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346: Go Back and Pop Myself

 

00:00:00   Hi everybody. We are live. Live from the show floor here at the Microsoft event where we

00:00:07   are covering all of the Windows 10 X 10 live surface events and all the new Surface X hardware

00:00:15   with all the dual touch screens and the folding dual X 10 screens. It's going to be a whole

00:00:22   big event. So we obviously have the entire show devoted exclusively to Microsoft's new

00:00:30   innovations here and we cannot wait to see what you do with them.

00:00:33   Oh my god, please no. I know I should probably care but I don't think I care.

00:00:39   Here's the thing. I really respect Microsoft for trying. They really have been pushing

00:00:46   the hardware forward over the last like five years or so with their Surface stuff. And

00:00:51   most, for the most part, you don't really see anybody using those big desktops and everything

00:00:56   but what you do see are a lot of people out there using the Surface tablets and laptops.

00:01:02   Those actually seem to have somewhat significant market success, not by anywhere near what

00:01:08   Apple might get with some of their stuff. But in the world of PC hardware, Microsoft's

00:01:15   Surface stuff looks like it's alright. It isn't perfect but it's pretty decent. People

00:01:20   seem to pretty much like them. And so I do have to give them credit. They do seem to

00:01:24   make successful hardware. If you're grading on a curve of like, not like Apple level success

00:01:32   but they do make successful hardware in the sense that it sells reasonably well for what

00:01:38   it is. People do seem to like it. It does seem to do what is advertised for the most

00:01:44   part and not have too many horrible problems. And so I give them ultimate respect for that.

00:01:53   When they first started making weird Surface hardware, like back when Surface meant the

00:01:56   giant table, and even the first one or two Surface tablet things, they were really weird

00:02:02   and not very good and nobody bought them really. But they've been pushing. They've been advancing

00:02:08   and now they make pretty okay PC hardware. In some ways it's pretty good even. So I

00:02:13   gotta give them credit. The only problem is that we don't care about PC hardware and we

00:02:19   don't care about Windows and we don't care about Surface and Android and all the stuff

00:02:23   that's running out. We don't care about any of that on this show. None of us are in those

00:02:27   worlds really. Not anymore! The world of tech is a really big place and I don't think it's

00:02:34   unreasonable for us to specialize. And we don't cover Android stuff because we don't

00:02:40   use Android. We don't cover Windows stuff because we don't use Windows. So I don't see

00:02:46   a lot of anything for us to cover here. The one thing I do like about it is how much they

00:02:53   stick their finger in Apple's eye about laptops. I do really enjoy that because Apple could

00:02:58   use a good finger in the eye sometimes. Apple does not make good products when they think

00:03:02   they're on top and they start coasting. So it is nice to see Microsoft poke fun at things

00:03:08   like all the digs they made about the keyboard and everything. They do okay. I'm proud of

00:03:15   them for what they do but we don't live in that world at all.

00:03:20   - It's funny to me that you apparently either haven't looked at the show notes or don't

00:03:23   care because item number one, two, three, four, five.

00:03:27   - I'm going with don't care. Both of you still do not understand the show format.

00:03:31   (laughing)

00:03:32   - We're gonna talk about a thing, we'll talk about it during the show. How is that so hard?

00:03:37   If we learned anything, it's that neither one of you can say I don't want to talk about

00:03:43   this and then proceed to not talk about this. If you ever begin any sentence with we're

00:03:47   not gonna talk about this, everyone but apparently you two knows that you're gonna talk about

00:03:52   it. You're gonna. Otherwise you wouldn't have said anything. I want you to say I'm not gonna

00:03:58   talk about pumpkins and then just not say anything about pumpkins. Just try that as

00:04:02   an exercise every day when you wake up.

00:04:06   - In my defense, I did read the show notes document but I stopped at about three topics

00:04:11   into the topics because we never get through more than that in an episode.

00:04:14   - That is true.

00:04:15   - They're very small. They're very small.

00:04:18   - Alright, apparently we should start with some follow up. I don't know if this is even

00:04:23   really follow up but I'm gonna call it follow up. I wanted to give everyone a few updates

00:04:29   and also maybe complain a little bit because that's what I've been doing a lot lately.

00:04:33   First of all, my iMac half died and now it's back to life. It did not go back to the Apple

00:04:40   Store. Let me explain. It did not go back to the Apple Store yet but I was noticing

00:04:45   very similar problems to what I was having earlier like where it wouldn't survive overnight

00:04:51   without just hard locking and things just seemed wonky and I thought to myself, "Self,

00:04:58   before you go to the Apple Store and tell them to fix this again, why don't you eliminate

00:05:04   the one thing you couldn't really eliminate last time which is the software installation?"

00:05:10   So if you recall, last time before it went to the Apple Store, I couldn't get the SSD

00:05:16   to work. I couldn't even repair it, much less format it, etc. So that's why I threw my hands

00:05:22   up and just said, "Apple, please deal with this." So this time, things were just not

00:05:28   seeming right but weren't as catastrophic as they were before. Thankfully, one of the

00:05:32   first things I did when I had restored from Time Machine Backup was I took all the detritus

00:05:37   and cruft and garbage that was strewn across my computer's desktop and moved it off to

00:05:43   the Synology so God forbid something happened, I would be prepared and that mostly worked.

00:05:48   And so then I did an Internet recovery which put High Sierra on the iMac which was a little

00:05:54   unexpected. I got very confused by why APFS wasn't an option during the format and it

00:05:59   was either Steven or John or maybe Marco, somebody, it was always John. That's right,

00:06:03   I forgot, it's always John. John pointed out that it was because the Internet recovery

00:06:08   was putting on High Sierra and anyways, I put on High Sierra then migrated to Mojave

00:06:12   and this was a couple of days ago and so far, it seems like everything is better, question

00:06:20   mark? So I'm really not confident in this iMac right now. I feel kind of similar to

00:06:27   it as I did my BMW before I got rid of it but it seems to be working. Maybe there was

00:06:32   some sort of software agita in addition to the clear, to me, clear hardware issues. I

00:06:39   also, while I'm thinking of it, got some feedback from someone who is a former genius who kind

00:06:44   of threw some theories at me as to why I wasn't charged for the repair and there are many,

00:06:52   many different options but it sounds like it is possible that there were no favors called

00:06:57   in. And like I said, I didn't call in any favors but nobody else, it seems, may have

00:07:00   called in favors and just because Apple wasn't exactly sure what did or did not fix the problem,

00:07:07   they might have just said, "Ah, the heck with it. We'll just let this guy walk away for

00:07:11   free." So I wanted to, now that the iMac update is done, I wanted to also update on my watch.

00:07:19   My battery life has gotten considerably better as of, what are we on? What day is today?

00:07:25   What are we on? 13-1-2 on the phone and 6-0-1 on the watch, is that right? I think that's

00:07:31   right, something like that. It doesn't matter. Anyway, the latest updates as of Wednesday,

00:07:36   October 2nd, have gotten me to the point that I can make it all day without charging again.

00:07:41   My watch was brought off the charger 14 hours ago. I did a half an hour of exercise and

00:07:48   I'm currently sitting at 21%, which is not great but is livable. So I am mostly happy

00:07:56   with that. I did, with both my watch and Aaron's watch for different reasons, I did not restore

00:08:03   them. I set them up as new. That did fix Aaron's problems with not having photos on her watch.

00:08:10   It's one of the 13 different things I threw against the wall to fix my battery problems,

00:08:13   although I think ultimately it was the new versions of the OS. And so my computing world

00:08:19   is mostly better now. There's still so much broken with iOS 13 though and it's driving

00:08:25   me insane. And Aaron is so, so annoyed because she's a regular person and to her she just

00:08:33   spent $1,000 on this phone that compelled her to go to iOS 13 and now nothing works

00:08:38   the way it should. And like mail particularly is such a dumpster fire in iOS 13. And it's

00:08:45   just, I don't understand how a company as big as Apple ships something that broken.

00:08:51   I just don't. And maybe I'm too far removed a year in. I'm too far removed from how

00:08:56   big business works and how QA works in a big business. But I just, I don't get how, like,

00:09:01   let's just pick on mail for a second. How is mail that friggin' broken right now? How

00:09:05   does that happen?

00:09:06   - And that wasn't new. Mail has been broken the entire beta period.

00:09:09   - Right!

00:09:10   - Like, it's not a brand new thing. Like, it has been incredibly broken all summer and

00:09:14   it seemed to only slightly get better towards the very, very end. Like, I think ultimately,

00:09:20   like, you know, we can keep making excuses all we want. We can keep saying, well, you

00:09:25   know, they didn't, you know, they, last year was the stability year and this year was the

00:09:28   features year. And they had two years worth of features then to catch up on. And we can

00:09:31   keep making excuses. We can say, oh, they couldn't hold up the iPhone shipping 'cause

00:09:36   that would, you know, be a big problem for the company. So they had to ship it when they

00:09:39   did and they had to give it to the carriers a month early. There's a million excuses.

00:09:43   But the fact is, all of these things either happen every year and so they've been doing

00:09:49   it for a while. They should expect things like earlier carrier submission. They should

00:09:54   expect things like when the iPhone has to ship. Like, none of that is new. All of that

00:09:59   is predictable under their control. And, you know, when it comes to things like, oh, well,

00:10:04   you know, last year was super stable and lower our standards or raise our standards or whatever,

00:10:07   like, that's not good enough. Like, that's not a good enough excuse for a company that's

00:10:12   running like, you know, 10-year-old operating systems or more on the Mac side, you know,

00:10:17   and having all these stability problems. We haven't even gotten to Catalina yet, which

00:10:19   is a disaster as well. Like, thank God it isn't out yet. But, like, it's about to be.

00:10:24   So we have a problem there too. All the iCloud stuff that goes along with it. Like, watchOS

00:10:29   is itself a mess. You know, iOS is a mess. The, you know, now renamed iPad OS is a bit

00:10:36   less of a mess but still in some ways messy. Like, honestly, I think it's just bad management

00:10:41   in the software quality side. Like, somehow, I don't know, I'm not gonna, like, blame a

00:10:46   certain executive 'cause I don't know, you know, I don't know how things went. But this

00:10:51   is not, this beta cycle proves that something went seriously wrong here in the management

00:10:58   and direction and shipping and releasing of the software platforms on this schedule. They

00:11:03   took on too much or they shipped too soon or whatever the case is, things went really

00:11:08   badly and that lies right at the feet of management because they should have been able to see

00:11:14   all of this coming months ago and they chose to do what they did anyway. So, rather than,

00:11:20   you know, cut certain features, they decided to plow ahead. Rather than, you know, delay

00:11:24   certain things or whatever, they plowed ahead. Like, and certain things are still delayed

00:11:29   and it's still, like, what's left is still a mess. And it's hard to look at this and

00:11:35   come up with any other conclusion other than, like, the software quality is being poorly

00:11:40   managed by this company. And for a company the size and prestige of Apple, that's not

00:11:47   good enough.

00:11:48   - Yeah, agreed. And, you know, I wanna talk to John about this a little bit 'cause I think

00:11:52   he will have a more even opinion about all this. But looking at myself and particularly

00:12:00   Erin, so I'm picking on Erin in a sense because she's a regular person who doesn't understand

00:12:04   what it's like to write software. I can both be more annoyed and also more forgiving because

00:12:10   I write software and I know how difficult it is. But if you look at it from our/her

00:12:15   perspective, each of us just bought a brand new iPhone to the tune of, like, $1200 or

00:12:20   something like that, which was a choice. I'm aware it was a choice. I'm just saying we

00:12:23   each bought a brand new iPhone, we each bought a brand new Apple Watch. So we're each, like,

00:12:26   almost $2,000 apiece in our new hardware. And my Apple Watch was not literally a brick

00:12:33   but was, it felt almost as though it was a brick for a week. What has it been, a week

00:12:38   and change, something like that? I couldn't get through a day without charging halfway

00:12:42   through the day. How is that possible that this is what they release? And what an absolute

00:12:47   buzzkill it is to get this new toy that you've saved your money for and then it's just a

00:12:52   piece of garbage that can't get through the day. Like, it can't even get through 12 hours,

00:12:55   it's six hours sometimes. It's just, it's so frustrating. And, you know, Erin has said

00:13:01   to me a few times over the last week, I think mostly to get rise out of me, but somewhat

00:13:05   seriously, like, why am I continuing to buy Apple stuff if it's this broken? Like, why?

00:13:10   It never used to be this way. Why would I continue to do this? And, you know the answer

00:13:14   I've had for her? Yep, that's it. That's what I got. Like, I don't have a good answer. I

00:13:22   mean, at one point, like, if you want to get an Android phone next, like, I don't think

00:13:27   that's really gonna be a lot better, Erin, but I'm not the boss of you. Like, if that's

00:13:31   what you want, go for it. Like, and it's just, this is very frustrating. So, Jon, let's put

00:13:38   on a happy face, hopefully, or at least maybe you could explain to me, like, how does a

00:13:41   company this big have this many problems? And maybe corollary to that, do you think,

00:13:50   Jon, that maybe this is stemming from this one big splash every year release cycle?

00:13:56   Before we get to that, I think it's worth considering that there are things that you

00:14:01   can change in your behavior that will help with this issue, you know, setting aside what

00:14:05   we can and can't do to change how Apple works. Buying an Android phone, yes, is one choice.

