00:00:00 ◼ ► It's been so long since we've recorded last. It has been one week, right? Right, everyone?
00:00:07 ◼ ► I love, it's such an old gag, and I feel like they did this on Wayne's World at some point or another, but when they do like the completely ridiculous dub, you know, "Hey, it's so great to see you guys, it's been one week since we've spoken last!" I love those gags, it cracks me up every time.
00:00:25 ◼ ► I have, in a move that will surprise probably nobody, I have a rip of a Blue Man Group DVD in my Plex.
00:00:35 ◼ ► They are so good! I saw them in New York City actually a couple of times many, many, many years ago. I saw them in Charlottesville once, and they're like concert tour. Anyway, at the end, I forget what, there's two of these concerts in my Plex, and at the end I ripped both of them myself.
00:00:49 ◼ ► After one of them, they bring someone up on stage, like an audience member, because they want to introduce the band and they don't talk, and so they say, "Now we're going to introduce the band!" and blah blah blah blah blah. "Thank you!" Insert name of city here. "Oh, Dallas!"
00:01:04 ◼ ► So like the lady up there literally reads "Insert name of city here" before she realizes what's going on. I don't know, maybe you had to be there. No, you can cut that out, Mark, that was fun.
00:01:12 ◼ ► No, it's fine. I was there. So we've all seen Blue Man Group live. How does this, I didn't think it was that common of a thing, but there you have it.
00:01:18 ◼ ► Oh, wait, really? We haven't all seen The Godfather Part II. Anytime. Right? I know, but Blue Man Group, we're all set there.
00:01:27 ◼ ► We have important things to talk about, even though we're talking about it from the future. We have breaking news. I believe you mean it was breaking last week.
00:01:36 ◼ ► Yes, I'm sorry, last week there was breaking news that apparently, hypercritical sharks are back, baby! Yeah, every five years. I spent a long time trying to search the internet for an animal that does something every five years, like migrates or molts.
00:01:53 ◼ ► The locusts are like some prime number, like 17 years or something. I couldn't find any animals that migrated, but anyway, like a fictional animal that migrates every five years, every five years, hypercritical sharks return.
00:02:07 ◼ ► What the heck are hypercritical sharks, you may be asking. Well, hypercritical is a podcast I did a long time ago, and I think after that podcast ended, I made a website that I called hypercritical.
00:02:18 ◼ ► I talk about it here. This is just my personal website. It's got a bunch of crap on it. And I post on it occasionally. And then I made a t-shirt to both commemorate/celebrate the podcast that was, and also just like a t-shirt for my website, which is a thing people used to do in the age of blogs.
00:02:34 ◼ ► What's a website? Yeah, right? Yeah, exactly. And then some people bought them and I was like, "Oh, that was fine." And then five years later, people were like, "Hey, I spilled coffee on my hypercritical shirt," or, "I missed it last time you sold it. Are you ever going to sell them again?"
00:02:47 ◼ ► And after five years, I said, "You know what? I will sell them again." And so I sold them again, and people bought them. And I said, "All right, this is the thing now. Every five years, I'm going to sell t-shirts."
00:02:57 ◼ ► Which I can tell you is not a great business plan if your goal is to make money. But if your goal is to make sure that people who want hypercritical t-shirts have them, every five years seems about right.
00:03:07 ◼ ► So I put a post up on my website, and I have a little convenience URL, which we've talked about this before on the show, and I think this is an important last for anyone who has a website.
00:03:18 ◼ ► So the URL is hypercritical.co/shirt. And the reason it looks like that, that redirects to another thing, but the reason it works like that is because if I ever have a shirt for hypercritical, that will redirect to whatever it is.
00:03:34 ◼ ► That's why we do ATP.fm/star that may redirect somewhere, or maybe a landing page or whatever, because it's a URL that we control that is short and easy to read on a podcast, easy to type in, and it goes to whatever the most relevant thing is.
00:03:47 ◼ ► Rather than me reading off a big long URL, rather than me, I've seen some people that use a URL shortener that redirects to their gigantic URL of the thing, a URL shortener that they don't control. Those are all bad ideas.
00:03:59 ◼ ► This will redirect to the post where I talk about the shirts a little bit. It's not that complicated, the shirts, you can buy them. I describe it as a really, really slow, non-renewing subscription plan to hypercritical t-shirts.
00:04:12 ◼ ► So it's every five years, right? And if you miss it, they're not coming back until 2028, and it's like a subscription because I think it's the same people buying the shirts.
00:04:21 ◼ ► Because after five years, the shirt's getting kind of threadbare, the printing is fading in the wash, maybe you spilled something on it, maybe you got a hole in it or something like that.
00:04:32 ◼ ► Yeah, maybe you changed sizes. Some people have said that their old shirts are surprisingly tight on them now and they can't understand why.
00:04:43 ◼ ► Definitely. There are a couple changes this year. People always ask for Tri-Blend. The reason I don't Tri-Blend is I like them to be solid colored. And I know some people don't like that, but they're my shirts, so it is what it is.
00:04:54 ◼ ► But now there are some offerings where it's solid colored Tri-Blend. This is a first for Cotton Bureau. So you can get white or black in Tri-Blend and they're both solid colored.
00:05:04 ◼ ► And then I also added a new color, pink, which you can think is in celebration of the Barbie movie, which my daughter is very excited about. And she really wanted a pink shirt, so she's going to get one. And if you want one, you can buy one too.
00:05:16 ◼ ► What does it look like? It's the little classic Mac pixel art logo that I drew of the front view of a classic Mac. It's a weird pixel size. It's not like a 32x32 or 16x16. It's something in between with weird chunky pixels.
00:05:29 ◼ ► Anyway, it's got the word "hypercritical" underneath it in the same serif font that you will see on my website. And it comes in the signature hypercritical color of gold, which I hope they never stopped making that.
00:05:41 ◼ ► In fact, about six months ago, I asked our person at Cotton Bureau, "Do they still have that gold color?" I don't know what I would do. But anyway, it comes in gold, but also you've got gray, navy blue, black, white, and now pink.
00:05:51 ◼ ► I'm guessing there's been a few boxes of these sitting at Cotton Bureau for approximately five years and no one else is using this color for shirts.
00:06:02 ◼ ► I don't know if we've ever done gold ones. I'm trying to think. Maybe we should. If we did it, we would put black on it. If we did an ATP shirt, we'd probably put black on this one.
00:06:11 ◼ ► We had a yellow variant of the ATP monochrome shirt this past sale, but it was pretty pale.
