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347: Not Enough Carrot to Take the Stick

 

00:00:00   So what computer are you on right now?

00:00:02   - The fact that you even have to ask that question

00:00:04   is really depressing, really, really depressing.

00:00:08   I'm on my iMac, I think last we spoke,

00:00:11   nothing has changed with regard to the iMac, so it was--

00:00:15   - So you still only had it repaired once,

00:00:17   and then you did a software restore, basically?

00:00:19   - Well, so, I had it repaired once,

00:00:21   I restored from Time Machine, things got wonky,

00:00:25   and then last Monday, so not October, what is today,

00:00:29   it's the ninth, so not October 7th,

00:00:31   but September 30th, I believe it was,

00:00:34   I decided I'm just gonna nuke everything from orbit,

00:00:36   and what is the genesis of that reference, John?

00:00:39   - You don't know, you're making me so disappointed.

00:00:42   I use it, you use it, I'm like,

00:00:44   yeah, we're all on the same page, we all get this reference,

00:00:46   but now you're admitting that you don't,

00:00:47   and of course Marco doesn't.

00:00:48   - No, of course not.

00:00:49   (John laughs)

00:00:50   - What is genesis of that?

00:00:51   - Aliens, the one with the S, the plural one,

00:00:54   the second one, the James Cameron one.

00:00:56   - I've never seen it.

00:00:57   - You've never seen aliens?

00:00:59   - Wait, hold on, there are two different movies,

00:01:01   one called Alien and one called Aliens.

00:01:03   - There sure is.

00:01:04   - That's terrible.

00:01:05   - Are they related?

00:01:06   - They sure are, 'cause the first one had one alien,

00:01:10   and the second one had more than one,

00:01:13   thus the plural. - Spoiler alert!

00:01:14   - That's terrible. - Right there in the title,

00:01:16   Casey, Alien, that's not terrible, that is classy.

00:01:19   That is, before it was like--

00:01:21   - Aliens 2, more aliens.

00:01:23   - Furious 5, and The Fate of the Furious,

00:01:25   and Fast Five, and all this ridiculous,

00:01:27   we had Alien, and then it was followed up by Aliens,

00:01:30   which is a perfect way to amp up the sequel

00:01:33   while not being too loud about it.

00:01:35   It's like, you get where I'm coming from.

00:01:37   You had Alien, and it was a great movie,

00:01:39   and you all loved it, guess what?

00:01:40   Aliens, also James Cameron.

00:01:42   And it's another rare sequel that is,

00:01:44   let's say, almost as good as the original,

00:01:47   some would say better, some would say,

00:01:49   oh, it'll never match the original,

00:01:51   'cause it's a different kind of movie,

00:01:52   but I think we can all agree, it's a very good sequel.

00:01:55   - Oh, God. - Totally, totally.

00:01:57   - Marco, you and I are gonna get right on that, right?

00:01:58   That's our homework, you and me?

00:02:00   - I'm assuming neither of you has seen the original Alien,

00:02:03   the singular one, right?

00:02:04   - I don't think so.

00:02:04   - 'Cause that's like a '70s movie,

00:02:05   and that's before your time, but Aliens,

00:02:08   I think Casey, at least, would enjoy if he's not too scared.

00:02:11   - If anything, I think Casey and I have proven to you, John,

00:02:14   over the years, that whether or not a movie was in our time

00:02:17   has nothing to do with whether we've seen it.

00:02:19   The answer is we've never seen it.

00:02:21   - You've seen a lot of garbage '90s movies.

00:02:23   There's a higher chance of you seeing it

00:02:24   if it's in your time,

00:02:25   whereas the classic '70s movies you haven't seen,

00:02:28   but you've seen no garbage '70s movies, right?

00:02:31   And you've seen few classic '70s movies,

00:02:33   but '90s movies, you're probably all,

00:02:35   you know, you've seen all sorts of trash.

00:02:36   - So when Erin and I were engaged,

00:02:40   she was living in Richmond,

00:02:41   and I was still in Charlottesville,

00:02:42   and that meant I had lots of time on my hands

00:02:45   with nothing to do,

00:02:46   and this was back when Netflix still sent DVDs,

00:02:49   and I went on a binge of watching the original versions

00:02:54   of then modern films that I really loved.

00:02:56   So I watched the original "Italian Job."

00:02:59   I watched the original "Oceans 11."

00:03:01   - The original "Dodgeball."

00:03:03   - I hope you're kidding, 'cause if that's a remake,

00:03:06   I've gotta watch the original right away,

00:03:07   but I'm pretty sure you're full of it.

00:03:09   Anyway, I watched the original "Gone in 60 Seconds,"

00:03:12   and I don't know if it's my,

00:03:15   as we've long established, terrible sensibilities,

00:03:17   but not a one of those was any good at all.

00:03:20   Even, what was it, "Italian Job" had Michael Caine,

00:03:23   who I love, my cocaine,

00:03:26   and I absolutely love Michael Caine,

00:03:27   and that movie was also terrible.

00:03:30   So I have seen some things from the '60s and '70s,

00:03:33   and I did not enjoy them, but that's okay.

00:03:36   So to come back around to my computers,

00:03:38   a week ago Monday, I had nuked the iMac from Orbit,

00:03:43   as we discussed, that's from the movie "Aliens."

00:03:45   That's right, right?

00:03:46   "Aliens" got "alien"?

00:03:47   That doesn't matter.

00:03:48   Anyway, it's from some movie I haven't seen.

00:03:50   So since then, knock on my glass desk,

00:03:53   it seems to be behaving considerably better.

00:03:56   Then a few days ago,

00:03:59   I was attempting to use my MacBook,

00:04:02   and I would start it up either from sleep or rebooting it,

00:04:06   and it would work for a little bit,

00:04:07   and then it would refuse all input

00:04:10   from the mouse and the keyboard.

00:04:12   Now, the mouse was clicking, because, mind you,

00:04:14   this is one of the, what's the term for the fancy track pads

00:04:19   where it's all haptic, right?

00:04:20   There's no-- - Oh, it's a 3D Force.

00:04:23   - Whatever, yeah, sure.

00:04:25   But anyway, the point is,

00:04:27   it's a mini haptic engine that's causing the clicking.

00:04:30   It's not an actual physical motion

00:04:32   that's causing the clicking, and it was clicking,

00:04:33   which typically indicates that somewhere deep

00:04:36   in the software, something is working.

00:04:38   But I couldn't change focus to a different window.

00:04:41   I couldn't do anything with the keyboard.

00:04:43   It was just a disaster.

00:04:44   And this happened reliably several times in a row,

00:04:46   and I thought, well, I guess it's time

00:04:47   to nuke this bad boy from Orbit, too.

00:04:49   So that's what I did.

00:04:51   I did an internet recovery, which actually,

00:04:54   quick aside, works stunningly well,

00:04:57   at least for me on my very fast internet connection.

00:04:59   So if you hit, I'm gonna get this wrong,

00:05:02   but it's Command + Option + R,

00:05:04   or maybe it's Command + R, I forget what it is.

00:05:06   - Command + R is regular recovery.

00:05:07   Command + Option + R is the one

00:05:09   where it gets the latest version of the internet.

00:05:11   - Yes, and then there's Command + Option + something else R

00:05:14   that gives you the version that came with the computer,

00:05:17   again, off the internet.

00:05:18   - No, no, Command + R does that,

00:05:19   because it's just booting from your recovery partition,

00:05:21   which probably has not been updated

00:05:23   since you installed the original operating system

00:05:25   or since it came with the computer.

00:05:26   Command + R boots off the recovery partition,

00:05:28   I'm pretty sure, and the Command + Option + R is internet.

00:05:30   - Right, and I thought, maybe I'm wrong,

00:05:31   it doesn't really matter,

00:05:32   but I thought there was another key modifier

00:05:34   that you could do an internet recovery

00:05:36   against the version of the OS that your computer came with.

00:05:39   - Oh yeah, there probably is.

00:05:40   I didn't know if it would be presented with you,

00:05:42   a menu or something.

00:05:43   Once you're going to the internet,

00:05:44   you have the option to pull different versions, I'm sure.

00:05:47   Yeah, so anyway, so I did an internet recovery,

00:05:49   and this was, I think the day that Catalina came out,

00:05:52   it was this past Monday or something like that.

00:05:53   It was shortly after Catalina came out,

00:05:55   and sure enough, it gave me Catalina,

00:05:56   and so far, it actually seems to be working better,

00:06:01   I would say.

00:06:02   The iMac in particular had a fair bit of cruft within it,

00:06:05   but the MacBook, I don't think it had very much cruft

00:06:09   from years and years and years

00:06:10   of the same load being brought forward

00:06:13   with each new computer, but even still,

00:06:16   a couple of years on, I feel like the MacBook,

00:06:18   and maybe it's a placebo,

00:06:19   but I feel like the MacBook

00:06:20   is operating considerably better now.

00:06:21   So my MacBook, and we'll talk about this more later,

00:06:23   my MacBook is on Catalina.

00:06:25   I have not yet touched Catalina on the iMac.

00:06:27   I'm not really sure why, except that everyone seems

00:06:30   to be up in arms about the thought of upgrading.

00:06:33   I think I would be fine, but I'm so scared

00:06:35   to touch anything at this point

00:06:37   that I figure I'll just wait it out for a little while.

00:06:40   But yeah, all seems well in my computing world,

00:06:44   at least for the time being, and I really am impressed.

00:06:48   I really honestly am impressed

00:06:49   with how well the internet recovery worked on the MacBook,

00:06:52   because I have a gigabit connection,

00:06:55   basically both directions, and it didn't take

00:06:59   considerably longer than I would have expected.

00:07:01   It took about as long as I expected,

00:07:02   especially given that it's a MacBook,

00:07:04   which is slow and underpowered, et cetera.

00:07:06   And it worked really, really, really well.

00:07:08   And so I think everything's good, believe it or not.

00:07:12   I don't know, we'll see.

00:07:14   (electronic beeping)

00:07:16   Tell me, gentlemen, I did not put this in the show notes,

00:07:18   but as soon as one of you did, I kinda slapped my forehead

00:07:22   and realized, oh man, I completely forgot about this.

00:07:25   Did FaceTime attention correction ship?

00:07:28   - I check on my phone, but my phone is still not running

00:07:30   iOS 13 'cause I'm a scaredy cat.

00:07:32   Why don't one of you check for me?

00:07:34   - All right, so where would this be?

00:07:35   I'm looking in settings, let me search for FaceTime.

00:07:37   - Well, that's assuming the search is working.

00:07:39   - Yeah, that's true too.

00:07:40   - No, don't search, just search with your eyeballs.

00:07:43   - While I'm looking at the FaceTime portion of settings,

00:07:46   I see allows FaceTime to access Siri and search,

00:07:49   FaceTime on or off, my Apple ID, where I can be reached,

00:07:52   my caller ID, FaceTime Live photos,

00:07:55   and blocked contacts, and that is it.

00:07:56   - And I can verify on 13.2 it's exactly the same.

00:07:58   - Interesting, so I would say that no, it has not shipped.

00:08:01   Where did we come down on this?

00:08:03   If I recall correctly, I thought that this was really cool,

00:08:06   and I thought that both of you guys

00:08:07   were kind of anti-attention correction, is that right?

00:08:11   - Yeah. - I was very anti.

00:08:13   For reasons beyond the technical,

00:08:14   'cause I just thought it was the wrong thing

00:08:17   to try to accomplish.

00:08:18   I don't remember what Marco's stance was.

00:08:21   - Mine was almost as anti as you, basically.

00:08:23   It's a very risky thing to try to do,

00:08:26   because if you do it even slightly wrong,

00:08:28   it really messes up badly.

00:08:30   - Yeah, I was saying that even if you did it perfectly right,

00:08:33   and perhaps especially if you did it perfectly right,

00:08:36   I still don't like it.

00:08:37   Anyway, we'll add that to the bin of things

00:08:40   that didn't quite make it into 13.0 or 13.1 or 13.2.

00:08:45   Stay tuned, brutal.

00:08:49   - And speaking of, one of you has noticed

00:08:52   that at apple.com/macos/catalina/features,

00:08:55   we'll put a link in the show notes,

00:08:56   there is a genuinely long list of features,

00:08:59   I didn't even realize this page was here,

00:09:01   a very long list of features that are new in Catalina,

00:09:04   but if you look closely,

00:09:05   two of them have little asterisks next to them.

00:09:08   One of them is iCloud Drive folder sharing,

00:09:11   which I think I speak for all three of us in saying

00:09:13   we were very excited to have,

00:09:15   because we could have maybe stopped using Dropbox

00:09:18   for sharing audio files between the three of us.

00:09:20   - You two were excited about that, I was not.

00:09:22   I continue not to be excited by iCloud Drive

00:09:25   or folder sharing or anything related to it.

00:09:27   - Well now I'm not.

00:09:28   I was very excited about that,

00:09:32   but now I'm thinking when it comes out,

00:09:34   are we gonna trust it?

00:09:36   You know, it has had such a rocky summer,

00:09:39   like the early betas,

00:09:41   the reason it was delayed it seemed was

00:09:42   that the early betas were really bad

00:09:43   and people were losing data and files.

00:09:45   And it seems like now it's even,

00:09:49   it was so hard apparently to fix that and get it right

00:09:51   that they were delaying it until next spring.

00:09:54   So I don't know, when it does finally come out,

00:09:56   are any of us gonna trust it?

00:09:58   How long is it gonna take for any of us to trust it?

00:10:01   I mean, I feel like in this context specifically,

00:10:05   so the three of us are trying to share files

00:10:08   amongst ourselves, where presumably these files

00:10:13   will get caught up by time machine

00:10:15   on each of our respective computers

00:10:17   within an hour of them being generated.

00:10:20   I feel like I would be okay with it.

00:10:21   I don't think I would be too scared,

00:10:25   but you know, you never really know what can happen,

00:10:27   especially when it comes to iCloud.

00:10:29   I haven't yet been burned by iCloud really badly

00:10:32   and I almost wonder if that shoe is about to drop,

00:10:34   especially given the conversation we just had

00:10:36   about everything else in my computing life

00:10:37   being a little rough these days.

00:10:39   But I don't know, I feel like Apple has had themselves

00:10:44   burned by this whole beta experience

00:10:48   and one would hope that they have learned their lesson

00:10:51   and one would hope that they will not make

00:10:54   this mistake again.

00:10:55   But I don't know, with Apple,

00:10:56   especially when it comes to services,

00:10:57   can you ever really be confident ever?

00:11:00   - Well, a lot of their services do work well,

00:11:03   but the ones that don't, they seem to never really fix

00:11:07   in a way that earns our trust.

00:11:10   - Yeah.

00:11:10   - I mean, some of them, they've done a good job with.

00:11:13   I feel like the backend for the Photos app,

00:11:17   we had so many reasons not to trust it

00:11:18   and there were bugs in the beginning

00:11:20   and people did lose photos and have weird glitches

00:11:22   and stuff, but overall at this point,

00:11:24   I think the Photos backend has matured to the point

00:11:26   where the vast majority of complaints about Photos

00:11:30   have nothing to do with the backend

00:11:32   and everything to do with the application

00:11:33   that through which you use the backend,

00:11:35   but in general, I think the Photo backend sinks.

00:11:38   And that's a hard problem, I mean,

00:11:40   'cause Photos are numerous and large and just ever-growing

00:11:43   and I don't think there are as many light users of Photos

00:11:47   because like on Drive, you can put three or four things there

00:11:50   and that's it, right?

00:11:51   Whereas Photos, if you take any photos,

00:11:53   presumably if you continue to live,

00:11:55   you will take more photos.

00:11:56   And you probably don't delete your old photos

00:11:58   and so it's a larger volume problem.

00:12:02   The main reason I put this in the notes is,

00:12:04   here we've talked about iCloud Drive folder sharing

00:12:06   being delayed or whatever and we're thinking like,

00:12:10   oh, maybe it's delayed till 13.1 or maybe 13.2

00:12:12   if you wanna be pessimistic, but as Mark already noted,

00:12:15   this page from Apple says, coming this spring,

00:12:19   which you'll note is next year,

00:12:22   like not even, but in the fall or by the end of the year

00:12:27   or in early next year, I guess spring could be early

00:12:31   next year, but as Marco also noted on Twitter today,

00:12:34   this spring or whatever, you were saying mid-year

00:12:36   or whatever, could also mean like WWDC.

00:12:38   I guess this spring can't mean WWDC.

00:12:40   - Yeah, I was talking about the Mengxi quote rumor

00:12:42   about second half or Q2 or like first half,

00:12:45   but it's like the first half of the year ends in June

00:12:48   and so anything that says, oh, it's gonna be announced

00:12:51   by Q1 or Q2, that could be WWDC.

00:12:54   - Yeah, anyway, they're giving themselves a lot of time,

00:12:57   which is fine, like if that's how long it takes,

00:13:00   that's how long it takes.

00:13:01   None of us want them to ship this in a broken state,

00:13:04   so take your time and get it done.

00:13:06   Hopefully you get it done before whatever's after Catalina.

00:13:10   There's one more item here that I hadn't even recalled,

00:13:16   but I saw it on the same feature page,

00:13:17   which is communication limits where it's kind of like

00:13:20   part of the screen time where you can limit

00:13:23   who your children can communicate with

00:13:26   during certain periods maybe or all the time.

00:13:29   Like when they're in downtime,

00:13:31   they can use the Messages app,

00:13:32   but they can only use the Messages app

00:13:33   to communicate to you and not to their friends

00:13:35   or something like that.

00:13:36   That feature is apparently so complicated

00:13:39   that it's also not coming until spring.

00:13:42   - It is a cool feature though.

00:13:42   I don't remember them having talked about that at all

00:13:45   when I saw this in the show notes.

00:13:46   - I remember it 'cause I'm more attuned

00:13:48   to the parental control-y type things,

00:13:51   mostly because I, well, I don't know.

00:13:53   I do use screen time,

00:13:54   but it's basically like a bedtime enforcement mechanism

00:13:58   to say, just so the kids don't secret their phones

00:14:00   into the bed and stay up until 1 a.m.

00:14:02   texting under the covers, they need to get sleep, right?

00:14:05   But I do want their devices to be useful in an emergency,

00:14:07   so Apple has all these sort of exceptions

00:14:09   where you can carve out,

00:14:11   like if they're stranded on the side of the road,

00:14:12   they can always call you, they can message you,

00:14:14   they can email you, they can do all sorts of things,

00:14:18   but it's very difficult to strike the balance

00:14:19   between having a device that works in emergencies

00:14:22   for everything they could possibly need,

00:14:23   maps, so on and so forth,

00:14:25   but also that doesn't let them burn too many hours of sleep

00:14:30   chatting with friends.