00:14:11   Another choice is to not buy the phone on day one.

00:14:14   Yeah, that's true. That's very true.

00:14:15   I don't know what's worse. If you waited six months, probably the stability of the software

00:14:20   will be a lot better. I think it's safe to say that. Now, who wants to wait six months?

00:14:25   No one wants to wait six months. People can't even wait a week or a month. But that is a

00:14:29   way you might be able to change how you purchase things or in exchange how she purchases things

00:14:35   to avoid issues like this. Because as far as I'm aware, there hasn't been an iOS release

00:14:41   where six months in it was still a buggy piece of crap. There have been releases where within

00:14:47   the first week or two, there's lots of things that are buggy. This may be the worst it's

00:14:51   ever been. It's hard to know because, you know, memory fades, especially if like, if,

00:14:57   you know, 13.2 fixes it all, we're all gonna forget about this or whatever. Maybe we'll

00:15:02   remember it because it's lucky number 13. But yeah, that is, as someone who is relatively

00:15:09   technically savvy, you and Aaron will have the choice to understand that that's a thing.

00:15:15   Now, that said, most people don't know that's a thing or should have to know. Like, that's

00:15:19   not on anyone's radar. If you're not listening to technology podcasts, you have no idea that

00:15:25   this is even a thing that you shouldn't buy the iPhone on day one because of the point

00:15:29   zero software is bad and it gets better and so on and so forth. Like, most people don't

00:15:33   even know the new iPhones are out until they wander into an Apple store a month and a half

00:15:36   later, right? So that's, you know, or see an ad on TV or think, Oh, is that did that

00:15:40   just come out? Or has that been out for a month or a year anyway? So that's my suggestion

00:15:47   to consider alongside getting an Android phone. And the question of like, you know, why do

00:15:51   we keep buying Apple stuff? It's usually as Marco just talked about in a part that may

00:15:55   or may not be before this in the release version of the podcast. The alternatives are usually

00:16:03   worse or not maybe not worse, are less to our liking. Right? So, you know, you got complaints

00:16:10   about the Mac when I get a Windows computer. All right, well, how do you feel about Windows?

00:16:15   worse than I do about the Mac? And then you know, it's not like we're captive, but we

00:16:19   are trying to as consumers are trying to make the best choice available to us is the best

00:16:23   choice. Good enough? Perhaps not like I said, is best choice, perfect. Best choice might

00:16:28   not even be good enough. To Marco's point, like there is a bar and a reasonable bar of

00:16:34   consumer expectations. And sometimes Apple doesn't reach it. Now as for how stuff like

00:16:40   this shifts, it's clear that, you know, 13 had a bunch of stuff pulled from it at the

00:16:44   last minute, pulling stuff at the last minute, while it may be the right move is also risky.

00:16:49   Because if you pull stuff at the last minute, then what you're releasing is not the thing

00:16:52   that you had been working on and testing for the past, you know, x months, right? Maybe

00:16:59   a better move would have been to delay the phones, but I'm sure there are much bigger

00:17:02   issues involving who knows what I mean, all sorts of, you know, Apple, Apple has its priorities,

00:17:09   whatever its priorities may be, whether it's because of, you know, tariffs or manufacturing

00:17:14   costs or just who knows what it is, but they made their decision, right? And they have

00:17:19   to deal with the consequences. And it seems like the consequences of their decision are,

00:17:23   you know, that we end up with a perhaps the buggiest release of iOS ever. Now, it does

00:17:28   depend on what you're doing with iOS. If you don't, for example, use the mail app, iOS

00:17:34   10 probably is less of a tire fire for you. Like if you if you just happen to use the

00:17:39   parts of it that work okay, which I think is most of it, you know, maybe it's mostly

00:17:44   alright, maybe people don't mind too much, especially with like a new update coming out

00:17:48   every three days, maybe this window of instability will pass us by. So I'm not sure, you know,

00:17:56   like, obviously, we're all cranky about it, because we know the intimate details of this

00:18:00   stuff. But I'm wondering if people who aren't listening to this podcast and who aren't into

00:18:06   technology who just happened to get a new phone feel the same way about obviously Aaron

00:18:11   does, but she I feel like is definitely technology adjacent. Yeah, no, I mean, it's, it's a bummer.

00:18:20   I'm sure Apple's disappointed about it too, as to how Apple ships something like this.

00:18:26   In some respects, Apple surely knows where many of the bugs are, you know, mostly because

00:18:34   Apple is always experiencing a version of the operating system that is far ahead of

00:18:39   what's released. And there's this, you know, whatever release pipeline that puts out actual

00:18:44   releases. By the time we see the release, Apple has moved on to the one where the thing

00:18:48   that we're worrying about is fixed, and so on and so forth. So it's difficult for them

00:18:51   to get an idea of what the consumer experience would be like. But for apps like mail, or

00:18:55   anything that's data driven, despite their public betas, it's unfortunately reasonable

00:19:02   to assume that reason not to assume reasonable to imagine that there are things that customers

00:19:11   may see that Apple has never seen. That's just a fact of software life, unfortunately,

00:19:17   especially when it's an application that deals with data, because all of Apple's mail and

00:19:21   all of Apple's test data and all of their public beta things, you don't have the kind

00:19:26   of over the shoulder metrics to know what everyone's experience is like, and the channels

00:19:31   for feedback are limited, and it's like, "How could they have shipped this? My mail is all

00:19:36   blank." Maybe there's something, you know? It's still a bug. I'm not saying it's not

00:19:42   their fault, but this is, again, a thing regular consumers shouldn't need to know. But software

00:19:47   developers, especially people who do software that has a server or data component know,

00:19:52   it's impossible to know exactly how your software is going to behave when it's in the hands

00:19:55   of your consumers. And very often it's difficult to know how it is behaving. That's why people

00:20:00   put all that telemetry into their applications and have all this spyware installed, because

00:20:04   they want to know, "How is it going for the people who are using my application?" And

00:20:09   yes, they can sell that data and the evil nefarious side of it as well. But the white

00:20:13   hat side of it is, if you really want to know how things are going for your consumers, you

00:20:18   want to know everything about how they're using the app. Did they go to a screen and

00:20:21   leave immediately? Did they go to the screen and their stuff didn't display? How long are

00:20:24   things taking for actual consumers? And my impression is that Apple does not put that

00:20:29   much telemetry in their apps for obvious privacy reasons. But I'm willing to believe that Apple's

00:20:34   out there thinking, "Mail's probably working okay for most people, right? It's working

00:20:37   for us, right? Yeah, I haven't heard anything about it in the public beta. Maybe one or

00:20:40   two complaints, but I think we fixed those. Meanwhile, mail is completely unusable for

00:20:46   some specific individual person."

00:20:48   You know, I take your point on that, and I think that's fair. But the number one thing

00:20:53   that's driving me insane about mail is I'll go to archive or trash a message when I'm

00:21:01   looking at a message on my phone. So I'm looking at a message, I go to trash it or delete it,

00:21:07   or excuse me, trash it or archive it. And at that point, in every other version of mail

00:21:11   ever, it would pop to the prior view controller, which is the list of messages. And a lot of

00:21:16   times what will happen is the message in question will disappear, or the other screen will almost

00:21:22   entirely become blank, but I'm still looking at the message detail view controller. I'm

00:21:26   just sitting there. And I have to go back and pop myself, which is a stupid thing to

00:21:32   whine about. I totally hear myself saying this, and I'm thinking to myself, "Wow, you're

00:21:36   a big baby." But when you do this many, many times in a row, it's infuriating. And to me,

00:21:43   it's like, how did you not catch this? It's happening to me, it's happening to Aaron,

00:21:47   I'm sure it's happening to other people. How do you not catch this? How is this not a thing?

00:21:52   And the battery life on the watch, how do you not catch that? Like, how is this not

00:21:57   obvious? And I know there's probably a million and six reasons how it could have slipped

00:22:01   through the cracks, but how do you not catch that?

00:22:03   Well, so the first one, I think we have a good answer for what you're looking for before,

00:22:07   some sort of explanation for big corporations. That strikes me as the kind of bug that they

00:22:12   absolutely knew about, but that they ship it, knowingly ship it anyway, for the reason

00:22:17   that you should know, Casey, because bugs get triaged and prioritized. Is that a data

00:22:21   loss bug? No. Is it a crash bug? No. Is it a security bug? No. Well, guess what? We're

00:22:27   shipping it. That's what it comes down to. It's crappy. It's a bug, you know, as we all

00:22:33   know, everybody who works in a big corporation shipping software, ships software with known

00:22:37   bugs all the time. I do. Right. It's just a fact of life now. No, you're right. You know,

00:22:47   you don't get credit for the bugs you don't ship, right? Oh, well, we didn't ship any

00:22:49   bugs that erased all your mail, right? It's a bad bug in that if it's consistent, it seems

00:22:55   like that's definitely a thing that they know about. They don't feel good about shipping

00:22:58   software with bugs, I'm sure, but that's the decision they made. You can make the decision

00:23:02   of when do we ship, when do we not ship, and when you roll it all up or whatever, they

00:23:07   said, you know, with all the things on one side of the scale with selling iPhones and

00:23:12   manufacturing and tariffs on the other side, you know, non-data loss, non-crasher bugs.

00:23:17   I don't think there's a single application that Apple ships that doesn't have a huge

00:23:21   list of known bugs, many of which will never be fixed, because they're not crash or data

00:23:27   loss, you know? So that's crappy. And the watch thing, here's what the watch got me

00:23:32   scratching my head about the watch thing. I have no idea what was causing it, but the

00:23:37   watch thing is baffling because it is such a top-line performance characteristic where

00:23:43   unless watchOS inside Apple is so incredibly far ahead, I wonder how Apple could have the

00:23:50   confidence to know that this product will eventually last all day like we said it would.

00:23:57   Unless they had seen it last all day internally, because they're using some version of watch

00:24:02   OS that's way ahead of what they ship, shipping it seems like a huge risk. Like shipping it

00:24:07   and saying like, well, it doesn't last all day now, but we'll fix that in software in

00:24:12   a couple weeks. That's a hell of a risk. And I'm thinking they wouldn't take that risk.

00:24:16   I think they know what was killing the battery, but just didn't have time to fix it. And,

00:24:22   you know, like the fix for that thing was too risky to shove in. So that's the only

00:24:29   thing that occurs to me because I've heard that story from now multiple people where

00:24:33   the watch had terrible battery and some software updates went. It also could just be like day

00:24:36   one or week one, like random, you know, in the old days when you get a new Mac out of

00:24:41   the box and you do spotlight indexing and it would make your thing slow to a crawl for

00:24:45   the first day or two that you used your computer. It's the thing that Apple knew about and that

00:24:49   sucked, but Apple could have some confidence to say, you know, it'll settle down in a week

00:24:54   and you'll be okay. So I have to think that the watch situation is like that too, that

00:24:59   they shipped a thing that they knew either was bad because of bad, you know, bad software

00:25:04   or unoptimized things somewhere or was like there's some initially setting up your watch

00:25:10   with a new phone kind of grinding that's going to kill your battery on the first day or two,

00:25:13   but it'll get better. But either way, I'm glad to hear that the battery got better,

00:25:18   but that is the one that I would love to know the inside story on because I would think

00:25:23   that Apple would never ship a product with the hope that an upcoming software update

00:25:30   will fix the battery life because battery life is a thing that people do notice. It's

00:25:33   not something like, oh, my view controller didn't pop off and I have to do some manual

00:25:37   thing. It is sort of an existential threat to the product that you say you're selling.

00:25:43   So I have to believe that they didn't just hope that the battery life get better. They

00:25:47   knew and it was just a question of time. I hear you and I almost entirely agree, but

00:25:54   at the same time, I can't get past what a terrible purchase experience it was. And I

00:26:00   don't mean purchase experience like going to the store. I mean, you know, I've got

00:26:03   my new treat and I want to use it and I can't use it for more than four hours at a time

00:26:09   because then it dies. And I don't know, like we would rake them over the coals probably

00:26:15   worse if they said, you know what, we need another week on this watch, especially if

00:26:19   they said we need another week on this watch that you've already preordered and we told

00:26:22   you would arrive on Friday or we wouldn't. I don't think we would. I think we'd say good,

00:26:27   fine. Ship it to me when it's stable. I think that's, you know, tech nerds is what we've

00:26:30   always said. I don't know. I'd like to think that, but I don't know if that's what I would

00:26:33   be saying. I don't know. But yeah, it's just, it just, I keep coming back to, it was just

00:26:39   such a crummy several days. And again, like ultimately it's a computer on my wrist that

00:26:46   I can make a phone call to China with if I so desired. Like I really probably just need

00:26:52   to, what is that? Who was the troubled comedian that was, you know, we're in a tube in space

00:26:57   in the sky browsing the internet. Thank you. What was it like? It's amazing. You know what

00:27:05   I'm saying? So like everything's happy or everything's amazing and nobody's happy. And

00:27:09   I know I'm having that moment right now and I, and I am a little bit sorry for that, but

00:27:13   the reason that I love maybe loved Apple so darn much is that these things wouldn't happen.

00:27:22   These are the sorts of things that would happen to Microsoft stuff years ago. I'm not saying

00:27:26   now, I'm saying years ago. This is the sort of thing that happened on Microsoft stuff.

