00:00:00 ◼ ► Let me help you, let me help you here. With Lord of the Rings, it is like 44 hours of film with a bunch of people walking around trying to throw a ring in a volcano. That's the whole thing. That's all you need to know. That is it. It was the biggest waste of my time in the world. It's not even worth it, Marco. Don't do it.
00:00:17 ◼ ► Let's start with the Mac Pro whole design because we can't get away from the trypophobia, whatever it's called. I don't even remember anymore. But a friend of the show, Steven Hackett, has collected a bunch of links and information that he conveniently put on one post, I think, expressly for us. So, Jon, tell us what's going on here.
00:00:36 ◼ ► Yeah, a few tidbits. First, in one of the popular feedback items we got last week, people were pointing us to the design page on Apple's website for the Mac Pro. They actually have a little movie animation thing showing how the holes are created.
00:00:52 ◼ ► They show a side view, sort of a side view cutaway of the thing, and they show hemispherical divots appearing first on one side and then on the other offset. So that's what we theorized, and we should have just gone to Apple's website because they confirmed that is indeed how those things are shaped.
00:01:07 ◼ ► How they're made, we don't know, but that's how they're shaped. And then the speculation about where the design came from and about the poorly heard conversation between Jonny Ive and Tim Cook about it coming from the G4 Cube.
00:01:21 ◼ ► Steven Hackett took out his G4 Cube and looked at the bottom of it, and you can see, there's the bottom of the top. Anyway, one side of the Naked Robotic Core thing has a bunch of big holes, and then behind that, another piece of metal with a bunch of small holes, and they are offset in the same sort of arrangement where through each big hole you can see a bit of three other holes.
00:01:41 ◼ ► But it's not a 3D thing, so it's unclear based on the overheard conversation whether Jonny was referring to this, like "Oh, the Mac Pro looks kind of like the G4 Cube."
00:01:54 ◼ ► Or, as I originally thought, that they actually did think about this machined pattern with the hemispheres, but then just didn't actually put it on the G4 Cube and just did something that was much, much cheaper and simpler to manufacture, but also not as cool and not as prominent.
00:02:09 ◼ ► These are much smaller scale holes. And then finally, somebody, who sent this? Ivar Majus sent us an article by Ian Parker in the New Yorker that is an old article from 2015 talking about Jonny Ive, and in it they talk about a particular person in the design studio who used to come in early in the morning and make a bunch of geometrically complex objects.
00:02:33 ◼ ► Then they would have the machinist mill, which doesn't seem cost-effective. I don't know if people are coming in just wasting the time of your machinist on staff and spending material and electricity and wear and tear on the tools just to make cool designs.
00:02:45 ◼ ► Anyway, sometimes when they're having a meeting about a speaker hole pattern or something, Jonny will ask the guy, "Can you get your box of patterns?"
00:02:54 ◼ ► He'll think that this is just a ready-made box of weird patterns they can try out, which is fun. That's kind of like brainstorming and just coming up with ideas and socking them away and then saying, "We have a need for this."
00:03:06 ◼ ► Instead of having to come up with something on the fly that you have just sort of a parts bin of interesting design ideas that you may or may not be able to apply. So that may have happened in this case as well.
00:03:15 ◼ ► We have thoroughly exhausted the origins and design merits and aspects of the hole pattern in the front of our Mac Pros. I think we can put this one to bed, please.
00:03:30 ◼ ► No argument here. I had seen some information about this fly-by, but I didn't get a chance to read it.
00:03:36 ◼ ► What we had put in the show notes is, "Apple reverses course on MDM, which is mobile device management, in parental control apps. Can someone pinch hit as the chief summarizer-in-chief and let me know what this is about?"
00:03:54 ◼ ► We talked about before that there's parental control applications that we're using, mobile device management features that are normally used to control a fleet of company-owned or company-controlled devices, and they're using it for parental control.
00:04:07 ◼ ► Apple told them they couldn't do that anymore. Apparently, Apple has reversed that decision, and it now says that you're allowed to do it for parental control applications as long as you don't sell, use, or disclose any data to third parties for any purpose.
00:04:22 ◼ ► How Apple's going to enforce that, I have no idea, but bottom line is that apparently there are enough companies making and selling parental control applications using this technology, and their cries were heard by Apple, and they have relented, and they are allowed to continue to have businesses using this technology.
00:04:39 ◼ ► Honestly, Apple really needs to create purpose-built APIs just for this. Apparently, they do want this third-party market for parental control stuff that have these powers. They want that to exist, because if they didn't want it to exist, they could have just held fast and said, "Sorry, your business is over. It's screen time or nothing now."
00:04:59 ◼ ► Obviously, they want it to exist. They should do better than MDM, because MDM really is not the best tool for that job and not really intended for that purpose, and having these multiple sets of rules about if you're a parental control app, you have this, but if you're an enterprise app, enterprise, you know, actual mobile device management app, you have that set of rules is just weird, but anyway, I'm sure they'll resolve it in a few more years.
00:05:22 ◼ ► Kind of tangentially related, around the same time that this parental control brouhaha happened, there was the illicit app store thing where people or companies were using enterprise certificates in order to distribute apps to people that were not part of their company.
00:05:38 ◼ ► So to recap, if you're a big company, say like Northrop Grumman, you might have a bunch of internal tools that you want to distribute only to your own employees, and you can get a enterprise certificate from Apple if you jump through the appropriate hoops and pay the appropriate money, which will allow you to distribute apps outside of the app store, sort of kind of side-loading them just for your own employees.
00:05:59 ◼ ► And what some, you know, not very nice people were doing was letting anyone be their quote-unquote employee. And so apparently, Apple has tightened up their rules with regard to enterprise app certificates, and one of you was kind enough to put in the show notes the following quote,
00:06:14 ◼ ► "You understand and agree that Apple reserves the right to review and approve or reject any internal use application that you would like to deploy at any time during the term of this agreement. If requested by Apple, you agree to fully cooperate with Apple and promptly provide such internal use application to Apple for such review."
00:06:30 ◼ ► So I read that as, you have to do what we say when we say it, and if you think you have something private, well, it's not private when it comes to us because we are the gatekeepers.
00:06:40 ◼ ► Again, enforcement is weird. Like, how would they know what to request from who for what reasons? Like, it's just kind of like they have to hear through the grapevine that somebody's using the certificate to distribute an application that they shouldn't or that Apple is, you know, an Apple can ask and say, "Show us what you're distributing," or "Show us this application," but if they don't know, you know, anyway.
00:06:58 ◼ ► And this seems mostly tangential to the thing that's even worse and I was amazed that people found, like, just random people on the web who want to distribute an application outside the App Store.
00:07:10 ◼ ► They're not a big company. They don't have any employees. They just somehow got an enterprise certificate and they're using it to distribute, like, some weird jailbreak application or a game emulator or some other weird tracking spyware stuff that wouldn't go through the App Store.
00:07:23 ◼ ► And they just have a website and have instructions on how you can download stuff from the website and install their enterprise certificate on your phone and install this weird software that gets you pirated stuff or, you know, is porn or gambling or whatever.
00:07:36 ◼ ► And that has just been sitting there existing on the web outside of Apple's view, apparently. And so this doesn't change any of that because those people would just get shut down no matter what.
00:07:48 ◼ ► This is more like for companies like Google or whatever that do legitimately have enterprise certificates. It's just that Apple now says, "At any time, we can ask you, 'Hey, what are you distributing? Show us this. Show us that,' and then we can give a thumbs up or thumbs down to it," which I'm sure the big companies love.
