ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► - I am back on the beach today and I'm so happy.

00:00:02 ◼   ► The beach in September is beautiful

00:00:04 ◼   ► because it's still pretty warm,

00:00:07 ◼   ► some of the restaurants are still open,

00:00:09 ◼   ► and there's no one here.

00:00:10 ◼   ► 'Cause as soon as the school year starts,

00:00:14 ◼   ► everyone stops coming here.

00:00:16 ◼   ► It's like the workers who work locally here

00:00:19 ◼   ► call it Tumbleweed Tuesday, the day after Labor Day,

00:00:21 ◼   ► because it's just, it literally is like a light switch.

00:00:25 ◼   ► Like Labor Day weekend, massive, crowded, everything,

00:00:28 ◼   ► and then literally Tuesday,

00:00:30 ◼   ► just Tumbleweeds blow through the town, no one is here.

00:00:33 ◼   ► So it is, we're not able to spend a ton of time here

00:00:37 ◼   ► because we also are bound now by the mainland school year,

00:00:40 ◼   ► but wow, it's so nice here.

00:00:43 ◼   ► It's like walking through one of those

00:00:45 ◼   ► deserted video game levels.

00:00:46 ◼   ► - Fewer zombies.

00:00:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, I mean, the few people who were left,

00:00:51 ◼   ► we're certainly an eccentric crowd.

00:00:54 ◼   ► Certainly some characters walking around.

00:00:57 ◼   ► We don't get sent on a lot of side quests though,

00:00:59 ◼   ► but it is certainly some eccentrics.

00:01:04 ◼   ► That's part of one of the best things I love

00:01:07 ◼   ► about being here in this weird beach town

00:01:09 ◼   ► is that the people who are here for long enough,

00:01:13 ◼   ► I don't know if it makes you eccentric,

00:01:15 ◼   ► or if only eccentric people can tolerate being here

00:01:17 ◼   ► for that long, but whatever it is,

00:01:19 ◼   ► it selects for eccentricity.

00:01:22 ◼   ► And so everyone here is weird.

00:01:24 ◼   ► Like I fit in great, 'cause I'm weird too.

00:01:27 ◼   ► And I'm weird in different ways than some of the other ones,

00:01:29 ◼   ► but like everyone here is just so gloriously weird.

00:01:34 ◼   ► I feel so at home here.

00:01:36 ◼   ► Like Long Island, Long Island has its weirdos for sure,

00:01:39 ◼   ► but it's more like regular suburban America.

00:01:42 ◼   ► You don't see a lot of that coming out.

00:01:44 ◼   ► In the beach town, everyone lets their weirdness fly,

00:01:48 ◼   ► and it is just glorious to be here.

00:01:50 ◼   ► And you feel like the most normal person,

00:01:53 ◼   ► even when you are as weird as I am.

00:01:56 ◼   ► - Oh my.

00:01:57 ◼   ► Do you have your car back?

00:01:58 ◼   ► - Yeah, I've got it back, the issue has not recurred,

00:02:01 ◼   ► it's been fine.

00:02:01 ◼   ► I actually heard from a couple of listeners who wrote in

00:02:04 ◼   ► who said that they actually had similar problems

00:02:06 ◼   ► with like some high voltage error message

00:02:08 ◼   ► with their BMW iX on its first day,

00:02:11 ◼   ► and then they got it fixed and they never saw it again.

00:02:13 ◼   ► So I'm hoping that's going to happen to me.

00:02:16 ◼   ► Otherwise, still loving the car, it's still really great.

00:02:20 ◼   ► There's nothing more to report there.

00:02:21 ◼   ► I hope it's now gonna be just a boring car ownership story

00:02:25 ◼   ► for the next three years, and then I'll pick something else

00:02:28 ◼   ► or the same thing again, or buy this one, who knows.

00:02:30 ◼   ► But I look forward to going back to my car

00:02:34 ◼   ► not being a point of flux.

00:02:37 ◼   ► I've had various neck and shoulder tension issues

00:02:42 ◼   ► over the last couple of years,

00:02:43 ◼   ► working through some weird little issues.

00:02:45 ◼   ► During all the Caribbean drama,

00:02:47 ◼   ► I couldn't even turn my head all the way to one side.

00:02:50 ◼   ► It was really bad.

00:02:51 ◼   ► My whole shoulder blade was all tense,

00:02:53 ◼   ► and I went to a physical therapist

00:02:56 ◼   ► and fixed it a little bit,

00:02:57 ◼   ► but I had to go back the next week to fix it more.

00:03:00 ◼   ► And then as soon as I got the new car,

00:03:04 ◼   ► it was like a light switch turned off there too.

00:03:07 ◼   ► It's like, it was just all that stress was just melted away

00:03:11 ◼   ► as it just started working, and it just didn't,

00:03:14 ◼   ► it wasn't causing all this problem

00:03:17 ◼   ► and distraction in my life.

00:03:19 ◼   ► - Did the physical therapist tell you

00:03:20 ◼   ► that your neck was too smart to move?

00:03:22 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:03:24 ◼   ► - All right, before we get started, it is still September.

00:03:29 ◼   ► There's a week left in September,

00:03:31 ◼   ► and September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month,

00:03:35 ◼   ► which means we are still, still trying to raise money

00:03:38 ◼   ► for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

00:03:41 ◼   ► At one point, I had my little show notes up

00:03:43 ◼   ► or that would tell me the talking points I'm supposed to use

00:03:46 ◼   ► but I accidentally closed it.

00:03:47 ◼   ► So I'm gonna do this off the dome, as Marilyn would say.

00:03:50 ◼   ► - You don't need notes, you've lived it now.

00:03:52 ◼   ► - I've lived it, yes, that's right.

00:03:53 ◼   ► So speaking of, this past Friday as we record,

00:03:55 ◼   ► I was in Memphis at St. Jude's campus,

00:03:59 ◼   ► and we did 12 hours of live telethon.

00:04:04 ◼   ► We called the podcast-a-thon, it was myself, Mike Hurley,

00:04:06 ◼   ► Stephen Hackett, Jason Snell, and Kathy Campbell,

00:04:09 ◼   ► and we did all sorts of fun hijinks for 12 hours

00:04:12 ◼   ► and raised $130,000 or thereabouts

00:04:15 ◼   ► for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

00:04:16 ◼   ► So why do we do it?

00:04:17 ◼   ► St. Jude is, like I've said several times now,

00:04:20 ◼   ► a children's research hospital.

00:04:22 ◼   ► So some of the incredible stuff that they do

00:04:24 ◼   ► is not only do they treat children who are really

00:04:28 ◼   ► in the throes of terrible life-threatening illnesses,

00:04:31 ◼   ► but they also do a ton of research

00:04:33 ◼   ► and they try to figure out ways to make sure

00:04:36 ◼   ► that no child would die in the dawn of their lives

00:04:40 ◼   ► and in the beginning of their lives.

00:04:41 ◼   ► And so when I was there, I attended a couple of talks

00:04:46 ◼   ► from some doctors there who were just talking

00:04:50 ◼   ► about these absolutely phenomenal things that they're doing

00:04:53 ◼   ► and how they're looking at research for one type of cancer

00:04:56 ◼   ► and very cautiously and in a controlled way

00:04:59 ◼   ► applying it to different kinds of cancer

00:05:00 ◼   ► and finding incredible, incredible solutions

00:05:04 ◼   ► and fixes and whatnot.

00:05:05 ◼   ► The work they do there is incredible.

00:05:07 ◼   ► They talk about how they're doing DNA sequencing

00:05:09 ◼   ► in order to figure out, okay, well, we know that you have,

00:05:12 ◼   ► let's say not a cancer, say epilepsy.

00:05:14 ◼   ► We know you have epilepsy, but it could be one

00:05:17 ◼   ► of 50 different kinds of epilepsy.

00:05:19 ◼   ► But thanks to genetic sequencing, we can say, oh, no, no,

00:05:21 ◼   ► your particular style of epilepsy is the one, two, three,

00:05:24 ◼   ► four, five style and we know that this drug

00:05:27 ◼   ► treats that one, two, three, four, five style really well

00:05:29 ◼   ► and we shouldn't use this other drug

00:05:30 ◼   ► that treats the six, seven, eight, nine, 10 style

00:05:32 ◼   ► or whatever the case may be.

00:05:34 ◼   ► The work that St. Jude does is really incredible

00:05:36 ◼   ► and one of the most incredible things

00:05:37 ◼   ► about what St. Jude does is that they do this

00:05:39 ◼   ► without billing their patients or their patients' families.

00:05:43 ◼   ► So their perspective is, if you have a child

00:05:46 ◼   ► that's fighting for their lives,

00:05:48 ◼   ► the last thing you wanna worry about as a family

00:05:50 ◼   ► is anything but helping that child

00:05:53 ◼   ► and making that child feel better.

00:05:55 ◼   ► If you need help getting to Memphis,

00:05:58 ◼   ► they will fund the trip to Memphis.

00:06:00 ◼   ► If you need help staying in Memphis,

00:06:02 ◼   ► they will figure out a way for you to stay in Memphis,

00:06:04 ◼   ► either on their own campus or somewhere else.

00:06:06 ◼   ► If you need the patient or perhaps a sibling

00:06:10 ◼   ► to go to school, they have a school on campus,

00:06:13 ◼   ► it's just utterly incredible all the work

00:06:16 ◼   ► that St. Jude does in order to do everything they can

00:06:19 ◼   ► to stop this just terrible, terrible series of diseases

00:06:23 ◼   ► 'cause it's not just cancer, like I said.

00:06:25 ◼   ► So how can you help?

00:06:26 ◼   ► Well, you can do a couple things.

00:06:27 ◼   ► You can go to stjude.org/atp, S-T-J-U-D-E.org/atp

00:06:31 ◼   ► and you can throw them a few bucks.

00:06:32 ◼   ► Now, we've done a phenomenal job this year,

00:06:35 ◼   ► a truly incredible job.

00:06:37 ◼   ► We've broken all, Relay as a whole

00:06:39 ◼   ► has broken all of its records.

00:06:41 ◼   ► As I sit here now, we're over $800,000 raised.

00:06:44 ◼   ► But here's the thing, St. Jude uses a lot of money

00:06:46 ◼   ► because all this research is expensive.

00:06:48 ◼   ► All the treatments are expensive.

00:06:50 ◼   ► And they're also trying to help fund treatments

00:06:53 ◼   ► going to other countries.

00:06:54 ◼   ► There's a program, I forget the specifics

00:06:57 ◼   ► off the top of my head, but they're trying to figure out

00:06:59 ◼   ► a way to get chemotherapy treatments into other countries.

00:07:04 ◼   ► This isn't just America here.

00:07:06 ◼   ► So you can go to stjude.org/atp

00:07:07 ◼   ► and you can throw them a few bucks, five bucks, 10 bucks,

00:07:09 ◼   ► it doesn't matter.

00:07:10 ◼   ► Anything you can contribute is helpful.

00:07:12 ◼   ► And I think that I and perhaps the three of us

00:07:15 ◼   ► kind of get ourselves wrapped around the axle

00:07:17 ◼   ► about the big donations, but truly,

00:07:19 ◼   ► anything you can offer is helpful.

00:07:23 ◼   ► I saw Ryan Richard, excuse me, Ryan Ricard earlier today

00:07:27 ◼   ► posted this, which I thought was great.

00:07:30 ◼   ► And we're gonna talk about the Marco offset in a second,

00:07:32 ◼   ► but Ryan said an idea for an alternative Marco offset

00:07:35 ◼   ► for those who didn't buy Apple stuff this year,

00:07:37 ◼   ► check any credit cards with cash rewards.

00:07:39 ◼   ► Mine had over $100 hanging around,

00:07:40 ◼   ► which I was happy to hand over to St. Jude.

00:07:42 ◼   ► This is free money that you got generally

00:07:45 ◼   ► for being a wealthy person, but it's no more valuable.

00:07:47 ◼   ► I think that's great.

00:07:49 ◼   ► So you could do that or you could apply the Marco offset.

00:07:51 ◼   ► Marco, do you know anything about the Marco offset

00:07:53 ◼   ► or is that just a funny coincidence?

00:07:55 ◼   ► - I've never heard of that before.

00:07:56 ◼   ► No, actually I think I'm up with where,

00:07:57 ◼   ► so you look at your purchases this fall

00:08:00 ◼   ► of your new tech devices that you might've frivolously

00:08:04 ◼   ► to some degree purchased.

00:08:05 ◼   ► Maybe you could have gone without these tech devices,

00:08:07 ◼   ► but you have your tech devices and you have

00:08:10 ◼   ► the baseline price for the device family.

00:08:12 ◼   ► So if it's the iPhone Pro, that's $999 or whatever.

00:08:15 ◼   ► And then you add up whatever you actually spent

00:08:18 ◼   ► at checkout or will spend over time

00:08:20 ◼   ► with Apple Care descriptions or whatever.

00:08:22 ◼   ► So it's gonna include things like sales tax,

00:08:24 ◼   ► storage upgrades, size upgrades, cases,

00:08:27 ◼   ► any kind of accessories you bought

00:08:28 ◼   ► when you bought your new phone or whatever.

00:08:30 ◼   ► Add those up, subtract the base price for the family.

00:08:33 ◼   ► That is your Marco offset.

00:08:34 ◼   ► So for a $1000 phone, it might be a few hundred bucks.

00:08:37 ◼   ► And that is my suggested minimum donation

00:08:41 ◼   ► that you consider putting into St. Jude.

00:08:44 ◼   ► If you can swing it, that's great.

00:08:46 ◼   ► If you can swing more, that's great too.

00:08:48 ◼   ► If you can't swing that, but you can swing 10 bucks,

00:08:50 ◼   ► 20 bucks, good, that's great too.

00:08:51 ◼   ► Every little bit helps, so please.

00:08:53 ◼   ► And you can actually, as Casey I believe mentioned,

00:08:56 ◼   ► you can go to the marcooffset.com to actually

00:08:59 ◼   ► compute this amount based on the iPhone purchase

00:09:03 ◼   ► for this year.

00:09:04 ◼   ► But yeah, basically look at what you tack on

00:09:07 ◼   ► to your tech purchases as kind of extra money

00:09:10 ◼   ► that you don't scrutinize too much maybe.

00:09:13 ◼   ► And that's a pretty good barometer

00:09:14 ◼   ► for what you can probably afford to give if you can.

00:09:16 ◼   ► So help out if you can, please.

00:09:18 ◼   ► It helps a lot and we appreciate it.

00:09:20 ◼   ► - Very much so.

00:09:21 ◼   ► Now John, I mentioned earlier that I was recording

00:09:24 ◼   ► or I was doing a telethon for 12 straight hours.

00:09:27 ◼   ► Did you know anything about that by chance?

00:09:30 ◼   ► - I did, I watched almost all of it

00:09:32 ◼   ► and I appeared briefly for 15 minutes of those 12 hours.

00:09:36 ◼   ► So I was glad to contribute in my small way.

00:09:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, and so John and Jason did a live recording

00:09:43 ◼   ► of Robot or Not and I was basically--

00:09:44 ◼   ► - With you there in the peanut gallery.

00:09:46 ◼   ► - Exactly right, exactly what I was gonna say.

00:09:48 ◼   ► So I was the peanut gallery for that.

00:09:49 ◼   ► That was, I don't know, like hour eight or nine

00:09:52 ◼   ► or something like that.

00:09:52 ◼   ► It was toward the end of the broadcast,

00:09:54 ◼   ► I don't recall exactly when, but you can look it up

00:09:55 ◼   ► and you can check it out.

