven McLaughlin I think tabs as in Safari tabs. I think the

1:05:16idea here is that if you wanted to have multiple copies of Google Docs running at the same

1:05:21time, you could do that. I'm not sure the exact mechanism, but something like a tabbed

1:05:26Safari experience. Or actually in Safari on the iPad, you can create two side-by-side

1:05:33Safari quote-unquote "windows," if you will, and they're each their own tab, and you're

1:05:37looking at two tabs or two windows simultaneously. I think something like that—god, this terminology

1:05:42is terrible—but it's something like that, I think.

1:05:45Eric Meyer The vocabulary reflects the mess that is the

1:05:47actual UI.

1:05:48Steven McLaughlin Yeah, well put. But I think it's something

1:05:51where basically you could have two copies of the same app open at the same time.

1:05:54Eric Meyer Just like Windows.

1:05:56Steven McLaughlin Yeah. I don't know, Marco, any thoughts

1:06:01on that?

1:06:02Eric Meyer No.

1:06:03Steven McLaughlin All right. And then finally, improvements

1:06:04to file management, which would be great.

1:06:05Eric Meyer Which is as vague as you can get without saying

1:06:07nothing, literally nothing.

1:06:08Steven McLaughlin Yeah. But everyone wants it. I was just thinking

1:06:11today about how I feel like if I had file system access in a couple places, my iPad

1:06:16could really potentially replace my computer for anything but—

1:06:19Eric Meyer Would you like that file system access to be

1:06:20improved, Casey?

1:06:21Steven McLaughlin Yeah, it would be great. I would love that.

1:06:24Eric Meyer The most exciting thing I think here, like buried

1:06:27at the bottom of this article—I read this whole article, and I'm like, the very end

1:06:31has something I think is the most significant. I told this story before. I'll keep telling

1:06:37it again for the people who've been listening to every single episode of the show or weren't

1:06:40alive in 2010 or whatever the hell. When the iPad came out, before it came out, we all

1:06:45knew they were going to come up with a tablet, and we were all talking about it. A big topic

1:06:48of discussion was what will this Apple tablet look like when you turn it on, right? We knew

1:06:58what the phones looked like. The phones looked like a bunch of icons on a grid that had springboard

1:07:02on them. But when you have an iPad, what will that look like? The leading contender was

1:07:07not it would look like a phone, but the icons would be more spread out. I'm not going to

1:07:12say it wasn't in contention because it was brought up, but it was so distant. Everyone

1:07:16was thinking about what could it look like. It's not going to be the finder, obviously.

1:07:20It's not running Mac OS. It's going to run iPhone OS or a variant of iPhone OS. But with

1:07:26all that screen space, what could you do? When they came out, they said, "We're not

1:07:30doing anything. It's exactly like the phone but spread out." It's like, "All right, well,

1:07:35it's the first version of this." In practice, it works fine. It's an interface everyone

1:07:41is familiar with. Here we are, what is it, eight years later, nine years later? Just

1:07:48now we're getting rumors, hopefully, substantiated in some way, that now they're going to take

1:07:54a crack at doing something other than having just a big grid of icons spread out a little

1:07:59bit more. It's so far overdue. I'm not even a super iPad power user. Every time I hear

1:08:06the umpteenth seven-hour dissertation of how people are arranging their icons into folders

1:08:10with spacers and color-coding them and stuff, I'm like, "Oh, there's so little flexibility

1:08:16in such an important interface." It's nice that folders were an addition, so that's good.

1:08:21It's nice that people can find ways to make these two Lego pieces fit together in different

1:08:27patterns because you've got the icons and you've got the folders, and we can do creative

1:08:30things with them. But that's a pretty big screen, especially on the really big iPads.

1:08:35There's so much more you could do to let people build a more efficient place to go back to

1:08:42when they're not in an application. I don't know how far Apple will go with this, but

1:08:47I will be very happy when they do something. Unlike my Mac Pro, they're going to get it

1:08:52in under the decade line and say, "See? We eventually addressed what was a burning question

1:08:58about an Apple tablet in less than a decade."

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1:11:03to Aftershokz for sponsoring our show. Oliver DeJean writes, "Currently I have a MacBook

1:11:11Pro 13 inch mid 2014. With my previous MacBooks I've always updated the hard disk drive or

1:11:15RAM at some point. For this you had to remove the lower case and I always use this opportunity

1:11:19to remove dust with some compressed air and with a brush for the fans. I cannot tell you

1:11:23if it caused the MacBooks fans to spin up more rarely or not. However I thought it couldn't

1:11:27hurt. On my current MacBook the memory is soldered in place and I also had no reason

1:11:30to replace the SSD yet. So until now I haven't removed the lower case on this machine. After

1:11:35four and a half years of usage I'm wondering if it would still make sense to open the lower

1:11:38case and remove some dust. What do you think?" I don't think I've removed any part of any

1:11:43of my MacBooks for years. At most I would just blow some compressed air in the vents

1:11:48and call it a day. But Marco, what would you do? I would say if you're not having actual

1:11:54problems with the fans and cooling, like if it's not broken, don't fix it. Because you

1:12:01run two big risks here if you do this. I mean number one, even if you just blast compressed

1:12:06air into the vents, you run the risk of shoving some dust where it wasn't before that could

1:12:12possibly cause problems. And if you take the bottom case off, not only do you run that

1:12:18same risk, but you also run the risk of damaging something in the process of taking it off

1:12:23or putting it back on. There's a, as you learn from the stage or anything, there's a lot

1:12:27of very, very small, very sensitive, very weak components that are in these. And for

1:12:34somebody who has not been formally trained on how to service each model like some of

1:12:38the Apple geniuses in service places, and for people who don't do this for a living

1:12:43and maybe this is your first time or tenth time or fifth time opening up a laptop ever,

1:12:48the risk I think is too high unless you're having a problem. And even if you are having

1:12:53a problem, I think my first step would be bring it to Apple, like have them do it if

1:12:58it's still under warranty. Just because the risks of slightly or less than slightly breaking

1:13:06something I think are too high.