00:08:05 ◼ ► Marco, you've been tweeting recently about Bluetooth and a new, I guess, like, prompt that's in iOS 13. I am not yet running iOS 13 on any of my devices. I will probably put it on my iPad when the next seed comes out.
00:08:20 ◼ ► But can you tell me a little bit about what's going on here? Because I find it very interesting and I thought we could talk about it a little bit before I go to sleep during the Mac Pro section.
00:08:28 ◼ ► And I should begin this with a massive disclaimer that I'm still learning about this and I currently don't know that much about it. I don't know that much about the Bluetooth API usage and everything.
00:08:39 ◼ ► But basically, the world of ad tracking and analytics tracking is always looking for a way around Apple's protections and rules. So lots of apps basically want people's location data and other things that they can sell to make money.
00:08:59 ◼ ► You'd be shocked how many apps sell your location data behind the scenes for money, especially apps that actually get permission to use your location for some part of the app.
00:09:11 ◼ ► Like, this is very common among scammy weather apps and even some ostensibly non-scammy ones, like some of the really big weather apps end up being caught, like, tracking your location all the time and then selling it to people for money.
00:09:24 ◼ ► Tracking location is a very valuable privacy thing to be sold and so lots of apps try to do it and Apple tries to lock it down.
00:09:33 ◼ ► If you deny the location access to the actual GPS chip of the phone, there are still ways to infer your location much of the time.
00:09:44 ◼ ► One of those ways is to scan for Wi-Fi networks around you and match it against databases of known Wi-Fi networks and where they are and you can oftentimes get tracked that way.
00:09:55 ◼ ► Another way is via Bluetooth beacons and other Bluetooth devices that can be scanned with core Bluetooth.
00:10:02 ◼ ► What Apple has done in iOS 13 is lock down core Bluetooth in the same way that GPS access is locked down by requiring user permission.
00:10:14 ◼ ► So it pops up a box saying, "Hey, a so-and-so app wants to use Bluetooth. Do you want to allow this?"
00:10:18 ◼ ► In iOS 13, I've had the beta installed on all my main devices for about two days now. By the way, don't do this. It's really bad. Beta 2 is really bad.
00:10:33 ◼ ► Especially around audio and volume and audio routing to multiple audio devices. It's really bad. So don't do this.
00:10:44 ◼ ► But anyway, the Bluetooth dialog boxes just keep popping up for me from apps that I haven't even launched that are just doing background refreshes or responding to silent push notifications or something.
00:10:57 ◼ ► And so I tweeted earlier today, I think yesterday, I tweeted like, "Hey, here's the apps that so far in one day of running this, I already have six or seven apps that most of which I haven't even launched that are trying to use Bluetooth."
00:11:12 ◼ ► And I've gotten a ton of responses since then from people either saying, "Wow, my list is even longer." Or from people saying, "Here's all the ways and all the reasons why some of these are legitimate."
00:11:24 ◼ ► And I think it's interesting. One of the things people pointed out is that the location-based apps like Google Maps and Waze, they apparently will use Bluetooth beacons to, like if you're in certain tunnels that have these beacons installed, to provide GPS in tunnels.
00:11:41 ◼ ► Or to provide GPS indoors, in various places indoors. I don't know how useful and accurate that is. I mean, if you're driving down a tunnel at like 60 miles an hour, can you even make a Bluetooth connection to something you're passing by?
00:11:58 ◼ ► I don't think it connects. I think it's just like a pinging type thing. It's not making a, it's not pairing with it or anything.
00:12:14 ◼ ► There are some legitimate reasons why apps that use your location as part of the functionality, like a mapping app, might want Bluetooth access. I do find it creepy that it's Google that's doing this. Another problem is YouTube.
00:12:35 ◼ ► So one of the things that Bluetooth is often used for is for proximity device communication. And so, like one of my things that I had was the Nokia Health Mate app. Because I have a Wi-Things, or I guess Nokia now, Wi-Fi scale.
00:12:54 ◼ ► And during setup, it uses Bluetooth for setup and pairing of the scale initially. Now, this just came up in a background refresh. I haven't launched the app in months.
00:13:05 ◼ ► And I think it's, what we're seeing is like, the app just instantiates the core Bluetooth device manager, you know, singleton. And it just instantiates that and just like, has it ready to go all the time.
00:13:18 ◼ ► Even though like, I'm not currently pairing a new scale, so I don't need this. The scale, like every day when I step on the scale, it communicates over Wi-Fi. And I get my results in the app over Wi-Fi.
00:13:31 ◼ ► So like, Bluetooth isn't necessary anymore, but you know, the app just starts the Bluetooth manager API, probably in like the application did finish launching, you know, startup method and just, you know, calls it a day.
00:13:43 ◼ ► Similarly, the Tesla app, so like, there's a couple of features that Tesla offers that I have never set up and don't use, and some of them my car isn't even capable of.
00:13:52 ◼ ► But apparently, it also just instantiates a Bluetooth connection in the background all the time, like whenever a background refreshes. So, what we're seeing is, there are legitimate uses for a lot of apps to have this, but there's also a lot of apps that really don't need this permission.
00:14:05 ◼ ► By the way, I've said no to all of them, and everything still works. And there were a few responses on Twitter from people who were upset that I was calling them out, like, "These are legitimate, this is going to cause problems."
00:14:17 ◼ ► But I think what we're seeing here is like, apps often just request access to things by default because it's easy, because it's part of some like global setup method, like your app to finish launching method, and you just instantiate the Bluetooth just in case you need it.
00:14:32 ◼ ► So for example, there's an API on UI device, which is kind of like your API gateway as an app developer to the phone and its properties. And there's an API to check the battery level of the phone.
00:14:44 ◼ ► Which, by the way, people have used to be creepy. Like, one of the ways people would try to fingerprint devices, or fingerprint unique people and devices between different apps, without using the ID for advertising that Apple provides,
00:14:58 ◼ ► would be to match the exact battery level, which would be like 94.37% with the time of day, and with other things to try to fingerprint you.
00:15:06 ◼ ► And so, years ago, Apple made the battery API only go in 5% increments, so you'll never get 94.35% reported to you as the app. You'll get 95%, and then a little while later you get 90%.
00:15:20 ◼ ► And so, Apple's always in these battles with creepy analytics packages to try to lock down things so that you can't be uniquely identified without your knowledge.
00:15:29 ◼ ► And so, Overcast enables battery monitoring. You have to actually tell the API, "Turn on battery monitoring," and then you can start getting values from it.
00:15:38 ◼ ► And I do that right from the start. As soon as my sync engine starts, I'm enabling battery monitoring, because I check the battery level to determine how frequently to sync.
00:15:47 ◼ ► Because syncing involves a network request, and that could use power, and so when your battery level is not great, or when you are in low power mode, I throttle back the sync engine so it doesn't make as many requests.
00:15:59 ◼ ► There's lots of things like that, that people might be starting up the Bluetooth API just automatically, all the time, for every background refresh, for some feature like that that they think is minor, or might occasionally be helpful to you.
00:16:11 ◼ ► And they just do it out of just, "Why not do it?" Right? So what's nice about this is that now it gives people the knowledge of what they're doing on this thing that could be used for creepy purposes, even if it isn't always.
00:16:26 ◼ ► But it could be used for creepy purposes. So Apple's giving people the knowledge like, "Hey, you know what, by the way, this app here, they're wanting to access your Bluetooth hardware, and you get a chance to say no."
00:16:38 ◼ ► And for most apps, you can say no, and nothing bad happens. I should also clarify before, I just remember now, before I forget, before we get a lot of confused emails and tweets, the Bluetooth access that this is prompting about, and potentially denying, has nothing to do with Bluetooth audio output.
