The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► Yeah hammering be one thing but it's it's they're doing the like grinding like I don't know if it's like a saw or if it's like

00:00:06 ◼   ► Sanding or something and it's funny because I know because so actually this this podcast is gonna have a different character than usual because as

00:00:13 ◼   ► As listeners have noted in the past usually when we record it's it's I would say morning

00:00:19 ◼   ► But it's more like noon is your time and it's like middle of the night my time and I am usually drinking scotch, but now

00:00:27 ◼   ► But now it is it is morning my time and evening your time, which means I'm drinking coffee and sparkling water

00:00:32 ◼   ► So my character may be different. But yes, we also have to put up with environmental noise

00:00:37 ◼   ► They've been doing it for a while now and I I think I have gotten used to it

00:00:42 ◼   ► So I don't even it didn't even occur to me until I sat down like oh crap

00:00:45 ◼   ► I forgot this stupid instructions going on. So anyhow, that's a long-winded introduction to if there is weird grinding noises. I

00:00:51 ◼   ► Apologize it's it's not me. It's the construction

00:00:55 ◼   ► I too am drinking coffee and sparkling water.

00:00:59 ◼   ► You're going to be up all night?

00:01:03 ◼   ► Yeah, probably.

00:01:07 ◼   ► Speaking of Serenity Caldwell, I have some follow-up here.

00:01:11 ◼   ► I forgot this last week. I should have done it last week.

00:01:15 ◼   ► Serenity and I, two episodes ago, were talking about my inability to

00:01:19 ◼   ► all I wanted to do, because I have a brand new 256 gigabyte iPhone

00:01:23 ◼   ► And one of the things I wanted to do is just put all of my music on it because my music library is

00:01:29 ◼   ► Let's see if I can find it here

00:01:32 ◼   ► Less than 256 21 gigabytes. I have 4,000 songs 21 gigabytes. So, you know, it's not that big but

00:01:41 ◼   ► You know big but but not not that big

00:01:45 ◼   ► Easily fits on 256 megabyte iPhone and that way just put it all over there

00:01:52 ◼   ► And then I never have to worry I get on an airplane I can be out in the sticks

00:01:56 ◼   ► I can I could lose my SIM card and I've got all my music

00:02:00 ◼   ► And there's I could for the life of me couldn't figure out how to do it because I'm also using

00:02:07 ◼   ► iCloud music library like if I didn't use iCloud music library

00:02:12 ◼   ► I could do it the old-fashioned way where I just plug it into

00:02:14 ◼   ► My Mac by the lightning cable and then you in iTunes go over to music and say

00:02:21 ◼   ► sync everything, and then hit a button,

00:02:24 ◼   ► and wait for it to be done.

00:02:25 ◼   ► And then, boom, there's all my music.

00:02:28 ◼   ► But you can't do that with-- if you have iCloud Music Library

00:02:31 ◼   ► on, when you go to Music on your Mac when it's connected,

00:02:34 ◼   ► it just says, you're using iCloud Music Library.

00:02:36 ◼   ► Do it all that way.

00:02:39 ◼   ► And Serenity, who knows a lot more about this stuff

00:02:41 ◼   ► than I do, because she actually writes

00:02:45 ◼   ► all these detailed how-to-- she was stumped, too.

00:02:48 ◼   ► Anyway, long story short, the best way to do this--

00:02:51 ◼   ► And so far, I've had a bunch of people on Twitter, email,

00:02:56 ◼   ► a whole bunch of people have given me the solution.

00:02:59 ◼   ► I'll put a link to it in the show notes.

00:03:02 ◼   ► But long story short, the way you can do this,

00:03:05 ◼   ► the best workaround anybody can think of

00:03:07 ◼   ► is you create a smart playlist that matches all music.

00:03:12 ◼   ► Let's see what my criteria are.

00:03:16 ◼   ► Oops, started playing music.

00:03:21 ◼   ► Here, if I edit smart, I tried to double click a smart playlist to show the credentials here.

00:03:27 ◼   ► If MediaKind, uh, no, match, match music for all of the following, and I put size is less than 300

00:03:36 ◼   ► megabytes. So any audio file, any music file that's less than 300 megabytes, and it'll be

00:03:42 ◼   ► matched by the playlist. And I said 300 megabytes, I don't even know why. It's arbitrary, arbitrary

00:03:48 ◼   ► number. But I have a couple of really big audio files that I do want synced to the iPhone.

00:03:54 ◼   ► Like I have the, do you ever hear of these Ben? The Criterion Collection, Shamis.JamesBond

00:04:04 ◼   ► Director's Commentaries?

00:04:05 ◼   ► Ben

00:04:05 ◼   ► No, I have not.

00:04:07 ◼   ► Merlin Mann turned me on to these a long time ago.

00:04:11 ◼   ► Long story short, when the first laser discs of the Criterion Collection Bond movies came out,

00:04:21 ◼   ► like the Connery era ones, so you got like Goldfinger and Dr. No and From Russia With Love,

00:04:30 ◼   ► the commentaries weren't approved by Eon Productions,

00:04:35 ◼   ► and there's some really interesting stuff on them.

00:04:38 ◼   ► Like the editor, I forget his name,

00:04:41 ◼   ► but the guy who edited Goldfinger,

00:04:46 ◼   ► more or less threw the director under the bus

00:04:48 ◼   ► about some totally mismatched shots and camera angles

00:04:53 ◼   ► that made it a disaster to put together.

00:04:55 ◼   ► And once you hear him say it, you can see it.

00:04:57 ◼   ► - Peter Hunt.

00:04:58 ◼   ► - Peter Hunt, exactly.

00:04:59 ◼   ► who went on to direct on Her Majesty's Secret Service,

00:05:03 ◼   ► which I thought was a terrible movie,

00:05:04 ◼   ► but some people love.

00:05:05 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:05:07 ◼   ► - I was just thinking that.

00:05:08 ◼   ► - But that's neither here nor there.

00:05:09 ◼   ► But Peter Hunt really throws,

00:05:12 ◼   ► I forget who directed that one.

00:05:14 ◼   ► Was it a Guy Hamilton who directed Goldfinger?

00:05:19 ◼   ► - I'm looking it up.

00:05:20 ◼   ► - Or maybe that was the first one.

00:05:22 ◼   ► Guy Hamilton.

00:05:23 ◼   ► - Didn't you? - Yeah, Guy Hamilton.

00:05:24 ◼   ► - All right, so he throws him under the bus

00:05:26 ◼   ► about some mismatched footage,

00:05:28 ◼   ► And it's that opening scene where Bond is at the fountain blue down in Miami,

00:05:35 ◼   ► and Felix Leiter shows up and everything gets started.

00:05:38 ◼   ► But they shot some of it outdoors at a real outdoor resort,

00:05:42 ◼   ► and some of it on a sound stage.

00:05:44 ◼   ► And it was just a mismatch.

00:05:45 ◼   ► Anyway, once Eon Productions got--

00:05:49 ◼   ► they were like, wow, this is really some fascinating behind the scenes stuff.

00:05:52 ◼   ► When they listened to it, they made the Criterion people

00:05:54 ◼   ► pull it from future editions.

00:05:56 ◼   ► So anyway, I've got copies of these things as MP3 files.

00:06:00 ◼   ► They're almost 300 megabytes.

00:06:03 ◼   ► And so that's why I picked it.

00:06:04 ◼   ► But anyway, long story short, make a playlist,

00:06:07 ◼   ► smart playlist that will match all music.

00:06:09 ◼   ► Then you go over to your phone, and you can go to the playlist.

00:06:12 ◼   ► And then you can hit the Cloud button

00:06:14 ◼   ► for that playlist, which means download all the songs

00:06:17 ◼   ► on this playlist.

00:06:17 ◼   ► But since the playlist matches all of your songs,

00:06:20 ◼   ► it will download all of your songs.

00:06:23 ◼   ► But Apple seemingly goes way out of its way

00:06:25 ◼   ► to deliberately make that something that you can't do.

00:06:29 ◼   ► Like, 'cause when you go to the,

00:06:31 ◼   ► without going to Playlist, if you just go to All Music,

00:06:33 ◼   ► there is no Cloud button.

00:06:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, I guess the question is,

00:06:37 ◼   ► do they deliberately go out of their way

00:06:39 ◼   ► to make it difficult, or is it just general,

00:06:42 ◼   ► the general mollies that is the case

00:06:45 ◼   ► with iTunes and Apple Music?

00:06:47 ◼   ► - I think in this case, it's deliberate.

00:06:48 ◼   ► I think that they want you to sort of--

00:06:50 ◼   ► - It's sort of a commission or a synonymation,

00:06:51 ◼   ► is the word. - Yeah, I think it's sort of

00:06:52 ◼   ► like you're supposed, but it's very frustrating,

00:06:54 ◼   ► I think for people like I don't know every single year every year when my wife gets a new iPhone

00:06:59 ◼   ► There's a time where I I catch an earful

00:07:01 ◼   ► Because she goes to the gym and her iPhone doesn't have any music on it

00:07:05 ◼   ► even though she her last one did and then she did a full backup and restore and you know

00:07:10 ◼   ► do everything you can to say make my new iPhone just like my last one and then

00:07:14 ◼   ► There's every year none of her music

00:07:16 ◼   ► And she's you know, like at the gym that she goes to there's no signal, you know, you can't it's not like you can download the stuff

00:07:23 ◼   ► every year. And I just don't think it's that much to ask.

00:07:27 ◼   ► Yeah, the whole, it's interesting,

00:07:31 ◼   ► I haven't really thought about this a ton, but I use

00:07:35 ◼   ► the streaming services, the various ones, and it's funny,

00:07:39 ◼   ► I actually have, it's really frustrating, because I actually have a subscription to both Spotify

00:07:43 ◼   ► and Apple Music, and the reason is that

00:07:47 ◼   ► when I'm in, or I think we're going to talk about Siri in a little bit, but when I'm in the car

00:07:51 ◼   ► driving with the kids, I was like to request songs.

00:07:54 ◼   ► And so using Siri is obviously preferable

00:07:57 ◼   ► when you're driving.

00:07:58 ◼   ► And so it's worth it for that.

00:08:00 ◼   ► But then my stereo has Spotify Connect,

00:08:03 ◼   ► which is really great.

00:08:06 ◼   ► I can play stuff on my phone or whatever,

00:08:07 ◼   ► and it just plays on the stereo.

00:08:09 ◼   ► It's kind of like how a Chromecast works,

00:08:10 ◼   ► where you control it,

00:08:12 ◼   ► but it's not streaming like AirPlay,

00:08:14 ◼   ► which is, it's a much better model.

00:08:16 ◼   ► It works much better, at least for me.

00:08:19 ◼   ► And now like the Amazon has come out with their service

00:08:22 ◼   ► that will play in the echo.

00:08:23 ◼   ► We have an echo set up and notice like, well,

00:08:27 ◼   ► boy, that'd be convenient.

00:08:28 ◼   ► It does have Spotify as well, so it works.

00:08:31 ◼   ► But yeah, this whole like, yes, there's the allure

00:08:36 ◼   ► of having all the music and having access to it,

00:08:39 ◼   ► and it's like the upfront cost is much lower,

00:08:42 ◼   ► but the costs at the backend

00:08:44 ◼   ► of like actually playing your music,

00:08:46 ◼   ► there's all these sort of hidden costs that are there.

00:08:48 ◼   ► and I'm paying for it now, like quite literally,

00:08:53 ◼   ► but it's really, it's funny, the music industry

00:08:58 ◼   ► is all about like, yes, of course they're motivated

00:09:01 ◼   ► to have their music everywhere,

00:09:02 ◼   ► but they're reinforcing these silos

00:09:06 ◼   ► with this sort of new model.

00:09:07 ◼   ► I mean, like if you're not only all Apple,

00:09:11 ◼   ► if you're not only all whatever service,

00:09:13 ◼   ► you're kind of stuck in the middle

00:09:14 ◼   ► and it is pretty frustrating.

00:09:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I don't know.

00:09:18 ◼   ► I don't know how much of it is related to the fact

00:09:20 ◼   ► that if you buy, say, a 32 gigabyte iPhone,

00:09:22 ◼   ► you don't want your 20 gigabyte library synced over.

00:09:26 ◼   ► And yes, they have the optimized storage feature

00:09:29 ◼   ► for that for music and they have it for the photos too.

00:09:32 ◼   ► But it certainly would be very easy for somebody

00:09:34 ◼   ► with a 32 gigabyte device to run up against the limit.

00:09:39 ◼   ► And so maybe that's why, I don't know.

00:09:42 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's a good point.

00:09:43 ◼   ► They probably sell more of the lower cost phones.

00:09:46 ◼   ► I mean, if you look at the average selling prices,

00:09:48 ◼   ► it is weighted in that direction.

00:09:50 ◼   ► - Yeah, and you know, I admit that I guess the idea

00:09:54 ◼   ► of I want all of my entire music on my device all the time

00:09:57 ◼   ► is sort of an old fashioned, I'm still thinking

00:10:00 ◼   ► like it's the iPod era, but I actually find it useful a lot.

00:10:05 ◼   ► Or at least every time I fly, every time I fly.

00:10:07 ◼   ► If I want to listen to this.

00:10:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, I should do that now, 'cause yeah,

00:10:15 ◼   ► I realized my big storage issue with phones.

00:10:18 ◼   ► And so I got, this is the first time

00:10:19 ◼   ► I've gotten the absolute largest one.

00:10:21 ◼   ► I think I had a 64 previously

00:10:23 ◼   ► and I bumped up against the limits over this last year.

00:10:28 ◼   ► But my big culprit is podcasts.

00:10:30 ◼   ► I think the Overcast app was occupied

00:10:33 ◼   ► like 16 gigabytes or something like that,

00:10:35 ◼   ► something ridiculous.

00:10:36 ◼   ► Because all accumulate ones that I want to listen to

00:10:39 ◼   ► or I'll get recommendations

00:10:40 ◼   ► and they'll just be sitting in there.

00:10:41 ◼   ► And who knows if I'll ever listen to them.

00:10:44 ◼   ► But yeah, you can just, that's for me,

00:10:47 ◼   ► that's the big culprit where I accumulate stuff.

00:10:50 ◼   ► But I don't know, it's, yeah, we were just talking before,

00:10:54 ◼   ► like there's still like these rough edges

00:10:58 ◼   ► of having everything in the cloud is convenient.

00:11:02 ◼   ► But yeah, airplanes is definitely a big one for me.

00:11:05 ◼   ► I travel a lot and there's nothing more frustrating

00:11:07 ◼   ► than being in a place where you just can't get it

00:11:12 ◼   ► and you're stuck.

00:11:13 ◼   ► I've actually, speaking of like old school iTunes and iPods,

00:11:17 ◼   ► I got a, so this company called Underwater Audio

00:11:21 ◼   ► waterproofs iPod shuffles,

00:11:24 ◼   ► and they sell waterproof headphones,

00:11:25 ◼   ► so that you can listen while swimming,

00:11:29 ◼   ► which is, it's amazing.

00:11:31 ◼   ► I mean, I've, you know,

00:11:34 ◼   ► exercise is already miserable enough,

00:11:36 ◼   ► but to be actually like, listen to podcasts

00:11:37 ◼   ► or whatever way you're doing it is great.

00:11:39 ◼   ► The problem is, and it took me a while to figure this out,

00:11:42 ◼   ► is I, so I loaded a bunch of podcasts onto the shuffle,

00:11:46 ◼   ► which is already a pain,

00:11:47 ◼   ► 'cause I have to go like use iTunes

00:11:49 ◼   ► and it's not synced with Overcast and all that sort of stuff.

00:11:51 ◼   ► But I get there, I get to the pool,

00:11:52 ◼   ► and I can't, I'm stuck on the first podcast,

00:11:55 ◼   ► and I can't go to the next one.

00:11:56 ◼   ► You hit the next button on the iPod Shuffle,

00:11:58 ◼   ► what would you expect to happen?

00:11:59 ◼   ► You think it would go to the next track?

00:12:01 ◼   ► It doesn't.

00:12:02 ◼   ► It turns out that with the last iPod Shuffle,

00:12:07 ◼   ► you have to use voiceover.

00:12:09 ◼   ► Well, it turns out voiceover doesn't work very well

00:12:11 ◼   ► when you're in the pool.