00:14:31   - Makes sense.

00:14:32   Can we pivot ever so slightly?

00:14:34   What are your guys' expectations

00:14:36   with regard to the remainder of this month in an Apple event?

00:14:38   Because a week or two ago, I would have said,

00:14:42   without question, there's going to be an Apple event

00:14:46   shortly before Halloween, just like there was last year,

00:14:48   and that is going to be the deal.

00:14:50   There'll be new MacBook Pros,

00:14:52   there will probably be a new iPad Pro.

00:14:55   We'll get more details about your beloved Mac Pro,

00:14:58   God rest my soul,

00:14:59   and we'll probably get some of the things

00:15:02   that have been promised software-wise,

00:15:04   like Photoshop for iPad,

00:15:05   but I don't know, after seeing this Ming-Chi Kuo rumor

00:15:09   and some of the other talking heads like ourselves

00:15:11   have started to pump the brakes a little bit on this,

00:15:14   and now I'm starting to waffle a bit and wonder,

00:15:16   do you guys still think there will be an October event,

00:15:19   and if so, what do you think will be there?

00:15:21   And let's start with Marco.

00:15:22   - The rumors are, the latest rumors are basically

00:15:25   that new MacBooks with scissor keyboards are coming out

00:15:28   basically next year by June,

00:15:31   but that is actually,

00:15:33   we've actually heard rumblings of that same thing before

00:15:36   with that same schedule.

00:15:38   What those rumors didn't mention

00:15:39   is the rumored 16-inch MacBook Pro.

00:15:42   Those rumors were about the other models

00:15:44   of various Apple laptops.

00:15:46   The 16-inch is still unknown,

00:15:48   but the latest rumors of the 16-inch

00:15:51   were that it's coming imminently,

00:15:53   that it's coming this fall,

00:15:54   like possibly even this month.

00:15:57   So as far as I know,

00:16:00   or as far as we've heard, rather,

00:16:03   that hasn't changed.

00:16:05   So I still believe, I'm still holding onto the dream

00:16:09   that we're getting this 16-inch.

00:16:12   I could really, really use a 16-inch laptop this weekend,

00:16:17   and so therefore, it's gonna be announced next week,

00:16:21   because I need it this weekend. (laughs)

00:16:23   - So thank you, Marco.

00:16:24   - Yeah, so to answer your question,

00:16:27   there is still so much that's rumored in the pipeline

00:16:30   that seems like it's fairly imminent.

00:16:31   So things like the little tag tile tracker things

00:16:35   that the U1 chip is supposed to help locate,

00:16:38   the rumored, and that we'll talk about later,

00:16:41   maybe the leaked image of the AirPods with the rubber tips,

00:16:46   so some kind of new AirPods model,

00:16:48   a rumored cheaper HomePod that was rumored recently.

00:16:53   There's all this different stuff.

00:16:54   And not to mention,

00:16:57   maybe when the TV service launches,

00:17:01   maybe they'll wanna do something too.

00:17:02   Oh, there's also rumored Apple TV hardware update as well.

00:17:05   So there's all this rumored stuff

00:17:07   about these lower-priority products

00:17:10   that are all still waiting in the wings somewhere.

00:17:13   And the iPhone event did seem

00:17:14   like some stuff was cut out of it.

00:17:16   So I'm still holding on to hope.

00:17:19   I'm not actually hopeful for iPads.

00:17:21   iPads seem like the rumors are all saying next year,

00:17:24   and that's fine.

00:17:25   The iPad Pro was just updated one year ago,

00:17:28   and they tend to be on a year-and-a-half or so cycle,

00:17:30   so that would be totally fine.

00:17:33   But I still think there is room for a smaller event

00:17:36   that would be the 16-inch MacBook Pro,

00:17:39   new HomePod, new AirPods, new Apple TV,

00:17:42   maybe something like that,

00:17:43   and maybe that tile tag tracker thing.

00:17:45   - Yeah, I started to get doubtful about the iPads

00:17:48   after the phone event just had the cheap one.

00:17:51   It's like, why wouldn't they say that for the iPad event,

00:17:53   oh, maybe there's not gonna be an iPad event.

00:17:54   But it seemed like it was still a thing that they could do.

00:17:57   But this new rumor about the next iPad having

00:17:59   what they keep calling a 3D ToF, or Time of Flight camera,

00:18:05   which is basically a camera that emits stuff,

00:18:08   I think it's light,

00:18:09   and tracks how long it takes to bounce off things.

00:18:13   - It's stuff.

00:18:14   - Yeah, I mean, it might be, I don't know if it's IR,

00:18:17   if it's visible light, if it's a laser,

00:18:19   if it's, you know, whatever.

00:18:20   Anyway, it times how long it takes to hit something

00:18:22   and bounce back to it to get a better depth map

00:18:26   for the purposes of AR and all that other stuff.

00:18:28   That's the rumor that the next iPad Pro

00:18:32   has that on its rear camera.

00:18:34   And also coming along with that rumor is,

00:18:37   and it's coming in the first half of next year.

00:18:39   So that, I feel like if there's any foundation at all,

00:18:42   kind of squashes any hope of a boring iPad Pro update,

00:18:47   which is basically take the existing iPad Pro,

00:18:48   put an A13 in it, you know,

00:18:50   that doesn't seem like it's gonna happen.

00:18:52   But like Marco said, the 16-inch rumors continue to be

00:18:56   that this is a thing that Apple could announce at any time.

00:19:00   Obviously all the rest of the laptops

00:19:03   have never really been rumored for imminent release

00:19:06   and are probably into next year.

00:19:08   That's fine.

00:19:09   I think the laptop can carry an October event.

00:19:11   Now, what do you have besides the laptop?

00:19:13   I think you can have the laptop

00:19:15   and like one other thing and it's fine.

00:19:18   I don't think all the things Marco listed

00:19:19   are gonna be there.

00:19:20   You can have laptop in the tiles, fine, there's your event.

00:19:22   You can have laptop and Apple TV, fine, there's your event.

00:19:25   You can have the laptop and the earbuds, fine,

00:19:26   there's your event.

00:19:27   Because if Apple's smart, well, I don't know.

00:19:30   I don't know if this is the right PR move,

00:19:31   but I think it would make everyone feel better

00:19:35   for Apple to make a very big deal

00:19:37   about how great this new laptop is.

00:19:39   Now, they don't have to have any self-flagellation

00:19:41   about oh, we made a bad keyboard, we're so sorry.

00:19:43   But they know that we know that they know.

00:19:46   You know, and they're just like,

00:19:48   look at our amazing new laptop.

00:19:51   This is the best laptop we've ever made

00:19:52   and we're really proud of it.

00:19:53   They can say all positive things and we'll get the subtext.

00:19:56   The subtext is they're not crap anymore.

00:19:58   And you know, actually, I have to make it not crap, right?

00:20:01   So new keyboard and one new port, that's all we ask

00:20:04   and we'll probably get half of that, so.

00:20:06   (laughing)

00:20:07   Anyway, yeah, we're hungry for new laptops.

00:20:11   Apple tends to make us think when they say like,

00:20:15   this is what all our new laptops will look like

00:20:17   going forward, presumably this is that moment

00:20:19   that we've been waiting for for so long.

00:20:21   So yeah, I think they just need that laptop

00:20:23   and want another thing.

00:20:23   And surely, of all the stuff that was possible

00:20:26   for release in the September event,

00:20:28   one of those things should be ready

00:20:30   to be announced alongside.

00:20:31   Maybe not shipping, I mean, forget about shipping,

00:20:33   but if you got an event, you can announce stuff.

00:20:35   And especially for things like the noise canceling AirPods,

00:20:40   which I remember thinking about that way back when,

00:20:42   like how can you make an AirPod noise canceling?

00:20:44   But I kept thinking of the AirPod as like a current AirPod.

00:20:46   You can't make the current AirPod noise canceling,

00:20:50   I suppose, because it doesn't seal your ear canal.

00:20:53   It just kind of rattles around there, which is fine

00:20:56   when you're just emitting sound.

00:20:57   But if you want to counteract outside sound,

00:20:59   you have to have a much more controlled sort of sound chamber

00:21:02   so you gotta plug it up.

00:21:03   So anyway, the rumors of those things are AirPods

00:21:07   that look more like, I don't know what you would call them.

00:21:09   Are they, they'll call those in-ear?

00:21:11   I think they're just like not quite in-ear,

00:21:13   but squishy into-ear.

00:21:16   - I mean, yeah, they look like PowerBeats,

00:21:18   but without the earhook.

00:21:19   - Yeah, what do you call that style of ear thing?

00:21:22   - I, you know, they're not quite in-ear monitors

00:21:25   'cause they don't really seal.

00:21:26   - Right.

00:21:27   - I don't actually know what that style,

00:21:29   it's just like, it's a rubber-tipped earbud, basically.

00:21:33   - It used to be the only kind of earbud

00:21:35   before I think they started popularizing,

00:21:37   the kind that don't actually squish

00:21:39   into your ear canal in any way.

00:21:40   Like the AirPods just kind of, you know,

00:21:42   are grasped by the funny little cartilage in your ear

00:21:44   and they just hang out there,

00:21:46   but they don't shove into your ear hole

00:21:47   in any way whatsoever.

00:21:49   But before that, if you had said earbuds,

00:21:51   you would have thought of something

00:21:52   that looks like these AirPods with a little rubbery tip,

00:21:54   maybe changeable tips, maybe that's too much for Apple.

00:21:56   Anyway.

00:21:57   - The PowerBeats have changeable tips.

00:21:59   It's really nice, actually.

00:22:01   - Yeah, I mean, I suppose they have to make changeable tips

00:22:03   because if it's shoving into your ear canal,

00:22:05   it's harder to come up with a one-size-fits-all,

00:22:07   even harder than it is for the AirPods,

00:22:09   so I suppose it has to be changeable.

00:22:11   - Yeah, and like, this is, I'm actually,

00:22:12   I'm really hoping they ship something like that

00:22:15   because I like the PowerBeats.

00:22:18   So I have both PowerBeats and AirPods.

00:22:20   I don't use the AirPods frequently

00:22:22   because they are not very comfortable on me,

00:22:24   even with the little like aftermarket silicone wraps

00:22:27   that I put around them.

00:22:28   Like, that makes them a little bit better,

00:22:29   but they're still not very comfortable on me.

00:22:31   The PowerBeats, which have those changeable rubber tips,

00:22:34   and they come with three or four sets of them

00:22:36   in different sizes, those fit me very well,

00:22:39   but they have the giant earhook

00:22:41   and the giant case to accommodate that,

00:22:43   and so they're a much bigger thing that's harder to pocket.

00:22:47   If Apple can make something that's close to AirPods

00:22:50   in size and form factor,

00:22:51   that can also have a pocketable case like AirPods do,

00:22:55   but that has that rubber tip for a better,

00:22:57   more comfortable fit, I am so in on that.

00:23:00   I really, really hope they do.

00:23:02   - Yeah, 'cause you always wanted to use the AirPods,

00:23:05   but they don't quite fit your ears,

00:23:06   so this is another chance for Apple to not fit your ears.

00:23:08   - Well, and not only that,

00:23:10   but if they have this kind of changeable tip thing,

00:23:12   that also means that even if Apple totally blows it

00:23:15   and doesn't give you multiple tips,

00:23:16   other people can probably make them and sell them

00:23:18   because they probably will have one of those little like,

00:23:20   like stick port things on it that all these headphones do

00:23:23   that you can, you know, it would take two seconds

00:23:25   for a third party manufacturer to design something

00:23:27   that could fit it if it's any kind of like

00:23:29   removable rubber tip.

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00:25:21   (upbeat music)

00:25:24   - Can we talk a little bit about,

00:25:25   this has been going around on other podcasts

00:25:27   and in our various slacks,

00:25:28   and I know we talked about it in the past,

00:25:30   but I want to revisit it again.

00:25:31   The idea of, oh, I know IY came up,

00:25:33   'cause there was a story about how you can get Apple

00:25:35   to replace your AirPod when the batteries go dead.

00:25:38   The idea that AirPods are completely sealed

00:25:41   and you use them and eventually use them

00:25:43   for a certain amount of time

00:25:44   and the battery no longer holds a charge,

00:25:46   and then what recourse do you have?

00:25:47   Because you can't change the batteries.

00:25:48   Apple can't change the batteries.

00:25:50   You just have to essentially either throw them away,

00:25:52   buy new ones, or get them replaced.

00:25:54   And the story, well, we should find a link

00:25:56   for the show notes for this,

00:25:56   but the story was like, if you know the magic words to say,

00:26:00   you can go into an Apple store and be like,

00:26:02   I've had these AirPods for two years

00:26:04   and now they last like 20 minutes.

00:26:06   Can I get a battery service?

00:26:08   Can I get the battery service for them?

00:26:10   And they charge you less than the price of new AirPods

00:26:13   and essentially give you new AirPods.

00:26:14   Like they don't actually change your batteries,

00:26:16   but, and it's not much less than the AirPod.

00:26:19   They get to pay $98 and then you get two refurbished AirPods,

00:26:23   which is cheaper than $160.

00:26:25   So maybe go in and say battery service.

00:26:27   Obviously if your batteries are crappy

00:26:29   within the one year warranty,

00:26:30   they'll just give you new ones for free or whatever.

00:26:32   Like this, we find there are articles to the other options.

00:26:35   But anyway, this is renew the debate about,

00:26:38   is this product a good idea?

00:26:40   Like, yeah, we all love our AirPods,

00:26:41   but it's another Apple thing with sealed batteries.

00:26:45   And unlike some of the other sealed batteries,

00:26:47   this literally can't be replaced

00:26:50   because it's just totally glued in there

00:26:51   and there's no way to get it out

00:26:53   without destroying the thing.

00:26:54   So once those batteries die, which they inevitably will

00:26:58   because the lithium ion batteries only last

00:27:00   a certain number of cycles and then they're no good,

00:27:02   it seems wasteful to throw them out.

00:27:05   Well, let's, I don't wanna say it seems wasteful.

00:27:07   Look, here are the different angles on why it's bad.

00:27:10   One is that it costs you lots of money.

00:27:12   You paid $160 and that lasts you 18 months,

00:27:14   then you have to pay another $160

00:27:16   and then you get 18 months.

00:27:16   That's not a great treadmill to be on.

00:27:19   These are not a cheap product.

00:27:20   No one wants to keep paying for that,

00:27:22   says the person who buys a new phone

00:27:24   for $1,000 every two years.

00:27:25   Anyway.

00:27:26   (laughing)

00:27:27   Or a new computer for 12 grand every 10 years.

00:27:30   Anyway.

00:27:31   - I think you're getting away with just 12.

00:27:32   - Yeah.

00:27:33   - Yeah, that's laughable.

00:27:34   - Well, we'll see.

00:27:35   Well, I know.

00:27:36   (laughing)

00:27:37   So that's the cost argument.

00:27:38   It doesn't feel good to spend that money.

00:27:39   Second is environmental argument.

00:27:42   You buy this thing and you just throw it away

00:27:45   and then you buy another one and you throw it away.

00:27:48   Is there a third argument?

00:27:49   Let's see.

00:27:49   You got cost environmental.

00:27:51   There's a right to repair angle.

00:27:54   I mean, I feel like you have the right to try to repair that,

00:27:56   but they're assembled in such a way

00:27:57   that it's not gonna happen.

00:27:59   I mean, yeah, I think those are the two major angles,

00:28:04   cost environmental, unless there's some other thing

00:28:06   that I'm thinking of.

00:28:07   Anyway, I've been thinking about them

00:28:11   and we talked about it last time.

00:28:12   Last time I think where I came down was

00:28:15   I would rather have an AirPod with a changeable battery

00:28:18   on it would be a worse product given the technology

00:28:21   that existed at the time,

00:28:24   because it would have to be bigger and bulkier

00:28:25   and it wouldn't be as sort of, you know,

00:28:28   lightweight and svelte and perfect and beautiful

00:28:30   as the AirPod is.

00:28:32   But we're on our second generation of AirPods now

00:28:35   and it's been a few years.

00:28:37   And I think it's worth revisiting the idea of, you know,

00:28:40   revisiting the idea of these particular harms

00:28:43   and how they could be mitigated.

00:28:45   - I have such mixed feelings about this.

00:28:50   I agree that this is an example of consumerism

00:28:55   kind of run amok.

00:28:56   You know, I happily spent almost $200

00:29:01   on my AirPods 2 with wireless charging case,

00:29:05   just two years after I spent 150 bucks,

00:29:08   whatever it was, on the AirPods 1.

00:29:09   And I use my AirPods every day.

00:29:11   I freaking love these things.

00:29:13   I still think they might be the best Apple product

00:29:16   I've ever purchased.

00:29:17   And if they were made appreciably worse

00:29:21   by having say a removable battery,

00:29:23   that would make me really, really sad.

00:29:26   That being said, it is bananas that in probably

00:29:29   another year and a half or whatever it's been

00:29:30   since I bought this set,

00:29:31   I will be buying yet another set of AirPods.

00:29:34   And it is bananas that the old ones are probably

00:29:37   just gonna end up in a landfill somewhere.

00:29:38   And that's really, really crummy.

00:29:41   - Is it really, really crummy?

00:29:42   How crummy is it?

00:29:44   - Well, I think it's really crummy

00:29:46   from an environmental perspective.

00:29:48   - But why?

00:29:49   - Well, because it's just very wasteful.

00:29:50   - It's very wasteful as compared to what?

00:29:53   - I mean, yeah, I think it pales in comparison

00:29:56   to the other waste that we will generate

00:29:58   over that same timescale.

00:29:59   - Yeah, that's fair.

00:30:00   - How, like, how much mass is in an AirPod?

00:30:03   (laughing)

00:30:04   And how much mass is in every disposable plastic cup

00:30:07   you get from a fast food restaurant in a month or whatever?

00:30:09   Like, AirPods are very small and very light.

00:30:12   Now, there is a manufacturing cost,

00:30:14   'cause they're not just simple plastic.

00:30:15   Like, there's electronics inside them,

00:30:16   there's mining that goes into that.

00:30:18   There is, they have a hot,

00:30:19   they punch above their weight

00:30:20   in terms of environmental costs.

00:30:22   But the bottom line is, they're very small.

00:30:24   There is very little actual mass in these things.

00:30:27   And when I think about a replaceable battery

00:30:29   from the environmental perspective,

00:30:30   it's like, I mean, like the cost thing aside,

00:30:33   from an environmental perspective,

00:30:34   if you had to throw out,

00:30:35   what percentage of the mass of AirPods

00:30:38   do you think the battery is?

00:30:40   Over 50, surely, right?

