00:00:05 ◼ ► I'm so sorry. Obviously, John and I knew this already. I'm not going to feign ignorance right now, but I know I speak for John, and John will probably speak for himself, but I speak for John in saying, you know, we're very sorry. Having met Hopps many times, he was the goodest dog. He was a great, great, great dog, and I know that John and I will miss him to the degree that we can miss somebody else's dog, and I'm sure that you guys are going to miss him for quite a long time.
00:00:30 ◼ ► Yeah, he was such a fixture in your family, like just seemed to fit in so well. It's hard to imagine everyone without him, but, you know, dogs don't live forever.
00:00:43 ◼ ► And we were very fortunate that he was really very healthy the vast majority of that time, and it was, you know, it didn't, it ended in, you know, a very reasonable and, you know, fortunate way for all of us.
00:01:00 ◼ ► Well, he picked a good family, and the family picked a great dog, and I will miss him, and John will miss him, and I know that the three of you will miss him dearly.
00:01:14 ◼ ► So we are electively redoing the primary and kids' bathrooms, which are both of the upstairs of my house.
00:01:44 ◼ ► So we got home, we actually took a trip to Manhattan over the last few days, got home yesterday, and then the demolition on the primary bathroom, which here in America we called master bathroom for the longest time.
00:01:56 ◼ ► And I'm really trying to get rid of that vocabulary from me, but apologies in advance if I slip up.
00:02:01 ◼ ► So the primary bathroom, you know, the one that's on the suite with, you know, Aaron and my room, my and Aaron's room, whatever.
00:02:15 ◼ ► The contractor, the broader contracting company that we're using, we, at this point, are pretty friendly with the gentleman who owns it.
00:02:54 ◼ ► And then the two people who are doing the demolition are screaming about, turn it off, turn it off, turn it off.
00:03:00 ◼ ► I go sprinting out of the house to the crawl space underneath the house to turn off the master water feed for the house.
00:03:13 ◼ ► And water is flowing from the ceiling to the floor, which is not something you want to see inside of your house.
00:03:20 ◼ ► So the temporary fix was to basically make Swiss cheese of the ceiling in order to make sure that the ceiling didn't actually collapse.
00:03:39 ◼ ► So there's water, there's like a quarter inch of, which is what, like a half a centimeter to a centimeter of water?
00:03:56 ◼ ► I love that even in the midst of this story, you feel the need to offer both units to our listeners.
00:03:59 ◼ ► Well, because, hey, Fahrenheit is the one true temperature measure, and I will freaking block you if you argue with me this week.
00:04:21 ◼ ► But anyways, so it turns out that this bathroom remodel is now also going to include new floors in the downstairs.
00:04:29 ◼ ► So I said to my dear friends here on the show, I might be a little bit late because we're going to be running to the floor and decor store to figure out what flooring we would like to replace the downstairs flooring with.
00:04:40 ◼ ► There had been other minor issues over the last 15, almost 18 years since we moved in, something like that.
00:04:47 ◼ ► There have been minor issues over the last several years where a little bit of water has come in for some reason or another.
00:04:52 ◼ ► And it wasn't, it didn't seem that bad at the time, but as they're ripping up the kitchen floorboards, they're seeing, oh, there's a bunch of mold there.
00:05:07 ◼ ► So if Marco and I are cranky or sad or distracted or whatever, Marco has a much better reason than I, but we both have reasons.
00:05:14 ◼ ► And so if this is not our top performance on this episode of ATP, I'm genuinely quite sorry.
00:05:22 ◼ ► Also, apropos of nothing and definitely not apropos of needing to add thousands of dollars to the bill that I was already footing, ATP.fm slash join if you're interested.
00:05:35 ◼ ► So there's a, you mentioned before that like Aaron noticed the water and then became a lot louder.
00:05:46 ◼ ► Do you recall when, when it became clear to her that something disastrous was happening?
00:06:18 ◼ ► I'm not trying to paint this as though this is, you know, her ram, ramming this through.
00:06:23 ◼ ► So thankfully that means, you know, I, I, I'm not going to somehow take the blame for it or anything.
00:06:33 ◼ ► It was such a blur, but she started escalating very quickly and about the same time that happened, I get a notification from, from home assistant that's saying, oh, the refrigerator has detected a leak because I had a Yolink sensor right there at the refrigerator.
00:06:52 ◼ ► And so it started screaming and the, and I have the, um, the Yolink speaker hub play like a boop, boop, boop, if, if it ever detects a leak, because I want to freaking know if there's ever a leak.
00:07:12 ◼ ► She was calling your name specifically and not like the name of the builders or just yelling somebody do something.
00:07:27 ◼ ► Well, and that's the other thing that was very frustrating is, you know, the two people doing the demo were like, how do we turn off the water as I'm like pushing them out of the way to get to the crawl space?
00:07:35 ◼ ► Uh, I guess Aaron is actually, I guess Aaron and Declan are tuning in a little bit because I'm getting real time followup from inside the house.
00:07:41 ◼ ► I was sitting at the kitchen table, researching bathroom things and heard water moving fast.
00:08:04 ◼ ► Uh, and in the heat of the moment, like, you know, in all kidding and snark and whatever aside, like she is bawling and she's pulling me in as we, as we continue.
00:08:18 ◼ ► Yeah, that's, that's not, it's, I understand why he would ask that question in that context, but it's not super helpful.
00:08:23 ◼ ► Like in that, when you have that scale of a problem, you're like, we're beyond, you know, step one is like turn off everything.
00:08:33 ◼ ► And it reminds me of the, uh, the dad style fire drills that I, uh, have done occasionally and wish I had done more when my kids were younger and would actually listen to me.
00:08:41 ◼ ► Um, one, one version of this game is, uh, for young children, whoever can touch a fire extinguisher first gets a cookie.
00:08:51 ◼ ► Because that means they need to know where they are and they need to know where the closest one is to win against a sibling or a parent or whoever they're competing against.
00:08:58 ◼ ► And the other one is how fast can we get to the main water shutoff or the main breaker shutoff, which shows that you have to know where it is and know how to get there without falling down the stairs and so on and so forth.
00:09:28 ◼ ► OS 10 reviews, but now dad games, your children will refuse to play once they get to a certain age.
00:09:53 ◼ ► You know, when you have a pet, you know that they're going to live a lot less time than you probably.
00:09:58 ◼ ► And so I knew this day would come and I was fearing all this time when it would finally come and it has come and it is exactly as bad as I feared.
00:10:17 ◼ ► In the meantime, if you want to, you know, win any arguments against me, today's the day to do it.
00:10:33 ◼ ► No, it's funny though, because I was thinking about telling you to, no, I, I just, I don't have the, the brain power for this today.
00:10:39 ◼ ► But honestly, I think for, probably for Marco and certainly for me, I need a distraction for a little while.
00:10:55 ◼ ► I was all excited with myself that I was getting my express replacement done for the low, low price of $30.
00:11:00 ◼ ► And although I have not seen the bill come through yet, enough people have told me that this is the case, that I presume it's the case.
00:11:24 ◼ ► I know, but I guess express replacement is treated in the quote unquote, other damage category, which I was not aware of.
00:12:02 ◼ ► I just, I wish that I, and I'm not saying this is Apple's fault, but I wish I had read a little closer and realized that it was a hundred dollars and not 30.
00:12:13 ◼ ► Even if you had known, wouldn't you have just done the express replacement anyway, just to save the time?
00:12:26 ◼ ► It doesn't really matter, but I was trying to slot this in, in the three days, three or four days we were home.
00:12:37 ◼ ► Now the short pump, which is the name of the area of town that the store is in the short pump Apple store.
00:12:46 ◼ ► And so I probably could have gotten an appointment had I sought, seek, sought, whatever.
00:12:58 ◼ ► Um, but in any other instance, I 100% would have spent the time to save the 70 bucks for sure.
00:13:08 ◼ ► No, this is, uh, it seems to be my lot in life to, uh, be in this situation where I find,
00:13:20 ◼ ► Uh, and that product has a fatal flaw that causes it to break after a short period of time.
00:13:27 ◼ ► And so I have to troll the internet looking for backup copies of this product that I like that is no longer made.
00:13:36 ◼ ► And for myself, when I let Google later to try to figure it out that yes, the mouse that I like has once again died, just like all my cheese graters that I like always die.
00:13:46 ◼ ► I have been building up a back backlog of backup, uh, mice, but it just, the way we've talked about this mouse before, uh, we'll put a link in the show notes as the Microsoft surface precision mouse.
00:14:00 ◼ ► In particular, there's a Microsoft ergonomic Bluetooth mouse, which is not wired, which I can't use because Bluetooth signal to my computer is not satisfactory.
00:14:09 ◼ ► As far as I'm concerned from my distance, and yes, you can get extenders, blah, blah, blah.
00:14:16 ◼ ► Even though it does have Bluetooth, I have it connected to an actual wire that plugs into my computer.
00:14:55 ◼ ► It just, you can start getting lag or repeat keystrokes or missing keystrokes and changing
00:15:11 ◼ ► Like, I don't know if it's the optical sensor or some circuitry, but it's at first you think
00:15:16 ◼ ► maybe it's just me and maybe it's always been like this or like, was there something high
00:15:36 ◼ ► But I really wish I could find another mouse that I like to see past episodes when I tried
00:15:40 ◼ ► a whole bunch of different mice that were probably a lot more reliable than this one, including
00:15:55 ◼ ► I'm just like I'm doomed to troll eBay for my particular eyeglass lenses, which I've actually
00:16:16 ◼ ► For many years, like every time I get like a new prescription, I was like, let's try some
00:16:21 ◼ ► And I would pick out some frames and I get, you know, sometimes I pick ones that I didn't
00:16:33 ◼ ► I have my smaller frames, which are for distance and my bigger frames, which are for computer
00:16:42 ◼ ► So I do have backups of them and plus a bunch of other frames that I spent way too much money
00:17:11 ◼ ► When trying to add it to AppleCare one, you will get a warning that says the device is on
00:17:23 ◼ ► A couple hours after canceling the existing AppleCare plan, the device will now be eligible
00:17:30 ◼ ► So this is specifically for devices that, uh, you, you chose to pay for with a payment plan.