00:27:29   It's the sort of thing that happened on all sorts of other technology in my life, but

00:27:32   Apple would never do that. It would always have it right and it would always be right

00:27:36   or mostly right at least in the first, right out of the box, right out of the gate. And

00:27:42   I just, cranky old man yells at cloud, right? But I just, I miss those days.

00:27:48   Those days never existed. Those are just rose colored glasses. I mean, I think like 10,

00:27:52   five leopard was so much worse than iOS 13. Now it mattered less to be fair. It mattered

00:27:58   less because who the heck was running max at all back then compared to the number of

00:28:01   people that own iPhones. Like I understand that it is a different scale, but Apple is

00:28:06   like, "Oh, you should bug yourself here." This is probably the worst. Unless one of

00:28:10   you remembers an iOS that's worse than this, probably the worst initial iOS release. But

00:28:14   I think it may also be the fastest fix. Certainly the number of updates and how close they are

00:28:19   together has been faster than any previous point releases after an initial release of

00:28:26   iOS.

00:28:27   Well, because A, first of all, it's not fixed yet. B, it's basically on fire. They're having

00:28:34   significant issues that are even to the point of impacting, like almost every review of

00:28:41   the new iPhone has mentioned the buggy software. Many reviews of the new Apple Watch have mentioned

00:28:48   the poor battery life. Like, it's, you know, Apple is clearly, you know, prioritizing hardware

00:28:53   over all else and it's hard to look at the company and think they should do anything

00:28:57   else. Honestly, they are, you know, they are a hardware driven company and certainly a

00:29:00   hardware funded company. So it makes sense why they would prioritize hardware, but they

00:29:06   basically, you know, really forced their customers to have really buggy software this time in

00:29:11   order to get that hardware schedule, you know, to be kept. And it's hurting now. It's hurting

00:29:16   the press reviews and it's hurting the public opinion of their new hardware. And I hope

00:29:22   that's really kicking them in the stomach. Like, because they need that. Like, this is

00:29:26   not good enough and it is, they shouldn't, they should realize quite how expensive it

00:29:34   is to de-prioritize software quality to make a hardware release schedule like this. Like,

00:29:41   it seems like, I mean, again, I'm sure they considered this, you know, they have smart

00:29:45   people there. I'm sure they considered this to be expensive, but they should really feel

00:29:49   how expensive this was to maybe make better decisions in the future. Like, for instance,

00:29:54   like you mentioned, John, they could, you know, they could delay stuff. You know, I

00:29:59   think as long as two things continue to be the case, this is still going to be a problem.

00:30:04   Thing number one is that they keep releasing new hardware on the same schedule every year

00:30:08   that seems very inflexible. That seems, you know, based on things like the stock market,

00:30:14   that seems unlikely to change. I think they're probably always going to release new iPhones

00:30:17   in, you know, the fall, probably in September, for the foreseeable future because that's

00:30:22   such a big part of the company and its finances and everything else. The other thing that

00:30:26   they could change is disconnect the major OS releases from the hardware releases. Now,

00:30:33   I know this is complicated. I know that, you know, you have, like, they couldn't have just

00:30:38   shipped the new iPhones all of a sudden with iOS 12 because new iPhones have new hardware

00:30:43   in them and the new OSes have, like, basically, like, the drivers for that hardware, whatever

00:30:49   the equivalent of that is in modern iOS architecture, like, and they have to test and certify that

00:30:54   the drivers for the new hardware work in the OS that they're in. So it is a non-trivial

00:30:59   job to backport the, you know, quote, "drivers" for the iPhone 11, to backport those to iOS

00:31:06   12. But it's not so much of a non-trivial job if you plan it that way from the start.

00:31:13   So maybe the right thing to do here is to disconnect the brand new cutting edge software,

00:31:20   which is so frequently, you know, hard to nail down a release date for, for quality

00:31:24   purposes, because it's software, that's reasonable, disconnect that from the hardware release.

00:31:28   So for, you know, for the iPhone, you know, 12 or, you know, whatever the next year's

00:31:33   iPhones are called, develop their drivers and test their drivers for iOS 13. Don't make

00:31:39   it iOS 14 only, so it bonds those things together in their release schedules. Develop the next

00:31:44   iPhones for iOS 13. And if it just so happens that iOS 14 is ready on time, great, you never

00:31:51   had to use it. But to have that contingency plan from the start, to have that be planned

00:31:57   and be the official target from the start, that you can ship those phones with iOS 13

00:32:01   point whatever, I think that is a recipe for much better outcomes, much better software

00:32:07   quality. And then, you know, then if iOS 14 has to slip until November, fine, it doesn't

00:32:14   really matter. But that's what, that isn't what they've done so far. They've bonded these

00:32:18   things together. And while they have reasons why they've done it, I don't think they're

00:32:24   very good reasons. And they aren't, like, it isn't the way it has to be. Like, they

00:32:29   can choose to do it a different way. They can choose to do OSes, you know, differently

00:32:34   bonded to hardware. They can choose to write the drivers for the last OS versus the next

00:32:40   OS. They just don't do that yet. But there's no reason why they can't.

00:32:43   They've done that on the Mac in the past as well, having new Macs come out without an

00:32:48   entire new major operating system. It would just have a new point release. The interesting

00:32:52   thing about this whole conundrum is that Apple just learned this lesson after iOS 11, right?

00:32:59   That's what iOS 12 was about. So they swung, you know, they said, "Well, you know, we learned

00:33:03   our lesson. We needed to concentrate on stability and speed and making old phones faster and

00:33:08   not so much on the new features." They did iOS 12. And then just swung right hard back

00:33:13   in the other direction, right? And so, you know, 14, they'll probably learn the lesson

00:33:16   again. They need to get a steadier state and a longer memory. Like, there is a happy medium.

00:33:23   You know, Casey mentioned the beginning of this, like, is the yearly release schedule

00:33:27   to blame for this. And Marco was talking about decoupling them. And all those, you know,

00:33:32   decoupling is perfectly fine. They did it with Mac OS. You know, it is a little bit

00:33:35   more expensive, but it gives you more flexibility. You could also go with, like, the Infinite

00:33:39   version where you just pick a name and you stop incrementing the number and there's no

00:33:43   such thing as a major Big Bang release anymore and it's just incremental features forever

00:33:46   and ever. Lots of reasons why Apple wouldn't want to do that for marketing and so on and

00:33:49   so forth. But the thing I always come back to is whatever scheme you pick, big yearly

00:33:55   releases, never any releases, just point releases, totally decoupled, independent timelines,

00:34:01   or you know, like, they can all be made to work and you can screw all of them up. So

00:34:07   if Apple wants to do, for marketing reasons, a year, like, the current thing where they

00:34:12   do a new OS and a new phone at the same time every year, so on and so forth, it's possible

00:34:17   to do that and not mess up. It's just as possible to do that and not mess up as it is to do

00:34:21   with Marco scheme or any other scheme. Every system that you come up with and schedule

00:34:26   or whatever is possible to be successful at. You just have to have different trade-offs.

00:34:32   If they're totally decoupled, you have more flexibility, but on the other hand, you also

00:34:36   can get into a situation where you bite off more than you can chew and like, 14 doesn't

00:34:40   come out until two years later and then you paint yourself into a corner or whatever.

00:34:44   You always have to pick. How many features can we fit? When do we decide if it's a go

00:34:50   or a no-go? What do we use to judge quality? And sometimes they get it right and are very

00:34:57   conservative like iOS 12 and sometimes they bite off more than you can chew, like 13,

00:35:01   and it goes terribly. So I'm all for changing the scheme if it seems like they're having

00:35:08   more difficulty with this system and have a different set of trade-offs, but I fully

00:35:12   believe in every company's ability to screw up any software release plan. Because, you

00:35:17   know, like, you know, a big company for a long time used to be like, "We had all these

00:35:21   problems with strategy X of release. We're going to change the strategy Y that will eliminate

00:35:26   those problems." And it does, but it comes with its own new set of problems and five

00:35:29   years later, everyone's sick of those problems and they swing back in the other direction.

00:35:32   So you know, this is not related to Apple in quality, but people in the Destiny community

00:35:39   know that this was a big week for Destiny because they released the big expansion and

00:35:42   the game is now free, so there's tons more people coming on to play. And Bungie, the

00:35:47   creators of Destiny, had tons of server issues as the flood of people came into play and,

00:35:54   you know, gamers being gamers, were all angry at them and yelling and saying, "You knew

00:35:57   this would happen! The game was free! You knew people would come! Why didn't you just,

00:36:01   you know, double your server capacity? Why didn't you just, you know, provide more?"

00:36:05   And it's like, that's exactly what consumers should think. They have an expectation that,

00:36:09   you know, well maybe not their free game, but they have an expectation that the game

00:36:11   will work. That's the consumer expectation. They shouldn't need to know anything about

00:36:15   software. All they know is, "I paid for a game, I'm supposed to be able to play for

00:36:18   a game, and I can't play for the game." They don't have to be jerks about it. But anyway,

00:36:22   I excuse them from not knowing. But as someone who has worked in server-side software my

00:36:26   entire career, it's totally obvious to me why you might have a problem. Why is it that

00:36:35   even today, even in 2019, you can release a new thing and then a flood of people go

00:36:43   to use it and it has problems? Like, of course. Of course it does. There is no magical…

00:36:51   I'm willing to say that even with almost infinite money, it wouldn't even be possible

00:36:57   to predict how… The systems are so complicated and we don't fully understand them and we

00:37:01   don't account for so many different variables. And Bungie is doing exactly the same thing

00:37:06   as Apple, only on a compressed time scale. Not sleeping, scrambling on a trick and with

00:37:11   their heads cut off, fixing problems as fast as they possibly can. You know, launch day.

00:37:17   That's what it's like.

00:37:18   Yeah. How is the new Destiny stuff?

00:37:24   Once I can get logged in and not get booted out in the middle of the thing, there's

00:37:29   some bugs, let me tell you. It's much less critical for when it's a game, but I guess

00:37:34   so far there have definitely been crashing bugs, but no data loss bugs. So thumbs up

00:37:38   so far.

00:37:39   We are sponsored this week by Squarespace. Start building your website today at squarespace.com/atp.

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00:39:26   for making it super easy to make websites and sponsoring our show. Make your next move

00:39:31   with a beautiful website from Squarespace. I don't think we spent the time last episode

00:39:39   of the one before whenever it was talking about our 10 in my case or 10s in Marco's

00:39:44   case to 11 Pro transfer because I amongst many other people tried the, I forget what

00:39:51   the term is for it, but basically the direct transfer between the two phones. And I did

00:39:56   that with mine and I did it with Aaron's and it didn't work exactly flawlessly, but it

00:40:04   worked pretty darn well for this having been the first year of it. And to kind of turn

00:40:09   our frown upside down, I wanted to commend that commend apple in that the direct transfer

00:40:16   worked pretty darn well for me. Comically, the thing that tripped me up the most, although

00:40:20   it only took me a minute or two to figure out was that it didn't transfer my phone number

00:40:25   from the old phone to the new phone, which to the best of my recollection always happened

00:40:28   in years past. And I couldn't figure out what to do about it. And I was really kind of stuck

00:40:33   and wasn't sure what to do. And then it occurred to me, no, you idiot, you just move the SIM.

00:40:37   That's all you need to do. And then it worked no problem. But my recollection from a couple

00:40:42   of years ago was that all I needed to do was restore backup and magically everything would

00:40:46   work. Maybe my recollection was wrong. But anyway, all that to say that it worked pretty

00:40:51   darn well for me. Marco, what did you do, and John, what did Tina do in order to transfer

00:40:56   stuff between phones?

00:40:57   >> So I did, this is the first year. Normally I do the, for the last couple of years I've

00:41:03   been doing the whole like, you know, set up wizard thing where you hold the phone, you

00:41:06   know, the other one, take the picture of the cloudy thing.

00:41:08   >> Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. That's what I'm talking about.

00:41:10   >> And then it does like the direct transfer for some stuff and then it does iCloud for

00:41:13   most stuff.

00:41:14   >> Was this not the first year for that? I thought this was the first year for that.

00:41:17   >> No, well that, the iCloud part of it, that's been a few years old. I think at least one

00:41:23   or two years old. But what was new this year was the offer to do a direct transfer. And

00:41:30   I thought that would bypass the need to download all my apps again.

00:41:34   >> Hell no.

00:41:35   >> It didn't do that and it did take a very long time for me and it took a very short

00:41:40   time for some people. And what we think, what I think we've worked out here is that the

00:41:44   direct transfer seems to transfer downloaded media between the two phones. So in my case

00:41:51   I had a bunch of music downloaded to my phone. I think it might also transfer downloaded

00:41:54   photos but I'm not sure about that. But anyway, so downloaded media, if you have music and

00:41:59   movies and maybe photos, the direct transfer will actually transfer those instead of relying

00:42:03   on the phone to re-download it from iCloud. So it takes a pretty long time if you have

00:42:07   a bunch of music or other stuff downloaded there. And it did work for me eventually.

00:42:13   And it was great because all my music and stuff was there. It did successfully transfer

00:42:18   like key chain logins, passwords. Slack finally learned to use the key chain API so that was

00:42:24   nice. So almost everything transferred without needing to re-download. But then it's funny

00:42:29   like after this big long transfer I kind of assumed, and because it took I think like

00:42:32   two or three hours, and I kind of assumed like oh now my phone will boot up and it will

00:42:37   be ready to use. And nope, it booted up and still did download all the apps from iCloud.