00:09:56 ◼   ► So again, I don't know if we're gonna do this again

00:09:59 ◼   ► next week, this might be the last time.

00:10:00 ◼   ► We probably will next week, maybe, actually maybe not.

00:10:03 ◼   ► We'll see, but one way or another, stjude.org/atp,

00:10:06 ◼   ► S-T-J-U-D-E.org/atp, please and thank you.

00:10:09 ◼   ► We truly, truly, truly, truly appreciate all the money

00:10:12 ◼   ► that you have sent because again,

00:10:15 ◼   ► most of the money that we have earned for St. Jude

00:10:18 ◼   ► comes from the five, 10, $15 donations.

00:10:20 ◼   ► So please, anything you can do, please feel free.

00:10:23 ◼   ► Stjude.org/atp.

00:10:25 ◼   ► Let's do some follow up.

00:10:26 ◼   ► John, you've gotten some solutions

00:10:28 ◼   ► to your extracting file names from photos conundrum.

00:10:32 ◼   ► Would you, if you don't mind, give a super duper brief recap

00:10:36 ◼   ► of what the issue was, please.

00:10:37 ◼   ► - Yep, this was from our photo workflows

00:10:39 ◼   ► member special episode where we all described

00:10:42 ◼   ► the way we deal with photos

00:10:43 ◼   ► and also of our photography equipment.

00:10:46 ◼   ► Casey's system was the weirdest,

00:10:47 ◼   ► but mine had one step in it that was definitely troubling

00:10:52 ◼   ► and problematic and it involved me taking screenshots

00:10:55 ◼   ► of the photos app and then OCRing text out of them

00:10:58 ◼   ► because photos does not provide a convenient way

00:11:00 ◼   ► to select a bunch of photos

00:11:01 ◼   ► and then just copy their file names,

00:11:04 ◼   ► which would be very helpful.

00:11:05 ◼   ► So many, many people sent me solutions.

00:11:08 ◼   ► As I said on the show, like, oh,

00:11:10 ◼   ► I think maybe it was Casey's or something,

00:11:11 ◼   ► why don't you just use AppleScript?

00:11:12 ◼   ► I'm like, yeah, that would totally work,

00:11:13 ◼   ► but I hate AppleScript so much, which is true, I do.

00:11:17 ◼   ► But one of the things that a couple of people did

00:11:19 ◼   ► is they said, hey, I hate AppleScript too,

00:11:21 ◼   ► but I asked chat GPT to write me an AppleScript.

00:11:24 ◼   ► And I said, you know what, that's a good idea.

00:11:26 ◼   ► I do hate AppleScript, but I use chat GPT all the time

00:11:28 ◼   ► for programming stuff, so let's give it a shot.

00:11:30 ◼   ► So I went and opened up my own chat GPT window

00:11:33 ◼   ► and asked it to write an AppleScript for me and it did.

00:11:36 ◼   ► And you know, the script didn't work, but you know,

00:11:38 ◼   ► it's chat GPT sometimes it needs a little bit of help.

00:11:40 ◼   ► Like it just got like one or two small things wrong

00:11:42 ◼   ► and I fixed them and it was fine.

00:11:43 ◼   ► I'm like, hey, now I have an AppleScript.

00:11:45 ◼   ► And of course, once I've got that AppleScript to,

00:11:48 ◼   ► and by the way, what I wanted the AppleScript to do

00:11:51 ◼   ► was get the file names of the current selection.

00:11:54 ◼   ► Lots of other people were saying, oh, we'll get file names

00:11:55 ◼   ► of all your favorites.

00:11:56 ◼   ► That's, you know, 50,000 photos, don't do that.

00:11:59 ◼   ► Or we'll get the file names of all the favorites

00:12:01 ◼   ► within a date range, then you have to pick a date range.

00:12:03 ◼   ► It's like, no, just let me just select the photos.

00:12:06 ◼   ► You know, whenever I'm doing my workflow in photos,

00:12:09 ◼   ► this, during this step, it's very easy for me

00:12:11 ◼   ► to simply select the favorites that I've just processed.

00:12:15 ◼   ► And you know, maybe worst case it's like 200 photos

00:12:17 ◼   ► or something, so I can just, you know,

00:12:19 ◼   ► click and then shift click, I've made a selection.

00:12:22 ◼   ► Then I run the script and it can get the file names

00:12:24 ◼   ► out of the thing.

00:12:25 ◼   ► So that's what I did, I made an AppleScript that did that.

00:12:26 ◼   ► And of course, once I have an AppleScript that does that,

00:12:28 ◼   ► you know where I'm going, straight to Perl.

00:12:30 ◼   ► So I wrote a Perl script that calls the AppleScript

00:12:33 ◼   ► using the OSA script command line thing or whatever.

00:12:36 ◼   ► So now, what I've written for myself is a Perl script

00:12:38 ◼   ► that all I have to do the next time I'm doing

00:12:40 ◼   ► this sort of workflow is select the photos that I want.

00:12:43 ◼   ► And again, listen to the episode if you want to hear

00:12:45 ◼   ► what I'm selecting, whatever, but select the photos

00:12:47 ◼   ► that I want and then run the Perl script.

00:12:49 ◼   ► There is no other step and when I run the Perl script,

00:12:51 ◼   ► it will get this file names of the ones that are selected

00:12:54 ◼   ► from photos using the AppleScript.

00:12:55 ◼   ► And then for each one of those file names,

00:12:57 ◼   ► it will look to see if there's a raw on my mounted SD card

00:13:01 ◼   ► with the raws in it.

00:13:02 ◼   ► And if there is a raw with that file name,

00:13:03 ◼   ► it will copy it and do all the things.

00:13:05 ◼   ► So that's gonna save me a lot of time

00:13:07 ◼   ► and a lot of screenshotting.

00:13:09 ◼   ► Now, having said that, oh, and by the way,

00:13:11 ◼   ► I will link in the show notes to my AppleScript.

00:13:14 ◼   ► It's not very exciting, it's exactly what ChatGPT

00:13:16 ◼   ► would give you with like one bug fixed.

00:13:18 ◼   ► So anyway, it's very straightforward,

00:13:20 ◼   ► I just really hate AppleScript and I'm glad ChatGPT

00:13:23 ◼   ► did it for me because I wouldn't want to have to look up

00:13:25 ◼   ► all that stuff because I just hate it.

00:13:27 ◼   ► - I really just like AppleScript.

00:13:29 ◼   ► I get why it's the way it is largely

00:13:31 ◼   ► and I do think it's potentially for the best,

00:13:34 ◼   ► but I also don't particularly care for it.

00:13:36 ◼   ► I was going to ask you, why are you printing the file names

00:13:40 ◼   ► or returning the file names rather than just copying them

00:13:42 ◼   ► to the clipboard?

00:13:43 ◼   ► But I didn't think that because now you have

00:13:46 ◼   ► something you can throw Perl at, of course,

00:13:48 ◼   ► that's what you're gonna do.

00:13:49 ◼   ► - That's right, yeah, that's why at the end of it,

00:13:50 ◼   ► you'll see I'm emitting the file names one per line

00:13:54 ◼   ► as opposed to comma separated or as JSON or whatever.

00:13:57 ◼   ► One per line is straightforward.

00:13:58 ◼   ► I promise to never have new lines in my file names, right?

00:14:01 ◼   ► Just, it'll be fine.

00:14:03 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, I just want text output to standard out

00:14:06 ◼   ► and then I just feed that into Perl.

00:14:08 ◼   ► It's my preferred way of doing things.

00:14:11 ◼   ► All right, now on to all the many, many suggestions

00:14:13 ◼   ► people sent because so many people sent suggestions.

00:14:15 ◼   ► I hope an equal or greater number of people send suggestions

00:14:18 ◼   ► to Casey, but I don't know what Casey sees.

00:14:19 ◼   ► All I know is what I see and I saw a bazillion suggestions

00:14:23 ◼   ► for this one step in my workflow.

00:14:24 ◼   ► By far the most popular, which boggles my mind was,

00:14:28 ◼   ► hey, why don't you just export all the photos?

00:14:30 ◼   ► 'Cause once you've exported them to the finder,

00:14:32 ◼   ► then you can just select them in the finder and hit copy

00:14:33 ◼   ► or you can do, you know, once they're files

00:14:35 ◼   ► in the file system, there's a million ways

00:14:36 ◼   ► to get the file names from them, you know what I mean?

00:14:39 ◼   ► Yeah, that would work, but why in the world,

00:14:42 ◼   ► why export photos and make it like,

00:14:45 ◼   ► you know, can you do it small size?

00:14:46 ◼   ► They won't take up a lot of room, you know,

00:14:48 ◼   ► but why would I make it do all that work?

00:14:49 ◼   ► Why is empathy for the machine?

00:14:50 ◼   ► Why would I make it like recompress, export,

00:14:53 ◼   ► make a bunch of files just so I can get the file names

00:14:55 ◼   ► and then delete the things at all?

00:14:56 ◼   ► No, no, that's, I mean, yes, that was technically,

00:15:00 ◼   ► that would absolutely work.

00:15:01 ◼   ► And some might find it preferable

00:15:03 ◼   ► to what I was doing with OCRing,

00:15:05 ◼   ► but at least when I was OCRing,

00:15:06 ◼   ► I was making one screenshot for dozens and dozens of photos

00:15:09 ◼   ► because I have a very big screen, right?

00:15:11 ◼   ► Actually, yeah, exporting the files.

00:15:13 ◼   ► Everyone suggested that.

00:15:14 ◼   ► I guess, I mean, I guess if you're not in a kind of like,

00:15:18 ◼   ► I'm gonna write an automation script mindset,

00:15:20 ◼   ► this is the most straightforward way to do it.

00:15:22 ◼   ► Hey, you want file names?

00:15:23 ◼   ► Make files, they've got names, boom, problem solved.

00:15:26 ◼   ► But no, I'm not, that's a solution I reject.

00:15:30 ◼   ► Some other people suggested using shortcuts,

00:15:32 ◼   ► which is sort of the modern,

00:15:33 ◼   ► sort of Apple script type equivalent.

00:15:35 ◼   ► We'll put a link in the show notes

00:15:36 ◼   ► to an example one from Josh Woodward.

00:15:38 ◼   ► Shortcuts can totally do all this stuff, I'm sure.

00:15:40 ◼   ► Shortcuts, I find, I'm even more allergic to

00:15:42 ◼   ► than Apple scripts because I'm a programmer

00:15:44 ◼   ► and at least Apple script lets me

00:15:45 ◼   ► sort of kind of do programming,

00:15:46 ◼   ► but shortcuts makes me like arrange widgets in a GUI

00:15:50 ◼   ► instead of programming.

00:15:51 ◼   ► And I'm glad that it exists

00:15:53 ◼   ► and I'm glad that it is very powerful.

00:15:55 ◼   ► It can do lots of things

00:15:56 ◼   ► and I'm glad a lot of people like it.

00:15:58 ◼   ► Not for me, but we'll put an example in there.

00:16:01 ◼   ► Mootly suggested a Python project,

00:16:04 ◼   ► which we'll link to in the show notes

00:16:06 ◼   ► called OS X, OS 10, whatever, OS X photos.

00:16:11 ◼   ► And it's a command line utility

00:16:12 ◼   ► that talks directly to the photos database

00:16:14 ◼   ► and it can do all sorts of stuff.

00:16:16 ◼   ► It can output stuff as CSV or JSON

00:16:20 ◼   ► and you can also, of course, query the SQLite database

00:16:24 ◼   ► that is behind photos yourself.

00:16:26 ◼   ► For some reason that I don't understand

00:16:28 ◼   ► that someone from Apple will surely write in

00:16:30 ◼   ► and tell us about all the tables that are interesting

00:16:32 ◼   ► in the SQLite database, beginning with the letter Z.

00:16:34 ◼   ► Is it like a core data thing or something?

00:16:36 ◼   ► I don't even know. - I think so, yeah.

00:16:37 ◼   ► - Yeah, anyway, the Z asset table has the info you want,

00:16:40 ◼   ► but this Python command line utility

00:16:42 ◼   ► will just basically bypass everything

00:16:44 ◼   ► and let you just query the database.

00:16:46 ◼   ► I don't think I actually want that

00:16:48 ◼   ► because I imagine the current selection

00:16:49 ◼   ► isn't reflected in the database,

00:16:51 ◼   ► but I could be wrong about that.

00:16:52 ◼   ► But anyway, because I want to go off of the current selection

00:16:54 ◼   ► as just a flexible way of saying,

00:16:56 ◼   ► I know which photos I'm dealing with here,

00:16:58 ◼   ► just let me select them in the app

00:16:59 ◼   ► and then run the script, right?

00:17:01 ◼   ► I don't know if it's convenient to get the current selection,

00:17:03 ◼   ► but that's another thing you could do.

00:17:05 ◼   ► Will LineWeber provide an example

00:17:08 ◼   ► of directly reading the photos database

00:17:09 ◼   ► if you want to see what that looks like.

00:17:10 ◼   ► It's just SQLite, it's just SQLite database.

00:17:12 ◼   ► You can just query it like the tables are wacky

00:17:15 ◼   ► and they begin with letter Z and the columns

00:17:17 ◼   ► are maybe not what you expect, but you can do it.

00:17:19 ◼   ► And finally, a couple of people sent Swift code

00:17:21 ◼   ► that uses PhotoKit.

00:17:23 ◼   ► We'll put a link in the show notes to one on GitHub

00:17:26 ◼   ► from Alex Mazinoff, _DavidSmith also provided one.

00:17:29 ◼   ► Yep, Apple obviously has APIs to get to the photos database.

00:17:32 ◼   ► That's how you can do photo pickers

00:17:34 ◼   ► and all sorts of other stuff that interacts with it.

00:17:36 ◼   ► And you can write Swift to do that.

00:17:38 ◼   ► So if Swift is your preferred language, like Perl is mine,

00:17:40 ◼   ► you can write up a Swift quote-unquote script.

00:17:44 ◼   ► Same thing, put a line at the top

00:17:47 ◼   ► that will run user bin Swift or whatever.

00:17:49 ◼   ► You can use Swift like that

00:17:51 ◼   ► and it will compile it on the fly and run your thing.

00:17:53 ◼   ► Same caveats about, I'm not sure you can get

00:17:56 ◼   ► the current selection from the photos app

00:17:57 ◼   ► without asking it through shortcuts or AppleScript,

00:18:00 ◼   ► but I could be wrong with that as well.

00:18:03 ◼   ► There are lots of ways to skin this cat,

00:18:05 ◼   ► but predictably the way I did it is with Perl

00:18:08 ◼   ► with the smallest amount of AppleScript possible

00:18:10 ◼   ► just to do the part that I didn't wanna do in Perl.

00:18:13 ◼   ► - With regard to your earlier half question,

00:18:16 ◼   ► what kind of feedback did I get?

00:18:17 ◼   ► I got basic, almost universally feedback

00:18:21 ◼   ► that what I was doing was wrong.

00:18:22 ◼   ► - From the internet?

00:18:23 ◼   ► - Yes, I know I'm shocked as well.

00:18:26 ◼   ► It came with various degrees of obnoxiousness/empathy.

00:18:31 ◼   ► I did get a couple of suggestions for minor things,

00:18:33 ◼   ► including I think the most actionable suggestion I got

00:18:36 ◼   ► was there's a couple other apps that'll do the GPS tagging

00:18:40 ◼   ► that I need to at least investigate

00:18:42 ◼   ► and see if they will better fit my workflow.