00:16:57 ◼ ► Like, Overcast does not use this. Even though you can play to a Bluetooth headset, it's only about scanning for Bluetooth devices and communicating with Bluetooth devices in ways that are not about playing audio. That's all this is.
00:17:12 ◼ ► So you shouldn't see this prompt from podcast apps and stuff, unless they integrate the Google Chromecast SDK, which apparently starts this up for whatever reason.
00:17:23 ◼ ► So anyway, most of the warnings you see are going to be legitimate, and most of them don't reflect the apps being creepy as hell, but there are a whole lot of apps out there that are creepy as hell, and use this in some way.
00:17:37 ◼ ► And so I would say, similar to if an app asks for your location, say no, unless you have a really obvious, clear reason to say yes.
00:17:48 ◼ ► I wonder if Apple's going to eventually come out with their version of cross-origin request, whatever stuff. I know they have the thing where they require all your network connections to be secure and everything, but we're not at the point where the iPhone has a little snitch installed and tells you everything you're connecting to.
00:18:06 ◼ ► Do they have a thing where you have to list all the domains your app communicates with? Is that a requirement?
00:18:10 ◼ ► No, and that's how Overcast can download podcasts, because otherwise that would be a big problem.
00:18:15 ◼ ► I can imagine that coming on eventually, because that's the next frontier of creepy things.
00:18:22 ◼ ► So the Bluetooth is one, and the other thing, I forget if you already talked about this or tweeted about it, but analytics packages, not just Chromecast SDK, but if you have any sort of thing, we'll send you crash reports, and we'll accompany them, and by the way, we'll also track the location of all your users and convey that information as well.
00:18:40 ◼ ► So using Bluetooth, again, to find location without GPS. You can do Wi-Fi network mapping, and there's the Bluetooth stuff, so that's another reason I think a lot of apps use it.
00:18:49 ◼ ► Not because the app maker is trying to creepily do something, but because they merely embedded a third-party SDK that they had no idea was doing this. I bet half the people who embedded the Chromecast SDK don't know.
00:18:59 ◼ ► But anyway, the next frontier is where is this application sending your data? And if the application vendors had to just whitelist and say, "This application is going to communicate with these domains," and then at least there would be some way for both Apple to know what it's supposed to do with and disallow connections to anything else, and maybe some place for users to understand what it's connecting to.
00:19:23 ◼ ► Obviously, for things like podcast applications, they'd have to have the "I'm going to communicate with everything," which would definitely be a thing that you should be able to ask for, and Apple should give it to you, and then Apple would know what's up with that application, and people who are interested in what things your app are communicating with could see the list, and it says, "This app has the permission to communicate with any website or any server, and here are the last 100 servers that it communicated with," and you could look at that list, and maybe I'm going a little bit overboard, but it seems like that's the direction Apple is going.
00:19:52 ◼ ► And every way that app makers can find to funnel data into or out of the phone for purposes that the user of the application might not guess, Apple is adding controls to, adding visibility to. Not that they're stopping them from doing that, but just that if it's a legit thing you have to do, you should have no problem saying that, saying, "This is what my app is going to do," and you shouldn't be ashamed to explain that to your users, and you should be able to explain that to your users.
00:20:16 ◼ ► If you could explain it somewhere to either Apple or your users, they should be like, "Yeah, okay, that all makes sense. Fine." Right? If that's not the case, and you're like, "Why is this application," you know, again, like in the old days, "reading all my contacts and sending them up to the server? This application has nothing to do with my contacts. Why is it even doing that? Why is it tracking my location?" Like, if you can't explain that to your user, you shouldn't be allowed to use it, so I like this type of change, even though it is a little bit more complicated than it is, and it's not a good thing.
00:20:40 ◼ ► If you can't explain that to your user, you shouldn't be allowed to use it, so I like this type of change, even though it is producing yet more dialog boxes. That was the other complaint that I saw on Twitter, that people were like, "Well, you're just training people to click through all these dialog boxes and click 'OK.'" Maybe, but it's better than no dialog box, in which case, you know, it has 100% of people essentially allowing it to happen because they're never even prompted, so it's better than no dialog box at all.
00:21:08 ◼ ► How much better and how much dialog fatigue are we getting? I'm not sure, but hopefully, after the initial release, when everyone has to deal with all these dialogs, it will just fade into the background and not be such a common thing.
00:21:19 ◼ ► And by the way, real-time follow-up so we don't get this next week, the Withings co-founder bought the company back from Nokia in 2018. That's fine. You sell your company to Nokia, some big company.
00:21:29 ◼ ► Yeah, you sell your company to Nokia and presumably get a nice payday, and then the big company squanders everything your company had and they sell it back to you for a song.
00:21:39 ◼ ► So you're back in control of your company and you made a nice windfall in the meantime. That's kind of great.
00:21:44 ◼ ► I think this is fascinating, and I do love that Apple, as you guys have said, is calling more and more attention to this behavior that could, isn't always, but could be nefarious. And I think oftentimes it is either nefarious or laziness.
00:22:00 ◼ ► And I've been guilty of this. I can't think of specific examples, certainly not with regard to Bluetooth, but I've been guilty of this. I can see myself, and I don't use any third-party analytics in vignette, but I could totally see myself just throwing some analytics package in there, not realizing that I need to tweak this setting here or turn off this feature there in order to prevent this sort of dialog from popping up.
00:22:22 ◼ ► So I don't entirely blame your average app developer, but I definitely am creeped out by how many apps seem to be doing this.
00:22:32 ◼ ► And it was, I think Benjamin Herrin had tweeted and you had retweeted a list of what looked to be like 50 plus apps that he had discovered on his phone that were trying to get Bluetooth access, which is just bananas.
00:22:44 ◼ ► And it's so hard because, as you guys have said, how do you know where this data is going? How do you know if it's using it to find your location in a tunnel or if it's using it to try to figure out your specific point on the earth for an app that adds images to your contacts?
00:23:01 ◼ ► It's so hard to say, but I do like that Apple's surfacing this. I do like this effort to give more control to users, and I hope that this sort of thing continues. Another thing like this is, I don't have anything to put in the show notes handy, but maybe we'll be able to dig something up, but apparently when you delete an app that has an associated subscription, it actually says to you, "Hey, you still have a subscription for this thing, and it's going to re-up on such and such a date," or something like that, which I think is another great idea.
00:23:31 ◼ ► It stinks for Marco in the sense that he might not collect money from people who didn't even realize they were sending him money, but I know I speak for Marco in saying, "That's for the best." That's okay.
00:23:42 ◼ ► Yeah, that doesn't suck. I actually really don't want people's money if they are tricked into giving it to me. I really don't want that at all.
00:23:50 ◼ ► So I really like that as well. I just really like this direction. Yeah, I think, Jon, you had said that there's fatigue about dialogues, there's fatigue about subscriptions. We're getting fatigued about everything, our current administration.
00:24:03 ◼ ► Anyway, it's worth it, I think. It's worth it to see this and to think about this at least for a second.
00:24:12 ◼ ► Yeah, I think that this behavior will change, because the reason all these things are using Bluetooth is because you didn't have to prompt before. Once you have to prompt, it changes the equation entirely. You'll have to find some new nefarious way to figure out where you are for the purposes of analytics.
00:24:26 ◼ ► It's kind of the same reason that I installed an analytics package that tells me what all my users are doing with the applications and sends me crash reports, and to each crash report, it attaches the last 30 seconds of audio heard by the phone so I can hear the user cursing.