00:42:42   So that was kind of annoying in that it just took a lot longer than I expected. But the

00:42:47   result was really nice. And one little nice thing I noticed, I don't know how recent this

00:42:51   is, but so if you have TestFlight apps, they don't transfer in this kind of thing. You

00:42:57   have to launch TestFlight on the new phone and reinstall them from TestFlight. And one

00:43:03   little nice thing that I noticed this year that I don't think was there in previous years

00:43:07   is when you do that, if you had it on your phone before and you reinstall it from TestFlight

00:43:13   on the new phone, it puts it back in the right spot on Springboard.

00:43:17   - Yeah, yeah I noticed that too. And I thought I saw, maybe I'm making this up, but I thought

00:43:21   I saw that they would have, there would be like proxy icons almost, that's my term, not

00:43:26   an official term, where there was like a cloud and a down arrow. So it's like download this

00:43:31   from the cloud where the cloud in this context is TestFlight. So I would see the icon.

00:43:35   - Oh really? I've seen that for other apps. I haven't seen it for TestFlight stuff.

00:43:39   - I may be lying to you about that, but I'm doing so accidentally. But I think what that

00:43:45   meant was you need to go back to TestFlight and download it. And I'm sure we'll follow

00:43:49   up next week to correct me. But I thought that's what that was. I don't know, John,

00:43:54   how did Tina handle it?

00:43:56   - So I suggested to her that she just do the, you know, the hold the phone up and the little

00:44:02   cloudy picture thing, and then iCloud, restore from iCloud, backup. Because I knew about

00:44:06   the direct transfer thing, but I'm like, I don't, I wanted to wait, she got her phone

00:44:10   on day one, so I wanted to hear if people had success or not. So I told her the old

00:44:13   fashioned way, and it worked fine. But then when we were, it's not setting up a new phone,

00:44:19   but we were transferring her old phone to my son's, basically taking his iPhone 6 and

00:44:24   replacing it with her old iPhone 10. I decided to do the direct transfer, mostly because

00:44:30   I knew that he doesn't have a lot of data, right? So, you know, I figured I'll try it,

00:44:34   see how it works. And it worked fine. It's the same process, only instead of picking

00:44:39   from iCloud, you pick the direct data transfer from the other phone. The only tricky bit

00:44:43   about it is there's a whole bunch of screens to get through to get to it. I thought I had

00:44:47   gotten to the screen where I could just plug it in and walk away and let them do the transfer.

00:44:50   I had not, so I came back like, it said, this will take about 20 minutes. I came back 20

00:44:54   minutes later and then realized there was one more confirmation screen or something.

00:44:57   So stupid. But yeah, it seemed to work okay. You mentioned SIM swapping before. Of course,

00:45:05   we got a new case for the phone and I did the thing I always do, which is I put in the

00:45:09   new case and then realized I forgot to swap the SIM. So I had to take the case off, which

00:45:13   is very painful to me. You know, I want the case to go on once and off once, but what

00:45:17   can you do? So I swapped the SIM and then to make sure everything worked after the phone

00:45:22   was all set up and everything was transferred to the thing I usually do, which is I call

00:45:26   that phone from my phone to make sure that the new phone rings, right? And the new phone

00:45:31   did ring, but so did the old phone. Well, it's all right. Well, wifi calling, you know,

00:45:37   it's audio FaceTime, it's internet, blah, blah, blah. So let me fix that by making sure

00:45:43   I'm doing the phone number and not like iMessage or FaceTime audio and both phones still ring.

00:45:49   And I just did the Homer Simpson's backing to the Bush's thing. I just turned off the

00:45:54   old phone because the new phone does ring. And so I just turn off the old phone and I've

00:46:01   got the old phone sitting in front of here, by the way. I've been looking at it while

00:46:04   we've been podcasting iPhone six, right? Yeah. We talked about how thin it is and everything.

00:46:08   He managed not to bend it, which is amazing because the first phone we gave him the five

00:46:12   S he bent, which is a hell of a thing. Wow. Five S it's kind of impressive. Yeah. Yeah.

00:46:17   It was bent pretty badly too. Like, like separating the layers kind of bent. Oh yeah. Like you

00:46:24   can see inside the phone. It's bad. Uh, but at the six survived, it is very thin. Uh,

00:46:29   but the most hilarious thing about the six when I look at it is you look at the front.

00:46:32   Okay, fine. Turn around and look at the back and you're like, that's the camera. It's so

00:46:37   small and there's only one of them. It's the small, it's like, it's hilariously small. It's,

00:46:43   it's like a little tiny baby camera. It's like an iPod touch. Yeah. That's what it's like. And,

00:46:48   and it does stick out, but barely, it barely sticks out. It's like a tiny little, tiny little

00:46:54   blueberry. Remember how much everybody cared too? Like, cause that was the first one that stuck out.

00:46:59   Like that was such a big deal among like, you know, nerds like us like that. Oh my God,

00:47:02   there's a camera bump now. How could we stoop to this level flat on the table? Yeah. Rocks.

00:47:07   And now it's just like, there's a giant mountain for the camera and the camera and the phone itself

00:47:14   is much thicker. Well, that was also, that was also the slipperiest phone I think they've ever

00:47:17   made. And, uh, and so they, uh, they solve the doesn't lay flat on the desk problem by making

00:47:23   all of us need cases. For real, John, in settings, cellular calls on other devices. Do you see what

00:47:31   the story is there? That could be what it was. Cause I know like the thing is the phones were

00:47:35   near each other and they're both on the same wifi. So I'm like, it's probably just the phones knowing

00:47:40   about it because I didn't like, I didn't erase the other phone yet. It just didn't have the right SIM

00:47:45   in it. So anyway, I'm, I'm, it's fine. Like this is, this phone is going off, it's going up into

00:47:51   the attic and it won't receive calls anymore. And the new phone is receiving calls. So it's all set.

00:47:56   I'm surprised you're not erasing it before putting it in longterm storage. Yeah, whatever.

00:48:02   We are sponsored this week by burrow. Don't settle for your same old couch. You got a comfy new burrow

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00:49:53   All right, so tell me one of you about XDR Display Tech being in iPads and MacBook Pros sometime

00:50:03   between 2020 and 2021, maybe, possibly.

00:50:07   I thought this rumor was interesting because it's our old pal Ming-Chi Kuo, who is actually fairly

00:50:14   accurate with the part sleek type rumors. And the part in question is badly described in this article.

00:50:21   I've amended the quote here. You know, they're talking about high end iPad and MacBook models with

00:50:26   mini LED. I think it said mini LED displays. They don't have mini LED displays. People keep talking

00:50:32   about this and they keep calling them mini LED displays. Not what they are. It's mini LED back

00:50:36   lights in front of LCD displays, which is that's the XDR technology, right? Between late 2020 and

00:50:43   mid 2021. So this got me thinking, by the way, you know, the specifics of the tech, there is a big

00:50:53   step up from the XDR because the XDR is like 7, I don't know, 576 backlights, like tiny little LEDs

00:51:01   forming the backlight, which is a lot, although I think they're not all independently controlled.

00:51:07   Anyway, the new one is supposedly using 10,000 LEDs, which sounds like a lot, but it is way

00:51:13   smaller than the number of actual pixels still. Again, OLED has the advantage that there is no

00:51:19   backlight that's controlled with a bunch of stuff in front of it. Every single pixel is its own

00:51:23   source of light. An actual mini LED display, every single pixel will be made up of tiny little LEDs.

00:51:29   That's not what this is. This is a backlight that is more granular than one big light and more

00:51:34   granular than three regions, you know, and they keep increasing the number of regions. 10,000

00:51:38   is a lot of LEDs, but it may be a smaller number of regions, even though that's the number of LEDs.

00:51:42   The reason I'm interested in this story is I'm trying to imagine how it could possibly be true,

00:51:53   because this particular technology, having a big grid array of lights, essentially, and then a bunch

00:52:01   of layers sandwiched in front of it, culminating in the typical layers that make up an LCD,

00:52:07   is really thick. And I can't imagine how you could fit that in an iPad or a MacBook without making it

00:52:14   hugely thick and also hot, right? I mean, if you look at the Cinema Display XDR with 500 little

00:52:21   LEDs in it, it's not thick for the hell of it. They use all that space. There's lots of stuff

00:52:27   inside there, including fans. If you're going to make one for the iPad or a MacBook with,

00:52:32   you know, 10,000 LED backlights inside it, I don't understand how that can be the right thickness.

00:52:40   So it got me thinking like, "Oh, maybe it's, you know, maybe they're making XDR displays that

00:52:47   aren't as big as the giant one. Maybe this rumor is just off. Or maybe there is an advancement in

00:52:53   this type of display technology that I'm not aware of." Because they are making televisions with it,

00:52:56   and the televisions, they're also kind of thick, but maybe they're thinner than the

00:53:00   Cinema Display XDR. Anyway, I'm interested in this rumor just because it's a head scratcher in terms

00:53:07   of feasibility. And I would just dismiss it as like, "Oh, whatever." But, you know, it's from

00:53:12   a source that has been right in the past. So I'm willing to entertain the idea that either this is

00:53:18   an entirely different product or that Apple has found a way to make the Cinema Display XDR

00:53:23   technology much, much thinner. Stay tuned in 2020 or 2021.

00:53:28   Moving on, a week or two ago, maybe even a little more than that, there was something that happened

00:53:36   wherein a bunch of some sort of professional like audio or video software, I don't recall what it

00:53:42   was, Avid in front of me, thank you, Avid, would just stop working all of a sudden. And nobody

00:53:48   really knew why for like a solid, I don't know, 12 to 24 hours. And it turns out, you know, even

00:53:55   though we just spent, especially me, spent some time saying perhaps yearly releases aren't the

00:53:59   greatest. Well, it turns out daily releases or whatever Chrome is on these days may also not be

00:54:04   the best. So in certain situations, which I guess a lot of Avid or computers dedicated to Avid ran

00:54:14   into, in certain situations, Chrome would cause the computer to what, not be bootable or something

00:54:20   like that? Tell me about what's going on. This was, this was kind of amazing. So like, it wasn't,

00:54:25   it turns out like this was, it started being reported as like, oh, there's something up with

00:54:29   Mac Pros running Avid that are bricking. And it was first, it was like the Mac Pros are breaking

00:54:35   and then, then it became Avid is breaking them. And then eventually what they figured out is,

00:54:39   is that had nothing to do with Mac Pros or Avid. It just so happened to spread a lot among that

00:54:44   community first, because many people who run Avid and many people who are an Avid running on Mac

00:54:50   Pros, uh, disable system integrity protection for whatever reason. I don't know if it's due to those

00:54:55   weird little like anti-piracy keys they use or whatever it is, whatever the reason, a lot of

00:54:59   people running some of those pro tools disable system integrity protection. And if you were

00:55:04   running on a Mac with system integrity protection disabled and you happen to run Chrome and it

00:55:09   happened to run this update in just, I guess just the wrong way, it would delete your /var folder,

00:55:16   which on a Unix system is kind of a problem. So John, did I get that roughly right? Yeah,

00:55:25   actually deleted the SIM link cause /var on a Mac is actually a SIM link to /private/var.

00:55:31   Oh yeah. Yeah. Like, so the Chrome, Chrome is what we were talking about before of like

00:55:34   deciding to go to what Jeff Howard called the infinite version, which is like,

00:55:39   don't worry about versions anymore. We will, the application will update itself as new updates

00:55:43   appear. You don't have to worry about it all. Every time you run it, it will basically be the

00:55:47   latest version. Occasionally maybe we'll nag you to reboot, to restart the program if you haven't

00:55:52   done so in a while. Right. That's what Chrome does. And it does that with this background

00:55:55   process called Keystone or whatever that you'll see running on your Mac for many years that is

00:56:00   responsible for doing updates. And this is basically, might as well be like a, you know,

00:56:06   the poster child for system integrity protection. System integrity protection is supposed to,

00:56:09   as the name says, protect the integrity of your system. Meaning there's parts of your computer

00:56:13   that are the operating system and they should not be, it should not be possible to mess with them.

00:56:21   They should be invulnerable, you know, even if you try to delete them, you shouldn't be able to. And

00:56:25   this, as we all know from the stories, the beginning of a Mac OS X is a real problem for

00:56:31   real users because users would boot into Mac OS X coming from classic Mac OS and they'd see this

00:56:35   folder called library. And they're like, well, I don't want any of this library stuff. It must've

00:56:38   just come with a bunch of books and they would delete it. And that's render their computer

00:56:43   inoperable because your computer needs those files. Cause they're part of the operating system

00:56:47   and they're there. They're going to say rightly so how am I supposed to know what the heck is part of

00:56:50   the operating system? All I know is I see a bunch of stuff that wasn't there before. It doesn't

00:56:53   belong to me. I don't want it. I'm going to delete it. System integrity protection makes it so that

00:56:58   you can't delete it. And you know, more recent versions within the past few years of Mac OS X

00:57:02   hides the library folder and do all sorts of stuff to prevent this. But bottom line, there's the UI

00:57:07   aspect of it, of not putting things in people's faces that understand. And then there is the sort

00:57:11   of security and reliability aspect of it, which is don't let people delete that. It should be

00:57:16   impossible to delete it. That's exactly what system integrity protection does. It makes it impossible

00:57:20   to delete things that are essential for the operating system to even boot the computer.