00:30:42   60, 70%, 80% of the mass is battery?

00:30:46   So if you're like, this isn't wasteful,

00:30:47   I'll just put in a new battery.

00:30:48   You're basically throwing away 80% of the device anyway.

00:30:53   And it's not a particularly environmentally friendly 80%,

00:30:56   because lithium ion batteries

00:30:57   are not great at sitting in a landfill.

00:30:59   But mass-wise, as compared to almost anything else

00:31:04   that we consume and throw out,

00:31:05   a wrapper, a waste, packaging, whatever from,

00:31:09   it's so small.

00:31:10   Every two years, you throw out like the equivalent

00:31:13   of 1/18th of a golf ball worth of industrial waste.

00:31:17   That's nothing compared to the amount of crap

00:31:19   that the average person throws out.

00:31:21   And how many AirPods are there in the world

00:31:23   given that they're like a $200 wireless earbud

00:31:27   that nobody actually really needs?

00:31:29   Again, as compared to like anything else

00:31:32   that you can imagine, plastic shopping bags

00:31:34   before they were banned everywhere,

00:31:36   cups, fast food cups, containers,

00:31:38   like just all the plastic stuff

00:31:41   that comes in the packaging of all the food that we buy,

00:31:43   every package thing of strawberries

00:31:45   and blueberries or whatever.

00:31:47   And yeah, some of that can be recycled

00:31:48   and see that depressing, what was that?

00:31:51   99% invisible, I forget.

00:31:52   Some depressing podcast episode

00:31:53   about exactly how grim the recycling situation is.

00:31:56   But bottom line is AirPods are really small.

00:31:58   Now, I'm not saying we should throw them out.

00:32:00   I'm saying of all the things

00:32:01   that you should be concerned about waste-wise,

00:32:03   I feel like you can offset that waste

00:32:05   by buying three fewer plastic cups per every two years.

00:32:10   And you've offset most of the plastic.

00:32:14   The manufacturing and the sort of the microchip part

00:32:18   of that or whatever, I can see where,

00:32:21   again, it punches above its weight

00:32:22   in terms of how much energy it takes

00:32:23   to actually create these things and all the mining involved.

00:32:26   But it's still so tiny,

00:32:28   so tiny compared to almost anything else.

00:32:31   The old laptop that you have,

00:32:32   how much more electronics is in an old laptop

00:32:35   that you're no longer using

00:32:36   that you maybe didn't throw away

00:32:38   because you remembered how much it costs,

00:32:39   but bottom line is you're gonna eventually throw it away

00:32:41   if you didn't sell it immediately

00:32:42   because it becomes obsolete.

00:32:44   And phone's the same deal.

00:32:45   Like it's just AirPods, environmentally speaking,

00:32:48   I'm not saying it doesn't matter.

00:32:50   I'm saying it is not the top of my list for concern.

00:32:55   And furthermore, that replaceable batteries

00:32:57   does not really help the environmental story for these.

00:33:00   Like lithium ion batteries are not great for the environment

00:33:03   because they have a limited number of charge cycles,

00:33:05   and when they're done,

00:33:05   we don't have a good way to dispose of them.

00:33:08   Again, a single Nissan Leaf that didn't come

00:33:11   with climate control for the battery to save costs

00:33:14   and therefore destroys its battery

00:33:16   in like three to five years,

00:33:18   how many AirPods worth of lithium ion battery cells

00:33:21   are in a Nissan Leaf?

00:33:22   All of them?

00:33:23   All the AirPods ever manufactured?

00:33:25   I don't know.

00:33:26   - Maybe.

00:33:27   (laughing)

00:33:28   - So I don't think there's a good solution

00:33:31   to the environmental thing.

00:33:33   Even replaceable batteries,

00:33:34   although it would make people feel better,

00:33:36   doesn't actually solve the environmental impact of AirPods,

00:33:38   which itself is tiny.

00:33:41   - Yeah, you make a really good point.

00:33:42   And can we just address that you and I drive combustion cars

00:33:47   because anytime anyone says anything about the environment,

00:33:50   then we have to address the fact that we drive a car

00:33:52   that does not burn electricity, good grief,

00:33:55   that does not use electricity.

00:33:56   Like can we just--

00:33:57   - That's incredible mileage.

00:33:59   (laughing)

00:34:00   It's like a 1.5 liter four cylinder, naturally aspirated.

00:34:03   Come on.

00:34:04   - You get a lot better mileage than me.

00:34:05   But yes, the thing is, you can what about your way

00:34:10   all the way down when it comes to really anything,

00:34:12   but particularly the environmental stuff.

00:34:14   And I am just so tired of hearing what about your car.

00:34:18   But anyway, to come back to the actual point,

00:34:21   you make a very good point actually,

00:34:23   that these things in terms of mass alone are not big.

00:34:26   And even if millions upon millions of them

00:34:28   have been produced, well, there's been millions

00:34:30   and millions of of a cords produced,

00:34:33   and we don't know where all of that scrap metal ended up.

00:34:35   And we don't know where all of the car batteries

00:34:37   that have ever been replaced in the history of time

00:34:39   have ended up.

00:34:40   We don't know where Marco's prior Tesla's battery pack

00:34:43   ended up.

00:34:44   And so, yeah, I think you're right.

00:34:46   And maybe it's one of these things

00:34:48   that I'm majoring on a minor.

00:34:50   Well, I mean, I don't, I'm not really,

00:34:53   my engine is not really that revved one way or another

00:34:55   about this, but for the purposes of this discussion,

00:34:58   maybe I'm majoring on a minor when it comes to the AirPods.

00:35:01   I do think it is unfortunate that there is no way

00:35:04   to keep them going.

00:35:05   You know, the advantage of say my car and yours, John,

00:35:08   and maybe Marco's, is that even when we're done with them,

00:35:12   in theory, they can continue on in the hands of somebody else

00:35:16   and continue to be used as a car.

00:35:18   And then hopefully, eventually,

00:35:20   when they are no longer being used by someone else,

00:35:22   they will be piecemeal, taken apart,

00:35:25   and used in other cars or sold for scrap metal

00:35:28   or what have you.

00:35:29   But I just, I kind of wish, it's so hard,

00:35:33   because I kind of wish that I had a computer

00:35:37   with a removable battery, for example,

00:35:39   so I could easily prolong the life of that computer

00:35:42   and do that myself.

00:35:43   You know, my first Mac laptop had a removable battery,

00:35:46   if I'm not mistaken, and it eventually swelled, swelled?

00:35:50   Swelled?

00:35:51   And swelled.

00:35:51   - Swelled as something else.

00:35:52   - Yeah, yeah, something else in time.

00:35:54   Yeah, yeah, I went to the gym, got real swole.

00:35:57   Anyway, it eventually swelled and it got replaced,

00:35:59   and it was pretty easy, and I kind of missed those days,

00:36:02   but that being said,

00:36:03   I freaking love carrying my MacBook Adorable.

00:36:06   I freaking love that my AirPods fit

00:36:08   in the little change pocket in my jeans,

00:36:10   and neither of those things would be true,

00:36:12   to your point, John, if they were easily serviceable.

00:36:16   - Yeah, so the cost angle is the other part of this.

00:36:18   Like, set aside the environmental thing.

00:36:21   I feel like, you know, the environmental thing,

00:36:24   we're stuck due to battery technology,

00:36:25   no matter what Apple does.

00:36:27   If they had 100% replaceable batteries,

00:36:30   it wouldn't help the environmental factor,

00:36:31   but if they had 100% replaceable batteries,

00:36:34   it could definitely, if Apple prices it right,

00:36:36   help the cost, because although the battery is

00:36:40   over 50% of the mass of AirPods,

00:36:43   it is not over 50% of the cost, I would imagine.

00:36:45   Maybe I'm wrong.

00:36:46   Maybe I'm overestimating how much

00:36:48   the integrated circuits in it cost,

00:36:50   but either way, I feel like if Apple wanted

00:36:53   to do the right thing and make people happier

00:36:56   with their AirPods, it eventually came out well

00:36:57   in the removable batteries.

00:36:58   When the batteries died, as they definitely will

00:37:01   with current lithium ion technology in a year or two,

00:37:04   you know, when they get so annoyingly run down,

00:37:08   Apple could sell you new batteries for a reasonable price.

00:37:12   I don't know, 50 bucks, maybe, 60 bucks

00:37:15   for two of them for a pair, like, you know,

00:37:18   that's, I feel like the margins on that would be good,

00:37:20   given the size of these batteries, right?

00:37:22   You know, as Marco would know,

00:37:24   how big a lithium ion battery can you get

00:37:26   for one of your weird flashlights?

00:37:27   How much mass is in that battery

00:37:29   as compared to how much mass is in the Apple ones?

00:37:30   I know the Apple ones are odd shape,

00:37:32   and the Apple, you know, anyway,

00:37:33   feel like there's plenty of profit margin in that,

00:37:35   and you could bring in your AirPods

00:37:36   when you buy the new ones,

00:37:38   and give Apple your old batteries,

00:37:39   which they could then, I don't know, try to recycle?

00:37:41   Is there some way to recycle

00:37:43   lithium ion batteries, presumably?

00:37:45   - Yes, in general.

00:37:46   I mean, I don't know about these specific ones

00:37:48   that they're using in AirPods,

00:37:49   but yes, you can, like, you know,

00:37:50   extract some stuff out of lithium ion batteries.

00:37:52   - Yeah, I mean, again, the mass is so small

00:37:53   that it may not be economically worthwhile to do that,

00:37:56   but it's the right thing to do,

00:37:57   and it will get, if you get people into your store,

00:38:00   and they're willing to, you know, again,

00:38:01   this is the fictional AirPod

00:38:03   with an unscrewable battery stick thingy.

00:38:06   Go into the store, give 'em 60 bucks,

00:38:08   give 'em your old little sticks, screw in the new ones.

00:38:10   Now, what you're actually doing is you're saving,

00:38:12   like, once you unscrew the battery part,

00:38:14   and you realize, this is what I'm saving?

00:38:16   These two little turds here that weigh like nothing?

00:38:18   It's like, yeah, that's where all

00:38:19   the amazing, magical smarts are.

00:38:22   You could prolong the life of your AirPods

00:38:24   until they eventually die from earwax impaction,

00:38:27   as all AirPods, I presume, will eventually.

00:38:31   Just keep shoving 'em in your ears,

00:38:33   and they get pushed into that little mesh grill,

00:38:35   and anyway, right to repair and right to remove earwax.

00:38:40   You need to be openable.

00:38:43   But, you know, I feel like that is a worthy endeavor,

00:38:47   because it makes a product

00:38:48   that people will be more satisfied with.

00:38:50   Apple, like, oh, doesn't Apple,

00:38:52   Apple wants you to buy a new $160 one.

00:38:54   I think Apple would be fine with you buying

00:38:56   very high-margin $60 lithium-ion batteries

00:39:00   that weigh as much as a bird's feather every 18 months.

00:39:04   They would be better with you buying AirPods every 18 months,

00:39:09   but unless they can keep adding new features,

00:39:10   that road is harder for Apple to go down,

00:39:15   to say, every year, we're gonna give you a reason

00:39:17   to buy, you know, a brand, or every 18 months,

00:39:20   we're gonna give you an actual, real reason

00:39:22   why you want to buy a new pair of AirPods.

00:39:24   Instead, right now, we have to buy new AirPods

00:39:28   if we wanna keep using them,

00:39:28   because the battery ends up lasting 20 minutes,

00:39:30   and that really just makes them not useful

00:39:33   for their intended purpose for most people.

00:39:35   So, I'm rooting for Apple to get replaceable batteries

00:39:39   in their AirPods eventually,

00:39:41   but not really for environmental reasons.

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00:41:49   (upbeat music)

00:41:52   - Let's talk about Catalina.

00:41:53   We glanced off of this earlier.

00:41:55   I had told you to recap from just a little while ago

00:41:58   that I do have it on my MacBook Adorable.

00:42:00   I do not yet have it on my iMac.

00:42:02   And so far so good, just a few days in.

00:42:04   I also wanted to quickly, before I pitch to you guys

00:42:07   and ask what your status is,

00:42:09   I wanted to say that having just reformatted,

00:42:13   to use Windows-ism, reformatted both of my computers

00:42:17   and started from scratch, surprisingly refreshing.

00:42:20   I feel like the iMac in particular

00:42:24   had a lot of cruft and garbage and junk on it

00:42:28   that I didn't even, couldn't even keep track of.

00:42:31   And I don't know what about it.

00:42:34   Maybe it's again, all a placebo,

00:42:35   but having this like new fresh installation,

00:42:38   even of Mojave, has felt really, really good.

00:42:41   And I really, really recommend it

00:42:43   if you haven't done this in a long time.

00:42:44   And I'd be curious, Marco,

00:42:46   particularly when I stop talking,

00:42:48   how you feel about the idea of doing that.

00:42:50   Because last I had heard, I thought Marco,

00:42:52   you and maybe John as well,

00:42:54   were carrying basically a build that had been migrated

00:42:57   from, I don't know, 15 years ago,

00:43:00   carrying it through all the way to your iMac Pro today.

00:43:02   And as a final quick note,

00:43:05   I wanted to call attention to Homebrew Bundle,

00:43:09   which I wrote a small blog post about this week,

00:43:11   and I'll link that as well.

00:43:12   But Homebrew Bundle is kind of like a bundler for Ruby gems,

00:43:15   if you're familiar with that at all,

00:43:16   and basically lets you put together a file

00:43:19   that Homebrew will use to look at,

00:43:21   to install a whole bunch of software on your computer.

00:43:23   And that doesn't necessarily mean just command line stuff.

00:43:25   It can be Mac App Store stuff, it can be GUI stuff,

00:43:29   all sorts of different things.

00:43:30   And I found that having done this

00:43:33   and worked out exactly what I wanted in my brew file,

00:43:36   as they call it,

00:43:37   working out exactly what I wanted my brew file for the iMac

00:43:42   and getting it kind of locked in there,

00:43:44   it made it that much easier and less daunting

00:43:46   to go ahead and refresh and reformat my MacBook Adorable,

00:43:51   because all I had to do was run this brew file

00:43:53   I just worked on the week prior,

00:43:55   and 90% of the stuff I needed was automatically installed,

00:43:58   which was really, really great.

00:43:59   So let me start with Marco, two questions.

00:44:01   One, are you running Catalina, and if so, where?

00:44:04   And two, are you still carrying around

00:44:07   a 10 or 15 year old builds, for lack of a better term?

00:44:11   - So in typical style,

00:44:12   I'm going to answer your second question first,

00:44:14   and answer your first question later.

00:44:15   (laughing)

00:44:16   Second question is,

00:44:18   am I still carrying the same installation?

00:44:19   Yes.

00:44:21   I've had two unique Mac desktop installations

00:44:25   during my Mac using career since 2006,

00:44:30   since 2004, rather.

00:44:31   I forget when I did the second one, but it's old.

00:44:35   So I did one for a few years, then reset it,

00:44:37   did a fresh one, but last time I did the fresh one

00:44:40   was a long time ago.

00:44:41   To answer your first question a little bit later,

00:44:45   before that, to jump back for a second,

00:44:46   your homebrew thing.

00:44:48   So I read this blog post, I was very interested

00:44:50   because as you mentioned,

00:44:51   that it doesn't just install command line stuff,

00:44:53   I'm really curious to learn about how it can also install

00:44:56   other apps that are not,

00:44:57   that are in the Mac App Store and stuff.

00:44:59   But my concern, or my hesitation before I invest

00:45:02   any time into this, the idea of having a script

00:45:06   to set up a fresh installation of Mac OS,

00:45:09   I love that idea.

00:45:10   I tried making one of those, using homebrew

00:45:12   for some of my command line stuff, you know,

00:45:14   about a year ago.

00:45:16   And as has been the case with most package managers ever,

00:45:21   and especially for me with homebrew,

00:45:25   it seems like if I write the script, get it all working,

00:45:30   and then I buy a new computer in six months,

00:45:35   the chances of the script still working are extremely low.

00:45:39   And the chances that I'm gonna have to mess with it

00:45:41   and fix things that have broken in the meantime

00:45:44   is almost 100%.

00:45:45   And therefore-- - Well of course you have

00:45:46   to have a new version of your package manager

00:45:48   for the new OS, so just do that before you get it set up.

00:45:50   - Right, and so, but it's like,

00:45:52   this gets me every time with package manager stuff,

00:45:54   and especially with homebrew.

00:45:56   Homebrew is so bad about this,

00:45:57   'cause they change stuff so often.

00:45:59   Like, I have a really hard time getting excited

00:46:03   about this stuff, because I don't need to set up,

00:46:05   like if I had to set up five computers this week,

00:46:08   I would get one of these going,

00:46:09   if I didn't have any kind of other automation thing,

00:46:11   I would get one of these things going, and that'd be great.

00:46:13   But for my actual need for it,

00:46:16   which is setting up a new computer maybe once or twice a year

00:46:19   it's so unlikely that it's actually gonna end up

00:46:22   saving me time, because I have to mess with it

00:46:24   the next time I actually have to use it, 'cause it breaks.

00:46:26   - You know, I hear you, I really honestly do,

00:46:28   and all I can tell you is that I first started working

00:46:32   on a brew file like a year and a half ago,

00:46:34   maybe two years ago, when I was at my jobby job,

00:46:37   my last jobby job, and I think I did have to make

00:46:40   a couple of small changes, and as I've lamented before,

00:46:44   homebrew is a blessing and a curse,

00:46:46   like the error messaging is both obnoxious

00:46:49   and not very useful, and there were a couple of things

00:46:52   that I needed to tweak, but it was very, very low impact,

00:46:56   and for me, I still had this brew file from like,

00:47:00   I don't know, 18, 24 months ago,

00:47:02   and it almost entirely worked as is.

00:47:04   So I totally sympathize with what you're saying,

00:47:07   you are not wrong, but there's not a lot

00:47:09   to these brew files, it's not like I'm running shell scripts

00:47:11   or anything like that, which actually those don't really

00:47:13   change over time, but you get my point, right,

00:47:15   that there's not a lot of execution that's happening here,

00:47:18   I'm just pointing homebrew at a bunch of different

00:47:20   either Mac App Store IDs or brew package names

00:47:24   or whatever the case may be, and it's just going

00:47:27   to fetch them, so there's so little,

00:47:29   there's so many, there's so little moving parts

00:47:32   in the brew file, obviously there's a ton of moving parts

00:47:34   behind the scenes, but in the brew file itself,

00:47:35   there's so few moving parts that I'm not too worried

00:47:38   about keeping it up to date between OS releases,

00:47:40   but again, I totally hear what you're saying,

00:47:42   and especially if you're the kind of person

00:47:44   that only does this once every five years,

00:47:47   then this is kind of useless, but for me,

00:47:50   I like having this as a tool in my tool belt,

00:47:53   so if I get a new 16-inch laptop, for example,

00:47:56   I can just run this file and it will make all my software

00:48:00   just get magically installed in one shot,

00:48:02   and Marco, as someone who buys computers as often

00:48:05   as I change underwear, this seems like something

00:48:07   that might appeal to you.