00:12:12 ◼   ► So in there's no mic, anyhow, you can, there's a way around it.

00:12:15 ◼   ► You can like hold down the voiceover button and then the next and the next

00:12:19 ◼   ► buttons work. It's super complicated. It makes no sense at all. But yeah,

00:12:23 ◼   ► anyhow, it's been, it's been really eyeopening, but beyond that,

00:12:26 ◼   ► just like having to use iTunes again and actually sync stuff and like manually

00:12:30 ◼   ► manage things like you really appreciate this idea.

00:12:32 ◼   ► Like I can subscribe to podcasts or I can have the music and it's just there and

00:12:35 ◼   ► you don't have to think about it to actually have to like pre-plan what I'm

00:12:39 ◼   ► to listen to, it's like, man, we lived like savages for a long time.

00:12:43 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:12:44 ◼   ► A good segue to my next bit of follow-up. Now, this is from last week's show—I always say last week,

00:12:54 ◼   ► even though it's sort of like on a 10-day schedule. But the previous episode when Ben—not Ben,

00:12:59 ◼   ► you're Ben—Matthew Banserino was on, and we were talking about the AirPods and about how the

00:13:08 ◼   ► the biggest minus, the only significant,

00:13:11 ◼   ► the only serious minus about them to me

00:13:14 ◼   ► is that they don't have the little buttons

00:13:16 ◼   ► for play/pause and up/down for volume.

00:13:20 ◼   ► And because it's not so much the play/pause,

00:13:22 ◼   ► because the whole idea where you just take the one out

00:13:25 ◼   ► and it pauses and you put it back in and it plays,

00:13:28 ◼   ► works really, really well in almost every situation.

00:13:31 ◼   ► In fact, in some situations it works even better

00:13:34 ◼   ► than the button, because for me, a lot of the times

00:13:38 ◼   ► It's like if I've got them on because I'm listening

00:13:40 ◼   ► to something and I'm in a store, like grocery shopping,

00:13:43 ◼   ► and then I get to the register, I always

00:13:45 ◼   ► like to take my headphones out or at least take one out

00:13:48 ◼   ► so that I don't look like I'm listening to something.

00:13:51 ◼   ► And so to integrate the play/pause

00:13:53 ◼   ► and the taking out of one of the AirPods, it works great.

00:13:59 ◼   ► But what I miss is the next track, previous track,

00:14:03 ◼   ► like the shortcuts by double clicking

00:14:05 ◼   ► that you used to be able to do.

00:14:07 ◼   ► And I said that you can't use Siri to change the volume.

00:14:11 ◼   ► So when you double tap one of the AirPods

00:14:13 ◼   ► and say like, turn the volume up or turn the volume down,

00:14:17 ◼   ► doesn't work.

00:14:18 ◼   ► You have to change the volume either from your Apple Watch

00:14:21 ◼   ► if you have one or by taking your,

00:14:23 ◼   ► getting to your phone and using the volume buttons

00:14:25 ◼   ► on the phone.

00:14:26 ◼   ► Turns out I was wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

00:14:29 ◼   ► You can definitely change the volume by Siri.

00:14:32 ◼   ► You can do next track, previous track.

00:14:34 ◼   ► I did it the one time I tried it.

00:14:36 ◼   ► I did try it, and I said, turn the volume up.

00:14:40 ◼   ► And I was outside, which might have been the problem.

00:14:43 ◼   ► And Siri said, I'm sorry, I can't do that, John.

00:14:46 ◼   ► And I took that as meaning that she completely

00:14:49 ◼   ► understood what I asked, but was telling me that I can't do this.

00:14:53 ◼   ► And we might get back to this later about Siri.

00:14:57 ◼   ► My fault, it really is my laziness.

00:15:01 ◼   ► But I interpreted that.

00:15:02 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:15:03 ◼   ► like she said, "Sorry, I didn't understand you." She said, "I'm sorry, I can't do that, John."

00:15:08 ◼   ► And so I took it as meaning volume control is something that was outside the control of Siri.

00:15:13 ◼   ► Turns out I was completely wrong. A couple of people have AirPods corrected me on that. Now,

00:15:19 ◼   ► obviously, you know, there's not many people who have AirPods at the time.

00:15:22 ◼   ► But then I tried it again, and it does work. You could say volume up, volume down,

00:15:27 ◼   ► turn the volume up, turn the volume down, next track, go back a track, previous track.

00:15:33 ◼   ► I don't have a full list of it, but you know there's synonyms that work like go back a track

00:15:37 ◼   ► and previous track are the same thing. Those all work. Can you do like the skip 15 seconds or

00:15:45 ◼   ► sort of thing? I mean it was like the headphones if you like, again I use overcast, if you,

00:15:51 ◼   ► so mark was it set up like if you double click like it will skip 30 seconds you can set the

00:15:56 ◼   ► whatever lengths you want. I don't know. I don't know what happens in Overcast. I

00:16:01 ◼   ► suspect if I say next try... I didn't try it. I suspect if I said next track in Overcast,

00:16:05 ◼   ► it would just go to the next podcast. I don't think... Yeah, it's interesting.

00:16:08 ◼   ► I don't think you could... You know what I mean? I think with the clicker, Marco could

00:16:12 ◼   ► hook into it in a way that I don't think Siri would enable. But...

00:16:17 ◼   ► Well, now we just set a follow-up for the next podcast. Listen to next week.

00:16:24 ◼   ► A couple of people then wrote in--

00:16:26 ◼   ► I don't think Matthew and I talked about it,

00:16:28 ◼   ► but a couple people have said, if you have--

00:16:30 ◼   ► one of the pains in the butt, if you do have the watch,

00:16:33 ◼   ► it's a little bit easier if you don't

00:16:34 ◼   ► want to use a Siri to do it.

00:16:37 ◼   ► But you still have to bring up--

00:16:39 ◼   ► if you're in a workout, which is often the situation I'm in

00:16:41 ◼   ► where I do want to adjust the volume, like I'm out running

00:16:45 ◼   ► and it gets noisy, like if I'm running

00:16:47 ◼   ► through a noisier traffic neighborhood

00:16:49 ◼   ► and I want to turn the volume up because I can't hear anymore.

00:16:54 ◼   ► On the watch, you still have to poke around a little bit

00:16:57 ◼   ► to get to a screen where you can adjust the volume.

00:17:01 ◼   ► Like, you know, the easiest way, in my opinion,

00:17:03 ◼   ► is to just get to the now playing glance,

00:17:06 ◼   ► which I keep as the first glance,

00:17:09 ◼   ► so it's usually not, you know,

00:17:10 ◼   ► it's like one tap on the sidebar, then tap on now playing.

00:17:13 ◼   ► And then, once you're on now playing,

00:17:15 ◼   ► you can actually change the volume by spinning the crown,

00:17:18 ◼   ► which is really, really nice

00:17:20 ◼   ► when your fingers are sweaty or something like that.

00:17:22 ◼   ► You don't have to poke at the little buttons on screen.

00:17:24 ◼   ► But it would be kind of nice if you could somehow set a preference so that if there's music playing right now through either your phone or the watch,

00:17:32 ◼   ► that you could use the crown from like the watch face to change the volume.

00:17:36 ◼   ► Because right now the crown on the watch face does nothing.

00:17:39 ◼   ► It would be kind of nice if it would change the volume.

00:17:41 ◼   ► So when you spin the crown on the watch face, does it no longer zoom into like that app view?

00:17:47 ◼   ► No.

00:17:48 ◼   ► Okay.

00:17:49 ◼   ► In watchOS 3, it does nothing.

00:17:51 ◼   ► and it doesn't do, they actually,

00:17:53 ◼   ► if you're on the app view,

00:17:54 ◼   ► it does zoom you back towards the watch face.

00:17:58 ◼   ► - Right.

00:17:58 ◼   ► - But when you're on the watch face,

00:18:00 ◼   ► what it used to do in watchOS 2

00:18:01 ◼   ► is it gave you the time travel,

00:18:04 ◼   ► or whatever they called it.

00:18:06 ◼   ► - Yeah, well it used to be that you would zoom in.

00:18:08 ◼   ► Yeah, it was funny 'cause I've observed people

00:18:12 ◼   ► who aren't technical users,

00:18:13 ◼   ► and that was for sure one of the things

00:18:16 ◼   ► that always got them frustrated.

00:18:17 ◼   ► Like I was actually seen by a guy on a plane

00:18:18 ◼   ► who was wearing an Apple Watch,

00:18:21 ◼   ► he was asking about it, you know, how he liked it.

00:18:23 ◼   ► And he generally liked it, but that was,

00:18:25 ◼   ► like that's the fact that he's like,

00:18:27 ◼   ► it keeps zooming in and I don't know why.

00:18:29 ◼   ► Like that was the one thing that was driving him

00:18:31 ◼   ► absolutely up the wall.

00:18:32 ◼   ► So I didn't realize that they had changed it, I guess.

00:18:34 ◼   ► I'm so accustomed to not even touching it

00:18:36 ◼   ► that I didn't notice.

00:18:37 ◼   ► But I think in general, I wouldn't be surprised if,

00:18:40 ◼   ► you know, clearly, and I think we're definitely

00:18:44 ◼   ► both in agreement in this, like Apple,

00:18:47 ◼   ► And there were some unfortunate decisions that were made about how the watch would be

00:18:51 ◼   ► used in version one.

00:18:52 ◼   ► I think they kind of, they went too far down the road of prescribing how people would use

00:18:56 ◼   ► it instead of waiting to understand how people want it, you know, would actually use it.

00:19:00 ◼   ► And one of the casualties of that I think was the functionality of the buttons in general.

00:19:05 ◼   ► And so, yeah, so like in version one, pressing that button was like the whole contacts, like

00:19:10 ◼   ► personal communication crap, whatever, which is now completely gone.

00:19:14 ◼   ► But in general, I think there's still that sort of, it's not fully realized the potential

00:19:18 ◼   ► of those buttons.

00:19:19 ◼   ► Like that, but the button should be much more usable and I bet over time will become even

00:19:24 ◼   ► more usable in apps.

00:19:25 ◼   ► And same thing with the digital crown.

00:19:27 ◼   ► Like what you're talking about makes perfect sense.

00:19:29 ◼   ► If music is playing, why shouldn't that be volume?

00:19:31 ◼   ► And especially if they're going to pursue this focus of being health and fitness, where

00:19:36 ◼   ► a touch screen that that's like the worst possible scenario for a touch screen.

00:19:41 ◼   ► And it's an example of how the, their kind of the health and fitness focus is a, is,

00:19:49 ◼   ► was clearly not what they're thinking about from day one.

00:19:53 ◼   ► It was a part of it, but it wasn't like the thing that is for, cause I think there's things

00:19:57 ◼   ► they would have done differently.

00:19:58 ◼   ► And one of those things they would have done differently is how those buttons are used.

00:20:02 ◼   ► And so I would imagine in, in, in like watchOS 4, for example, they're going to move even

00:20:06 ◼   ► more to those buttons in the crown being actual usable controls?

00:20:12 ◼   ► Right now, if you're in a workout and you have the workout thing is on your... That's

00:20:21 ◼   ► what you see when you're... Because you're doing a walk or a run or something. When you

00:20:24 ◼   ► spin the crown, it just changes the focus from the different things on the screen. Like

00:20:28 ◼   ► if I'm trying and I'm doing a fake run right now, and as I spin it down, it goes from the

00:20:33 ◼   ► elapsed time to the active calories to the heartbeat, you know, and just folk changes focus

00:20:38 ◼   ► I would I would find it much more useful to have that change the volume

00:20:41 ◼   ► Honestly, but that's just me. Yeah. Well, I think yeah and I went again

00:20:47 ◼   ► This is one of those things where they change so much in OS 3 like they really just fundamentally changed how the operating system worked

00:20:54 ◼   ► And you're not gonna get everything in kind of one go which is fine. Like I think that's that's the mistake

00:20:59 ◼   ► I think they made in version one like that it was over it was over prescribed the way you ought to use it without really I

00:21:05 ◼   ► Think having an understanding of how people would use this. I mean you go back

00:21:08 ◼   ► This is what made the the first phone in particular

00:21:13 ◼   ► You know so smart is whether there's this classic story in in design talk like I'm sure you've heard a million times, but where

00:21:21 ◼   ► there is some school or whatever where they they built up this whole new area of the campus or something like that and

00:21:28 ◼   ► instead of putting in sidewalks, they put in like this really nice grass.

00:21:32 ◼   ► And then they observed where the grass got worn down and then they put sidewalks there.

00:21:37 ◼   ► And like that's just a, and you can see there's other examples where there's like a path and

00:21:42 ◼   ► right next to it there's like worn down grass because people are like taking like little

00:21:45 ◼   ► shortcuts and stuff like that.

00:21:47 ◼   ► And with the phone in particular, Apple really took sort of the grass approach where they

00:21:53 ◼   ► got the basics there.

00:21:55 ◼   ► They got a browser, they got a phone, they got an iPod.

00:21:57 ◼   ► And then the rest of it was really that period where folks like Craig Hockenberry or whatever

00:22:03 ◼   ► were figuring out the API and were building side-loaded applications, I think was really

00:22:09 ◼   ► valuable to help Apple really understand what needed to be built and how they should go

00:22:15 ◼   ► about opening up the API and what things might be possible.

00:22:20 ◼   ► And that's the exact opposite process they did with the watch.

00:22:23 ◼   ► The watch, they did too much.

00:22:26 ◼   ► There wasn't enough of a sort of open canvas

00:22:29 ◼   ► to figure out what works and what doesn't.

00:22:32 ◼   ► And now they're having to kind of unwind

00:22:34 ◼   ► what they did before.

00:22:35 ◼   ► And that's just gonna take time.

00:22:37 ◼   ► - I don't know if that story is apocryphal or not,

00:22:39 ◼   ► the story about the paths on campus.

00:22:41 ◼   ► But I remember-- - I remember,

00:22:43 ◼   ► it's a great story though.

00:22:44 ◼   ► - It is a great story.

00:22:45 ◼   ► And there's a truth to it.

00:22:46 ◼   ► 'Cause I remember at Drexel,

00:22:47 ◼   ► when I was there in the late '90s,

00:22:49 ◼   ► there were definite dirt paths through grass,

00:22:53 ◼   ► you know, that were, they're obviously there forever.

00:22:56 ◼   ► That clearly they should have, you know,

00:22:58 ◼   ► I remember when I first heard that story,

00:22:59 ◼   ► I thought specifically about certain areas.

00:23:02 ◼   ► If anybody went to Drexel, it was then,

00:23:07 ◼   ► I don't know if they even call it,

00:23:08 ◼   ► the campus at Drexel has changed so much

00:23:10 ◼   ► since I went there, but we used to, you know,

00:23:11 ◼   ► we called it the quad, the section off Market Street.

00:23:16 ◼   ► Street. There definitely was I mean it couldn't have been more exactly like

00:23:22 ◼   ► that story like here's a plate you know you're supposed to walk all the way over

00:23:26 ◼   ► there and go around this building and everybody just cut through right here I

00:23:30 ◼   ► could think of two examples in Apple's history where the apples done that and

00:23:34 ◼   ► but they're both like classic Matt you remember the classic Mac OS you didn't

00:23:37 ◼   ► use the Mac back then did you I do remember it I but yeah no I didn't two

00:23:42 ◼   ► One of the things I can think of would be Command-Tab, where that was a Windows invention,

00:23:49 ◼   ► where you'd hit Command-Tab.

00:23:50 ◼   ► And originally in Command-Tab in Windows, you would just cycle through apps in most

00:23:56 ◼   ► recently used order.

00:23:58 ◼   ► And obviously Windows users took to it.

00:24:02 ◼   ► But then where it really became a good interface was when they put up the heads-up display

00:24:08 ◼   ► that showed you where, you know, all of your apps in most recent order, so you could see,

00:24:14 ◼   ► "Oh, I need to go four to get to Excel." You know, you'd actually see it. It used to not

00:24:19 ◼   ► have that heads-up display. It would just switch through the apps, you know, and you'd

00:24:23 ◼   ► find out which app you were getting to each time you hit tab. And it became a thing where

00:24:29 ◼   ► there were, I don't know, three or four competing third-party utilities from Mac OS that did

00:24:35 ◼   ► the exact same thing and everybody had one of them installed.

00:24:38 ◼   ► I mean, it was one of those things where I don't know anybody who didn't.