00:06:19 ◼ ► It's not yellow, it's a banana. It's that currently fashionable, faded, dusty color. Even the pink is kind of a dusty pink, but this gold is more like orangey-yellowish kind of gold thing.
00:06:32 ◼ ► Anyway, if you want to know what the deal is, you can read the post. It's not that long. I just wanted people to know.
00:06:38 ◼ ► I know you're out there, you're listening to the show, you have a Hypercritical t-shirt.
00:06:42 ◼ ► If it's getting threadbare, think about buying another one. Or if you missed out on it last time, give it a try. If not, see you all again in 2028.
00:06:49 ◼ ► To put things in perspective, the last time these shirts were on sale, I might have had a real job, and Michaela was certainly an infant.
00:06:57 ◼ ► And now I am five years in on not having a real job, and Michaela is entering kindergarten.
00:07:04 ◼ ► So she will be in, what, the end of elementary school the next time these are for sale? That's terrifying.
00:07:09 ◼ ► Alright, well, please go to hypercritical.co/shirt and check out the fine-fine wares that John Siracusa has for you to purchase.
00:07:18 ◼ ► And please go ahead and purchase. It helps John. It doesn't help Mark or one eye, but that's okay. We like helping each other.
00:07:25 ◼ ► We have some follow-up. We have some EV-related follow-up first from Sam Balsamid, who is one of the hosts of the Excellent Wheel Bearings podcast.
00:07:33 ◼ ► This is a little bit long, but I think it's worth it. Sam writes, "The SAE J1772 connector, which is the top circular portion of the CCS connector, predates NACS.
00:07:43 ◼ ► The standard was finalized in 2009 and debuted in production in 2010 in the Gen 1 Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf.
00:07:48 ◼ ► However, that same connector was designed as an AC charging plug supporting up to 240 volts.
00:07:53 ◼ ► As Tesla was developing the Model S, they wanted DC charging support at 400 volts, so they created what is now called NACS to support both AC and DC charging.
00:08:02 ◼ ► The CCS connector was being developed at the same time, but the standard wasn't finalized until mid-2012, about the same time as the Model S was launching.
00:08:08 ◼ ► There are two CCS variants, Type 1, which features five pins in the AC portion for North America, because we only have single-phase AC here,
00:08:15 ◼ ► and Type 2 for Europe, where they have three-phase 240 volts as the standard, has the two extra pins in the AC portion.
00:08:21 ◼ ► On top of the EV weight, they are heavier, but they don't typically have larger brakes than internal combustion engine vehicles because they rely so much on regenerative braking.
00:08:29 ◼ ► To Jon's comment about not having small nimble EVs with rear drum brakes, let's take a look at the rear axle of the Volkswagen ID.4, which has drums.
00:08:39 ◼ ► I would say that the ID.4 is not what I would call small or nimble. Also not a very good EV, by the way.
00:08:45 ◼ ► From what I understand, it is not a very good EV. From what I understand, it is not very nimble.
00:08:58 ◼ ► The ID.4 is also 8 inches taller, the same width, and here it comes. Anywhere from 1,400 to 1,600 pounds heavier than the Accord. That's not a small difference.
00:09:15 ◼ ► You should do volume. Because the car is taller and because it's an SUV shape, it definitely looks much bigger.
00:09:24 ◼ ► I know, but it's all low-slung nose, you know what I mean? Whereas this thing is just gigantic. This thing doesn't even have a frunk either, by the way.
00:09:29 ◼ ► VW didn't have the short stubby nose, but if you open up the front of it, you can't put anything there, so there's no frunk.
00:09:55 ◼ ► Although, I will point out when I was looking at the specs of this thing, in passenger capacity, my car is bigger.
00:10:13 ◼ ► This thing has no nose, a little stubby thing, because it's an EV. I have an entire engine in front of me.
00:10:17 ◼ ► More interior shoulder room for the same width of car. Look at the shoulder and hip room in the back seat.
00:10:24 ◼ ► The ID.4 is not a good car, and it's definitely not nimble, and I wouldn't call it small.
00:10:29 ◼ ► And the final thing I'll point out is, the Honda Accord is the biggest car Honda sells.
00:10:33 ◼ ► Not biggest SUV, biggest car Honda sells. It's not a small car! It's big! It's the big one!
00:10:51 ◼ ► Finally, while the weight does cause more wear and tear on the roads, there's also another major issue that you all overlooked.
00:10:59 ◼ ► Sure, they don't have a tailpipe, but they do produce a lot of particular emissions, which cause a variety of respiratory diseases such as lung cancer.
00:11:06 ◼ ► The weight and that lovely instant torque that Marco was going on about cause dramatically more tire wear.
00:11:11 ◼ ► When tires wear, the rubber doesn't just magically disappear. It becomes airborne particulate matter.
00:11:16 ◼ ► Modern diesels and gas engines are remarkably free of particulate emissions, but tires and brakes are now the number one source of particulate matter emissions in cities.
00:11:29 ◼ ► But presumably less particulate brake matter though, right? Because again, regen, not having to use brakes is not...
00:11:35 ◼ ► Brakes also don't just disappear to nothing. But I mean this argument, while this is probably factually true, look, anytime you're going to be driving a multi-thousand pound box hundreds of miles as part of a routine part of your life,
00:11:55 ◼ ► Yeah, if you're looking at like, should I buy a gas powered car or a clean electric car, it's kind of no contest. Yes, EVs have a few downsides.
00:12:06 ◼ ► You don't have to throw away your gas car that works perfectly fine. But next time you get a car, if you get an EV, you're probably making a better choice for the environment overall.
00:12:13 ◼ ► This is why everyone is interested in battery technology for EVs because all these problems that we're talking about stem from the fact that gasoline is incredibly energy dense and battery is far less so.
00:12:25 ◼ ► So that's why you need a huge amount of mass to try to provide the same amount of energy as a way smaller gas tank.
00:12:31 ◼ ► Because the gas tank in your car, most people don't even know where it is it's so small compared to the battery.
00:12:35 ◼ ► Whereas if you get an EV, you know where the battery is. It's huge, massive, and it's heavy.
00:12:40 ◼ ► And that leads to more wear on the tires and so on and so forth. So battery technology, like the promise of solid state batteries, which are always five to ten years away.
00:12:48 ◼ ► But I think there's another round of stories about breakthroughs and that if and when we get something like that, they're interested in them because they're more energy dense.
00:12:55 ◼ ► They can go through more recharge cycles faster and so on and so forth. So if we can get better battery tech that makes the cars lighter and takes up less interior space.