00:48:07   (laughing)

00:48:09   - You change underwear about once a year?

00:48:10   - Yeah, I was waiting for that, I was waiting for it,

00:48:13   fair play, fair play.

00:48:14   - Yeah, and to be fair, while I just said that

00:48:17   I hardly ever change over and start fresh

00:48:19   on my main desktop Mac, I usually will start

00:48:22   any laptop I get fresh, and I usually do buy

00:48:25   about one laptop a year, so it's, yeah,

00:48:28   I do need this, but I need it just infrequently enough,

00:48:32   like about once a year, maybe twice if it's a really

00:48:34   crazy year, or maybe every two years if I'm exercising

00:48:37   some self-control, but I need it infrequently enough

00:48:40   that it usually breaks and it drives me nuts,

00:48:42   but anyway, so going back to your original question

00:48:44   about Catalina, I have not yet installed it,

00:48:48   I installed the early betas here and there

00:48:50   like on second partitions, but I have not upgraded

00:48:52   my main partitions to them, I didn't even keep up

00:48:54   with the betas, I eventually just stopped caring

00:48:55   and have just abandoned those partitions.

00:48:58   I haven't booted into Catalina in months now,

00:49:02   because ultimately, the only reason I wanted to boot

00:49:04   into it was to develop for Catalyst, or play with

00:49:07   SwiftUI live previewing, and I quickly learned

00:49:10   that A, I wouldn't have time for either of those things

00:49:13   this summer or fall, and B, I quickly learned

00:49:17   those things were very, very, very early,

00:49:19   I had still lots of problems, and so I didn't want

00:49:21   to get into it yet, so I'm mainly looking at Catalina now

00:49:25   as a user, not as a developer, and as a user,

00:49:30   there are so many downsides and removals

00:49:35   and somewhat hostile changes in Catalina.

00:49:39   - Such as what?

00:49:41   - Well, all the permissions stuff, all the 32-bit apps

00:49:44   breaking, all of the new dialogs and exceptions,

00:49:48   a lot of stuff has changed under the hood

00:49:50   for various reasons, the new partition thing,

00:49:53   which might, who knows what little problems

00:49:56   that might cause for various scripts

00:49:57   and other apps and everything, all the crazy stuff

00:50:01   you have to do to get terminal to work correctly,

00:50:03   they changed my shell on me, there's so many changes

00:50:06   that are going to be little pains in the ass to me

00:50:09   that I have to look at the other side and say,

00:50:12   all right, what's the benefit here,

00:50:14   what am I getting for this?

00:50:16   And there's also the risk, by the way, of quality issues.

00:50:21   Like, it's very clear that Apple has released

00:50:24   all the software this fall, not because it's ready,

00:50:28   not because it's good, but because it was time.

00:50:32   And so, as a user, I'm not particularly excited

00:50:37   to jump into this, I'm scared about it,

00:50:40   because I know that there is going to be regressions,

00:50:45   there's going to be feature losses,

00:50:46   I'm going to probably have to replace some old software,

00:50:49   or I might not even know that very quickly,

00:50:51   it might take a while to even realize that,

00:50:54   I know there's going to be some friction involved

00:50:55   in getting through all the apps, permissions, dialogs,

00:50:59   and fixing terminal, all this stuff,

00:51:01   I'm going to have to probably fix my PHP

00:51:03   and Nginx setup again, using Homebrew

00:51:06   to rewrite my entire script again.

00:51:09   Like, this happens with every OS.

00:51:11   So, there is a significant cost to me as a user,

00:51:16   and I look at, well, okay, what am I getting for it?

00:51:20   And I just don't see it, I'm not motivated at all,

00:51:23   I'm not excited, I don't want to jump into it,

00:51:26   because it seems like what you're getting with Catalina is,

00:51:30   Apple really needs a lot of this stuff.

00:51:33   Like, it benefits Apple to remove all this crap

00:51:37   and change all this stuff and lock everything down even more.

00:51:41   Does it really benefit me?

00:51:43   I'm not sure a lot of it does.

00:51:45   And so, for me, there's just not enough carrot

00:51:50   to take the stick, I guess.

00:51:51   Like, there's not enough good stuff here

00:51:54   to motivate me to want to update,

00:51:56   and not to mention the fact that I'm concerned about quality

00:51:59   and so, you know, I will eventually update to it.

00:52:02   I might last another like, you know, point one or point two,

00:52:07   and I'm sure whenever the new laptops come out,

00:52:09   I'm gonna buy it immediately,

00:52:11   and so I'll have Catalina on that.

00:52:13   But, you know, otherwise, like on my desktop,

00:52:17   I'm not motivated yet to upgrade,

00:52:19   because there just seems to be not enough upside,

00:52:22   and there's significant possible downsides.

00:52:25   - You know, I think the key thing you just said

00:52:28   was on my desktop, because the one thing

00:52:30   that I really was enthusiastic about putting Catalina

00:52:34   on my MacBook was Sidecar, which is the Luna Display-esque,

00:52:39   you know, use your iPad as a secondary display

00:52:43   when you're perhaps away from the house.

00:52:45   So, as an example, I did not use it this morning,

00:52:47   but this would have been the sort of time I would have.

00:52:49   I went to Wegmans, which is a local fancy pants grocery store

00:52:53   kind of in the vein of Whole Foods, if you will,

00:52:55   and I was sitting in their little like cafe area,

00:52:58   and I was using both my laptop and my iPad.

00:53:00   Now, today, it just so happened

00:53:02   I was doing different things on both,

00:53:03   but generally speaking, especially if you have,

00:53:05   oh, I don't know, a 12-inch laptop,

00:53:08   that would have been the perfect opportunity to use Sidecar.

00:53:12   And I am really excited to use it.

00:53:15   I did use it very briefly when I first installed Catalina

00:53:17   just to try it out, and in the literally five minutes

00:53:20   I used it, it seemed to work really, really well.

00:53:23   And so, I think if you're the kind of person

00:53:26   who likes having two displays when you're,

00:53:29   I don't know, on a graycation,

00:53:31   then maybe you would enjoy Catalina on a laptop,

00:53:34   but I think that's ultimately why I am not in a huge rush

00:53:38   to put it on my iMac.

00:53:39   Like, of course, I want the new Shiny,

00:53:41   but to your point, Marco, on a desktop anyway,

00:53:44   there's nothing that I can think of off the top of my head

00:53:46   that I can point to that makes me say,

00:53:48   this is what I need Catalina for, and I need it for now.

00:53:51   It's my OS, and I want it now.

00:53:54   So, I'm curious how long both of us last before our iMacs,

00:53:58   well, in your case, iMac Pro, gets Catalina.

00:54:02   Any other thoughts before we punt to Jon?

00:54:04   - I mean, I think what's gonna finally make me do it

00:54:07   is when I wanna start playing with Catalyst.

00:54:10   Overcast, I'm finally catching up with some of the stuff

00:54:12   I wanna do this summer, and I would still like

00:54:16   to do a Catalyst app.

00:54:18   I still have a lot of work to do before that's a good idea,

00:54:21   but I'm probably gonna do it over the next month or two.

00:54:24   So, I'm guessing I'm probably gonna upgrade,

00:54:27   I don't know, in a month or two.

00:54:29   - That's fair, and sitting here now,

00:54:32   to the best you're willing to share,

00:54:33   you view Catalyst and a Mac app as more important

00:54:37   or interesting to you than doing something with SwiftUI?

00:54:41   - At this point, yes.

00:54:42   I think Catalyst is going to change over the next few years,

00:54:47   a lot less than SwiftUI will.

00:54:51   It seems very clear, looking at what they've done

00:54:54   with Catalyst, and what's considered okay,

00:54:57   and what's some things that seem not okay

00:55:02   that they're considering okay.

00:55:04   It seems clear to me that Catalyst is not gonna be

00:55:07   an area of heavy investment for Apple.

00:55:10   That what they really, I think the direction

00:55:12   they're trying to go is SwiftUI.

00:55:14   'Cause SwiftUI, Catalyst is like,

00:55:16   let's put iPad code in a window and very lightly

00:55:21   reskin some parts of it to be kind of Mac-like.

00:55:25   Whereas SwiftUI is, let's let people write

00:55:30   higher level code that doesn't give a lot of the specifics,

00:55:33   and then the operating systems can deal with these specifics

00:55:38   differently in ways that are native to them.

00:55:40   That's probably the better approach for cross-platform code.

00:55:44   And it does seem like SwiftUI is like the ultimate plan

00:55:48   of where Apple wants us to go in the future.

00:55:52   And it seems like Catalyst is a stopgap.

00:55:55   Catalyst is our carbon to the carbon-cocoa divide

00:56:00   of years ago.

00:56:01   And so it will serve a function,

00:56:05   but I don't know how much investment it's going to get,

00:56:07   and it certainly doesn't seem like it's going to be

00:56:09   the focus of a whole lot of excitement

00:56:11   or necessarily high-quality apps.

00:56:14   And it's also just, I mean, part of it,

00:56:17   it's still super early.

00:56:18   Like everything else they shipped this summer,

00:56:20   it's not really ready yet in a lot of ways.

00:56:22   There's still some pretty annoying limitations

00:56:26   and just like oversights.

00:56:28   Like one of the things that a lot of people are facing

00:56:31   is that you can't share purchases,

00:56:33   and it can't be the same bundle ID.

00:56:34   There's all sorts of weird stuff,

00:56:37   because it's still two separate app stores.

00:56:40   And so it's a whole thing.

00:56:41   But anyway, I am not excited about Catalyst at all.

00:56:47   I view it simply as a tool.

00:56:49   Like I'm as excited about Catalyst

00:56:51   as I am about App Store Connect.

00:56:53   It's like this is a tool that I will have to use

00:56:57   to achieve a goal I want,

00:56:59   but I'm not excited about it at all.

00:57:00   - Yeah, I hear you.

00:57:01   And for the record, I think that that is the correct call,

00:57:03   not that you really need my approval,

00:57:04   but I think Catalyst probably makes a lot more sense for you

00:57:07   than doing something with SwiftUI.

00:57:10   But I view them as somewhat related,

00:57:12   since both of them to be used properly

00:57:14   really do require Catalina.

00:57:17   - Yeah, and SwiftUI I think is gonna be very important

00:57:21   to me in the future, but I kinda wanna hold off.

00:57:24   My initial plan of SwiftUI was to redo my watch app

00:57:28   is with SwiftUI first, learn it there

00:57:30   on that much simpler, smaller canvas

00:57:33   and smaller problem space,

00:57:35   and then be able to apply those skills

00:57:37   to other stuff in the main app.

00:57:39   And that's probably still what I'm going to do.

00:57:41   I haven't started yet.

00:57:42   That's probably still what I'm going to do,

00:57:44   but even doing the watch app in SwiftUI,

00:57:48   SwiftUI itself is still so early and still so,

00:57:52   like almost everything Apple has done recently,

00:57:54   so poorly documented and undiscoverable.

00:57:58   And it's still, as mentioned before,

00:58:01   the error messages are comically hostile

00:58:03   and it's still very obtuse in lots of ways.

00:58:06   And so I might even wait still on that.

00:58:10   But SwiftUI I think has a much more exciting future

00:58:13   than Catalyst in the present.

00:58:16   Frankly, I'm not that excited about either of them.

00:58:18   - Yeah, that makes sense.

00:58:19   Can we do a quick tangent if you don't mind,

00:58:22   and you can just-- - Us?

00:58:23   - Through the magic of, yeah, through the magic of editing,

00:58:24   you can just put this somewhere where it makes sense.

00:58:26   How is the documentation so bad this year?

00:58:30   How is this a thing?

00:58:31   - Honestly, it's not just this year.

00:58:33   Like this is, I think it's worse this year

00:58:36   than it had in previous years,

00:58:39   but almost all new APIs that Apple has released

00:58:44   over the last few years have very little

00:58:47   to no documentation.

00:58:49   There are so often that I have to jump

00:58:51   into the header file for something just to see

00:58:53   what the heck even the methods and properties do.

00:58:56   - Speaking of that, with Swift not having header files,

00:58:59   how do you deal with that?

00:59:01   - I haven't had to deal with that yet,

00:59:02   but that's gonna be an issue.

00:59:04   And even the things that aren't header file based,

00:59:09   a lot of the APIs, the documentation is,

00:59:12   oh, go watch this WWDC session video from three years ago.

00:59:16   That's the only time this was ever explained.

00:59:18   - Yep, and that just grinds my gears so much.

00:59:20   It's so unbelievably frustrating.

00:59:23   Apple says, here, developer, here's this magical API

00:59:27   that we allege will do exactly what you've wanted to do,

00:59:32   but (bleep) you, figure it out yourself.

00:59:34   It's just so frustrating.

00:59:36   And I understand that it is more important

00:59:41   to have a functional API, and you were kind of going

00:59:44   on a tear about this briefly earlier on Twitter, Marco,

00:59:46   and I agree with you.

00:59:48   It is more important to have a functional API,

00:59:49   which doesn't always work these days with Apple,

00:59:51   but it is more important to have a functional API

00:59:53   than it is perfect documentation.

00:59:55   But it is genuinely unfortunate and frustrating.

01:00:00   And I would almost go so far as to say unfair

01:00:04   that Apple is expecting all these developers like you,

01:00:07   like me, to adopt all these new APIs,

01:00:09   but yet there is no formal documentation for them.

01:00:12   And I know that some of the developers internal to Apple

01:00:16   will put just unbelievably good documentation

01:00:19   in their header files.

01:00:20   Like, look at the Collection View header files

01:00:22   and how unbelievably good they are

01:00:23   with all of the ASCII art that's in there.

01:00:25   But is there any good Collection View proper documentation

01:00:29   on any of this stuff?

01:00:31   I haven't seen much.

01:00:32   And a lot of times, it's like you said,

01:00:33   go to the dub dub session and you'll be fine.

01:00:35   And that's just not acceptable.

01:00:38   And it makes me wonder if the people who are writing,

01:00:41   like Collection View and some of these other things,

01:00:43   are taking the time to do this header documentation,

01:00:46   is that because something outside of their org

01:00:49   is preventing them from doing the real documentation?

01:00:52   Like, is it that the lawyers are holding it up

01:00:54   or the people who, maybe it's a different org

01:00:57   that writes the documentation,

01:00:58   which actually is probably the case,

01:00:59   and they're just behind or slow or gosh knows what else.

01:01:03   But man, what a frustrating and silly self-own,

01:01:07   at least to my eyes.

01:01:08   - Oh yeah, I mean, which is honestly,

01:01:09   that's kind of the story of a lot of the Apple stuff

01:01:11   recently, but yeah, like, and you know,

01:01:14   you mentioned a second ago that like, you know,

01:01:15   that's probably a separate team

01:01:17   that writes the documentation.

01:01:19   It seems, first of all, that's probably true,

01:01:20   and it seems like that should be an easy thing to scale.

01:01:25   - Yeah, one would think.

01:01:26   - 'Cause you don't have to have the engineers

01:01:27   who wrote the stuff be the ones who documented everything.

01:01:31   And it seems like it should be relatively easy,

01:01:34   'cause that's relatively orthogonal

01:01:36   to the development of the APIs.

01:01:37   Like, you can have people who make documentation.

01:01:40   You can have people who make sample code

01:01:42   and sample projects.

01:01:43   Like, that seems like it would be easy

01:01:46   to hire totally separate people to do those things.

01:01:49   One of the biggest problems that I have

01:01:51   as a developer with Apple's APIs,

01:01:52   in addition to the lack of documentation,

01:01:55   is that a lot of the APIs simply don't work,

01:01:58   and it seems like no one in Apple

01:01:59   ever actually tried to use them.

01:02:01   And this is like yet another thing

01:02:03   that you would think a similar orthogonal group could do.

01:02:07   Have a group of people at Apple employed

01:02:09   who just try to build something

01:02:11   with every new API they make,

01:02:13   using only the public stuff that developers get to use.

01:02:16   Because I've faced so many problems over the last few years

01:02:20   of seeming like I'm the only person

01:02:22   who's trying to build on something,

01:02:23   or building on an API that's like two years old,

01:02:26   and finding critical flaws in it

01:02:29   where it doesn't actually work,

01:02:30   and it's like, has anybody actually shipped anything

01:02:33   using this API over the last two years?

01:02:35   'Cause you can't.

01:02:36   And it seems like, with so much other stuff,

01:02:39   they don't seem to actually be even trying it

01:02:42   before they ship it, or after they ship it.

01:02:44   - Anyway, John, I'm sorry, we got on a tangent,

01:02:47   which was my fault, so tell me,

01:02:48   how do you feel about Catalina,

01:02:49   and how many decades has this Mac probe been in existence?

01:02:54   Has that build lived?

01:02:57   - Actually, before we get off that tangent,

01:02:59   I'm really surprised that Marco would be even considering

01:03:02   SwiftUI in any form, except for the fact

01:03:05   that it's your only option if you wanna do

01:03:06   like good WatchKit apps.

01:03:08   Like that's, because SwiftUI is,

01:03:10   it's not as young as the original Swift, but it's close.

01:03:14   The only reason I say it's not is because

01:03:15   the integration with Xcode necessarily

01:03:18   is much richer than the original Swift had,

01:03:21   because of the whole like, you know,

01:03:22   real-time updates of the UI and the thing, or whatever.

01:03:25   Swift 1.0 didn't have that.

01:03:26   But other than that, I would imagine SwiftUI

01:03:29   is probably gonna go through the same sort of

01:03:31   tumultuous series of changes that Swift, you know,

01:03:34   2.0 through 4.0 went through.

01:03:37   Hopefully not syntax-wise and breaking your code-wise,

01:03:39   but it's got a long way to go.

01:03:41   Like, we see the promise, you know,

01:03:44   much more so than with Swift itself, I think.

01:03:46   We see what SwiftUI could bring

01:03:50   when it gets more full-featured,

01:03:52   when the tooling gets even better,

01:03:53   when, as you both complained,

01:03:55   the error messages get better.

01:03:56   And by the way, the error message,

01:03:57   it's not just a matter of like writing good error messages.

01:03:59   Structurally, there are things about the way SwiftUI works

01:04:02   that's going to make it very difficult to be sensible,

01:04:06   and they have to come up with solutions

01:04:08   for all of those problems.