00:24:43 ◼   ► And eventually Apple acquiesced.

00:24:45 ◼   ► I don't know which version of Mac OS it was, but they added it as a system level thing.

00:24:52 ◼   ► And I think they delayed on it because I think there was a sort of reluctance to add anything

00:24:57 ◼   ► that came to Windows first to the Mac.

00:24:59 ◼   ► Yeah, probably.

00:25:01 ◼   ► And then the other one I could think of

00:25:03 ◼   ► was the old Apple menu.

00:25:06 ◼   ► Used to just be-- in the original Mac OS,

00:25:09 ◼   ► the Apple menu had--

00:25:11 ◼   ► I think it still had the About for whatever app you're in.

00:25:19 ◼   ► About this app would be the first item in the Apple menu.

00:25:25 ◼   ► And then the rest of it was just a list of your desk accessories,

00:25:29 ◼   ► which were the little-- and this is super old.

00:25:31 ◼   ► this is like going back to the '80s Mac OS,

00:25:33 ◼   ► which were the little, in DOS terms,

00:25:36 ◼   ► what were they used to called in DOS,

00:25:37 ◼   ► the little way you'd get multitasking?

00:25:40 ◼   ► Like little in-app, resident, in-resident?

00:25:45 ◼   ► - I got nothing for you, sorry.

00:25:48 ◼   ► - Well, I'll think of it.

00:25:50 ◼   ► But anyway, desk accessories were little things

00:25:52 ◼   ► that ran within the memory of the app itself.

00:25:54 ◼   ► So like the calculator and the,

00:25:58 ◼   ► there was a thing called the scrapbook,

00:25:59 ◼   ► which was sort of like a clipboard history,

00:26:01 ◼   ► so you could keep little snippets of text.

00:26:04 ◼   ► And third party utilities came up

00:26:06 ◼   ► that made the Apple menu way more useful,

00:26:07 ◼   ► so that you could put an alias to your hard drive in there.

00:26:11 ◼   ► So you could just go to the Apple menu,

00:26:12 ◼   ► go down to your hard drive, and get a hierarchical list

00:26:15 ◼   ► of every folder.

00:26:16 ◼   ► So you wouldn't have to go to the Finder

00:26:18 ◼   ► and go to your hard drive and double click on a folder,

00:26:20 ◼   ► and then double click on a folder and double click.

00:26:22 ◼   ► You would just go to your Apple menu, go to your hard drive,

00:26:25 ◼   ► go to applications, go to utilities,

00:26:28 ◼   ► and then launch the app from that folder

00:26:30 ◼   ► that you wanted to, or wherever you wanted to go.

00:26:33 ◼   ► But instead of leaving a whole history of Windows

00:26:35 ◼   ► behind of each folder you went to,

00:26:37 ◼   ► there was just a hierarchical goal list of menus.

00:26:39 ◼   ► And that was another one of those things

00:26:42 ◼   ► where everybody had one of these utilities.

00:26:45 ◼   ► I think the one that I used was called Now Menus.

00:26:47 ◼   ► Boy, it's really going back.

00:26:49 ◼   ► But eventually Apple added that to the system as well.

00:26:51 ◼   ► It was like, hey, if everybody's got this,

00:26:53 ◼   ► you should, it oughta be part of the system.

00:26:55 ◼   ► - Yeah, the only, it's funny, the two add-ons

00:26:59 ◼   ► that I still depend on now is, one is from Windows,

00:27:04 ◼   ► because when I use Windows,

00:27:05 ◼   ► I like there's shortcuts to manage,

00:27:08 ◼   ► to move your Windows around.

00:27:10 ◼   ► So you can like snap your Windows

00:27:11 ◼   ► to one side of the desktop or to another

00:27:13 ◼   ► or things like and do all kinds of things.

00:27:15 ◼   ► So once I have one of those on the Mac,

00:27:18 ◼   ► I use one called BetterSnapTool, but that's amazing.

00:27:21 ◼   ► But that's super niche, I doubt Apple will ever add that.

00:27:25 ◼   ► But the other thing, and it's funny because this is,

00:27:28 ◼   ► this is arguably the single thing that keeps me using a Mac instead of like a

00:27:33 ◼   ► Chromebook or, or an iPod or anything is a clipboard manager.

00:27:39 ◼   ► It like,

00:27:40 ◼   ► it's unbelievable how often I use something like that and how much more powerful

00:27:45 ◼   ► that makes, that makes using, using a computer. But again, I guess they,

00:27:50 ◼   ► they are, those are pretty niche. They've already used all the, uh,

00:27:53 ◼   ► taken up all the, all the low hanging fruit. Yeah. Uh,

00:27:55 ◼   ► Which clipboard manager do you use?

00:27:58 ◼   ► - I use one called copy and paste.

00:28:00 ◼   ► I used to use launch, yeah, I used to use launch bar,

00:28:02 ◼   ► but launch bar had this weird bug

00:28:04 ◼   ► where it would just, it wouldn't work after a while.

00:28:06 ◼   ► And they eventually fixed it after it was around

00:28:08 ◼   ► for like years and people were complaining about it.

00:28:10 ◼   ► They kept saying it was Apple's fault,

00:28:11 ◼   ► but like every other clipboard manager had the problem.

00:28:14 ◼   ► But yeah, so I use, I don't remember why I got it.

00:28:17 ◼   ► I mean, I got it for when I would need a replacement

00:28:21 ◼   ► and there's a good review somewhere,

00:28:23 ◼   ► but I've seen no reason to switch, it works well for me.

00:28:26 ◼   ► It keeps a bunch in there, you can do stuff like,

00:28:28 ◼   ► if you've copied stuff, you can paste it

00:28:31 ◼   ► as plain text super easily,

00:28:32 ◼   ► you can make everything all capitals

00:28:33 ◼   ► or take away all the capitals.

00:28:34 ◼   ► Like it, so it does like text transformation

00:28:36 ◼   ► on stuff as well if you need.

00:28:37 ◼   ► So, anyhow, but there's a bunch of them out there,

00:28:39 ◼   ► I think they're all probably pretty good.

00:28:41 ◼   ► - The ones I've used are Launch Bar's built-in one,

00:28:45 ◼   ► which I kind of don't like the display of,

00:28:47 ◼   ► but it's actually what I'm using right now.

00:28:52 ◼   ► Keyboard Maestro, you ever hear of Keyboard Maestro?

00:28:55 ◼   ► - Yeah, I've heard of it.

00:28:56 ◼   ► I can't remember if I tried it, but yeah.

00:28:58 ◼   ► - Keyboard Maestro does so much stuff.

00:28:59 ◼   ► Keyboard Maestro is a great utility.

00:29:02 ◼   ► You could record macros that do all sorts of things,

00:29:05 ◼   ► but really just sort of automate, multi-step,

00:29:08 ◼   ► automate the whole GUI, really.

00:29:10 ◼   ► But it also is sort of, you can, if you want it to,

00:29:14 ◼   ► act as like text expander where you type TLA

00:29:18 ◼   ► and it expands to three-letter acronym

00:29:20 ◼   ► or something like that.

00:29:21 ◼   ► and it has a clipboard history.

00:29:23 ◼   ► Keyboard Maestro's clipboard history is searchable,

00:29:26 ◼   ► which is actually kind of neat.

00:29:27 ◼   ► And Keyboard Maestro--

00:29:28 ◼   ► - Oh, that's, yeah, that would be awesome.

00:29:30 ◼   ► - Keyboard Maestro has a heuristic

00:29:32 ◼   ► that looks for things that look like a password

00:29:35 ◼   ► and bullets them out.

00:29:39 ◼   ► So, and I think only keeps them as,

00:29:41 ◼   ► I forget what else it does.

00:29:42 ◼   ► If it's just a visual thing,

00:29:44 ◼   ► or if it only lets you copy,

00:29:47 ◼   ► actually paste it when it's the topmost thing.

00:29:50 ◼   ► But whatever it does, it's actually never once

00:29:54 ◼   ► did the wrong thing for me.

00:29:55 ◼   ► Like the heuristic is so smart about it,

00:29:57 ◼   ► that however it is that it works,

00:29:59 ◼   ► it's so smart about identifying things that look like,

00:30:04 ◼   ► wow, that looks like a password that somebody would make up

00:30:09 ◼   ► or that like a password utility would make up

00:30:11 ◼   ► that it doesn't get exposed.

00:30:13 ◼   ► And then the one that's most recent, which I've used,

00:30:15 ◼   ► I used in beta, but it hasn't stuck with me

00:30:18 ◼   ► is Payspot from the Tweetbot guys.

00:30:20 ◼   ► - Yeah, the searchable one would be super valuable.

00:30:25 ◼   ► I think, 'cause when I do the daily updates in particular,

00:30:28 ◼   ► where those usually have more quotes and links

00:30:32 ◼   ► than my weekly articles do,

00:30:34 ◼   ► like I will accumulate a ton of links

00:30:37 ◼   ► in the process of writing just one of them.

00:30:39 ◼   ► And yeah, sometimes, particularly if I want

00:30:41 ◼   ► to look something up, like I write about something

00:30:43 ◼   ► and then I forgot, 'cause I end up having like,

00:30:45 ◼   ► I will end up with like well over 100 tabs

00:30:47 ◼   ► every single day after I'm finished writing these,

00:30:50 ◼   ► which is ridiculous.

00:30:51 ◼   ► And so I often find it's easier to just,

00:30:53 ◼   ► and this is how I get a bunch of tabs,

00:30:55 ◼   ► instead of going through all my tabs

00:30:56 ◼   ► and finding the article that I'm looking for,

00:30:58 ◼   ► I'll just open a new window and go to my clipboard manager

00:31:00 ◼   ► and I know the links in there because I just used it.

00:31:03 ◼   ► But if I could search it, that would make it even better.

00:31:06 ◼   ► Yeah, it's funny the weird things that you end up doing

00:31:10 ◼   ► that are just making no sense at all,

00:31:11 ◼   ► but you fall into these patterns, so.

00:31:13 ◼   ► - All right, I will put links to all of those apps

00:31:15 ◼   ► in the show notes, I swear.

00:31:17 ◼   ► - Hey, I mean, for the record, I think this is my,

00:31:22 ◼   ► I don't know, six or seven time on here,

00:31:24 ◼   ► and I got a message, I woke up to a message from you,

00:31:27 ◼   ► including notes for the podcast.

00:31:29 ◼   ► I was very impressed, I think that is a first.

00:31:31 ◼   ► So for the record, the talk show

00:31:35 ◼   ► is getting ever more organized.

00:31:37 ◼   ► So kudos to you.

00:31:39 ◼   ► - We're doing it, it's the same thing,

00:31:40 ◼   ► we talked about it with the, Pansarino last week,

00:31:43 ◼   ► using the iCloud shared notes, which is actually pretty useful.

00:31:48 ◼   ► It is, except that the, maybe because I'm not in Syria,

00:31:54 ◼   ► I don't update my Mac for usually a couple months after the update.

00:31:58 ◼   ► But yeah, it doesn't sync to my iCloud on the Mac.

00:32:02 ◼   ► Right.

00:32:03 ◼   ► But that might be just because I'm not on the current version.

00:32:06 ◼   ► But it reminds me of one of the irritations I have with Apple,

00:32:12 ◼   ► like when they do web apps.

00:32:13 ◼   ► So I have it open in the browser now

00:32:15 ◼   ► because that obviously syncs.

00:32:17 ◼   ► But I think the reason why Apple's web apps

00:32:21 ◼   ► like try to mimic like desktop apps,

00:32:24 ◼   ► but that makes them frustrating to use

00:32:27 ◼   ► 'cause doing something in a browser

00:32:29 ◼   ► isn't as efficient or fast or as good of a user experience

00:32:33 ◼   ► as using a native app without question.

00:32:35 ◼   ► Whereas there are some web apps that I use,

00:32:38 ◼   ► like I do all my writing in a web app,

00:32:39 ◼   ► one called Draft, drafting.com, it's awesome.

00:32:43 ◼   ► But it's, it's, it's a web, like it embraces

00:32:47 ◼   ► it being a web app.

00:32:49 ◼   ► And I think that's the case for all sorts of products.

00:32:52 ◼   ► Like if you embrace the medium that you're on,

00:32:54 ◼   ► the user experience can be really great.

00:32:56 ◼   ► But if you're trying to like mimic one

00:32:58 ◼   ► that's from somewhere else, it's not nearly as good.

00:33:01 ◼   ► Anyhow, that is just sort of a random sort of observation.

00:33:05 ◼   ► I mean, this is the first time I've used the syncing

00:33:08 ◼   ► or sharing thing for notes.

00:33:12 ◼   ► - It's weird, I've been doing it for a couple episodes now,

00:33:14 ◼   ► but I've been running, I'm like you, I'm very reluctant,

00:33:17 ◼   ► and it always seems like I've got something open

00:33:19 ◼   ► and I don't wanna restart, even just restart the machine.

00:33:21 ◼   ► I still haven't updated my iMac to Sierra,

00:33:24 ◼   ► and that's where I record from, so I have it on my phone,

00:33:28 ◼   ► and the phone has the new, fancy new,

00:33:31 ◼   ► share this note with somebody

00:33:32 ◼   ► and get the changes synced feature,

00:33:34 ◼   ► but my Mac's version doesn't.

00:33:37 ◼   ► and then you had the idea to use the iCloud web app,

00:33:40 ◼   ► which never even occurred to me,

00:33:41 ◼   ► 'cause I never use the iCloud web apps

00:33:44 ◼   ► for anything other than find my iPhone.

00:33:46 ◼   ► But it's weird too, because it does try

00:33:50 ◼   ► to mimic a desktop app, but it's not,

00:33:55 ◼   ► it doesn't look anything like the Mac version,

00:34:00 ◼   ► and it doesn't look like the iPad version either.

00:34:02 ◼   ► It's like this, it does look like a desktop app,

00:34:07 ◼   ► but it doesn't look like a Mac one,

00:34:09 ◼   ► and it doesn't look like an iPad app.

00:34:11 ◼   ► - Yeah, who knows what's going on.

00:34:13 ◼   ► - And there's all, I don't understand

00:34:15 ◼   ► how anybody uses web apps,

00:34:17 ◼   ► 'cause it's like I tried to use the shortcut shift command H

00:34:19 ◼   ► to make a text to header, which works in,

00:34:24 ◼   ► it's a keyboard shortcut I know

00:34:26 ◼   ► from the desktop version of Note,

00:34:28 ◼   ► but of course Safari ate that keystroke

00:34:30 ◼   ► and tried to take me home.

00:34:32 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:34:34 ◼   ► - But it was smart enough to say,

00:34:36 ◼   ► do you want to, are you sure you want to do that

00:34:38 ◼   ► because you've got unsaved changes

00:34:39 ◼   ► in this text editing field?

00:34:41 ◼   ► I would much prefer an app that just was like written

00:34:45 ◼   ► in old 1999 HTML.

00:34:48 ◼   ► - Yeah, the ones that I use, like they're ones that,

00:34:52 ◼   ► like they are, they're pure web,

00:34:55 ◼   ► when they're pure, they're for the web,

00:34:57 ◼   ► like just unabashedly.

00:34:59 ◼   ► And this is something that I think,

00:35:00 ◼   ► I think this is one of the reasons why Google Docs,

00:35:02 ◼   ► especially it's gotten better now,

00:35:04 ◼   ► but it was very frustrating because it kind of

00:35:06 ◼   ► was trying to mimic a desktop interface.

00:35:09 ◼   ► I mean, obviously Docs is some amazing things,

00:35:11 ◼   ► particularly the collaboration stuff and all that.

00:35:13 ◼   ► But I think the apps that I actually like using on the web

00:35:17 ◼   ► and like for like the writing one, for example,

00:35:19 ◼   ► it's just a plain field and you get the benefits

00:35:21 ◼   ► of a web app where stuff's saved instantly

00:35:23 ◼   ► and if anything happens like to your computer,

00:35:26 ◼   ► like you never lose data ever.

00:35:28 ◼   ► Like it's, to me it works very well.

00:35:31 ◼   ► But the other thing that I do

00:35:34 ◼   ► that I think makes it much more tolerable is,

00:35:36 ◼   ► oh, speaking of Mac utilities, is Fluid,

00:35:39 ◼   ► where you get like a single site browser

00:35:41 ◼   ► and then you can make an icon.