00:13:03 ◼ ► And you know, if we keep we keep working on EVs, we could eventually get to the point where the battery part of an EV takes up the same amount of room as the gas tank in a regular gas car today and contains the same amount of energy.
00:13:16 ◼ ► The other alternative we could do, speaking of small nimble cars, which thus far America at least has not had an appetite for.
00:13:22 ◼ ► You can just put a smaller battery in an EV like Marco's i3 thing. It will have less range because it's less energy dense, but it will also be lighter and more nimble.
00:13:31 ◼ ► And you'd have to get over the psychological hump of you mean I'm going to buy a car for fifty thousand dollars that gets 100 miles of range or gets 90 miles of range.
00:13:39 ◼ ► But if it's like a sports car or just a little fun little commuter, it will feel nimble and nicer than a car with the heavier battery.
00:13:48 ◼ ► And most people don't go on long trips. And in fact, if our charging infrastructure gets really good and it's a really small battery, it takes less time to charge.
00:13:55 ◼ ► I really hope we do come to that because I mean, it's kind of wishful thinking because in this country we keep buying bigger and bigger monstrous, ridiculous trucks to carry around two people to a grocery store or whatever.
00:14:05 ◼ ► Like we're going in exactly the wrong direction. But in theory, you know, when we're all dead, some new generation that is wiser than than we are apparently could start buying EVs with better battery tech and with smaller batteries that carry less energy that have a shorter range.
00:14:22 ◼ ► But are lighter, safer, have less, you know, have no CO2 emissions and have far less particulate matter from the wheels and tires because they're lighter cars.
00:14:31 ◼ ► I think that that kind of market for like a smaller, lighter, more nimble EV that will exist, but it's not going to exist yet.
00:14:41 ◼ ► Because that's the kind of thing that people I think will be comfortable buying one of those after they've already owned another EV.
00:14:52 ◼ ► And then, you know, when it's time to buy their next car or a second car down the road, then maybe they'll be like, you know what, for this other role in my life or for this next phase of my life, I only need 100 miles of range because everything and that will have given it time for the charging infrastructure to get better and things to get faster and everything else.
00:15:10 ◼ ► So I think that market is definitely going to exist, but just, you know, not for the first generation of most people having EVs.
00:15:19 ◼ ► You're talking about in America, though, and other parts of the country, I'm sure that will exist because it probably already does exist because they like small cars and they don't care about this stuff.
00:15:26 ◼ ► And also the thing that's going to fix it here is not people buying their second EV. They have to die.
00:15:29 ◼ ► And then maybe their kids will get their first, their kids won't grow up with the expectation of massive range and five minute fill ups or whatever, like changing the expectations because it's really hard to change, you know, people's mindsets about that.
00:15:43 ◼ ► It's pretty enlightened to say, well, I've got my long range car and my short range car.
00:15:46 ◼ ► Again, look at what people are buying, gigantic quote unquote pickup trucks that have four doors and probably more interior space than my Accord and this tiny vestigial bed in the back where they can jack the thing up 500 inches.
00:16:02 ◼ ► And the, you know, a six foot tall person, you can't see their head when they're walking in front of the car because the hood is up so high and they're just plowing over school children and destroying the roads.
00:16:11 ◼ ► And it is also, they can put one bag of groceries in the bed where they have no bed covers, who just rattles around and their stuff goes flying out on the highway. That's what Americans are buying.
00:16:18 ◼ ► That's very true. Sage and Mr. Palmer in the chat both pointed us to carsized.com, which I was not aware of, which shows it's comparing the size of your Accord versus the ID4.
00:16:34 ◼ ► Not that much taller either, John. It's taller for the ID4 is taller, but it is not that much taller.
00:16:40 ◼ ► Six to eight inches. It depends because the four wheel drive version is a little bit taller.
00:16:44 ◼ ► Either way. These are similarly sized cars. Does it give volume? Yes. Cargo volume anyway, it does.
00:16:49 ◼ ► No, no. I mean the volume of the car. I don't know. I mean, you can just multiply these numbers together. I mean, they're all metrics, so who knows how you multiply them.
00:16:56 ◼ ► I mean, like, I mean, like if you made a shell of the car and filled it with water, you know, what's the volume of the car?
00:17:00 ◼ ► What I'm saying is that if you saw my car next to the ID4, you'd think the ID4 was a bigger car. It's unquestionably taller.
00:17:06 ◼ ► Even though it's, even though it's like, like you said, almost a foot shorter, it just, it's more imposing presence. It's up higher. The roof is higher and it's not a sedan.
00:17:13 ◼ ► So the whole, the roof goes more or less straight back and it's just got a lot of volume. That's why it's got double the cargo space because it's got, you know, it's basically a wagon.
00:17:20 ◼ ► All these things, all these SUVs are basically gigantic, jacked up wagons with terrible plastic wheel arches. And look at that. Look at the hood.
00:17:27 ◼ ► It's short and it's stubby, but can you believe they didn't put a frunk there? Not a good EV. Not recommended. Try it. Try an IONIQ 5 maybe.
00:17:34 ◼ ► Diemiro just put up the review of the EV6 GT, which is their hot rod one. I really want an EV6 GT real bad. I'm not going to get one because I'm cheap and I don't need it.
00:17:47 ◼ ► It's a little weird looking, but not too bad. But that's the, if I were to buy today, that's what I would buy, I think, is an EV6 GT. They are quite, quite fancy.
00:17:57 ◼ ► Anyways, moving right along. We should talk about Tesla V4 Superchargers. I was not even aware of this. John, can you take us through this a little bit?
00:18:03 ◼ ► Sure, this is an older story from April, but just this was like when they were first coming out. It says, "Tesla has only one V4 Supercharger in the world. It opened in March to Tesla drivers and was recently made available to all EVs. The V4 Supercharger is located in..." Oh, here we go.
00:18:16 ◼ ► "Kartarvik, the Netherlands, which is just about an hour away from Amsterdam." I'm sorry people in the Netherlands. I have no idea how to pronounce anything in your language. "The V4 charger is theoretically capable of providing up to 615 kilowatts of power, 615 amps at 1000 volts."
00:18:33 ◼ ► So that was April. Presumably the V4 Superchargers are going to roll out across the entire world. I don't know how long, how far they have spread since then, but this is the future.
00:18:41 ◼ ► "To continue, the V4 charging stall is taller than previous generations and importantly includes a much longer cable. That means some non-Tesla EVs won't have to park at odd angles to reach the charging point and block other stalls."