00:17:35 ◼ ► And I think that what you mean is like, instead of paying with the whole sum up front, how
00:17:46 ◼ ► Anonymous writes, my iPad was marked as ineligible for AppleCare one, despite having gotten the
00:17:53 ◼ ► When I called Apple support, they did some research and determined that since I had a two
00:17:56 ◼ ► year AppleCare plus plan that I bought when I purchased the iPad and I chose to pay in monthly
00:18:03 ◼ ► The representative made it seem like I'd done something abnormal when I'd simply accepted
00:18:09 ◼ ► Canceling the existing AppleCare plus plan would create a refund, but the monthly installments
00:18:14 ◼ ► So this sounds like the same situation, but this person actually called Apple and Apple
00:18:19 ◼ ► But they've determined, I don't know if experimentally or by talking to out to the support person that
00:18:24 ◼ ► if they were to cancel the AppleCare plus plan, they would get a refund, but then they'd still
00:18:36 ◼ ► But anyway, edge cases, edge cases exist and Apple as always does not seem to be handling
00:18:42 ◼ ► And speaking of edge cases and other cases with AppleCare one is an update on my AppleCare
00:18:48 ◼ ► When I talked about it in the last episode, I was saying how it was complaining about my
00:18:53 ◼ ► son's computer, you know, and that it made me log into it with my Apple ID, which I did
00:18:57 ◼ ► and it was satisfied, but then he yanked it off the plan again and I was going back and forth.
00:19:01 ◼ ► Eventually I just gave up trying to add my son's laptop because even though it will let
00:19:05 ◼ ► you add it and it will give you a warning and you'll satisfy that warning, it will still
00:19:12 ◼ ► And then I also mentioned, you know, people had questions because isn't it weird that when
00:19:17 ◼ ► Apple's thing prompted me, hey, you should use AppleCare one, you can put these three devices
00:19:38 ◼ ► Well, the other issue dropped this week and I got an email that said, hey, we're yanking
00:19:49 ◼ ► I don't know why it prompted me to add that phone if it thought there was going to be a
00:20:08 ◼ ► Apple ID, which normally I'm signed in with my Apple ID to the app store on all my devices.
00:20:37 ◼ ► If Apple's come on as saying, you should put these three devices on it to save this amount
00:20:45 ◼ ► Anyway, it's because again, I've never been signed into any of my wife's phones with my
00:20:53 ◼ ► But then also the Mac Studio that is it's technically my wife's Mac Studio, but I set that computer
00:21:09 ◼ ► And in particular, this week, I've been using it a ton signed into my account with my Apple
00:21:14 ◼ ► ID going back and forth to my Tahoe Mac, which is I'm booting my Mac Pro into Tahoe to do dev
00:21:35 ◼ ► You must sign into the Mac Studio with the Apple account associated with your Apple Care
00:21:39 ◼ ► It's like, dude, I'm signed into the Apple account associated with my Apple Care One plan
00:21:44 ◼ ► I'm like, I got this email on the computer while signed into this account and a new Apple account
00:21:55 ◼ ► Certainly, they're not going to tell you in the email because they don't have that information.
00:22:01 ◼ ► You have 24 hours for when this email was sent to sign in or your Mac Studio will be removed
00:22:08 ◼ ► So I just restarted the Mac Studio, logged into my account, and again, and it satisfied it.
00:22:24 ◼ ► I don't think if you haven't signed up for Apple Care One, even if it tells you you can
00:22:29 ◼ ► Because right now, you are always 24 hours away from some device being yanked off of Apple
00:22:40 ◼ ► 24 hours from when this email was sent to do a thing that you think shouldn't be necessary.
00:22:47 ◼ ► It's like screen time all over again or any of the other features that Apple introduced,
00:23:07 ◼ ► Either let people put any device they want on Apple Care One, because again, you pay $5.99
00:23:21 ◼ ► How is it called Apple Care One when it's per Apple ID, but not really per Apple ID, because
00:23:37 ◼ ► And historically speaking, when things like these don't work well, it's not always a sure
00:23:50 ◼ ► I don't even know where to go from here, which is too bad because I hadn't done the math in
00:24:00 ◼ ► But on the surface, this seems like a pretty solid idea, especially because I plan to keep
00:24:06 ◼ ► carrying Apple Care at least on my phone, and I have it on my Vision Pro at least for now,
00:24:16 ◼ ► So on the surface, I think those three devices would be a great combination for Apple Care One.
00:24:38 ◼ ► So usually, if you're already paying for a whole bunch of stuff individually, bundles can save you money.
00:24:43 ◼ ► So I was inclined to like this, because it would actually save, like, even just the three devices would save me, like, $18 a month.
00:24:53 ◼ ► Like, just every day I wake up and say, you know, what 24-hour timer started when I was asleep,
00:24:58 ◼ ► where I have to do some kind of weird dance that makes no sense to allow Apple Care to continue.
00:25:03 ◼ ► I never had to worry about this before when I either paid, when I did the monthly thing, which, by the way, a lot of the monthly ones got canceled for this,
00:25:09 ◼ ► because whenever you put added device to Apple Care One, it cancels and refunds the existing one.
00:25:13 ◼ ► I wish I could get back those month-to-month ones, because they just billed me every month, and it always worked.
00:25:23 ◼ ► oh, you're now no longer in compliance with our nonsensical rules that aren't consistently enforced.
00:25:55 ◼ ► They're just making their own lives more miserable with whatever code they had to implement,
00:26:06 ◼ ► So we're not going to say you can't add it because you're not signed in with your Apple ID.
00:26:11 ◼ ► And then after the fact, scan them or do some kind of polling to make sure they're in compliance with our rules.
00:26:25 ◼ ► Given that this is probably a pretty important component of Apple's services revenue going forward,
00:26:32 ◼ ► Because keep in mind, like, again, services revenue, it's impossible to overstate how important that is for Apple's financial narrative.
00:26:47 ◼ ► And a lot of Apple's, you know, reputation and stock price and everything in the financial market is based on continued growth of that.
00:26:55 ◼ ► That's why they squeeze so hard at every opportunity for things like App Store fees, because so much of it is stuff like that.
00:27:10 ◼ ► Like, Best Buy is basically an entire retail chain that sells extended warranties and happens to have electronics in the store to help you buy these extended warranties.
00:27:21 ◼ ► Like, what gets you in the door is, like, you know, the car stereo or whatever, and then they make all their money from the warranty.
00:27:59 ◼ ► Anyway, so extended warranties are a very high profit item for retailers who sell them.
00:28:05 ◼ ► And so Apple has a very good reason to expand their services even more with even more ways
00:28:16 ◼ ► I think they have a pretty strong incentive to keep working on this to the point where it's
00:28:20 ◼ ► very appealing to lots of people because anything they can do to get you paying them monthly
00:28:28 ◼ ► So they're going to keep pushing things like this, and they have a pretty strong incentive
00:28:42 ◼ ► I was paying $5.99 a month additional for that device, and you just took it off and refunded
00:28:50 ◼ ► So somebody somewhere hopefully has some metric that says, hey, how many devices did we yank
00:29:14 ◼ ► And the decision that came to it is, it all has to be on the same Apple ID, which we read
00:29:22 ◼ ► But then no one else got the memo on that one recommending the default devices or anything
00:29:34 ◼ ► Like, I get it, it's complicated, but this just seems like a stinker of a plan for now.
00:29:54 ◼ ► Sentry helps you fix bugs faster, so you can deliver the great experience your users expect.
00:30:03 ◼ ► Swift, RN, Python, Node, and every Apple platform from watchOS to visionOS and everything in
00:30:18 ◼ ► So this goes way beyond what you get from the built-in, like, you know, app store crash
00:30:26 ◼ ► So you get real-time crash reporting, real-time performance monitoring, hang detection, session
00:30:42 ◼ ► Sentry also recently launched a new AI agent called Sear, which can automatically generate
00:31:04 ◼ ► And listeners of our show can use the code ATPpod for three months and 150,000 errors for free.
00:31:11 ◼ ► So once again, Sentry.io, use code ATPpod for three months and 150,000 errors for free.
00:31:31 ◼ ► So if you recall last episode, I think it was last episode, we talked about the dialogue
00:31:44 ◼ ► Like, I'm looking at it again, knowing full well where it is, and I can barely make it out.
00:31:59 ◼ ► But yes, they have fixed the completely invisible checkbox to being the little bit too low-contrast checkbox
00:32:16 ◼ ► the lock screen clock has been updated with additional transparency, allowing more of the background
00:32:20 ◼ ► The clock also has more of a 3D floating look, which is in line with the rest of the liquid glass design.
00:32:29 ◼ ► It's notable because I feel like the, you know, like, oh, you know, they'll roll something out
00:32:36 ◼ ► The tweaking, let's say, the attempt to make things legible seems to have peaked, depending
00:32:50 ◼ ► So here's iOS Beta 6 making, for example, the gigantic clock on the lock screen less legible.
00:33:10 ◼ ► And so we are, you know, regardless of what changes before release, people say, well, this
00:33:18 ◼ ► But I think now the changes, the average of all the positive and negative changes, this
00:33:29 ◼ ► to the left, a little bit to the right without any clear direction of like, let's improve
00:33:49 ◼ ► I think the iOS 18 photos thing, everybody in the tech nerd circles knew about the photos
00:34:01 ◼ ► But boy, when it hit the, the, like the general public, that was the thing that they cared about
00:34:07 ◼ ► And so it's very difficult to predict how, you know, I don't want to say regular people,
00:34:13 ◼ ► how non-tech nerds, how non-tech enthusiasts are going to react when this starts appearing
00:34:19 ◼ ► on their devices, especially if they're buying a new iPhone this fall and it comes with this
00:34:26 ◼ ► I'm going through this right now with my daughter because she's going to get a new phone for college.
00:34:34 ◼ ► I have to have the discussion with, I have to have the talk, which is like, you know, if
00:34:50 ◼ ► So do you want to get a 16 now or do you want to get a 17 later knowing that you have to
00:35:00 ◼ ► have to get a phone that probably, unless you use that phone for seven or 10 years or however
00:35:04 ◼ ► long this liquid glass hangover lasts, like you're going to, you're going to have to do
00:35:10 ◼ ► But yeah, I'm, I'm just, this is like the, the, the thing that I am paying the most attention
00:35:16 ◼ ► to with his OS releases, not so much like me using the OSs or whatever, but it is seeing
00:35:21 ◼ ► what the public reaction, partially because yes, I'm having this, this, this wonderful sliver
00:35:26 ◼ ► of hope, like maybe the general public will hate it so much that they'll actually fix it.