00:35:42 ◼   ► So basically when I open like Draft for example,

00:35:45 ◼   ► or WordPress or MailChimp,

00:35:47 ◼   ► like the various web apps that I use frequently,

00:35:50 ◼   ► they all have their own, they're like their own apps.

00:35:53 ◼   ► And you click, you make it in Fluid and you click it

00:35:56 ◼   ► and it opens up with its own icon in the dock

00:35:58 ◼   ► and it's separate, and so it's not buried

00:36:00 ◼   ► in my hundreds of tabs, it's like its own distinct entity.

00:36:03 ◼   ► And to me, that's another app I cannot live without.

00:36:08 ◼   ► Like if I actually had to use web apps inside a browser,

00:36:12 ◼   ► like just, I'm so disorganized in general,

00:36:14 ◼   ► it'd be intolerable, but Fluid makes it feel

00:36:18 ◼   ► like a normal app, which is just

00:36:20 ◼   ► from a navigational standpoint.

00:36:21 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:36:23 ◼   ► - I have used Fluid in the past for once or twice

00:36:25 ◼   ► when I had to use a web app, because it's,

00:36:27 ◼   ► sometimes you want it to be a command tab target,

00:36:29 ◼   ► but it's not like a real app at all.

00:36:31 ◼   ► It's terrible.

00:36:32 ◼   ► - No, no, I meant from a navigational standpoint,

00:36:34 ◼   ► where to your point, where you can find it very easily

00:36:37 ◼   ► and you can go to it.

00:36:38 ◼   ► But again, well, I think when you get apps

00:36:42 ◼   ► that are mimicking desktop apps in the web,

00:36:45 ◼   ► they feel awful.

00:36:46 ◼   ► But again, just to use Draft as an example,

00:36:49 ◼   ► you open it up and you open an article

00:36:52 ◼   ► and all it is is it's a blank page and you type.

00:36:54 ◼   ► And it's basically a text editor

00:36:56 ◼   ► and it handles markdown and stuff like that.

00:36:58 ◼   ► So I find it, there's lots of benefits I find

00:37:02 ◼   ► from being a web app, including particularly the,

00:37:04 ◼   ► like I've never ever lost stuff that I've written ever.

00:37:08 ◼   ► Because even if my computer were to crash

00:37:09 ◼   ► or something like stuff doesn't get corrupted,

00:37:12 ◼   ► it's just, it's always there.

00:37:14 ◼   ► And to me, it's because it's not trying to do too much,

00:37:18 ◼   ► not trying to put all these menu bars there

00:37:21 ◼   ► and make it feel like it's Word,

00:37:24 ◼   ► but now it's on the web, kind of like Google Docs does.

00:37:26 ◼   ► and all that sort of thing, it's perfectly,

00:37:30 ◼   ► it's more than tolerable, it's downright enjoyable to use,

00:37:33 ◼   ► and those are the ones that I really appreciate.

00:37:36 ◼   ► - I think it's been a while, but I know that

00:37:39 ◼   ► for people of our generation, losing data on your computer

00:37:44 ◼   ► used to be like part of life.

00:37:48 ◼   ► - Yep, it was just like, "Oh, I guess this is

00:37:51 ◼   ► "my unlucky day."

00:37:52 ◼   ► - Right, like your system would freeze up,

00:37:54 ◼   ► the app would just crash and vanish.

00:37:57 ◼   ► No apps in the old days did auto save.

00:38:01 ◼   ► You were stuck with the last time you ever hit Command + S

00:38:03 ◼   ► and everybody had a horror tale.

00:38:05 ◼   ► I don't think it ever really happened to me

00:38:06 ◼   ► in a catastrophic way, but everybody knew somebody at least.

00:38:09 ◼   ► It wasn't like you had to know somebody

00:38:10 ◼   ► who knew somebody who's brother.

00:38:11 ◼   ► You knew somebody who had happened to,

00:38:13 ◼   ► where they opened up Word or whatever they used,

00:38:16 ◼   ► hit Command + N, started writing their paper,

00:38:19 ◼   ► got to the end, and that's when,

00:38:21 ◼   ► maybe when they went to hit print,

00:38:22 ◼   ► the print driver crashed.

00:38:24 ◼   ► And because they'd never saved, the whole thing was gone.

00:38:27 ◼   ► It was just irrevocable.

00:38:30 ◼   ► And there was nothing you could do.

00:38:31 ◼   ► There was no cache of temporary saved files.

00:38:35 ◼   ► No matter how much of an expert you were at computing,

00:38:38 ◼   ► there was absolutely nothing you could do.

00:38:40 ◼   ► And we just accepted that, oh, well,

00:38:41 ◼   ► I guess I should have hit Command-S.

00:38:44 ◼   ► - I know, we blamed ourselves.

00:38:45 ◼   ► - I've written about this.

00:38:47 ◼   ► And it was actually, the main reason

00:38:50 ◼   ► was a common scenario was that that first command s was sort of a pain in the ass because

00:38:54 ◼   ► you'd have to pick a location and then pick a file name. And subsequent command s's are

00:38:59 ◼   ► always very easy because there's nothing else to do. You've already given it a location

00:39:03 ◼   ► and a name and the command s you just, you know, in the old days you did have to wait,

00:39:07 ◼   ► you'd have to wait like a second or two for the actual file to write. But it was nowhere

00:39:11 ◼   ► near as much of a cognitive hurdle of that first command s would, you know, you know,

00:39:17 ◼   ► The right interface, I think this is one of those ways

00:39:19 ◼   ► that the original Mac team got it wrong,

00:39:21 ◼   ► was in those days, if that's how it was gonna be,

00:39:24 ◼   ► where there was no autosave, when you hit Command + N,

00:39:27 ◼   ► instead of immediately giving you a new untitled window,

00:39:30 ◼   ► it should have immediately forced you

00:39:31 ◼   ► to pick a location and a file name.

00:39:35 ◼   ► The first thing, before you get that window

00:39:38 ◼   ► where you could start typing,

00:39:39 ◼   ► you should have had to pick a location and file name.

00:39:45 ◼   ► - Well, I think, so one of the things that's great about iOS,

00:39:48 ◼   ► and this is another reason I use web apps,

00:39:49 ◼   ► is because iOS was from the ground up

00:39:54 ◼   ► kind of designed that way, and apps in general

00:39:56 ◼   ► are always saving, and they're always syncing,

00:39:58 ◼   ► you know, syncing what they have to the cloud.

00:40:01 ◼   ► There's no like distinct sort of save process.

00:40:03 ◼   ► It's sort of integral to how they work.

00:40:06 ◼   ► So I have a lot of apps where I have a iOS version,

00:40:10 ◼   ► and then I have the web version on my Mac,

00:40:14 ◼   ► And I like those because they're always in sync constantly.

00:40:17 ◼   ► Whereas ones that have a Mac app and ones that have an iOS app, the Mac app,

00:40:22 ◼   ► the sync is never like perfect every time. Like for me,

00:40:25 ◼   ► like if I don't trust the sync that it's going to be synced up every single

00:40:29 ◼   ► time, like it almost like to me,

00:40:33 ◼   ► that's trumped like the user interface of like, of like using a native app,

00:40:37 ◼   ► which I do prefer native apps in general.

00:40:39 ◼   ► But if I don't have full confidence that it's going to be synced every single

00:40:43 ◼   ► I will put up with the web app just to have that knowledge

00:40:48 ◼   ► that's always there, because to me having it always available is key.

00:40:52 ◼   ► And I know that Apple tried to rejigger the document model, what was it, back in Lion,

00:40:55 ◼   ► to make it more iOS-like.

00:41:02 ◼   ► But the problem was, I think that still drives me up the wall.

00:41:04 ◼   ► Actually, that's one of the reasons I stopped using iWork.

00:41:10 ◼   ► I know they added it back in bits and pieces, and there's some terminal commands you can get to read it.

00:41:13 ◼   ► restore like the save as button and stuff. But I know you hold down the option.

00:41:17 ◼   ► You're always that what it is. I think you can, you can add a permanently.

00:41:20 ◼   ► I think there's a terminal command where you can,

00:41:21 ◼   ► you can have it in the menu permanently.

00:41:22 ◼   ► So you have to press option every single time. But the,

00:41:25 ◼   ► I destroyed so many documents by forgetting to like duplicate and like the auto

00:41:30 ◼   ► save because it's, it's, well, it's like the path thing. Like once,

00:41:34 ◼   ► once you have the muscle memory and you're used to doing it a certain way,

00:41:38 ◼   ► even if that's not the best way, like you're, it's, it's,

00:41:42 ◼   ► at least for people who have been using it for years,

00:41:45 ◼   ► it's like too late.

00:41:46 ◼   ► But anyhow, so now I'm stuck using web apps.

00:41:51 ◼   ► But like I said, in the right context, I like them.

00:41:54 ◼   ► We're 43 minutes in, we haven't talked about anything.

00:42:00 ◼   ► - Anyway, long story short, the AirPods do have Siri commands.

00:42:05 ◼   ► That was the best digression ever.

00:42:07 ◼   ► I will say this though, those Siri commands

00:42:10 ◼   ► controlling the audio on the AirPods, they do work and they've worked remarkably well

00:42:15 ◼   ► ever since it was pointed out to me that they work. I don't know why it failed for me the

00:42:18 ◼   ► first time. But they're not instantaneous. It's the double tap. There's a moment before

00:42:25 ◼   ► you hear the Siri, "Okay, I'm listening," and then there's a moment after that before

00:42:29 ◼   ► it'll actually catch everything you say. So it works, but it's nowhere near as instantaneous

00:42:35 ◼   ► is just clicking a button on the earphone cable to just go volume up, volume up, or

00:42:41 ◼   ► something like that.

00:42:43 ◼   ► Interesting.

00:42:44 ◼   ► So the only controls that you have on the AirPods are trigger Siri or take them out

00:42:49 ◼   ► of your AirPods, right?

00:42:50 ◼   ► Yes.

00:42:51 ◼   ► There's no extra like...

00:42:52 ◼   ► There's nothing else.

00:42:53 ◼   ► There's no options for like triple clip.

00:42:55 ◼   ► You double tap for Siri.

00:42:57 ◼   ► There's no way to say that if I triple tap or quadruple tap or something like that to

00:43:01 ◼   ► do something else.

00:43:02 ◼   ► Maybe they'll do that in the future.

00:43:03 ◼   ► Maybe not because it's a little finicky.

00:43:06 ◼   ► Overall, this is not a deal breaker for me by any part.

00:43:09 ◼   ► The only headphones I wanna use

00:43:11 ◼   ► other than the ones I use for podcasting are AirPods.

00:43:14 ◼   ► It is though the only minus I can think of with them.

00:43:18 ◼   ► - Huh, that's interesting.

00:43:21 ◼   ► I'm worried, I know you said that they fit better

00:43:23 ◼   ► than the regular ear ones,

00:43:24 ◼   ► which don't fit in my ears at all.

00:43:27 ◼   ► So I'm gonna get them, I'm very intrigued by them,

00:43:30 ◼   ► But that specific point is a little bit of a,

00:43:33 ◼   ► it's weird, I can see both.

00:43:34 ◼   ► 'Cause I have been in a situation

00:43:36 ◼   ► where I both want to take them out of my ear,

00:43:37 ◼   ► but then I also have to hit pause.

00:43:39 ◼   ► So that idea of it doing it once is really compelling.

00:43:42 ◼   ► For the same situation, like if you want to talk to somebody

00:43:44 ◼   ► and you want to take it out of your ear.

00:43:47 ◼   ► But at the same time, I'm worried about fit

00:43:49 ◼   ► and I'm worried about the, yeah, the having that control.

00:43:53 ◼   ► I use the clicker, I have the Beats ones,

00:43:55 ◼   ► and I use that clicker all the time.

00:43:57 ◼   ► - I did too with the Beats ones.

00:43:59 ◼   ► All right, let's take a break and thank our first sponsor.

00:44:02 ◼   ► It is our good friends at Backblaze.

00:44:07 ◼   ► Backblaze, you know these guys.

00:44:09 ◼   ► They offer unlimited native backup for the Mac and for PC.

00:44:13 ◼   ► I don't know, I've never used a PC,

00:44:17 ◼   ► so you have to take their word for that.

00:44:19 ◼   ► But on a Mac, I can guarantee you it is excellent.

00:44:23 ◼   ► No credit card required, no risk.

00:44:25 ◼   ► You get a 15-day free trial

00:44:26 ◼   ► at backblaze.com/daringfireball.

00:44:30 ◼   ► I say this every time.

00:44:32 ◼   ► I wish that they would stop sponsoring the show,

00:44:34 ◼   ► because they would write to me and say, sorry, John, nobody

00:44:37 ◼   ► is signing up anymore, because everybody

00:44:39 ◼   ► listens to the talk show is signed up for backblaze.

00:44:41 ◼   ► I would love it.

00:44:42 ◼   ► It would make me feel better.

00:44:43 ◼   ► Even though I do like the money that they

00:44:45 ◼   ► pay to sponsor the show, I would feel better

00:44:48 ◼   ► knowing that everybody who is listening to this show

00:44:50 ◼   ► has some sort of offline, out of their office backup.

00:44:56 ◼   ► Use it in addition.

00:44:57 ◼   ► You don't have to use it as your only backup.

00:44:59 ◼   ► You could, in theory.

00:45:00 ◼   ► I think backup is one of those things that really should be--

00:45:04 ◼   ► you should have multiple layers of it.

00:45:06 ◼   ► So use Time Machine.

00:45:07 ◼   ► Use Super Duper or something like that

00:45:09 ◼   ► to make a clone of your startup disk.

00:45:12 ◼   ► Do those things.

00:45:12 ◼   ► Hard drives, external hard drives, are relatively cheap.

00:45:14 ◼   ► You can buy them, especially if you get the spinning disk ones.

00:45:17 ◼   ► You can get them just for backup, and they're so cheap.

00:45:20 ◼   ► Do it.

00:45:20 ◼   ► But having a backup that's off-site is such a--

00:45:26 ◼   ► I say it every time-- it makes you sleep better.

00:45:28 ◼   ► It is such a relief to know that everything--

00:45:31 ◼   ► and backplays has no limit.

00:45:32 ◼   ► So you think, well, I'd like to sign up,

00:45:34 ◼   ► but I've got a giant hard drive full of all of these movies

00:45:39 ◼   ► and photos.

00:45:41 ◼   ► I don't want to have to decide what I back up on.

00:45:43 ◼   ► It's unlimited.

00:45:44 ◼   ► It doesn't matter.

00:45:45 ◼   ► You pay $5 per Mac per month--

00:45:49 ◼   ► five bucks a month for each Mac.

00:45:50 ◼   ► And it doesn't matter how much you have.

00:45:52 ◼   ► They'll just back it all up.

00:45:53 ◼   ► The only hitch is that it just takes longer

00:45:56 ◼   ► for that initial backup

00:45:57 ◼   ► to actually upload everything you've got.

00:45:59 ◼   ► So the more data you have, yes,

00:46:01 ◼   ► there's no magic that will let 10 terabytes update

00:46:05 ◼   ► in an hour.

00:46:06 ◼   ► It's not gonna happen.

00:46:07 ◼   ► But however long it takes, once it's updated,

00:46:09 ◼   ► it just incrementally runs from there.

00:46:12 ◼   ► I have never noticed it.

00:46:14 ◼   ► I mean, I've been talking about

00:46:16 ◼   ► problems with some other apps that take up space.

00:46:21 ◼   ► I often have activity monitor running

00:46:23 ◼   ► and I'm looking at apps that are taking up too much CPU.

00:46:26 ◼   ► I've never seen back plays pop up into my list of CPU usage.

00:46:30 ◼   ► It never slows down your machine.

00:46:32 ◼   ► I have no idea when it runs.

00:46:33 ◼   ► I don't know, I just set it to the default settings

00:46:35 ◼   ► and let it go.

00:46:36 ◼   ► I never notice and it's always there

00:46:38 ◼   ► and when I've checked just to see what's in my back plays,

00:46:40 ◼   ► it's always up to date.

00:46:41 ◼   ► It is an amazing service.

00:46:44 ◼   ► The Mac software is written by former Apple engineers.

00:46:46 ◼   ► It's totally native.