00:18:44 ◼   ► But for the most part, people just shook their heads

00:18:46 ◼   ► in mutual embarrassment on my behalf.

00:18:49 ◼   ► - Yeah, I thought we gave you

00:18:50 ◼   ► some good actionable improvements

00:18:52 ◼   ► that didn't really change your workflow,

00:18:53 ◼   ► but just ahead in this step you could do this

00:18:56 ◼   ► with less work or whatever during the episode.

00:18:59 ◼   ► But yes, obviously people are amazed

00:19:01 ◼   ► by the Rube Goldberg machine that you've constructed.

00:19:04 ◼   ► I also checked out that, I figured which one it was,

00:19:06 ◼   ► it was like the GPX, I should have put a link in here.

00:19:08 ◼   ► Someone suggested one of the tagging apps

00:19:11 ◼   ► that looked pretty good.

00:19:12 ◼   ► Basically it's just an app that you run on your phone

00:19:14 ◼   ► and it keeps track of your location

00:19:15 ◼   ► and it exports files in a format

00:19:16 ◼   ► that a lot of apps can read to tag your files.

00:19:19 ◼   ► Anything to get out of the world of proprietary,

00:19:21 ◼   ► like in my case, Sony apps,

00:19:23 ◼   ► that I think Sony recently discontinued their app anyway,

00:19:25 ◼   ► I don't even know if they replaced it,

00:19:26 ◼   ► but those apps were terrible.

00:19:29 ◼   ► The good thing those apps had going for them

00:19:30 ◼   ► is that they think they directly communicate

00:19:32 ◼   ► with the camera, so there's no like bringing it all

00:19:34 ◼   ► into the Mac and combining it or whatever,

00:19:36 ◼   ► but I'll gladly do that if it's something more sane.

00:19:39 ◼   ► So I have on my list to check out some of the apps.

00:19:41 ◼   ► I think I already downloaded one of them

00:19:43 ◼   ► to check out some of the apps

00:19:44 ◼   ► that can export this standardized format for GPS tagging.

00:19:46 ◼   ► And if I end up finding something that works

00:19:49 ◼   ► or if Casey does, we'll talk about it on the show, I'm sure.

00:19:51 ◼   ► - All right, then with regard to my question,

00:19:57 ◼   ► if I'm not mistaken, about, hey,

00:19:59 ◼   ► I kind of wish I could just always share all of my photos

00:20:02 ◼   ► to the shared library or at least default to that.

00:20:06 ◼   ► And what Apple tries to do is it tries to be smart about it.

00:20:08 ◼   ► And you can say, oh, when you're at home,

00:20:11 ◼   ► always go to the shared photo library.

00:20:13 ◼   ► And otherwise, if your partner or spouse

00:20:15 ◼   ► or what have you is nearby, I guess by way of Bluetooth,

00:20:18 ◼   ► then you can do shared photo library,

00:20:20 ◼   ► but otherwise it goes to your personal library.

00:20:22 ◼   ► And Alexander F wrote in to say,

00:20:25 ◼   ► if you select share manually in the shared library settings

00:20:28 ◼   ► and then just press the yellow bubble on the camera app,

00:20:30 ◼   ► it will remember that setting

00:20:31 ◼   ► and automatically always put all photos

00:20:34 ◼   ► in the shared library, regardless of what the smarts thinks.

00:20:37 ◼   ► I did this once when shared photo library came out

00:20:39 ◼   ► and haven't needed to touch it since.

00:20:40 ◼   ► That's a good tip, I didn't know that.

00:20:42 ◼   ► - Yeah, so there's a couple of nuances here.

00:20:43 ◼   ► One is like the feature that Casey was referring to,

00:20:46 ◼   ► like you get basically two choices of like,

00:20:48 ◼   ► hey, what do you want me to do

00:20:49 ◼   ► with respect to shared library?

00:20:50 ◼   ► And the choices are automatic,

00:20:52 ◼   ► which tries to do the smart thing and manual.

00:20:54 ◼   ► So Alexander's solution is first select manual.

00:20:58 ◼   ► And then second, in the camera app at the top,

00:21:01 ◼   ► there'll be this little yellow circle

00:21:02 ◼   ► with either like one little person's head in it

00:21:04 ◼   ► or two little people's heads in it.

00:21:06 ◼   ► Change it to two little people's head because that says,

00:21:08 ◼   ► hey, when you take a photo with this camera,

00:21:10 ◼   ► it'll go to the shared library and that's it.

00:21:13 ◼   ► And unlike many other settings,

00:21:16 ◼   ► there is nothing in the camera settings in iOS

00:21:20 ◼   ► that says in the section for preserving settings

00:21:23 ◼   ► that refers to this.

00:21:24 ◼   ► So if you go to settings, go to camera,

00:21:27 ◼   ► there's this thing of like,

00:21:28 ◼   ► hey, which settings do you want me to preserve

00:21:29 ◼   ► between launches of the camera?

00:21:31 ◼   ► So like you launch the camera

00:21:32 ◼   ► and say you change into video mode

00:21:35 ◼   ► and then you go to a different app.

00:21:36 ◼   ► When you come back to camera,

00:21:37 ◼   ► do you want it to still be in video mode

00:21:39 ◼   ► or do you just want it always to go back to camera?

00:21:41 ◼   ► That's an example of deciding

00:21:43 ◼   ► whether you want a setting to be preserved.

00:21:44 ◼   ► And Apple provides like a whole screen full of these.

00:21:46 ◼   ► You want me to preserve the style, the focus, the zoom,

00:21:50 ◼   ► like you can toggle these on and off.

00:21:53 ◼   ► And so if you've never checked that out,

00:21:55 ◼   ► if you're frustrated that every time you launch the camera,

00:21:57 ◼   ► it doesn't remember something

00:21:58 ◼   ► or it does remember some other thing,

00:21:59 ◼   ► you can change your mind about those.

00:22:01 ◼   ► But this shared versus non-shared thing

00:22:03 ◼   ► is not in that set of preferences.

00:22:05 ◼   ► As far as I can tell, it's just always remembered.

00:22:07 ◼   ► So as long as you set that setting and don't change it,

00:22:10 ◼   ► it will be preserved

00:22:11 ◼   ► and you basically have no choice about that.

00:22:13 ◼   ► You gotta be careful of,

00:22:14 ◼   ► especially if it's not your phone,

00:22:15 ◼   ► that someone doesn't accidentally hit that

00:22:17 ◼   ► and change it back to the other thing.

00:22:18 ◼   ► So there's some amount of vigilance required

00:22:20 ◼   ► to make sure you stay on sending everything to share it.

00:22:23 ◼   ► But this was a great tip.

00:22:24 ◼   ► I tried to do the same thing to my wife's camera app

00:22:26 ◼   ► and told her about it and said,

00:22:28 ◼   ► "Now everything will go into your shared library,"

00:22:30 ◼   ► because occasionally she sends things

00:22:31 ◼   ► into the regular library.

00:22:32 ◼   ► So set to manual, change the setting in the camera app,

00:22:37 ◼   ► and don't worry about the preserved settings

00:22:39 ◼   ► 'cause it doesn't apply to this particular thing.

00:22:42 ◼   ► - Excellent.

00:22:43 ◼   ► John, can you tell me about JPEG XL in iOS 18

00:22:46 ◼   ► and on the iPhone 16, please?

00:22:48 ◼   ► - So this was a bit of a letdown.

00:22:49 ◼   ► We had the rumors of Apple's gonna go to JPEG XL

00:22:52 ◼   ► and they did add support for JPEG XL in iOS 18

00:22:56 ◼   ► on the iPhone 16s, pretty much only,

00:22:58 ◼   ► and only for their ProRAW stuff.

00:23:02 ◼   ► So it's not like Keek where they said,

00:23:03 ◼   ► "Oh, by the way, all our cameras take photos

00:23:06 ◼   ► in a new format by default."

00:23:07 ◼   ► And it's this great new format.

00:23:08 ◼   ► They didn't say that.

00:23:09 ◼   ► They didn't talk about it at all.

00:23:11 ◼   ► But nevertheless, in iOS 18, on iPhone 16s only, I believe,

00:23:16 ◼   ► because when I was on iOS 16 and my 14 Pro

00:23:18 ◼   ► didn't mention JPEG XL anywhere.

00:23:20 ◼   ► So I think it's only on the 16s.

00:23:22 ◼   ► It's definitely not on the 14 Pro.

00:23:23 ◼   ► I can tell you that.

00:23:25 ◼   ► If you go to the formats section of the camera preferences,

00:23:29 ◼   ► you will see at the top pro default,

00:23:32 ◼   ► and you see heaf max, ProRAW 12 megapixel,

00:23:35 ◼   ► ProRAW max up to 18 megapixel.

00:23:37 ◼   ► And then the next section is ProRAW format

00:23:40 ◼   ► and your choices are JPEG lossless,

00:23:42 ◼   ► which they now list as most compatible.

00:23:44 ◼   ► And then there are two JPEG XL choices,

00:23:47 ◼   ► lossless and lossy.

00:23:48 ◼   ► And again, that's only for when you're shooting in RAWs.

00:23:51 ◼   ► You can have a lossless RAW with JPEG XL

00:23:54 ◼   ► or a lossy compressed RAW with JPEG XL.

00:23:56 ◼   ► Here's what PetaPixel had to say about it.

00:23:59 ◼   ► "Apple has wrapped JPEG XL photos inside a DNG container,

00:24:02 ◼   ► enabling ProRAW files to retain their flexibility

00:24:04 ◼   ► while being significantly smaller.

00:24:06 ◼   ► What would typically be a 75-ish megabyte ProRAW max file

00:24:09 ◼   ► will be a 20 megabyte in lossy ProRAW format

00:24:11 ◼   ► using JPEG XL compression.

00:24:13 ◼   ► A lossless file is still under 50 megabytes.

00:24:15 ◼   ► Without compromising quality,

00:24:17 ◼   ► these are significant storage savings."

00:24:18 ◼   ► So JPEG XL is on your iPhone if you have a newish iPhone

00:24:23 ◼   ► and if you're shooting in RAW.

00:24:24 ◼   ► And if you are, you can get files that are up to

00:24:26 ◼   ► half the size that they used to be at about the same quality.

00:24:30 ◼   ► So good, thumbs up, but it is not the JPEG XL revolution

00:24:33 ◼   ► that we had been waiting for.

00:24:34 ◼   ► So I did change to JPEG XL.

00:24:37 ◼   ► I think I went with lossless

00:24:38 ◼   ► just because I'm shooting in RAW.

00:24:40 ◼   ► I probably just, I do it so rarely on my phone,

00:24:43 ◼   ► I'll just pay the full cost of the size

00:24:44 ◼   ► and it's still smaller than it used to be.

00:24:46 ◼   ► So, you know, partial thumbs up on JPEG XL.

00:24:49 ◼   ► Hopefully it will expand over the years.

00:24:52 ◼   ► - Guillermo Rambo with regard to iPhone apps

00:24:56 ◼   ► spying via the microphone.

00:24:58 ◼   ► So we mostly debunked this, but then Guillermo said,

00:25:02 ◼   ► "I once found a vulnerability that allowed for an app

00:25:04 ◼   ► to listen to the user's AirPods microphone

00:25:06 ◼   ► in the background without permission,

00:25:07 ◼   ► but in a very limited way."

00:25:08 ◼   ► And this has already been fixed a couple of years ago now

00:25:11 ◼   ► in 16.1.

00:25:12 ◼   ► I'd forgotten about this.

00:25:13 ◼   ► I read this one, it debuted.

00:25:15 ◼   ► In fact, I think Guy might've had me proofread this form

00:25:18 ◼   ► if memory serves, although I might be wrong about that.

00:25:21 ◼   ► But anyways, it's a fascinating write-up.

00:25:23 ◼   ► It's not too long, really, really interesting

00:25:25 ◼   ► if you're even vaguely nerdy

00:25:27 ◼   ► and Guy does a great job of doing the write-up.

00:25:29 ◼   ► So I would definitely check that out.

00:25:30 ◼   ► Just if you're interested in, you know,

00:25:32 ◼   ► I don't know, like doing this sort of work

00:25:36 ◼   ► in kind of, what is it, white hat?

00:25:38 ◼   ► I don't really love that phrasing,

00:25:40 ◼   ► but you know, the kind of doing things that may seem bad,

00:25:43 ◼   ► but for good, and that's what Guy was doing.

00:25:45 ◼   ► And then Guy also added, "The iPhone 16 lineup

00:25:48 ◼   ► and all devices based on the A18 or M4

00:25:52 ◼   ► have a new secure exclave, that's not enclave, but exclave,

00:25:56 ◼   ► that presumably makes it impossible for an exploit,

00:25:58 ◼   ► even with kernel-level access,

00:25:59 ◼   ► to disable the microphone or camera in use indicators

00:26:02 ◼   ► because the little orange or green dot

00:26:03 ◼   ► is rendered by a separate OS running in an exclave

00:26:06 ◼   ► directly onto the display hardware."

00:26:08 ◼   ► That is pretty wild.

00:26:11 ◼   ► And anyways, Apple calls it the secure indicator light.

00:26:14 ◼   ► - I recall, like, way back in the PowerBook days, maybe,

00:26:17 ◼   ► or maybe it was the MacBook days,

00:26:18 ◼   ► there was similar indicator light

00:26:19 ◼   ► and Apple made similar claims about how,

00:26:22 ◼   ► well, it's impossible to hack this light

00:26:25 ◼   ► 'cause there's a hardware feature in the laptops

00:26:27 ◼   ► that basically says when the camera is active,

00:26:30 ◼   ► this light comes on.

00:26:30 ◼   ► Like, this was an example of it

00:26:31 ◼   ► not being software-mediated at all,

00:26:33 ◼   ► but it was something like,

00:26:34 ◼   ► hey, if the camera's on, the light's on,

00:26:35 ◼   ► there's no software environment,

00:26:37 ◼   ► software has no visibility into the light whatsoever,

00:26:39 ◼   ► can't turn it on, can't turn it off,

00:26:40 ◼   ► it's just like an electrical fact of life

00:26:43 ◼   ► about how we've connected the camera.

00:26:45 ◼   ► And even when they did that,

00:26:46 ◼   ► I believe someone found a way to get the camera

00:26:48 ◼   ► to turn on without the light going on.

00:26:49 ◼   ► Like, hackers are devious.

00:26:51 ◼   ► So this exclave is, you know, in the game of cat and mouse,

00:26:53 ◼   ► here's Apple's next move.

00:26:55 ◼   ► It's like, oh yeah?

00:26:56 ◼   ► Let's make it even harder for you to get this light.

00:26:58 ◼   ► Even if you have kernel access,

00:26:59 ◼   ► you still can't get it this big.

00:27:01 ◼   ► This is a different OS running in this secure exclave,

00:27:04 ◼   ► which is this other little machine that you can't get to.

00:27:06 ◼   ► The secure enclave is obviously where you can put secrets

00:27:08 ◼   ► that are hard to get to if you're running

00:27:10 ◼   ► on the main CPU SOC.

00:27:12 ◼   ► But now we have the secure exclave,

00:27:13 ◼   ► which is a whole other chip with a whole other OS.

00:27:15 ◼   ► It's even harder to get to.

00:27:17 ◼   ► And I'm sure that's true, but hackers are very devious.

00:27:20 ◼   ► So let's see how the next move goes.