1:13:07- Yeah, I mostly agree, like especially with laptops and these tiny little devices, I never

1:13:11like the idea of them ever being opened by anyone, even a professional who's opened 100

1:13:15of these this week. It's never the same. No matter how good you are, it's just never the

1:13:21same. That said, we don't know Oliver's life. If you know that you live in a house with

1:13:2775 cats and a smoker--

1:13:29- I think you have other problems at this point.

1:13:31- Right, and if you know your devices are constantly filled with stuff, it really depends.

1:13:37I wouldn't say, if you know that's a problem, if you know all your devices eventually get

1:13:41choked with cat hair and dander, you should think about doing something. But if it's just

1:13:49like sort of a hang up, like you lead an otherwise normal life and your devices do not fail at

1:13:55an incredibly higher rate and they aren't all choked with dust or sawdust or whatever,

1:13:59like who knows what's going on. If you don't live in an exceptional scenario and you just

1:14:03feel like if you look at your MacBook and you look at the events of any other person's

1:14:07MacBook, they're more or less the same, yeah, don't open it, don't mess with it, don't blow

1:14:12things into it. Hopefully you can assess this and know whether you have a problem or not.

1:14:18But I can tell you that I have never opened up any of my little devices to remove dust.

1:14:22That said, my Power Mac G5 and my Power Mac G3 and my Mac Pro all have a side that opens

1:14:28up really easily and occasionally. When I'm in there for other reasons, I will blow out

1:14:32dust. But they are cavernous and they are meant to be opened by people. There are no

1:14:36screws, it's just a little handle and that's a totally different ballgame. And speaking

1:14:40of the delicate parts in there, I was reminded of a sad thing I just heard today of someone

1:14:45who remained anonymous to protect the innocent, who opened up his brand new Mac Mini to replace

1:14:52the RAM and accidentally cracked some tiny little connector that connects the Wi-Fi antenna

1:14:57because they're super delicate and if you pull it off the wrong way, it just goes "jink".

1:15:01And so now all the time and money this person was saving by doing the RAM themselves has

1:15:05gone down the drain as they have to go crawling back to Apple and say "yeah, I opened it up

1:15:09myself and I pulled a little bit too hard on this tiny delicate plastic thing and now

1:15:13please tell me how much money I'm going to have to pay to get this fixed".

1:15:16Alright, moving on. Jeremy Kennison writes "I'm planning to get an iMac, not an iMac

1:15:21Pro, for the family to use. No video editing, no coding or high intensity use. Honestly,

1:15:26the only hardcore thing would be playing Firewatch, which by the way, if you haven't played it,

1:15:29you should. Is there any difference that I should care about between the 3.4 GHz, 3.5

1:15:33GHz or 3.8 GHz if they're all core i5 or whatever?" says Jeremy. "I feel like storage and RAM

1:15:38are more important than the processor for a typical non-coding, non-developer user. In

1:15:43my mind, this is not something I should worry about or need to pay extra for". My personal

1:15:47opinion is, when you're buying a new computer, it's exactly what Jeremy said. Start with

1:15:51RAM, get as much as you can afford, then storage, get as much as you can afford and then if

1:15:56you need to worry about the processor, so be it. Obviously that's not true for everyone,

1:16:00you don't need DMLs, but for an average rule of thumb, that's my two cents. We started

1:16:03with Marco last time. John, what are your thoughts on this? In rare circumstances, there

1:16:08can be differences between CPUs that are all out of proportion with a difference in price.

1:16:14If it's just the case where it's like, oh, slightly higher clock speed or whatever and

1:16:17there's no real differences, then yeah, you should know what you want to do with your

1:16:23computer and if stuff that you do with your computer will not see an appreciable difference,

1:16:26don't pay 300 bucks for the faster CPU. But every once in a while, not recently, but every

1:16:30once in a while, there's like the "good CPU" and the one that's $100 less is way worse

1:16:36and the one that's $300 more is just slightly better. There is sometimes discontinuities

1:16:40in the line, so it's good to be aware. If you're not following the CPU world or whatever,

1:16:45you can just look at benchmarks and say, look, here's how much faster this one is and here

1:16:49is how much more money it costs and if you know you're never going to see or feel that

1:16:54speed, it can actually be better to get the slower one, especially in a portable device

1:16:57because it can use less power. So I think Jeremy correctly assessed his needs and should

1:17:04not be chasing the best CPU. And to Casey's point, the thing that you will regret about

1:17:10your computer much more than if it feels a little bit slower after a year is when you

1:17:14run out of space or when, I mean, it's less now because you're not spending disks, when

1:17:19you run out of RAM or like it ends up swapping. Again, with SCCs, it's much better than it

1:17:23used to be, but yeah, RAM and storage over CPU if you're not doing anything where you

1:17:29need the absolute fastest CPU.

1:17:31Yeah, you pretty much covered it. The one thing to get to be aware of is that the CPU

1:17:37performance within a family does not scale linearly with the advertised clock speeds.