00:35:30 ◼ ► Because obviously the feedback from developers and stuff has caused them to, for the first
00:35:40 ◼ ► Let's just, you know, and yeah, I feel like this is the extent of, you know, how, how much
00:35:56 ◼ ► And we're at the limit of that now, and somewhat rightfully so, because at a certain point you're
00:36:00 ◼ ► like, look, this is a, the audience that is currently using the betas is not representative
00:36:14 ◼ ► Like, I disagree with it, but like, you can't, you can't be in the mindset of like, oh no,
00:36:28 ◼ ► So first of all, you know, the difference in legibility on the lock screen clock in betas
00:36:32 ◼ ► five and six, I can't use my clock anymore when my phone, like, so I have the always on
00:36:37 ◼ ► screen, but that when the always on screen is in like dim mode, it just has a black background,
00:36:45 ◼ ► In betas five and six, you, that you get a very translucent clock placed upon a black background.
00:36:52 ◼ ► So you basically have like almost total darkness and the clock, so you, like the widgets are
00:37:03 ◼ ► Um, I hope they change this, but that being said, we are at the point now, this OS is, is
00:37:39 ◼ ► You know, the, the feedback from us, like we had our time, we had a very narrow window to
00:37:59 ◼ ► Well, I mean, that does presume, I think a higher level of, of care and craft that we've, that
00:38:05 ◼ ► I mean, it presumes the design is good, which I disagree with, but you know, like the, as
00:38:09 ◼ ► a general philosophy, I would, I would say that if you come up with the design, take your
00:38:18 ◼ ► You know, there was no chance that after they showed this off in June, there was no chance of
00:38:32 ◼ ► Here we are in beta six, and there are still a large number of animation bugs, which are
00:38:39 ◼ ► There are still like, there's still like, you know, designs and components and animations
00:39:09 ◼ ► So what we have, like whatever we have today in beta six, like chances are most of what
00:39:22 ◼ ► And the only things that will be likely to be fixed between now and shipping are like very
00:39:49 ◼ ► It is much slower, especially on older phones, but even on like modern phones, like the frame
00:39:57 ◼ ► There's still, again, there's still animation bugs, but like it was very illuminating when
00:40:03 ◼ ► my son installed the beta on his phone without asking me first whether he should do it.
00:40:29 ◼ ► Again, performance, probably or maybe, but the design itself, I think this is just going
00:40:37 ◼ ► I think it might go a little bit worse than that, just because I think it's a significantly
00:40:48 ◼ ► And I think we as nerds who feel a little bit more ambivalent about it, I think we need
00:40:52 ◼ ► to prepare ourselves that we're going to we are already and we're going to be in the minority
00:41:01 ◼ ► And I think that's, you know, what I'm trying to do as a developer here is just try to embrace
00:41:11 ◼ ► So, you know, one of the one of the ways I'm doing that is like my mini player redesign.
00:41:17 ◼ ► You know, if you look at the Overcast app and on iOS 18 now, like the part that looks the
00:41:23 ◼ ► most out of place, in my opinion, the part that looks the oldest when you're used to 26 is
00:41:28 ◼ ► those solid top and bottom bars on the navigation screens and, you know, the bottom bar being
00:41:32 ◼ ► So, of course, I'm resigning the mini player to be a liquid glass, you know, blob design.
00:41:37 ◼ ► But I can do things, you know, it's within my control to adjust that blob and to figure
00:41:46 ◼ ► So one thing I'm doing is I am not setting up the design in such a way that will scroll,
00:42:07 ◼ ► So when you're scrolling the list, making a bunch of images show behind the glass, it's
00:42:18 ◼ ► So the issues of having brightly colored images behind text on glass won't usually come up
00:42:31 ◼ ► I'm not going to pretend like I'm never going to use it because that will just set me behind
00:42:39 ◼ ► So I'm embracing the design as best as I can while trying to do a good job to avoid its
00:43:20 ◼ ► Yeah, I think you're right that the average person is not going to be as upset with it as perhaps we are.
00:43:32 ◼ ► But now that we're back from all of our summer travel, it's probably going to happen sooner rather than later.
00:43:37 ◼ ► And I'm excited to have it on anything but my iPad, but I'm also scared because I don't know if I really want to live with all the problems.
00:43:45 ◼ ► But when I say live with all the problems, I mostly mean like crummy battery life, crummy performance, animation hitches like you were talking about earlier.
00:43:52 ◼ ► So I think I expect that I'm going to largely like it and largely think that the contrast or the readability and legibility is not what it should be, which is what everyone has been saying.
00:44:04 ◼ ► I think I will echo everyone else. And from the rumblings I've heard from like friends of friends who have tried it and oftentimes without permission, if you will, like Adam did, most everyone I understand to think it's pretty good to your point, Marco.
00:44:19 ◼ ► So I don't think it's going to be as ruinous as perhaps we expect, but I also think it will be a more vocal in vociferous, I think is what I'm looking for, a response than Apple is expecting also.
00:44:32 ◼ ► Just to be clear, like what I said before was the tiny glimmer of hope that there would be a negative reaction.
00:44:41 ◼ ► First of all, like even if there was a negative reaction, they wouldn't direct it at the new design because that's not a concept in their head, really.
00:44:51 ◼ ► Like it could just be some obscure corner of the, uh, of some app that they changed in, like the Photos app.
00:45:00 ◼ ► So you never know what people are going to be cranky about, but no, I, I wish people would be angry about this.
00:45:09 ◼ ► Um, oh, and, uh, oh, I understand the chat room said Marco, if you want to make your numerals more legible, uh, change the clock style from glass to solid and see if that helps.
00:45:47 ◼ ► I love this TV, but your pain points about notifications and input switching are probably it's two weakest points in the G5 gets a little worse.
00:45:57 ◼ ► The best solution is to run all firmware updates and then disconnected from the internet.
00:46:02 ◼ ► Assuming you're going to use an Apple TV as a primary way to consume streaming services on the LG G4 quote unquote magic remote, which by the way is what they call it.
00:46:17 ◼ ► Instead, it brings up a lower third menu that previews all the outputs on all the inputs and you have to hit select on the one you want.
00:46:33 ◼ ► I believe you can switch your remote to use the old magic remote, but I couldn't quickly find confirmation that the old remotes work with the G5.
00:46:40 ◼ ► Yeah, the Sony, even the Sony button that I described, there's an input button and when you first hit it, it brings up the menu.
00:46:50 ◼ ► So the days are gone when you could hit the button and the one hit of the button would change the input, which honestly is probably a good thing because how many people accidentally hit the input button?
00:46:58 ◼ ► And then like their parents can figure out how the TV works because they switched inputs accidentally.
00:47:03 ◼ ► But you should just be able to bounce on that same button to cycle through the inputs and just stop on the one that you want, which is how the Sony one works.
00:47:10 ◼ ► But anyway, it seems like there's been backsliding since the C7, which is 2017, not 2027.
00:47:16 ◼ ► Yeah, and part of why this frustrates me is that whenever, like when I use like the ones I was originally complaining about, the Samsung TVs that have like their whole menu to switch inputs that you have to go through everything, it's just so much slower than it used to be.
00:47:32 ◼ ► Like old TVs, old, you know, five-year-old TVs, you just put the push the select input button and it switches within a few seconds.
00:47:43 ◼ ► But I do think that given that they used webOS on your C7 and they're still using webOS with much faster processors, it should actually be more responsive than your C7.
00:47:52 ◼ ► And I don't know what the hell Samsung's doing, but I agree their interfaces are both ugly and slow.
00:47:56 ◼ ► Yeah, I just, like, this is like, it's an area of technology where like, they're adding so much functionality, like even though we don't always want it.
00:48:04 ◼ ► But the basics are just getting so much more annoying and worse and slower and like less reliable, harder to use.
00:48:11 ◼ ► Like, I don't know, I feel like this, I feel like that's like a tragedy of the industry.
00:48:16 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, at least that makes me thankful for the Apple TV because it does let you never have to look at your smart TV's interface, except for the input switching, which, I mean, so obviously I would promote the use of receiver, which you don't want.
00:48:26 ◼ ► But still, HDMI CC, I still have it enabled because honestly, I don't even know if I can enable it on my current modern setup.
00:48:40 ◼ ► Like, if I just grab my Switch 2 Pro Controller and hit the little home button, hold down the home button, it wakes my Switch up, turns on my receiver, turns on my television, changes the input to be the dedicated, changes the input on my TV to be the dedicated input that the Switch connects to because I don't have it going through the receiver for input lag reasons.
00:49:04 ◼ ► I'm like, HDMI CC, you're actually doing what you're supposed to do, unlike AppleCare 1.
00:49:09 ◼ ► Occasionally, you know, again, things get wonky, but HDMI CC can take you a long way to not having to hit the input button.
00:49:22 ◼ ► I, in particular, was quite snarky about this last episode, and the user potato.zip writes, on episode 651, you mentioned that you should never run your own mail server.
00:49:32 ◼ ► Apple offers running iCloud mail on a domain you own so you can have a customer address.
00:49:39 ◼ ► This is pretty different, and I haven't done this myself, but this is just pointing, like, MX records for your domain at Apple, right?
00:49:46 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, it goes through some Apple interface, but basically, you, my understanding, because I haven't actually done this myself, is that you buy a domain, whatever, you know, your cool domain name dot com, whatever.
00:49:56 ◼ ► But then you tell Apple, Apple, I want you to have, to receive email for this thing and have an email account for me, so I'll, you know, hook up to it with my mail apps or whatever.
00:50:06 ◼ ► But my understanding is that Apple runs the mail server for you, Apple receives the mail, you send your mail through Apple.
00:50:13 ◼ ► The only thing you bring to the party is the domain that you previously purchased and paid for.
00:50:23 ◼ ► And the reason I haven't used it is the answer to the question, would you recommend it?
00:50:38 ◼ ► I've had Apple email for as long as they've offered Apple email, and they just offer no visibility or control into what they're doing with your email.
00:50:47 ◼ ► And very often, I've supposedly gotten emails that Apple has disappeared, probably through some well-meaning spam filtering, that I have no way to know.
00:51:00 ◼ ► I basically don't consider Apple to be a reliable place for me personally to receive email, given the volume of email I received and how important it is to what I do.
00:51:08 ◼ ► On the other hand, I have tons of family members who have an Apple email account, and they think it's fine.
00:51:15 ◼ ► But anyway, I don't recommend it because I don't think they do a good job of providing reliable emails.
00:51:24 ◼ ► I want it to be deterministic, and I want, like, if I have to go in there and manually correct something, I want to be able to do that.
00:51:56 ◼ ► But anyway, Mindspring was my ISP, and I think they were a national ISP, and they gave you an email address.
00:52:02 ◼ ► And I used that as my main email address for years because, I don't know, I was younger and more foolish than I am now.
00:52:18 ◼ ► Sticking with the same theme, Peter Polio writes, one solution for dealing with spam that I never, ever hear discussed is using Hide My Email, the iCloud Plus feature.