00:46:47 ◼   ► It's just a simple control panel and the system preferences.

00:46:50 ◼   ► And there's no gimmicks or additional charges.

00:46:53 ◼   ► There's no trick to this $5 a month per device thing.

00:46:57 ◼   ► That's the offer and that's it.

00:46:58 ◼   ► So go to backblaze.com/daringfireball.

00:47:02 ◼   ► Then they'll know you came from here.

00:47:03 ◼   ► You get 15 days to try it free.

00:47:06 ◼   ► Do that.

00:47:06 ◼   ► You won't be charged a nickel before then.

00:47:08 ◼   ► And then you just start paying after that.

00:47:10 ◼   ► So my thanks to Backblaze.

00:47:12 ◼   ► Go sign up for them.

00:47:13 ◼   ► Sign up your parents.

00:47:14 ◼   ► Sign up anybody you know.

00:47:15 ◼   ► Get everybody backed up.

00:47:18 ◼   ► - I am a happy customer.

00:47:20 ◼   ► - It's a great service.

00:47:25 ◼   ► All right, what else we got on the agenda?

00:47:28 ◼   ► Did you see on Twitter, I tweeted a couple,

00:47:30 ◼   ► like a week or two ago that Amy's watch fell apart?

00:47:33 ◼   ► - I did, yes.

00:47:35 ◼   ► It's funny because you, well, I think you're gonna describe

00:47:38 ◼   ► what happened, but my wife has been complaining

00:47:40 ◼   ► that her watch is getting really bad

00:47:42 ◼   ► at heart rate monitoring.

00:47:44 ◼   ► - Oh, it's gonna fall apart.

00:47:45 ◼   ► - Yeah, I know, so.

00:47:47 ◼   ► - I guarantee it, she's probably like three weeks,

00:47:49 ◼   ► three weeks ahead of Amy.

00:47:51 ◼   ► So that's what happened.

00:47:53 ◼   ► So Amy has a 38 millimeter stainless steel Apple Watch

00:47:58 ◼   ► that was-- - Yep, same as my watch.

00:47:59 ◼   ► - Just very early, maybe even ordered,

00:48:01 ◼   ► like when they first went on sale,

00:48:03 ◼   ► and they were famously back ordered for a while.

00:48:06 ◼   ► So sometime in May of last year is when she got it.

00:48:09 ◼   ► She's worn it not necessarily every day,

00:48:12 ◼   ► but she's worn it most days,

00:48:14 ◼   ► and she loves it for the fitness tracking.

00:48:16 ◼   ► It is first and foremost a fitness tracker for her.

00:48:19 ◼   ► She wears it when she works out.

00:48:20 ◼   ► She wears it to fill her circles every day.

00:48:22 ◼   ► And a couple of weeks ago, I'm not quite sure exactly,

00:48:26 ◼   ► she just started vaguely, again, she blames me

00:48:29 ◼   ► for everything that goes wrong with every Apple product.

00:48:31 ◼   ► It's not even like she asks for help, she just blames me.

00:48:34 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:48:35 ◼   ► And she blamed me that she was getting less credit

00:48:39 ◼   ► for things and, you know, like some things

00:48:42 ◼   ► like a workout in the gym, maybe some days you are feeling it

00:48:47 ◼   ► and you're more motivated or you have more energy

00:48:49 ◼   ► and you're an hour doing the same exercise,

00:48:53 ◼   ► maybe you do burn more calories

00:48:55 ◼   ► because you're more into it.

00:48:57 ◼   ► But she was getting fewer calories burned counted,

00:49:01 ◼   ► even for things like walking to school to pick Jonas up,

00:49:04 ◼   ► if she set like a walk thing, which you'd think,

00:49:06 ◼   ► which should be very, very close every single day,

00:49:09 ◼   ► and usually used to be, and hers was very low.

00:49:12 ◼   ► And then she upgraded to watchOS 3 and it went the other way and she started getting

00:49:15 ◼   ► like seemingly extra credit for her calories burned and she didn't complain as much then

00:49:21 ◼   ► but she still thought something was flaky.

00:49:23 ◼   ► And then the other, about a week ago, she woke up and she went to take her watch off

00:49:27 ◼   ► the charger and the whole back just stuck to the magnetic charger.

00:49:31 ◼   ► Yeah, I think you had mentioned that.

00:49:34 ◼   ► So after my wife was like literally like two days after you talked about that, she was

00:49:40 ◼   ► complaining of the same thing about the track not working so I took the charger

00:49:43 ◼   ► and I was like did it like a bunch of times attaching and unattaching it

00:49:47 ◼   ► seems would pop off it hasn't popped off yet but no same situation she's she's

00:49:51 ◼   ► worn it pretty much daily since she got it at the same time period and has the

00:49:55 ◼   ► exact same same model has exact same complaints so yeah I and I I'm looking

00:50:00 ◼   ► forward to getting a look at the watch it hurts apparently so seems like a

00:50:03 ◼   ► common failure I tweeted a picture of it and and cracked a very snarky joke

00:50:09 ◼   ► because I happened to follow a couple of other watch things on Twitter and I

00:50:14 ◼   ► forget who it was what was the company pet pet tech had came out with a new

00:50:19 ◼   ► watch and I I tweeted the same day I tweeted a link to this new petech watch

00:50:26 ◼   ► and you know which is like a $25,000 dive watch and I said I wonder what type

00:50:34 ◼   ► but glued Patek to seal the case back.

00:50:38 ◼   ► And I, of course, I have way too many followers.

00:50:41 ◼   ► - Of course people took it way too seriously.

00:50:42 ◼   ► - Right, I can't tweet something like that

00:50:44 ◼   ► without having two or three, four people

00:50:46 ◼   ► think I'm being serious, and then they were like,

00:50:49 ◼   ► Patek doesn't glue their watches together, John.

00:50:51 ◼   ► And it was like, yes, I know.

00:50:53 ◼   ► - I know, you feel bad kind of making fun of them

00:50:56 ◼   ► 'cause they're trying to help,

00:50:57 ◼   ► but it's the earnestness in the replies that it,

00:51:00 ◼   ► I get that sometimes as well.

00:51:03 ◼   ► So, but the other, the more interesting thing was I got a whole bunch of replies from people

00:51:08 ◼   ► who were like, "Same thing happened to me.

00:51:10 ◼   ► Same thing happened to me."

00:51:13 ◼   ► Seems like it's more common with the stainless steel ones, at least anecdotally based on

00:51:18 ◼   ► Twitter followers who tweeted me about it.

00:51:21 ◼   ► It, because it wasn't only steel ones, but it was primarily steel ones.

00:51:26 ◼   ► And knowing that the aluminum sport models sell in greater quantity, you would think

00:51:31 ◼   ► that if it was as likely to happen to any other watch,

00:51:33 ◼   ► it would be mostly the sport models.

00:51:35 ◼   ► So I think that the problem is more typical with the steel.

00:51:37 ◼   ► I don't know if it's because they went through

00:51:41 ◼   ► a different production line, and that was the production line

00:51:44 ◼   ► where the problem was.

00:51:45 ◼   ► I don't know if it was that maybe they used the same glue,

00:51:48 ◼   ► but that glue adhesed better to aluminum than to steel.

00:51:53 ◼   ► Could just be, honestly, if you think about it,

00:51:55 ◼   ► it could just be Apple has, what, 10 years of expertise

00:51:59 ◼   ► working with aluminum and stainless steel is relatively new to their...

00:52:04 ◼   ► Yeah, that's probably the explanation right there.

00:52:08 ◼   ► But anyway, long story short, a whole bunch of people wrote and said it happened to them.

00:52:12 ◼   ► They took it to the Apple Store and it was, you know, you got to wait.

00:52:14 ◼   ► They don't just give you a replacement on the spot, but they take the watch away and

00:52:18 ◼   ► give you a replacement even if it's out of warranty.

00:52:21 ◼   ► And Amy's was out of warranty because I haven't bought AppleCare for any Apple products since

00:52:25 ◼   ► 1991.

00:52:27 ◼   ► So I did.

00:52:29 ◼   ► I took it to the Apple store.

00:52:30 ◼   ► I did not seem to be recognized, which I'm always worried about, because I want to report

00:52:34 ◼   ► on this as, you know, like what if I'm just a normal Apple customer?

00:52:38 ◼   ► What happens when you take your Apple Watch in after it falls apart on the charger?

00:52:44 ◼   ► I'm pretty sure that the genius guy I dealt with didn't recognize me.

00:52:52 ◼   ► As soon as I described the problem, he started typing it into his iPod there.

00:52:56 ◼   ► The trouble with shooting things...

00:52:57 ◼   ► or two?

00:52:58 ◼   ► Well, he didn't.

00:53:01 ◼   ► It didn't seem-- at first-- and he looked it up,

00:53:03 ◼   ► and he had to type in the serial number.

00:53:05 ◼   ► And then when he described the problem, he said, oh, good.

00:53:10 ◼   ► Even though this is not a warranty, I can cover this.

00:53:13 ◼   ► And it seemed new to him.

00:53:14 ◼   ► And then he laughed and said the first question--

00:53:18 ◼   ► I'd already told him how it was discovered

00:53:20 ◼   ► that it wasn't dropped or anything, just pulling it off

00:53:23 ◼   ► the charger.

00:53:23 ◼   ► And he said, oh, the first question

00:53:25 ◼   ► is, did the customer discover the problem removing

00:53:27 ◼   ► a watch from the charger.

00:53:29 ◼   ► - Yeah, so it's definitely a known thing.

00:53:31 ◼   ► It's in the system. - It's so known, yeah.

00:53:33 ◼   ► It's so known that there's a chain through the,

00:53:35 ◼   ► you know, how did this happen, that begins with,

00:53:38 ◼   ► did it happen pulling the watch off the charger?

00:53:41 ◼   ► So, you know, as we record, the watch is in that

00:53:45 ◼   ► three to five day, we'll tell you when it comes back, period.

00:53:48 ◼   ► I'm curious if they're gonna, if they replace it,

00:53:52 ◼   ► if they're going to replace it with a Series Zero

00:53:55 ◼   ► or a Series One.

00:53:57 ◼   ► Yeah, that's a good question.

00:54:00 ◼   ► The trouble with the app, I kind of want it because I'm on this swimming thing now, so

00:54:04 ◼   ► I kind of want to get the, well first off, Craig Hockenberry is apparently a popular

00:54:11 ◼   ► guest in this episode, but he's written about that he's been using the original Apple Watch

00:54:15 ◼   ► for swimming ever since he got it, and he's swimming in the ocean where it's probably,

00:54:19 ◼   ► I would imagine the corrosiveness is more of a problem.

00:54:23 ◼   ► But the problem is that the workout app does not, you can't get the swimming on the original

00:54:29 ◼   ► Apple Watch, even with the updated OS, like Apple, it's just not included.

00:54:33 ◼   ► So you have to get a new watch.

00:54:35 ◼   ► The problem is, I mean, I've kind of stopped wearing the Apple Watch in day-to-day things.

00:54:41 ◼   ► For me, I've trimmed my notifications so much that when I get a notification, I almost

00:54:46 ◼   ► always want to deal with it on the phone anyway.

00:54:49 ◼   ► I'm just super aggressive about not getting hardly any notifications, but and the delay

00:54:55 ◼   ► in looking at the time was just that was kind of, I got fed up with it.

00:55:00 ◼   ► So I'm back to a regular watch most of the time, but I would like to, I'd still like

00:55:05 ◼   ► to track, you know, the actual exercising.

00:55:08 ◼   ► So I want to get a, maybe I'm considering getting a new one.

00:55:11 ◼   ► The problem is I personally just don't find the aluminum ones good looking at all.

00:55:16 ◼   ► Like to me, the stainless steel still looks so much better.

00:55:19 ◼   ► And actually the one that looks really great is the white one.

00:55:22 ◼   ► So but the problem is I can't really justify getting the new edition.

00:55:27 ◼   ► Right?

00:55:28 ◼   ► If I'm just using it for workouts, like, well, maybe I'll start wearing it day to day.

00:55:32 ◼   ► I'm like, well, no, I don't know.

00:55:34 ◼   ► So I'm stuck in paralysis right now, but we'll see.

00:55:39 ◼   ► I'll probably get one of the sport ones.

00:55:41 ◼   ► I think it would be, I should anyway, just to see what it's like, how it's improved

00:55:46 ◼   ► relative to the current one.

00:55:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, anyway, that was my story about the Apple Watch.

00:55:50 ◼   ► So I wonder--

00:55:53 ◼   ► - I will, I look forward, I don't look forward,

00:55:56 ◼   ► but it sounds like I will be corroborating it soon.

00:55:58 ◼   ► Exact same symptoms that you had.

00:56:01 ◼   ► - Do you wanna talk about,

00:56:04 ◼   ► I don't wanna spend a long time on it,

00:56:05 ◼   ► but this story of Dash, the developer of the Dash app,

00:56:10 ◼   ► anybody who's been reading Tearing Fireball

00:56:14 ◼   ► over the last week would know it.

00:56:16 ◼   ► Long story short, do you want to summarize it?

00:56:21 ◼   ► It's such a weird story.

00:56:24 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think that, well, I think that the,

00:56:26 ◼   ► I personally don't want to spend on tech quality

00:56:28 ◼   ► in part because it's still kind of unclear.

00:56:31 ◼   ► There's a new story that Renee Ritchie wrote this morning

00:56:34 ◼   ► that I haven't fully read that apparently is,

00:56:36 ◼   ► more details are coming out.

00:56:38 ◼   ► And this is one of those things like it's,

00:56:41 ◼   ► there's going to be inherent speculation here.

00:56:44 ◼   ► I think the only comment I would have,

00:56:46 ◼   ► like it sounds like this guy made some mistakes

00:56:49 ◼   ► and probably, you know, what's the saying?

00:56:51 ◼   ► Like the coverup is always worse than the crime

00:56:54 ◼   ► and like wasn't fully transparent about his situation.

00:56:59 ◼   ► And so it's easy to look at it and put in balance

00:57:02 ◼   ► and say, well, Apple gave him a chance and did this stuff

00:57:05 ◼   ► and he did these bad things.

00:57:06 ◼   ► And you kind of weigh the situation

00:57:08 ◼   ► as one against the other.

00:57:09 ◼   ► The only, I guess the only pushback I would have to that

00:57:13 ◼   ► is we're dealing, on one side is the biggest corporation

00:57:17 ◼   ► in the world where this particular developer

00:57:20 ◼   ► and app doesn't make any difference to their bottom line.

00:57:24 ◼   ► And you have this other guy where like this is his life,

00:57:26 ◼   ► it's his job.

00:57:27 ◼   ► And that changes sort of the moral calculus

00:57:32 ◼   ► for lack of a better term.

00:57:33 ◼   ► Like it sounds like this guy definitely screwed up

00:57:35 ◼   ► and he kind of covered his tracks.

00:57:38 ◼   ► And you could be a very moralistic and legalistic about it

00:57:42 ◼   ► and say like, "Sorry, you screwed up.

00:57:44 ◼   ► "Apple's justified here."

00:57:45 ◼   ► And that's not wrong, but I think it's on Apple.

00:57:50 ◼   ► And you have this situation with Google

00:57:52 ◼   ► with YouTube accounts being suspended

00:57:54 ◼   ► or AdSense, like just money disappearing.

00:57:56 ◼   ► This has happened again and again,

00:57:58 ◼   ► where the balance of power and the balance of injury

00:58:02 ◼   ► is so out of whack that I think it behooves

00:58:06 ◼   ► the sort of big players to have more grace

00:58:10 ◼   ► and more understanding.

00:58:11 ◼   ► And hopefully that's the way it's gonna work out.

00:58:13 ◼   ► But I think that's just the main point I would make.

00:58:15 ◼   ► This isn't like a one to one,

00:58:16 ◼   ► like who's right and who's wrong.

00:58:18 ◼   ► You have to consider like what are the consequences

00:58:20 ◼   ► of these actions.

00:58:22 ◼   ► And hopefully it's gonna all work out in the end.

00:58:24 ◼   ► And fortunately for this guy,

00:58:25 ◼   ► he's selling an app for developers,

00:58:27 ◼   ► so him not being in the Mac App Store in particular,

00:58:31 ◼   ► he'll probably be okay.

00:58:34 ◼   ► But anyhow, that's just my kind of big picture

00:58:37 ◼   ► sort of observation about the whole thing.