00:18:52 ◼ ► Also, and I don't know where this came from, but it wasn't from this article. Someone sent us some info that the liquid-cooled charging cables that Marco was talking about last time, the Tesla charging cables, are thinner and lighter than the non-liquid-cooled ones.
00:19:05 ◼ ► And we're talking about on Tesla chargers. They sent a picture and it's dramatic difference. So the liquid-cooling, I guess it lets them use thinner conductors that are then cooled by the liquid.
00:19:15 ◼ ► But either way, I don't know if the V4 ones have that. It may be that they've had them since V2 or V3.
00:19:22 ◼ ► But ideally what we would all like is V4 caliber superchargers with liquid-cooled cables that are thin and light and long enough to reach all of our charging ports on all of our vehicles that have NACS charging ports on them.
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00:21:49 ◼ ► Listener Jason put up a toot about window management in iPadOS and I didn't understand the context of how we got here but watching this little video in this toot is quite funny.
00:21:59 ◼ ► Yeah to describe what it's showing. So Jason's moving around a window. He's got a small window in front of a bigger window and so he clicks on the bigger window and on the Mac the bigger window would come in front of the smaller window completely hiding it.
00:22:13 ◼ ► Like once the bigger window is in the front the smaller window is totally behind it and you can't see it. But iPadOS is trying to help out the user a little bit. They don't want to end up in a situation where somebody in iPad goes "Where'd that little window go? I don't see it anywhere."
00:22:25 ◼ ► Part of it I think is because iPad probably has less window management tools than the Mac. Like I don't know if they have something like a you know machine control or whatever or a command tilde to cycle through windows.
00:22:35 ◼ ► Although I think they probably do. Have you tried that on your keyboards in your iPad? Just command tilde to cycle through windows?
00:22:40 ◼ ► I gotta figure out how to get a second window and then I gotta figure out how to get rid of it. Hold on.
00:22:43 ◼ ► Anyway, what the video shows is when the big window comes in front of the small one the small one peeks its little head out of the side and says "Here I am." Like the small window moves on its own. You didn't move the window but as soon as you brought the big one in front of the small one pokes its little head and says "Don't worry I'm still here."
00:22:58 ◼ ► And if you move the big window to the side it pops out the other side and says "I'm still here. Look here I am. Here's a centimeter of me if you want to click on me. I'm still here."
00:23:04 ◼ ► Like it tries to keep itself visible which is helpful but also kind of weird. And part of the reason I put this thing in here. By the way, no. By the real time follow up it does not do command tilde.
00:23:15 ◼ ► At least not, I don't have stage manager on. At least not in the regular weird split everything stuff. Yeah I can't tell if this is stage manager because I don't see the little things on an angle.
00:23:23 ◼ ► And I put this in here, it's also Mac OS Sonoma has some window management stuff for widgets. Oh it does do it in stage manager. There you go. Although it's full of keyboard bugs.
00:23:32 ◼ ► Like it's like you know you hit launch new Safari window and then like hit command L for the address bar and like you know it goes to some other weird thing in the other window and you got it's ugh.
00:23:42 ◼ ► Is this on the beta or on the 16? Nope this is on the release version of 16. This is just iPad, keyboard and multitasking. They are extraordinarily buggy and they always have been.
00:23:51 ◼ ► Supposedly stage manager on iPad OS 17 is better and gives you more freedom in placement of windows and in Mac OS Sonoma there is a thing for placing widgets on the desktop and it reminded me of the app that I said I would make if I ever could.
00:24:07 ◼ ► If I ever made another app. It would be a window management app but unfortunately the API's for doing window management on Mac OS are really poor and you have to ask for accessibility permission to get any of them and trying to be in the Mac app store with accessibility permission is kind of a pain.
00:24:19 ◼ ► Yada yada. There is no clear path for me doing this but what I have always wanted out of Mac OS for window management is kind of like the other two dinky little apps I have made. Entirely aimed at my particular taste for window management and probably nobody else's.
00:24:33 ◼ ► Because what everybody else seems to want is the things you can get from like Moom or Rectangle or Hammer Spoon or any version of windows in recent years where you take a window and you are like I want this to be the left 50% and this window is the right 50%.
00:24:48 ◼ ► I want this one to be the upper right corner or upper left corner or full screen in the middle or full height. Dividing the screen up into pieces and making windows fill fractions of the screen and that is not what I want at all.
00:25:00 ◼ ► I am glad people who like it can have it. In fact it is built into the operating system to do stuff like that as well.
00:25:05 ◼ ► What I want from window management is essentially what you get in graphics apps when you turn on grids and guides like in a good vector program where it will snap to other window objects but also snap to edges but also snap to the center but also snap to a grid.
00:25:20 ◼ ► So I would want snappable grids and guides with configurable margins between everything. So instead of like in a graphics app where you snap to the upper left corner, upper right, so on and so forth, it would leave margins and instead of windows snapping directly to each other it would lead to margin between them and it would be configurable for how much margin you want around the screen.
00:25:39 ◼ ► So if you look at, well you can't look at it because I don't have a video for it in the show notes, but when you all get Sonoma and you start dragging widgets to your desktop you will see that Mac OS does this thing where it says hey so you're dragging a widget near another widget.
00:25:50 ◼ ► It will put this little outline and says if you release now we will snap the widget to be essentially aligned with that other widget while allowing a little gutter to be between it.
00:25:59 ◼ ► I think it's the first time I've seen Apple do something like that and it's like yes you're getting closer now just do this to all the windows and make it configurable so that you can, you know, they'd have to be able to snapping for tiling, snapping for abutting, you know, because all these things I don't want my windows to fill half or a quarter of the screen.
00:26:15 ◼ ► I don't want to divide it up like it's a piece of pie. I want to size them the way I want them but once I size them that way I like them to be able to be aligned to each other in a few patterns.
00:26:22 ◼ ► One of them is cascading tile from upper left to lower right. One of them is abutting but with margins and with leaving, you know, uniform margins between everything and, you know, just basic snapping stuff.
00:26:31 ◼ ► I know there is window snapping in Mac OS but they snap right to each other. They don't leave room for the drop shadows. They don't leave margins. Anyway, so I figured I would throw that out there. It's not like I'm ever going to make this app because I think it's basically impossible to make and Apple doesn't care.
00:26:43 ◼ ► But since Apple is kind of going in that direction, I want to encourage them. The thing you did with widgets, you can do something even better than that for every single window on the operating system. Just don't make it the default.
00:26:53 ◼ ► It kind of annoys me that the dragging snapping behavior in Mac OS since like Sierra or wherever they put this out, the default is to try to like, you know, not let you put one window or the other like, you know, and they butt up against each other.