00:57:25   Is it enabling system integrity protection? I can imagine lots of reasons why they might do it. You

00:57:31   already mentioned the dongles software that hasn't been updated to account for it. Software that

00:57:36   expects to be able to spray its files into directories owned by the operating system,

00:57:40   just because that's what it's always been able to do. It's very difficult to transform a PC

00:57:47   operating system from a world where programs can write anything anywhere, as long as you give them

00:57:52   permission, to a world where certain things are absolutely positively off limits. It's also,

00:57:57   I suppose, maybe possible that those computers were running a version before system integrity

00:58:03   protection came out. When I saw this story, I immediately thought, "Oh no, I have Chrome on my

00:58:08   Mac. Does my Mac even have system integrity protection?" But guess what? System integrity

00:58:13   protection was introduced in the latest version of the operating system that my Mac can run.

00:58:18   So I do indeed have system integrity protection. It is indeed enabled, which is good because I do

00:58:23   run Chrome and it probably did run that updater. So yeah, why does system integrity protection

00:58:28   exist? To protect the operating system from bugs in other programs, like say a bug in an

00:58:33   updater that accidentally deletes an essential part of the system without which your computer

00:58:38   won't boot. My favorite thing about this, I think, is the official Chrome, or I believe this to be

00:58:45   the official Chrome like statement on it or Google statement on it. "Chrome update impacts some MacOS

00:58:50   systems." Impact is an understatement. Yeah, for real. They describe what's going on and then

00:58:56   "Update number two, September 27, 2019. A new recommendation has been added in place of the

00:59:02   previously provided terminal commands. The recommendation is as follows. To recover a

00:59:06   machine that has been affected by this bug, use the directions found here to reinstall MacOS

00:59:11   for MacOS recovery." That is brutal. Honestly, I was surprised when I saw these,

00:59:19   you know, there was like a bug report thread where like, "Oh, here's what you do to fix it. That's

00:59:23   just like a, you know, a tech person telling other tech people here how you can fix it."

00:59:28   But thinking that you can put instructions, like that you know how to restore things the way they

00:59:35   were, you're probably mostly right. But Apple changes stuff like that all the time. The bottom

00:59:40   line is it's part of the operating system that you deleted. You may know how to put it back now

00:59:46   so that it works, but are you sure you got everything? And what about the next version of

00:59:49   the operating system, the next version, and so on and so forth? Now, this is not going to be a

00:59:52   persistent problem because again, the infinite version and they'll just move on and no one will

00:59:56   ever install this version of Chrome again, and that version of Keystone will be gone, yada, yada.

01:00:00   But telling people the fix for our bug is to paste a bunch of these commands into the terminal

01:00:07   as root, it's not a great solution. So although it sounds ridiculous for us to like, you know,

01:00:12   nuke and pave and say, "Reinstall the operating system," that is really the official supported

01:00:17   way to fix it. If something borks your operating system, you probably should reinstall it because

01:00:22   who knows if your supposed fix running a bunch of commands as root is going to work. And it's

01:00:29   just another opportunity for you to put in typos or whatever.

01:00:31   Steven McLaughlin So that was almost a sad day for John,

01:00:35   but there was a sad day for John recently. Sounds like you're going to have to divorce your TiVo,

01:00:41   John. John

01:00:59   Newhart Which, yay, TiVo's not out of business and they're making new hardware. And I was excited

01:01:03   about that for those two reasons. I was also excited because the new hardware is not bent.

01:01:07   For people who don't know, the current line of TiVo products come in this jointly bent box. It's

01:01:15   like, imagine a little rectangular box, but like bend it about a third of the way through it, like

01:01:20   literally bend it so it's up like a little, you know, like a little tent. It's terrible. You can't

01:01:25   stack anything on top of and they're noisy and annoying and I don't like them. We have one of

01:01:30   those in the house, but, you know, and they shipped them for years and years. So finally,

01:01:34   they're going to ship hardware that's not bent. So I was excited about that. But the news that

01:01:39   I'm not so excited about came a little bit later, which is that TiVo is going to basically add

01:01:46   pre-roll advertisements in front of recording. So you go to your TiVo, you find a recording,

01:01:51   you hit play to watch the recording. And rather than playing the recording, what it will do first

01:01:55   is play an ad and then play your recording, which is terrible because most people have TiVo, so they

01:02:02   can skip ads and TiVo touts all of its ad skipping features. They haven't gone all the way to the old

01:02:08   replay TV thing where they automatically skip all the commercials for you, but they basically do

01:02:12   that. They have people put little waypoints in all of the popular programs. So to skip commercials,

01:02:17   you hit a single button that jumps past all of them immediately. It's really nice. But then

01:02:22   they're going to insert their own ad. Now, you can skip their own ad as well. So practically speaking,

01:02:29   it impacts your experience by adding one more mandatory ad skip. And also people have said

01:02:39   that it's slow because it loads the ads from the internet and it's actually worse experience than

01:02:45   just skipping an extra ad. But it's basically that. But setting aside the practical things,

01:02:51   sort of spiritually thinking, ethically, emotionally, morally, it's not what anybody

01:02:57   wants from TiVo. It goes against everything that their loyal customers, their few remaining loyal

01:03:03   customers want out of TiVo. And so you may be asking yourself, or maybe Casey's asking himself,

01:03:10   how could a corporation do this? I mean, I think we all know the answers, right? TiVo is not doing

01:03:15   great. When the companies aren't doing great, it isn't surprising. It's sad, but it's not surprising

01:03:23   when they do something desperate to try to make more money. And I can, although I think they're

01:03:31   making a terrible mistake, as everybody thinks they're making a terrible mistake, I can actually

01:03:36   argue for the other side of it. And the other side of it is this. They have this small set of loyal

01:03:42   customers. They could be making the calculation that we can afford to annoy them because where

01:03:52   else are they going to go? What are they going to switch to? The whole reason they're using TiVo is

01:03:57   because they think that they don't like their cable company's DVR. They think that they can't

01:04:03   get by just using streaming. That's why they're still using TiVo. If they thought otherwise,

01:04:09   they wouldn't be using us at all. They're basically trapped because we are the last

01:04:14   player standing in the standalone boutique, very expensive DVR that you run yourself.

01:04:19   So we're about to go under, we need money. Can we squeeze more money out of our customers

01:04:27   by showing the mandatory ads that they can skip? It's a terrible mistake because there are so many

01:04:33   other ways you could squeeze money out of those people, like say doing that for everybody and then

01:04:37   charging an additional fee to not do that because we would all pay it. Again, these are all people

01:04:43   who think that they still want TiVo, but I can understand why they think they actually have a

01:04:49   captive audience. Their audience is so small and so desperate and so loyal and have so few

01:04:54   alternatives that they're making the calculation that this won't push them over the edge to say,

01:05:00   "I thought that I couldn't use my cable company's DVR, but this is going to make me try."

01:05:05   Because now, forget it, TiVo has completely betrayed me. They don't even have a way that

01:05:10   I can pay the money to make this go away, which is like the worst sin because that's basically what

01:05:15   TiVo people do. They pay huge amounts of money that other people don't pay for a slightly better,

01:05:19   in their opinion, experience. TiVo could have just charged more money or put in the ads and charged

01:05:26   people to skip. They'd still be screaming, don't get me wrong, because people pay like I pay the

01:05:29   big upfront fees for like lifetime so I don't have to pay them on a monthly basis. And apparently,

01:05:35   that's still not enough money. So if you came back to those lifetime people and said, "Oh,

01:05:38   now you're going to have a monthly fee again," or you got to pay another 500 bucks or whatever,

01:05:42   people would be up in arms. But they'd be less up in arms than if you make them watch ads or

01:05:46   make them skip ads. So good old TiVo. I actually prefer this to them going out of business,

01:05:55   because at least it gives me the option. I can leave TiVo or I could not leave TiVo. If they

01:06:00   go out of business, I don't have that option anymore. But I will say that this made me look at

01:06:05   the Fios DVR to see what state it's in, which is something I had never done before. Practically

01:06:13   speaking, unless they screw it up even more, I probably will eventually get one of these TiVOs,

01:06:19   assuming they're still in business at the time I need to get a new one. The only thing that's

01:06:22   scaring me about it is I didn't see a large capacity model. That's one of my complaints about

01:06:29   the ones you get from cable companies. They tend not to come in high capacity.

01:06:32   So you can store 100 or 200 hours of HD in my current TiVo store is like 500 hours or something

01:06:38   insane. It's twice as big as the biggest one you can get from the cable company. And we're always

01:06:45   at 85% capacity or more, and we have to manage to that. So that's why I'll probably still end up

01:06:51   buying one of these. I'm hoping I can do a DNS black hole on the address for the streaming. But

01:06:58   what I'm really hoping is that the incredible bad press that TiVo is getting about this bad press,

01:07:03   like anyone talks about TiVo, the incredible bad reaction they're getting from their loyal

01:07:08   customers will make them think twice about this and say, "Maybe we shouldn't do this." Because if

01:07:12   they had thought, if they had made that calculation, like, "Look, our customers are captive,"

01:07:15   one look at literally anywhere this story appears from anything said by any actual TiVo customer,

01:07:24   and they would know, "Well, 100% of the TiVo customers who have commented on the story had

01:07:27   said they're leaving TiVo unequivocally. That's it. As we've miscalculated, we thought they had

01:07:34   nowhere to go. They're going. Where they're going, we don't know, but they're going." So this is a

01:07:39   terrible decision TiVo needs to reconsider. The fact that this hasn't shipped yet makes me think

01:07:44   there's time to reconsider because they are right and the customers really don't have any place

01:07:49   great to go. They straighten the box and they add ads. Just do one of those things,

01:07:56   and it'll be much better. I'm sorry, Jon.

01:08:00   Yeah. I mean, maybe it'll be fun for the program because if I get one of these things,

01:08:05   I'll get to tell you just exactly how grim it is. Oh, and setting aside the ad thing,

01:08:10   the new software for TiVo is so bad. Not in terms of bugs or, again, data loss crashes. No,

01:08:20   not in terms of that. In terms of the UI, both on iOS, there's an iOS app for TiVo,

01:08:25   and on the actual television device. It is worse than the previous UI in every single way,

01:08:31   in hilariously obvious ways that I could go on about for hours and hours and hours. It just

01:08:35   bottles my mind how they could screw things up so incredibly badly.

01:08:40   To give just one example, which grinds my gears every time I look at it, on the iOS app,

01:08:46   they change from a text list of episodes. You go into a show and say, "Here's all the episodes

01:08:52   of the show," and it would show just a list. It would have the title of the show and a date,

01:08:58   basically like list view. They went from that on iOS to a thing that shows thumbnails.

01:09:06   The thumbnail is very often a single static screen that is the same for every single episode. It's

01:09:13   just like a splash screen for the show. I don't know if other shows don't have this, but all the

01:09:18   shows that I watch, it just shows the same image from every single thumbnail. It's horizontal

01:09:22   scrolling. Of course, they're little 16 by 9 things. They're like little TV screens,

01:09:25   so you can fit maybe three or four or five of them, depending on what orientation you have

01:09:29   your iPad in. They scroll horizontally. The whole rest of the screen is wasted where you

01:09:33   could have a list. They scroll horizontally. No text. What episode is that? What episode is that

01:09:38   next to it? They are literally identical. There is nothing on them to distinguish them from each

01:09:43   other. If you go into a show and you say, "I want to see episode number five or episode number 11,"

01:09:49   you've got to count squares. One, two, three, four. What if you're looking by title? Tough luck. You

01:09:54   can't see the title. If you tap on it and go into a detail view, then you can see the title.

01:09:58   How does that even happen? At first, I thought it was a bug or maybe it's just for some shows.

01:10:05   That is one sample of the huge downgrade that is the modern TiVo software. I have the modern TiVo

01:10:13   software because one of my old TiVos got a bad hard drive and I got it replaced under warranty.

01:10:17   The replacement unit they sent came with new software. There is a way to downgrade it.

01:10:22   I didn't want to bother going through it because my "main TiVo" still has the old software. TiVo was

01:10:28   really swinging and missing lately, but that is not surprising for companies that are not doing well.

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01:12:33   We already covered the new Microsoft stuff in the pre-show, so we're good on that, right?

01:12:37   Yep. Actually, yeah. I did have some things to say about this. I don't know how long we want to go

01:12:45   here, but it's not about the products themselves. One meta comment before we get to the products,

01:12:51   to put a link in the show notes, I did the typical Google thing for like, you know,

01:12:55   I searched for Microsoft Duo Neo, right? And I expected after scrolling past a couple of things,

01:13:02   I'd find eventually the link to Microsoft site, right? Where they, you know, the official pages,

01:13:07   because if we're going to put something in the show notes, I don't want to put like a

01:13:09   wired story or a link to the Verge. Let's just go to the Microsoft site. As far as I could tell,

01:13:14   there is no Microsoft site for these products. Oh, cool.

01:13:20   Maybe I'm wrong. I will grant that I did not go past the first page of Google results,

01:13:24   but I did manually go to Microsoft.com and I didn't see these products on the homepage.