00:27:21 ◼   ► But anyway, Apple continues to try to make it very difficult

00:27:25 ◼   ► to spy using its products without using the easiest method,

00:27:30 ◼   ► which is, of course, social engineering.

00:27:32 ◼   ► - Of course, the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus batteries,

00:27:38 ◼   ► you can remove them as you always could,

00:27:40 ◼   ► but in a very different way.

00:27:43 ◼   ► This is from MacRumors.

00:27:44 ◼   ► Apple has confirmed that the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus

00:27:46 ◼   ► have a new electrically induced battery removal process.

00:27:51 ◼   ► The batteries use a type of adhesive that can be loosened

00:27:53 ◼   ► with low voltage electrical current,

00:27:55 ◼   ► such as from a nine volt battery, according to Apple.

00:27:57 ◼   ► The battery can then be easily be removed from the devices.

00:28:00 ◼   ► This new process is considered to be easier

00:28:02 ◼   ► than the adhesive pull tabs that are found under batteries

00:28:04 ◼   ► in previous iPhone models.

00:28:05 ◼   ► And so there's, of course,

00:28:06 ◼   ► an iFixit teardown all about this.

00:28:08 ◼   ► - Yep, and they demonstrated.

00:28:10 ◼   ► So we talked about this, I think, before the event,

00:28:12 ◼   ► where there was rumors of this happening.

00:28:13 ◼   ► And I don't know how I pictured it working.

00:28:15 ◼   ► Maybe you'd short something out

00:28:18 ◼   ► and there'd be a puff of smoke and the battery would come out

00:28:20 ◼   ► or it would just pop out or whatever.

00:28:22 ◼   ► It is much less dramatic than that, but it is no less cool.

00:28:25 ◼   ► In the iFixit video, they take a little power supply

00:28:28 ◼   ► and they hook it up to the battery.

00:28:30 ◼   ► There's a little metal contact that pops out

00:28:32 ◼   ► for you to connect it to,

00:28:33 ◼   ► and then you just connect something else

00:28:34 ◼   ► to ground inside the thing.

00:28:36 ◼   ► And you put some power into it for a few seconds

00:28:39 ◼   ► and it basically chemically changes the adhesive

00:28:41 ◼   ► to make it not sticky anymore,

00:28:43 ◼   ► and then the battery just comes out.

00:28:44 ◼   ► And they explain a little bit how it works.

00:28:46 ◼   ► Interestingly, if you reverse the polarity,

00:28:49 ◼   ► where you put the plus and the minus on the opposite side,

00:28:52 ◼   ► it will make it restick, but not to the thing.

00:28:56 ◼   ► It'll restick to the battery, so don't do it that way.

00:28:58 ◼   ► So there are still some dangers here.

00:28:59 ◼   ► But another interesting thing

00:29:00 ◼   ► about how they installed this is once the battery is out,

00:29:05 ◼   ► again, you'll see it in the iFixit video

00:29:07 ◼   ► and the blog post that we'll also have in the show notes,

00:29:10 ◼   ► inside the case where the battery goes,

00:29:13 ◼   ► Apple has essentially carved a U-shaped channel,

00:29:17 ◼   ► like intentionally, roughly, like it's scuffed up.

00:29:20 ◼   ► Like if you use like a circular buffer on a car

00:29:23 ◼   ► and you did a really bad job and you left swirl marks,

00:29:25 ◼   ► that's what they did inside the phone.

00:29:27 ◼   ► They made this big, long U-shaped channel,

00:29:28 ◼   ► which is where the adhesive goes,

00:29:29 ◼   ► that's intentionally scuffed up and rough

00:29:32 ◼   ► to give lots of like craggly surface

00:29:33 ◼   ► for the adhesive to stick to,

00:29:35 ◼   ► which is so wild to see inside Apple's cases

00:29:37 ◼   ► that are usually so beautifully,

00:29:39 ◼   ► perfectly machined and everything's precise.

00:29:41 ◼   ► And here's this area that's made intentionally rough

00:29:43 ◼   ► and the adhesive sits directly down in that.

00:29:46 ◼   ► And this process is, you know, the pull tabs are cool.

00:29:48 ◼   ► It's like those 3M things, kind of like you pull sideways

00:29:50 ◼   ► and big, long, stringy, sticky things comes out

00:29:52 ◼   ► and then it comes out, but this is just so much more elegant.

00:29:55 ◼   ► You just apply the voltage

00:29:57 ◼   ► and then the thing isn't sticky anymore and you lift it out.

00:30:00 ◼   ► It's pretty cool.

00:30:01 ◼   ► I think this is only on the 16 and the 16 Plus

00:30:04 ◼   ► and not on the Pro.

00:30:05 ◼   ► I think the Pro still use the sticky stuff

00:30:07 ◼   ► because I saw a teardown of one of those things as well,

00:30:09 ◼   ► which is interesting.

00:30:09 ◼   ► But yeah, check out the whole iFixit video.

00:30:12 ◼   ► They seem to think that the 16 continues

00:30:15 ◼   ► to push the frontiers of easy repairability.

00:30:18 ◼   ► Again, not the 16 Pro.

00:30:19 ◼   ► I haven't seen the iFixit teardown of that,

00:30:20 ◼   ► but the 16 using the dual sided design

00:30:23 ◼   ► and the battery that's easy to remove

00:30:25 ◼   ► and the way they have the parts arranged.

00:30:26 ◼   ► Apple is making progress

00:30:27 ◼   ► in making these tiny, very delicate devices

00:30:30 ◼   ► that much easier and less error prone to repair.

00:30:34 ◼   ► - Just very quickly, one of my favorite things

00:30:35 ◼   ► about the iFixit teardown was at one point,

00:30:37 ◼   ► they said, "Oh, you know, it comes out so easily.

00:30:39 ◼   ► "Gravity will do it."

00:30:40 ◼   ► And so they turned one of them upside down,

00:30:42 ◼   ► applied the voltage and waited a few seconds

00:30:44 ◼   ► and sure enough, boop, all of a sudden the battery

00:30:46 ◼   ► just came tumbling out.

00:30:47 ◼   ► - It just falls out

00:30:48 ◼   ► because the adhesive is not sticky anymore.

00:30:50 ◼   ► It doesn't leave a residue.

00:30:51 ◼   ► It's pretty amazing.

00:30:52 ◼   ► - That's really cool.

00:30:53 ◼   ► We are sponsored this episode

00:30:55 ◼   ► by 1Password Extended Access Management.

00:30:58 ◼   ► So quick question.

00:30:59 ◼   ► Do your end users always,

00:31:01 ◼   ► and I mean always without exception,

00:31:03 ◼   ► work on company owned devices and IT approved apps?

00:31:07 ◼   ► Yeah, I didn't think so.

00:31:08 ◼   ► So next question.

00:31:09 ◼   ► How do you keep your company's data safe

00:31:12 ◼   ► when it's sitting on all those unmanaged apps and devices?

00:31:15 ◼   ► 1Password has the answer to this question.

00:31:19 ◼   ► Extended Access Management.

00:31:21 ◼   ► 1Password Extended Access Management

00:31:22 ◼   ► helps you secure every sign in

00:31:24 ◼   ► for every app on every device

00:31:26 ◼   ► because it solves the problems

00:31:28 ◼   ► that traditional IAM and MDM can't touch.

00:31:31 ◼   ► So check it out at 1Password.com/ATP.

00:31:35 ◼   ► That's 1Password.com/ATP.

00:31:39 ◼   ► Thank you so much to 1Password Extended Access Management

00:31:41 ◼   ► for sponsoring our show.

00:31:43 ◼   ► - All right, so if you wanted to get rid of those

00:31:48 ◼   ► annoying monthly screen recording prompts,

00:31:51 ◼   ► Jeff Johnson has reverse engineered a way to do it.

00:31:54 ◼   ► Jeff writes, Richie Adams found the file

00:31:57 ◼   ► where the prompt dates are stored.

00:31:58 ◼   ► And we'll put a link to all this

00:32:00 ◼   ► 'cause I'm not gonna read it out now.

00:32:02 ◼   ► The file is protected by TCC.

00:32:04 ◼   ► What does that stand for, John?

00:32:05 ◼   ► - Trusted Computer. - Trusted Computer.

00:32:08 ◼   ► - This is the database that keeps permission and stuff.

00:32:10 ◼   ► I don't remember what it stands for.

00:32:11 ◼   ► - All right, no worries.

00:32:12 ◼   ► It's protected by TCC.

00:32:13 ◼   ► So to access it, you'll need to grant

00:32:14 ◼   ► full disk access to the terminal app.

00:32:17 ◼   ► In the plist file, the keys are the paths

00:32:19 ◼   ► or perhaps the fully qualified domain names

00:32:22 ◼   ► or whatever it is of the executable files

00:32:25 ◼   ► with screen recording permission

00:32:27 ◼   ► and the values are the dates.

00:32:29 ◼   ► To stop the prompts forever for the rest of your life,

00:32:31 ◼   ► anyway, set the date too far in the future.

00:32:32 ◼   ► For example, the year 3024 instead of 2024.

00:32:36 ◼   ► You'll need to do this for each app

00:32:37 ◼   ► and afterward log out and log in again

00:32:39 ◼   ► so that the replayd process recognizes the new defaults.

00:32:43 ◼   ► Dan solely notes my keys are not the paths of the app,

00:32:45 ◼   ► but there it is, the bundle identifier.

00:32:46 ◼   ► Couldn't think of the name there.

00:32:48 ◼   ► John, it looks like you have some thoughts about this,

00:32:51 ◼   ► which we'll get back to in just a second.

00:32:52 ◼   ► But then Kyle Rubenok wrote a shell script

00:32:55 ◼   ► that will set the dates to a year from now.

00:32:57 ◼   ► So you could perhaps run that on login.

00:32:59 ◼   ► - Although that shell script doesn't actually work

00:33:01 ◼   ► and I sent him a reply about that.

00:33:02 ◼   ► It's kind of like the chat GPT thing.

00:33:04 ◼   ► I think he forgot a line in there,

00:33:05 ◼   ► but one could write a shell script.

00:33:07 ◼   ► You can take a look at his and fix it

00:33:08 ◼   ► by adding the missing line or whatever.

00:33:10 ◼   ► But anyway, you might not have to do that because.

00:33:12 ◼   ► - Because now breaking news as of just like an hour ago

00:33:17 ◼   ► or something like that, there's a new app called Amnesia

00:33:19 ◼   ► that apparently will allow you to disable these

00:33:23 ◼   ► on an app by app basis.

00:33:24 ◼   ► - Yeah, and so it's a screen recording thing.

00:33:26 ◼   ► I'm living it both.

00:33:27 ◼   ► I saw this example here and I wanted to try it myself.

00:33:30 ◼   ► And I discovered that in my plist file,

00:33:32 ◼   ► which is I'll read the thing in case you wouldn't.

00:33:34 ◼   ► It's in your library directory and it's group containers,

00:33:36 ◼   ► group.com.apple.replayd, screencaptureapprovals.plist.

00:33:40 ◼   ► Again, it'll be in show notes.

00:33:41 ◼   ► - This sounds like an Amazon product title.

00:33:43 ◼   ► - Yeah, my paths were, my keys in this little,

00:33:46 ◼   ► you know, the name value pairs, they were the full path.

00:33:49 ◼   ► So it was applications/zoom.us.app/content/macos/zoom.s.

00:33:53 ◼   ► Like, I don't know why they were bundle paths

00:33:56 ◼   ► in Dan's thing, but maybe it varies on each system.

00:33:58 ◼   ► But anyway, the values are just dates.

00:34:00 ◼   ► It's a simple default command to change it.

00:34:02 ◼   ► So I did that for Zoom, which I had recently used

00:34:05 ◼   ► to share my screen and edit a complaint

00:34:07 ◼   ► and I set its date to 30/24.

00:34:09 ◼   ► So in theory, it will never complain again.

00:34:11 ◼   ► And having a GUI app for this is good

00:34:14 ◼   ► if people don't wanna mess with like command line stuff

00:34:16 ◼   ► or whatever.

00:34:17 ◼   ► But many questions are raised by this discovery, right?

00:34:22 ◼   ► So first of all, the whole point of this thing

00:34:24 ◼   ► was like, oh, what if someone's spying

00:34:26 ◼   ► and you wanna be reminded every once in a while

00:34:28 ◼   ► to know that someone's spying and yada yada.

00:34:30 ◼   ► Well, if you can just write a value

00:34:32 ◼   ► to a plist to override this,

00:34:33 ◼   ► anyone who's like spying on someone

00:34:36 ◼   ► or like abusive partner or something

00:34:37 ◼   ► is just gonna Google this, find this result,

00:34:40 ◼   ► set the dates forward to 30/24

00:34:42 ◼   ► and never have to worry about it again.

00:34:43 ◼   ► So what the hell happened to like the security benefits

00:34:46 ◼   ► of this feature are so easily bypassed

00:34:48 ◼   ► that now we're just being annoyed for no reason, right?

00:34:51 ◼   ► Before it's like, oh, we're being annoyed,

00:34:52 ◼   ► but they can't figure out a way

00:34:54 ◼   ► to make this more secure without annoying us

00:34:55 ◼   ► and they figure a month interval is good.

00:34:58 ◼   ► But now it's like actually there's no security benefit

00:35:00 ◼   ► because anyone who cares can Google this in two seconds

00:35:02 ◼   ► and download a GUI app

00:35:04 ◼   ► that will set all the things to the future.

00:35:05 ◼   ► So this is, I'm assuming Apple will see this

00:35:08 ◼   ► and then in a future update to Sequoia,

00:35:10 ◼   ► come up with a different, much more secure system

00:35:13 ◼   ► that doesn't allow you to run a single default write command

00:35:16 ◼   ► or download a GUI app to change this

00:35:18 ◼   ► and never have to worry about it again.

00:35:20 ◼   ► Because like, what's the point of the feature?

00:35:21 ◼   ► It's just annoying people for no reason at that point, right?

00:35:24 ◼   ► And the second thing is how has life been on Sequoia

00:35:28 ◼   ► with these screen recordings?

00:35:29 ◼   ► Well, I did use Zoom and I did share my screen

00:35:31 ◼   ► and it did prompt me and I'm like, ah, well, Zoom,

00:35:33 ◼   ► how often do I share my screen?

00:35:35 ◼   ► I think in the, what, week or two I've had Sequoia,

00:35:39 ◼   ► I've gotten prompted like four times by four different apps.

00:35:42 ◼   ► It just keeps catching me by surprise.

00:35:43 ◼   ► Just today, I used TextSniper,

00:35:45 ◼   ► which by the way, I still recommend.

00:35:47 ◼   ► And what was using TextSniper for?

00:35:48 ◼   ► Not to get fines out of photos.

00:35:49 ◼   ► You know what I was using it for?

00:35:51 ◼   ► A good old preview.

00:35:52 ◼   ► I had a PDF that had text in it

00:35:55 ◼   ► and I wanted to copy and paste that text out of the PDF.

00:35:58 ◼   ► But unfortunately, that text was tabular

00:36:01 ◼   ► and selecting the text in preview and hitting copy

00:36:03 ◼   ► and then pasting into a plain text document

00:36:05 ◼   ► just was just a soup, right?

00:36:07 ◼   ► But TextSniper actually printed it a line at a time.

00:36:10 ◼   ► It didn't put tabs between it or anything,

00:36:12 ◼   ► but at least it was like, here's the first row,

00:36:14 ◼   ► here's the second row, here's the third row.