00:24:39 ◼ ► That doesn't happen because you need permission to get access to the microphone, and no one wants to prompt for that if their application doesn't actually need it. So same thing with this new rule on Bluetooth.
00:24:48 ◼ ► All these weird SDKs that don't actually need Bluetooth or are just using it as a backdoor to get your location are going to find some other way.
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00:26:58 ◼ ► I think this is the bottom of the barrel of Mac Pro topics. Oh sure it is. How many times have we said this? Things that were put into the document at WWDC. I think this is probably the last of them. This is about briefly one small item about the afterburner card which we had touched on before. The card that lets the Mac Pro deal with three simultaneous streams of 8K video or an even larger number of streams of 4K video.
00:27:27 ◼ ► And it does all of the work of decoding and video on this card and it uses an FPGA which is a field programmable gate array which is basically like I imagine a chip with a bunch of gates on it instead of someone deciding ahead of time how they should be connected to each other and what they should do.
00:27:43 ◼ ► You can program it to arrange itself however you want. It's field programmable so you can take this Lego set of gates and make essentially the chip that you want it to be. And then it runs software after it has become that chip.
00:28:00 ◼ ► Obviously it is less efficient and bigger and hotter and all that than an actual custom designed integrated circuit that just does one thing. But it's very flexible. And there was a couple questions about that at WWDC. Why did they use an FPGA? What's the deal with that?
00:28:15 ◼ ► I thought my first guess was like maybe it's time to market. Like they were kind of in a rush for this Mac Pro and they wanted to have this afterburner card and maybe making a custom chip in that time frame wasn't feasible and it turns out an FPGA could do the job just as well.
00:28:31 ◼ ► Obviously it would be more expensive and take more power but money and power are two things the Mac Pro has plenty of so that's not a big deal. But when Craig Federeri was on the talk show at WWDC he said that the reason they're using FPGA is because it's reprogrammable.
00:28:45 ◼ ► Like that it's field programmable. Implying or outright saying I forget that essentially they'll be able to change the card to reconfigure it. Maybe to do different things. Maybe to just do the same thing but better. But that's an actual goal that it will be reprogrammable to change its behavior in one way or another.
00:29:05 ◼ ► Which is really cool. Again I'm not sure how often Apple will exercise this or whether it's open to third parties but that makes that piece of hardware even a little bit more exciting.
00:29:15 ◼ ► And then Doug Brooks on MacPowerUsers podcast also at Macworld mentioned the afterburner card as a way for customers to spec fewer CPU cores. It's a money saving thing.
00:29:25 ◼ ► Like if you get the afterburner card then you don't have to get the Mac Pro with a bazillion cores because you're offloading a big part of the hardware that the CPU would be doing to the second card.
00:29:35 ◼ ► So Apple's always looking out for your wallet with that Mac Pro. How much does that, we don't even know, I was going to say how much does the afterburner card cost? Like if that money saving thing only makes sense if the afterburner card itself is not like 10 grand or something.
00:29:47 ◼ ► I have no idea, obviously it's probably not 10 grand but we don't have the prices on anything so right now it makes sense as a money saving story. Although it probably makes sense no matter what because probably the most expensive thing aside from RAM that you can add to your Mac Pro is to max out the CPU because Intel's prices are pretty nuts when you get that high.
00:30:05 ◼ ► Oh yeah, Intel is going to have quite a good time with these CPU prices on this. The afterburner I would say is unlikely to be under $1000.
00:30:17 ◼ ► The wheels are going to be under $1000, the stand is $1000, of course it's going to be over $1000.
00:30:23 ◼ ► I'm guessing that's like a $1500 option maybe but I don't know anything about FPGA pricing. It's interesting that also they called it afterburner. They didn't call it ProRes accelerator.
00:30:35 ◼ ► I think that also opens them up to future expansion of this into other types of roles. There's all sorts of pro hardware that is basically some kind of accelerator card for some kind of specialized task that goes into a PCI express slot.
00:30:53 ◼ ► Apple themselves were bragging about things like Avid has some kind of accelerator, there's some kind of DSP accelerator for Pro Tools or something. I don't know.
00:31:06 ◼ ► See I don't know this market at all but many pro fields have these kind of accelerator cards that are usually like basically programmable things, not programmable, specialized hardware to super accelerate some tasks similar to how a GPU accelerates graphics calculations.
00:31:22 ◼ ► I think there is a future here for other applications and there probably will never be a large number of other applications but I bet there's going to be at least like 1 to 3 more.
00:31:33 ◼ ► I think the main interesting prospect is that the card continues to do essentially the same job but they get better at it and support more different codecs and formats or whatever as time goes on. They protect your investment that way. Not that suddenly the FPGA is reprogrammed as like a bitcoin miner or something although that's certainly possible but seems like not something that Apple would be into.
00:31:54 ◼ ► Alright tell me about the Pro Display XDR. One more leftover item from our discussion of that. Longevity. We talked so much about the price and the stand and all the other stuff and we talked about the longevity of the Mac Pro itself but the final thing to consider for this horrendously expensive but cheap if you want a reference monitor display is how long do you think it will last?
00:32:16 ◼ ► As I sit here in front of a 10 year old monitor that is as far as I can tell as perfect as the day I bought it. Does not have any dead pixels, doesn't have any image retention, isn't any dimmer.
00:32:28 ◼ ► Monitors in theory if they don't have anything weird and complicated inside them can last a very long time. The biggest thing in favor of the longevity of the display is the number of pixels on it and 10 years from now you're not going to be like, well I don't know, depends on how well Apple does with the glasses thing.
00:32:47 ◼ ► But presumably if current trends continue 10 years from now you will not look at this 30 whatever inch monitor and be like I really need a bigger monitor or I need more pixels. I certainly won't because my vision is just getting worse not better.
00:33:00 ◼ ► So features wise that monitor is not going to look old or small or dim anytime soon. But there are many things on the other side of the longevity equation aside from assuming it continues to work perfectly will you be disappointed with this? No.
00:33:17 ◼ ► The assuming it continues to work perfectly thing is very fraught because this is not a sort of reliable implementation of a proven technology for monitors. As far as I'm aware there is no monitor and Apple has tried to emphasize this that has the same features and is built the same way as this monitor.
00:33:35 ◼ ► There are televisions that are built the same way as this monitor but they're very different. They have far fewer pixels. They are much larger. They have much more headroom for cooling because they're not shoved into a smaller space.
00:33:50 ◼ ► So that's the only real analog we have. And televisions getting around 10 years no matter what technology they're built on you start to ask questions about reliability about just the circuitry in there and everything. This display I guess if all goes well maybe you get 10 years out of it but it's got moving parts. It's got two fans.
00:34:11 ◼ ► I mean the fans of my Mac Pro are okay but that tends to be the type of thing that dies. I've gone through many GPU coolers in my Mac Pro which are obviously of lower quality than the fans that Apple puts in the entire thing so maybe the fans will last 10 years. Will the cooling be sufficient? Will some part of that thing be baking? Will it have image retention problems? The whole HDR thing? The back of it being a heat sink makes you think it's going to be generating a considerable amount of heat?
00:34:37 ◼ ► So my confidence in this monitor actually physically lasting 10 years and continuing to function is not that great. So if you're thinking of buying this and you think it's going to be, yes it's horrendously expensive but I'm sure I'll use it for 10 years. I wouldn't bet on that.
00:34:53 ◼ ► The other thing to keep in mind is this technology, dynamic backlit LCD with a bunch of LEDs that turn on and off, there's a reason it is not the top tier technology in televisions anymore because it is more complicated and not as good quality as OLED which is a much simpler technology that gives you essentially the same results.