00:52:28 ◼ ► Yes, it requires a lot of upfront work, but I get maybe 20 spam emails a week now at most.
00:52:33 ◼ ► I'm not trying to imply with what I'm about to say that Peter is wrong or anything like that, but I don't really understand how the Hide My Email feature decreases spam because the whole Hide My Email feature is that it gives a completely unintelligible email to the vendor that you're working with.
00:52:53 ◼ ► And they can still email that address whenever they want, and it'll get forwarded to you.
00:53:08 ◼ ► Basically, if there's a data breach and your email gets leaked, your email is not your email.
00:53:22 ◼ ► They will auto-generate you an email address that you don't need to know or remember, but that Apple keeps track of.
00:53:27 ◼ ► And if there's data breach at, you know, pets.com or whatever, and they leak all your email addresses, you just kill that email address.
00:53:34 ◼ ► You just say, like, okay, well, I'm going to delete that account, and I'm going to turn off that email address.
00:53:41 ◼ ► So spammers who got it from the data dump, they can spam it all they want because it doesn't deliver to me anymore.
00:53:45 ◼ ► I don't like, surprise, I don't like this feature either because of the lack of visibility and because I don't like not knowing the account name, like the email address associated with all these accounts.
00:53:55 ◼ ► I know Apple takes care of it for you when you log in, you have to do it, but, like, what if I have to log in from a non-Apple device?
00:54:03 ◼ ► It was hard enough for me going from, like, bespoke passwords to auto-generated passwords decades ago.
00:54:08 ◼ ► I'm not ready to go to, you don't even know what the email address is that you sign into this thing with.
00:54:15 ◼ ► On the other hand, my email address has been public for so long, I get the maximum amount of possible spam, so it's not really a concern for me.
00:54:34 ◼ ► But I do think the downsides and, quote-unquote, horror show aspects get blown out of proportion sometimes.
00:54:40 ◼ ► The worst thing about it nowadays is that you're suspicious by default if you're on any kind of cloud server or consumer ISP IP address.
00:54:46 ◼ ► Deliverability can be a challenge even if you do all the right things with DKIM and SPF.
00:54:51 ◼ ► My outbound has been relayed through AWS for a few years now so I can ride on their reputation.
00:54:59 ◼ ► All in all, it's not a huge amount of work day to day, but I've sunk a lot of hours in over those 20 years.
00:55:10 ◼ ► So this was the mildest of the people telling us that actually running your own mail server is easy.
00:55:22 ◼ ► People who have been doing this for a while say that it is definitely a thing that you can do and they're fine with it.
00:55:27 ◼ ► I do have to say that the volume of email we've gotten and the volume of things I've read online still heavily lean in favor of do not run your own mail server.
00:55:41 ◼ ► So Lisa Oogre writes, in last episodes of Overtime, you discussed post-quantum cryptography and noted that quantum computers capable of breaking today's cryptography don't currently exist.
00:55:55 ◼ ► It's widely believed that there are actors currently recording encrypted traffic with the intention of decrypting it once such quantum computers exist.
00:56:03 ◼ ► Using algorithms that have already been written despite not yet having hardware on which to run them.
00:56:11 ◼ ► It's called Harvest Now, Decrypt Later, and I meant to mention it last week and I didn't and I was punished for it.
00:56:32 ◼ ► Now, this is kind of an interesting wager here because it kind of assumes that quantum computers will be around in a time that will make it valuable to decrypt it.
00:56:41 ◼ ► So let's say, just for sake of argument, if a quantum computer capable of breaking today's encryption didn't exist until 500 years from now, that stored data, if it still exists, will most be of interest to historians.
00:56:54 ◼ ► But if quantum computers come out two years from now, it's of interest to a lot of people.
00:57:00 ◼ ► So, yeah, many people wrote in today, all the assumptions that, like, you know, world governments are storing data, other bad actors are storing data.
00:57:22 ◼ ► But, yeah, they're definitely saving this data because, you know, it could end up being a goldmine if those quantum computers come online in a reasonable time frame.
00:57:32 ◼ ► Saul Sutherland writes, PQ3 was actually first brought to iOS 17.4 to improve encryption of iMessage chats.
00:57:43 ◼ ► February 21 of 2024, iMessage with PQ3, the new state-of-the-art in quantum secure messaging at scale.
00:57:54 ◼ ► Brian Jarvis writes, what will compel network infrastructure manufacturers to adopt PQC?
00:58:00 ◼ ► The government, NIST, the NSA, and various other scary agencies have established an expectation that cloud service providers, browser, and OS vendors, network hardware manufacturers,
00:58:10 ◼ ► basically everyone up and down the tech stack that uses public key cryptography must get their collective butts in gear and adopt PQC gradually over the next decade.
00:58:18 ◼ ► This will impact the awarding of government contracts, so there's a pretty hefty financial incentive to migrate, even if the security argument doesn't compel you.
00:58:25 ◼ ► This also presupposes that we have a functional American government, but that's neither.
00:58:34 ◼ ► Like, we've been successful at making sure that the hardware stack supports it, and we did get some feedback I didn't put in here of, like, mobile networks in particular,
00:58:46 ◼ ► Like, your phone, when using cellular data, is probably using IPv6 to communicate instead of IPv4.
00:58:52 ◼ ► It's just more of the existing infrastructure for sort of terrestrial intranet access still has a lot of IPv4 stuff in it.
00:59:00 ◼ ► So anyway, what we're talking about is, like, let's make sure this hardware can work with PQC because of the things that we talked about in overtime,
00:59:08 ◼ ► that the packet size has changed and some hardware manufacturers made assumptions that will no longer be true that would cause their hardware to fail.
00:59:18 ◼ ► And so in that respect, IPv6, again, let's see last episodes over time comparing this to the IPv6 transition.
00:59:26 ◼ ► IPv6 has essentially completely rolled out to pretty much everywhere in terms of, does the hardware and software stack support it?
00:59:32 ◼ ► It doesn't mean that everyone's computer is now communicating over IPv6 on the internet.
00:59:36 ◼ ► It doesn't mean that web servers still only exist on IPv4, including, by the way, as many people pointed out,
00:59:41 ◼ ► many of our own web servers, ATP.fm, my personal website, might not even be listening on an IPv6 address,
00:59:53 ◼ ► But sometimes if you're hosting a website elsewhere, it's pretty easy to add support for it.
01:00:13 ◼ ► It's true that some TLS-specific hardware broke, but these are not that common for the consumer internet.
01:00:24 ◼ ► Here's a post about PQC from Cloudflare in 2024 called The State of the Post-Quantum Internet.
01:00:32 ◼ ► Today, nearly 2% of all TLS 1.3 connections established with Cloudflare are secured with post-quantum cryptography.
01:00:52 ◼ ► When they decide to adopt PQC, they can have a large effect on the percentage of traffic that is using it.
01:01:02 ◼ ► Now, if you're an IT person and you have employees who bypass security to use their unapproved apps
01:01:14 ◼ ► security and productivity no longer have to be at odds with what your users want to do.
01:01:19 ◼ ► I personally have used 1Password's regular, you know, person edition and the family edition for years now,
01:01:39 ◼ ► and enforce security requirements and best practices across every app your employees use.
01:01:44 ◼ ► You can manage shadow IT securely onboard and off-board employees and meet compliance goals.
01:01:55 ◼ ► 1Password exceeds the standards set by various authorities and is a leader in security.
01:02:06 ◼ ► and it's just one of the ways that Extended Access Management helps teams strengthen compliance and security.
01:03:10 ◼ ► including adding, like, supporting a clear variant in addition to the dark and light ones,
01:03:25 ◼ ► I actually have five because I have two little dinky things that are not in the App Store,
01:03:41 ◼ ► and their documentation on their website about what app icons are supposed to look like.
01:04:57 ◼ ► It just writes all those numbers, all those booleans, all those things into a structured
01:05:06 ◼ ► You make one of those things with Icon Composer, and you can tweak it to say, here's what I want
01:05:17 ◼ ► This is very different than in the past, where they would ask for differently sized bitmaps
01:05:41 ◼ ► It's kind of like a fuzzy, liquidy glass kind of thing, where it's like colored layers on
01:05:56 ◼ ► If you look at Apple's own terrible icons, especially on the Mac in Tahoe, they're all made like this.
01:06:11 ◼ ► All the apps you know and love from Apple, the mail app, Safari, system settings, those
01:06:14 ◼ ► are all made with this app in this style, or if not with this app, with an app that puts
01:06:31 ◼ ► This presents a bit of a problem, maybe for all apps, but certainly for me on the Mac, because I, as much as I despise this new icon style, and as much as I love my current icons, I do want my Mac, my Mac apps to fit in on Tahoe.
01:06:51 ◼ ► I could just draw different icons on Tahoe with bitmaps or whatever, but I'm going to use Icon Composer like they say, you know, whatever.
01:07:05 ◼ ► And in fact, they wouldn't fit in, in that context, because in Tahoe, all the icons look like that.
01:07:19 ◼ ► And it kind of boggles my mind that one of the main points of Apple's documentation or their videos wasn't, here's how you can do this thing that we know people are going to want to do.
01:07:27 ◼ ► I don't know if they just assume that people are leaving behind every old OS as soon as they do a Tahoe icon, or they're going to release a new version of their app that only runs on Tahoe or something.
01:07:35 ◼ ► But it's like, guys, people support more than the latest version of OSes sometimes with their apps.
01:07:41 ◼ ► Nobody wants their Tahoe icon showing up on earlier OSes because everybody knows they're hideous.
01:07:46 ◼ ► And even if they weren't hideous, even if they looked awesome and we love them, they just don't fit in on the old OS.
01:07:54 ◼ ► So, anyway, Apple didn't explain how to do that, but people quickly figured out, if you just give the icon composer file the same file name minus the file name extension as your existing app icon, it does what you want.
01:08:07 ◼ ► When you're on Tahoe, you get the icon composer thing, and on pre-Tahoe, it doesn't know anything about the icon composer thing, and you get the old icon.
01:08:20 ◼ ► And I'd burned basically an entire week going back and forth on Mastodon with a bunch of people smarter than me, figuring out how to restore that functionality.
01:08:28 ◼ ► Turns out, after much gnashing of teeth and custom build phases and other things like that, eventually, who was it?
01:08:43 ◼ ► All of it hinged on an undocumented flag that I guess they found by running strings on Apple's binary of, like, the AC tool asset catalog compiler that compiles your asset catalog in your app.