1:17:43There's lots of complexity these days in real world performance. One of the biggest things

1:17:47is turbo boost, which is, you know, like the CPUs are not always operating at the speed

1:17:52they advertise. They're often operating at higher speeds. And when you have, you know,

1:17:58three different clock speeds within one CPU family that's like the same generation of

1:18:03processor, it's, you know, everything else is the same. They're all branded i7 or they're

1:18:06all branded i5 or it's a mix of i5s and i7s or whatever. Like the actual difference between

1:18:12different models is smaller than you might think because of all these complicating factors.

1:18:17One of the easiest things to do, as John said, is like, you know, you can go do research.

1:18:20Like for me, my favorite place to do research is the Geekbench browser. If you go to browse.primatelabs.com

1:18:26or something like that, we'll put the link in the show notes, you can look up every Mac

1:18:30model with every processor going back a number of years. And so you can see right there,

1:18:36you can see, all right, you look at the single core and the multi core and you can see, all

1:18:39right, here is the 2018, you know, MacBook Pro, whatever, whatever it is, right? And

1:18:43you can see, all right, here's the top CPU here, middle CPU here, bottom CPU here. And

1:18:49if you look at what the actual variance between these is, most of the time, with a few exceptions,

1:18:53like if the high end model has more cores, like is the case with the Mac mini and the,

1:18:59and some of the MacBook Pros right now, if the high end model has more cores than the

1:19:04low end model, it will have a significant advantage in multi core benchmarks, you know,

1:19:08on the order of like, you know, 20 to 50%, maybe, you know, it depends on, you know,

1:19:12what the difference is. But usually within a family, usually you don't have that choice.

1:19:18Usually it's just like, here's three different clock speeds. And if you look at the actual

1:19:21differences on Geekbench, you'll see that usually the range between the low end processor

1:19:26and the high end processor is like 15%, maybe it's like in that ballpark. And so it's probably

1:19:33not worth you spending an extra three or $400 to get 15% more performance. Most people are

1:19:41not well served to spend the amounts of money it takes to get such a small percentage performance

1:19:46increase. Whereas, as John and Casey said, these days SSD size, storage size, is the

1:19:54premium. And so if you're looking, if you have a limited budget and you're looking for

1:19:57which aspect of this computer should I upgrade or focus on, I would focus on SSD size because

1:20:03even the lowest end CPU in almost every Mac family is totally fine and not that different

1:20:10from the highest end one.

1:20:12All right, and finally, Andrew writes, "What tweet management approach do you have? I ask

1:20:16because Marco's tweet count seems to be decreasing since Andrew named Marco. Why don't we start

1:20:21with you?"

1:20:22Well, I don't really have much of an approach necessarily. It's not like a methodology or

1:20:26a formal thing where I'm like, you know, having standups every morning in the parking lot

1:20:30and whiteboarding my action items. So it's not really a formal thing. I've been tweeting

1:20:36less because Twitter sucks. That's about it. Like every time, like it's like, you know

1:20:42how if you eat a certain type of food and you vomit after eating it, you tend not to

1:20:49want to eat that type of food for a while if ever. Imagine that feeling in a smaller

1:20:55way every time I go to Twitter. It's like, wow. Every time I use Twitter, I feel a little

1:21:02bit worse about using Twitter more in the future. And so that feeling is accumulating

1:21:07over time.

1:21:08I wonder if your tweet count actually is decreasing though. Like I don't know. I'd like to see

1:21:12some charts because my impression is you've been tweeting more than usual lately. Or maybe

1:21:16it's just they're more like bursts. I don't know. I would have to see some numbers on

1:21:20it, but I'm wondering how this person came to the conclusion that your tweet count, they

1:21:24said seems to be decreasing.

1:21:26Well, did you delete a bunch of tweets when that was trendy like a month or two ago?

1:21:30Yes. So the actual tweet count probably does go up and down a lot because I have one of

1:21:36those things that just deletes tweets older than X days. But I don't think it didn't sound

1:21:40like this is what this person was talking about.

1:21:42Yeah. I read it the way you read it the first time. And then I came back to that, you know,

1:21:47week or not a week, I guess a few days later. And I thought what he meant was, did you delete

1:21:52a bunch of tweets?

1:21:54Oh, yes.

1:21:56But to kind of come back to your interpretation of this, Marco, I found that I am paying less

1:22:02and less attention to Twitter over time. I'm still addicted, but less so. So that's good

1:22:07if you can consider there a gray area in this conversation. I find that I'm tweeting less

1:22:12and less because more and more frequently, even when I tweet innocuous things, I get

1:22:17angry tweets in return. And I don't typically pay attention to my timeline anymore. I think

1:22:24I've said this either on here or on analog, but I have a list of roughly 30 or 40 people.

1:22:29It's a private list that I do pay attention to. And I am a completionist on that list.

1:22:34But my main timeline, I only look at if I get really bored. And so I just have been

1:22:39slowly backing away from Twitter. Slowly.

1:22:44I mean, the thing is, like, if you go to a place where you're hanging out with your friends,

1:22:49and suppose it's like a bar that you all go to with your friends, right? I love these

1:22:52kinds of metaphors on Twitter because they're almost as overused as car metaphors on computers.

1:22:56So it's like hanging out at a bar with your friends. And you keep going there because

1:23:01all your friends are there, and it used to be a really good bar. And every time you go

1:23:05there, someone walks up to you and slaps you in the face and walks away. And you're like,

1:23:10"Well, that kind of sucks, but my friends are just..." And then a few minutes later,

1:23:13someone comes up and just farts, and it just stinks up the whole place. And then they walk

1:23:16away. And they're like, "Oh, God, this, okay, this is kind of unpleasant." And then a few

1:23:19minutes later, somebody else walks up and just starts yelling at you, like a crazy person.