01:13:30   And it just shows how accustomed I am to the Apple way of doing things where they get up on stage,

01:13:34   they have a thing, they say, look at this great new stuff, and this is coming in the fall or

01:13:38   coming whenever, blah, blah, blah. And then as soon as they go off stage, you can go to apple.com

01:13:43   and probably on the homepage, some big image about one of the things they showed and maybe

01:13:48   see smaller images about other stuff. Like there's an official site. I don't think there's an

01:13:52   official site for these products yet. So we will link to the Verge story, I guess. But anyway,

01:13:58   what I wanted to talk about in relation to these products, which we should describe briefly,

01:14:03   is not the products themselves or the operating systems or all the reasons that Mark already

01:14:08   outlined about why we're not particularly interested in them and tend not to cover them,

01:14:12   but a larger point. So description, these are basically foldable devices where it looks like

01:14:20   a big or a small book where each half of the inside of the book is a screen. When you close it,

01:14:27   the screens are facing each other. When you open it there, the screens are flat.

01:14:30   It's not a continuous screen like all those other cell phones with a big piece of plastic across it.

01:14:37   It's two screens with a hinge between them. There is a gap. There is a crease. It is two

01:14:41   physically separate screens connected by a hinge. There's a little one, which is called the Duo,

01:14:46   and there's a bigger one, which is called the Neo. The bigger one is laptop-sized, and it comes with

01:14:51   a little keyboard that you can lay on top of the screen element. And the little one is, I'm not

01:14:56   going to say it's phone-sized, but it's phablet-sized. Yeah, I guess it's phablet-sized.

01:15:01   And the main thing for the reason I was like today, yesterday, it hasn't been much time

01:15:07   plus I've been playing Destiny, so I haven't had a lot of time to look at these.

01:15:11   Timelapse, and you're playing Destiny.

01:15:14   Yeah. Something like that.

01:15:15   The one thing I wanted to talk about is kind of the same thing we talk about with the foldable

01:15:19   stuff. What advantage do we see to having two screens? And I want to talk about the smaller

01:15:30   one first, I suppose. The bigger one, I think I have clearer answers, but the smaller one,

01:15:34   I'm kind of left with the same question as the foldable phones. Let's pretend that this was

01:15:39   awesome. Let's pretend they ran iOS. Pretend whatever you want, like setting aside anything

01:15:45   that may keep you away from it. Do you think you would want, would you find useful something like

01:15:51   this, where there are two screens that fold in on each other? What's the advantage?

01:15:58   I don't know. I got to imagine there would be one, but sitting here now, I don't have the

01:16:05   faintest idea. I mean, the obvious thing you can think of is, well, you can see more stuff.

01:16:09   We all want to see more stuff. That's why bigger phones are nicer than smaller ones. You can see

01:16:13   more email messages. Things are bigger. With a crease between them, you can't really see

01:16:19   one thing bigger, but you can see two things, right? People like multiple monitors. What's

01:16:24   the advantage? I get that. I get the same exact reason why you'd want two monitors on your Mac is

01:16:29   why you'd want two screens on your phone. But you don't carry your two monitors in your hands.

01:16:37   So I'm looking at this device and I'm like, okay, it's thicker than a phone. It's about

01:16:44   phablet sized. Would I ever use both of the screens? Like you can have it folded up like

01:16:54   a phone and just use it like a really thick phone with one screen that you can't see because it's

01:16:57   not facing you. But would I unfold it to look at that second screen? Would I go into like

01:17:03   productivity mode with my phone phablet thing? Would I take it out and say, I'm going to set it

01:17:08   up in front of me and fold it like a little laptop or hold it like a paperback book and read a book,

01:17:14   one on each page? Like almost every scenario I can think of, I was like, I wouldn't do that.

01:17:21   It would be more cumbersome for me to do that. It would never make up for the additional weight

01:17:25   and complexity and size and heat and everything with that utility because it's a phone size thing.

01:17:33   Now maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we've crossed some threshold and we've gotten to the point where

01:17:38   it actually is small enough and it won't bother people. And suddenly we'll see people

01:17:42   in one smooth motion, pulling this thing out of their jacket pocket and flipping it open like a

01:17:46   paperback book and looking at it and have Instagram on the left and Twitter on the right, or been

01:17:52   messaging somebody on the right and it'll be like an awesome dual screen experience. And then they'll

01:17:56   fold it back up in one motion and shove it back in their pocket. Because you can imagine that if

01:18:00   it was thin enough and light enough that you could maybe pull it off. But I feel like we're not there

01:18:05   yet. And I don't think this is a thing that we should be shooting for quite yet. Like it seems

01:18:15   like something that should remain in the lab. Now it's hard to say because I haven't used one. Maybe

01:18:20   it's awesome. Maybe the utility will be clear as soon as you get one. You'd be like, "Oh,

01:18:23   I can't go back to an old phone because I can see so much less and I can't set it up as a mini

01:18:27   laptop in front of me when I sit down in Starbucks or whatever." But looking at these pictures, I am

01:18:32   not sold on the utility of that small sucker. I mean, I have no argument here. I also,

01:18:41   sitting here now, I'm not really sure what's getting Mike so jazzed about the Galaxy Fold

01:18:46   or whatever it is that he's extraordinarily horny for. Whatever it is, I mean, if it makes him happy,

01:18:53   that's fine. Cool. I'm sure there will come a time that I will want something like that in an Apple

01:18:59   product or Android, depending on the way things are going, which I know that is Android. But anyway,

01:19:03   but I don't know. It just seems to, right now, today, it just seems way too clunky to me.

01:19:09   I don't know. I get the appeal. I really do. The whole reason why big phones are popular is because

01:19:18   when we're using it, we want the biggest possible screen we can get. And unfortunately, we also want

01:19:25   something that's small enough to fit in pockets and bags and everything, and that's oftentimes

01:19:29   harder. And so the appeal of the folding phone, which this kind of isn't, but the appeal of a

01:19:35   folding phone is you can get a much bigger screen with a smaller footprint when it's in your pocket

01:19:40   or bag, right? So that makes sense as a theory of why this is cool. That being said, I think,

01:19:49   as we're seeing with the first generation of foldable phones that are just kind of barely

01:19:54   fumbling out the door, it seems like there's still a lot of just physical, real-world reality

01:20:00   problems with these things that we're just not there yet. And so the Surface Duo that we're

01:20:05   talking about now, none of us have seen these in person yet, but looking at their images and videos

01:20:12   and stuff they announced today, it sure looks like, yeah, that would be really cool if it was

01:20:19   maybe five years from now and we've had all these times for advancements. Right now, it looks like

01:20:25   a really big, clunky, thick, heavy thing that has some really cool functionality that I would use

01:20:31   sometimes, but not most of the time. Most of the time we're using our phones, most of us at least,

01:20:41   I think we're doing things that don't require a massive screen. But sometimes it's really nice

01:20:46   to have one. So if you're doing something with media, obviously, you're looking at photos,

01:20:49   video, whatever, it's really nice to have those things, great. But if you're just trying to read

01:20:55   an email, it doesn't make a huge difference how big your screen is, right? Or if you're

01:21:00   messaging, doing text messaging, which is probably the most common thing people do with their phones.

01:21:03   Screen size doesn't matter a whole lot. It matters in the sense of how big you can make the keyboard,

01:21:08   and that can affect typing accuracy and stuff. But once you get beyond a certain point,

01:21:13   like diminishing returns, what they've achieved here seems like it's kind of

01:21:19   halfway between a phone and a tablet. In a way, phablets were, you know, phablets now,

01:21:25   they're just, we just call those phones. Like, what we used to call phablets when that was a word,

01:21:29   like that was like, you know, five and a half inch or six inch display. It's like, we just have those

01:21:33   now in our regular phones. But this is something else. This is like significantly larger than that,

01:21:38   significantly thicker. And I just, I don't, I think it's just too clunky for most people to

01:21:44   want this for the value it provides. And so down the road, when, you know, as John said, like,

01:21:50   you know, when technology advances more, this could be really cool. I think what's interesting

01:21:55   though also is that the Surface Duo is, while it was announced today, they're saying it's not

01:22:01   going to come out until the holiday season of 2020. So it is still a little bit over a year out

01:22:08   if it's on time. And so this is still like, they've barely even been able to achieve this.

01:22:15   And even this is not imminent. So we'll see what happens, you know, as this stuff actually comes

01:22:22   out, if it actually comes out, which is a big if. But even in what they're showing today, which is

01:22:29   probably best case scenario, it just looks like it's a bit too big and clunky for what people

01:22:33   actually want. But hey, you know, we could be wrong. Look, big phones surprised us when back

01:22:39   when, phablets were first for thing, we were all making fun of them and saying, well, who's going

01:22:43   to hold up an iPad to their face. And now we all basically hold up iPads to our faces. And, you

01:22:47   know, and it turns out that all the rest of the time that we're using it, we aren't holding up to

01:22:51   our face. No one cares about how big it is. And we all just hold it. You know, it might be that,

01:22:57   you know, first of all, you know, while pants pockets are the way that most,

01:23:03   you know, men hold their phone, that isn't the case for most people. You know, a lot of people carry

01:23:08   bags and, you know, there's, there's lots of ways that we can carry things like this where if the

01:23:15   utility is high enough, people will do it. People will buy it. And maybe it isn't like, you know,

01:23:22   exactly what individuals like me or you might want, but that doesn't mean there won't be a

01:23:26   market for it. Like if you wanted to care, like if I carried some kind of bag or purse with me every

01:23:31   day and this would fit in there and I kept my phone in there anyway, well, I got a lot more

01:23:36   leeway on how big that phone can be before it gets on wheelie compared to a pants pocket. And if I

01:23:41   could have like much of a tablet's functionality in a footprint closer to a phone, that's pretty cool.

01:23:48   That, that would have high utility for me. So I don't know. I'm really curious to watch this.

01:23:55   I'm hesitant to outright say, Oh, it's, it's too big. No one will use it because we've been burned

01:24:02   predicting things like that in the past. But I'm also hesitant to be super optimistic about

01:24:08   something that is still more than a year away if it goes well. So we'll see.

01:24:13   - Real time follow up. Microsoft does in fact have pages for these products. We'll put the links in

01:24:18   the show notes. Why they're not linked from their homepage, I have no idea. Maybe they are linked

01:24:22   and I just couldn't find it. But anyway, there are pages. The fact that they're not coming out until

01:24:27   late next year explains why there's not much on these sites, but you know, that's fine.

01:24:31   The size thing, the screen space, the utility, the size stuff, I see that the part I keep getting

01:24:39   hung up on is the folding. Now this is modified somewhat by the fact that lots of people do use

01:24:45   like folio cases for their existing phones. Like you've seen people who take out their phone and

01:24:50   they actually do have to open it before they can use the phone. What they're usually opening though

01:24:57   is like a very thin flap over the phone and then there's the phone or anything. It's not an equally

01:25:02   sized computerized device that they have to fold over. But the phone habits that I see people

01:25:10   performing in public is people look at their phones a lot, people take their phones out and

01:25:16   put them away a lot, that motion gets repeated. The people with folios do have an additional thing

01:25:22   in that motion. I've got my pouch to deal with, right? They've got their little flappy cover,

01:25:26   but all those things are significantly less cumbersome than actually unfolding a device

01:25:34   that is equal parts electronics on both sides, let alone folding all the way back on itself on that

01:25:39   big hinge. It almost strikes me as a play at a smaller laptop than a play at a larger phone.

01:25:48   Because it just doesn't seem like it would accomplish the job that I see these phones

01:25:53   performing, which is to be ready at hand at a moment's notice to look at Instagram,

01:25:57   right? To be able to take it out, send a text and put it away, to see who was that that was texting

01:26:04   me. Because when this thing is closed, you can't see anything. There's no screens on the outside,

01:26:08   unlike some of the other folding phones, right? I just feel like the utility of this device is

01:26:14   trapped inside the clamshell. It's not up to the task of being your ready at hand,

01:26:21   quick phone-like device. It's so silly that we call these things phones or whatever, but

01:26:27   it seems like it's fulfilling a different role, which is fine. Maybe there's a role for it,

01:26:31   or a role for people who don't use their phones like that, who don't pull out their phone and

01:26:35   see who it was that texted them, who don't take a spare moment of waiting in line to read Twitter,

01:26:40   right? If that's not how you use your phone, this is much more appealing as a, you know,

01:26:46   as a phablet type thing with more utility. With Mike and his love for the foldable phone stuff,

01:26:51   there is a certain amount of like techno future lust of like, wow, it's just like we talked about

01:26:56   bendable screens, like the fact that it is all one screen, that you can actually do the thing that I

01:27:01   said you couldn't do earlier on this, which is see one thing larger, have a video playing bigger than

01:27:07   it could play. I don't think you'd want to play video with a big split down the middle, right?

01:27:11   But if it's actually all one screen, like those bendy phones are trying to be, you could, in

01:27:16   theory, unfold it and watch a movie on the plane just on your phone. Don't have to bring your

01:27:21   tablet because look how big the screen is when you unfold your phone. Obviously those foldy ones

01:27:25   have serious problems with the folding part. We think we talked about this before.