01:04:09   It's not just, oh, we didn't have time

01:04:10   to make good error messages.

01:04:11   It's like sort of the tooling around React

01:04:14   or any other kind of like various event-driven frameworks

01:04:18   where things happen asynchronously,

01:04:21   where just getting a stack trace tells you nothing, right?

01:04:24   And just getting an error from the point where it occurs

01:04:26   tells you nothing about where it originated, right,

01:04:28   because of the nature of the sort of execution model

01:04:31   and the fact that it is declarative and not imperative,

01:04:33   and you're not controlling when everything happens.

01:04:34   Things just happen in response to things that you declared,

01:04:37   but you're not quite sure what thing you declared

01:04:38   caused that thing to happen at that time.

01:04:39   And, you know, it's a hard problem to solve.

01:04:42   So for how long Marco stayed away from Swift,

01:04:46   I'm really surprised that he's even looking at SwiftUI

01:04:49   at all, except when forced, like with the Watch app.

01:04:51   So in other words--

01:04:52   - That just tells you how bad WatchKit is.

01:04:55   - Well, yeah, 'cause it's an upgrade over like

01:04:57   just describe a window for me,

01:04:59   and I'll put it on the screen for you.

01:05:01   At least you get to use two interactive elements

01:05:03   and you like draw things and stuff.

01:05:05   - Yeah, like WatchKit is like that much

01:05:08   of a bane of my existence whenever I go near it.

01:05:10   Like I hate WatchKit so much that I will tolerate

01:05:14   learning the new craziness with SwiftUI

01:05:17   because WatchKit's that bad.

01:05:18   - Yeah, and plus you would imagine like

01:05:20   there's not that many controls on WatchKit,

01:05:22   and so even with the current limits of SwiftUI,

01:05:25   plus or minus the error messages,

01:05:26   like you're not gonna have that many controls

01:05:28   on screen at once.

01:05:29   They're not gonna be that complicated,

01:05:30   so it feels like it actually is a good fit

01:05:32   for a first foray, but then you'll have to change

01:05:36   all that code like next year and the year after

01:05:38   as they break stuff or quote unquote improve things.

01:05:41   They will improve things, and that will mean

01:05:42   your crusty old original SwiftUI stuff has to be changed.

01:05:46   - Yeah, well that's okay.

01:05:47   I rewrite my Watch app every couple of years anyway.

01:05:50   - Who doesn't, right?

01:05:52   Really quickly, Scott Horn on Twitter just posted,

01:05:55   which I thought was very well put.

01:05:57   If you can't properly document your API,

01:05:58   the chances are that it works as intended are slim to none.

01:06:03   Documentation forces testing,

01:06:04   and I think that's a very good call.

01:06:06   - Documentation forces testing, so optimistic.

01:06:09   Yeah, right, forces testing.

01:06:11   You know what tells you if your API works?

01:06:12   Tests, that's what tells you your API works, do you?

01:06:14   But here's what documentation does.

01:06:16   Documentation, this is why I always press at work

01:06:19   and no one ever believes me,

01:06:20   so I'm the only person who thinks this,

01:06:21   but it is actually right.

01:06:23   Writing documentation-- - Of course it is.

01:06:25   Everyone else is wrong, John.

01:06:26   - You'll agree with me, you'll see.

01:06:27   Writing documentation for your API, your code, your library,

01:06:32   is a great way to let you know if you have a good API,

01:06:37   because if you find yourself struggling

01:06:38   to explain how something works,

01:06:41   if you find yourself having to write paragraph

01:06:42   after paragraph, including caveats and prerequisites

01:06:45   and assumptions and everything, you have a bad API.

01:06:48   It may work great and the tests may all pass,

01:06:50   but then you're like, when it comes time

01:06:52   to explain the purpose of this function,

01:06:54   explain what arguments it takes

01:06:56   and what it returns under what conditions,

01:06:58   if you end up writing a choose-your-own-adventure novel

01:07:00   underneath that thing, guess what?

01:07:03   You just discovered that your,

01:07:04   and that's why you can't leave, that your API is bad.

01:07:06   You can't leave this to the end,

01:07:08   because at the end when you're all done,

01:07:09   like we wrote our API and people are building on it

01:07:12   and all our tests pass and it's awesome

01:07:13   and we did performance improvements,

01:07:15   now, finally, the last step, the cherry on top,

01:07:17   I'm gonna go write the docs, and you're like,

01:07:19   oh my God, this API is terrible and we have to change this.

01:07:22   There's no way I can explain to a user how to use this API.

01:07:24   Like, I'm embarrassed for myself

01:07:26   that I have to say these words, like,

01:07:28   well, I can do this, but if you pass that and it does that,

01:07:30   make sure you do this, but don't call it in this context

01:07:31   and then just, like, oh God, what have we done?

01:07:34   Like, it works, but, so you can't save the documentation

01:07:37   at the end, you have to write the docs,

01:07:39   maybe not at the beginning, but somewhere in the middle,

01:07:41   because you will learn that your API is screwed up

01:07:44   through writing the documentation,

01:07:45   or someone else will learn it and come tell you.

01:07:48   (laughing)

01:07:48   - Well put, you're right, I did end up agreeing with you.

01:07:51   All right, I'm gonna stop talking.

01:07:53   Marco is hopefully gonna stop talking.

01:07:54   Tell us about Catalina.

01:07:56   - Oh, I'm gonna talk about my, you know,

01:07:57   so I do upgrade installs on my Mac forever.

01:08:00   I am pretty sure that I have files on my Mac

01:08:04   that came from classic Mac OS.

01:08:06   - Wow, that's interesting. - Because remember,

01:08:08   when, you know, my Blue and White G3 was purchased with

01:08:11   and ran for most of its life, classic Mac OS.

01:08:13   Eventually it ran Mac OS X, but I installed it on top of

01:08:16   my installation of classic Mac OS.

01:08:18   So yeah, I've just been,

01:08:21   I just peeked in my library preferences folder

01:08:23   and the oldest file I have in there

01:08:25   was last modified in 2003.

01:08:27   So I have files that, - Oh, golly.

01:08:29   - I have files that predate both of your use of the Mac.

01:08:31   You can know that, you know they're old files from classic

01:08:33   when they, the file names don't have file name extensions.

01:08:36   That's a good way to tell.

01:08:37   - Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:08:38   - Yeah, anyway, that's what I do

01:08:39   and I will continue to do with my installs.

01:08:41   Although it's like, transferring to the new Mac Pro

01:08:46   is gonna be, I gotta figure out how I can actually

01:08:49   connect them with a cable that's not ridiculously slow

01:08:51   'cause you can like firewire to Thunderbolt to USB to,

01:08:56   maybe I'll just do ethernet, I don't know.

01:08:58   I'll figure something out, but it's gonna take a while

01:09:00   'cause I have a lot of files.

01:09:01   (laughing)

01:09:03   So Catalina, obviously I'm not running it on this Mac

01:09:06   because I can't.

01:09:07   - Oh, wop wop.

01:09:09   - I feel very similar to Marco in that,

01:09:14   like there's not much pulling me into Catalina

01:09:18   and there's lots of stuff keeping me away.

01:09:20   Aside from bugs, like oh, I'm afraid the first version

01:09:22   will be buggy or whatever.

01:09:24   There's the whole 32-bit apps going away.

01:09:27   I have a lot of 32-bit apps, most of which I've been

01:09:30   saying my goodbyes to, like all right,

01:09:32   I'm gonna live without you, like saying my goodbyes

01:09:34   to Drag Thing, all my games and like, you know.

01:09:38   There's a lot of stuff, but there's a couple ones

01:09:40   that are really just, I bought a new version

01:09:42   of Microsoft Office because the version of Microsoft Office

01:09:45   I had was so old that, I don't know if it was 64-bit or not,

01:09:48   but it was like, I was just, let me just solve that problem.

01:09:51   The one that's really killing me though is Photoshop CS6.

01:09:55   And I checked Photoshop CS6 as soon as I knew

01:09:58   that Apple was dropping, like it was like two years ago

01:10:00   when they made the announcement like this version

01:10:02   will run 32-bit and then they stopped talking.

01:10:04   It's like okay, well the next version won't.

01:10:05   I'm like well I have to buy a new Photoshop

01:10:07   and I did a little, you know, get in, I launched Photoshop,

01:10:09   my Mac and I got in, oh, Photoshop CS6 is a 64-bit process,

01:10:12   everything's fine and then I forgot about it

01:10:15   and then I redid it, I downloaded like that,

01:10:17   but Sinclair Software has this Go 64 application

01:10:20   that will just scan your thing for 64-bit applications

01:10:23   and, or 32-bit applications.

01:10:25   And you know Photoshop CS6, it's a 64-bit application,

01:10:28   I'm okay, right?

01:10:29   But I did notice a lot of other 32-bit things

01:10:32   with the word Adobe and I'm like, how do I do that stuff?

01:10:36   So this is a question I have.

01:10:37   I meant to tweet it earlier today

01:10:39   and I'd already have the answer by now if I had tweeted it

01:10:41   but I'll just, I shouldn't ask it on the program

01:10:43   but anyway, 'cause I don't want a million people to tell me.

01:10:47   I'll find out next week.

01:10:48   But the question I have is if I upgrade to Catalina,

01:10:52   can I even launch CS6 or will I, you know,

01:10:55   like it's a 64-bit app, presumably it will launch,

01:10:57   will it immediately crash because some Adobe utility

01:10:59   won't work or is it like, you can launch it

01:11:01   but you can't use like Bridge or some import functionality

01:11:04   that I never use, like I'm a very light user of Photoshop

01:11:07   but I do want to have it, I'm accustomed to it.

01:11:11   So I don't, and I don't want to pay Adobe

01:11:15   a monthly or yearly fee for Photoshop

01:11:17   'cause I use it so rarely.

01:11:18   Like I basically use it as like an image resizer,

01:11:23   slight modification, you know, like I do, yeah,

01:11:26   whatever weird t-shirt designs we're doing,

01:11:29   sometimes I do in Photoshop, you know, or mock-ups.

01:11:32   Like I don't use it that much.

01:11:33   It's not worth it, it's not worth it for me to pay

01:11:36   even like $5 a month for Photoshop

01:11:39   or the equivalent yearly fee and you can't,

01:11:41   as far as I know, you can't buy Photoshop anymore.

01:11:43   I bought CS6 specifically because it was the last version

01:11:47   that wasn't infected with Creative Cloud, not infected.

01:11:50   Like I'm not against that model, I think it's fine.

01:11:51   It just doesn't fit my use, my use of Photoshop.

01:11:54   I'm not a professional person who makes their living

01:11:57   using Photoshop, put it that way.

01:11:59   So I don't want to upgrade to Catalina and lose Photoshop.

01:12:02   And that's currently my biggest barrier,

01:12:06   that and there's one application my wife uses

01:12:08   for budgeting that she's saying her goodbyes to

01:12:10   and she's like, she's told me before she left

01:12:13   on another one of her trips, like don't upgrade my computer

01:12:17   when I'm gone because I know that my budgeting application

01:12:21   will not be supported anymore and I'm auditioning a new one

01:12:25   but until that happens, you can't upgrade it.

01:12:27   So there are a couple things keeping me away from it

01:12:29   and the main thing pulling me into it is,

01:12:33   I'm not really interested in Sidecar

01:12:34   but I am interested in like the new applications,

01:12:38   believe it or not, like the ability to watch 4K video

01:12:42   if I wanted, yay, I'm entering the modern era.

01:12:44   The new version of Photos, I spend a lot of time in Photos

01:12:46   and I'm always hungry for a new version of Photos

01:12:48   which tends to be tied to the OS.

01:12:50   This new version of Photos might be good, might be bad

01:12:54   but any change is an opportunity for things to be better

01:12:59   whereas just for the entire life Mojave, I was like,

01:13:02   yeah, here's Photos, it's never getting any better

01:13:04   until the new version, so I do want to see that

01:13:06   and by the way, my favorite plugin for doing

01:13:12   the books that I print, Mimeo, that is not ready

01:13:15   for Catalina yet either so I gotta wait for that update.

01:13:17   There's an update coming soon that will make it work

01:13:19   in Catalina and all the preference, the permission dialogue

01:13:24   stuff, I'm not really too worried about that.

01:13:25   It will be annoying but I'm the type of user

01:13:28   that can handle that assuming I eventually defeat it all

01:13:32   and it goes away.

01:13:33   So the iMac hasn't been upgraded, long way of saying

01:13:36   but I did willingly upgrade the laptop, the MacBook Air

01:13:41   because, mostly because I want screen time

01:13:44   'cause that's the kid's homework, quote unquote

01:13:46   homework laptop but it's also their bypass of screen time

01:13:49   if they want to watch YouTube all hours of the night,

01:13:51   they can do so on the laptop.

01:13:53   So I, and also I just wanted to see what it was like.

01:13:56   I had Catalina installed on a separate APFS volumes

01:14:00   on my, in my US container on the iMac.

01:14:03   So I'd seen Catalina before, I'd run a bunch of the betas,

01:14:05   I'd looked at it like, not like I'm too surprised

01:14:07   but I upgraded the MacBook Air to Catalina.

01:14:12   So far seems fine, a little bit of wonkiness

01:14:14   around Apple ID stuff as usual, like it's always not

01:14:17   a great first run experience like, you know,

01:14:19   it's a bunch of permission dialogues,

01:14:21   this app wants to do that, do you want to allow this

01:14:23   after that, yeah, buh buh, go through all that thing

01:14:25   and then I go into system preferences and I go

01:14:27   to the new Apple ID screen, it's got like a red badge

01:14:29   on it that's like, you need to update your Apple ID

01:14:33   settings or something, like all right, fine, whatever,

01:14:36   enter your Apple ID password, all right, fine,

01:14:38   enter your Mac password, all right, fine,

01:14:40   and then it grinds for a really long time

01:14:42   and then it's done grinding and then I'm like,

01:14:44   okay, I guess I'm done but the badge is still on the thing.

01:14:48   It's like close to some preferences and then later

01:14:49   I come back to the computer and it's like,

01:14:51   you need to update your Apple ID settings.

01:14:53   I went through the NAS like six times,

01:14:56   the badge never went away, I kept asking,

01:14:57   like what do you want from me, what am I,

01:15:00   you want to update my Apple ID settings, then do it.

01:15:02   It never did, I just logged out, I set up the kids' accounts

01:15:06   you know, I launched all the stuff and got rid of all

01:15:08   the permission dialogs for them, I set up screen time

01:15:10   on the Mac which I'm assuming will work

01:15:13   which is a big assumption because I have to say,

01:15:15   these screen time reports for family sharing,

01:15:17   like where you can see what your kid's usage is or whatever

01:15:20   across all their devices, how long has that been out now?

01:15:23   A year and a half, two years?

01:15:25   It has never worked right and continues not to work right.

01:15:28   Some devices don't show up at all,

01:15:29   some activity doesn't show up at all,

01:15:30   sometimes I go into my kid's screen time report

01:15:32   and it's just blank, there's like no activity,

01:15:35   activity will appear here once people use their devices,

01:15:37   oh really, once people use their devices,

01:15:39   two years later something will show up here?

01:15:41   Sometimes it shows up, sometimes I can see one device

01:15:43   but not another, like it's really bad, it's really,

01:15:46   it's so unreliable, it's like what am I even

01:15:48   getting reports on, you know?

01:15:50   Like I don't think I've ever seen anything reported

01:15:52   from my son's iPad but I do see his phone sometimes

01:15:55   and it just doesn't make any sense,

01:15:57   it's one of those features that's like, is this a feature

01:15:59   or is this a thing that like might work sometimes

01:16:01   but you know, check back later, same thing with the,

01:16:04   you know, the weird first round bugs in Catalina.

01:16:06   But I'm actually kind of interested in seeing

01:16:10   the new music app and having the,

01:16:13   all the device stuff in the finder,

01:16:15   like most of those UI changes and the new applications

01:16:18   I'm actually interested in, the new, is the new version?

01:16:20   No, I think Maps is not the new good version, right?

01:16:23   Messages got changed a little bit, anyway,

01:16:25   I am interested in the new OS but I'm just scared

01:16:28   to lose all my stuff and scared to break things so,

01:16:31   on the laptop it goes and you know, I have to say,

01:16:34   other than my complaints about those weird things,

01:16:37   it's been okay, like it hasn't crashed,

01:16:40   it seems to be running fine, it's not making the fan spin,

01:16:42   I, you know, I did a full time machine back above it

01:16:45   and that all seemed to go well.

01:16:46   So, you know, I don't recommend people upgrade to Catalina

01:16:51   but it has not been disastrous to me so far.

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01:18:21   - All right, let's bring back Ask ATP,

01:18:27   I think because we've been just full of stuff to talk about,

01:18:30   we've skipped it for the last couple of weeks

01:18:32   and so let's bring it back.

01:18:33   Dan Stanton writes, "With the advent of family sharing,"

01:18:35   speaking of, "why do you think contacts have been ignored?

01:18:38   In my mind, contacts in a family should be bucketed

01:18:40   just like calendar entries, yours, mine and ours."

01:18:43   Dan's wife doesn't want to see a couple hundred

01:18:45   of my work acquaintances in her address book,

01:18:47   but it would be nice if I updated random aunt's info

01:18:50   that my wife got the change.

01:18:52   Do y'all experience this issue, any creative solutions?

01:18:54   - Yes, this is a problem that Aaron and I face.

01:18:58   Because I am, I don't know,

01:19:01   like a pack rat of contact information,

01:19:03   I have the kind of official contact list of the family,

01:19:07   but that causes Aaron to oftentimes have to ask me,

01:19:10   oh, what's so-and-so's address?

01:19:11   What's this person's phone number?

01:19:12   What's this person's email address and so on,

01:19:14   which is fine, but it's frustrating for both of us.

01:19:17   I don't know of any fix.

01:19:20   I would imagine that if you had some sort of

01:19:24   like Google app setup, which we actually do,

01:19:27   maybe you could share contacts that way,

01:19:30   or perhaps like I could log Aaron into my Gmail account

01:19:35   and I could have both of us sharing our contacts

01:19:39   with my Gmail account even if she doesn't look at my email.

01:19:42   But that seems very, I don't know, kludgy.

01:19:45   So I don't have any really good solutions,

01:19:47   but Dan, I feel your pain.

01:19:48   Marco, I get the feeling you have not a lot of input here.

01:19:52   - Yeah, I mean, Tiff and I both have contacts.

01:19:55   We occasionally have to ask each other,

01:19:58   hey, can you iMessage me that contact card for somebody

01:20:02   so we could get it?

01:20:04   But we don't have so much overlap

01:20:06   that it's a frequent problem.