1:23:24Like, "Why are you here? What are you doing? You're doing everything wrong." It's like,

1:23:27"Okay." And eventually, you're going to be like, "Hey, guys, you want to go somewhere

1:23:30else?" And that's kind of what I've been doing.

1:23:33John, any thoughts?

1:23:34Another vague question. Tweet management approach? Speaking of managing Twitter in general, Casey,

1:23:41I have a recommendation for you. Take that list of 40 people where you read the timeline

1:23:46and make that your new list of followers and unfollow everybody else.

1:23:49It's funny you said that. I really mean this. It's funny you said that. And I have thought

1:23:53about doing exactly that a lot. The reason I haven't yet is because there are a lot of

1:23:59people who I really, really, really, really like in the real world that I don't want to

1:24:06upset by unfollowing them.

1:24:08That's not how—you should change your mental model of Twitter. Come to my mental model

1:24:11of Twitter, which is, me following you doesn't mean I like you. Me not following you doesn't

1:24:15mean I don't like you. I follow people whose tweets I want to see. That is the whole criteria.

1:24:21Just because I don't want to see your tweets doesn't mean I don't like you. Maybe you're

1:24:24awesome. Maybe you tweet about a thing that I love, but you tweet about it just slightly

1:24:27too much. Like, "I love dogs, but maybe you tweet about dogs too much. I won't follow

1:24:31you." Don't take it personally. I just don't want to see all your dog tweets. It's fine.

1:24:35Anyway, everyone can decide how they want to follow.

1:24:38Tweet management approach? I guess we did—it's broad brush. Marco talked about his deleting

1:24:43tweets with some automated thing and why he's not liking Twitter too much, and you have

1:24:48your list and then your other timeline. Everyone knows my approach. He's listened to the show

1:24:52for a long time. I'm a completionist. I trim my follow list so I can read everybody's tweets.

1:24:57Pretty much nobody else in the world does that because it's not the way most people

1:25:00use Twitter, which makes me think, again, how could Andrew know what Marco's tweet

1:25:06count is? I get this a lot from other people who reply to me, and it's so clear from all

1:25:10the replies that I get. People don't have time to read everybody's tweets, so they'll

1:25:13ask about something that I tweeted about an hour ago. Why don't they know I tweeted about

1:25:16an hour ago? Why would they? It was an hour ago. They're not like their Twitter completionists.

1:25:24I tweet when I feel like it. I read Twitter when I feel like it. The only thing that I've

1:25:29been doing more in the past few years than I have earlier is I'm getting much quicker

1:25:35with the block button. Blocking and muting are the two biggest new tools in the past

1:25:45three years that I've used. I don't need to use them that much, but that's the only thing

1:25:51that I've added to my normal practice of keeping my follow list small. No one slaps me in the

1:26:00face or farts when I go on Twitter for the most part. I have the discipline not to respond

1:26:06to most people, which really helps, but the people I do respond to are nice and I have

1:26:09fun, and sometimes I do see pictures of dogs and they're cute. Except for we rate dogs

1:26:14who rejected my dog picture a year ago and then post one that looks exactly the same.

1:26:18Not that we're bitter. So angry about that. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Aftershocks,

1:26:23Marine Layer, and Casper. We'll see you next week.

1:26:53Bye.

1:27:00[MUSIC]

1:27:28We rate dogs is all, "Oh, if you have a cute picture of your dog, just DM it to me. Maybe

1:27:32I'll include it on my thing." "Great, I've got a cute dog. Check out this cute picture."

1:27:36Nothing. Silence. No response for a year. A year later, we rate dogs is like, "Look at

1:27:41this dog that blends into the surface that it's on." There's been a million of those

1:27:46pictures from we rate dogs. "I sent you a perfectly good dog blending into the surface

1:27:51that it's on picture a year ago and you never posted it. Are you trying to say my dog isn't

1:27:54cute or isn't blending with its surroundings?" Nothing. Nothing from we rate dogs.

1:27:59Very, very sad times. I'm sorry, John.

1:28:01It is. My dog is cute. Everyone should see my dog.

1:28:03Marco, you shipped something this week. You shipped Instant Search and I'm assuming that

1:28:11you used RxSwift for that. Is that correct?

1:28:13Oh, yeah. I always use PrescriptionSwift for everything. You should have called it InstaSearch.

1:28:20That's true. Oh, that's a missed opportunity.

1:28:21See, I can't use Insta anymore because I came out with Instapaper and then a couple of years

1:28:27later, Instagram came out. And now, if I would use InstaSomething, everyone would think I

1:28:34was just aping Instagram. Just call it FinstaSearch. Wow. Fake InstaSearch.

1:28:41Anyway, I haven't actually taken the time to play with this because I'm a terrible person.

1:28:47But you said in your blog post about it, which we'll link in the show notes, you said, "This

1:28:52was a lot of fun to build and I'm proud of it," which means now I need you to tell me

1:28:58why was it fun to build and tell me, not that you shouldn't be, why you're proud of it.

1:29:02Well, all right. So what Instant Search is, for a long time, I've had this fantasy for

1:29:08Overcast of, "Wouldn't it be cool to move the most common search items, like the most

1:29:16commonly searched podcasts, into a local cache that just is bundled with the app and will

1:29:22therefore be instantly searchable so that when you're typing in the name of something

1:29:27that you want to add, like the name of a new podcast you just heard about you want to go

1:29:30at it, it just shows up immediately." And I've tried lots of different ways to do this.