00:27:04 ◼ ► I don't know if people even know this because nobody moves windows. They just zoom everything's whole screen. But if you take a window in Mac OS and jam it up against the edge of another one, it won't slide underneath it for a second. It will kind of stick on the edge before it goes underneath.
00:27:15 ◼ ► And that's the default. And to defeat that, you have to hold down a modifier key. I think it should be the opposite. I think the default should be freeform and modifier key should activate all this dragging stuff.
00:27:23 ◼ ► And then if I made this app that would have like you see in the graphics apps, those cool like on a retina display hairline thin guidelines like the affinity apps do like a like a red one for vertical and a blue one for horizontal on a green one.
00:27:37 ◼ ► Like they have different color coding things or whatever. It could be really cool if Apple actually included like deep hooks into window management Mac OS, but they sort of really don't.
00:27:48 ◼ ► All right. iCloud keychain integration is coming with third party browsers. So this was covered in MacRumors and a friend of the show, Ricky Mondello, I think actually tweeted not tooted about this, but Ricky wrote.
00:28:03 ◼ ► Can we, by the way, this is the stupidest time period. Like when we have all these different like Twitter like services and still Twitter itself that we're keep having to try to bounce between and figure out what's going to like win and oh God, what a pain in the butt.
00:28:19 ◼ ► Like I just at this point, like, you know, we're talking about last week about format wars with charging connectors. Now we have this stupid social network format war between all of these Twitter like services, all of which seem to have certain promise in certain ways and might have a decent future in certain ways.
00:28:35 ◼ ► Like at this point, I kind of just want one of them to win even though the one that wins if one is going to win right now would probably be either Facebook's thing or Twitter itself, but I'm getting so tired of everything being so fragmented.
00:28:50 ◼ ► You don't have to check all of them. Yes, it is annoying, but that's why we're rooting for the activity pub ones because then we don't want another proprietary one to win because we're just going through all this again.
00:28:58 ◼ ► We want activity pub to win if that can somehow happen and then you don't then you don't have to worry about it after that because you get to use the client you want. You can use a single like the whole idea is like what if there was a meta client to let you read all the services.
00:29:09 ◼ ► Well, that is never going to happen with proprietary services and Twitter won't even let you have a non meta client as in just a client that I know meta is overloaded now, but Twitter won't let you have it just a third party client that just reads Twitter, let alone a third party app that reads Twitter,
00:29:23 ◼ ► Noster, Blue Sky, Mastodon, Threads like no, they don't want that but activity pub gives that promise because if you have an activity pub client and an activity pub actually becomes widespread and open and interoperable, then you're done kind of like you can just pick which web browser you want and read web pages with many asterisks on Chrome only sites or whatever.
00:29:42 ◼ ► So, again, I think the web and email and those other things that the platforms that don't have owners are the best examples we have of how this can work and you can talk about all we have all the bad things about the web and all the bad things about email, but they're still way far ahead of Twitter or Blue Sky or Threads or you know any of that stuff so fingers crossed.
00:30:05 ◼ ► I mean the good thing is like there is this period of tumultuousness at I guess tumult is the term I speak for a living as as there you know as Twitter imploded and left this huge vacuum of demand for similar services.
00:30:21 ◼ ► Obviously there was going to be a whole bunch of stuff that that would spring up at once and we've already seen some like I think post I think we can safely say that not only not only is dead, but I would I would assert was never alive.
00:30:31 ◼ ► There's a bunch of ones that we can't remember the names for you were talking about proprietary services that were not built on a number standard they were trying to be the new Twitter.
00:30:40 ◼ ► I would even go as far as to say I think Blue Sky is probably dead because I think most of the energy that was going to that is now going to Threads like it like in terms of like.
00:30:48 ◼ ► Although Blue Sky is in theory also a decentralized protocol it's not an activity pub but in theory supposedly is a decentralized protocol and it actually has better decentralization in some ways than activity pub but right now a that's just theoretical they're not actually decentralized and be they may have lost momentum now that Facebook is coming.
00:31:06 ◼ ► Oh they definitely have lost my like because everybody who was looking for like a more user friendly even more Twitter like Mastodon they all went to Blue Sky and now they're all like oh Threads and they went they all went over there.
00:31:19 ◼ ► So I think I think Blue Sky is probably done and Blue Sky is still invite only that's the funny thing.
00:31:24 ◼ ► I know they I think that was huge strategic error but anyway Blue Sky I think is done post Noster I think those are all done I think we're going to be left with you know these three silos of whatever is left for Twitter which is still big you know so whatever is left for Twitter.
00:31:37 ◼ ► Mastodon and whatever else is working with activity pub and Threads and I don't and I consider Threads as I said last last week.
00:31:46 ◼ ► I consider Threads and activity pub to actually be fairly separate because I still don't even trust that they are going to integrate with it and as we said last week if and when they do integrate with activity pub from Threads.
00:31:58 ◼ ► I think it's going to be not what anybody actually wants and it's not going to be adding a lot of value to activity pub it'll try to just be mostly taking value from it and so it's not going to be what we imagine when if we hear oh this big social network is going to go into activity pub like.
00:32:15 ◼ ► I don't think it's going to do that for us so anyway I think we're going to be in this world of like Twitter and Threads will be the big dogs in the room you know and then we'll have our little nerd world of Mastodon which is going to be kind of like desktop Linux but not this time we're actually using it.
00:32:32 ◼ ► And we're going to be here for a while and it'll be fun and it'll be nerds but you know I think the mass market will go between those two services.
00:32:51 ◼ ► But I hope they continue to decline I hope they are not seen as appear to Threads I hope they just fade away and you know Threads and the activity pub thing I really am still holding out hope that they do actually because like I said last show they can they can actually federate and they'll still have 90% of everything like it doesn't hurt them that much.
00:33:09 ◼ ► The thing I am excited about activity pub I talked about this when we first talked about the second round of Mastodon stuff and I think people misunderstood me I was like oh newspapers should start their own mass audiences and stuff like that and they're like newspapers can't moderate stuff and blah blah blah and I think people misunderstood me what I was saying is newspapers.
00:33:25 ◼ ► And there any kind of thing governments whatever should start their own mass on instances and the only people on it are employees of the newspaper the only people on it are the people who work for that branch of government because it always just Twitter in that moment in time everything was on Twitter brands were on Twitter the president was on Twitter the government warnings about hurricanes like official crap was on Twitter.