01:08:55 ◼ ► Apparently, there's an option in there that will tell it, don't, like, leave the icons alone for pre-Tahoe OSs, but let Tahoe...
01:09:06 ◼ ► I filed a bunch of feedbacks on it, so I filed a feedback that said, hey, there should be a way to do this.
01:09:11 ◼ ► Like, there should be, like, a documented, actual, like, Apple should say, if you want to do this very common thing, here's how we recommend doing it.
01:09:28 ◼ ► So I did a second feedback, depending on which might be more appealing, if anyone ever looks at these, which they probably won't.
01:09:34 ◼ ► And then the final feedback I put in was another aspect of the icon system in Tahoe is that, we've mentioned this before, but if you have a non-Tahoe icon on Tahoe and that icon is not a Big Sur-style squircle, as in a rounded rectangle where if nothing breaks the frame of the rounded rectangle squircle thing, your icon will be put into squircle jail.
01:10:00 ◼ ► It will be shrunken, shoved onto a gray squircle background, and your app will look terrible.
01:10:10 ◼ ► If developers don't update their icons, their punishment is that their icon doesn't fit in with the other icons.
01:10:15 ◼ ► Don't punish them further by shrinking their icon by 80% and putting it on a gray background.
01:10:23 ◼ ► All these feedback numbers will be in the show notes, not that I think that will make any difference.
01:10:28 ◼ ► So anyway, if squircle jail actually ships, which it probably will because no one's ever going to look at my feedback.
01:10:35 ◼ ► If it hasn't just been a tool during the betas to scare developers into making Tahoe icons, which, by the way, would have been a good strategy, but get rid of it for release.
01:10:42 ◼ ► But anyway, if it ships, I would expect to see more articles like this one that was on 9to5Mac this week, which is the title, which is macOS Tahoe, put your icons, your apps in icon jail.
01:10:56 ◼ ► You can go to macOSicons.com or whatever and find a squircle compatible icon for your app that's in squircle jail, and then use the finder, get info on the app and copy and paste the icon onto it.
01:11:09 ◼ ► That works fine until your app auto-updates and then rewrites back the old icon and you're back in squircle jail.
01:11:13 ◼ ► But anyway, regardless of whether people like the new interface or not, I don't think anybody is going to like seeing their app icons, especially ones that are in the dock that they see all the time, being shrunken and put in a gray rectangle.
01:11:31 ◼ ► For some reason, my icon of this app I use every day now is, like, small and in a gray thing.
01:11:37 ◼ ► Just, like, the amount of explanation that we're required or, like, explaining you can fix it, but when the app auto-updates, it will unfix itself.
01:11:46 ◼ ► I think it has served its purpose because they silently did squircle jail and scared everybody into making Tahoe icons.
01:11:53 ◼ ► But anyway, I just wanted to link to all this stuff to let you benefit from the pain that I and others have been experiencing.
01:12:03 ◼ ► Interestingly, by the way, one of the ways that we figured out how to do this for the custom build phase seemed to work great.
01:12:17 ◼ ► I planned to set out new test flights and found out that when I uploaded it to App Store Connect, it said, oh, you're missing some icon resources.
01:12:27 ◼ ► Like, I tested them going back and forth to the other Mac that's logged into my Apple ID all the time.
01:12:37 ◼ ► Even if you get something that works, you only know if it really works if you do a real archive build, sign it with developer ID, look at it on a Tahoe machine, look at it on a Sequoia machine, then also upload to App Store Connect and make sure it re-downloads and everything works fine and blah, blah, blah.
01:12:54 ◼ ► So anyway, I had to do it like nine times for all of my apps, and now all of my apps, I think, are compliant with the simpler system.
01:13:00 ◼ ► Just wanted to let the world know that, A, this is happening, and B, if icons look a little bit weird, especially in Tahoe, this is why.
01:13:09 ◼ ► And I want to say, I think the icon composer format and idea is actually kind of a good one.
01:13:14 ◼ ► Maintaining 700 different icon resolutions and bitmaps is not efficient, and it's kind of annoying.
01:13:20 ◼ ► I know iOS, or I think iOS changed recently to be able to let you say, let me just make one really big high-res icon, and it'll make all the other ones.
01:13:32 ◼ ► But even that, like, you know, having a sort of a definition file for icons, if you plan to have, I want to be able to make a clear one, a light one, a dark one, if you want to be able to programmatically do that with a specific icon style, that, to be clear, I do not like.
01:13:50 ◼ ► So I'm not against Icon Composer or the Tahoe icons, I'm against having an obvious built-in way to only have those icons on Tahoe and forward.
01:13:59 ◼ ► And obviously, the problem will solve itself in a few years when nobody cares about those old icons.
01:14:03 ◼ ► But I think what Apple is trying to avoid is a repeat of the Big Sur thing, where they said, hey, in Big Sur, and from now on, everyone should use Squircle icons.
01:14:17 ◼ ► And I think that's why Squircle Jail exists, which is like, no, seriously, this time, we demand that you make your icons look like our icons.
01:14:31 ◼ ► And, you know, when Apple tries to maintain compatibility with old OSs, they don't face the same issues that we do with their apps, because most Apple apps are built into the operating system.
01:14:43 ◼ ► So they don't need, like, the same code that's running on iOS 18 to be running at, like, as the same bundle in the App Store as what's going to run on iOS 26.
01:14:53 ◼ ► And same thing with, you know, the Mac OS equivalents and all the other, like, they don't need to worry about that.
01:14:57 ◼ ► Like, the team that writes Apple Mail, they have their, you know, before 26 builds, and they have their 26 builds.
01:15:05 ◼ ► And those are basically different apps, or at least probably a different branch or whatever.
01:15:09 ◼ ► The closest they get is Safari on the Mac, because they do ship a version of the new Safari on the old OS.
01:15:17 ◼ ► And so, like, so, you know, in areas that Apple does not face the same challenges or face them in the same way as developers, they generally really don't care how hard it is for us.
01:15:33 ◼ ► They just kind of institutionally, Apple has never been amazing at dogfooding the developer experience.
01:15:42 ◼ ► Like, they don't really know, like, they don't really fully, people at Apple don't usually fully appreciate what developers need to do in certain ways or, you know, around certain problems.
01:15:52 ◼ ► Because they just don't face those problems themselves, and they don't care, or they are not important enough to them for them to care more.
01:15:58 ◼ ► And also, once Apple goes in a new direction, whether that's a software update or a redesign or whatever else, that's a one-way transition for Apple.
01:16:12 ◼ ► Like, as soon as they are on the new thing, they don't care about the old thing at all.
01:16:18 ◼ ► And so, for us to be like, well, we kind of do need to still care about, you know, the old OS for a while.
01:16:26 ◼ ► Like, so, this is the kind of area that tends to be underserved in Apple's, like, tools and solutions and everything.
01:16:35 ◼ ► So, this is an area where, like, yeah, like, you know, when I build my app, like, the iOS app, when I build it with the new icon and it runs on iOS 18, it shows, like, a flattened rendering of the glass icon as the new app icon on iOS 18.
01:16:54 ◼ ► Like, and that's, maybe I could hack around that the same way you're trying to here, but, like, I'm just, I'm not going to because it's just not worth it.
01:17:23 ◼ ► But, and also, your particular, the overcast icon, does lend itself well to this style.
01:17:27 ◼ ► Like, you didn't have, like, a photorealistic, like, I mean, my Switch class icon, which I love, by the way, is, like, by Brad Ellis.
01:17:51 ◼ ► But your icon was already a squircle, is a flat rendering that is not, doesn't have, like, 3D shapes that are rotated or shaded and stuff like that.
01:17:58 ◼ ► You can make a Tahoe version of your icon that doesn't look that different than the regular version.
01:18:04 ◼ ► Whereas, if I showed the Tahoe icon of any of my apps on pre-Tahoe, it would stand out like a sore thumb, because none of my apps look anything like that pre-Tahoe.
01:18:13 ◼ ► But, but again, like, this is an area where, like, I'm on the easy side, because I'm on iOS.
01:18:18 ◼ ► And Apple, you know, they do everything with iOS first, and first priority, and with the most effort, and macOS gets table scraps.
01:18:27 ◼ ► Someone on that front, James Thompson's apps, or I think it was James Thompson and somebody else.
01:18:33 ◼ ► Some, let's put it this way, some iOS developers went a little overboard with the custom icons.
01:18:48 ◼ ► And they were saying that the build phase in Xcode, when just doing, like, dev builds, of trying to build all the icon bitmaps from those icon composer description files that I just said was taking a lot of time.
01:19:00 ◼ ► So they were trying to figure out ways to basically, like, make, like, conditional build steps to say, when you're doing a dev build, don't build all the icons.
01:19:07 ◼ ► Because it was taking, like, I think James Thompson said it was taking, like, five minutes just to do that phase of his build.
01:19:22 ◼ ► Yeah, that's, again, it's another area where, like, no Apple app has more than a couple of custom icons, if any, you know.
01:19:39 ◼ ► So, like, you know, when you face a problem in your app that Apple doesn't really face much themselves, it doesn't tend, again, it doesn't tend to get great tooling support, doesn't get a lot of attention from Apple.
01:19:50 ◼ ► So, I think the pragmatic solution here is you kind of have to decide how much you're willing to fight on this.
01:20:02 ◼ ► And, you know, in my case, as I said, like, with my, you know, showing my glass icon on iOS 18, I don't care.
01:20:09 ◼ ► I have so many other things to deal with that that's not something, that's not a hill I'm going to die on.
01:20:16 ◼ ► That's not something I'm going to spend any time looking at because the glass icon, like, that's, like, people who are going to hold on to iOS 18 because they hate liquid glass, they're probably going to have a problem with it.
01:20:30 ◼ ► And I'm so much better spending the time continuing to move the app forward and not thinking too much about the past.
01:20:39 ◼ ► They move their stuff forward and they don't spend too much time thinking about or working on or enabling the past.
01:20:45 ◼ ► And so, if you try to swim against the current, like, you can, it's hard, you will spend a lot of time doing it, and it might not be the best use of your time and effort.
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01:22:52 ◼ ► Do you think the decreased information and interface density in Liquid Glass in macOS might make the interface potentially more touch-friendly?
01:22:58 ◼ ► Setting aside the myriad of problems with legibility, consistency, and the Liquid Glass's brittleness, to use Snell's term,
01:23:15 ◼ ► Well, first, I just want to defend Daniel's honor and say that even though you read a myriad of,
01:23:19 ◼ ► he wrote correctly, the myriad of problems without an of in there, because that's the way you should use that word.