01:20:08   But that being said, I would love for Dan's

01:20:12   proposed solution here to bucket them

01:20:14   as yours, mine, and ours.

01:20:16   That would be awesome.

01:20:17   We do that with one password.

01:20:19   We have a one password family setup.

01:20:21   - Yep, same.

01:20:22   - So we each have our own vaults,

01:20:24   but we can also put stuff in the shared area

01:20:26   that we can both access.

01:20:27   - Yep.

01:20:28   - And I think that would be wonderful,

01:20:29   but Apple's not historically great at supporting

01:20:33   things that families need to do.

01:20:35   - I was just trying to Google to find out exactly

01:20:37   how long ago No iLife is an Island episode

01:20:40   of Hypercritical was.

01:20:41   This is the exact same problem again.

01:20:43   It occurs to me, I usually complain about it

01:20:45   in the context of photos, but contacts is a perfect

01:20:48   opportunity for Apple to work out what our,

01:20:52   I was gonna say to be fair, but I was like,

01:20:53   what are difficult issues?

01:20:55   Like it's not easy to do this in a way where the UI

01:21:00   makes sense to people.

01:21:01   It is a difficult interface problem.

01:21:03   But I feel like contacts, as I've complained about

01:21:07   in the past, just for a single person,

01:21:09   the current siloed version of contacts

01:21:11   still sometimes doesn't work for inexplicable reasons.

01:21:14   We went through on this show several episode run

01:21:16   of trying to figure out with like,

01:21:18   contacts aren't syncing 'cause the images are the wrong size

01:21:20   and it just silently doesn't sync

01:21:21   and you would never figure that out if you didn't listen

01:21:23   to weird tech podcasts or for us if we didn't have listeners

01:21:26   who knew this weird information and told us

01:21:28   that we then broadcast in our weird tech podcast.

01:21:31   So I kind of understand why they haven't done

01:21:35   the harder thing 'cause they can't even get

01:21:37   the easy thing right all the time,

01:21:38   which I find endlessly frustrating.

01:21:40   But if and when they tackle this idea,

01:21:42   contacts is a perfect place to do it

01:21:44   because the data volume is so much lower than photos.

01:21:48   Like it's just text and some small images

01:21:51   and the number of contacts you have does not,

01:21:53   as I mentioned before, grow essentially without bound

01:21:55   like photos does 'cause you just don't keep meeting

01:21:58   that many people like, you know, maybe if you're something--

01:22:01   - Speak for yourself.

01:22:03   - Maybe if you're like a salesperson

01:22:04   and you wanna keep everything in contact,

01:22:05   they just keep growing.

01:22:06   But in general, people have a much smaller number

01:22:08   of contacts than photos.

01:22:09   It doesn't grow as fast and the data is really tiny

01:22:11   so this would be a perfect test bed, Apple,

01:22:13   to finally figure out a solution to hey, families exist

01:22:18   and you know, you figure that out and you can make a family

01:22:21   and by the way, families don't wanna have two, three,

01:22:24   four copies of grandma's address

01:22:26   or someone's got their birthday

01:22:28   and someone has the anniversary and someone has the address

01:22:31   but you have the old address

01:22:32   but you have the new phone number.

01:22:34   It's a nightmare, we all do it.

01:22:36   But it's like which one of our address books

01:22:38   has this person's address

01:22:39   and so many things are duplicated.

01:22:42   Family, perfect, they're all of our family.

01:22:44   It's not like I just have my parents

01:22:46   and my wife just has her parents.

01:22:47   We both have both parents, right?

01:22:49   Common friends.

01:22:50   When an address is updated.

01:22:52   Now we have to update it in both places.

01:22:54   Now every time, I have to do this thing,

01:22:55   like every time I want to contact somebody

01:22:57   or mail somebody something in the mail

01:22:58   which you rarely do these days,

01:23:00   I have to diff both of them.

01:23:01   I have to say here's what I have for the address,

01:23:04   here's what you have for the address.

01:23:05   Which one was updated more recently

01:23:06   and which one looks like it's more right?

01:23:08   - No, that's when we mail people things,

01:23:10   like we mail Christmas cards every year

01:23:11   to a bunch of friends and that's contact hell

01:23:15   as Tiff and I go back and forth like oh, do you have,

01:23:18   didn't they move, would you have their address?

01:23:20   - Yeah, what's the more recent one?

01:23:22   - Yeah, right, exactly.

01:23:23   - Well, I updated this more recently

01:23:25   but I don't know if the address is more recent

01:23:26   'cause you don't have per time stamped fields

01:23:28   and the things and it's so bad.

01:23:30   It's just, and this is the case where it is a regression

01:23:34   from the old system which is you'd have

01:23:35   a family address book of this little black book

01:23:38   somewhere in your house that you'd write people's addresses

01:23:40   and phone numbers in and when someone updated their address,

01:23:42   you'd update it in one place and multiple people

01:23:45   in the family could pick up that address book.

01:23:48   Yeah, so I feel like we have the technology

01:23:50   to solve this problem.

01:23:51   Apple's not tackling it, they totally should

01:23:53   and here's the thing, Dan is asking for like,

01:23:56   any creative solutions, there are all sorts of quote unquote

01:23:58   creative solutions, I don't recommend any of them.

01:24:00   I know because my parents who apparently still want

01:24:04   that old black book have tried so many different things

01:24:08   to achieve this 'cause they have almost

01:24:11   all the same contacts.

01:24:12   They don't want them to have separate pools of things.

01:24:14   They get very frustrated when they have to update it

01:24:17   in two places or it's just in one place.

01:24:20   It's just, it is a nightmare.

01:24:22   They've tried all the terrible things like trying to sync it

01:24:25   through some third party service or sharing an Apple ID.

01:24:28   Do not do this, like any way you go off the sort of the way

01:24:32   Apple wants you to do things, you're just asking

01:24:33   for more problems and bugs and even if you can get it

01:24:35   to work for some brief moment in time,

01:24:37   it will eventually break and you'll end up

01:24:39   with duplicated or lost contacts and just the pain

01:24:42   and suffering of using, of sharing an Apple ID

01:24:46   but also wanting to have your own separate Apple IDs

01:24:48   and then trying to figure out what's what,

01:24:50   it's not an easy thing for people who are not

01:24:54   tech enthusiasts to keep track of and it does eventually

01:24:56   break and they can't fix it and they get even more

01:24:58   frustrated so there are creative solutions

01:25:01   but I don't recommend any of them.

01:25:02   Please just, you know, Apple needs to solve this problem

01:25:05   for us and it's not that hard to solve and they should do it

01:25:09   in contacts, it's a great first place to try it so

01:25:11   take Dan's recommendation Apple and do this now.

01:25:14   - I would prefer you to do photos 'cause I spend more time

01:25:17   interacting with photos than with contacts

01:25:19   but I understand that contacts are easier.

01:25:20   - You know, if there's an app in the App Store

01:25:23   that does this and does this well, I would love to hear

01:25:24   about it so please tweet at me.

01:25:26   - Oh, there are apps that do it, do it well.

01:25:30   - Yeah, exactly, exactly.

01:25:32   - 'Cause any time you're asking an application

01:25:34   to programmatically modify one of your sort of precious

01:25:38   data sets, oh, programmatically modify my contacts

01:25:40   in response to something else, the potential for danger

01:25:44   is big and again, I'll endorse the idea that you can

01:25:47   back up your entire contacts database from within

01:25:49   the contacts application.

01:25:51   I recommend that, again, the data set is small,

01:25:54   you will make a little archive file, worst case scenario,

01:25:57   you can just destroy everything, delete everything,

01:26:01   delete it all from iCloud, delete it all from your contacts,

01:26:03   delete, delete, delete and then restore it

01:26:05   with your contacts database.

01:26:06   I think it's lossless, I've had to do it a few times

01:26:08   so I hope it's lossless if I'm losing something,

01:26:10   I haven't noticed what I'm losing but unlike photos,

01:26:13   it's so easy to do that, make it an address book database,

01:26:16   backup, make five of them, stick them in a little folder,

01:26:19   stick those in Dropbox, have them go to Time Machine,

01:26:21   have them go to Backblaze, like have a million backups,

01:26:24   then start your experimentation, enjoy your life

01:26:27   and contact hell as they duplicate and copy all the place

01:26:30   and revert back to old versions and it's not good.

01:26:34   - Yeah, also I'd really like to quickly reiterate

01:26:37   what Marco said about 1Password.

01:26:38   We went to 1Password for families

01:26:41   right when that was first announced

01:26:43   and I cannot speak enough good things

01:26:44   about 1Password in general but particularly about families

01:26:46   and it is extremely convenient to have, like Marco said,

01:26:51   my personal vault, my limitless vault which is my LLC

01:26:56   to have a family vault so things like social security numbers

01:27:01   or something like that can go in the family vault

01:27:03   whereas a login to Twitter that Aaron doesn't ever need

01:27:06   can go in my personal vault and stuff like that

01:27:08   so it's super convenient and we do the exact same thing

01:27:11   as you and Tiff and I cannot recommend it enough.

01:27:14   - It's right there in the name, 1Password for families

01:27:16   and it seems like someone at 1Password understands

01:27:19   what families do when they live together

01:27:22   and exist as a family.

01:27:24   March 11th, 2011 by the way, no iLife was an island.

01:27:28   We're not at a 10-year anniversary

01:27:30   but we'll be sure to celebrate that.

01:27:32   - Cameron writes, Casey and John don't always upgrade

01:27:35   their phones every year.

01:27:37   Why not use the iPhone upgrade program?

01:27:39   For me, a couple of reasons.

01:27:40   First of all, it used to be and I don't know if this is true

01:27:43   that you needed to unfreeze your credit

01:27:45   in order to join the program

01:27:46   and I'm just too lazy to do that.

01:27:48   Secondly, I don't always buy AppleCare

01:27:50   but as recently discussed on this very program,

01:27:53   I am glad I did this year.

01:27:54   Third of all, I'm kind of allergic to having something

01:27:59   that I don't own.

01:28:02   I mean, obviously I don't own my home outright

01:28:04   but I really try hard not to have a loan of any sort

01:28:09   if I can avoid it and that to the best of my understanding

01:28:13   is exactly what this is.

01:28:14   Now, the last I had looked, it's not really costing users

01:28:19   of the upgrade program money.

01:28:21   Like when it first came out, I remember doing the math

01:28:23   and it was within like a nickel of,

01:28:26   if you were to take the cost of the iPhone plus AppleCare

01:28:30   plus and add that up and it turns out

01:28:34   if you divide by 24 or whatever,

01:28:35   that was the exact monthly price.

01:28:37   They weren't like fleecing you or anything

01:28:39   with the iPhone upgrade program

01:28:41   and I presume that's still the case.

01:28:43   But I don't know, I just don't really like,

01:28:45   I don't like owing people money if I can avoid it

01:28:49   and that's what this feels like to me.

01:28:50   So it's probably not a logical answer,

01:28:52   it's probably an emotional one

01:28:53   but I'm an emotional being.

01:28:56   John is a logical being.

01:28:57   Why aren't you on the upgrade program, man?

01:29:00   - I just want the control of when I get a new phone

01:29:02   and when I don't.

01:29:03   Having another, as John Rock was saying, another eel,

01:29:06   another like sort of payment and contract

01:29:09   and thing I have to remember that exists

01:29:11   in terms of service and it's just so much easier

01:29:13   to say like when I want a new phone, I'll buy one.

01:29:15   When I don't, I won't and it's a much simpler relationship.

01:29:19   And as you noted, like it's not a money,

01:29:22   even if there was a discount,

01:29:24   even if you saved money by doing this,

01:29:25   I probably still wouldn't do it

01:29:26   just for the convenience reason.

01:29:28   'Cause who knows when I'm gonna buy a phone again?

01:29:29   Just, I have been getting one every two years

01:29:31   but they could come up with a phone

01:29:33   that I really don't like

01:29:33   and I would keep my phone for an extra year.

01:29:35   And I know you can do that with the upgrade program

01:29:37   but it's just one more thing to have sort of running

01:29:38   in the background that you have to keep track of

01:29:40   and yeah, it's not to my taste.

01:29:43   - Fair enough.

01:29:44   Philip writes, "What non-high tech tech

01:29:47   do you like at the moment/which items

01:29:49   have had a nice impact on your lives?"

01:29:51   And Philip continues, "For example,

01:29:53   I have a nice hairdryer

01:29:53   that automatically lowers the temperature when it gets hot

01:29:56   and that's just so especially nice."

01:29:58   I came up with two answers.

01:29:59   One is kind of cribbing what Philip had said.

01:30:02   We recently joined the early 2000s

01:30:05   and got electric toothbrushes.

01:30:07   And one of the nice features about this is that they will,

01:30:11   obviously they're shaking and there's a motor running

01:30:14   as you're brushing your teeth

01:30:16   and they will like, I don't know, change the RPM

01:30:18   or do something so it sounds like an obvious change in pitch

01:30:22   when you need to move to a different section of your mouth

01:30:24   and then it'll turn itself off

01:30:25   after like a couple of minutes or whatever it is

01:30:27   when you can be all done.

01:30:28   And I really like that.

01:30:29   - Do you think electric toothbrushes were invented

01:30:31   in the early 2000s?

01:30:33   - I don't know.

01:30:34   My point was a long time ago.

01:30:35   My point was a long time ago.

01:30:37   - Aren't they from like the '50s?

01:30:39   - Well, okay.

01:30:40   - Well, these ones tell you when you need to move

01:30:42   to the next tooth, so.

01:30:43   - Exactly.

01:30:44   - That's really, really, otherwise you would just there,

01:30:46   you just grind that one tooth down to nothing.

01:30:47   You'd be like, "Oh, toothbrush never told me to move.

01:30:50   What am I supposed to do?" - I just wanted to do

01:30:50   you guys, I didn't know what to do.

01:30:53   And then the other one,

01:30:53   which is probably an even better answer is,

01:30:56   I don't know if there's like a technical name for this.

01:30:59   The one that I found that most closely resembles

01:31:01   the one we have is listed as, in all caps,

01:31:04   cast iron apple peeler.

01:31:06   And then it goes on for another 35 minutes

01:31:08   with different words and I don't know,

01:31:10   the random stuff to spam the search engine.

01:31:13   But anyways, in game the search engine,

01:31:14   what this is is you put an apple on a series of three spikes

01:31:18   and attached to those spikes is a hand crank

01:31:22   and you crank this apple through like a circular cutter.

01:31:27   And then there's a thing around the outside

01:31:29   that peels the apple at the same side.

01:31:31   And in summary, what you end up with is apple slices

01:31:35   that are peeled when all you have done

01:31:37   is turned a crank for a while.

01:31:38   It is magnificent.

01:31:40   And this particular one I'm looking at is 30 bucks on Amazon.

01:31:44   And I generally follow the Alton Brown school of thought,

01:31:48   which you know, don't have a unitasker that's a waste.

01:31:51   And certainly you can do all this by hand for sure.

01:31:54   But if your wife makes a phenomenal apple pie, as mine does,

01:31:59   and you wanna make sure that she does that

01:32:01   as frequently as possible, as I do,

01:32:03   then one of these is super helpful

01:32:05   and it saves a whole ton of time.

01:32:08   - Well, you say it saves time, but speaking of wives,

01:32:11   my wife is actually a very fast apple peeler.

01:32:14   She's one of the kitchen skills that I don't have,

01:32:16   which is, you know, the thing where you cut

01:32:18   with a paring knife towards your thumb?

01:32:20   - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:32:21   - To peel things.

01:32:23   I cannot master that skill.

01:32:25   I mean, I can do it, but it's clumsy and slow

01:32:27   and I take off way too much apple.

01:32:29   She can do that with any shape thing,

01:32:31   potato, apple, or whatever.

01:32:33   And this thing goes, whizzes right through it

01:32:35   in two seconds, but you do have to mount it first.

01:32:38   And so I would be interested to see an actual competition

01:32:41   starting from apple on table

01:32:43   between mounting and whizzing and unmounting.

01:32:45   - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:32:46   - And her just going, "Sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep,"

01:32:47   with the little paring knife.

01:32:49   But yeah, these things are super cool.

01:32:50   For me, 'cause I'm terrible at peeling apples,

01:32:52   if I had to make an apple pie,

01:32:53   I would love to have one of these things.

01:32:55   My parents had one.

01:32:56   I don't think we have one.

01:32:58   If we do, it's probably lost somewhere in the house.

01:33:00   But yeah, she makes apple pies with her paring knife.

01:33:04   But if I had to be involved,

01:33:06   I hate peeling oddly shaped things.

01:33:09   Yeah, these things are really cool.

01:33:10   Plus they're fun to watch.

01:33:11   If you have kids, get them in the kitchen

01:33:13   to watch the little peel go flying off.

01:33:14   Everything gets cool.

01:33:15   - Yep, Marco.

01:33:17   - I recently did an episode of "Due by Friday,"

01:33:20   our friend's wonderful podcast.

01:33:22   And I talked all about flashlights,

01:33:25   my love of modern LED and lithium battery-based flashlights.

01:33:30   So I will refer people to listen to that episode.

01:33:34   And specifically, I think my two favorites right now

01:33:38   are both by Phoenix, the PD-25 and the LD-12.

01:33:43   We'll put links to both of those in the show notes.

01:33:45   The PD-25 is a little bit smaller,

01:33:47   but uses a kind of non-standard kind of battery type.

01:33:50   The LD-12 is almost as small.

01:33:53   Both of them are similar brightness

01:33:55   and uses double A's or the crazy battery

01:33:59   that is like a double A,

01:34:00   but is lithium rechargeable and red.

01:34:02   Which off the top of my head,

01:34:03   I think is a 14500 battery, something like that.

01:34:05   So anyway, beside that, I want to also refer back

01:34:09   to something that I recently took out of the closet

01:34:12   for the season, my beloved Patagonia Micro Puff hoodie.

01:34:17   We had a very cold couple of mornings here last week.

01:34:21   And this is a jacket that weighs less than most hoodies

01:34:25   and is warm enough to be your only winter jacket

01:34:28   if it doesn't get too cold where you are.

01:34:30   And certainly by far my most frequently used jacket

01:34:33   in the winter.

01:34:34   - John, I don't think I ever got your answer, did I?

01:34:36   I think we skipped ahead after you were commenting

01:34:38   on my beloved apple peeler.

01:34:39   - No, I'll go now.

01:34:41   Speaking of Margot's flashlights,

01:34:43   I've been aware of the fancy flashlight world for,

01:34:46   I mean, since the internet existed.

01:34:47   I think that's where I discovered it, the internet.