00:35:13 ◼ ► Will there be an OLED screen that surpasses this? Certainly there could be an OLED screen that is much simpler than this. OLEDs have a problem with brightness. It's harder to get. On OLED televisions you can get a very bright little square in the middle of the TV but if you fill the entire screen with white, they don't have enough power to drive that at the brightness levels that an LED backlit thing does.
00:35:38 ◼ ► So there's that disadvantage but other than that OLEDs are so much simpler, thinner, don't require as many fans, don't have multiple layers of filters and circuitry to control which parts of the backlight are on. There is no backlight. It is self-emissive. Each pixel gives off its own light.
00:35:56 ◼ ► So I would imagine in 10 years this display, it won't seem old because it's too small or has too few pixels or doesn't look as good but it will seem kind of like my Mac Pro does now with a bunch of spinning disks and 9 fans and all that other stuff.
00:36:14 ◼ ► It's a lot of bulk and machinery and heat and power to get a result that you can get from a much thinner, completely silent, fanless, much cooler OLED. That's my hope anyway that in 10 years there is a replacement that had those attributes.
00:36:30 ◼ ► Certainly that's true if television is now. My Plasma TV with all its fans and its giant power draw and its huge hot stuff, you replace that with an OLED. No fans, much quieter, much less power. I expect that to happen in the modern world as well.
00:36:45 ◼ ► I guess I'm mostly telling this to myself. How am I justifying this horrendous display? It's not because I'm going to keep it for 10 years. I'm going to buy it with the expectation that it might not even outlast the Mac Pro. I might still have that Mac Pro 10 years from now with all the internals upgraded 10 times over but the display might have died by then.
00:37:05 ◼ ► I'm mostly okay with that but keep that in mind if you were thinking of plugging down the price of a car for the system.
00:37:11 ◼ ► I cannot wait until we get to the point that you can spec this out. Both of you can spec this out and see exactly what you're in for because oh boy this is going to be something else.
00:37:24 ◼ ► I already know that what I want is probably going to be like $18,000. It's probably going to be some obscene amount of money but I also really don't think I'm going to get one. I don't know.
00:37:40 ◼ ► I'll get one briefly. The resale value should be pretty good on these especially if you decide after six months that you don't want it anymore. You found that out with the trash can. It wasn't a computer for you and you sold it and the resale price was reasonable. You didn't take too much of a bad. It's not like rolling your Ferrari off the lot and you lose $150K.
00:37:58 ◼ ► The reason I sold the trash can after a short time was that the 5K iMac came out and I wanted desktop retina so badly and there was no good way to do it on the trash can for a while if ever after that. Otherwise I really enjoyed it. I liked it at the time I bought it. It was fine for me. It wasn't as ideal as an expandable tower but it was actually great and actually it would be more ideal for me now than I think the new Mac Pro which is unfortunate but that's not to say they should go back to it.
00:38:25 ◼ ► The more I think about it the more I think the iMac Pro is probably the best computer for me.
00:38:34 ◼ ► You have to buy it at least briefly because I need someone to buy it and tell me if it's finicky and weird so you have that duty to fulfill.
00:38:51 ◼ ► We'll see. If they do resolve the monitor situation by offering some kind of 5K monitor that's compelling and well priced that might change my calculus.
00:39:03 ◼ ► But for now with the only good monitor being the 6K monster that while I would love a 6K display I don't need any of the fancy backlighting and HDR. I don't need any of that.
00:39:17 ◼ ► I really just want a larger version of what I already have in the iMac because the iMac Pro monitor is already dramatically over specced for what I actually use it for.
00:39:37 ◼ ► And so for Apple to make a really nice $6,000 one that's great but I still don't need it.
00:39:44 ◼ ► So I'm really leaning towards iMac Pro still because I have it already first of all so it's kind of free.
00:39:52 ◼ ► So I have it already and it's just really good and there's nothing wrong with my iMac Pro.
00:39:59 ◼ ► And so maybe if things start going bad in a few years or if I have problems with the screen of the iMac Pro that might push me in the direction of a Mac Pro to separate those concerns.
00:40:20 ◼ ► Because once that configurator goes up suddenly Marco's trigger finger gets a little itchy.
00:40:24 ◼ ► You know I give you a hard time Marco but in a lot of ways I feel like the both of you, I think John more than Marco, but the both of you have been longing for this computer since probably before the trash can came out.
00:40:44 ◼ ► And I will be flabbergasted if you don't at least pull a, I don't know if it's a pulling a Steven or pulling a Marco at this point because you two are competing over who buys and resells or returns computers more often.
00:40:58 ◼ ► Anyways you'll pull a something and buy one of these and then I suspect you'll end up keeping it but I am not nearly as confident as I was before we started really thinking about what this pricing is going to be.
00:41:13 ◼ ► But I will be utterly flabbergasted if you don't at least briefly have one that you own in your house even if it leaves within the two week return window or perhaps like the two to six months Marco quote unquote return window wherein you will sell it to somebody else.
00:41:54 ◼ ► I wouldn't blame you. I mean I might drive there to pick it up. I probably wouldn't let you ship it but.
00:41:59 ◼ ► No you would totally do your little grumble like well you know the GPU just died. Probably wouldn't have happened if.
00:42:21 ◼ ► Marco I cannot possibly agree with you more on this issue. There is not a chance that I would sell John.
00:42:27 ◼ ► And now giving it to him which of course you wouldn't do with a computer that's expensive.
00:42:41 ◼ ► And if it's something that's too expensive for that I'll sell it to a stranger on the internet.
00:42:45 ◼ ► Because I don't want there to be that awkwardness of like if something goes wrong with it down the road.
00:42:54 ◼ ► But among the list of people I know John would be like the last person I would sell it to.
00:43:00 ◼ ► It's better to sell it to somebody you know because I know that you don't mistreat your hardware.
00:43:04 ◼ ► So it wouldn't be a suspicion in my mind that you would like you had stored it in a room with 700 cats.
00:43:11 ◼ ► And been chain smoking in front of it for a year and then you know dropped it off your desk.
00:43:22 ◼ ► Through a mishandled by UPS or anything else which is why I drive to go get it or whatever.
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00:44:53 ◼ ► No matter what your skill level is, Squarespace makes it super easy to make a site that not only is awesome but looks modern.
00:47:07 ◼ ► but it's really a great idea and one of the things they talked about during the keynote
00:47:44 ◼ ► so before we talk about forcing people to use it, any other notes about kind of what this is?
00:47:57 ◼ ► It's easy if you just kind of glance at this and the rule to think that they are going to require
00:48:29 ◼ ► because I don't have an Overcast login screen that says sign in with Google, sign in with Facebook.
00:48:37 ◼ ► The only people, as the rule is written, the only people who are required to do this right now
00:48:41 ◼ ► or who will be required this fall are apps that offer sign in with third party thing as their account system.
00:48:51 ◼ ► They always call it, in websites they call it sign in with email, which is basically make an account on my system
00:48:57 ◼ ► or don't bother making an account and we'll just authenticate you using whatever your social network or thingamabobber is.
00:49:07 ◼ ► And then the private email thing is kind of like the thing that tech nerds have done forever
00:49:13 ◼ ► where they give a unique email address to each service, it's just appending a plus and a service name or something like that.
00:49:18 ◼ ► So that when they get spam, they can have the satisfaction of knowing, aha, I only gave this specific email address to this company
00:49:28 ◼ ► What they do with that information, other than being satisfied briefly, I don't know because every company sells your email address.
00:50:09 ◼ ► You do want them to stop spamming you, but you also still want to get the email that confirms your order
00:50:17 ◼ ► I think the most interesting thing about that option, though, is Apple has said they won't retain any of your messages.