00:58:39 ◼   ► Yeah, the developer's name is Bogd--

00:58:41 ◼   ► I hope I pronounced it close enough.

00:58:43 ◼   ► He's from Romania, Bogdan Popescu.

00:58:48 ◼   ► And he's still, I think, is fairly young.

00:58:51 ◼   ► And it was confusing at first, because more or less

00:58:54 ◼   ► the story is that there were two developer accounts tied

00:58:57 ◼   ► that were related to the same bank account and same credit

00:58:59 ◼   ► card.

00:59:01 ◼   ► And the one account was full of mostly cheesy apps.

00:59:06 ◼   ► And the other account only had the Dash apps.

00:59:10 ◼   ► Dash is an API browser and snippet browser.

00:59:16 ◼   ► And snippets meaning you can enter your own little snippets

00:59:18 ◼   ► of text, like if you do tech support or something like that

00:59:21 ◼   ► and you have a bunch of frequently used responses,

00:59:24 ◼   ► you can invoke Dash, type a couple of letters

00:59:26 ◼   ► to get the saved snippet you want, and boom, there it is,

00:59:30 ◼   ► pasted into your email.

00:59:32 ◼   ► And it's a really great app.

00:59:34 ◼   ► I don't do enough programming anymore

00:59:36 ◼   ► that it's really been useful, but I can see that it's super, super useful.

00:59:41 ◼   ► I know that people use it even instead, like Mac developers use it instead of Xcode for

00:59:48 ◼   ► document browsing.

00:59:49 ◼   ► It's so good.

00:59:51 ◼   ► For people who are doing things that are not Xcode, like PHP or Perl or something like

00:59:56 ◼   ► that, it can be way better than the documentation that's typically invoked through Terminal

01:00:02 ◼   ► or something like that.

01:00:05 ◼   ► a really well-regarded app.

01:00:07 ◼   ► There's an iOS version and stuff like that.

01:00:08 ◼   ► And people, at first, when this guy's developer account did--

01:00:11 ◼   ► what Apple did at first was yank all of it.

01:00:13 ◼   ► It was all taken off the store.

01:00:15 ◼   ► And this guy said, hey, they said I did app review fraud.

01:00:18 ◼   ► I don't-- I didn't do that.

01:00:20 ◼   ► And people really did--

01:00:21 ◼   ► I think rightly so.

01:00:22 ◼   ► And I think it was the right way for the community to go.

01:00:25 ◼   ► We're like, hey, I believe this guy, because his apps

01:00:28 ◼   ► don't look scammy at all.

01:00:29 ◼   ► I use them and love them.

01:00:30 ◼   ► These are good apps.

01:00:31 ◼   ► And it went from there.

01:00:34 ◼   ► And I think it was good.

01:00:36 ◼   ► I didn't link to it at first, and I'm glad I didn't.

01:00:39 ◼   ► I felt like my spidey sense kicked in,

01:00:40 ◼   ► 'cause I just felt like there was something fishy going on.

01:00:43 ◼   ► Like it just didn't seem like the whole story was out,

01:00:45 ◼   ► so I didn't link.

01:00:47 ◼   ► I will say I feel a little bad that I wrote about this.

01:00:53 ◼   ► I know I got to talk to Apple the day that they said,

01:00:57 ◼   ► they issued a statement about what happened.

01:00:59 ◼   ► And I linked to Dalrymple's report about it,

01:01:03 ◼   ► I didn't want to post a major article about it myself, but I ended up doing so anyway.

01:01:09 ◼   ► But I felt a little bad posting about it when I did because it seemed like we were only

01:01:17 ◼   ► getting apple-side of the story, and my instinct was we should wait to hear Popescu's side

01:01:22 ◼   ► too. But I was getting on an airplane. I was away for the weekend, and I didn't want to

01:01:27 ◼   ► wait four hours or trust that I'd be able to work on the Wi-Fi, which is in hindsight.

01:01:33 ◼   ► feel like it worked out. I don't feel like I wrote anything that I had to retract or anything like

01:01:36 ◼   ► that. But in hindsight, I feel like that was kind of a bad decision. I feel like I should have been

01:01:44 ◼   ► willing to completely miss the story or be way late on it than only hear one side of it, even

01:01:52 ◼   ► though I think Apple's side was more right than wrong. Yeah, well, the other big point I would

01:01:58 ◼   ► make is, and I saw it and it's hard to know for sure what Apple's thinking was around

01:02:03 ◼   ► this, but I certainly saw this on Twitter, is people were being very skeptical.

01:02:07 ◼   ► Oh, someone would share their credit card or they'd share a bank account.

01:02:10 ◼   ► Like that is absolutely the reality in lots of countries.

01:02:13 ◼   ► And I think that, you know, in the States, the idea that you would, and this is for sure,

01:02:19 ◼   ► this is Apple's biggest error for sure.

01:02:20 ◼   ► Like they, and they even said they were sending the notifications to the fraudulent account,

01:02:25 ◼   ► not even though the two accounts were joined.

01:02:27 ◼   ► So because they assume that if they have the same credit card, they must be the same developer.

01:02:32 ◼   ► But when I was, and I deal with this not just because I live internationally, but when I

01:02:36 ◼   ► was at Microsoft and we were setting up the Windows App Store originally, this was one

01:02:40 ◼   ► of the biggest problems we had to deal with.

01:02:41 ◼   ► And it was very difficult, is that like Apple, the developer accounts needed to have a credit

01:02:47 ◼   ► card and there's a nominal cost.

01:02:50 ◼   ► But it turns out it's really hard to get a credit card in many countries of the world.

01:02:54 ◼   ► And even if you do have a credit card, it often doesn't work with a US-based transaction

01:03:00 ◼   ► because for fraud or whatever, or they just don't do internet, they only work inside

01:03:03 ◼   ► the country.

01:03:04 ◼   ► And it was like a multi-month project to get workarounds for this to work.

01:03:08 ◼   ► So the point being like this idea that to assume that because two accounts use the same

01:03:14 ◼   ► credit card, they're linked, that's in lots of countries, that may not be the case.

01:03:19 ◼   ► And it's very reasonable that that may not be the case.

01:03:21 ◼   ► And I think, so in reaction in general, I think there wasn't enough of an appreciation

01:03:25 ◼   ► that that might be the case.

01:03:27 ◼   ► And again, reading the Rene article, he says that the other person was actually his mom.

01:03:31 ◼   ► That's why he was being kind of cagey about it.

01:03:34 ◼   ► But those particular details, I think, I just have wildly different reactions.

01:03:41 ◼   ► Some people immediately assume that that sounds ridiculous and fraudulent.

01:03:44 ◼   ► From my reaction, I can completely believe that's the case.

01:03:48 ◼   ► And the other thing with Apple is now that the App Store and this decision-making was

01:03:52 ◼   ► going up to Phil Schiller, Phil Schiller did not set up the App Store.

01:03:57 ◼   ► That was under EdiQ.

01:03:59 ◼   ► And the reason why I think that's relevant is he didn't…

01:04:03 ◼   ► I don't know, but I think it's reasonable to presume that Phil may not be familiar with

01:04:11 ◼   ► these sorts of things, like the hassles of credit cards in different countries and bank

01:04:16 ◼   ► accounts and why they might be combined, just not because he's dumb or doesn't care,

01:04:20 ◼   ► but he didn't have to go through the pain of figuring out all the workarounds to get

01:04:23 ◼   ► that set up.

01:04:24 ◼   ► Like, Eddy Cue's team had to figure that out when they set up the iTunes Music Store

01:04:27 ◼   ► and they set up the App Store the first time.

01:04:29 ◼   ► And if you don't even know about that, then immediately it sounds super sketchy.

01:04:34 ◼   ► Whereas if you do know about that, and so my initial reaction, and I was to be totally

01:04:40 ◼   ► believe it, 'cause it's super believable

01:04:43 ◼   ► if you understand the circumstances of different countries

01:04:46 ◼   ► that the infrastructure isn't there.

01:04:48 ◼   ► And I still think that, again, I think it was more like

01:04:52 ◼   ► the coverup was worse than the,

01:04:53 ◼   ► I think in broad strokes, there's probably,

01:04:57 ◼   ► like his story I think is,

01:04:59 ◼   ► I still tend to think it's mostly true.

01:05:01 ◼   ► I think he absolutely made mistakes.

01:05:02 ◼   ► And this is where I get to that sort of my original point,

01:05:05 ◼   ► if you weigh it in the balance.

01:05:06 ◼   ► Did he make mistakes?

01:05:07 ◼   ► It seems clear he did.

01:05:09 ◼   ► But when you consider that,

01:05:12 ◼   ► if you take the totality of the situation

01:05:14 ◼   ► and understanding different markets

01:05:16 ◼   ► and the credit card thing and the bank account thing

01:05:18 ◼   ► and them starting out as a young developer,

01:05:20 ◼   ► it would be nice to have a little more slack

01:05:25 ◼   ► and mercy, for lack of a better word, in this situation.

01:05:28 ◼   ► And I do hope it turns out in the long run.

01:05:31 ◼   ► - I definitely suspected, you and I are on a slack

01:05:34 ◼   ► where we talked about this before it went public

01:05:36 ◼   ► And I was early on thought, hey, I think there's an English

01:05:40 ◼   ► as a second language problem here, you know,

01:05:42 ◼   ► 'cause I suspect that Popescu speaks,

01:05:45 ◼   ► we now know Romanian is his first language

01:05:49 ◼   ► and English as a second language.

01:05:50 ◼   ► His written English is excellent, truly excellent.

01:05:54 ◼   ► And I could see why some people would notice it,

01:05:55 ◼   ► but I see certain telltale signs that say

01:05:57 ◼   ► that there's just like a certain stiffness to it

01:05:59 ◼   ► that to me reads like English as a second language.

01:06:02 ◼   ► And even no matter how good it is,

01:06:06 ◼   ► and you know this firsthand, living in Taipei,

01:06:10 ◼   ► that nuance is the hardest thing to get, right?

01:06:14 ◼   ► It's in a subtle, and this is a situation

01:06:18 ◼   ► that required nuance, and I definitely think

01:06:21 ◼   ► that there was, I think that there was certain

01:06:26 ◼   ► bits of nuance that slipped between the cracks,

01:06:29 ◼   ► and I think, to your point about credit cards

01:06:33 ◼   ► and bank accounts from Romania that work with US credit

01:06:38 ◼   ► and bank account and iTunes systems and stuff like that.

01:06:41 ◼   ► I think there were some cultural differences

01:06:45 ◼   ► that were even harder to match up

01:06:50 ◼   ► because of the English as a second language thing.

01:06:52 ◼   ► And the whole thing to me was,

01:06:55 ◼   ► no matter what the true story is,

01:06:57 ◼   ► I can't help but think that this was sort of

01:06:59 ◼   ► a perfect storm of problems.

01:07:03 ◼   ► by which I mean that part of the blow up on Twitter

01:07:07 ◼   ► against Apple when this guy's account was initially yanked

01:07:12 ◼   ► was sort of, and rightly so,

01:07:15 ◼   ► well, maybe not rightly so, but justifiably so,

01:07:17 ◼   ► from the developer community of,

01:07:21 ◼   ► wow, here's a world where your entire livelihood

01:07:25 ◼   ► can be pulled by Apple

01:07:28 ◼   ► and they don't even show you the evidence against you,

01:07:32 ◼   ► which is kind of terrifying.

01:07:34 ◼   ► And Brent Simmons has written, wrote a good piece about that

01:07:41 ◼   ► that I agreed with largely that there's a reason why

01:07:45 ◼   ► the foundation of most modern judicial systems

01:07:50 ◼   ► involve the right to be able to face the evidence

01:07:55 ◼   ► that you're charged with.

01:07:56 ◼   ► That the government can't just come and say,

01:07:59 ◼   ► we know that you committed this crime,

01:08:01 ◼   ► so therefore you're going to prison.

01:08:03 ◼   ► Doesn't work like that.

01:08:04 ◼   ► Well, this isn't a judicial system.

01:08:07 ◼   ► This isn't the law of the land.

01:08:08 ◼   ► Apple, it's within Apple's rights as a private company

01:08:10 ◼   ► to do what they want.

01:08:11 ◼   ► I do think though, in hindsight,

01:08:16 ◼   ► as more of this story has come out, as much of it has,

01:08:19 ◼   ► I think the one thing you can look at and say,

01:08:21 ◼   ► well, Apple surely deals with actual fraud,

01:08:24 ◼   ► outright fraud, on a daily basis.

01:08:27 ◼   ► I think that the App Store anti-fraud team is very busy,

01:08:32 ◼   ► seven days a week.

01:08:33 ◼   ► I think it's something that this is the first time

01:08:37 ◼   ► in all the years the App Store's been up

01:08:38 ◼   ► that something like this has come to light

01:08:41 ◼   ► where somebody might have had their account pulled

01:08:44 ◼   ► and maybe shouldn't have.

01:08:47 ◼   ► - Right, 'cause most of them are probably just,

01:08:48 ◼   ► they're pure fraudsters, so when they disappear

01:08:50 ◼   ► and no one notices.

01:08:51 ◼   ► It was the fraud account tied to the legitimate account

01:08:56 ◼   ► that I think made this unfortunate.

01:08:59 ◼   ► And yeah, and it's a very fair point,

01:09:04 ◼   ► and it's the same thing with Google and YouTube

01:09:06 ◼   ► and any of these other sites that deal with this.

01:09:08 ◼   ► I mean, they're dealing with scale,

01:09:10 ◼   ► and it's hard from an individual perspective

01:09:15 ◼   ► unless you've actually worked at these companies.

01:09:18 ◼   ► I told this story before where,

01:09:20 ◼   ► I think it was like my second day at Microsoft,

01:09:22 ◼   ► and I was in like some business,

01:09:23 ◼   ► like a monthly business review sort of meeting,

01:09:25 ◼   ► and they're just going down this list,

01:09:26 ◼   ► they're talking about, oh, X percentage in Brazil,

01:09:28 ◼   ► and then about Eastern Europe,

01:09:29 ◼   ► and it was mind blowing,

01:09:31 ◼   ► like just the casualness that they were talking about,

01:09:33 ◼   ► like massive regions of the world,

01:09:35 ◼   ► and like the user numbers and engagement

01:09:37 ◼   ► and stuff like that.

01:09:38 ◼   ► And you get used to it after a while once you're there,

01:09:41 ◼   ► but the scale that these companies are operating on,

01:09:45 ◼   ► they can't, you know, there's a limit between doing

01:09:48 ◼   ► a sort of one-on-one judicious review

01:09:50 ◼   ► and needing to have systematic approaches.

01:09:53 ◼   ► And I did find it encouraging that,

01:09:57 ◼   ► the phone call I posted that Apple

01:09:58 ◼   ► was engaging with him one-on-one.

01:10:00 ◼   ► I still, I'm still unclear why Apple suddenly went out

01:10:03 ◼   ► with a press release and did this big thing.

01:10:05 ◼   ► I would have liked to,

01:10:07 ◼   ► but I can have sympathy for both sides.

01:10:10 ◼   ► I've been fortunate to see both sides.

01:10:13 ◼   ► But the challenge for both is if you're Apple,

01:10:17 ◼   ► because you're dealing with scale,

01:10:19 ◼   ► like I said, once I was at Microsoft

01:10:20 ◼   ► and I got used to the scale stuff,

01:10:21 ◼   ► like it just became normal,

01:10:23 ◼   ► But it's not normal.

01:10:24 ◼   ► It's a very sort of narrow way to view the world,

01:10:29 ◼   ► to just view it at scale

01:10:31 ◼   ► and not to forget about the individual sort of level.

01:10:34 ◼   ► And you could see how that could happen

01:10:39 ◼   ► on the management side.

01:10:40 ◼   ► And you have this sort of mismatch

01:10:41 ◼   ► of the individual perspective

01:10:43 ◼   ► versus the en masse perspective.

01:10:45 ◼   ► And it's a hard problem.

01:10:46 ◼   ► It's a hard problem for both sides.

01:10:48 ◼   ► - One of the things that- - And it's exacerbated

01:10:52 ◼   ► by the cultural things and the international things

01:10:55 ◼   ► and the language things.