00:33:47 ◼ ► Why is government stuff like it we communicate out to the world we have the emergency broadcast system on television and also we're tweeting about it on a proprietary service from a company that we don't control owned by a bunch of other people that eventually sells the Elon Musk that's not tenable the beauty of decentralization government make your own damn servers like the DMV server where I go to renew my license is not running on like you know Facebook pages for crying out like they have their own website is not a good website.
00:34:13 ◼ ► I'm not saying the government's great but like and for newspapers like journalists getting kicked off Twitter and getting censored newspapers start your own mass on instance and the only people honored your own employees and you will not have moderation problems because you can just fire them.
00:34:26 ◼ ► It's just it's literally it's just for your own employees and they can post about their stories there and they can keep from you can defend them from people harassing them there because it's a small instance that you control and they will do what you say because you're literally their bosses and it's their work account.
00:34:41 ◼ ► You know like and so there's a story like what I forget I was going to say the Netherlands but every time I guess the Netherlands it's not them it's Sweden but anyway some country somewhere recently put up a mass on instance because they were tired of posting official messages on Twitter and so now they have complete control over their message to I guess the tiny portion of their population that are computer nerds that are on mass it on but that's the future I want to see.
00:35:04 ◼ ► I don't like seeing I don't want like threads to win and then every you know tied brand detergent and the National Weather Service and the BBC and customer support for Delta Airlines are all on threads.
00:35:17 ◼ ► They should be on their own instances federated with every other instance findable by anybody who joins any instance in the Fed averse using the client of their choice.
00:35:27 ◼ ► You could say it's just like the web where anyone can view any web page using the browser of their choice as long as it's Safari or Chrome or maybe Firefox.
00:35:39 ◼ ► Honestly I think the ship has sailed on expecting organizations and governments and media organizations and things to actually use their own domains for much of anything I mean they were on Twitter for all these years and didn't think that was a problem.
00:35:57 ◼ ► But governments do have their own web pages they have .gov web pages so they do have their own domains.
00:36:02 ◼ ► I think logically I'm with you that you know logically it seems like it would be just like web domains or email domains where like you know you know you follow people at their website or whatever but I think in reality people like the benefits and ease of centralized services.
00:36:16 ◼ ► And so I think we're mostly going to just bounce between centralized services for social products for the foreseeable future.
00:36:24 ◼ ► Well it could be a centralized service run by the government but that would be socialism Marco so we can't have that. So all I'm saying is individual departments can set up their instances.
00:36:33 ◼ ► I think it would be fine because people would just search for like IRS and they would see IRS something something .gov and they would know that's the real one and you know like that kind of annoys me about the verification like Instagram has verification which is not really verification but whatever.
00:36:46 ◼ ► And Twitter has verification that is no longer really verification but one of the beautiful things about Blue Sky is it has verification through domain stuff and so does Mastodon.
00:36:54 ◼ ► And so if you know if you know a domain that you say okay well only you know IBM could control IBM.com and this account is verified with IBM.com I believe this is the real IBM account.
00:37:05 ◼ ► That works for governments because you don't get a .gov domain unless you're part of the government and it's pretty easy to tell IRS.gov that's probably the real IRS like I feel like that is a level of verification that we're already used to with the web and yes you can be spoofed and so on and so forth like with the web browsers have working been working against that forever.
00:37:21 ◼ ► But it's way harder to spoof than it is to get a blue check and change your name to IRS on Twitter.
00:37:26 ◼ ► It is but we've as nerds we've always had these challenges of like trying to communicate security and authenticity to the general public in some kind of easy to understand clearly visible way so that way people don't get phished and stuff like that.
00:37:41 ◼ ► As a practice we technologists have mostly entirely failed with this mission and I'm not sure it's a winnable mission.
00:37:47 ◼ ► We've tried different things like having the lock icon in the address bar and check the domain and we even tried to send a verification certificate that would show the business name in the address bar.
00:38:01 ◼ ► You'd have all these phishing emails and phishing scams that would have these big long domain names and they would work anyway because no one's really looking at that.
00:38:09 ◼ ► Whereas I think the Twitter verification checkmark the old one back when it was real actually worked really well but that required like human review like human verification and it kind of requires a global name space.
00:38:23 ◼ ► Like you know if you say you're you know that if you have somebody named John Syracuse with a with a blue checkmark you better be sure there's only one John Syracuse that most people are looking for.
00:38:32 ◼ ► There's another guy with the same name in a podcast unfortunately who also was verified back in the just like me back in the real verification days. It's tough.
00:38:40 ◼ ► At least he didn't invent a follow-up but still like that system was very human and accessible and I think largely successful.
00:38:52 ◼ ► That's the problem yeah but but that's like this I think we've seen over and over again like as technologists it's really hard slash maybe impossible to design systems that show oh this is the real person or the real business that you think you should be talking to and don't go over to this other website with this other domain name.
00:39:08 ◼ ► But it was the same on Twitter though because we think the blue checkmark was useful back in the old days but in the old days people casually complaining to Delta Airlines had no idea about the blue checkmark didn't even know where to look for it and their client had no idea what it meant.
00:39:19 ◼ ► It is not obvious and so they would just complain to at Delta and if someone else had at Delta they would get messages and if they were phishing that that plane was phishing and saying oh send me your credit card so I could send you a refund from your ticket they would get phished right.
00:39:35 ◼ ► I try to renew my license and I enter my credit card and decided it wasn't the real DMV.
00:39:38 ◼ ► It was a scam right. In some respects there's no getting around that like when you look up the address to somehow to find out where the DMV is to go get your license renewed and some shop is set up that looks like a DMV but it's not really and they take your money right.
00:39:50 ◼ ► Like it's always possible that it gets scammed. What level of technology you're at if you're in medieval times or if you're you know wherever you are you do have to somehow navigate the world to distinguish inauthentic from authentic.
00:40:04 ◼ ► Not doing it at all like Twitter where it's like hey anyone who pays $8 can get the one and only system we supposedly have for quote unquote verification is terrible but anything remotely official and under the control and systematic like domain names or whatever is better than nothing.
00:40:20 ◼ ► And I think domain names like people do eventually find their way to the real websites to renew their license right. Some people probably get scammed some people get phished but in the end the only thing that lets people know that they're the real DMV is Google search results.
00:40:33 ◼ ► And the fact that people who scam them the government probably finds them and has them arrested because it's a big enough deal to shut them down. Same thing with Delta Airlines.
00:40:41 ◼ ► If you're pretending to be a Delta Airlines website if you're pretending to do customer service Delta Airlines they'll find you as they're financially incentivized to get rid of you.