00:50:28 ◼ ► The way this system works is big, long, cryptic, weird looking hex string at something.something.apple.com.
00:50:42 ◼ ► The Apple server, using the email system as we know it, then stores and forwards that email to your actual address.
00:50:51 ◼ ► So we are essentially trusting Apple to not look at these emails, the vast, vast, vast majority, which are not encrypted in any way.
00:51:00 ◼ ► Most people don't have, you know, signing keys and all sorts of other stuff, even though you can.
00:51:04 ◼ ► So there is an inherent part of this feature that relies on people having trust in Apple,
00:51:11 ◼ ► which I think is entirely well founded because Apple doesn't make money by scanning your email and selling advertising based on what the content of it or so on and so forth.
00:51:21 ◼ ► Apple is the, has the best reputation for privacy among these big companies, actually is the best on privacy for, you know, for the economic reasons.
00:51:31 ◼ ► And so I think this won't be much of a barrier because people honestly don't even understand what all the other big companies are doing with email.
00:51:41 ◼ ► Because if you give the company, if you give this online store your actual email, the email will not necessarily pass through Apple on its way back to you.
00:51:51 ◼ ► Because again, email is storing forward and you have no idea how many places your email is being stored and forwarded to and who gets access to it.
00:52:09 ◼ ► And the final thing I think is interesting about this, and the reason I've wanted a feature like this for such a long time, and the reason people offer sign in with Facebook, sign in with Google.
00:52:39 ◼ ► Do you remember that? Where you had to pick a username, and the username you wanted would be taken.
00:52:43 ◼ ► And so you wouldn't even be able to remember what the heck you put, because your first and last name are taken, your first name is taken, your last name is taken, your first and last initial are taken.
00:52:52 ◼ ► Thankfully, from the even worse old days till today, most sites have switched to doing an email address, which hopefully you have some stable version of.
00:53:00 ◼ ► Which is, again, not a great system, especially when you use third-party email vendors on a domain that you don't own.
00:53:06 ◼ ► But no one wants to set up an account. I don't want to put in my first name and last name.
00:53:09 ◼ ► I don't want to have to put in my address. I don't want to have to uncheck all the check boxes about the spam.
00:53:20 ◼ ► So sign in with Facebook is like, "Oh, I'm already signed into Facebook in all my web browsers and in the application and on this phone."
00:53:27 ◼ ► So I'll just tap the sign in with Facebook, and it will bounce me through the little single sign on thing.
00:53:32 ◼ ► And I won't even have to enter anything because I'm already signed in and the embedded web view already has my cookies.
00:53:48 ◼ ► Every time I use it, I regret it because I use the sign in with Google, not sign in with Facebook, obviously.
00:53:54 ◼ ► But I don't like the idea of Google being that much of a linchpin, even though my email address is a Google anyway.
00:54:01 ◼ ► And so, anyway, it's convenient in the moment. Long term, perhaps, it's not that great.
00:54:08 ◼ ► But the advantage that Apple has is they have even less friction than sign in with Google and sign in with Facebook.
00:54:14 ◼ ► Because while you're using your phone, you are signed in to your Apple ID if you have any iCloud.
00:54:21 ◼ ► I don't even know. Can you even get onto your phone without any kind of iCloud sign in? I suppose you probably can.
00:54:29 ◼ ► Yeah, but nobody does that. Because if you want to do anything useful on your phone in any way like buy apps,
00:54:35 ◼ ► which is a thing I feel like you might want to do on your phone, you're going to have an Apple ID and you're going to be signed into it.
00:54:41 ◼ ► And that sign in process has access to touch ID and face ID and your keychain with all your passwords on it
00:54:49 ◼ ► that sync across all your other Apple devices, even if you don't use a third party piece of software.
00:55:01 ◼ ► I just want it to be like when I make a purchase in the App Store or Apple Pay on the web,
00:55:06 ◼ ► where it just, like, I'm staring at the screen and it looks at my face and it approves it and it goes through.
00:55:11 ◼ ► I barely even need to hit anything except for the double tap on the side thing for Apple Pay.
00:55:15 ◼ ► But for login, you won't have to do anything except for hit sign in with Apple, continue to stare at your screen and get signed in.
00:55:21 ◼ ► Using an account that you probably already have from a company that has the best reputation and privacy in the entire industry
00:55:27 ◼ ► that you already trust with a certain amount of information because you're using an iPhone and you're presumably buying apps from the App Store.
00:55:50 ◼ ► I already have an Apple identity. I'm probably always going to have an Apple identity for as long as the company exists.
00:55:56 ◼ ► I'm already signed into it everywhere. It's the ultimate, you know, friction reduction in sign in that is possible on the devices that I use.
00:56:08 ◼ ► So I'm looking forward to this feature. I probably won't use the private email thing because honestly, everybody has my email.
00:56:26 ◼ ► No, you won't. You won't get less. Anyway, I'm probably not going to use that feature, but they're nice for including it.
00:56:30 ◼ ► And it will make paranoid people happy and give them something to do as they deny people access to the email by turning it off.
00:56:39 ◼ ► But I'm really looking forward to signing in as easily as I pay for stuff with Apple Pay. Probably even easier.
00:56:48 ◼ ► So the short answer is I don't know yet. If I were starting brand new today, if I didn't have an existing app to have legacy about, I wouldn't have an account system at all.
00:57:03 ◼ ► I would store everything in CloudKit and try not to even run servers. And just get myself out of that business.
00:57:12 ◼ ► There's reasons why now I'm regretting where I currently stand. First of all, I'm going through a whole bunch of server upgrades and database upgrades and everything.
00:57:26 ◼ ► Like it's like, oh man, I wish I could just get rid of all this user data. And I'm trying to.
00:57:30 ◼ ► But another part is that the future world of where Apple is pushing us as soon as this fall is multiple devices.
00:57:39 ◼ ► And Overcast has a sync backend and a web player and has had an iPhone and iPad app for years.
00:57:45 ◼ ► So I'm already in the multi-device world. But where they're really pushing us is for a lot more people to have multiple instances of Overcast.
00:58:01 ◼ ► In fact, I think already the Watch app, not the standalone playback, but I think the Watch app in general has significantly more users than my iPad app.
00:58:12 ◼ ► As I'm facing the prospect of rebuilding my Watch app again to be an independent app, as well as looking at the Catalina, I'm sorry, the Catalyst version to have the Mac app also exist.
00:58:23 ◼ ► I'm looking at a whole bunch of places where people are going to have to log into Overcast.
00:58:27 ◼ ► And every time somebody has to log into their existing account, that introduces the potential for them to abandon the effort and just say forget it and delete the app.
00:58:40 ◼ ► And they have two different accounts and they have a problem and they lose their data or they email me or they get all confused.
00:58:47 ◼ ► So having all this account stuff is a pain and it's a pain for everybody, for the users, for me to have to manage it and own it and everything.
00:59:02 ◼ ► I would love to migrate to an entirely CloudKit based system, but I don't think I have time this summer to do that.
00:59:12 ◼ ► That would probably take six months, first a few months to implement it and then a few months to fix all the bugs that would result.
00:59:23 ◼ ► So I would love to be in a place where I was starting fresh and had no accounts at all.
00:59:55 ◼ ► But then I worry like, is everyone just going to tap this and now they have a third account?
01:00:01 ◼ ► You'd have to port them, like have a migration process where if they tapped it, and then Apple offers APIs for you to be able to do this.
01:00:10 ◼ ► If they use the same email address to sign up for their account or you could say, are you sure you have another account?