01:10:56 ◼   ► - One of the things that's most extraordinary

01:10:57 ◼   ► about it though is that we know from,

01:11:00 ◼   ► and you know, right or wrong,

01:11:02 ◼   ► but one of the things that Popescu did

01:11:04 ◼   ► was record a phone call from Apple Developer Relations.

01:11:08 ◼   ► And we know from the guy from Apple who spoke to him

01:11:10 ◼   ► that this clearly did percolate up to the level

01:11:13 ◼   ► where Phil Schiller was fully aware of it, right?

01:11:15 ◼   ► Which is kind of amazing, you know,

01:11:17 ◼   ► in terms of the scale and in terms of where this got to

01:11:20 ◼   ► that this one man indie developer's problems

01:11:25 ◼   ► with being somehow tied to a different account

01:11:29 ◼   ► or a joint account or however you want to put it

01:11:31 ◼   ► and what should happen, whatever,

01:11:33 ◼   ► it percolated up to the point where Phil Schiller

01:11:35 ◼   ► was fully informed on it and was making decisions on it,

01:11:38 ◼   ► which is really kind of extraordinary.

01:11:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I'm not sure if it's a good thing, right?

01:11:42 ◼   ► It kind of speaks to there being a lack of process here.

01:11:46 ◼   ► I'm not sure if that's the sort of decision

01:11:47 ◼   ► that should percolate that high,

01:11:50 ◼   ► But again, it might have been,

01:11:51 ◼   ► I think there was the extraordinary circumstance here,

01:11:53 ◼   ► is that the combination of legitimate and illegitimate,

01:11:57 ◼   ► whereas most fraudsters are just illegitimate,

01:11:59 ◼   ► so they get caught and they're deleted

01:12:02 ◼   ► and no one knows and no one cares.

01:12:03 ◼   ► It was the combination here

01:12:05 ◼   ► and Apple tying those two accounts together

01:12:08 ◼   ► because of the same credit card,

01:12:09 ◼   ► and not sending the notices to the account as a whole,

01:12:14 ◼   ► only sending it to the fraudulent account.

01:12:16 ◼   ► But anyhow, I hope it works out.

01:12:19 ◼   ► I feel bad for the guy.

01:12:20 ◼   ► It's one of those things you need to point and say,

01:12:22 ◼   ► oh, you should have been more clear and upfront

01:12:24 ◼   ► with exactly what was going on and revealed everything.

01:12:27 ◼   ► But it's one of those things like

01:12:28 ◼   ► if you were in the same situation and,

01:12:31 ◼   ► I guess I take that there,

01:12:33 ◼   ► but for the grace of God go I sort of thing.

01:12:35 ◼   ► And with tremendous gratitude that my business

01:12:37 ◼   ► is based on the open web and is not a closed ecosystem

01:12:41 ◼   ► with no sideloading, no way around

01:12:43 ◼   ► the sort of Apple gatekeeper.

01:12:47 ◼   ► - All right, I think that's enough for a short segment

01:12:49 ◼   ► on Dash, but hopefully I agree the same way.

01:12:52 ◼   ► I hope that somehow this still works out

01:12:53 ◼   ► such that Dash can get back into the App Store

01:12:56 ◼   ► 'cause it really is a good app

01:12:57 ◼   ► and I really do think ultimately

01:12:59 ◼   ► the guy has good intentions

01:13:00 ◼   ► and the quality of the work is--

01:13:03 ◼   ► - Yeah, and like a death penalty,

01:13:05 ◼   ► I mean, it's not physical death,

01:13:07 ◼   ► but like death of the app and his company.

01:13:10 ◼   ► I mean, maybe I'm just a softy,

01:13:12 ◼   ► but it seems like a bit of a bummer.

01:13:15 ◼   ► - Yeah, well the good news is, worst case scenario,

01:13:19 ◼   ► we've still got the Mac app that he can,

01:13:21 ◼   ► the Mac app can run outside the App Store and do his own.

01:13:25 ◼   ► He's already had, you know,

01:13:26 ◼   ► you can already get it outside the App Store.

01:13:28 ◼   ► And he has a system in place so that people

01:13:31 ◼   ► who bought it through the App Store

01:13:32 ◼   ► can get the non-App Store version

01:13:34 ◼   ► without having to pay for it again, so.

01:13:37 ◼   ► It's not the worst case.

01:13:37 ◼   ► - The other thing that, I guess the thing

01:13:38 ◼   ► that bums me out about this episode,

01:13:40 ◼   ► and a lot of stuff with Apple,

01:13:41 ◼   ► is there's a certain segment that is so instinctual

01:13:46 ◼   ► in defending Apple, no matter what.

01:13:49 ◼   ► And so you had a lot of people,

01:13:51 ◼   ► particularly developers that were very skeptical of Apple

01:13:54 ◼   ► and defending this guy, which was great.

01:13:56 ◼   ► But meantime, there's a lot of people on Twitter

01:13:58 ◼   ► that are regarding, oh no, for sure he did wrong.

01:14:01 ◼   ► It just sort of just, it became tribalistic,

01:14:05 ◼   ► I think, too quickly.

01:14:06 ◼   ► And then you kind of had this weird scenario where,

01:14:08 ◼   ► I think you, and again, we talked to some of these guys,

01:14:11 ◼   ► who were defending him, and they kind of felt out on an island because they're like saying

01:14:14 ◼   ► that Apple did a bad thing and you're getting these sort of attacks on social media.

01:14:19 ◼   ► And so as soon as Apple releases some sort of evidence that means it's right, the instinct

01:14:23 ◼   ► for those people who initially defended the developer is like snap to the other side.

01:14:26 ◼   ► It's like, "Oh, okay, I did my best, but no, he's going wrong."

01:14:30 ◼   ► And the truth is, as with the vast majority of things, there's gray in the middle, both

01:14:33 ◼   ► sides screwed up.

01:14:36 ◼   ► Apple particularly in the communications point, that's definitely a screw up.

01:14:39 ◼   ► And I don't know, just black, this is,

01:14:43 ◼   ► we're not getting philosophical,

01:14:45 ◼   ► but like there's no, most matters are gray

01:14:47 ◼   ► and this is probably a perfect example of that.

01:14:49 ◼   ► And that's why it's hard to talk about

01:14:50 ◼   ► because it's very much in the gray area

01:14:54 ◼   ► and again, hopefully in the long run

01:14:56 ◼   ► it works out for everyone.

01:14:57 ◼   ► - I will say, before we move on,

01:14:59 ◼   ► I'll say also in the same regard,

01:15:01 ◼   ► the other thought that occurred to me

01:15:02 ◼   ► is this is why Apple keeps its corporate mouth shut

01:15:07 ◼   ► about almost everything.

01:15:08 ◼   ► As infuriating as that can be and as opaque as it can make the company be, it's why they just don't

01:15:15 ◼   ► talk about stuff, even when they want to, even when they feel like they've been falsely accused

01:15:20 ◼   ► or they know they've been falsely accused and that somebody says X and it's not true,

01:15:27 ◼   ► and they don't come out and say, "No, that's not true. Here's why." They just take it.

01:15:30 ◼   ► They just take it because they kind of can't win. That they can let it stand and keep their mouth

01:15:36 ◼   ► shut and let some amount of people think that this false thing is true or they can come out and

01:15:42 ◼   ► dispute it even they could even prove it but then they look like a bully that you know literally the

01:15:47 ◼   ► biggest and you know the biggest company in in the world uh coming out against you know in this case

01:15:55 ◼   ► literally a one-man company so yeah they it's sort of a no-lose situation and a no-win situation and

01:16:01 ◼   ► and I can see why the lesser, you know,

01:16:03 ◼   ► the better route for them is usually

01:16:07 ◼   ► they keep their mouths shut.

01:16:08 ◼   ► - Totally, totally.

01:16:09 ◼   ► - Do you think that Apple should allow side loading

01:16:11 ◼   ► of apps, by the way, on iOS?

01:16:13 ◼   ► - No, I do not.

01:16:14 ◼   ► If I worked at Apple and I was in charge,

01:16:17 ◼   ► or they asked my opinion,

01:16:18 ◼   ► should we allow side loading of apps in iOS,

01:16:21 ◼   ► I would say no.

01:16:21 ◼   ► In an ideal world where there's no bad actors,

01:16:26 ◼   ► yes, that would be the right way to go,

01:16:28 ◼   ► But you know this, the example I'm going to show,

01:16:32 ◼   ► it says Dropbox.

01:16:35 ◼   ► There's a whole thing--

01:16:36 ◼   ► I haven't really written or talked much about it,

01:16:38 ◼   ► but there was a thing that came out over the summer

01:16:40 ◼   ► over somebody and found out that the Dropbox app for Mac

01:16:47 ◼   ► was like, it would say, hey, we need your admin password just

01:16:51 ◼   ► to finish installation.

01:16:52 ◼   ► And then they would take those admin privileges

01:16:54 ◼   ► and write themselves into the database that controls

01:16:59 ◼   ► who has, which apps have accessibility access

01:17:02 ◼   ► to your app, to your Mac, which is really sensitive

01:17:05 ◼   ► because apps that have that accessibility access,

01:17:07 ◼   ► you really have to trust them because they can like

01:17:09 ◼   ► do things like see all your keystrokes

01:17:11 ◼   ► or see what you're clicking on and stuff like that.

01:17:14 ◼   ► And-- - And not just that,

01:17:15 ◼   ► but they stored the password.

01:17:17 ◼   ► - No, they didn't store the password.

01:17:18 ◼   ► No, they didn't store the password.

01:17:21 ◼   ► I forget the exact details of it.

01:17:22 ◼   ► I'll put it, I swear to God, I'll put it like,

01:17:25 ◼   ► people thought they were,

01:17:27 ◼   ► people were reasonably thinking they stored the password,

01:17:29 ◼   ► but they didn't.

01:17:30 ◼   ► What they did was grant themselves access to that database

01:17:33 ◼   ► so that they could just keep writing to that database

01:17:37 ◼   ► over and over again. - Oh, okay.

01:17:38 ◼   ► That makes sense.

01:17:39 ◼   ► - So they were more or less,

01:17:41 ◼   ► instead they weren't taking your admin password,

01:17:43 ◼   ► but they were granting themselves permanent admin privileges

01:17:46 ◼   ► to your accessibility preferences,

01:17:47 ◼   ► I think is a very fair way of saying it.

01:17:49 ◼   ► - And would you say it that way?

01:17:52 ◼   ► It just sounds as terrible as it is.

01:17:54 ◼   ► - Well, it's a betrayal of trust.

01:17:55 ◼   ► It really is.

01:17:56 ◼   ► It's shenanigans and it shouldn't be happening.

01:17:58 ◼   ► There's no need for it.

01:17:59 ◼   ► It's really, as far as what I've heard,

01:18:01 ◼   ► is that the whole thing is just to enable

01:18:03 ◼   ► some sort of integration with Microsoft Office files,

01:18:06 ◼   ► something about the complexity of Microsoft Office's

01:18:09 ◼   ► bundled file formats.

01:18:13 ◼   ► For people like me who don't even have Office installed,

01:18:18 ◼   ► it's ridiculous that they're doing something

01:18:20 ◼   ► that I would consider almost like malware-like behavior,

01:18:23 ◼   ► however good their intentions are.

01:18:25 ◼   ► And they do things, they, Dropbox, you know,

01:18:31 ◼   ► does some things that they monitor all access

01:18:34 ◼   ► to the file system, and depending on how powerful

01:18:36 ◼   ► your Mac is, it can actually significantly slow down

01:18:39 ◼   ► operations like unzipping files and stuff like that,

01:18:42 ◼   ► because they look, they're snooping at every single action

01:18:46 ◼   ► in your file system, whether it's inside the Dropbox folder

01:18:49 ◼   ► or not, which is contrary to how it used to work,

01:18:52 ◼   ► and contrary to me to how any reasonable person would

01:18:56 ◼   ► think Dropbox works.

01:18:57 ◼   ► I would think, yes, of course they're

01:18:58 ◼   ► looking at everything that happens inside the Dropbox

01:19:00 ◼   ► folder.

01:19:02 ◼   ► I would assume that they need to so that they

01:19:04 ◼   ► can keep everything in sync.

01:19:05 ◼   ► It seems ridiculous to me that they're looking at anything

01:19:08 ◼   ► that happens outside the Dropbox folder,

01:19:09 ◼   ► because I don't want them to.

01:19:11 ◼   ► But they are.

01:19:13 ◼   ► I did some timing tests on my new 5-- or relatively new 5K

01:19:16 ◼   ► iMac that has all these extra cores and stuff like that and an SSD drive and it's hardly

01:19:22 ◼   ► noticeable. But on a MacBook Air or something like that, it can significantly slow down

01:19:28 ◼   ► stuff.

01:19:29 ◼   ► And that's my example of an app that's not malware. It's doing what they said, but they're

01:19:33 ◼   ► taking advantage of the fact that an app that you download on the Mac from Dropbox.com can

01:19:41 ◼   ► and more or less do whatever it can get away with.

01:19:43 ◼   ► And however, whatever X, Y, and Z,

01:19:48 ◼   ► the good things would be if you could side load apps on iOS.

01:19:52 ◼   ► And admittedly, I installed all sorts of apps

01:19:55 ◼   ► from outside the App Store on a Mac,

01:19:57 ◼   ► and I wouldn't have it any other way on the Mac.

01:19:59 ◼   ► It's an advantage that iOS, you know, it's a trade-off.

01:20:03 ◼   ► There's trade-offs to the Mac style,

01:20:04 ◼   ► and there's trade-offs to the iOS style.

01:20:06 ◼   ► But I feel like Apple has an advantage

01:20:07 ◼   ► by having one operating system that takes the one side

01:20:10 ◼   ► in one operating system that takes the other.

01:20:12 ◼   ► What do you think of that?

01:20:14 ◼   ► - Yeah, I agree, I agree.

01:20:15 ◼   ► I mean, I would, as a user,

01:20:17 ◼   ► I would prefer to be able to sign old apps,

01:20:18 ◼   ► and were I a developer, I would like to know

01:20:21 ◼   ► that there's that option to do that,

01:20:26 ◼   ► and that the App Store isn't the only gatekeeper.

01:20:29 ◼   ► But if I put on my sort of business hat

01:20:33 ◼   ► and think about what concerns Apple,

01:20:36 ◼   ► what concerns Apple is they're operating

01:20:38 ◼   ► at this unbelievable scale with hundreds of millions

01:20:40 ◼   ► of customers and secure, it's a huge target.

01:20:44 ◼   ► And yes, you can walk it down to an extent,

01:20:47 ◼   ► but then like phishing becomes an option

01:20:49 ◼   ► where you get people to install these apps.

01:20:51 ◼   ► And people will, people are, I mean,

01:20:53 ◼   ► people are not careful about this stuff

01:20:55 ◼   ► in a way that probably you and I

01:20:57 ◼   ► and most of the listeners of this are.

01:20:59 ◼   ► I think, I agree with you, it's even though

01:21:02 ◼   ► all the problems of having a single gatekeeper

01:21:04 ◼   ► and the fact that you have a situation with this developer

01:21:07 ◼   ► where Apple can have, like literally have a kill switch

01:21:10 ◼   ► on his account, those are all true

01:21:14 ◼   ► and that means it's really on Apple

01:21:17 ◼   ► to make sure they get that sort of stuff right.

01:21:20 ◼   ► But I agree, from a business perspective,

01:21:24 ◼   ► it doesn't make sense to open it up.

01:21:26 ◼   ► So yeah, we're on the same page.

01:21:28 ◼   ► - Right, I think that the advantage

01:21:29 ◼   ► of having both the Mac OS and,

01:21:32 ◼   ► I mean we could probably do a whole show about this,

01:21:33 ◼   ► but that the advantage of having Mac OS and iOS

01:21:36 ◼   ► at the same time, and I'm firmly of the belief

01:21:38 ◼   ► that Mac OS is, I know this is maybe even unpopular

01:21:42 ◼   ► among the pundit class, I don't think that it is

01:21:44 ◼   ► on its deathbed and it's gonna be replaced by iOS

01:21:47 ◼   ► any year now, I think Mac OS is as thriving

01:21:50 ◼   ► as it's ever been.

01:21:51 ◼   ► I think the way Apple sees it, and I think they're happy

01:21:54 ◼   ► with it, is that they've got one operating system

01:21:57 ◼   ► that starts from the bottom up.