01:27:30   That technology is nowhere near perfected. Taking something that is made of some kind of plastic or

01:27:35   polymer and bending it back and forth. Eventually it's going to crease or bend or crack and then the

01:27:40   crap gets inside them. And it's like what Microsoft is doing is much easier to do engineering wise and

01:27:47   a better solution engineering wise. They can make two solid, in theory, even waterproof, basically

01:27:52   phones and connect them with a good solid hinge. There's no weird bendy plastic part. There's no

01:27:58   gaps where crap can go in. None of that is a problem. But you got a big crease down the middle

01:28:04   of the screen. So I understand the trade off they were making, but it does. I can't imagine Mike

01:28:09   being as excited about this because it's not as cool and techno futurey as the all one screen

01:28:15   thing. This one though, I think could actually work and not break within the first 24 hour period,

01:28:19   unless in case he washes his car with it. That's true. That's true. That's a pro tip. Don't have

01:28:24   this with you when you're washing Aaron's car. I do wonder though, it's been a while since we've

01:28:30   had phones that had moving parts, besides camera lenses shaking around and stuff. But like...

01:28:37   The haptic engine. Yeah, but to have a giant hinge as something that is put under a lot of stress

01:28:45   every single time the phone is used. This is going to be a hinge that you're operating

01:28:50   thousands of times over the lifetime of this device. And that is dealing with lots of potential

01:28:55   stresses. Some of the times that it is being operated, it might have some grit or dust or

01:29:00   something in there. And you might be jamming it up somehow. There is going to have to be some kind of

01:29:06   cable that runs between the two halves. Probably some big ribbon cable that goes between them or

01:29:11   something like that. So that can wear out or break or pull away from whatever it's mounted to,

01:29:17   or flake out or whatever. I wonder, back when we had phones that folded and everything,

01:29:25   everything was a lot simpler technically. And people were not using their phones nearly as

01:29:29   often as they do now. And there wasn't nearly as much in those hinges and everything. Now,

01:29:34   I almost wonder, is that going to be a problem where many of these devices might have

01:29:39   significant physical issues with usage over time? It's actually pretty hard to develop a hinge that

01:29:45   is that good and that sturdy and that reliable under all the crazy conditions that people put

01:29:50   their phones in now. Yeah, that's a good point with the flip phones. That gets me back to what

01:29:54   I was saying about the Folio before. So the aspirations of this Duo product are that it is

01:29:59   possible to use it kind of in a laptop mode. They show it in the video, like, oh, you could open it

01:30:03   up and have the flat screen on the table be like a keyboard and the other part kind of up like in

01:30:07   an L shape. That's your screen, right? So the hinge has to be, has to have a mode where it is

01:30:13   stiff enough to support itself. But all of the things that have succeeded in the market for phones

01:30:20   have had the ability to flip open and close quickly. Flip phones, we've seen that little

01:30:26   motion, take out your phone, you flip it open. And more importantly, when you're done, snap,

01:30:31   close it right back up. When we had flip phones, that's how they operated. You could do that

01:30:36   because they either didn't have a screen on one side or had very sturdy plastic screens or

01:30:41   whatever. But like, they were treated in a way that you would not want to snap something like this

01:30:46   close. Like they weren't as delicate, let's say, as our current smartphones where if you were to

01:30:53   take two smartphones and slap them together with the ferocity that we closed our flip phones,

01:30:58   that would not be a good idea. They would last probably a few of those snaps and eventually

01:31:03   they would crack. And so this hinge has two things. This line is two things against it. One,

01:31:08   the hinge can't be really loose and yet loose is exactly how you'd want it to be like a folio case.

01:31:12   You want it to be loose, you can flip it open real easy. That's what we demand of our devices,

01:31:18   whether they be flip phones or a phone in a folio case. If you had a folio case with a hinge that

01:31:22   you had to pry open, no one would buy that case. It's terrible. But two, if you're going to have

01:31:27   aspirations to use it like a laptop, the hinge has to at least have a mode where it is stiff because

01:31:33   it has to support the weight of the screen screen and underneath the keyboard screen.

01:31:38   So it is not just a challenge to make a hinge that is durable enough, but I think part of the

01:31:45   challenge is also to make a device that can be flipped, opened and closed in the way that thus

01:31:49   far we have demanded of our phones while also not shattering itself when doing that while also

01:31:54   having a mode in which it is stiff. So it is quite an engineering challenge. I'm assuming they will

01:31:59   solve it by not doing any of that and simply making it like a laptop hinge, which is already

01:32:03   a challenge. It has the same challenges, but presumably laptops are not open and closed as

01:32:08   much as this would be. Although again, I get back to my discussion before, will this appeal to people

01:32:13   who need to look at their phone every two seconds or will this only appeal to people who basically

01:32:17   use like a laptop, in which case you're basically just making a good laptop hinge, which is itself

01:32:22   a difficult task. Just ask anyone who's had a Mac laptop repaired for ribbon cable stuff or whatever.

01:32:29   But the characteristics that would make this useful as a phone seem counter to the characteristics

01:32:35   that would make it good as a little mini laptop thing. So it's quite a challenge.

01:32:40   - And keep in mind also a few other factors here. Number one, anything their phones can do,

01:32:45   people will idly fidget with that. So if you have a phone that can open and close, we did back when

01:32:52   we had the phones, people would just idly flip it open, flip it closed. It just adds an idle

01:32:56   animation. They would just fidget with it anywhere they were all day long, just fidgeting. People do

01:33:01   it with AirPods cases now. So that's gonna be a problem, number one. The number of open close

01:33:08   cycles on these things is gonna be way higher than a laptop. And number two, back when we had

01:33:16   flip phones, phones were heavily subsidized by the carriers on only two year contracts at most,

01:33:23   in most places, and they didn't cost $1,000. So now, if you're gonna have something like this,

01:33:31   I don't think they talked about pricing, I'd be surprised, but assume something like dual screen

01:33:35   phone like this is probably gonna be like, what, $1,500 maybe? It's not gonna be cheap.

01:33:39   And so you're gonna have this $1,500 unsubsidized phone that most people want something like that

01:33:47   to last them at least two or three years, and then add to it this moving part that is critical

01:33:55   to its operation. Oh, geez, that is a recipe for disappointment. And I think this is all part of

01:34:02   also why all of the Samsung Galaxy Fold and whatever the other one was, I think that's why

01:34:09   these products are having so much trouble getting to market also, because this is gonna be a problem

01:34:13   with any foldable phone. Any phone that can open and close that is not a basic flip phone,

01:34:19   they're all gonna have this problem, and you're just battling against physics at some point here,

01:34:23   like to design things that can take that kind of abuse in such a small size and have all those

01:34:30   characteristics and be affordable and be mass producible, you're just asking for trouble here.

01:34:35   So I think it's gonna be a while before any of this stuff is good, and it might never happen.

01:34:41   **Matt Stauffer** Yeah, we've been discussing this in the context of foldable phones,

01:34:44   because that's really what I wanted to talk about, but it occurs to me that I have no idea if the

01:34:48   Surface Duo is meant to be a phone in any way whatsoever. This may not be the intention of the

01:34:53   Microsoft device. So forgive me for seeming to slam the Surface for a thing that is not even

01:34:59   intending to do. I think it is just a small laptop, in which case a lot of these problems

01:35:02   don't go away, but I'm thinking of the larger thing that we keep seeing, which is phone-ish

01:35:07   size devices that are foldable, with the idea that you get more screen space, but then it can

01:35:13   become a smaller size to fit in your pocket or something. So setting aside the Duo itself,

01:35:18   just all the foldable phones, many of which are similar in size to the Duo. In fact,

01:35:22   that's kind of what I'm getting at, that like, are we ever going to get to the place where

01:35:28   a foldable thing replaces the thing that we're all using and now calling a phone, or is this only of

01:35:34   interest in sort of the laptop space? And we can go on a little while, but to briefly touch on its

01:35:39   larger sibling, the Neo, it is a much more understandable device. It's basically laptop-sized.

01:35:47   It's the same thing. Like, if you didn't see anything next to it for scale, you'd be like,

01:35:52   "Is that the Duo or the Neo?" They look basically identical. They may even be proportionally

01:35:56   identical, but one is much larger. One is like a laptop size. If you can imagine a modern MacBook,

01:36:02   where instead of a screen and the thing with a keyboard and trackpad, it's just got a screen

01:36:06   and a screen. We talked about this when the Touch Bar came out as the natural evolution of the

01:36:10   screen slowly expanding to fill your laptop. There was another laptop that actually was released

01:36:14   recently from maybe Asus or something. It's pronounced "ass-es," John. Yeah. It has like a

01:36:21   half a screen. Like, if you can imagine a Touch Bar that's four inches high. Have you seen that one?

01:36:26   I think it was HP, actually. But yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah. Like, the expansion of screens on

01:36:31   there makes sense for all sorts of reasons, and it doesn't make sense for all sorts of reasons.

01:36:35   The natural extension of that is, like, just make it all screen. Then it's infinitely configurable.

01:36:39   You could use it as a one larger screen with a big seam down the middle if you want. You can use it

01:36:43   with the screen that's on the bottom as like a to draw on, and then you can look at stuff. There's

01:36:47   all sorts of things you can do. They've added into the mix here. And if you want a hardware keyboard,

01:36:52   you can just lay the hardware keyboard like a little kind of smart keyboard. Just lay it on

01:36:55   top of the screen. And I'm sure there's some smarts that lets it know that the keyboard is laying

01:36:59   there and scrunching stuff up. It's much more interesting because no one has notions that

01:37:06   they're going to be carrying this in their pocket or whipping it open and closing it. It's just a

01:37:10   very interesting laptop. And seeing people ship the sort of one and a half screen laptops,

01:37:16   this is exactly what we need people to do. Try things out and see if there is an arrangement

01:37:23   that is actually good. The half screen laptop sounds like such a mongrel thing, but looking

01:37:29   at it and looking at the various applications, it occurred to me that there's lots of...

01:37:34   I found it appealing. I found it appealing in some ways, but then I also looked at it and said,

01:37:40   "Yeah, but if you can do that, you should just make it all screen." And Microsoft is not the

01:37:43   first one to go all screen. I think there's a couple of PC vendors that have sort of

01:37:47   two screen laptops. But then you've got the keyboard problem, right? Because no one wants

01:37:53   to type on an onscreen keyboard, so you can have an external keyboard. And then what are you even

01:37:56   doing, right? Finding the form factor that everyone agrees is pretty much okay is very difficult.

01:38:05   We've been with the same laptop form factor basically since the PowerBook that introduced

01:38:12   the form that we currently know as laptop, which is a screen, clamshell, a keyboard that's shoved

01:38:18   back up against the screen and a pointing device right in front of you in the middle. That is the

01:38:21   PowerBook design. Before that, laptops didn't look like that. After that, all laptops looked

01:38:25   like that. And we've been stuck with it/enjoying it for many, many decades now. Is double screen

01:38:32   the thing that's going to replace it? I mean, maybe, especially if Apple keeps going the way

01:38:35   it's going with its keyboards, especially if you can slap a hardware keyboard on top of it.

01:38:39   But I'm glad someone besides Apple is trying it out because I am not yet convinced.

01:38:45   You know, I wonder, do we need to replace this? You said what's going to be the next form factor

01:38:52   or the decided on form factor for laptops? And I think we've already had it. I think we solved

01:38:57   this problem. We solved the laptop problem. We like laptops. I think the market has proven over

01:39:01   and over again that in this era that we're seemingly in for the last five to seven years of

01:39:06   just massive throwing anything at the wall to see what sticks, how many screens can we put on things,

01:39:12   how big or small can we make them. There's been this massive era of experimentation that's been

01:39:17   going on. But I think overall, I think what the market has actually shown us is no, actually,

01:39:22   laptops are great. We like laptops like the way we've had them. Just keep evolving them slowly,

01:39:28   not trying to make radical changes like getting rid of the entire keyboard and trackpad section.

01:39:32   It turns out laptops are great. And so are tablets and so are phones. And they need not necessarily

01:39:40   converge. We are fine having multiple devices. And I think for all the years that, you mentioned

01:39:50   the PowerBook form factor, and you're right, that did define things for a long time. But the

01:39:55   PowerBook form factor was not that much of a massive step over what came before it. It was a

01:40:03   gradual evolution into this is what laptops are. And the whole industry kind of consolidated on

01:40:10   this one thing of making everything look like Apple's laptops. And everything was fine for a

01:40:15   long time. And once we figured that out, we didn't keep changing everything. We just refined it and

01:40:22   made it better until the last few years we started making it worse. But up until the last few years,

01:40:27   we just kept making it better. And I feel like we're so, as an industry, we're so innovation

01:40:36   happy right now in the hardware area, in the form factor area, that we're just doing a bunch of

01:40:40   stuff and just throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall, seeing what sticks. But I feel like

01:40:45   everyone is so quick to try to replicate the success of the smartphone and then the smaller

01:40:50   success of the tablet. We're so quick to try to replicate that everywhere we can because there's

01:40:55   a lot of money to be made if you succeed at it, that we're reinventing things that don't need to

01:41:00   be reinvented. The laptop is great. The laptop is fine. And there are still ways we can make the

01:41:08   laptop form factor better without dramatically throwing a whole bunch of stuff out the window,

01:41:14   like the way these dual screen things do, by getting rid of the keyboard and all that stuff.