1:29:38And the main problem I kept coming back to, I basically tried this every six months for

1:29:42like the last few years, and the main problem I kept coming back to was the index that it

1:29:47would create, the search index it would create, would just be too big. And so I would shelf

1:29:52the idea, like, "Okay, it isn't worth the size. I'll shelf it for now and I'll come

1:29:56back later." What I started doing, maybe about a year ago, I forget exactly, is I started

1:30:03recording with new subscriptions for new podcasts what search queries led to that podcast being

1:30:12subscribed to. And so that gives me, when I combine that with popularity rankings on

1:30:18Overcast, just how many people subscribed to each one, that combination is able to give

1:30:23way more relevant results than straight up title relevance matching with no waiting.

1:30:31Imagine Google without page rank, that's kind of crappy, it's just a keyword search

1:30:35at that point. That's how most podcast apps are able to search, is they just kind of do

1:30:40like a dumb text relevance score, like there's algorithms like BM25 and stuff like that,

1:30:47there's algorithms where if you search for accidental tech and our podcast shows up on

1:30:52the list because it includes those keywords and you might rank it because it was part

1:30:56of the title, which is more important than the body, and it was two thirds of the title

1:31:00of this show, and some other show it might only be two of ten words in the title, and

1:31:06the words are next to each other, so you might rank it highly. There's all these different

1:31:08algorithms that search engines use to rank to see what's most important, that you can

1:31:13use without any knowledge of the result set of how important they are. All you know is

1:31:20how well does it match the text of the query. So that's what I was doing for years, and

1:31:24it's been mediocre, it's been fine. Anyway, so I started in more recent times adding popularity

1:31:29rankings to that, and episode recency, so that way if you search for the talk show,

1:31:36you get John Gruber's more recent talk show podcast, not the one that was on Five by Five

1:31:42like five years ago and hasn't been updated since. So there's all sorts of matching things

1:31:47you gotta do to kind of account for that. So you have, I factor in recency of episodes,

1:31:51I factor in popularity on Overcast, so that way if you launch a podcast called This American

1:31:56Lives, you know, and you shouldn't get every search for This American Life because you

1:32:02kind of didn't earn that, like people who search for that probably meant the first,

1:32:05probably meant the big public radio show, not yours, right? So you gotta account for

1:32:10stuff like that, and so the more factors you can put in that are based on popularity or

1:32:16like the merits of this as verified by human beings, the more relevant your search can

1:32:21be. So I started building in this thing about like whatever people typed, and then whatever

1:32:27they actually subscribed to, weight that more highly. So over time, if you figure like that

1:32:33will eventually make, like if you type in a search query and it brings up three results

1:32:38and the one that everybody really wants always shows up third, over time that will actually

1:32:43rise in the list up to first place. Because if everyone types in This American Life and

1:32:48above it is This American Lives and This American Love and then This American Life, below that

1:32:52like eventually people will type This American something, subscribe to This American Life,

1:32:58and eventually that will rise up to the top until it is the first result in that list.

1:33:02So because I had this increased relevance building algorithm, I was able to then make

1:33:07a downloadable local search index using that combined with my other popularity and stuff

1:33:12like that, that was way, way, way smaller, but that actually had significant relevance

1:33:19to most searches. And the index of that takes about three megs. And I could make it smaller

1:33:26if I made it slower, but I include in that three meg index everything that is needed

1:33:33to show it in the search result list, like the artwork URL, the title, the description,

1:33:37the authors, like I include all that in the database even though I could fetch it, but

1:33:41it just shows up faster. And so the result of this is I've been able to achieve my dream.

1:33:48You can go to the search box and you can type in a single letter. Effectively immediately

1:33:54you will get three results right there on top. You type in letter number two and you

1:33:58get a different three results, or maybe one of the same ones, but like letter number two

1:34:01you refine your search even further, and chances are by letter number two or three if you're

1:34:07searching for a popular show it's probably already on screen.

1:34:10You're bearing the lead here. The most important feature which you demonstrated in your movie

1:34:13is now finally you can go to Overcast. Go to the search feature and type the letters

1:34:19ATP. And the number one hit is this podcast, which does not contain any words with the

1:34:26sequence of letters ATP in them. Nevertheless, it will be the number one hit.

1:34:30You've been able to search for ATP by the phrase ATP in Overcast for about six months

1:34:35now because about six months ago I started indexing keywords in domain names as part

1:34:43of search results. And our domain name as you heard in the song is ATP.fm, and so I

1:34:48separate tokenized based on the dot, I discard the TLD, and so our domain name's keywords

1:34:52are ATP. And so it would show up in relevance for a long time if you type in ATP for about

1:34:58six months, and over time that query leads to result algorithm made it slowly rise in

1:35:05that list, and now it's on top when you search for ATP.

1:35:08Was it number one before? I don't know. I don't remember.

1:35:11Well, anyway, it's the number one result now as it should be, and honestly Marco should

1:35:15have added special case code for this a long time ago.