01:21:59 ◼   ► In other words, and this is what I'm talking about, iOS,

01:22:02 ◼   ► and it's for anybody and everybody,

01:22:05 ◼   ► And it's the simpler one, both in terms of the user interface,

01:22:09 ◼   ► but also in terms of the technical capabilities.

01:22:12 ◼   ► The only output is a Lightning port,

01:22:17 ◼   ► and you have to plug in a dongle even to get to a USB.

01:22:19 ◼   ► The multitasking is a lot simpler.

01:22:26 ◼   ► Any app that you install has to come from the App Store

01:22:28 ◼   ► where it's been vetted, and it could be killed at any minute.

01:22:32 ◼   ► The multitasking system is such that any app

01:22:34 ◼   ► has to be ready to be killed at any moment.

01:22:37 ◼   ► And then they've got this other operating system,

01:22:38 ◼   ► macOS, that starts from the top down,

01:22:40 ◼   ► where it's there for the most expert of expert users.

01:22:45 ◼   ► If you really are, you want to have a Unix terminal

01:22:48 ◼   ► and command line on your system, you've got it.

01:22:52 ◼   ► I think that really is a very strong place to be,

01:22:56 ◼   ► and I think it's worked out very, very well.

01:22:59 ◼   ► - Yeah, I completely agree.

01:23:00 ◼   ► I find it bizarre that people think they're gonna be

01:23:04 ◼   ► sync together and it's really viewing the problem

01:23:07 ◼   ► from the wrong perspective.

01:23:08 ◼   ► 'Cause it's sort of like a,

01:23:10 ◼   ► you're looking at it from a complexity

01:23:11 ◼   ► oh Apple's gonna have to manage multiple operating systems,

01:23:14 ◼   ► blah, blah, blah, well that's their job.

01:23:15 ◼   ► That's like it's their job to manage that complexity

01:23:18 ◼   ► and keep it simple for the user.

01:23:19 ◼   ► Like what the proposal that they combine the two

01:23:24 ◼   ► quote unquote simplifies it for Apple

01:23:27 ◼   ► but it makes it more complicated for the user

01:23:28 ◼   ► because you have a overly complicated operating system

01:23:33 ◼   ► on one device and a way to lock down oversimplified

01:23:37 ◼   ► on another device and that's to completely misunderstand

01:23:41 ◼   ► I think the way that Apple thinks about its products.

01:23:44 ◼   ► I mean the idea is that you should,

01:23:47 ◼   ► what's presented to the user should be simple

01:23:49 ◼   ► and what's the like the Einstein quote

01:23:50 ◼   ► about simplicity or whatever like--

01:23:52 ◼   ► - Everything should be as simple as possible but not more so.

01:23:54 ◼   ► - Exactly, exactly and that Apple would prioritize

01:24:00 ◼   ► its internal efficiency in maintaining two operating systems

01:24:04 ◼   ► and put that complexity onto the user,

01:24:06 ◼   ► that seems counter to the entire way Apple thinks

01:24:09 ◼   ► about simplicity and managing complexity.

01:24:11 ◼   ► - Right, the way I've put it, I've been past,

01:24:14 ◼   ► I forget where, I have the Einstein quote memorized.

01:24:18 ◼   ► Although, like all great quotes,

01:24:19 ◼   ► supposedly that quote is apocryphal

01:24:21 ◼   ► and maybe it was never said by Einstein

01:24:23 ◼   ► or he said something that was not quite as clever,

01:24:25 ◼   ► but people cleaned it up over the years.

01:24:27 ◼   ► But anyway, that's the quote that's attributed to it

01:24:29 ◼   ► I'm sticking to it.

01:24:31 ◼   ► My line is something to the effect of it's the heaviness

01:24:35 ◼   ► of Mac OS that allows iOS to be so light.

01:24:38 ◼   ► That if they got rid of the Mac, they'd

01:24:39 ◼   ► have to make iOS so much more complex to pick up the things

01:24:42 ◼   ► that the Mac does that iOS can't, that it would wreck iOS.

01:24:46 ◼   ► And all of the things they've done over the years--

01:24:49 ◼   ► and I think it's the same thing is true on Windows,

01:24:51 ◼   ► too-- all of the ways that over the years Apple and Microsoft

01:24:54 ◼   ► have tried to make simple modes for Mac or Windows,

01:24:58 ◼   ► They fail. They fall short. There used to be like the simple finder on Mac OS,

01:25:04 ◼   ► which was like a mode you could put the Mac in where the finder only showed you. Instead of

01:25:08 ◼   ► showing you like the whole file system, it just showed you like a panel full of your apps.

01:25:13 ◼   ► There's still like that launch window thing, launcher or whatever. Yeah, it's the same idea.

01:25:19 ◼   ► Yeah. And I think that that launcher for Mac OS, what's it called? The thing I never want,

01:25:25 ◼   ► launchpad. I never used it. They could just erase it. They could just drop it from Sierra,

01:25:30 ◼   ► and I would never even notice because it's irrelevant.

01:25:35 ◼   ► I think any attempt like that to make Mac OS too much IOS-y is a failure. I think anything

01:25:41 ◼   ► they ever did, although I don't think there's ever been something like that, but anything

01:25:44 ◼   ► they did that made IOS too much like Mac OS would wreck the good parts of IOS.

01:25:50 ◼   ► You could argue this was, I mean, to go back to the watch, this is the mistake they made

01:25:54 ◼   ► in watch version one, was they should have developed it where, in this case, the heaviness

01:26:01 ◼   ► was on iOS on the phone, and the watch should have been like the iPod, right?

01:26:06 ◼   ► The iPod, it was the perfect example of this.

01:26:09 ◼   ► What made it so great was all the complexity of managing your music was all offloaded on

01:26:13 ◼   ► the computer, and all the iPod did was play your music.

01:26:17 ◼   ► that made it so much more powerful.

01:26:18 ◼   ► And I think the mistake that was in version one

01:26:22 ◼   ► of the watch was with that launcher

01:26:23 ◼   ► and that honeycomb of apps and all that sort of thing.

01:26:25 ◼   ► Like it was trying to take, pack an iPhone into it,

01:26:29 ◼   ► make it self-sufficient.

01:26:30 ◼   ► And in the long run, I still think there's a future

01:26:34 ◼   ► where the watch is the center.

01:26:35 ◼   ► Like once it gets solar-capped building,

01:26:37 ◼   ► it's much more powerful.

01:26:38 ◼   ► And there the watch becomes heavy

01:26:40 ◼   ► and like your AirPods become light

01:26:42 ◼   ► or something along those lines.

01:26:44 ◼   ► But we're not there yet.

01:26:45 ◼   ► And I think that's, if you were to encapsulate

01:26:50 ◼   ► where version one of the watch went wrong,

01:26:52 ◼   ► I think it's somewhere in there.

01:26:54 ◼   ► - I know that there are people,

01:26:57 ◼   ► of course you really screwed me by jumping in

01:26:59 ◼   ► before I did the sponsor read, but it's a good topic.

01:27:03 ◼   ► I know that there are people listening to us

01:27:04 ◼   ► who are frustrated and they're, I feel your frustration.

01:27:08 ◼   ► It's people who do want sideloading and they want that

01:27:11 ◼   ► because they can tell how for them

01:27:13 ◼   ► it would make iOS even better.

01:27:15 ◼   ► And I don't deny that at all.

01:27:17 ◼   ► For me, iOS would be better if I could side load apps

01:27:21 ◼   ► like I can on a map, meaning that I could just get

01:27:24 ◼   ► a version of application X straight from the developer,

01:27:28 ◼   ► not through the app store, and put it on my phone.

01:27:31 ◼   ► And maybe it would mean I'd have a version of

01:27:35 ◼   ► Amazon Video for my Apple TV, 'cause I could side load it,

01:27:41 ◼   ► and then it would get around.

01:27:43 ◼   ► To me, it's one of the worst things about Apple TV

01:27:45 ◼   ► is I don't have Amazon.

01:27:46 ◼   ► I have an Amazon Prime account.

01:27:47 ◼   ► I think Amazon has some of the best original content.

01:27:51 ◼   ► I mean, it's maybe not, they're not quite up there

01:27:53 ◼   ► with Netflix and HBO, but they're second tier.

01:27:56 ◼   ► And it's just such a pain in the ass

01:27:59 ◼   ► to have to load it on my phone

01:28:00 ◼   ► and airplay it over to the Apple TV

01:28:02 ◼   ► rather than just get it on Apple TV.

01:28:04 ◼   ► But I totally understand Amazon's point of view

01:28:06 ◼   ► that they don't want to give up the 30%

01:28:10 ◼   ► or have a version that you can't buy stuff from.

01:28:12 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:28:13 ◼   ► But sideloading would obviously get around that,

01:28:15 ◼   ► and I can see how that would make it better.

01:28:17 ◼   ► But the thing I want to say,

01:28:19 ◼   ► the thing I want to express

01:28:20 ◼   ► to the people who are frustrated by that

01:28:21 ◼   ► is it's not about us.

01:28:23 ◼   ► The Mac is there for people like us.

01:28:25 ◼   ► And we've got a system like that.

01:28:28 ◼   ► But you can't deny that the fact

01:28:30 ◼   ► that you can screw up a Mac by installing the wrong thing

01:28:34 ◼   ► has led to an awful lot of people

01:28:36 ◼   ► who've screwed up their Mac by installing the wrong thing.

01:28:39 ◼   ► I can't emphasize enough what an amazing weight

01:28:42 ◼   ► off the shoulders it is to non-technical users

01:28:45 ◼   ► to have a computer like the iPhone or the iPad

01:28:48 ◼   ► that they can't screw up.

01:28:51 ◼   ► - It is a big benefit to developers too

01:28:53 ◼   ► 'cause people download a million more apps,

01:28:56 ◼   ► way more than a million, exponentially more apps

01:28:59 ◼   ► on the phone because they're not scared of apps.

01:29:01 ◼   ► I mean, it's hard to remember now,

01:29:04 ◼   ► but you go back 10 years and people were scared

01:29:06 ◼   ► to install stuff on their computers.

01:29:08 ◼   ► - Oh, absolutely.

01:29:09 ◼   ► And that would be, and once, and the problem is,

01:29:13 ◼   ► you say, oh, only tech leaders do it.

01:29:15 ◼   ► Well, no, you get the things like,

01:29:17 ◼   ► what's the accessibility thing in China, right?

01:29:20 ◼   ► We talked about the home button where people,

01:29:21 ◼   ► but you get these, people do weird stuff with their phones

01:29:25 ◼   ► because it becomes a thing to do,

01:29:26 ◼   ► and there's like tutorials and videos about it.

01:29:29 ◼   ► Like people, lots of people that shouldn't

01:29:32 ◼   ► would enable sideloading, and then what happens?

01:29:34 ◼   ► You get an email, say, oh, or you get,

01:29:36 ◼   ► Someone puts up a notification,

01:29:38 ◼   ► or they slip something into the app store,

01:29:40 ◼   ► they put a legitimate app, they put a notification,

01:29:42 ◼   ► say, "Oh, you need to update something."

01:29:43 ◼   ► You click a button and it goes to, sorry,

01:29:46 ◼   ► illegitimate website and downloads it,

01:29:48 ◼   ► sideloads an app because you enabled it

01:29:50 ◼   ► for some reason or other,

01:29:51 ◼   ► and now you have a malware type app on your computer,

01:29:54 ◼   ► or on your phone.

01:29:55 ◼   ► And this stuff will happen, it absolutely will happen.

01:29:59 ◼   ► And the fact that right now,

01:30:02 ◼   ► and you see this on jailbroken phones, right?

01:30:04 ◼   ► when you see a report about malware on the phone,

01:30:06 ◼   ► it's almost always happening to jailbroken phones.

01:30:09 ◼   ► And to, in that case, you kind of brought it on yourself.

01:30:14 ◼   ► It's super clear you're doing something you shouldn't do

01:30:16 ◼   ► when you're jailbreaking it.

01:30:17 ◼   ► If it was Apple-enabled and Apple-endorsed,

01:30:21 ◼   ► even if not by default, just the number of people

01:30:24 ◼   ► that would do that and expose themselves would be huge,

01:30:27 ◼   ► and it would be a support nightmare for Apple,

01:30:30 ◼   ► and it would be bad for developers,

01:30:32 ◼   ► 'cause people would start getting scared of apps again,

01:30:34 ◼   ► and that would be a terrible place to be.

01:30:36 ◼   ► - What was the name of Amazon?

01:30:38 ◼   ► There's a company that Amazon owns

01:30:40 ◼   ► that ranks websites by traffic.

01:30:43 ◼   ► Is it called Alexa?

01:30:46 ◼   ► Even though now that's the name of their Siri type thing?

01:30:48 ◼   ► - No.

01:30:49 ◼   ► - What was the name of that?

01:30:51 ◼   ► And it used to get its measurements

01:30:52 ◼   ► through the Amazon toolbar or something like that.

01:30:55 ◼   ► What was the name?

01:30:57 ◼   ► You remember, and it doesn't seem

01:30:58 ◼   ► like anybody really talks about it.

01:30:58 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, maybe it was Alexa.

01:31:00 ◼   ► - I think it was called Alexa,

01:31:01 ◼   ► but it was, and they do a rankings

01:31:03 ◼   ► of like the top thousand websites and stuff like that.

01:31:05 ◼   ► And one time--

01:31:06 ◼   ► - Yeah, Alexa internet.

01:31:07 ◼   ► - Yeah. - Right.

01:31:08 ◼   ► I totally forgot about that.

01:31:09 ◼   ► Yeah, that's funny.

01:31:11 ◼   ► - One time, a long time ago, I was at a conference

01:31:15 ◼   ► and I got into a poker game late at night

01:31:20 ◼   ► with a bunch of people and one of the guys worked at Alexa

01:31:24 ◼   ► or something like that.

01:31:25 ◼   ► And this was a while ago, maybe even like 10 years ago.

01:31:27 ◼   ► And it was when Alexa mattered more.

01:31:29 ◼   ► And Daring Fireball was at the time

01:31:31 ◼   ► rated terribly in Alexa.

01:31:32 ◼   ► I mean, their estimates of my web traffic

01:31:35 ◼   ► were way less than I knew it to be

01:31:36 ◼   ► just because I could look at my logs.

01:31:38 ◼   ► And I asked them about it.

01:31:39 ◼   ► And it didn't really matter too much to me

01:31:41 ◼   ► because I wasn't really interested

01:31:43 ◼   ► in the type of advertising that was like,

01:31:45 ◼   ► at the time, if you wanted typical web advertising,

01:31:50 ◼   ► your Alexa ranking mattered

01:31:52 ◼   ► in terms of the rates you'd get.

01:31:54 ◼   ► And I didn't wanna pursue that.

01:31:57 ◼   ► And again, we could do a whole show

01:31:58 ◼   ► about my thoughts on web advertising.

01:32:00 ◼   ► But at least in terms of like, wow,

01:32:02 ◼   ► if I need to, at least I could, it was like,

01:32:04 ◼   ► wow, that door isn't even open to me

01:32:06 ◼   ► 'cause I'm way under-counted.

01:32:07 ◼   ► And he said, oh yeah, of course you're way under-counted,

01:32:10 ◼   ► of course, because all the measurements for Alexa

01:32:12 ◼   ► come from people who've installed the Amazon toolbar

01:32:15 ◼   ► and almost everybody who installs the Amazon toolbar

01:32:17 ◼   ► did it by accident or doesn't know how it got there

01:32:19 ◼   ► and people who read Darren Fireball

01:32:21 ◼   ► are smart enough not to install it

01:32:23 ◼   ► and most of them are on Macs

01:32:24 ◼   ► where it doesn't even run anyway.

01:32:25 ◼   ► It was like, oh, no matter of fact about it.

01:32:31 ◼   ► But that's the exact same--

01:32:32 ◼   ► I think about those web toolbars a lot.

01:32:34 ◼   ► People used to get those.

01:32:35 ◼   ► And he even said, we know that most people get it

01:32:38 ◼   ► and don't even know how they got it.

01:32:41 ◼   ► That's never going to happen on iOS.

01:32:44 ◼   ► Anyway, I'm going to take a break and thank our next sponsor.

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01:34:13 ◼   ► But I have to say the textured handle is so much better

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01:34:21 ◼   ► even though I've been a big fan of their stuff for years,

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