01:41:17   I don't think we need this. I don't think the world needs this. I honestly don't. And I think

01:41:23   if the world decides it needs this, it's going to be similar to how when tablets came out,

01:41:29   a lot of people who were very innovation happy and future obsessed, a lot of people said,

01:41:35   "Oh, well, laptops are dead. Computers are dead. Everyone's going to be using tablets only."

01:41:39   And what actually happened is laptops and computers are fine. Some people use tablets only,

01:41:46   but most people use tablets and laptops. And I think that might happen. This to me looks

01:41:53   more like a fancy tablet than a fancy laptop. Well, to that point, though, I feel like part of

01:42:03   the evolution of the laptop is the current what you're calling tablets as a separate thing. Like

01:42:07   the Surface, to name just one thing, but even just all of our friends who we know who basically have

01:42:12   a weird floppy laptop, right? And they're choosing to do that, despite the fact that there are

01:42:18   advantages that we often cited for an actual laptop over those weird floppy things.

01:42:22   I think the Surface design, the reason you see Microsoft Surface around, and the reason you see

01:42:27   people using iPads with keyboards is because that is a potential new iteration of the laptop. It's

01:42:34   a different decision than to screen. It's basically screening keyboard as separate things where

01:42:38   sometimes you just use the screen and the keyboard as an accessory that you can arrange. It's a

01:42:43   different set of trade-offs, but setting aside the operating system, I don't view that as a tablet

01:42:49   and laptop. I view that as a redefinition of the sort of a new form factor for the same job as a

01:42:57   laptop with a different set of trade-offs, and it's one that actually has gained some traction.

01:43:02   Obviously, it hasn't replaced laptops, and I would argue that it's not better than laptops,

01:43:06   but it's a thing that people use. It's not a curiosity. You're not shocked if you go on a

01:43:11   plane and you see someone take out this big floppy thing, whether it's a Surface or an iPad, and start

01:43:16   typing on it. That has some traction, which makes me think it has some utility, and some of the

01:43:22   things that the utility has are also shared by these dual screen things. Then you have more

01:43:27   flexibility. You can use it just as a tablet. You can have flexibility about what you use for the

01:43:32   other space and how you arrange it and whether it's a hinge or a stand. Surface has both of them.

01:43:38   I think there's something there, and I'm lumping that in with laptops, despite the fact that we

01:43:43   all just call them tablets in the Apple world. They run an entirely different operating system.

01:43:46   It's a whole big thing. Really, it's a thing that I can put in front of me where I can type and look

01:43:52   at a screen at the same time in a laptop-y kind of way. So I would lump that in there.

01:43:56   I don't see as many people using a dual screen. Maybe it's because they don't like the keyboards,

01:44:01   but I feel like the jury's still out on that. The point about the laptops, the PowerBook being an

01:44:09   evolution of what came before it, it's in some ways, yeah, because it's an unfolding thing with

01:44:15   the keyboard and the screen, right? But the diversity of things with keyboards and screens,

01:44:20   and they folded where the hinges were. Even the first Apple laptop, the Mac portable,

01:44:24   was not a clamshell. Many laptops were not clamshell. So even just clamshell, as in where

01:44:29   there's two halves that are the same size with the hinge at the back, that wasn't a given for a long

01:44:33   time in the PC industry. Let alone the whole PowerBook design, which is shoving the keyboard

01:44:39   back and having a pointing device. Because there was no pointing devices, there was just DOS. The

01:44:42   entire bottom of the laptops was keyboard, and the top part was screen. There was nothing else.

01:44:47   And then when pointing devices came, the PC laptops had a thing where they shoved a track

01:44:52   pad on the side of it. It could have been that track balls back then, if you shove a track

01:44:57   ball on the side, sorry, a track ball on the side of it. It could have been the case that a pointing

01:45:01   device along the right or left edge could have been the thing that goes, "Hey, I don't have a

01:45:05   hand coming out of the middle of my belly button. I don't know about you." So why is the track pad

01:45:10   in the center middle of the thing? How is that the right call versus not having a pointing device on

01:45:14   the left or the right side? It seems obvious in retrospect, like all they did was move the keyboard

01:45:19   back and put a pointing device in the middle. But for whatever reason, that was the arrangement of

01:45:24   things that stuck. And unfortunately, getting back to the experimentation, whether or not something

01:45:29   succeeds in the market doesn't necessarily reflect whether it's a good idea. These Microsoft things

01:45:33   could fail for the same reasons that Marco outlined in the beginning, because people may not

01:45:37   be interested because they run Windows. There's all sorts of like platform ecosystem, marketing,

01:45:42   reputation, historical reasons why a good product can fail and a bad product can succeed.

01:45:47   I think the PowerBook design is a reasonable compromise and is better than having a pointing

01:45:54   device left and right. But there is something to be said with the fact that it was Apple and Apple

01:45:58   has a reputation and lots of people copy Apple because they're good at designing, yada yada.

01:46:01   In the same way that there are many Microsoft products and designs that if Apple did them,

01:46:05   we would be going Gaga over them, but we're not going Gaga over them because they run Windows and

01:46:09   we don't like Windows. And Microsoft is not in the power position in the PC industry and Microsoft

01:46:14   is not one of the big players in the phone world. And you know, a million reasons why these things

01:46:19   might not succeed to the degree that they "should" or "would" and under ideal conditions.

01:46:25   But someone needs to try these things out. If only so, people with a more viable platform can

01:46:32   copy them and be more successful. Thanks to our sponsors this week,

01:46:36   Eero, Squarespace, and Burrow, and we will see you next week.

01:46:40   [Music]

01:46:41   [Music]

01:46:42   Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.

01:46:53   John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.

01:47:04   And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM and if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,

01:47:22   N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A, it's accidental, accidental. They didn't mean to, accidental, accidental.

01:47:38   Tech podcast, so long.

01:47:43   They finally fixed my bug in 13.2 beta 1.

01:47:47   Hooray!

01:47:48   They finally are going to stop corrupting my navigation bar whenever you touch the search bar.

01:47:52   So can you describe either for me, an iOS developer, or preferably for those who are not iOS developers, what was the behavior that was broken?

01:48:03   Alright, so, anyone who's still on 13.1, you will see this. Open up Overcast, on the root screen is a search box.

01:48:11   Tap the search box, then tap outside of the search box. Then tap something like a playlist or anything. Then tap back.

01:48:19   You will see in the navigation bar, at the top of the screen, all of the items start accumulating.

01:48:25   They no longer transition, they also no longer work, and that bug will persist until the app is force quit and restarted.

01:48:33   Cool.

01:48:34   Yeah, I'm getting many bug reports a day now that iOS 13.1 is out from people running this.

01:48:41   This was a bug that all summer during iOS 13.0 betas, this bug was not there.

01:48:48   This bug was introduced in beta, I forget, two or three of iOS 13.1.

01:48:54   Neat.

01:48:55   Not even the first build of the bug fix update introduced this horrible navigation bar bug, and it isn't just Overcast, there's a couple other apps.

01:49:05   Basically, you will suffer from this bug if you use UI Search Controller in a certain combination of conditions, where it's not auto hiding and everything.

01:49:16   UI Search Controller, this is the thing for non-developers out there, UI Search Controller is the API that Apple has provided for a number of years now.

01:49:25   Before that, I think it was called UI Search Bar Controller, or something, there was something variant before that.

01:49:29   This was the rewrite from a few years back.

01:49:32   It's the thing where, when you have a navigation bar at the top of an app, you can integrate a search box into that, in the way that when you tap it, a cancel button appears.

01:49:43   Sometimes it moves up and replaces the contents of the bar with the search box only, so any title or icons that were there before, it slides up and replaces it.

01:49:53   As you scroll, that box might go away or it might not, these are all configuration options.

01:49:59   And then as you type and you get results, it overlays what was on the rest of the screen with a list of results that you can then tap and get into.

01:50:08   This is all the role of UI Search Controller.

01:50:11   This class has been notoriously buggy in iOS, which is why they keep having to rewrite it.

01:50:18   In iOS 13, they rewrote it again.

01:50:21   In iOS 13, the rewrite actually did fix a lot of previous bugs and actually has overall been pretty good, except for this one little thing.

01:50:31   But there have been so many bugs related to this during the beta cycle, so many weird layout problems and other issues with UI Search Controller,

01:50:43   and little gaps appearing between the search results and the background and stuff like that, all sorts of weird stuff we had to deal with this summer with this class because they rewrote the whole thing.

01:50:53   And then for them to throw in that middle finger at me at the very last minute with iOS 13.1 and then ship it to all their customers, oh, God, it's been a hard week.

01:51:05   And it's going to keep being a hard week.

01:51:07   And my solution to this was, well, I guess I can rewrite the screen to not use a search box anymore.

01:51:14   That's ultimately what I want to do because the search box is just too buggy.

01:51:19   I don't like having to rely on this all the time.

01:51:23   I also don't like how it looks in my current prototype three-column mode for iPad and future Mac app.

01:51:31   So I want to get rid of the search box, but that's a much bigger job, and it's going to take time.

01:51:36   So in the meantime, I need the search box to work.

01:51:38   And today, the very first beta for iOS 13.2 came out, and the bug is fixed.

01:51:45   And the search box works.

01:51:47   So I'm just hoping beyond hope two things.

01:51:50   Number one, please, for the love of God, don't break it again.

01:51:54   And number two, how quickly can you ship this beta to customers as 13.2?

01:52:00   Because I am getting so many bug reports every single day from this stupid navigation bar corruption bug.

01:52:06   Oh, my God, I just can't wait for this.

01:52:09   I hope they actually keep this fixed, and I hope they actually ship this very, very soon to customers.

01:52:15   Did you file a radar on this one? I forget.

01:52:17   No, of course not. It's a waste of time.

01:52:19   I was going to ask if your radar had been updated or if they just silently fixed it, but you didn't even file one.

01:52:24   And that wouldn't have mattered because my radar's never got updated.

01:52:27   When I do get over myself and file radars, most of my bugs remain open with no response forever.

01:52:34   Even the ones that are fixed, they won't ever tell me.

01:52:38   You know, we get the people who email us and say, "Hey, just checking in. Just wanted to see if you got my past, you know, that spam PR."

01:52:44   I'm doing that with my radars now.

01:52:47   So I have a radar for if I, on my wife's computer, if I do customize toolbar in Safari to customize the toolbar,

01:52:57   Safari immediately beach balls and hangs forever. 100% reproducible.

01:53:01   So I filed that as a bug, and we did some, you know, a syst diagnosed and other stuff, and people had some theories.

01:53:09   But anyway, I filed it as an official radar.

01:53:11   And I was like, "Look, it's 100% reproducible hang." I was afraid they would go away.

01:53:14   I was afraid, like, some update would come and it would just go away and I wouldn't be able to reproduce it anymore,

01:53:18   so I would have a useless bug report because they'd be like, "Does this still happen?"

01:53:21   No. But every once in a while I check.

01:53:23   In fact, I wanted to check to actually customize my toolbar, and I totally forgot about it.

01:53:27   It's still there.

01:53:29   And that bug has not been updated.

01:53:31   So I went back to the bug and I said, "Just so you know, this still happens on insert new versions of all the software that I'm running."

01:53:37   "Maybe I'll do that every couple of months, right? Until the bug goes away."

01:53:41   I said, "Just so you know, this still happens."

01:53:43   Did you get my last email?

01:53:45   Yeah. Just checking in to see if you got this bug report.

01:53:49   They didn't even mark it as duplicate. Like, that's not what happened to mine.

01:53:51   It's like, "Oh, yeah, duplicate and then whatever." But no, nothing.

01:53:54   No, that's the thing. Like, when they do mark it as duplicate, it used to be that you got no response ever after that.

01:53:59   At least in, sometime recently they changed it so that you can see the status of the bug that it's duplicated to.

01:54:06   You can't see the title or anything about it, but you can see whether the bug is closed or not.

01:54:10   So that's at least nice.

01:54:12   But even then, most of my bugs literally don't even get that far.

01:54:16   They don't even get a response at all. They literally just stay open forever.

01:54:19   I could have put tons of time into it.

01:54:22   I file lots of things here and there that are super...

01:54:26   I file a bunch of AirPlay 2 bugs because I want to support AirPlay 2 and still can't really do it very well.

01:54:33   And I file all those, got no response whatsoever.

01:54:36   I file bugs about WatchKit and the only time I ever got anything that resulted from it was when I also made a blog post about it.

01:54:44   And even then, I wouldn't get responses to the bugs. Just those things might be fixed the next year.

01:54:49   Marco, never run to the press. Never run to the press.

01:54:52   It never helps, right? Except it seems to literally always help.

01:54:56   Except it always, always helps.

01:54:58   And more importantly, not running to the press seems to not do anything at all.

01:55:02   I don't have a bug that I want them to fix. I just want to fix my broken computer.

01:55:06   Because I want to customize my toolbar. I don't care what the bug is.

01:55:09   I'm sure it's some data bug. I have some file that's corrupt somewhere.

01:55:12   I'm sure that's what it is. I don't care about that.

01:55:15   I literally want to customize my toolbar in Safari. That's all I want.

01:55:18   If someone says, "Oh, just delete this file," and it'll go away.

01:55:21   I haven't gotten to the point where I've deleted everything.

01:55:23   Because I don't want to lose all my settings and preferences and everything.

01:55:27   But I would love to actually know how to fix it without totally removing every single one of my preferences from Safari.

01:55:35   [beeping]

01:55:37   (beep)