1:35:18So Overcast, people always accuse me of this. Overcast has no special case code for ATP

1:35:24with one very, very, very small exception. I do have a flag in the database. So normally

1:35:31when a show, like you have a show like This American Life where it only usually includes

1:35:37the one most recent episode in the feed, and then any old episodes you can't download

1:35:41fresh anymore, like you have to like go buy their app or whatever to get them, like they

1:35:45remove it from the public feed. So Overcast has a feature that's been there for a while

1:35:49where it keeps track of what episodes it knows about from a feed that are no longer in the

1:35:55feed. And for people who are newly arriving at that podcast, it doesn't show the ones

1:36:00that are no longer in the feed because the assumption is you probably can't download

1:36:03them anymore. ATP is hosted on Squarespace. Squarespace has a limit of 100 items in RSS

1:36:10feeds. So because Overcast have been running for long enough to catch ATP from episode

1:36:15one in that feed, Overcast knows about all the episodes because they were at one time

1:36:20in the feed that it saw. It just has many of them marked as no longer in the feed. I

1:36:25do have a special flag in the backend that I can set for a podcast that says ignore what's

1:36:32no longer in the feed and just show everything I know about that has ever been in the feed.

1:36:38And so I have that set for ATP and a handful of other shows where I know this is a problem.

1:36:42And therefore, Overcast can see all the back catalog of ATP even though the RSS feed only

1:36:48ever included the last 100 episodes. But other than that, that is the only special case handling

1:36:53of ATP in Overcast and that's not applied only to ATP.

1:36:57Cote- So what made this so fun to write other than just accomplishing this thing that you've

1:37:01wanted to accomplish for so long?

1:37:03Jared- It was a fun technical challenge for me because it involved a lot of low level

1:37:08stuff. I love low level optimization code. I love like take this enclosed problem that

1:37:14like it's not, it doesn't really involve anything like frustrating. Like there's no weird concurrency

1:37:22stuff. There's no weird like UI conditions and testing in weird states. There's no time

1:37:28based anything. There's no network based anything. Like it's just a very like here's a bunch

1:37:34of data that you need to operate on in low level ways and make it really fast and keep

1:37:40it really small. And I love problems like that. So it was a very fun problem to work

1:37:44on of like how do I make the index in the first place? How do I decide what goes into

1:37:48the index? How do I rank what's in the index? And then how do I make the index as small

1:37:52as possible? And then how do I make the app read and display contents from the index as

1:37:57quickly as possible? And all of that was, oh and then how do I make the servers serve

1:38:02the index as quickly as possible through the CDN and everything so the servers don't all

1:38:06get hammered when all the apps come down with the update? There's all sorts of fun little

1:38:10challenges that were involved here that I just, I just love that kind of work. I get

1:38:14a lot of joy out of it. That's why I've been doing this. And then the result of it is sheer

1:38:19delight. Like the result of seeing instant search because most search boxes don't work

1:38:25this way. Like most search boxes in any other podcast app and even in many other kinds of

1:38:30apps in general you're searching a catalog of things like the app store. You know like

1:38:35you type in a letter and you don't immediately get results. You might after a few letters

1:38:41get one of those like suggested search things where it just shows like the text below the

1:38:45box and you can tap on it to actually run that search. You might get that but I don't

1:38:50know of anyone else who does search like this where you're actually searching what is technically

1:38:53remote content but it shows up instantly thanks to this local cache. So I really I'm very

1:38:59proud of it. I think it's a very delightful feature and as I wrote up my blog post it's

1:39:04an important feature because search is incredibly important to podcast apps and I think overall

1:39:11we as podcast app makers have not done a great job prioritizing search for the importance

1:39:16that it actually has. Like it is a really important feature and I kind of learned this

1:39:20like I had over winter break. I had some server issues. Mostly it wasn't a problem that people

1:39:28couldn't sync their playback. The biggest problem was you couldn't easily search to

1:39:33add new podcasts and that made me realize quite how important search is because the

1:39:37first thing you do when you install a new podcast app is use the search box to add the

1:39:41shows you want to hear and what people do frequently throughout you know their usage

1:39:46of the app is oh they hear about a new show I want to go add it. Go you type into the

1:39:49search box. Speaking of that by the way, that use case I run across all the time. Someone

1:39:55mentions a cool podcast and I want to go add it to overcast. I wish search was more available

1:40:02in the UI like more prominent in the UI. Now that you've improved it so vastly I would

1:40:05love it if like everywhere I could get access to from wherever I am and it was context aware

1:40:11like if I'm on the playlist and I want to go find an episode and stick it in the playlist

1:40:15that I'm currently looking on I don't want to leave the playlist and go back to the home

1:40:18screen and do a search whatever I want to do it right there. So I think now that you've

1:40:21improved search you should whatever your next UI redesign is think about how to feature

1:40:26it more prominently and make it more useful and more context because now you know even

1:40:31the old search I wanted to use frequently and now that it's fast I would love to just

1:40:34use it immediately.

1:40:35Yeah thanks that's actually that's a good idea. I mean I it's it's a little tricky in

1:40:40that the the combination of the search box and the way iOS standard controllers display

1:40:47search results by overlaying the table view with a new table view that has just the search

1:40:52results in it and they kind of like it dims the background and moves the search box up

1:40:56the way that's all done is through this thing called UI search controller. UI search controller

1:41:00has been notoriously buggy and hard to work with over time. The current version is no

1:41:05better it is very buggy and hard to work with it especially is buggy when dealing with navigation

1:41:12pushes and pops where you have multiple levels of navigation like overcast has and where

1:41:16you might you might want a search controller in a deeper level of it than the root level

1:41:21or you might want one in both but or one or the other and overcast also has a bug since

1:41:275.0 and when I added search which is search controllers just totally break when used in

1:41:34combination with pull to refresh. Apple has UI refresh control it is a built-in pull to

1:41:40refresh thing and if you use that with Apple's built-in search controller to display search

1:41:45box as a navigation bars they just conflict and you have animation bugs all over the place

1:41:49this is I know this is a bug in overcast the reason why I haven't fixed it yet is because