01:00:17 ◼ ► Or you might have a record of their other account on the other devices like you do now for the sign in across iPad and iPhone.
01:00:22 ◼ ► Yeah, like right now I do iCloud syncing of the login token so that way when you set up the app on a new iCloud connected device,
01:00:37 ◼ ► Which is how I can have email and password less accounts that still have multi-device sync.
01:00:46 ◼ ► But like you mentioned CloudKit and everything, that was originally one of the big selling points of CloudKit.
01:00:50 ◼ ► CloudKit was essentially sign in with Apple because it's like, oh, each user can have a certain amount of data.
01:00:57 ◼ ► It's like, well, what do you mean each user can have a certain amount of data? How do you know what user the data belongs to?
01:01:14 ◼ ► Like this seems like an ideal fit for the way you want to deal with accounts by not dealing with them.
01:01:20 ◼ ► But you do have this legacy problem and you'd have to somehow figure out how to convert and it'll be a big pain in the butt.
01:01:25 ◼ ► If you could magically convert all of your accounts to sign in with Apple accounts, I'm sure you would.
01:01:32 ◼ ► So you just have to, I mean, depending on what you think your growth curve is, like you could offer it as a conversion and push it on first launch and make all new users be faced with a giant default button to sign in with Apple and just sort of slowly drain the swamp and, you know, phase out.
01:01:51 ◼ ► That phrase had meanings in the software context before it was destroyed just like red baseball hats.
01:02:09 ◼ ► I will say, though, so one thing I've been doing as part of my big database migration is, you know, I've been running Overcast since 2014.
01:02:24 ◼ ► And GDPR happened and so all of a sudden I had to start, like, you know, making sure I was really adhering to these rules, which I mostly already was anyway.
01:02:36 ◼ ► My pre-GDPR privacy update, I added a splash screen at first launch to existing users saying basically prompting them to remove the email address from their account to convert email accounts into anonymous accounts.
01:02:51 ◼ ► And I added all this stuff to be able to go back and forth whenever you wanted to, change your password, change your email, whatever you want.
01:02:56 ◼ ► But I really encourage people, you know, on first launch to lose their email address basically in Overcast, which by the way created a ton of support problems.
01:03:05 ◼ ► Let me tell you, I'm still paying for that with, like, you know, people who, you know, basically lost track of their accounts because they then signed out or they deleted it unexpectedly.
01:03:17 ◼ ► Anyway, so I prompted everyone then and I also made it such that on the new user screen, I don't even give you a chance to create a new email account.
01:03:27 ◼ ► First you have to create an anonymous account and then if you want to add an email to it later in the account settings screen, you can.
01:03:33 ◼ ► The result of this is that my rate of acquiring new email addresses went down substantially, but I still had all of these user accounts from, you know, from the last four years before that, most of which had email addresses on them.
01:03:57 ◼ ► Holy smokes. Because it's been, so I basically, you know, I was smart enough to, for a long time now, to record on the user account the timestamp that they last either logged in or synced anything.
01:04:15 ◼ ► It turns out, you know, and I know how many active users I have and my number of total user accounts was many times that.
01:04:37 ◼ ► That's why VCs want to know your active user account, not your user account count. Because the number of user accounts you have is fairly meaningless.
01:04:46 ◼ ► Because tons of people create an account, try it for an hour, delete it, move on, right?
01:04:51 ◼ ► Or people accidentally create multiple accounts and they only end up using one of them or whatever.
01:04:56 ◼ ► So I had all these user accounts. So before I did this bulk delete, oh and my here stick was accounts that were not currently subscribers, had never bought an ad because I offer ad buyers a dashboard where they can log in and see the stats of the ads they bought.
01:05:28 ◼ ► In case somebody like creates an account and then it gets deleted immediately because there was no activity on it, right? That would be terrible.
01:05:37 ◼ ► And now the vast majority of my accounts that are left don't have email addresses on them.
01:05:47 ◼ ► I'm getting rid of as much user data as I can but I still need to get to that holy grail of like I just want none of this user data.
01:06:10 ◼ ► And I've experimented with various ways of doing this over the last few years but I haven't come up with anything that actually is a good idea yet.
01:06:16 ◼ ► Like one idea I had was to hash them all the same way you hash passwords and just store the hashes of email addresses.
01:06:36 ◼ ► But in a world where I have a Mac app, the ability to log into the website and use a web player becomes way less important.
01:06:58 ◼ ► Like I would still, in my scenario in my head here, I would still have web addresses that you could go to for each podcast.
01:07:10 ◼ ► It just wouldn't be tied to anybody's user account so you couldn't log into the website in this world.
01:07:18 ◼ ► So the only people this would really hurt if I got rid of that after I have a Mac app would be people who use the web player when logged into their account on like a Windows PC at work.
01:08:10 ◼ ► But I currently don't plan to because all it would be doing would be adding more robust support for something I don't even want.
01:08:36 ◼ ► But in the API, you have to say, the examples they always give, like if you want to ask them for their email address and their first and last name.
01:08:43 ◼ ► And I didn't dig into it deep enough to know, are they just saying that to say like, oh, if you want their name, you have to ask for that extra?
01:08:48 ◼ ► But I think the idea is, if you don't want any of that, don't ask for it and your app won't ever have it.
01:09:00 ◼ ► Then I could prompt everyone to sign in with Apple on first launch of the new version, associate that ID with their accounts, and just have that be the anonymous account.
01:09:34 ◼ ► No, because like I want, like when people, so I really want to have an independent watch app for this fall.
01:09:47 ◼ ► You all know the developers of the apps you use and you all are asking the developers of the apps you use.
01:09:59 ◼ ► Everything that we have access to now from WBC, all these new tools and APIs and platforms and everything.
01:10:09 ◼ ► This is going to be like, I have a feeling like this fall, we're going to be seeing a lot of really bad apps.
01:10:24 ◼ ► And a lot of developers who are just going to be like, sorry, my catalyst slash independent watch app isn't going to be ready yet.
01:10:36 ◼ ► It's going to be a long time for a lot of apps to update to all this stuff because there's just so much new stuff.
01:10:43 ◼ ► I would love for the first time you install my new independent watch app for that login screen to pop up.
01:10:58 ◼ ► Because there is kind of a massive question of like, how do you log in on the watch otherwise?
01:11:13 ◼ ► You just tell them to sign in by writing their email address with the Apple TV remote pointed at their watch.
01:11:21 ◼ ► Yeah, or I could have one of those terrible things where the watch displays a four digit alpha numerate code.
01:11:45 ◼ ► So I would love to have that experience be better for initial sign in for both the Mac app and the watch app.
01:12:53 ◼ ► two people who use the same Apple ID can no longer have two separate Overcast accounts.
01:15:38 ◼ ► One thing that really is a large degree of friction to adopting the new things we got this year,
01:16:17 ◼ ► And whether you do this the conservative way, like what I'm doing with a separate boot partition
01:17:03 ◼ ► And it turns out betas are terrible, and you don't want to run a beta on your development machine.
01:18:01 ◼ ► Lots of reasons like that, why your favorite apps might not have their Catalyst versions out on day one this fall.
01:18:33 ◼ ► I'm only signed into her phone as an iTunes store account, if that makes any sense at all.
01:18:41 ◼ ► It's still--it's not great, but that is not as bad as literally sharing the same Apple ID.