01:23:41 ◼ ► The notch making the menu bar taller, the setting that's in accessibility that does nothing in Tahoe.
01:23:47 ◼ ► But anyway, there's a setting in accessibility, I believe, that says, do you want me to show the regular menu bar in macOS?
01:23:54 ◼ ► Again, I think it does nothing in Tahoe, but that doesn't mean it's always going to do nothing or do nothing in Sequoia.
01:24:00 ◼ ► The lower information density and the larger controls in liquid glass and macOS and on iOS and an iPadOS, even though pretty clearly none of that was designed with the intention of making it easier to make touch Macs.
01:24:23 ◼ ► In a world of thoughtful interface design that acknowledges that there is a science to it and that things can be known and tested, an actual Mac interface designed for touch would do a lot more than liquid glass is doing, right?
01:24:41 ◼ ► But I do think that every step they take to sort of puff up the interface on the Mac specifically sets them up for a future where they could enable touch without making too many changes.
01:24:55 ◼ ► And honestly, like setting aside the retina transition, Apple has tried to hold the line on the Mac in terms of like DPI and how big things are on the screen.
01:25:05 ◼ ► And not for touch reasons, not for like the size of the tip of your finger because, you know, Macs don't have touch, but they've tried to make things kind of sort of stay the same size.
01:25:14 ◼ ► But if you there's lots of people posting historical images like here's how this graphic looked in macOS for the past 20 years or something online these days because of liquid glass stuff.
01:25:24 ◼ ► If you look at some of those, even when they account for retina and like don't do the 1x, 2x thing, older versions of macOS, especially when you go back to classic, things were smaller because screens were smaller, like physically, like they had fewer inches, like people had 13 inch CRTs, not 32 inch LCDs.
01:25:50 ◼ ► And I think, I mean, I think that's a good thing just because when you have so much screen real estate, there's not as much reason to make everything as small as you possibly can.
01:25:59 ◼ ► You don't need a lot of 9 and 10 point text everywhere in the UI because you're on a 9 inch monochrome screen.
01:26:06 ◼ ► So even though I think, you know, liquid glass has probably set us backwards from touch in many other areas, things getting a little bit bigger, assuming it stays that way until, you know, if touch the Mac's ever common, assuming the liquid glass stuff stays and someone doesn't come in and undo all that.
01:26:27 ◼ ► I wouldn't read too much into the design, like liquid glasses design being ported pretty closely to the Mac, like from the iPad.
01:26:36 ◼ ► I think that's just because they don't really care as much about the Mac as the iOS devices and they just brought the design straight over.
01:26:43 ◼ ► And I think, you know, you can say, well, why would they, why would they make the Mac have these bigger elements?
01:26:53 ◼ ► Another reason is it allows them to use basically the same design between iPad and macOS, which makes their own development of their own apps easier.
01:27:05 ◼ ► You know, if you look at like how much consideration has been put into this design for things like touch target sizing, legibility, you know, pretty, pretty significant like usability factors.
01:27:22 ◼ ► They made something that they thought looked cool and usability was a pretty far secondary concern in that list.
01:27:32 ◼ ► So, you know, the fact that they made things bigger, they're not thinking, ooh, then now they're touchable.
01:27:37 ◼ ► And in fact, in many cases, as I said, like in many cases, like the touch targets are actually way too small, even on the touch devices on their own native designs.
01:27:46 ◼ ► I think it's, they wanted to make one unified design language across all their devices and that makes their jobs easier.
01:27:53 ◼ ► And it gives them, you know, the brand unity that they've been wanting all these years.
01:28:11 ◼ ► Um, one of the ideas floating around out there because people always want to like, it's not a conspiracy theory.
01:28:16 ◼ ► People, people want to, um, they want to see intention where it may not actually exist.
01:28:21 ◼ ► That's why you get questions like, well, putting these chips in, make cellular more possible.
01:28:27 ◼ ► Again, I don't think they are planning for it, but in the end controls being a little bit bigger does help in that direction, but it's not the intention at all.
01:28:34 ◼ ► Um, a lot of people have been trying to play that game with the liquid glass, uh, design decision to put margins around and everything.
01:28:45 ◼ ► So all of Marco's, you know, bottom and top bars, they used to go edge to edge on the screen, which meant from the edges of the screen, you would move in from the literal edge of the screen by some margin.
01:28:55 ◼ ► Now you've got to have empty margin where there's nothing beginning of capsule, new margin inside the capsule.
01:29:05 ◼ ► So that's what you were saying, Marco, that actually the touch targets in some cases get smaller, even as the amount of room taken up by the interface element gets larger.
01:29:13 ◼ ► And people look at that and say, yeah, but assuming Apple is all knowing and all powerful, which is not true.
01:29:19 ◼ ► Um, there must be some reason they're making this terrible design decision of putting margins around everything and floating content, floating controls over content, harming legibility for no use of blah, blah, blah, see past episodes.
01:29:31 ◼ ► And the reason I've heard passed around a lot is, well, when the folding phone comes out and the screen wraps around and has a waterfall edge or whatever, not having, for example, bottom bars in iOS apps actually extend to the edges of the screen will help because that part of the edge of the screen might be wrapping around like a waterfall design or bending over a hinge or whatever, depending on how the app is oriented.
01:29:57 ◼ ► And so the liquid glass design is forward looking for devices that have not yet been released in particular, the folding devices.
01:30:04 ◼ ► I don't think that's why they did it again, like the touch things, depending on what the folding device looks like, this design might help, but I don't think that's why they chose to do this design.
01:30:18 ◼ ► I honestly don't know why they chose to do this design other than someone thought it looked good.
01:30:24 ◼ ► But that is, I just want to put that out there, is if the folding phone comes out and Apple says, you were wondering why we screwed with your interface so much, well, it was all because of the folding phone.
01:30:32 ◼ ► Like, they're never going to say that, but it might be the case that when the folding phone comes out, the floating elements everywhere with margins around them that reduces the touch target size might make slightly more sense.
01:30:42 ◼ ► Yeah, like there really was not a lot of consideration in a lot of parts of this design.
01:30:51 ◼ ► So, I don't, again, I don't think, like John, I don't think there is like a grand plan here.
01:31:04 ◼ ► They made a design that looks cool and they seem to slap it together, you know, kind of at the last minute in a pretty slapdash fashion.
01:31:16 ◼ ► It's like when you're a kid and you think like that adults like know how everything works and are doing things for the reason and then you become an adult and you go, oh, yeah.
01:31:27 ◼ ► Ian Anderson writes, it has been discussed in recent episodes that Tim Cook does not have, quote, good product sense, quote.
01:31:33 ◼ ► As someone early in a tech career with ambitions to be a leader one day in what could be considered a product organization, what sorts of things should I start doing?
01:32:04 ◼ ► So that's a great book if you are like a product manager, director, you know, whatever, to practice the actual like science and profession of product management.
01:32:15 ◼ ► That's when I say Tim Cook is not a good product person or doesn't have good product sense.
01:32:24 ◼ ► I'm more talking about like in like the visionary slash like kind of like the Steve Jobs sense of like having a really kind of like good instincts for the direction that they should go with product design.
01:32:39 ◼ ► With, you know, what products to make different choices while making them different things to prioritize and the the profession of product management does have a lot of overlap with that.
01:32:49 ◼ ► There is a lot of product management, you know, the discipline that can help with that, but it's kind of like having good artistic talent or good musical talent.
01:32:58 ◼ ► Like there's a lot of science behind it and a lot of practice that you can get into it to, you know, to make yourself better at it, to educate yourself on the fundamentals and, you know, the sciences and, you know, music theory, you know, various like forms of art instruction and art theory.
01:33:14 ◼ ► Like there, there are, there's, there's, there's educational paths you can and should take, but there's also kind of like fundamental aptitudes or, or talents that can really help you be the next level for a company like Apple coming off of Steve Jobs's life.
01:33:33 ◼ ► He was so good at that and they were so well known for their products that just had that, that they just had such a knack for making great products pretty reliably with great attributes and great, great combinations of things, great spirit behind them.
01:33:51 ◼ ► And a lot of that was Steve and a lot of the people under Steve and, you know, he was also a great editor and a great director and, you know, a great collaborator, you know, and so he had more than just like the, the science and discipline of product sensibility.
01:34:07 ◼ ► He was also just like a natural talent at identifying like what makes great products and what, what should we do?
01:34:16 ◼ ► What, how should I, how should we tweak these little things to make this product a little bit cooler, a little bit more kind of must have or more delightful.
01:34:29 ◼ ► Whatever you want to say about Tim Cook's, you know, pragmatism or operational expertise, he's really good at making money.
01:34:43 ◼ ► He knows he's not that, but because he's so not that he's not able to, I think, pick good people to serve those roles either.
01:34:55 ◼ ► And so when I say he doesn't have product sense, what I'm talking about is, is that kind of like the, the spirit, the, the natural or, or developed sense of like what makes cool gotta have not like good products that, that fit with what people really want and, and can, can, you know, break into new areas and set new, set new trends and everything.
01:35:17 ◼ ► He has none of those sensibilities, whatever product successes Apple has had in the Tim Cook era had nothing to do with him and probably happened despite him, not anything because of him.
01:35:31 ◼ ► Yeah, the, this question is about like, how do I prepare myself for a leadership role one day in a tech career, uh, in a product organization?
01:35:51 ◼ ► So if you aspire to be CEO, as, as Margaret said, the CEO level is different kettle of fish than being in charge of one product or being in charge of a set of products.
01:36:03 ◼ ► Because when you are at the CEO level, you're thinking about things like, what should this company be doing?
01:36:20 ◼ ► And in many respects, like those are the things that Tim Cook is, has been very good at is like the sort of setting aside the fact that it's Apple, which, you know, it's difficult to do.
01:36:29 ◼ ► Um, if you are the CEO of any really big company, one of your jobs is to sort of steer the ship to figure out what's next for Apple.
01:36:41 ◼ ► And Tim Cook has been pretty darn good at figuring out how to make Apple continue to grow and make money.
01:36:46 ◼ ► Unfortunately, Apple as a company is basically defined because of the second Steve Jobs era as being a company that is successful because of its great products.
01:36:56 ◼ ► Not because Steve Jobs is a genius at figuring out where the next growth thing was going to come from.
01:37:01 ◼ ► He wasn't like the whole things that Tim Cook has done with like services revenue and all the things that he's done with the financials.
01:37:16 ◼ ► But when we think of Apple, a lot of us still have that image in our mind of the company that like Apple was successful because they made great products, which is not true of lots of really big companies.