01:34:49   I think one of the, you know, that wasn't the first webpage,

01:34:52   but very soon after webpages became a thing,

01:34:55   people would have put their cool, you know,

01:34:57   their everyday carry, I think that term came later,

01:34:59   but people would put their cool little flashlight stuff

01:35:02   in there and like, oh, these flashlights are cool.

01:35:04   I would love to get this, you know, it's LED technology,

01:35:06   it's lithium ion batteries, they can be small and powerful,

01:35:09   especially as LEDs got cheaper or whatever.

01:35:12   But that's where I've always run into a problem.

01:35:14   Every time Margot recommends these, I'm like,

01:35:16   I really want one of these cool flashlights.

01:35:17   And then I see the prices and I'm like,

01:35:19   I don't want it that much.

01:35:20   (laughing)

01:35:22   They're so expensive compared to, like,

01:35:24   compared to, you know, a $5 stupid cheap,

01:35:28   like, especially now you can get cheap LED flashlights

01:35:31   for like no money.

01:35:32   I want one of the good ones,

01:35:34   but I want them to be less money.

01:35:35   They're so expensive, I just can't bring myself to do it.

01:35:38   So I continued to limp along with what I consider to be

01:35:41   a series of really terrible flashlights

01:35:44   that cost $3 each and they last like three years.

01:35:47   So it's like a dollar a year.

01:35:48   It's like, boy, I would have to,

01:35:49   I'm not gonna live long enough to recoup the cost

01:35:51   of these other flashlights.

01:35:53   Mostly I use them for morning dog walks

01:35:55   when it's pitch black because I live in New England.

01:35:59   It's to be able to see the poop to pick it up, right?

01:36:01   So you need a flashlight,

01:36:02   but I want it to be a small flashlight

01:36:03   so it can be in my pocket and everything.

01:36:04   So the ones I have now, you know, I get along with.

01:36:08   But I would like one of those cool ones.

01:36:10   I might, I should, when you put the links in,

01:36:11   maybe I'll look at them again.

01:36:12   Are they still, they're still like 60 bucks?

01:36:14   - Yeah, about 60 bucks is what a good,

01:36:16   like, you know, nerd flashlight costs.

01:36:18   - Yeah, it's too much.

01:36:19   - Agreed.

01:36:19   - But they seem to last forever.

01:36:21   I mean, like, I've had,

01:36:22   I started buying good nerd flashlights

01:36:24   probably about almost 10 years ago now.

01:36:26   I've yet to have one die.

01:36:28   Like, they're really good.

01:36:29   They're built, you know, very heavy duty.

01:36:31   - I think I'm gonna like lose it or break it.

01:36:33   I don't think it's gonna die.

01:36:34   I think I'm gonna like, it's gonna get lost somewhere

01:36:36   or the kids are gonna lose it

01:36:37   or I'm gonna break it in some way.

01:36:39   - Yeah, you'd have to try pretty hard to break these.

01:36:42   I'm not saying that you or your kids can't do it

01:36:44   if you've really tried, but like--

01:36:45   - They're very good at breaking things.

01:36:47   - Yeah, it would be, you know,

01:36:48   it would take some doing to break one of these.

01:36:52   Losing it, I think, would be the bigger concern.

01:36:54   But yeah, if you are willing to spend 60 bucks

01:36:58   on a little flashlight, these are delightful

01:37:00   because it's delightful, like, first of all,

01:37:02   like how heavy duty and just, you know, well-built they are

01:37:05   and also just like how much light you get

01:37:08   out of something that is so tiny

01:37:11   compared to like what we all grew up with.

01:37:12   You know, 'cause the world of LEDs

01:37:14   and now like, you know, higher voltage lithium batteries,

01:37:16   like it's really amazing what you can get

01:37:18   in a very tiny flashlight.

01:37:20   - Oh, the whole street,

01:37:21   now exactly where I'm picking up the poop?

01:37:23   I don't need to be that bright.

01:37:24   - Well, you don't have to, there's a button on it

01:37:26   that like you select your brightness level,

01:37:28   but so like, you know, most of the time

01:37:29   I don't have it on full brightness,

01:37:31   but it is nice to occasionally, like if I wanna like,

01:37:33   you know, when I'm walking my dog at night in the winter

01:37:35   and I wanna like, you know, scan the poorly lit street

01:37:38   ahead of me for like, is there like a deer or a raccoon

01:37:40   or a cat ahead of me, I wanna know that.

01:37:42   - Or a skunk, I don't watch for the skunks.

01:37:44   - Yeah, like I need to know that,

01:37:45   and so it's nice for, you know,

01:37:47   to amp up the brightness for a minute

01:37:49   while you scan around and turn it back down.

01:37:51   - Have you ever, has your dog ever gotten skunked?

01:37:53   - No, I've dodged that, fortunately.

01:37:55   - Be glad.

01:37:56   - I know, I've heard.

01:37:57   - All right, so my, what is this,

01:37:59   non-tech, non-high tech product at the moment.

01:38:04   I talked about this same thing on another podcast,

01:38:05   just like Marco talked about his on another podcast,

01:38:08   and mine is cheap.

01:38:10   I spend a lot of time in the kitchen,

01:38:12   I do most of the dinner cooking,

01:38:14   and so I spend a lot of time cutting things,

01:38:17   and the world of fancy knives is very much like

01:38:19   the world of fancy flashlights,

01:38:21   where you can just, you know, go nuts,

01:38:23   and like, it's more like the world of watches, actually,

01:38:26   'cause like at a certain point,

01:38:27   performance characteristics stop being meaningful,

01:38:29   and now you're buying like pieces of art or whatever.

01:38:30   Anyway, a while back, after a series of knives,

01:38:34   I was, you know, I was fine with,

01:38:35   like we got a set of knives from a local place

01:38:38   near my wife that we had, we got when we were married,

01:38:40   and we still have that set of knives,

01:38:42   so it's fine.

01:38:43   It was cheap, we didn't have a lot of money,

01:38:44   we married in our early 20s, we got a set of knives,

01:38:47   but it's still sturdy and working,

01:38:49   and so, you know, good investment.

01:38:52   But they weren't great knives,

01:38:53   so I've always been looking for, you know,

01:38:55   a good chef's knife to replace my, you know,

01:38:59   my wedding knives, and maybe 10 years ago or whatever,

01:39:03   one of the many nerd cooking shows that I watch,

01:39:06   I think it might have been Cook's Illustrated,

01:39:08   I don't even remember,

01:39:09   might have been America's Test Kitchen,

01:39:10   did a thing where they test a bunch of knives

01:39:12   and they pick their favorite,

01:39:13   and their favorite was this, how do you say this,

01:39:18   Victorinox, the Swiss Army knife company, right?

01:39:21   - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:39:22   - Victorinox Fibrox Pro Chef's Knife, eight inch.

01:39:27   And you can still buy this to this day,

01:39:29   and I'm very glad, because I didn't want it

01:39:31   to be like one of those things where I bought it,

01:39:32   and then like, I wanna get a new one in a decade

01:39:34   and then no longer make it.

01:39:36   I just had that experience with my garbage can, by the way,

01:39:37   my garbage can finally broke after like a decade,

01:39:39   I'm like, oh no, I don't wanna have to shop for a new,

01:39:42   I just want this exact same garbage can again.

01:39:44   I did find almost the same garbage can,

01:39:46   I bought two of them, so being smart.

01:39:48   - Of course you did.

01:39:49   - Yeah, anyway, this knife, it's not like a great knife

01:39:54   in terms of like how knives are,

01:39:56   how much carbon is in the carbon steel,

01:39:57   how fancy is the handle, it is like,

01:40:00   the most straightforward knife

01:40:01   you could ever possibly imagine,

01:40:03   probably made of a middling quality of steel.

01:40:06   The handle is just cheap textured plastic,

01:40:10   and that's exactly the way I want it.

01:40:12   It's like the Oxo Good Grips of chef knives,

01:40:14   it's $36 on Amazon, and we've had ours

01:40:18   for at least 10 years, probably longer.

01:40:21   I just bought a second one out of paranoia,

01:40:23   like the first one was perfectly fine,

01:40:24   I didn't want a second one, 'cause I'm like,

01:40:25   I just need to have another one of these.

01:40:27   It's like my main knife, I cut,

01:40:32   like every night I cut something with that knife,

01:40:34   I use it all the time, I've got a knife sharpener,

01:40:37   which is again, probably a cruddy knife sharpener,

01:40:38   I don't care, I'll put my $36 knife

01:40:40   into my cruddy automated knife sharpener,

01:40:42   I feel perfectly good about that,

01:40:43   and it's worked great for 10 years.

01:40:44   So if you don't have a chef's knife that you're happy with,

01:40:49   maybe you have a chef's knife that costs $120

01:40:51   that you don't like 'cause it's weird and uncomfortable,

01:40:53   get this knife, it is the Oxo Good Grips of chef knives,

01:40:55   and it's so cheap that you won't care

01:40:57   if you dull it or sharpen it badly,

01:40:59   or it gets caught in the garbage disposal and gets bent,

01:41:03   it's 36 bucks, get this knife.

01:41:04   I should probably get an infomercial,

01:41:06   like you can't afford not to buy this knife.

01:41:08   (laughing)

01:41:10   Four and a half stars on Amazon,

01:41:12   that is an accurate rating, it is not a fancy knife,

01:41:14   and so you'll feel good about using it.

01:41:16   The only thing I have to say is when I bought the new one,

01:41:17   I noticed the ridge on the cheap handle,

01:41:20   like the cheap molded plastic handle

01:41:22   with the textured plastic, there's a ridge on it,

01:41:24   but apparently that goes away after a while

01:41:25   'cause I looked at my old one and it's not there,

01:41:28   and so I started using it and eventually it wears down,

01:41:30   but yeah, get this knife, it's great.

01:41:32   - Thanks to our sponsors this week,

01:41:34   Linode, Fracture, and Clearbank,

01:41:36   and we will talk to you next week.

01:41:38   (upbeat music)

01:41:41   ♪ Now the show is over ♪

01:41:43   ♪ They didn't even mean to begin ♪

01:41:45   ♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪

01:41:48   ♪ Oh it was accidental ♪

01:41:51   ♪ John didn't do any research ♪

01:41:53   ♪ Marco and Casey wouldn't let him ♪

01:41:56   ♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪

01:41:59   ♪ Oh it was accidental ♪

01:42:01   ♪ And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM ♪

01:42:06   ♪ And if you're into Twitter ♪

01:42:09   ♪ You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S ♪

01:42:14   ♪ So that's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M ♪

01:42:20   ♪ Auntie Marco Armin S-I-R-A-C ♪

01:42:25   ♪ U-S-A Siracusa ♪

01:42:27   ♪ It's accidental ♪

01:42:29   ♪ It's accidental ♪

01:42:31   ♪ They didn't mean to ♪

01:42:33   ♪ Accidental ♪

01:42:34   ♪ Accidental ♪

01:42:36   ♪ Tech broadcast ♪

01:42:38   ♪ So long ♪

01:42:40   - Listeners of our show will know

01:42:44   that you occasionally hear the ringing of a call bell

01:42:49   in the background of our show.

01:42:50   It sounds something like this.

01:42:52   (bell ringing)

01:42:53   - What's that bell sound that I always hear?

01:42:54   It's so weird, I've been listening for years.

01:42:56   I've been understanding when that bell sound appears.

01:42:59   - So this bell sound originates with our friend Merlin Mann,

01:43:03   who has a bell like this and would occasionally ring it,

01:43:07   accenting a joke or something.

01:43:10   Mostly early on, I heard it mostly on "Back to Work,"

01:43:13   and then of course it has migrated to other shows as well,

01:43:15   and he is the master of these bells.

01:43:17   - Speaking of mastery of the bells, by the way,

01:43:20   this complaint has been voiced by listeners,

01:43:22   and I kind of agree with them.

01:43:23   You may have different things to say

01:43:25   as the performer of the bell.

01:43:27   This is your instrument,

01:43:28   and I understand that you may have

01:43:29   your particular techniques, but--

01:43:30   - Oh no.

01:43:31   - Traditionally speaking, a bell of this kind

01:43:34   should be rung by tapping and allowed to ring,

01:43:37   and people don't like it when you mute it

01:43:39   after hitting the plunger.

01:43:41   You're doing that on purpose, or is it just--

01:43:43   - Yes, because I learned that from Merlin.

01:43:46   - All right.

01:43:47   - You know, Merlin used to just ring it fully like that

01:43:50   and let it ring out, but then as he developed

01:43:54   the comedic stylings of using the bell,

01:43:56   he would have a really quick joke

01:43:58   and do a quick little hit and move on.

01:44:00   - He's got a fever.

01:44:01   (laughing)

01:44:03   - It's not a cow bell.

01:44:04   - It's slightly less bell.

01:44:05   - Anyway, so a while back, around like,

01:44:08   we started the show, what, like 2013 or something?

01:44:12   - Forever ago.

01:44:12   - Yeah, so yeah.

01:44:13   I occasionally, I have a whole folder of sound clips

01:44:16   that I'll occasionally drop in to punctuate a joke

01:44:20   or be funny or be a reference to something

01:44:23   or delineate sections of the show or whatever else.

01:44:26   And forever ago, I clipped out a sound effect

01:44:30   of Merlin's bell doing that short bell, that short ring,

01:44:34   and I used that for a little while here and there.

01:44:37   And it was some clip I stole from Back to Work

01:44:39   for like two seconds.

01:44:40   - Turns out.

01:44:41   - This was all before 2016,

01:44:43   that I would occasionally use that.

01:44:44   And we developed this joke on the show that,

01:44:48   I didn't wanna overuse Merlin's bell, because it's his.

01:44:51   I don't wanna steal or ruin his gag,

01:44:54   so I didn't wanna overuse it.

01:44:56   So we kind of came into this pattern that I would,

01:44:59   I only would use the bell during,

01:45:02   right after John mentions file systems,

01:45:06   either file systems in general, the file system,

01:45:08   or a particular file system,

01:45:10   and only the first time during a show.

01:45:12   - And I just wanna point out that that's not like

01:45:15   a thing that you do sometimes.

01:45:18   It's very consistent.

01:45:19   Literally every single time you hear that bell,

01:45:22   I have just said something about file systems.

01:45:25   So it kind of amazes me that people can listen

01:45:27   to the show for years, literally for years,

01:45:31   and not pick up, like you always say,

01:45:33   how good humans are at pattern matching,

01:45:34   and they find patterns when they don't even exist.

01:45:36   This is a definite pattern intentionally put there,

01:45:39   very consistently, and yet it doesn't connect

01:45:44   to a lot of people listening.

01:45:46   Maybe they're tuning out 'cause I'm talking

01:45:47   about file systems, and they're not even listening,

01:45:49   and then they hear the bell and it brings them back,

01:45:51   and they don't know what I just said.

01:45:52   So maybe I'm to blame here, but I'm always,

01:45:54   and that's why I don't answer them.

01:45:56   I'm not doing it to be mean, but I don't wanna explain

01:45:58   why the bell is.

01:45:59   I want people to sort of discover the bell on their own.

01:46:01   I mean, now obviously Marco's explaining it,

01:46:03   and I think that's fine after 60 years we've been podcasting

01:46:06   or whatever the hell it's been.

01:46:07   It's fine to explain it in the after show

01:46:08   where half the people probably won't listen

01:46:10   because those same people probably think

01:46:11   that when the show says, "Now this show is over,"

01:46:15   they're like, "Okay, well, turn this podcast off."

01:46:17   - Later.

01:46:18   - Yeah, so, pro tip, the show is not over.

01:46:20   - Actually, before we go any further,

01:46:22   I would like to point out that to the best

01:46:25   of my recollection, once Marco acquired a physical bell,

01:46:29   and I'm jumping slightly ahead here.

01:46:30   - Which I get to, yeah.

01:46:31   - Yeah, once Marco acquired a physical bell,

01:46:33   I cannot remember a time that John has mentioned,

01:46:38   one of the qualifying phrases, file system, APFS, et cetera,

01:46:42   I cannot remember a time that John has made mention

01:46:44   of one of those things, and Marco has not immediately

01:46:47   rang that bell with his hand.

01:46:50   It has been unreal how consistent he has been

01:46:54   over the course of the, I don't know, two or three years

01:46:56   that this bell has been a thing.

01:46:57   - So, I was using the sound effect.

01:46:59   I would just put it in during editing.

01:47:00   I would use the sound effect for the first couple years.

01:47:03   And because we talked a lot about file systems,

01:47:07   John was known for it, and we got a tip

01:47:11   a couple of months before WWDC 2016

01:47:15   that they were going to announce a new file system.

01:47:17   And so I thought, wouldn't it be funny

01:47:20   if I brought a bell into the keynote

01:47:23   and rang it when they said file system

01:47:26   like during the keynote?

01:47:27   But I didn't have one, so I ordered myself a physical bell.

01:47:33   I figured I have to get a physical bell,

01:47:36   then I have to teach myself how to do the short ding

01:47:39   that I was using the sound effect for

01:47:40   that Merlin was doing.

01:47:42   So I went on Amazon, ordered a bell,

01:47:45   and the one I ordered, unfortunately, had a much higher

01:47:48   pitched sound, it was like the wrong note.

01:47:51   And what I was trying to do was match the sound effect

01:47:54   I'd been using exactly, have it be the exact same bell tone

01:47:57   so that nobody could even tell that I was now

01:47:59   using a real one.

01:48:00   And in fact, still, people who listen to the livestream

01:48:03   are still very surprised that it's a real bell

01:48:05   like the first time they hear it.

01:48:07   That yes, this is actually a real bell that I'm hitting now

01:48:09   ever since early 2016.

01:48:11   But anyway, so I was trying to find exactly Merlin's bell.

01:48:13   First one I bought was the wrong note.

01:48:15   And you can't really search Amazon listings for like,

01:48:18   what is the frequency of this bell's ring?

01:48:21   (laughing)

01:48:22   None of them really have that information published.

01:48:25   And so eventually I just asked Merlin,

01:48:27   hey, what's the one that you got?

01:48:29   And he sent me this link, and we'll put it in the show notes

01:48:32   and it's of course, of course this is what Merlin has.

01:48:36   It is this gag ring bell for service

01:48:39   by this brand, Accoutrements, or Accoutrement,

01:48:43   I don't know, it's probably French.

01:48:44   And it's like this gag gift bell.

01:48:46   The kind of thing you get in a Spencer gift.

01:48:48   Like this is the bell, all right?

01:48:51   So I thought, okay, so I ordered that, got it,

01:48:55   and sure enough it was a perfect match.

01:48:57   So I've been using that bell ever since.

01:48:58   I've been bringing this bell everywhere we do a live show.

01:49:01   So I brought it to WWDC like literally four times,

01:49:04   or three times.