00:36:16 ◼   ► Text selection in both web pages and PDFs

00:36:19 ◼   ► continues to be an unsolvable problem apparently.

00:36:21 ◼   ► If you ever try to select text in a complicated web page

00:36:24 ◼   ► and you just want the text to be pasted

00:36:25 ◼   ► just like it appeared in your web page,

00:36:26 ◼   ► but when you paste it, you see that it's out of order

00:36:29 ◼   ► or it's selected other where it's stuff.

00:36:31 ◼   ► Same thing with PDFs, at least in the preview app.

00:36:33 ◼   ► I can select it and I can hit copy

00:36:35 ◼   ► and when I hit paste, I expect it to print those lines,

00:36:38 ◼   ► but sometimes it just absolutely doesn't.

00:36:40 ◼   ► It prints a scrambled mess of the lines

00:36:41 ◼   ► all connected to one big long line

00:36:43 ◼   ► or interleave with each other or whatever.

00:36:45 ◼   ► But TextSniper did it

00:36:46 ◼   ► because TextSniper doesn't care about that stuff.

00:36:48 ◼   ► TextSniper just use pixels that look like text

00:36:50 ◼   ► and it parses them as lines of text

00:36:51 ◼   ► and it will print them as lines of text.

00:36:53 ◼   ► But of course, when I launched TextSniper,

00:36:54 ◼   ► it said, hey, TextSniper wants to capture your screen.

00:36:58 ◼   ► Do you want to allow it?

00:36:59 ◼   ► Allow for one month, blah, blah, blah.

00:37:00 ◼   ► And so this is sort of the ongoing battle

00:37:02 ◼   ► because every new app still prompts you

00:37:04 ◼   ► and then I went to the command line and the default's right

00:37:07 ◼   ► and said, now you're never gonna ask me again

00:37:09 ◼   ► until 3024 or until Sequoia 15.1

00:37:14 ◼   ► when Apple changes all of this.

00:37:16 ◼   ► So this is a disappointing stopping point,

00:37:20 ◼   ► I'm not gonna say conclusion,

00:37:22 ◼   ► in this saga of suppose it increased security

00:37:24 ◼   ► because now all the security,

00:37:25 ◼   ► not all the security benefits,

00:37:26 ◼   ► but most of the security benefits are out the window

00:37:28 ◼   ► and yet we're still continuing to be annoyed by it

00:37:30 ◼   ► to the point where people are writing GUI apps

00:37:33 ◼   ► to help people circumvent this feature of macOS.

00:37:35 ◼   ► This is not a good sign for Apple

00:37:37 ◼   ► that they have struck the right balance

00:37:38 ◼   ► with the features they've shipped.

00:37:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's not great.

00:37:41 ◼   ► And obviously, we've all been upgrading to Sequoia

00:37:45 ◼   ► and getting just absolutely overwhelmed with all the,

00:37:48 ◼   ► hey, is it okay, is it okay, is it okay, is it okay?

00:37:50 ◼   ► Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, oh, are we cool, are we cool?

00:37:52 ◼   ► It's just incessant.

00:37:54 ◼   ► And I don't know, perhaps I'm not having enough empathy

00:37:58 ◼   ► for security professionals

00:37:59 ◼   ► because it's just not a world I live in,

00:38:02 ◼   ► but I find it to be extremely off-putting and frustrating.

00:38:06 ◼   ► - And again, if the security benefits are non-existent,

00:38:10 ◼   ► if anybody who's trying to do something nefarious

00:38:12 ◼   ► just Googles for it

00:38:13 ◼   ► and gets a thing they can paste into terminal

00:38:15 ◼   ► and solve the problem for them,

00:38:16 ◼   ► like it's just, ugh, it's very frustrating.

00:38:20 ◼   ► - All right, but in happier news, we've all got new toys,

00:38:22 ◼   ► and this is a year that even John has new toys.

00:38:25 ◼   ► So I will preface this by saying,

00:38:28 ◼   ► I was in Memphis over the weekend.

00:38:30 ◼   ► I thought about trying to do an in-store pickup

00:38:33 ◼   ► or even delivery while I was there.

00:38:36 ◼   ► Coincidentally, some things were delivered to the hotel

00:38:39 ◼   ► and I don't know if it's my business to say exactly what,

00:38:41 ◼   ► but I know that it could have worked.

00:38:42 ◼   ► Maybe I should have, but I didn't have the gumption

00:38:45 ◼   ► to do it.

00:38:46 ◼   ► So anyways, so I set a in-store pickup

00:38:47 ◼   ► for yesterday afternoon, Sunday afternoon,

00:38:50 ◼   ► the day I got home.

00:38:51 ◼   ► - Oh, well, you did get to unbox

00:38:53 ◼   ► pretty much all the new products, didn't you?

00:38:54 ◼   ► - That's true, yes,

00:38:56 ◼   ► because a lot of them did show up in Memphis

00:38:58 ◼   ► and Jason had them.

00:39:00 ◼   ► So I unboxed a lot of them.

00:39:01 ◼   ► But anyways, this morning I went

00:39:04 ◼   ► and I picked up my new iPhone 16 Pro,

00:39:09 ◼   ► natural titanium 512, my new Apple Watch Big Boy

00:39:14 ◼   ► in aluminum and Erin's stuff.

00:39:17 ◼   ► Erin hasn't opened any of her stuff yet.

00:39:18 ◼   ► We've been busy.

00:39:19 ◼   ► I've barely gotten mine all set up,

00:39:21 ◼   ► which we can talk about the transfer here in a minute.

00:39:24 ◼   ► But, and also, if we have time for me to whine

00:39:27 ◼   ► about the in-store experience,

00:39:29 ◼   ► I'd also like to do that at some juncture.

00:39:30 ◼   ► But if we don't have time, that's no problem.

00:39:32 ◼   ► - That's part of the setup.

00:39:32 ◼   ► You should talk about that now.

00:39:34 ◼   ► - Oh, okay.

00:39:35 ◼   ► Let me start by saying this is the first world,

00:39:38 ◼   ► this is the first world problems.

00:39:39 ◼   ► I'm gonna try to make this quick

00:39:41 ◼   ► and I will move right along.

00:39:42 ◼   ► But I go in and of course, there's no lines anywhere.

00:39:46 ◼   ► And I walk up to the first person

00:39:48 ◼   ► that doesn't have somebody in front of them.

00:39:49 ◼   ► And I say, "Hey, I have a pickup to do."

00:39:50 ◼   ► And they say, "Okay, go over to the pickup counter desk,"

00:39:53 ◼   ► whatever thing, fine.

00:39:54 ◼   ► There's a couple of people there.

00:39:55 ◼   ► There are a couple of customers there and one employee.

00:39:58 ◼   ► And this one employee is already looking

00:40:00 ◼   ► ever so slightly flummoxed.

00:40:01 ◼   ► Here's the thing.

00:40:03 ◼   ► If Apple wants to do this, oh, magic happens.

00:40:07 ◼   ► Just magically, your products will appear

00:40:09 ◼   ► where you're standing.

00:40:10 ◼   ► And magically, you can just walk up to anyone

00:40:13 ◼   ► and pay for them or even scan them on your own

00:40:15 ◼   ► if it's something cheaper and just walk out of the store.

00:40:19 ◼   ► It has to work.

00:40:20 ◼   ► And apparently, just from overhearing the conversations

00:40:23 ◼   ► between the employees, the quote unquote backstage area

00:40:26 ◼   ► was like completely overwhelmed with shipment coming in,

00:40:29 ◼   ► with all these people asking for runners to bring out

00:40:32 ◼   ► my phones and my watches and that person's this

00:40:34 ◼   ► and that person's that.

00:40:36 ◼   ► It's just, if you're gonna do this fancy stuff,

00:40:38 ◼   ► it's gotta freakin' work.

00:40:40 ◼   ► And I was there for, I'd already paid for everything.

00:40:43 ◼   ► I should've just been able to swoop in and swoop out.

00:40:45 ◼   ► And I was there for like half an hour, 45 minutes.

00:40:47 ◼   ► Now, in the grand scheme of things, does that matter?

00:40:49 ◼   ► No.

00:40:50 ◼   ► But Apple is supposed to be the it just works company.

00:40:53 ◼   ► It's the great experience company.

00:40:56 ◼   ► And this was not a great experience.

00:40:57 ◼   ► And some woman that was standing next to me

00:40:59 ◼   ► was waiting for like half an hour

00:41:01 ◼   ► to get a screen protector installed.

00:41:03 ◼   ► The reason was they couldn't just get, the dude at the desk

00:41:07 ◼   ► couldn't get his hands on the screen protector

00:41:08 ◼   ► 'cause it was backstage.

00:41:09 ◼   ► And I don't know, maybe I'm too East Coast for this,

00:41:13 ◼   ► but give me a fuckin' line to stand in

00:41:16 ◼   ► and give me, have the person that's helping me

00:41:19 ◼   ► run their ass to the back and go find my stuff.

00:41:22 ◼   ► I don't think this is that difficult.

00:41:24 ◼   ► Why does it have to be so synthetically fancy?

00:41:29 ◼   ► If you're gonna have it be fancy, make it be fancy.

00:41:32 ◼   ► This wasn't fancy.

00:41:33 ◼   ► This was the illusion of fancy.

00:41:35 ◼   ► And it's just infuriating.

00:41:37 ◼   ► Like it didn't have to be this way.

00:41:39 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's a system that doesn't scale very well.

00:41:41 ◼   ► Like it seems really great. - It's well put, well put.

00:41:43 ◼   ► - Like probably most of the year, probably most days,

00:41:46 ◼   ► most of the time, it's fine.

00:41:48 ◼   ► Like I still, I'm honestly like,

00:41:49 ◼   ► I don't love the Apple Store triage system

00:41:52 ◼   ► because like I don't love that you have to walk in,

00:41:55 ◼   ► okay, hey, hey, hey, hey, you wanna check in with me

00:41:58 ◼   ► right at the front door here?

00:41:59 ◼   ► Oh, you wanna go with that?

00:42:00 ◼   ► Oh, go stand over at that table over there.

00:42:02 ◼   ► It's like, okay, well, so there is a queue.

00:42:05 ◼   ► You're just, it's just confusing

00:42:07 ◼   ► and you can't really tell what it is.

00:42:08 ◼   ► And the queue is, I would say like,

00:42:13 ◼   ► kind of sloppily enforced enough

00:42:15 ◼   ► that I feel like a lot of times it is serviced out of order.

00:42:20 ◼   ► Because like, it's like, who's waiting at this table?

00:42:23 ◼   ► Oh, you gotta go see so and so in the blue shirt.

00:42:25 ◼   ► But oh, and then you're put into the system

00:42:27 ◼   ► as like a person with a red striped shirt.

00:42:30 ◼   ► And there could be someone else with a red striped shirt

00:42:32 ◼   ► get served first and like, am I standing at this table

00:42:35 ◼   ► or the one next to it?

00:42:36 ◼   ► Like, it's such a vague system that you as the customer

00:42:40 ◼   ► feel all the time like, have I been lost?

00:42:43 ◼   ► Even when you haven't been, and oftentimes you have been.

00:42:47 ◼   ► But even when you haven't been, you can't see that.

00:42:50 ◼   ► Like you have no feedback as the customer of like,

00:42:53 ◼   ► is the system working as intended?

00:42:55 ◼   ► Am I still in the queue?

00:42:56 ◼   ► - And neither do the employees, by the way.

00:42:58 ◼   ► Last time I was at the store, which was not a busy day,

00:43:01 ◼   ► I was sent to a table and then eventually someone came

00:43:03 ◼   ► to help me and they disappeared for a little bit.

00:43:05 ◼   ► And when they were gone, two other employees came up to me

00:43:08 ◼   ► and said, are you being helped?

00:43:10 ◼   ► I'm like, don't you know if I'm being helped?

00:43:11 ◼   ► Shouldn't you know whether I'm being,

00:43:13 ◼   ► like the whole system is you send us off

00:43:15 ◼   ► to these little tables to distribute this visible line

00:43:18 ◼   ► so we can't see the actual line.

00:43:19 ◼   ► But then we get serviced in order

00:43:21 ◼   ► and people are assigned to us.

00:43:22 ◼   ► You should know that somebody is already handling it.

00:43:25 ◼   ► If you don't know, then what is the system?

00:43:27 ◼   ► Do you just wander the store looking for people

00:43:29 ◼   ► who look lonely and say,

00:43:30 ◼   ► that person looks like they're not being helped.

00:43:31 ◼   ► Let me help them.

00:43:32 ◼   ► I mean, and obviously the biggest problem,

00:43:34 ◼   ► I mean, you're both dancing around,

00:43:36 ◼   ► it was lunch day for the iPhone, right?

00:43:38 ◼   ► - Right.

00:43:39 ◼   ► - Surely one of the busiest days in the Apple store

00:43:42 ◼   ► or involving iPhones, anything on lunch day,

00:43:44 ◼   ► the iPhone is going to be fraud and it exposes the weaknesses

00:43:46 ◼   ► of their systems because this is gonna be the most people

00:43:49 ◼   ► coming to the store in the shortest period of time

00:43:51 ◼   ► who want phones.

00:43:52 ◼   ► - I will say, however, that as I think I've talked about

00:43:55 ◼   ► in years past, I apparently, one of my many superpowers

00:43:58 ◼   ► is utterly ruining iPhone screens.

00:44:01 ◼   ► And I don't mean like shattering them,

00:44:03 ◼   ► although that's happened for sure.

00:44:04 ◼   ► - Have you scratched them already?

00:44:05 ◼   ► - Well.

00:44:06 ◼   ► - Oh no.

00:44:07 ◼   ► - No, no, no, I didn't.

00:44:08 ◼   ► No, no, no, this is, everything's fine, everything's fine.

00:44:11 ◼   ► I decided after much chatter from the internet

00:44:14 ◼   ► in my direction that I think, yep,

00:44:16 ◼   ► I think I'd solicited requests about what do you do

00:44:20 ◼   ► about screen protectors the internet came through.

00:44:22 ◼   ► And a lot of them said, just do the Belkin one

00:44:25 ◼   ► that Apple installs.

00:44:26 ◼   ► Do it right then and there.

00:44:27 ◼   ► They'll install it for you.

00:44:28 ◼   ► They know exactly what they're doing.

00:44:29 ◼   ► There won't be any bumps or anything like that.

00:44:31 ◼   ► There won't be any dust.

00:44:32 ◼   ► And you can get like free replacements.

00:44:35 ◼   ► I don't know if it's for life.

00:44:36 ◼   ► I haven't read, apparently you have to register

00:44:38 ◼   ► the screen protector.

00:44:39 ◼   ► I guess you at least get a series of free replacements

00:44:42 ◼   ► that apparently Apple's happy to reinstall for you

00:44:45 ◼   ► if need be.

00:44:46 ◼   ► - Do you know what the nature of the Belkin protector is?

00:44:50 ◼   ► Is it glass?

00:44:50 ◼   ► Is it plastic?

00:44:51 ◼   ► - I believe it is glass.

00:44:52 ◼   ► I don't think I, do I have the bag?

00:44:55 ◼   ► No, I don't think I have the bags in here

00:44:57 ◼   ► so I can look it up.

00:44:58 ◼   ► I apologize.

00:44:59 ◼   ► When one of you starts talking,

00:45:00 ◼   ► I'll look around the office

00:45:00 ◼   ► and make sure the bag isn't in here.

00:45:02 ◼   ► I believe it's glass.

00:45:03 ◼   ► I'm not 100% sure.