01:37:34 ◼ ► There's all sorts of other reasons that make these giant corporations able to be big and grow and like strategic, boring corporate stuff that we don't know.
01:37:43 ◼ ► Or maybe some stuff having to do with science of where they find the oil or like geopolitics of having to get it.
01:37:53 ◼ ► It's like this one company found a way by just doing really good things that people like to become tremendously successful.
01:38:15 ◼ ► But if you also can't correctly pick people to do that for you, or at the very least, tell when you made a bad choice and change it up.
01:38:24 ◼ ► And Tim Cook has definitely been slow to do that and reticent to do that, deferring a lot to other people.
01:38:33 ◼ ► If you want to be CEO, it's kind of like, I mean, there's not, there's not a lot, you end up reading business books.
01:38:53 ◼ ► At the company level, how do I know what products I should be making for which customers?
01:39:00 ◼ ► How do I know when I should decide that we should move away from this kind of customers to these other kind of customers?
01:39:09 ◼ ► Like, there's tons of people doing, you know, PhD theses and business case studies and like on all these things.
01:39:16 ◼ ► But all that, all of that science aspect of it, you'll see is not specific to anything.
01:39:21 ◼ ► Like, business school is not about the tech business or the farming business or the oil business.
01:39:33 ◼ ► So if you aspire to be a CEO, you should probably have some knowledge of business and companies and economies and big picture things.
01:39:42 ◼ ► If that doesn't interest you and you're like, I'm thinking more about how do I make a really good version of iMovie?
01:39:46 ◼ ► Like, how do I make, I want to be in charge of our most important products and I want to make that product the best it can be.
01:39:53 ◼ ► How do I figure out, this starts to get into UI design, but how do I figure out, should we be making a product for beginners or pros?
01:40:03 ◼ ► Again, there is a science aspect to that of figuring out how do we identify customer needs?
01:40:09 ◼ ► What is the state of the art of figuring out what customers exist, what they want, what they're not getting from competing products?
01:40:25 ◼ ► He was 100% in his gut, on his gut feeling, and we're lucky that his gut was right as much as it was, but it wasn't always right.
01:40:38 ◼ ► And I think he had none of that, other than like the school of hard knocks, because he'd been in so many companies, made so many products and so many mistakes.
01:40:48 ◼ ► Don't assume that you will have the early success that Steve Jobs had that gave him the millions of dollars to be able to make multiple mistakes and to get his one of his mistakes acquired by his earlier mistake.
01:40:59 ◼ ► So don't follow his lesson of, I'm just going to be a really good kind of gut person, and my instincts and taste will lead my company to great success.
01:41:10 ◼ ► So I would say, decide what level you want to work at, learn the science and sort of, I'm probably using science wrong on a lot of these things, because again, people would say, well, you know, business is not really the same.
01:41:21 ◼ ► But anyway, look at the things where they, where they, it is, it's a scientific method.
01:41:28 ◼ ► You're like, what is the state of the art in trying to determine what we know and what we don't know and how to find out new information and, you know, like the innovator's dilemma and all these various advances in our thinking about how markets work.
01:41:40 ◼ ► Learn about that science of it, because don't assume that your gut instincts are going to be right as much as Steve Jobs.
01:41:45 ◼ ► But don't forget about the gut, because if you just learn about like how to sell widgets or when to pivot your company from a B2B to a B2C to a SaaS or whatever, you're going to be missing the essential heart of what you have to actually like, like Marco always says, you have to, if you're going to run Apple, you should really care about computers or phones or like whatever, whatever it is that you think Apple's, you should, you should really super be into that.
01:42:12 ◼ ► I mean, Steve Jobs was like, no one was into computers when they were making the Apple One.
01:42:24 ◼ ► And I think that is an important aspect to, like, to have that passion and to be, to have that sort of, that gut and that love for the product helps you identify, you know, helps you know that people are going to love the iMac.
01:42:38 ◼ ► Even though lots of people are going to tell you it's dumb and ugly and I can't believe you're making this computer.
01:42:43 ◼ ► Not because he focus tested it or did the science part of it, because I don't think he even knew how to do that or cared about it at all, but just because he trusted his gut and got lucky.
01:42:53 ◼ ► You should probably actually understand the logic and rationale behind the product decisions you are making.
01:43:01 ◼ ► But then also have a passion for it and have some kind of, you know, have some kind of opinion about it and taste that hopefully will guide you right.
01:43:10 ◼ ► And Marco gave a book recommendation, which is more than I have, because I never aspired to be in this part of any of the businesses that I worked for.
01:43:16 ◼ ► So I don't know any, like, things that you should be reading, but that's my advice for, like, how to view this.
01:43:23 ◼ ► Find what level you're going to work at, figure out what sort of science-y stuff applies there, learn it, but then also have a passion about it and bring yourself and your art to it.
01:43:36 ◼ ► And you don't need to be a CEO of a tech company or a founder of a startup, necessarily, to get relevant product experience.
01:43:55 ◼ ► Like, you know, ask people, like, figure out what people need and try to make a solution that fits it and get it out there.
01:44:04 ◼ ► Like, pretty much every business offering that you might have from, you know, local services like that to a store to an app on, you know, in the app store or a web app.
01:44:13 ◼ ► Like, if you are putting something out there for customers, you're going to face all these same dynamics.
01:44:41 ◼ ► And then, once you have something out there, if you get any users whatsoever, that's great, first of all.
01:44:55 ◼ ► How can I get them maybe to give me more money or to use my product more or, you know, use it for more things?
01:45:00 ◼ ► Like, there's so much of this sensibility that is, it's great to read up and, you know, figure out a lot of the terminology and practices and science and theories behind it, but experience actually doing it with real products in front of real customers is way more useful and will serve you better.
01:45:28 ◼ ► And if it doesn't work, they put that in the paper and they say, we thought, you know, doing this would increase sales a huge amount.
01:45:45 ◼ ► Their successes and failures inform these case studies to say, we studied a bunch of different people who had different strategies for tackling this particular problem.
01:45:56 ◼ ► Rather than just going by, well, these people did it this way and the company got big, therefore, that must be great.
01:46:09 ◼ ► Blink dude of, like, lots of different kinds of ketchup or tomato sauce or whatever the examples are.
01:46:13 ◼ ► So, you've got to watch out for, like, a little bit of, like, seven habits, highly effective people, sort of junk science, pop culture stuff or whatever.
01:46:32 ◼ ► But in your own personal business, you do your own little experiments and you'll find out what works and what doesn't pretty quickly.
01:46:38 ◼ ► It'll be painful and it's not as much easier as to read about other people making the mistake.
01:46:46 ◼ ► And that is how you will develop the sense is put something out there, iterate on it, fail, or you're ready to figure out what fails and what succeeds.
01:47:06 ◼ ► I mean, and reading about it will let you know, like, for example, if you have an idea, I think I'm going to do X, Y, and Z with my product.
01:47:29 ◼ ► How can I control for that when all so many other things are changing at the same time?
01:47:33 ◼ ► How can I make sure that I don't turn something that I don't intend to be a make-or-break decision for my business into, oh, it turned out that was a make-or-break decision for the business, right?
01:47:44 ◼ ► But the actual ideas of what you do, you won't see that in a book because it's so specific to you, your business, your app, whatever problem you're solving, which hopefully is going to be unique enough that there aren't books written about it.
01:47:56 ◼ ► I think just very quickly, it's worth adding that if product design specifically is something you're interested in, then you can learn a lot about what's good and what's not.
01:48:08 ◼ ► Obviously, you have your own innate sense of what's good and what isn't, but you can learn a lot about why people think things are good or bad by listening, I guess, to shows like this.
01:48:17 ◼ ► But I've got to imagine there are other podcasts or perhaps YouTubers where they dissect what makes a product good or bad.
01:48:26 ◼ ► And, you know, as much as we poke fun at John for being hypercritical, I think one of the valuable things that I learned from listening to the hypercritical podcast was what does make a design good or bad?
01:48:37 ◼ ► And if there's something to be criticized or complained about or what have you, is that, why is that?
01:48:44 ◼ ► And, you know, John has always, since I've paid attention to John, it's been like 15 years now, has always been very good as an example of distilling why that is.
01:48:56 ◼ ► And you could argue that pretty much everything in your life is a product of some sort.
01:48:59 ◼ ► And so just thinking about what you do and do not like about things and why, and even better, hearing people who do this sort of thing or who are passionate about this sort of thing discuss why something is good, bad, or otherwise, I think is also really, really helpful.
01:49:15 ◼ ► Yeah, just to go back to the example I kept using with the art and science of UI design.
01:49:20 ◼ ► Step one is like caring enough about it to have opinions about I like this and I don't like that or whatever, and then trying to figure out why.
01:49:26 ◼ ► But also understanding that there is like, there's reasoning and rationale that other people have already considered that went into it.
01:49:34 ◼ ► So just to give one example, the menu bar that's at the top of the Mac screen versus the menu bar that's inside Windows on Windows, Microsoft Windows.
01:49:48 ◼ ► But understanding the different tradeoffs that those two designs make, like that there was thought behind them, that there was testing on them.
01:49:56 ◼ ► And they said, okay, well, the menu bar at the top of the screen, it's farther away, which is a minus, but the target height is essentially infinite because you can slam the cursor on the top, which is a plus.
01:50:06 ◼ ► Do people slam their cursors against the top of the screen or do they very carefully target the file menu and they never let their pointer touch the top of the screen?
01:50:14 ◼ ► And the menu bar inside the Windows, if you like that better, okay, it's closer to you and, you know, where your cursor is likely to be and you don't take up the spot on top of the screen all the time.
01:50:25 ◼ ► So you have more screen real estate, understanding that there are like knowable, objective, measurable tradeoffs between those two designs that were considered and weighed and then decide, okay, well, those weights, those weights are the opinion part.
01:50:39 ◼ ► But the science part is like, they didn't just guess like, it feels better to me when there's a menu bar on top of screen or I just like it when the menu bar is inside the window.
01:50:47 ◼ ► Like having that opinion is a start, but you can't just stay there and be like, oh, I just like it because I like it and you're a dummy, right?
01:50:53 ◼ ► There is like logic and reasoning behind the designs, not saying one is necessarily better than the other, but you have to understand the mechanisms and not just be like, oh, it's all, it's all magic.
01:51:04 ◼ ► And it's just like, oh, it's a feeling in my gut and I'm right because I'm the CEO and got so many CEOs are like that.
01:51:09 ◼ ► Like, like so many product designers like that, like, like the world is knowable and understandable.
01:51:16 ◼ ► It doesn't mean that you're going to come to a definitive opinion about what kind of menu bar is better, but it does mean you can understand the aspects of it that go into it and that, and that you can test them.