01:49:06   I traveled with it to and from the beach.

01:49:09   Like anywhere I'm going to where I'm recording this show,

01:49:11   I bring this bell.

01:49:12   - You forgot to, by the way, for the WWDC thing,

01:49:14   you forgot to mention the best part of that story.

01:49:16   - Oh yeah, well yeah, so I actually did bring the bell

01:49:19   into the keynote.

01:49:21   They didn't announce it during the keynote.

01:49:24   They did announce it during the State of the Union.

01:49:27   And you can hear us discuss this on ATP episode 174

01:49:31   titled A Ding in the Room.

01:49:33   I can tell you that somebody brought a bell

01:49:35   into the State of the Union and didn't tell anybody,

01:49:38   including all the co-hosts that were sitting next to him,

01:49:40   and hit it real hard and it was clearly audible

01:49:45   in the stream and the video.

01:49:46   But anyway, I had this bell,

01:49:48   I've been traveling with it all these years.

01:49:50   This year when I brought it back from the beach,

01:49:52   it got all rattly.

01:49:53   Like something here, I'll show you.

01:49:55   - What happens, you bring anything to the beach,

01:49:57   it just destroys it, it's the salt air.

01:49:59   - And it's just something has become mechanically wrong

01:50:02   with my bell and I couldn't figure out how to fix it

01:50:05   so it sounded right again.

01:50:06   It was just all rattly.

01:50:07   - You have the right to repair that bell.

01:50:09   It's not glued together, you can get right in.

01:50:10   - No, I've tried, right?

01:50:12   So I went back to the original Amazon listing

01:50:14   that I bought in 2016 and I ordered myself two more.

01:50:17   I figured, let me get, I'll get a spare.

01:50:19   - Okay, John.

01:50:20   - And I'll get, 'cause I mean one lasted three years

01:50:23   with a lot of travel.

01:50:23   Let me get two more, I can leave one at the beach,

01:50:26   that'll cut out a lot of the travel

01:50:27   and have like a travel bell and that'll be it, okay.

01:50:29   And it was a third party seller,

01:50:30   it was all that was selling there.

01:50:33   But they arrived a few days later

01:50:35   and it wasn't the blue box novelty ring bell for service.

01:50:40   It was a generic Graphco call bell

01:50:43   and instead of sounding like this,

01:50:44   it sounds like this, which is totally the wrong note.

01:50:47   - Oh no, oh no.

01:50:49   - And by a lot too, like that's totally wrong.

01:50:52   It's way higher.

01:50:54   So I thought, oh God, okay, so I requested a return,

01:50:58   I went back to the same listing,

01:50:59   which still had the picture of the nice blue box one

01:51:02   I was looking for and I went to a different seller

01:51:05   that was listed there and I ordered two more

01:51:09   from them and I figured, you know what,

01:51:12   just in case this is wrong, these aren't very expensive,

01:51:15   there was another one that was significantly more money.

01:51:18   It was a whole different seller,

01:51:20   it was like, so normally the regular price was $10 each,

01:51:23   the one I was ordering the second time was $14 each

01:51:26   and there was another seller

01:51:27   that was selling for $30 each.

01:51:28   And I thought, you know what--

01:51:29   - Oh my word.

01:51:30   - Just in case, these gotta be two different listings,

01:51:33   two different companies, maybe this bell's out of production

01:51:35   and they're like scalping people for the cost.

01:51:38   Fine, I need them, so I ordered two of the $14 ones

01:51:42   and two of the $30 ones from two different companies.

01:51:45   All four arrived, all four of them are from a company

01:51:51   called Honest Medical or HPMS or the Therapy Connection.

01:51:55   The mailing labels are very similar

01:51:57   and all four of them are the wrong note.

01:52:00   - Oh no.

01:52:01   - They're all the same generic Graphco bell.

01:52:04   So I have now three different sellers

01:52:07   that have sold me the same generic bell.

01:52:11   All of them seem to be exactly the same company behind them

01:52:14   and now I'm getting into like, oh God,

01:52:16   this is like an Amazon thing, right?

01:52:18   'Cause this is like, this is the problem with Amazon.

01:52:20   There's so much room for BS and arbitrage and scams

01:52:25   and counterfeiting and generic stuff.

01:52:28   Basically this listing has been corrupted

01:52:30   by this company is entering these as that item

01:52:35   when in fact they are not that item,

01:52:36   they are like a generic similar item

01:52:38   but it's not the same item that's listed or pictured, right?

01:52:41   - And now speaking of third party sellers,

01:52:42   I had a weird experience with Amazon recently too.

01:52:44   I mentioned my garbage can that I wanted to get more of.

01:52:46   I'm scouring the internet trying to find the garbage can,

01:52:48   eventually I track it down, who sells it, of course.

01:52:51   I found it at Walmart, sold it at Walmart,

01:52:54   but I don't know if any of you have ever

01:52:55   ordered online from Walmart.

01:52:56   They don't know how to deliver you things

01:52:59   that you order on the web.

01:53:00   They literally don't know how to do it.

01:53:02   They're so bad.

01:53:03   It's like half the time I order stuff from Walmart,

01:53:05   I just assume I'll get an email three days later

01:53:07   that says, "Yeah, that thing you ordered,

01:53:08   "we don't actually have that, nevermind.

01:53:10   "Your order's canceled."

01:53:11   Anyway, and then I also found that on Amazon,

01:53:14   similar deal to this Bell.

01:53:15   Sketchy looking listing, third party sellers,

01:53:18   you just send and cross your fingers, right?

01:53:20   So a couple days later, what arrives at my house

01:53:23   is two gigantic Walmart boxes.

01:53:25   They're brown cardboard boxes with the Walmart name

01:53:27   and logo wrapped all around them.

01:53:29   It's like a blue Walmart decorations all over them.

01:53:31   And I'm like, "Good old Walmart.

01:53:33   "Finally, bank makes an error in your favor.

01:53:35   "Walmart sent me two garbage cans when I just ordered."

01:53:38   And I double checked.

01:53:39   I went back to my email receipt.

01:53:40   I'm like, "Yep, I ordered one garbage can

01:53:42   "and Walmart sent me two."

01:53:43   Well, that kind of makes up for the 800 other times

01:53:46   that you canceled my order without sending me anything

01:53:48   after waiting three days.

01:53:49   (laughing)

01:53:50   But then I also noticed that my little Alexa

01:53:52   had a yellow ring on it.

01:53:54   And I said, well, I already said it, whatever.

01:53:57   I said, "Alexa, notifications."

01:53:59   And it told me that a shipment had arrived from Amazon

01:54:02   containing a garbage can.

01:54:04   Like, I did order one garbage can from Amazon

01:54:07   and one from Walmart, but what arrived at my doorstep

01:54:09   were two Walmart boxes.

01:54:11   So as far as I can tell, Amazon sent me a Walmart product.

01:54:16   Like, it's not ambiguous.

01:54:20   It is in a Walmart box that is identical

01:54:22   to the box from Walmart proper,

01:54:25   but they obviously both came from the same place

01:54:27   and arrived on the same day.

01:54:29   And they're both from Walmart.

01:54:30   And so I order something at Amazon

01:54:33   and Walmart fulfills it?

01:54:34   Like, what is going on?

01:54:36   The same way that you order a thing from this listing,

01:54:38   different sellers for different prices,

01:54:40   and the same stupid product

01:54:41   that's not that product shows up.

01:54:43   I don't understand what's happening in Amazon

01:54:46   or what even is Amazon anymore?

01:54:48   Is it just a place where you press a button

01:54:50   and then somehow things arrive at your, like,

01:54:53   how is, it's like going to Burger King

01:54:56   and ordering a quarter pound of cheese and getting a Big Mac.

01:54:59   What, I don't understand it at all.

01:55:02   - Yeah. - Anyway,

01:55:03   continue your Bell story.

01:55:03   - All right, so I was now in possession

01:55:06   of six of the wrong kind of Bell (laughs)

01:55:09   at various prices from 10 to $30 each.

01:55:12   - Oh my word.

01:55:13   You're gonna corner the market on Bells,

01:55:15   on incorrect Bells.

01:55:16   - Yeah, right.

01:55:17   And meanwhile, of the three orders I placed so far,

01:55:20   all three of them had, like, the same return address

01:55:23   and a very similar company name,

01:55:25   even though they were all three

01:55:26   from totally differently named Amazon third party sellers.

01:55:29   And so, like, clearly, like, you know,

01:55:31   there's these companies who, you know,

01:55:32   put themselves as lots of listings

01:55:34   at lots of different price points,

01:55:35   even though it's the same company.

01:55:37   They're just, you know, making all these shell companies,

01:55:38   I guess, or fake names, who knows?

01:55:40   So I thought, you know, okay, fine.

01:55:41   You know what, Amazon is killing me here.

01:55:44   They're useless.

01:55:45   Meanwhile, like, I was searching eBay for this,

01:55:47   for the brand and everything.

01:55:48   I was looking all over the place.

01:55:50   Couldn't find them anywhere.

01:55:52   And finally, I found using, like, Google Shopping,

01:55:55   there was this other site,

01:55:57   which I'm not gonna name for their protection.

01:55:58   There was this other site that had the listing

01:56:02   of exactly the bell I was looking for.

01:56:04   It had the picture of the right box and everything.

01:56:07   I'm like, finally, it was $21 each.

01:56:11   And I'm like, you know what?

01:56:12   I'm getting four of them.

01:56:14   I'm just kidding. (laughing)

01:56:15   Obviously, this is so hard to find,

01:56:18   I'm never gonna be able to find them again.

01:56:19   It's like, you know, John, like, you know,

01:56:21   it's like John Gruber holding onto his old Apple keyboards.

01:56:24   It's like, if I can find this for sale,

01:56:26   for God's sake, I'll buy them all, right?

01:56:28   I never wanna have to do this again.

01:56:30   So I ordered four of these bells

01:56:33   from this random other site.

01:56:35   They arrive a few days later,

01:56:36   and I look at the man label,

01:56:38   and it says Honest Medical HPMS Therapy Connection.

01:56:43   It's the exact same company

01:56:45   that was sending them from Amazon.

01:56:46   And I was like, you gotta be effing kidding me.

01:56:48   - They have all the bells, obviously.

01:56:50   They've cornered the market on bells.

01:56:51   - Sure enough, I open it up,

01:56:53   and it's the wrong bell.

01:56:55   (laughing)

01:56:56   And it's four of them from the same damn company.

01:57:00   - They just keep sending you the same bells

01:57:02   they sent you before.

01:57:02   You return them and get a refund

01:57:04   when you order them again from a different thing.

01:57:06   - Yeah, we keep sending a lot of bells to this address,

01:57:08   and they keep returning them.

01:57:09   - No, but like, I still had them all.

01:57:10   Like, you know, at peak time,

01:57:11   I had like 10 bells in my house.

01:57:13   So, 'cause I was like, you know,

01:57:15   waiting for the UPS guy to come pick up the returns.

01:57:17   So like--

01:57:18   - You should do a top four on bells,

01:57:19   top four bells, and all the bells are that bell.

01:57:21   (laughing)

01:57:23   - Right, yeah, exactly.

01:57:26   So like, so here I am, I'm like,

01:57:27   you gotta, like, no matter what I get,

01:57:29   no matter, it's like Groundhog Daily,

01:57:30   no matter what I do, the same thing shows up.

01:57:32   It's like, oh my god.

01:57:33   So, and it turns out this other site that I had found

01:57:37   was just like an Amazon front site.

01:57:39   Like, I emailed them all pissed off.

01:57:41   I'm like, you know, I demand a refund.

01:57:43   This is not what was pictured.

01:57:45   Clearly, you're just reselling Amazon stuff.

01:57:47   They responded, not addressing the accusation

01:57:50   that they were just an Amazon shill site,

01:57:52   but their return label that they gave me

01:57:54   was a PDF of an Amazon return label.

01:57:57   (laughing)

01:57:59   - My word.

01:57:59   - So, so you know, clearly,

01:58:01   so I fell for one of these arbitrage sites,

01:58:03   but I think I'm gonna get a refund.

01:58:04   We'll see, so, I'm like, you know,

01:58:08   I'm, you know, blocked at every turn here.

01:58:10   What the heck am I gonna do?

01:58:12   I went back to Amazon.

01:58:13   I went to all the other sellers.

01:58:15   There aren't that many sellers of this bell listed,

01:58:17   but you know, they were all that same company,

01:58:19   just different names.

01:58:20   There was one company in the list that they're,

01:58:24   like they had longer shipping times than the rest,

01:58:26   and they're listing like all their info

01:58:28   like that they give to Amazon.

01:58:29   Like it looked a little bit different than the rest.

01:58:31   - By the way, before you get to the end of the story,

01:58:34   I wanted to say what I would do in this situation,

01:58:36   and what I do do when I'm trying to,

01:58:38   in this exact situation,

01:58:39   I always try to find, if they're still in business,

01:58:42   the actual manufacturer of the product,

01:58:44   and I hope to hell that that manufacturer has a website.

01:58:47   Whoever makes this ring for service novelty bell

01:58:51   for Spencer gifts, find the company that makes it.

01:58:54   Go to their website,

01:58:56   and if they don't have online ordering,

01:58:58   at the very least get like the exact part number

01:59:00   and start searching based on that

01:59:02   rather than trusting the picture.

01:59:03   Now, maybe it's not possible with a novelty bell,

01:59:05   but that's my usual technique, so continue.

01:59:08   - All right, so yeah, and I try,

01:59:10   but this appears to be like no longer produced

01:59:13   for possibly quite some time.

01:59:15   So finally, I found this one seller

01:59:18   that looked a little bit different than the rest,

01:59:20   and I emailed them, and I'm like,

01:59:21   hey, here's exactly what I'm looking for.

01:59:24   Can you verify whether this is exactly what you have

01:59:27   or whether you have this other thing?

01:59:29   And they responded, and they're like,

01:59:31   yes, we actually have the real thing.

01:59:33   We only have three left.

01:59:36   Great, I place an order immediately,

01:59:37   not from Amazon, but from their site directly.

01:59:41   I got my bells.

01:59:44   What shows up a few days later is three of the correct bell.

01:59:49   So finally, for whatever price,

01:59:53   I think 20 bucks each, whatever it was, 15 bucks each,

01:59:55   I finally have the correct bell.

01:59:58   I have three of them now that work

01:59:59   and one of them that doesn't,

02:00:01   and so finally I'm gonna hoard these for the rest of time

02:00:05   or at least for the rest of the, however long ATP runs,

02:00:08   I'm gonna hoard these bells, and now finally I have them.

02:00:10   But it's just like, I know this is kind of,

02:00:12   and not a great ending to a story,

02:00:13   but I finally got the right thing,

02:00:14   but just like, it just kind of shows how messed up

02:00:18   the whole Amazon ecosystem is that you can get

02:00:22   one company dominating the listings for this thing,

02:00:25   selling a counterfeit item from all these different names,

02:00:27   all these different price points,

02:00:28   plus this arbitrage site that was off to the side

02:00:30   that was the same.

02:00:31   - Counterfeiting a garbagey item.

02:00:33   - Yes!

02:00:34   - It's like an Apple product or something.

02:00:36   It's counterfeiting a Spencer Gips thing.

02:00:38   - No, they're counterfeiting a $10 bell.

02:00:41   Oh God, so I finally have the right thing,

02:00:44   and that's it, that's my story.

02:00:45   - Now you should save the quote unquote broken one too.

02:00:48   - Oh I am.

02:00:49   - Just because it's good to have the parts,

02:00:50   and I feel like if you have two broken ones,

02:00:53   maybe you can make one working one out of it.

02:00:54   It's still interesting in exactly how this thing broke.

02:00:56   I feel like it could be, I tried to repair it

02:00:58   by the way, a garbage can, but I have some,

02:01:01   I tried using Krazy Glue that worked for like two days

02:01:04   as it usually does.

02:01:05   I have some mechanical ways I could try to fix it,

02:01:07   but I'm saving the body just like my cheese grater

02:01:10   so that I can eventually make one whole working garbage can

02:01:14   several years from now.

02:01:15   (laughing)

02:01:16   The garbage can situation was pretty grim,

02:01:18   'cause like what I wanted was a garbage can

02:01:21   that has a lid where you touch a thing on top of it

02:01:24   and the lid opens, so I didn't want a foot press thingy,

02:01:28   and where it is in my kitchen,

02:01:30   it has to open on the narrow side,

02:01:32   so it has to be wider than it is long,

02:01:34   it has to be like a rectangle,

02:01:35   and the hinge has to be on the short side of the rectangle,

02:01:39   'cause that's just how our garbage can is

02:01:40   and where it's placed, and that's not gonna change

02:01:42   unless we get our kitchen totally remodeled.

02:01:45   Just try finding a garbage can that's like that.

02:01:47   They either all have foot pedals,

02:01:48   or they all open the other way.

02:01:50   Like price was no object, materials were almost no object,

02:01:53   I didn't care, it's just impossible to find,

02:01:54   except for my one garbage can that I found,

02:01:57   almost the identical garbage can I found.

02:01:59   The only difference is that there's slightly textured plastic

02:02:03   in an area where the old plastic used to be smooth,

02:02:05   which I'm afraid will make it slightly harder

02:02:06   to clean that part of it, but it's not really visible

02:02:10   unless you're right on top of it,

02:02:11   and you can see that it's textured.

02:02:12   So I got two of them, and I'm keeping 'em.

02:02:15   Cheese gritters still can't find any of those.

02:02:17   Anyone ever finds my cheese grater,

02:02:19   just buy me one, I will pay you for them,

02:02:20   as long as the prices are reasonable.

02:02:22   Not like that $75 spatula that I didn't buy.

02:02:25   - Oh my gosh.

02:02:26   - But what is the right spatula?

02:02:27   I would have paid $75 for one of the correct bell.

02:02:31   - Yeah, yeah, well I mean, the thing is,

02:02:33   if you don't have a working one,

02:02:34   like that's the spatula I have a working one,

02:02:36   but the cheese grater is I know that they break,

02:02:38   and the bells, apparently now you know that they break.

02:02:41   Maybe you should be more gentle with your bell.

02:02:42   (laughing)

02:02:44   - I gotta stop traveling with it.

02:02:46   Shove it into a suitcase with a sock in the middle

02:02:48   so it doesn't ring.

02:02:49   - You should get one of those custom fitted cut foam,

02:02:52   like carrying cases for the bell.

02:02:54   - Yeah!

02:02:56   - You can margo this up,

02:02:56   how expensive can you make this $10 bell?

02:02:58   (laughing)

02:03:00   $150 custom cut Pelican carrying case for it.

02:03:05   (beeping)