01:21:48 ◼ ► and we got our first Macintosh, my grandfather and my uncle also got one at the same time,
01:21:56 ◼ ► I guess it was my grandfather, my grandfather went to Mac user group meetings, Moog meetings,
01:22:07 ◼ ► It was like a weighted, rubber-coated ball inside a thing that had two little rollers that touched it,
01:22:20 ◼ ► I guess it's maybe a compromise between how smoothly you can slide the mouse over the surface
01:22:34 ◼ ► But then it's also smooth enough that there's not a lot of friction when you're moving the mouse.
01:23:03 ◼ ► The only real consideration is you have to have a surface that works with an optical mouse.
01:23:07 ◼ ► If you try to use your mouse on a mirror surface, you're not going to have a good time.
01:23:19 ◼ ► I personally do use a mousepad, because I don't like the feel of an optical mouse on a bare desk surface.
01:23:45 ◼ ► My current preference is one of those rubber-backed fabric-covered mousepads that's very, very thin.
01:23:59 ◼ ► Amazon sells one. I recently bought a new one, because the kids destroyed the one that's on the 5K iMac.
01:24:34 ◼ ► So a glass desk, it doesn't work, because there is basically not enough visible texture
01:26:00 ◼ ► They also sell Teflon tape and Teflon feet that you can stick on the bottom of your mouse.
01:26:27 ◼ ► Which is that from the days of the rubber ball, to the present, and to the foreseeable future,
01:26:39 ◼ ► So you have like, the rubber ball, you'd have those big long strips that you could pull off of all the crap that it had picked up on each wheel.
01:26:57 ◼ ► And so it is nice to, after a few years, be able to just replace that surface with something brand new.
01:27:04 ◼ ► If you are just mousing directly on your desk, depending on the texture of the desk and the material,
01:27:22 ◼ ► And then finally, the reason I like mousepads, is because they reserve the space on your desk where the mouse goes.
01:27:31 ◼ ► Like, if you have a cluttered desk, the mousepad is like staking a claim on this square over here.
01:28:52 ◼ ► And they would have the mouse, and there would be a centimeter of space to move it on three sides.
01:29:53 ◼ ► usually they would have added the PC to a desk that was just like a regular paper desk before that,
01:30:27 ◼ ► If there is an old PC in point-of-sale, there's never room for the mouse in point-of-sale.
01:31:14 ◼ ► but I genuinely can't recall any, but I am confident that in the past I definitely did that.
01:31:20 ◼ ► No, no, no. It's just a black basic mouse pad that probably cost me five bucks on Amazon.
01:31:25 ◼ ► So I like something to be on my mouse pad, but I don't want something dumb on my mouse pad.
01:31:29 ◼ ► I'm kind of annoyed. I think the Amazon Basics one has an Amazon thing or something on it.
01:32:26 ◼ ► I replaced it with an AmazonBasics because I don't want to use any more of the good Sun mouse pads,
01:38:09 ◼ ► Every single aspect of every single meal, there's something about it that's like a little bit off.
01:38:38 ◼ ► It was similar to last year, but I feel like there, I think I said the same thing last year.
01:38:50 ◼ ► Yeah, pretty much every lunch, or at least a lot of them, didn't even fill all the little cubbies.
01:38:57 ◼ ► You got the big cubby where whatever the main thing is, you got two or three small cubbies.
01:39:18 ◼ ► They didn't try to make some unidentifiable weird rice concoction or vegetable medley thing or whatever,
01:39:23 ◼ ► which shows a lack of effort, but on the other hand, that is always the most challenging thing.
01:39:35 ◼ ► because it could be like a wet thing that flops over into the main bin and makes the bread on the sandwich wet or whatever.
01:39:42 ◼ ► And also by not trying, they didn't try to do anything exotic for the main dishes, right?
01:39:52 ◼ ► Like, the very first lunch on the very first day was a sandwich and a chocolate chip cookie,
01:40:06 ◼ ► And so I think the best lunch I had at WWC was the first one, which was a boring sandwich,
01:40:30 ◼ ► So I was disappointed by the lack of ambition, but I was happy about the sort of going for the, you know,
01:40:36 ◼ ► the crowd-pleasing fat part of the curve, don't try to do anything fancy, just do a sandwich and a cookie in a reasonable way.
01:40:42 ◼ ► So I think it was a pretty good year for lunches, even if it was not particularly spectacular.
01:40:50 ◼ ► You know, I had forgotten, and CMF reminded me in the chat, what was the Mango Tango situation this year.
01:40:56 ◼ ► They were there. It wasn't one of the dark years, of which there were two or three, I think,
01:41:05 ◼ ► But I think I only had, like, one bottle, which I believe I had in line with Jon waiting to go see the Mac Pro, actually.
01:41:22 ◼ ► It's hilariously expensive, but you get it quote-unquote "for free" with your $1600 ticket from time to time.
01:42:07 ◼ ► Jon didn't do any research, Mango and Casey wouldn't let him, 'cause it was accidental.
01:42:18 ◼ ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM, and if you're into Twitter, you can follow them.
01:43:00 ◼ ► I got a picture of you holding up your Mango Tango. Is that really the only one you had?
01:43:07 ◼ ► I mean, and I was actually in the conference more this year than I had been for a while,
01:43:12 ◼ ► 'cause a lot of times I had every intention of going in, and then I would need to meet up with, let's say, Jelly,
01:43:50 ◼ ► they never used to do this in San Francisco, with the actual box lunch right next to it,
01:44:32 ◼ ► like a pleasing combination that I didn't feel like there was lots of some nut that I didn't like.
01:44:46 ◼ ► So, $72, I felt like that would probably be too much of those two-ounce nut bags for me.
01:44:51 ◼ ► Wow. I should also point out that they, at one point, had full-on KitKat bars and other things
01:45:44 ◼ ► and then I have to -- I mean, part of it, honestly, is it's kind of nice that I'm avoiding Beta 1 mostly,
01:45:51 ◼ ► but Beta 2 is terrible, and I'm faced with this massive amount of stuff to do for the summer,
01:46:03 ◼ ► but one of the things I have to do -- by the way, I have to rewrite my audio engine partly
01:46:09 ◼ ► because they have officially deprecated the AU graph API that I've been using to render audio,
01:46:15 ◼ ► and they kind of said that unofficially two years ago, so I knew this was going to happen.
01:46:21 ◼ ► I really have to move to AV audio engine for lots of reasons because the audio graph stuff is --
01:46:38 ◼ ► And I need to rewrite an audio engine that will work on the watch anyway, and AV audio engine allegedly will,
01:46:45 ◼ ► so I have to rewrite the audio engine for that. I'm also working on a multi-column view
01:47:32 ◼ ► so it fits one or zero columns, you have to then tear those view controllers out of those navigation controllers
01:47:39 ◼ ► and stick them in either one navigation controller with them stacked, or stick them all with one with an app playing screen.
01:47:44 ◼ ► It's this whole thing that is surprisingly complex and just requires a lot of moving code around,
01:47:57 ◼ ► Not to mention the cosmetic issues of how do you lay this out in a way that doesn't look ridiculous
01:48:05 ◼ ► Just having a three column view, that's going to be two weeks of work right there, probably,
01:48:21 ◼ ► First I need a multi column view, that way my Mac app, I think if I can rank the importance of what I have to do for this fall,
01:48:29 ◼ ► number one is the Mac app, because that is the thing that will get me the most new ground covered,
01:48:59 ◼ ► I have to fix iOS 13 stuff first, which I haven't done, so I should really be doing that now.
01:49:24 ◼ ► The only reason that's not higher on the list is that I already have an independent-ish watch app,
01:49:45 ◼ ► So I have those three things to do, and I'm like a quarter of the way through the first thing.
01:50:02 ◼ ► I don't mean this in a mean way, but I do find there to be a little bit of humor in the thought that I just had,