01:51:25 ◼ ► Again, the idea of like it being an infinite target, you can say, well, it's an infinite target.
01:51:33 ◼ ► Do they get that targeting benefit because they don't have to carefully decelerate the mouse cursor when it comes up to the file menu and they can just jam it up against the top of the screen?
01:51:46 ◼ ► Like that, thinking of it that way, thinking that there are knowable things that go into it, that then you layer on top of your opinions and your, how much do you value this versus, yeah, how much do you value screen space versus targetability versus locality versus whatever.
01:52:00 ◼ ► Some of those things you can test too, but in the end, it always comes down to like value weighting of like, once you've, think you've identified the aspects that you care about and understand the rationale behind them, then you are free to assign weights that you think will make a good product.
01:52:14 ◼ ► And then you'll find out whether you're right or wrong when you put your translucent teal gumdrop shaped computer in front of the public.
01:52:25 ◼ ► And then finally tonight, Keith Heaton writes, when using the duplicate photos function in Apple photos on Mac OS, I'm presented with four photos who wants to merge.
01:52:43 ◼ ► How the heck do I audit these properly and pick and choose which attributes become the new singular master photo?
01:52:51 ◼ ► This duplicate processing in Apple photos, I think I talked about when it first rolled out.
01:52:55 ◼ ► It tries to save you some of this pain by giving you a button that says just merge these.
01:53:02 ◼ ► And it tries to essentially choose the quote unquote best one, but then combine all the metadata from all the other ones.
01:53:10 ◼ ► So by best, it usually means the highest resolution or the largest or both, but then it will try to do a union of the metadata from all the other ones.
01:53:22 ◼ ► You can manually choose to resolve this yourself by deleting the ones that you think are not duplicates.
01:53:31 ◼ ► And the second you don't want to just trust it, it gets way more complicated to the point where, as I've complained about in the past, when it sometimes identifies photos that are not actually duplicates, like you took a burst photo and you can see these are two different photos.
01:53:46 ◼ ► These are not the same photo, but they're close enough that that Apple photos thinks they're duplicates.
01:53:57 ◼ ► No, instead, you have to forever see that in the duplicate list and just remember to never merge those because they're two separate pictures or you just get frustrated and delete one of them that you like less.
01:54:04 ◼ ► But anyway, unfortunately for Keith, the root problem here is that if you have 10,000 duplicates and a lot of them are like this, like that a human description of them all is like it's difficult for a human to even figure out how to combine these, like what should be done?
01:54:25 ◼ ► How long does it take a human to figure out what the right thing to do is and then do it?
01:54:30 ◼ ► If that's your situation, no computer program is going to help you because in the end, uh, you've got a lot of human decisions to make complicated human decisions.
01:54:41 ◼ ► Now the program could be nicer about giving you all the information that I assume Keith had to look up manually that we just read off these bullet points.
01:54:47 ◼ ► It's like the sizes, which one's favorited, which one is in an album, which one has accurate exit data.
01:54:55 ◼ ► The program doesn't give you too much info, but in the end, you just got a lot of different photos.
01:55:03 ◼ ► You've got a library with a lot of duplicate photos and there is no sort of simple way to resolve that.
01:55:08 ◼ ► Now, if you just want to say, uh, you know, let go and let Apple, if they gave you a big button that said closing my eyes, I'm assuming what you're going to do.
01:55:25 ◼ ► I'm not listening and not think about the ones that you might have deleted that you liked.
01:55:30 ◼ ► You either manually drew a tremendous amount of work kind of, you know, this is a, I can, I want to do a report.
01:55:46 ◼ ► And you can either resolve them all very quickly with little oversight and just not worry about what it did.
01:55:54 ◼ ► And yes, Apple photos should do more to help you, but there's no amount of program can help you that will, uh, absolve you of having to make these decisions.
01:56:20 ◼ ► This week on overtime, we're going to be talking about whether AI voice control is a threat to Apple's platforms.
01:58:08 ◼ ► I think you complained that they told you that, uh, I think your problem is these fancy
01:58:14 ◼ ► So I had at various times three or four different AC repair companies out here over the course
01:58:22 ◼ ► of this spring and summer, um, trying to get them to just fix my stupid air conditioners
01:58:49 ◼ ► a lot of service calls from people who install a nest or something and it goes into energy
01:58:55 ◼ ► So like, I understand why they would be sensitive to that, but literally every, like no, everyone
01:59:05 ◼ ► And then like, they would call the manufacturer tech support, like as they're looking at stuff
01:59:32 ◼ ► If I have to fine, if that'll make you guys shut up and just work on my air conditioning
02:00:25 ◼ ► And also you paid a lot of money for air conditioning and your house is supposed to work.
02:00:35 ◼ ► So there's also all this drama now that the refrigerant that our system uses are for 10 a there's, you know, every heat pump system has, has a refrigerant in it.
02:00:47 ◼ ► And over time they, they find out like refrigerants tend to be pretty bad for the environment if they're vented into the atmosphere.
02:00:58 ◼ ► And then what happens eventually is usually states or the federal government will start, you know, restricting the old refrigerants from being used.
02:01:07 ◼ ► And so you, if you have a system that uses the old refrigerant, you oftentimes after a while can't get it anymore or can't get parts or can't get it serviced anymore or can't get it recharged if there's any slow leaks over time, you know.
02:01:30 ◼ ► I think as of around now or this year, um, and they're going to phase out the refrigerant over the next X years.
02:01:36 ◼ ► And it's going to be harder and harder to get and harder and harder to get parts and replacements.
02:01:45 ◼ ► So, so, you know, the repairer, he's like, you know, if you want, you can like get some extra, there's two big outside condensers.
02:01:55 ◼ ► He's like, you can get two replacement ones and just like store them somewhere right now.
02:02:10 ◼ ► Well, they're, they're telling you to buy the entire unit, the whole big thing with the fan.
02:02:24 ◼ ► Like do not keep them by the sea shore because when you need them, you open it up and it'll just be a chunk of rust.
02:02:32 ◼ ► And what we are talking about, if I wanted to, to keep a spare set of condensers, $27,000.
02:02:41 ◼ ► But what you do, if these things ever go and you need to replace them as you buy the newer, more efficient ones that are available on the market now.
02:02:47 ◼ ► And so, well, so the problem is when you, when you change the refrigerant on the outside units, chances are you probably also have to change the inside air handlers.
02:02:57 ◼ ► And if you're really unlucky, you might even have to run new refrigerant pipelines from the outside thing to the inside things.
02:03:18 ◼ ► Did he get an explanation of why you would need new, like, lines and inside units for refrigerant change?
02:03:25 ◼ ► Well, you know, every system, every, like, you know, pair of compressor and air handler, they have their own specs.
02:03:32 ◼ ► Like, okay, well, you need, you know, this diameter of pipe and you need, you know, it's like, there's all, they're all designed for each other.
02:03:39 ◼ ► I believe they're designed for, I just, it surprises me that the refrigerant changes would be so, such a radical change that you can't use the existing lines and inside units because, like, the diameter is wrong or they can't handle the pressure or something.
02:03:55 ◼ ► So now I'm like, I'm out literally thousands of dollars in thermostats and thermostat labor.
02:04:07 ◼ ► Did you enjoy at least a moment of smugness when they put in the new thermostats and it didn't help?
02:04:17 ◼ ► Right now, I've just spent thousands of dollars for uglier thermostats that don't work in HomeKit.
02:04:23 ◼ ► I would have loved if it was a thermostats because that's a lot simpler and cheaper than everything else we now have to look at.
02:04:32 ◼ ► But I'm just, you know, the next step is they're going to like, you know, flush out the whole system and put in all new refrigerant of my apparently about to be illegal refrigerant.
02:04:45 ◼ ► What they should do, I mean, I'm assuming they will do this, but if they don't talk to them about it beforehand, is they should be able to measure the amount of refrigerant that was in the system when they quote unquote drain it.
02:04:57 ◼ ► Like when they do it on your car and they, you know, refresh your air conditioner, your fridge or whatever.
02:05:02 ◼ ► When they collect it, they know there should be X number of liters in the system or whatever.
02:05:19 ◼ ► And hopefully they would find where it was leaking before they refilled it with fresh refrigerant because they're just going to keep leaking out or whatever.
02:05:29 ◼ ► And you know, like maybe they don't know the intended volume of the system because it's not written somewhere and they don't know how long the lines are or something.
02:05:35 ◼ ► But this would be a good thing to know if there is a refrigerant leak because that's what you need to fix.
02:05:49 ◼ ► And like, it's like, it sure seems like the refri, like it's like, so now, now that we have thermostats, now we can see the error codes.
02:05:59 ◼ ► And so I've, of course, been seeing, okay, well, the, you know, the, the upstairs reports one code, the downstairs reports a different code.
02:06:04 ◼ ► So I searched both of those and the only, and upstairs and downstairs seem to be demonstrating very similar symptoms and they have two different error codes and they, they're two totally separate systems.
02:06:15 ◼ ► And when you look at like the chat GPT summary of what these error codes might mean or what might be causing them.
02:06:24 ◼ ► No, I, you can, but like, but, but the code is like, you know, suction sensor one or whatever.
02:06:34 ◼ ► And the explanation, like the only overlap between those two Venn diagrams of the explanation of those two codes is refrigerant issues.
02:06:44 ◼ ► I probably had, like, you know, like when the, the earlier repair person over the spring worked on it, I think they screwed it up.
02:07:11 ◼ ► Um, but certainly once it continues to get hotter, I'm going to get more grumpy about that.
02:07:16 ◼ ► Yeah, hasn't been a good, uh, past few months for me, appliance wise too, but on a much smaller scale, I lost an air conditioner at the beginning of the summer and replaced it at significantly less money than you're talking about.
02:07:27 ◼ ► Because I have window units, lost my oven, had to replace it, lost my toaster, had to replace it.
02:07:36 ◼ ► And I, I think I've got another five years on my water heater and my, uh, my heating system on my house should have already broken.
02:07:49 ◼ ► Can I interest you in $27,000 worth of condensers that you won't be able to refill in a few years?
02:07:59 ◼ ► That's what, and like, I've, you know, I've been going back and forth with the questions.
02:08:02 ◼ ► I'm like, okay, if we do this, like, you know, they're like, they're 300 pounds each and they're huge.
02:08:14 ◼ ► Like where I'd have to like get a storage unit just for them and then like hire some trucker to like go pick them up.
02:08:21 ◼ ► Cause like you can't have like delicate equipment like that in like just random temperatures.