1:41:53it's merely a minor cosmetic bug if you pull to refresh and then you get the search box

1:41:56kind of stuck on screen for a second it's a cosmetic bug and it is to fix it will involve

1:42:02me writing my own UI search controller or and or UI refresh control and that has not

1:42:09been a pressing enough need yet to justify the amount of work that it will be. Tell me

1:42:14about the video player for this thing that appears to be a gif on your website but actually

1:42:19has play/pause controls which are emoji by the way and I vastly approve of them. So that's

1:42:24yeah so when marketing this feature it was important to me to show the video like so

1:42:29a couple weeks ago I did a tweet from the overcast account saying like coming soon this

1:42:33like fast search thing and the response to it was massive so I knew people really like

1:42:38this this really resonated with people's and so I wanted to you know really market it right

1:42:42with the blog post and so it had to be a video. As far as I could tell I didn't look too much

1:42:47into it honestly but as far as I could tell animated gifs there's no good way for browsers

1:42:52to pause their playback some of them will allow you to like click them to stop them

1:42:56or hit the stop button to stop them but like I couldn't find a way to like offer a play/pause

1:43:00button in the actual content of the page and give the users that control like reliably

1:43:05and so I didn't want this big animated thing to be forcibly animating for everyone as they

1:43:11try to read the text below it necessarily like I wanted it to be animating upon upon

1:43:16loading the page but to be stoppable. I also like the gif quality was okay but it was like

1:43:22two megs and I thought well let me see if I can get better quality with you know h264,

1:43:27h265, webm whatever else I can get right so I I use this opportunity to revisit what can

1:43:34the html5 video tag do these days and that is an html5 video it is literally it is three

1:43:41versions of the file it's h265 which plays in most modern safaris and that is the smallest

1:43:47of the files it also is h264 which plays in almost everything else and webm which plays

1:43:53in google's whatever bs that plays webm that I think covers all modern browsers that have

1:43:58a chance to do this I in order to at first I thought like oh let me let me use just the

1:44:03built-in controls it doesn't make it super simple but the building controls at least

1:44:07in safari overlaid the search box in the video and I thought that's that's not great that's

1:44:12kind of ruining the point here so I did no controls autoplay play in line and there's

1:44:19no sound so I don't worry about that and I thought well I'll just I'll make it so that

1:44:24if you click on it or tap on it playback stops and if you click on it again it'll start again

1:44:30people will figure that out but then I thought no people won't figure that out I can't I

1:44:34can't depend on that so it does that if you click on it it will stop playing and it'll

1:44:39click on it again it'll resume but I also wanted like some kind of very very small play

1:44:45button and I tried different things I tried first like a link that just said play slash

1:44:49pause or pause or whatever and it didn't it was ugly and big and eventually I'm just like

1:44:53let me just make a little emoji thing I searched found the emoji play and pause buttons and

1:44:58I wrote the smallest video player that I thought I possibly could it uses very you can view

1:45:04source it's right there it's like you know a couple lines of JavaScript and and and that's

1:45:09it and so it's very very simple and I'm actually kind of proud of like how easy and simple

1:45:15it ended up being and it was kind of a fun little thing to just like play with HTML I

1:45:18even did a I thought like what is the equivalent of an alt tag for video so that people using

1:45:26screen readers can know what this is I learned this thing called web vtt and it's basically

1:45:33a caption and transcription format like a subtitle kind of format and you can use web

1:45:39vtt formatted caption files to use them either as subtitles for the video or as something

1:45:47called text descriptions now semantically subtitles are not for this purpose like the

1:45:54purpose of a subtitle is not for a visually impaired user to learn what if it what's in

1:45:59a video it's for a hearing impaired user to be able to read what is being spoken in a

1:46:06video now my video had no sound all I wanted was the equivalent of a video alt tag of like

1:46:12to describe in text the image that is showing in the video and so there's a thing for that

1:46:19called web vtt and and you can use the track sub element of HTML 5 video and you can give

1:46:24it the the role like the semantic role of text description or something like that it's

1:46:28all it's all in the spec somewhere and so I did all that and I transcribed like I have

1:46:33I transcribed a video and it's it's great except no browser actually supports that yet

1:46:37turns out so nice if I label it as subtitles then the built-in controls which I've disabled

1:46:44because they were covering up the search bar the building controls would be able to display

1:46:48it as subtitles if you turn them on but they're not subtitles and that kind of sucks and as

1:46:54far as I can tell the built-in screen reader on iOS and Mac OS voiceover just skips right

1:47:00over the video video element no matter what I did whether it was subtitles or text descriptions

1:47:03or whatever like voiceover just skips right over the whole video does it like you it pretends

1:47:07it is even there so I don't as far as I can tell this that was not a good use of time

1:47:13to do this but hopefully in the future that will be useful to somebody I don't know and

1:47:18at least I learned how to do it so if browsers ever do support that then that'll be nice

1:47:21but it was it was kind of like a fun little thing to like make this little experiment

1:47:25of this totally self-contained little video player on in this blog post and just see like

1:47:29how easy can HTML5 make this for me and how minimal can I make it while still being functional

1:47:34I dig it it's cool when do you fall back to doing a search across the internet against

1:47:43your servers like at what point do you say the local cache is not enough and you go go

1:47:47and ask overcast servers for help I always will run a remote search once you've typed

1:47:53your third character so and one thing too like the instant search cache results never

1:47:57move once they're on screen when the remote results from my servers come in they will

1:48:02only ever go below them because what I what I didn't want is for you to type in something

1:48:08see the instant search results go to tap it and then as you're going to tap it it changes

