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