00:45:04 ◼   ► I didn't look closely at it.

00:45:05 ◼   ► But I did have them install it.

00:45:07 ◼   ► And do you want the good news or the bad news?

00:45:10 ◼   ► - Oh, no.

00:45:10 ◼   ► - The good news is, no, there's no real bad news.

00:45:13 ◼   ► The good news is it feels pretty good.

00:45:16 ◼   ► Like it's a little tackier.

00:45:19 ◼   ► That's maybe not the best word.

00:45:20 ◼   ► But like there's a little more friction on it

00:45:22 ◼   ► than I think a regular piece of glass was.

00:45:24 ◼   ► - Is it not as oleophobic as the screen maybe?

00:45:27 ◼   ► - No, I wouldn't say I think it is.

00:45:28 ◼   ► I think it is, but I'm not 100% sure.

00:45:31 ◼   ► However, you know how I always thought you were nuts, Jon,

00:45:35 ◼   ► and kind of still do,

00:45:37 ◼   ► for insisting on a bottomless iPhone case.

00:45:40 ◼   ► A case without a bottom so you can swipe up no problem.

00:45:42 ◼   ► And I always thought you were kind of nuts

00:45:43 ◼   ► because what is the big deal?

00:45:45 ◼   ► It's fine.

00:45:46 ◼   ► - I'm not gonna tell you you tried it.

00:45:47 ◼   ► - I've tried it.

00:45:48 ◼   ► It is unquestionably better.

00:45:50 ◼   ► Gosh, I've been talking a lot for having said

00:45:52 ◼   ► I had no opinions about this.

00:45:53 ◼   ► Here we are.

00:45:54 ◼   ► - Welcome to the show.

00:45:56 ◼   ► - Right, exactly.

00:45:57 ◼   ► Welcome, we've been here 10 years.

00:46:00 ◼   ► It is definitely better to have a bottomless iPhone case.

00:46:02 ◼   ► Full stop, not arguing that.

00:46:03 ◼   ► I just don't think it's as big a deal to me as it is to you.

00:46:06 ◼   ► Let me tell you what is not fun though.

00:46:08 ◼   ► When you take a phone that you do not intend

00:46:11 ◼   ► to have a case on it,

00:46:13 ◼   ► and you put an extra two to three millimeters

00:46:15 ◼   ► of screen on it.

00:46:16 ◼   ► So now I have a ledge every time I swipe up,

00:46:19 ◼   ► which is the screen protector.

00:46:21 ◼   ► Sitting here now, I hate it so much.

00:46:24 ◼   ► I think I'll get used to it,

00:46:26 ◼   ► but I hate it so much.

00:46:28 ◼   ► - They should round over that edge.

00:46:30 ◼   ► They should round over the bottom edge.

00:46:31 ◼   ► - I don't know.

00:46:33 ◼   ► Ultimately, I think it's worth it to me

00:46:35 ◼   ► because again, I don't,

00:46:37 ◼   ► well, I was gonna say I don't mistreat my phones.

00:46:38 ◼   ► I mean, clearly I'm doing something

00:46:40 ◼   ► to scratch these screens every year

00:46:41 ◼   ► for the last like four years.

00:46:43 ◼   ► So I don't think running without a screen protector

00:46:45 ◼   ► is the right choice for me,

00:46:46 ◼   ► but I kind of hate the way it feels right now.

00:46:50 ◼   ► - Put a case on it, put a case

00:46:51 ◼   ► that doesn't have a bare bottom,

00:46:52 ◼   ► and then you'll be hitting the gigantic bottom lip

00:46:54 ◼   ► of the case and you won't even feel the screen protector.

00:46:56 ◼   ► - And I think that may be what I end up doing,

00:46:59 ◼   ► but I really don't love any of the case options right now.

00:47:02 ◼   ► And so we'll see what happens.

00:47:04 ◼   ► But I did very much like, however,

00:47:06 ◼   ► the application process because they basically,

00:47:08 ◼   ► they asked me if they could unbox the phone.

00:47:10 ◼   ► I said, of course, thank you for asking.

00:47:11 ◼   ► They immediately put it in their fancy little machine

00:47:14 ◼   ► that lines everything up just right.

00:47:15 ◼   ► And then, foop, foop, foop,

00:47:16 ◼   ► and all of a sudden the screen protector's on.

00:47:17 ◼   ► And into my eyes, leaving aside

00:47:19 ◼   ► that there's an additional ledge

00:47:20 ◼   ► that I wasn't really considering,

00:47:22 ◼   ► to my eyes, they did an absolutely perfect job.

00:47:24 ◼   ► So in that sense, I'm very satisfied.

00:47:27 ◼   ► But yeah, I mean, I think that's,

00:47:29 ◼   ► with regard to the purchase experience,

00:47:31 ◼   ► that's all I've really got.

00:47:32 ◼   ► I did go back down, oh, that's the other thing.

00:47:35 ◼   ► I went from Pro Max to Pro.

00:47:36 ◼   ► Gentlemen, having a human-sized phone in my hand

00:47:41 ◼   ► feels so great, it's so much better.

00:47:43 ◼   ► I mean, well, for me,

00:47:44 ◼   ► I shouldn't say that the Max is bad.

00:47:46 ◼   ► I do a little teeny bit miss the screen real estate

00:47:50 ◼   ► of the Max, but oh, my word, it's so much nicer in the hand.

00:47:53 ◼   ► It is so much nicer in the hand.

00:47:56 ◼   ► I can use my phone without a popsocket.

00:48:00 ◼   ► Imagine that.

00:48:01 ◼   ► You can use a phone.

00:48:02 ◼   ► Did you know this, gentlemen?

00:48:03 ◼   ► You can actually hold a phone in one hand.

00:48:06 ◼   ► You can operate the entire keyboard with one hand.

00:48:09 ◼   ► You don't even need to have a little thing

00:48:11 ◼   ► poking out the back.

00:48:12 ◼   ► You can just hold the phone.

00:48:14 ◼   ► I stand by having gone the Max last year

00:48:17 ◼   ► for the 5X lens or camera system or what have you,

00:48:21 ◼   ► and I actually am very glad that I tried it.

00:48:23 ◼   ► I think I could do it again if we're in a situation

00:48:27 ◼   ► for like the 17 or something like that

00:48:28 ◼   ► where only the good camera's on the 17 Pro Max,

00:48:32 ◼   ► or you know what I mean, something along those lines.

00:48:34 ◼   ► But I stand by and I have now reaffirmed my commitment

00:48:39 ◼   ► to, oh, my, I am not a big phone person.

00:48:43 ◼   ► I can do it if I have to, but it's not for me.

00:48:46 ◼   ► - Because the thing is, even the now "small phone"

00:48:50 ◼   ► is a big phone, and it got bigger.

00:48:53 ◼   ► It got even bigger, and this is just gonna keep happening.

00:48:57 ◼   ► Obviously, that's the pattern of the market.

00:49:00 ◼   ► The market pushes phones, sizes up, people buy them,

00:49:02 ◼   ► and it drives the small phone people nuts

00:49:07 ◼   ► 'cause they're like, you're going further away

00:49:09 ◼   ► from our needs, which is true.

00:49:11 ◼   ► But also, the problem is the market just keeps

00:49:13 ◼   ► buying bigger and bigger phones also.

00:49:15 ◼   ► So the small phone people are kind of being outvoted

00:49:19 ◼   ► by most of the buyers in the market,

00:49:21 ◼   ► and so this is just gonna keep happening.

00:49:24 ◼   ► Even a lot of Max people are switching back with this one

00:49:28 ◼   ► 'cause they just keep making it.

00:49:29 ◼   ► - 'Cause the Max got bigger, too.

00:49:30 ◼   ► - Yes, they keep making it bigger.

00:49:32 ◼   ► Eventually, you're like, okay, this is actually beyond

00:49:34 ◼   ► what I actually want, and I actually have a story

00:49:37 ◼   ► with this for a little bit for later.

00:49:38 ◼   ► We'll get to that.

00:49:39 ◼   ► - All right, but so far, I think I'll wrap up,

00:49:42 ◼   ► even though, like I said, I'm already going longer

00:49:44 ◼   ► than I intended.

00:49:45 ◼   ► Immediate impressions, the phone transfer,

00:49:49 ◼   ► I did use a full bore, like $90 Apple bespoke

00:49:53 ◼   ► Thunderbolt cable, and it took roughly an hour,

00:49:56 ◼   ► and my vague recollection of last year

00:49:57 ◼   ► was that it took like two and a half, three hours.

00:49:59 ◼   ► So I do think that gets an A-plus thumbs up from me.

00:50:03 ◼   ► This is very not, I did not do a lot of science here,

00:50:06 ◼   ► to be clear, but the vibe I got

00:50:08 ◼   ► is that it was definitely better.

00:50:10 ◼   ► I failed to transfer my SIM on the first shot.

00:50:13 ◼   ► I mean, not from my fault, it just didn't work,

00:50:15 ◼   ► and then I tried it again, this is a Verizon eSIM.

00:50:17 ◼   ► Tried it again, and it worked no problem.

00:50:19 ◼   ► Other than that, I mean, everything seems nice.

00:50:23 ◼   ► I like the camera control.

00:50:24 ◼   ► I don't wanna go too far into it,

00:50:26 ◼   ► 'cause I think you guys are gonna have

00:50:27 ◼   ► many more thoughts about it.

00:50:28 ◼   ► It does not currently feel intuitive to me,

00:50:32 ◼   ► but that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad by any means.

00:50:35 ◼   ► I think I will absolutely get used to it,

00:50:37 ◼   ► but I have to think through, like,

00:50:39 ◼   ► is this a half-press, is this a half-double-press,

00:50:41 ◼   ► is it a full-press, is it a full-double-press?

00:50:44 ◼   ► It hasn't clicked, and typically, Apple stuff,

00:50:47 ◼   ► you don't have to think about it.

00:50:48 ◼   ► It just does, or it works exactly

00:50:51 ◼   ► the way you expect it to work.

00:50:52 ◼   ► And in this case, I don't think it's successful,

00:50:54 ◼   ► but again, I wanna repeat, I don't think

00:50:57 ◼   ► that that's necessarily an indictment of the camera control.

00:51:00 ◼   ► It's just, I gotta get used to it, that's all.

00:51:02 ◼   ► - We'll talk about it more in a little bit,

00:51:03 ◼   ► but I wanna talk about my setup process

00:51:04 ◼   ► that Marc can talk about, his setup process.

00:51:06 ◼   ► We'll do these piecemeal, piecewise,

00:51:08 ◼   ► old setup, and then, anyway.

00:51:10 ◼   ► So the setup process, you would think

00:51:13 ◼   ► this is such a non-issue.

00:51:14 ◼   ► Yours sounded like mostly a non-issue.

00:51:15 ◼   ► Yeah, it was annoying picking it up from the store,

00:51:17 ◼   ► but you used the cable to connect them,

00:51:18 ◼   ► 'cause you had a 15 Pro to a 16 Pro,

00:51:21 ◼   ► and it seemed to work out.

00:51:22 ◼   ► And I would grade your setup experience

00:51:25 ◼   ► as pretty much went okay.

00:51:28 ◼   ► - The software setup experience,

00:51:31 ◼   ► I would say, is solid A-minus.

00:51:34 ◼   ► It took a long time.

00:51:35 ◼   ► I don't love that you still have to download all the apps

00:51:37 ◼   ► even when you're doing a phone-to-phone transfer,

00:51:39 ◼   ► but in the grand scheme of things, it was fine.

00:51:41 ◼   ► There were no major issues.

00:51:43 ◼   ► - So I get a new phone every two years,

00:51:44 ◼   ► and there are two reasons that I dread getting a new phone.

00:51:49 ◼   ► One of them is the setup process.

00:51:51 ◼   ► The other one is cases, which we'll talk about later, right?

00:51:54 ◼   ► And it really does deter me from getting a new phone.

00:51:57 ◼   ► You think I'd be excited to get a new phone, and I am,

00:51:59 ◼   ► but then every time I actually am getting one,

00:52:00 ◼   ► I'm like, oh no, my world has been thrown into turmoil,

00:52:03 ◼   ► because the computing device that I use probably the most

00:52:07 ◼   ► that's with me all the time now is going to

00:52:11 ◼   ► not be satisfactory for some period of time.

00:52:13 ◼   ► First, I have to deal with the setup process

00:52:14 ◼   ► where I just hope everything transfers over,

00:52:17 ◼   ► and I deal with all that or whatever,

00:52:18 ◼   ► and then the cases, which we'll talk about later, right?

00:52:20 ◼   ► So I think last year, if we go back to, or not last year,

00:52:24 ◼   ► two years ago when I got the 14 Pro,

00:52:25 ◼   ► I think I said that my setup process went smoothly for once.

00:52:29 ◼   ► My usual experience is I get a new phone,

00:52:32 ◼   ► and the way I order it is through the Apple Store app,

00:52:34 ◼   ► and I order it on my old phone, and when you order on

00:52:37 ◼   ► your old phone, you can say, hey, are you gonna get

00:52:39 ◼   ► a new phone that's gonna replace the one

00:52:41 ◼   ► that you're currently ordering on, and I say yes.

00:52:43 ◼   ► It's like the most automatic, smoothest default path,

00:52:47 ◼   ► which is like, new phone, replace this phone.

00:52:49 ◼   ► Don't change anything, don't get an unlocked phone,

00:52:52 ◼   ► don't do anything weird, don't change carriers,

00:52:54 ◼   ► it's like just the default straightforward thing.

00:52:57 ◼   ► And yet, pretty much every year,

00:52:59 ◼   ► with the possible exception of last year,

00:53:00 ◼   ► I don't recall exactly, I end up on the phone with Verizon.

00:53:05 ◼   ► On iPhone, which is not the time you wanna be

00:53:08 ◼   ► on the phone with Verizon. - No.

00:53:10 ◼   ► - Well, guess what, I ordered my new phone,

00:53:13 ◼   ► using that same old default method,

00:53:14 ◼   ► I took it out of the box, I couldn't use the wired,

00:53:17 ◼   ► well I decided not to use the wired thing,

00:53:18 ◼   ► 'cause the 14 Pro has USB 2.0 speeds,

00:53:20 ◼   ► and Wi-Fi can beat that, I think.

00:53:23 ◼   ► So I'm just using plain old, you know, phone to phone,

00:53:27 ◼   ► wireless transfer with both phones plugged in,

00:53:29 ◼   ► and it starts doing the thing, you know,

00:53:32 ◼   ► I see a new phone, do you wanna do this,

00:53:34 ◼   ► connect to your other phone,

00:53:34 ◼   ► type in the passcode of this phone on that phone,

00:53:36 ◼   ► scan the fuzzy dot ball, you know,

00:53:39 ◼   ► like the whole process, right?

00:53:41 ◼   ► - All right, can I interrupt you right there,

00:53:43 ◼   ► does that actually, like is that like a QR code,

00:53:46 ◼   ► does that actually transmit data?

00:53:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, there's actual data in there.

00:53:49 ◼   ► - Okay, I can't fathom how, I believe you, okay.

00:53:52 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's just artfully done,

00:53:54 ◼   ► but yeah, it's like sort of an obscured artful

00:53:56 ◼   ► kind of like QR code type thing.