1:48:12that from under you to something else and you tap the wrong thing accidentally like

1:48:15that's exactly how the iOS app search works for me all the time yeah exactly that's a

1:48:19terrible experience so I didn't want to do that so it's basically like the results are

1:48:24stable whereas like the only way to make the contents of the list change is for you to

1:48:28enter more text or different text in the text box so if you have typed a query and then

1:48:34you go to tap something without typing any more letters whatever you go to tap on will

1:48:38still be there when you get there I dig it it's cool so Casey you published a video I

1:48:44did I win the competition between me hooray to not to my surprise yeah so I published

1:48:52the CRV video what is that yesterday morning and it has been up for a while unsurprisingly

1:48:59it hasn't made a tremendous splash I didn't promote it quite as aggressively as I have

1:49:02in the past and I think the subject matter is slightly less interesting than some of

1:49:07the stuff I've had in the past but the video is out I'm mostly happy with how it's turned

1:49:13out and we talked about this a lot last episode so I don't really need to relive the motivations

1:49:19and trials and tribulations of the video but all told I am pleased that it's out the door

1:49:27I am going to start on the next video probably tomorrow and in general I'm I'm happy with

1:49:34it there are definitely problems with it the one thing that slipped through the cracks

1:49:38and I'll beat probably John if not both of you on this is that at one point hand to God

1:49:43I don't know how this happened I don't know if I did it and then never caught it I did

1:49:47I did notice it at one point and then slipped my mind after that but at one point when I'm

1:49:52discussing how chatty the car is I have the video flipped in such a way it looks like

1:49:58it's a right hand drive car I don't know how that slipped through slipped my mind to fix

1:50:02that I don't even know how the video got that way but somehow that happened and somehow

1:50:08the one time I noticed it I didn't fix it immediately and then forgot about it and that

1:50:12really really ticked me off it was a self-created problem there are a couple audio pickups here

1:50:17and there but mostly I don't think they're nearly as egregious as they had been in the

1:50:21past and mostly I'm happy with it cool that's easy I mean I'm I don't we don't need to belabor

1:50:28it any more than that I'm assuming John is about to beat me up with a whole bunch of

1:50:31complaints and criticisms but but if if we're done at this point then I'd say go watch the

1:50:37first video mash that subscribe and hit the bell or whatever I'm supposed to say and and

1:50:42we're good John oh this is a video from the past so we're gonna talk about I want to talk

1:50:47about his future videos when you release one that's newer than the one you released before

1:50:52then we could talk about it yeah it's fine although I your your opinion of the CRV is

1:50:56warped by your contact with these luxury cars of course but like it is you could say what

1:51:01you want to say it is you're right and like I recorded as I stated on the video that wasn't

1:51:06a lie I recorded what I thought was going to be darn near all the footage for the car

1:51:13where I basically said it's a piece of trash and then it occurred to me it's really not

1:51:17it's actually a very nice car it's just that it's not it's not as nice as the car that

1:51:22cost twice as much which is weird right no no no you make my XC90 is nicer than this

1:51:28is it is it nicer it is nicer it only costs two times as much well there's that I hope

1:51:34it's nicer you're absolutely right and how do you feel about two CRVs versus the XC90

1:51:41no you're absolutely right and that's why I that's that's why I ended up re-shooting

1:51:47a lot of it and not to say I did it perfectly but my initial cuts at this were like oh this

1:51:52is a piece of crap and it doesn't do anything nice and that's not true actually it's really

1:51:56genuinely not true it's actually a very very nice car and it is an SUV I mean you can you

1:52:01can slam it for that but like you have to compare it to like it's the comparables as

1:52:04they say in the real estate business like there are other SUVs that cost about the same

1:52:07amount of money and how does you know like how does this compare to them is when you're

1:52:12you know running one of your the fancy cars like the quadrifolio or whatever you're comparing

1:52:18it to other cars of the same type in the same price class and that's the valid comparison

1:52:23but you're going to be constantly be comparing cars to cars that cost twice as much you're

1:52:27always going to be disappointed yeah and you're absolutely right and I think I I should have

1:52:32been more cognizant of that when I was when I was filming but you know you live you learn

1:52:36but yeah so I'm gonna hopefully be able to make heads or tails of this Tesla footage

1:52:41I shot in November I think within the next couple of working days I'm gonna know whether

1:52:46or not I can do anything with it I certainly hope to I plan to it's not gonna be as long

1:52:53a video as this was it's not gonna be as involved a video as this was but I hope to be able

1:52:57to put something short out based on it even if I end up like I'm really worried about

1:53:01the audio because I don't think I had my lavalier game dialed in correctly so even if I end

1:53:07up just you know doing a voiceover with a bit of b-roll that I might just try to do

1:53:11that we'll see once I go digging through this footage but I've set up a schedule for the

1:53:17next several months of what I want to review and when I want to do it and so I think if

1:53:21I don't do the Tesla video for February then I'm gonna do like a here's here's my my golf

1:53:27are after having lived with it for several months and what do I like what do I not like

1:53:32and so that's the plan for February and then I think the XC90 in March and and then we'll

1:53:39see where it goes from there yeah go check it out youtube.caseylist.com it's only 10

1:53:44minutes could you not get you don't you have a vanity or youtube.com/caseylist I haven't

1:53:50done it yet I need to do that but I haven't done it yet youtube.com/saracusagethetameineverenouncemarco

1:53:58yep speaking of which I should have recorded my day of woe and destiny because I would

1:54:03have made a great video ABR always be recording

1:54:06[BEEPING]