00:40:50 ◼ ► The App Store if you put up a scam threads app you only get 300,000 downloads before Apple gets rid of you. So it's not a perfect system but some system is better than that. Did you hear about that by the way that there was a threads by Instagram app that went up on the App Store and 300,000 people downloaded it.
00:41:07 ◼ ► Because how could App Review stop that? It's you know it's not like they're going over apps with a fine tooth cone looking for violations Casey.
00:41:15 ◼ ► We'll get to that in a little bit. We got really sidetracked on the iCloud keychain follow up so we should finish that.
00:41:29 ◼ ► Alright so Ricky wrote that Mac OS Sonoma brings Apple's password manager to Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and other browsers using their extension stores with the iCloud passwords browser extension.
00:41:38 ◼ ► If you're running the Mac OS Sonoma public or developer beta you can try it right now. You can autofill passwords and one time code, save new passwords and right click QR codes to set up code generators.
00:41:54 ◼ ► Is the existing iCloud's password browser extension that Apple ships for Chrome and Edge in conjunction with iCloud for Windows works out of the box on Mac OS Sonoma.
00:42:03 ◼ ► We don't have support for Mozilla Firefox at this time but it's a request that Ricky understands.
00:42:09 ◼ ► So that's great. I use Chrome and Safari and my passwords are on iCloud keychain but also Chrome has its own password manager and some passwords end up in there and it's kind of a pain.
00:42:21 ◼ ► It would be nice if they all were integrated into one place and it sounds like with Sonoma they will be able to be able to just use that Chrome extension from Apple.
00:42:30 ◼ ► We are sponsored this week by Collide and if you work in security or IT, let's face it as many of you, and if your company has Okta this is really for you.
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00:43:00 ◼ ► In that world phished credentials would be useless to hackers and you can manage every OS, even Linux from a single dashboard.
00:43:08 ◼ ► And you can get employees to fix their own device security issues without creating more work for IT.
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00:43:56 ◼ ► Start here. Before you start with this I want you to start by reminding everybody what your app is and what it does.
00:44:01 ◼ ► Ok so I'm working on an app that I'm calling CallSheet. CallSheet is the unofficial pitch is imagine if IMDB wasn't a pile of shit.
00:44:10 ◼ ► And imagine it was made by someone who actually gave a shit. And so what it is is it lets you look up...
00:44:16 ◼ ► This is the most Casey introduction ever. Just two swear words. I'm telling you about my app. I'm going to swear the whole time.
00:44:28 ◼ ► No it's fine. You've got to be you. People are getting the gist of it. I just want people to know what kind of app it is. You look up movies and TV shows right?
00:44:35 ◼ ► But the app does not make you swear at it. In fact the app is like the opposite. It's an anti-swear.
00:44:41 ◼ ► It makes you praise it and it makes you swear at all other apps for being so slow and crappy.
00:44:46 ◼ ► And we've talked about this app many times on the show. And people have sent feedback. In fact if you're an ATP member they all got access to the beta.
00:44:57 ◼ ► And during this entire time everyone's like... I think once you describe the app or once they try it they understand this kind of app.
00:45:03 ◼ ► Other apps like this exist. The IMDB app exists. IMDB exists. We've all been on the couch and watching the show and saying where is that guy from?
00:45:09 ◼ ► And you want to look it up. And yes you can go to the website to do it. Or you can use this app.
00:45:13 ◼ ► And if you imagine what the app would look like or the IMDB app or whatever it lists a bunch of TVs and movies and it shows like...
00:45:19 ◼ ► Here's the show you're watching and here's the actor. Here's George Clooney. Look at his little face.
00:45:27 ◼ ► At no time during the discussion of this app and we're all like how are we going to price it? What are we going to do with it?
00:45:32 ◼ ► Did any of the issues that Casey's about to describe come up? Because everyone's like...
00:45:36 ◼ ► That seems like a normal app, right? We didn't say like, well Casey are you sure an app like this is a thing that would be allowed in the app store?
00:45:44 ◼ ► But like this is an existing kind of app, right? You're just making a good version of it.
00:45:48 ◼ ► Right. So I submitted it Tuesday morning and we are currently recording from the past slash future. I don't know how it works anymore. Time. It's weird.
00:45:59 ◼ ► We're recording on the evening of Thursday the 13th of July. Yesterday overnight, or I guess two nights ago overnight, so it was yesterday at 1.57 AM New York time, I received my first of three rejections.
00:46:19 ◼ ► We noticed that your app did not meet all the terms and conditions for auto renewing subscriptions as specified in schedule 2 section 3.8b of the paid applications agreement.
00:46:26 ◼ ► We were unable to find the following required items in your app's metadata. A functional link to the terms of use or EULA, end user license agreement.
00:46:35 ◼ ► Okay. This is exactly the type of thing we were talking about. Like, oh, doing in app purchase and subscriptions is annoying. You always forget something.
00:46:42 ◼ ► So rejection number one, exactly what we thought it would be. Some detail of the subscription purchase flow, which you didn't have much experience with. Oh, you forgot to dot an I.
00:46:51 ◼ ► Right. Exactly. Now, the thing that kind of bothers me about this is that, I mean, leaving aside the fact that I was unaware of it, which that isn't an excuse, but I mean, this is not something that I felt like was a common piece of knowledge.
00:47:04 ◼ ► And I'm going on the assumption that if I look at 3.8b of the paid applications agreement, it will say something about how I screwed up.
00:47:12 ◼ ► That being said, what Apple seems to have wanted was a URL for my terms of use and potentially the privacy policy. I just put both in after this rejection.
00:47:22 ◼ ► But they want that in the app's description. Now, of the three of us, Marco, you have the most experience with doing anything with the app store.
00:47:31 ◼ ► Can you remind me, is it possible to click a link in an app's description in the app store?
00:47:38 ◼ ► Right. I'm telling you, this is why, like, I guarantee you, you ask any developer out there who has an auto-renewing subscription as part of their app, I guarantee you every single developer has had this happen to them.
00:47:53 ◼ ► Yeah, which is, again, like, it's fine. It's just, I don't understand the motivation behind it. I'm assuming it's some esoteric legal thing that they had to put in, but like, why would you put an unclickable URL into the app store description?
00:48:07 ◼ ► What are you going to do, take a screenshot of it and use the, what is it, lookup or whatever?
00:48:10 ◼ ► It's a thing that lets bad app developers, what they do is they see this and they rub their hands together, "Oh boy, oh boy, I'm going to put in a URL that's so long in Byzantine that no one will ever be able to type it correctly."