00:53:58 ◼   ► Anyway, and then they start doing their thing,

00:54:02 ◼   ► one thing that's always annoyed me

00:54:03 ◼   ► is the phone you are transferring from

00:54:05 ◼   ► has like a white sheet up that says, you know,

00:54:08 ◼   ► finish on other phone or whatever,

00:54:10 ◼   ► but if you try to dismiss that sheet,

00:54:12 ◼   ► it's like, oh, do you wanna exit the setup process?

00:54:14 ◼   ► It's like, no, I just don't wanna be staring

00:54:15 ◼   ► at this white thing,

00:54:16 ◼   ► and sometimes the screen won't even go to sleep,

00:54:17 ◼   ► but just fine, the phone is plugged in,

00:54:19 ◼   ► but it just seems stupid, but anyway, whatever.

00:54:21 ◼   ► On the new phone, it's doing stuff,

00:54:23 ◼   ► and it gets to a thing that says, you know,

00:54:25 ◼   ► whatever screen this is like activating, blah, blah, blah,

00:54:27 ◼   ► this may take a few minutes.

00:54:29 ◼   ► Well, I was on that phone for a solid hour the first time,

00:54:32 ◼   ► and I'm like, because I was afraid to abort it

00:54:34 ◼   ► and screw something up, and then I tried again,

00:54:36 ◼   ► and tried again, and it would be like activating,

00:54:39 ◼   ► this will take a few minutes, and then I resigned myself.

00:54:41 ◼   ► I'm like, look, it's never gonna get past the screen.

00:54:43 ◼   ► Like there was no skip, I'm assuming it was trying

00:54:45 ◼   ► to transfer, you know, my phone number, eSIM,

00:54:49 ◼   ► whatever thing from my 14 Pro to my 16 Pro.

00:54:52 ◼   ► It just wouldn't and couldn't do it,

00:54:54 ◼   ► and I'm going all over.

00:54:55 ◼   ► Like I have five bars in my house these days,

00:54:57 ◼   ► like they must have upgraded the coverage right here.

00:54:59 ◼   ► It's not even like I have bad signal anymore,

00:55:01 ◼   ► and they're both on Wi-Fi.

00:55:02 ◼   ► Like I don't know what the problem is.

00:55:04 ◼   ► Time to contact Verizon, which is just the most terrible

00:55:08 ◼   ► sort of resigned feeling of dread.

00:55:10 ◼   ► Like you're getting an exciting new thing,

00:55:12 ◼   ► and instead of setting up your exciting new thing,

00:55:14 ◼   ► you're going to be calling your phone carrier

00:55:16 ◼   ► on day one of iPhone.

00:55:18 ◼   ► It's just like, why is this my life?

00:55:21 ◼   ► - May I offer a suggestion?

00:55:23 ◼   ► You make merciless fun of me for trying the same thing

00:55:27 ◼   ► more than once or twice, expecting--

00:55:29 ◼   ► - I think it worked last year.

00:55:31 ◼   ► - I'm gonna let it go because I don't want to get

00:55:33 ◼   ► any of us angry at each other,

00:55:34 ◼   ► but I think maybe trying a different approach

00:55:36 ◼   ► for next year might be a good idea.

00:55:39 ◼   ► - Well, but what would you suggest?

00:55:40 ◼   ► Like what's, I mean, next year I'll use the wired one,

00:55:42 ◼   ► but that wasn't the problem.

00:55:43 ◼   ► It was the carrier activation.

00:55:44 ◼   ► Like that's where I'm getting it now.

00:55:45 ◼   ► - That's why, maybe I'm the idiot here,

00:55:48 ◼   ► which wouldn't be the first time,

00:55:49 ◼   ► but I always, or for the last several years anyway,

00:55:52 ◼   ► I just buy an unlocked phone.

00:55:53 ◼   ► I don't want Verizon to know what's coming.

00:55:55 ◼   ► I don't want them to think that they,

00:55:56 ◼   ► 'cause a lot of times in the past,

00:55:58 ◼   ► I don't know if this is true anymore,

00:55:59 ◼   ► but in the past if you bought a phone

00:56:02 ◼   ► to replace your existing one, like you're describing,

00:56:05 ◼   ► I want this one to be my new phone

00:56:07 ◼   ► and I tell Apple that ahead of time.

00:56:08 ◼   ► A lot of times like AT&T and Verizon would ding you

00:56:11 ◼   ► like 50 bucks for the activation for reasons unknown.

00:56:14 ◼   ► And so I would just buy an unlocked one.

00:56:15 ◼   ► And then typically, again, not always,

00:56:17 ◼   ► but typically neither Verizon or AT&T would ding you

00:56:20 ◼   ► the $50 activation fee because you're just bringing

00:56:23 ◼   ► something new to them.

00:56:24 ◼   ► It's like, how do they know if you're just John Gruber

00:56:27 ◼   ► or Jason Snell and you're just activating somebody else's,

00:56:29 ◼   ► or activating--

00:56:30 ◼   ► - Well, I mean, but I wanted to take over

00:56:31 ◼   ► my other number, obviously, my old number.

00:56:33 ◼   ► - Well, yeah, but mine does that every time.

00:56:35 ◼   ► It says, oh, do you wanna take over the old phone's number?

00:56:37 ◼   ► - But I'm assuming they'd still charge you the fee.

00:56:38 ◼   ► If they're gonna charge you the fee,

00:56:39 ◼   ► they're gonna charge you the fee.

00:56:40 ◼   ► - I don't think, again, we'll see what happens.

00:56:42 ◼   ► I might be wrong, but in the last couple of years,

00:56:44 ◼   ► I don't believe that's been the case,

00:56:45 ◼   ► or the last several years.

00:56:46 ◼   ► - Anyway, yeah, I could potentially try and unlock one,

00:56:49 ◼   ► but I just feel like that's been trading

00:56:50 ◼   ► a bunch of known problems for unknown ones.

00:56:52 ◼   ► So anyway, I have advanced in my ability to deal with this

00:56:54 ◼   ► because I was like, I can't do it, I can't dial that,

00:56:57 ◼   ► because remember, I can't call them on my cell phone either,

00:56:59 ◼   ► so I'd be calling on my, quote, unquote, landline phone,

00:57:02 ◼   ► still wireless, whatever, on my landline phone.

00:57:04 ◼   ► It would be on speakerphone,

00:57:05 ◼   ► I'd have to hear that music over the,

00:57:07 ◼   ► I just, I can't do it, so I'm like, you know what?

00:57:09 ◼   ► This year, I'm gonna try the chat thing.

00:57:11 ◼   ► They always heard you towards anyway,

00:57:12 ◼   ► like the in-web page Verizon text chat.

00:57:16 ◼   ► And so I did that, and the world's friendliest person

00:57:19 ◼   ► telling me, oh, I hope you're having such a wonderful day.

00:57:22 ◼   ► Congratulations to your new phone, blah, blah, blah.

00:57:24 ◼   ► I'm like, please, just, I've got all the data ready to go.

00:57:29 ◼   ► I tell him the situation, I say I'm on the activating screen.

00:57:33 ◼   ► He says, could you please give me your IME ID,

00:57:36 ◼   ► which I already have in the clipboard, I just paste it.

00:57:38 ◼   ► You know, I'm going, which by the way,

00:57:40 ◼   ► I had to transcribe manually,

00:57:42 ◼   ► because when your phone is in this terrible state,

00:57:44 ◼   ► you just use the little I and a circle in the upper right

00:57:46 ◼   ► to get the IME ID, but you can't copy and paste it

00:57:49 ◼   ► because your phone isn't even set up,

00:57:50 ◼   ► so I'm transcribing that carefully.

00:57:51 ◼   ► Like anyway, I do all this information, and you know what?

00:57:56 ◼   ► It takes like three seconds

00:57:57 ◼   ► when someone at Verizon is doing it.

00:57:59 ◼   ► They're like, okay, this is your thing, confirm this,

00:58:01 ◼   ► do that, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop.

00:58:03 ◼   ► And all of a sudden my phone screen says,

00:58:05 ◼   ► instead of saying activating, wait a few minutes,

00:58:06 ◼   ► it says, oh, transferring cellular service, whatever,

00:58:08 ◼   ► blue, blue, blue, blue, and it's done.

00:58:11 ◼   ► And I was like, okay, well that was, you know,

00:58:13 ◼   ► maybe like a half an hour on web chat

00:58:16 ◼   ► in the grand scheme of things.

00:58:18 ◼   ► You know, it's better to not have to contact them,

00:58:19 ◼   ► but it wasn't that bad.

00:58:21 ◼   ► The only weird wrinkle was, they're like, okay,

00:58:24 ◼   ► now call like pound, you know, 832 or whatever.

00:58:27 ◼   ► There's something they want you to do

00:58:28 ◼   ► to confirm that everything worked.

00:58:30 ◼   ► - What year is this?

00:58:31 ◼   ► - I'm pretty sure it worked,

00:58:32 ◼   ► because the phone is saying that it did all the things

00:58:35 ◼   ► and it's, you know, whatever.

00:58:36 ◼   ► But they're like, okay, well, and I said to them,

00:58:38 ◼   ► I can't dial anything right now

00:58:39 ◼   ► because it's doing the phone-to-phone transfer.

00:58:41 ◼   ► I won't have access to the dialer

00:58:42 ◼   ► until it finishes the phone-to-phone transfer.

00:58:44 ◼   ► And he says, that's okay, I'll wait.

00:58:46 ◼   ► I'm like, it's going to take hours.

00:58:49 ◼   ► And he's like, no problem, I'll just wait.

00:58:51 ◼   ► And then he tried to sell me insurance

00:58:53 ◼   ► and I said, no thanks.

00:58:53 ◼   ► And then I walked away from the computer

00:58:55 ◼   ► and I came back, you know, an hour or two later

00:58:58 ◼   ► and the transfer had finished

00:58:59 ◼   ► and the webpage had timed out.

00:59:00 ◼   ► So successful customer service interaction,

00:59:03 ◼   ► but chalk this up to another year

00:59:06 ◼   ► where I had to contact Verizon.

00:59:08 ◼   ► At least I didn't have to go on the phone with them,

00:59:09 ◼   ► but I had to contact Verizon to get my phone set up.

00:59:11 ◼   ► After I had gotten over that hurdle,

00:59:13 ◼   ► the phone-to-phone transfer worked the way it normally does,

00:59:15 ◼   ► where it forgets the test flight exists

00:59:17 ◼   ► and rearranges all my icons until I go back to test flight

00:59:20 ◼   ► and figure out where they all have to belong

00:59:21 ◼   ► and rearrange them manually.

00:59:23 ◼   ► Yes, I tried to use iPhone mirroring

00:59:24 ◼   ► to rearrange them with the mouse.

00:59:26 ◼   ► It's probably a little bit better,

00:59:29 ◼   ► but boy, you can really see the insanity of that system

00:59:31 ◼   ► when you have pixel precise control with a mouse cursor,

00:59:34 ◼   ► because it's such a cruel game.

00:59:36 ◼   ► It's like, oh, I went over the one pixel boundary

00:59:38 ◼   ► and now it switched to the other screen.

00:59:39 ◼   ► Like it's just, your meat fingers aren't in the way,

00:59:41 ◼   ► but now I know precisely how insane

00:59:43 ◼   ► the activation readings are

00:59:44 ◼   ► and precisely how broken it is

00:59:46 ◼   ► where you will drag an icon

00:59:47 ◼   ► and other icons will skitter out of the way

00:59:49 ◼   ► and leave an empty spot for your icon.

00:59:51 ◼   ► You will release and Springboard will say, nope,

00:59:54 ◼   ► and it'll just close that spot back up

00:59:56 ◼   ► and you'll do it 50 times.

00:59:57 ◼   ► Drag an icon, put it right where you want it to go.

01:00:00 ◼   ► Nothing else is there.

01:00:01 ◼   ► It is dead center on the spot.

01:00:02 ◼   ► Release disappears like it never existed.

01:00:05 ◼   ► The system's just broken, so the mouse helps a little bit,

01:00:07 ◼   ► but anyway, setup worked fine.

01:00:10 ◼   ► I managed to get through it all and there you go.

01:00:13 ◼   ► Marco, how was your setup process?

01:00:15 ◼   ► - Mine was perfectly fine. (laughs)

01:00:17 ◼   ► - Did you buy unlocked or did you buy as a replacement?

01:00:20 ◼   ► - I did the thing in the Apple Store app on the phone

01:00:22 ◼   ► where I say replace this phone on my plan

01:00:25 ◼   ► and it was simple.

01:00:26 ◼   ► Now granted, I use AT&T, so everything is mediocre,

01:00:31 ◼   ► but it worked better than yours. (laughs)

01:00:35 ◼   ► - Yeah, I don't know what it is.

01:00:36 ◼   ► I mean, I'm assuming there's some carrier servers

01:00:38 ◼   ► that are involved in this process

01:00:39 ◼   ► and the worst part is there's no way to say,

01:00:43 ◼   ► forget about that, I'll deal with it later.

01:00:44 ◼   ► Just do the rest of the setup.

01:00:45 ◼   ► You are stuck on that screen.

01:00:47 ◼   ► This is activating, this may take a few minutes

01:00:48 ◼   ► and as far as I know, there's no way to get past it,

01:00:50 ◼   ► which argues for Casey's thing of like,

01:00:51 ◼   ► hey, don't you just buy it unlocked

01:00:53 ◼   ► 'cause then at least you can do the phone,

01:00:55 ◼   ► like the data transfer part of the setup

01:00:57 ◼   ► and then when you have a functioning working phone

01:01:00 ◼   ► that just doesn't have a phone number,

01:01:01 ◼   ► then try to do the eSIM transfer or whatever,

01:01:04 ◼   ► however you initiate that process.

01:01:06 ◼   ► - I mean, I will say for whatever it's worth,

01:01:09 ◼   ► my Apple Watch cellular transfers never work.

01:01:13 ◼   ► The only way I ever get the watch to work

01:01:15 ◼   ► is to cancel the plan from AT&T's website for the old watch

01:01:20 ◼   ► and then have the new watch start over again

01:01:22 ◼   ► and even then, usually it's like it tries to activate,

01:01:26 ◼   ► it fails a couple times,

01:01:27 ◼   ► the plan shows up in the Apple Watch cellular section

01:01:29 ◼   ► as not in use.

01:01:30 ◼   ► I gotta like reboot sometimes a couple times.

01:01:33 ◼   ► I gotta do some dances to get that to work.

01:01:35 ◼   ► - And you gotta Google to be like,

01:01:36 ◼   ► wait, do I unpair from the old one first

01:01:38 ◼   ► or do I not like this?

01:01:39 ◼   ► This whole, I've done it successfully,

01:01:41 ◼   ► I use my wife's watch several times and every time I do it,

01:01:43 ◼   ► I have no confidence that I'm going to be successful.

01:01:45 ◼   ► I have no recollection of how I did it last time

01:01:47 ◼   ► or why it worked and I just like cross my fingers

01:01:49 ◼   ► and just dive in and by the way,

01:01:52 ◼   ► everything on the watch takes forever.

01:01:53 ◼   ► I guess it's probably getting better

01:01:54 ◼   ► as the watches get faster.

01:01:55 ◼   ► - It doesn't, no. - But it takes so long

01:01:56 ◼   ► to do anything.

01:01:57 ◼   ► - No, it's not getting better.

01:01:59 ◼   ► But the phone transfer, by the way,

01:02:01 ◼   ► just before we leave this,

01:02:02 ◼   ► the phone transfer for me was perfectly fine.

01:02:04 ◼   ► Like the eSIM moved over,

01:02:05 ◼   ► like it activated just fine in a reasonable amount of time.

01:02:07 ◼   ► - Did you use a cable?

01:02:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, I used a cable and I used both.

01:02:11 ◼   ► I used two of my like fan Peltier Element fans

01:02:14 ◼   ► that are the active cooling MagSafe fans.

01:02:16 ◼   ► - I did use ice packs just in honor of Marco.

01:02:18 ◼   ► I used them briefly but then I got worried

01:02:20 ◼   ► about condensation and stopped.

01:02:21 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:02:23 ◼   ► - Very quickly with regard to the watch,

01:02:25 ◼   ► I had heard a story and I think this was accurate

01:02:30 ◼   ► at the time, that the best way to move a watch

01:02:33 ◼   ► is to unpair on the old phone if I remember correctly.

01:02:36 ◼   ► - I think it's the only way.

01:02:37 ◼   ► - No, it'll offer to move it for you.

01:02:39 ◼   ► It just doesn't usually work with cellular for some reason.

01:02:42 ◼   ► - Well, so that's the thing.

01:02:43 ◼   ► So the way it used to be years and years ago

01:02:45 ◼   ► was you would unpair the watch,

01:02:47 ◼   ► then do your phone transfer,

01:02:48 ◼   ► then repair the watch on the new phone.

01:02:50 ◼   ► This time I didn't do any of that.

01:02:53 ◼   ► I just waited for the phone to say,

01:02:55 ◼   ► hey, would you like to move the watch over?

01:02:57 ◼   ► And I said, yes.

01:02:58 ◼   ► And it worked.

01:02:59 ◼   ► Now I do not have cellular though.

01:03:01 ◼   ► I do not have cellular

01:03:02 ◼   ► and I do think that makes a big difference.

01:03:03 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, it does, very much so.

01:03:06 ◼   ► - It moved, no problem.

01:03:08 ◼   ► And then when I unboxed my Apple Watch Series 10,

01:03:10 ◼   ► which we'll get to later,

01:03:11 ◼   ► I said, hey, can you make it,

01:03:13 ◼   ► or I think it asked or whatever,

01:03:15 ◼   ► do you want this to effectively replace the old one?

01:03:17 ◼   ► I said, yes.

01:03:18 ◼   ► And it said, sure.

01:03:18 ◼   ► And that worked pretty much no problem.

01:03:20 ◼   ► So my Apple Watch transfer experience was A plus plus.

01:03:24 ◼   ► Like it was pretty much flawless.

01:03:26 ◼   ► I was stunned.

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01:05:29 ◼   ► All right, camera control.

01:05:35 ◼   ► I've used it a decent amount.

01:05:38 ◼   ► I think it's a good idea.

01:05:42 ◼   ► The actual usage of it,

01:05:44 ◼   ► I think they're gonna need to tweak a little bit here

01:05:46 ◼   ► and there with some of the timings and settings

01:05:49 ◼   ► and tolerances and things like that.

01:05:50 ◼   ► But I think overall, I like it.

01:05:52 ◼   ► It is extremely useful for me

01:05:53 ◼   ► just as a camera launch button.

01:05:55 ◼   ► I know a lot of people have been using the action button

01:05:57 ◼   ► for that over the past year.

01:05:58 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's what I was doing.

01:06:00 ◼   ► - And that's totally fine.

01:06:01 ◼   ► And there are some benefits and drawbacks to that.

01:06:04 ◼   ► I, as I mentioned in previous episodes,

01:06:06 ◼   ► I use the action button for flashlight,

01:06:07 ◼   ► which I actually use a decent amount.

01:06:10 ◼   ► Although I actually, I am happy to report

01:06:13 ◼   ► that as I progress through my denial of,

01:06:17 ◼   ► that I really should be wearing progressive reading glasses

01:06:20 ◼   ► all the time because my close up reading distance

01:06:22 ◼   ► is not great anymore.

01:06:24 ◼   ► But my distance distance viewing is fine.

01:06:28 ◼   ► And so what I really should be doing

01:06:30 ◼   ► is wearing progressive reading glasses

01:06:31 ◼   ► that have no correction on top

01:06:33 ◼   ► and reading correction on the bottom.

01:06:35 ◼   ► I have yet to find any that I don't hate.

01:06:37 ◼   ► So instead what I'm doing is mostly

01:06:39 ◼   ► not wearing reading glasses

01:06:40 ◼   ► and just holding stuff out really far to see it.

01:06:43 ◼   ► But occasionally the system is not sufficient for something.

01:06:48 ◼   ► And the phone has a magnifier feature built in.

01:06:51 ◼   ► It has for a very long time

01:06:53 ◼   ► where it just basically is like a quick little view

01:06:55 ◼   ► that uses the camera to show you a magnified view

01:06:57 ◼   ► of whatever you're looking at.

01:06:58 ◼   ► It's great, especially when you have

01:06:59 ◼   ► the modern ultra wide lenses that have autofocus

01:07:02 ◼   ► and so they can actually get very close

01:07:04 ◼   ► with macro distances to view things like, you know,

01:07:07 ◼   ► that tiny little print on Apple's power adapters and stuff.

01:07:11 ◼   ► One of the things I tried to view recently was,

01:07:14 ◼   ► they have the new MagSafe pucks that charge 25 watts.

01:07:17 ◼   ► And they look almost identical to the old ones.

01:07:20 ◼   ► Apparently, I heard from John Gruber actually

01:07:23 ◼   ► that apparently they are slightly narrower,

01:07:27 ◼   ► which is going to be really annoying

01:07:29 ◼   ► when I try to fit it into anything that's made to like,

01:07:31 ◼   ► you bring your MagSafe adapter into this 3D mount

01:07:33 ◼   ► or whatever, like that's gonna be annoying.

01:07:35 ◼   ► I gotta verify that.

01:07:36 ◼   ► - Like the radius is smaller?

01:07:38 ◼   ► - Yeah, like apparently the actual size of the circle

01:07:40 ◼   ► is slightly smaller so it's not gonna fit in, you know,

01:07:43 ◼   ► docks and stuff that are made to, you know,

01:07:45 ◼   ► build an Apple's MagSafe pucks.

01:07:47 ◼   ► But I gotta verify that.

01:07:48 ◼   ► - But I bet there's some tiny light gray text

01:07:49 ◼   ► on a slightly darker gray background that you could also--

01:07:51 ◼   ► - Right, so what I was trying to do is like,

01:07:54 ◼   ► okay, how do I tell, if I'm holding one of these in my hand,

01:07:57 ◼   ► how do I tell which one it is?

01:07:59 ◼   ► 'Cause they now, you know, the modern MagSafe pucks now

01:08:02 ◼   ► with the, you know, the faster charging,

01:08:04 ◼   ► I believe they're 10 bucks more.

01:08:06 ◼   ► They're 40 bucks instead of 30 bucks.

01:08:07 ◼   ► And they have a different entire model number.

01:08:10 ◼   ► But if you're just looking at it, it's not obvious.

01:08:12 ◼   ► Like, and they do have a tiny little bit of text

01:08:16 ◼   ► printed on the metal right next to where the cable

01:08:18 ◼   ► goes into the metal ring.

01:08:20 ◼   ► And I could not see this for the life of me.

01:08:23 ◼   ► So anyway, all this is to say,

01:08:25 ◼   ► the magnifier's a good feature.

01:08:26 ◼   ► And what I've actually done,

01:08:27 ◼   ► since I have the action button as the flashlight,

01:08:29 ◼   ► now with iOS 18, you can replace the two circular

01:08:33 ◼   ► 3D touch buttons on the bottom of the lock screen,

01:08:35 ◼   ► the ones that used to be flashlight and camera.

01:08:37 ◼   ► So I've actually replaced the flashlight one

01:08:40 ◼   ► with the magnifier.

01:08:41 ◼   ► I'm happy to announce I have reached that point in aging

01:08:45 ◼   ► where I'm going to be using the magnifier

01:08:48 ◼   ► frequently enough on my phone.

01:08:49 ◼   ► I've already, I just did this like the other day,

01:08:51 ◼   ► and I've already used it like three times.

01:08:53 ◼   ► - You can change it to triple tap too.

01:08:55 ◼   ► That's the one that, that's the real old person move.

01:08:56 ◼   ► You change magnifier to triple tap with accessibility,

01:08:58 ◼   ► you just tap the back of the phone three times.

01:09:00 ◼   ► - I don't need that yet.

01:09:02 ◼   ► But certainly having it on the lock screen

01:09:04 ◼   ► on a button I was not using anymore is very useful.

01:09:06 ◼   ► And then, you know, and so similarly,

01:09:08 ◼   ► like you can have the camera, you know,

01:09:11 ◼   ► if you don't want to use Apple's camera app anymore,

01:09:14 ◼   ► or if you only want to launch it from the camera control,

01:09:17 ◼   ► then you can reassign the camera circle button

01:09:20 ◼   ► on the lock screen too to something else.

01:09:22 ◼   ► This is a whole new area of customization

01:09:23 ◼   ► that I actually find quite nice.

01:09:25 ◼   ► But anyway, all that is to say, the camera control,

01:09:27 ◼   ► therefore being my camera launch button,

01:09:30 ◼   ► will free up one of those spots for me.

01:09:31 ◼   ► And so using it as that so far over the last couple days,

01:09:34 ◼   ► I have enjoyed it, it has proven useful to me.

01:09:37 ◼   ► The only thing is that so far I have a very,

01:09:40 ◼   ► I had a very hard time figuring out

01:09:43 ◼   ► how to navigate the little tools menu inside of it.

01:09:46 ◼   ► Like that-- - Yep, same.

01:09:47 ◼   ► - I said this before any of us had ever tried it.

01:09:49 ◼   ► Remember by using the demos, I'm like, that's modal.

01:09:52 ◼   ► How are you gonna get out of that mode?

01:09:54 ◼   ► And I, trying it for real life,

01:09:55 ◼   ► I experienced the exact same thing,

01:09:57 ◼   ► the exact problem I predicted.

01:09:58 ◼   ► I'm like, I'm having that problem.

01:09:59 ◼   ► I eventually figured it out, but it's not great.

01:10:02 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think there's gonna be

01:10:03 ◼   ► a quite learning curve there.

01:10:05 ◼   ► And I think maybe Apple could tweak some of the like,

01:10:07 ◼   ► you know, timings and gestures and things on that

01:10:09 ◼   ► to make that a little bit easier over time.

01:10:11 ◼   ► 'Cause I have found that like the actual,

01:10:13 ◼   ► like the pushing of the button to open the camera

01:10:15 ◼   ► and to take pictures, that works great.

01:10:16 ◼   ► But I keep finding myself like accidentally

01:10:19 ◼   ► in some of the little menu modes

01:10:20 ◼   ► to the point where I might just turn them off.

01:10:22 ◼   ► And the second thing is that as soon as you start using

01:10:25 ◼   ► those menu modes, it, or even I think even just using it

01:10:30 ◼   ► for capture, like just pushing the button

01:10:32 ◼   ► to take the picture, it dims or hides

01:10:36 ◼   ► all of the camera UI on screen.

01:10:38 ◼   ► - Yeah, I noticed that too, which surprised me.

01:10:41 ◼   ► - Yeah, and it keeps it hidden for like a few seconds

01:10:43 ◼   ► after you hit the picture.

01:10:44 ◼   ► So like even if you wanna just review the picture

01:10:46 ◼   ► you just took, you have to like wait two or three seconds

01:10:50 ◼   ► for it to like fade those controls back in.

01:10:52 ◼   ► Like it's kind of annoying, like I see what they're going

01:10:54 ◼   ► for, it just becomes a camera with this control.

01:10:57 ◼   ► Okay, that's a nice idea, that's very precious.

01:10:59 ◼   ► In real life, I want those controls back immediately.

01:11:02 ◼   ► So like as soon as I'm done taking the picture,

01:11:04 ◼   ► I want those controls.

01:11:05 ◼   ► Or even if I'm just stuck in the weird, you know,

01:11:08 ◼   ► camera control menu thingy and I can't figure out

01:11:10 ◼   ► how to zoom back out or whatever,

01:11:12 ◼   ► just keep the controls on screen at all times.

01:11:15 ◼   ► Because yeah, it's great to have them in the camera control.

01:11:18 ◼   ► It's also great to have them on the screen.

01:11:20 ◼   ► And a lot of times you're gonna wanna switch

01:11:21 ◼   ► back and forth between them.

01:11:23 ◼   ► So that's something that like, I think until Apple

01:11:27 ◼   ► makes better balances and more usable defaults

01:11:31 ◼   ► or more usable behaviors with the camera control,

01:11:34 ◼   ► I don't see myself using it for any of those

01:11:36 ◼   ► little menu features other than just launching the camera

01:11:38 ◼   ► and taking a picture.

01:11:39 ◼   ► Like I think for those it's great, it's convenient.

01:11:41 ◼   ► The actual implementation of all those little menus

01:11:43 ◼   ► and things and the way it hides all the controls

01:11:45 ◼   ► in the main screen, that I think needs some iteration

01:11:48 ◼   ► to really be useful.

01:11:50 ◼   ► - All right, so here's my experience

01:11:51 ◼   ► with the camera control.

01:11:53 ◼   ► The very first thing that I discovered with my new phone

01:11:58 ◼   ► with the camera control is that the camera control

01:12:01 ◼   ► is placed exactly where I apparently grabbed my phone.

01:12:04 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:12:05 ◼   ► - I've done this a couple times.

01:12:06 ◼   ► - Like with it, taking it out of the box,

01:12:09 ◼   ► I kid you not, the phone is not even on.

01:12:11 ◼   ► I've just taken it out of the box.

01:12:13 ◼   ► I accidentally hit the camera control button

01:12:15 ◼   ► three times in under 20 seconds.

01:12:18 ◼   ► It's not even on, like the phone's not even on.

01:12:21 ◼   ► I'm hitting the button, which by the way--

01:12:23 ◼   ► - What part of your hand, are you hitting it

01:12:24 ◼   ► with like your like--

01:12:26 ◼   ► - That's apparently where I grab the phone.

01:12:27 ◼   ► I apparently grab it at the bottom with one,

01:12:30 ◼   ► you know, my thumb on like the left side

01:12:32 ◼   ► of where the camera control is and my other finger

01:12:34 ◼   ► is exactly on the camera control.

01:12:36 ◼   ► And it's a flush button, it doesn't even stick out.

01:12:39 ◼   ► I was hitting that button like crazy.

01:12:41 ◼   ► I'm like, okay, well, I can retrain myself,

01:12:44 ◼   ► but that's an unfortunate personal habit.

01:12:47 ◼   ► Apparently I grabbed the phone by the camera control.

01:12:50 ◼   ► And so I have signed up for hitting that button

01:12:53 ◼   ► accidentally a lot.

01:12:53 ◼   ► I'm getting better and unfortunately,

01:12:55 ◼   ► I think part of the way I'm getting better

01:12:57 ◼   ► is learning not to press as hard,

01:12:59 ◼   ► which is good in that I won't activate the flush button

01:13:02 ◼   ► but bad in that now I'm not gripping the phone as hard

01:13:04 ◼   ► when I pick it up, which I feel like

01:13:05 ◼   ► is just an increased drop risk, but that's a thing.

01:13:09 ◼   ► So setting that aside.

01:13:10 ◼   ► - Get that Apple care.

01:13:11 ◼   ► - Yeah, I do have it.

01:13:12 ◼   ► Using the actual camera control button,

01:13:16 ◼   ► I would not have predicted this based on their previews

01:13:18 ◼   ► in our discussion of this,