00:48:24 ◼ ► Yeah, they truncate them on the thing anyway. Like, no one even knows that you can expand that text to look at it.
00:48:30 ◼ ► So, I mean, it's fine. And honestly, like, as much as I was kind of like, "What the what?" Nevertheless, this is the whole point in putting out a build.
00:48:38 ◼ ► Like, if this was, if I ended up releasing the build that Apple still has, like, it would be fine. The screenshots weren't exactly what I wanted, which is going to come up again in a minute.
00:48:48 ◼ ► But I was waiting on a really good friend of mine to get, you know, like, fancy snazzy versions of the screenshot squared away, and the whole point of this was just trying to get through the App Store once, just to make sure I have crossed all Ts and dotted all Is.
00:49:04 ◼ ► And so I think, John, you said a minute ago, like, that was this rejection. I did not cross a T and I did not dot one of my Is.
00:49:14 ◼ ► Okay. So I resubmit, and they replied, I resubmitted sometime yesterday morning, I forget exactly when it was, but yesterday 4.13 PM, App Review writes, "Hello, thank you for your efforts to follow our guidelines. There are still some issues that need your attention. If you have any questions, we are here to help. Reply to this message in App Store Connect and let us know."
00:49:34 ◼ ► "Guide Line 5.2.2 Legal. Your app includes features for streaming TV channels, the content of which may be copyrighted. The use of third-party copyrighted materials requires documented evidence of your right to use such content in your app. Your app and its contents should not infringe upon the rights of another party in the event your app infringes on another party's rights, you are responsible for any liability to Apple because of a claim."
00:49:57 ◼ ► They provided a screenshot. The screenshot is a season, season two specifically, of the show Mushoku Tensei Jobless Reincarnation.
00:50:07 ◼ ► And it's a list of episodes, two of which have screenshots. The other, what is this like, the other 12 or so do nots.
00:50:16 ◼ ► That is their justification for the fact that apparently you can play video in CallSheet, which was an extremely interesting thing to read because I am the only author of code in CallSheet and I don't remember any ever doing anything with video.
00:50:35 ◼ ► Did your description neglect to mention that you can't watch television shows using your app?
00:50:46 ◼ ► Did you describe your app as a video streaming app anywhere, put it in that category or anything like that?
00:50:50 ◼ ► I did not. And the best part about it is you can't even watch a trailer in the app. Like that's something that hypothetically I would like to do at some point, but today, impossible. There is no video playback of any sort.
00:51:03 ◼ ► This is why people hate App Review because it's like they're spending enough time to look at all the little details of your app, but the person who sent this rejection has no idea what your app is supposed to do.
00:51:13 ◼ ► Like literally, it's not like they stumbled upon video in the app because it's not there for them to find.
00:51:18 ◼ ► And they apparently didn't read your description or understand what your claiming the app is supposed to do, nor did they use your app to determine what it does.
00:51:33 ◼ ► And to get a rejection like this is incredibly frustrating because you feel like someone's got just a dartboard and they're reading a book and your app comes in and they're like, "I don't know, let's say video streaming." Or you reject it.
00:51:46 ◼ ► Yeah, that's kind of what it felt like. And so I am upset, but I write back and I try not to swear and use kind words and say in so many words, "Hey, my app doesn't play video. Can you be more specific about what are you talking about here?" in so many words.
00:52:05 ◼ ► So I replied, again, this was 4.13 yesterday, I reply at 5 o'clock. 5.25, I get my third and final, so far, rejection. Hello, thank you for your response.
00:52:16 ◼ ► We did not find any streaming contents within your app. However, upon further review, we noticed that your app is not in compliance with the following guideline. 5.2.1, legal intellectual property.
00:52:25 ◼ ► Your app includes content that resembles Disney/Pixar material without the necessary authorization. Your app and its contents should not infringe upon the rights of another party.
00:52:34 ◼ ► In the event your app infringes another party's rights, you are responsible for any liability to Apple because of a claim. They hopefully provided screenshots to me.
00:52:41 ◼ ► These screenshots are my own App Store screenshots that I provided to them. One of them is the movie page for Spider-Man across the Spider-Verse. One of them is the person details page for Ming Na Wen.
00:52:56 ◼ ► And one of them is the Discover screen that has Elemental amongst many, many other movies on it. So I wrote back to them in so many words, like, "What?"
00:53:11 ◼ ► Now, the IMDb app exists, and I'm pretty sure they don't have bespoke agreement with Disney and Pixar for this. Is the issue that my screenshots contained it? Because I still think that's dumb. I didn't say this.
00:53:30 ◼ ► Well, and so here's the thing. So I said, is the issue the screenshots can't contain the content? Because I understand, well, I don't entirely understand it, but I can get behind that.
00:53:44 ◼ ► But I don't understand the way it's written right now. And actually what I said verbatim is, "Hello again. First of all, let me request again that perhaps a phone conversation would make more sense here?"
00:53:55 ◼ ► My phone number here in the United States is yada yada yada. I am happy to discuss. That being said, is the issue the screenshots? Yeah, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
00:54:02 ◼ ► And so here it was, I assumed, because I'm a dummy, "Hey, presumably since they seem to be looking at this reasonably quickly, you know, within half an hour to an hour of each of my replies, surely they're going to call me, aren't they?"
00:54:17 ◼ ► So that I wrote in at 5.31. And I thought, you know, I'll get on the phone with somebody, we'll spend 5-10 minutes hashing this out, they'll either tell me I cannot have Disney Pixar anything anywhere, or maybe they'll just say it can't be in the screenshots.
00:54:29 ◼ ► And whatever the case may be, I will work through it and we'll reach some sort of verbal understanding between me and App Review.
00:54:37 ◼ ► So that was 5.31. Yesterday at 5.52, "Hello! We appreciate your response and have scheduled a call with an Apple representative to discuss your apps review."
00:54:45 ◼ ► Okay, cool. "An Apple representative will call you on the number you've provided in the App Review information section of App Store Connect within the next 3-5 business days to discuss your app."
00:54:59 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, I was lucky you got it. Yeah, you are lucky to be in a call. But here's the thing, so that third one, now we're kind of getting somewhere.
00:55:06 ◼ ► But I would still be super mad about that because like, "Oh, so that one you sent about streaming video, that was just your first lazy guess?"
00:55:13 ◼ ► It's like when you're talking to one of those large language models and they sell you like 2+2=5 and you say, "No, 2+2=4, not 5."
00:55:20 ◼ ► The response is always, "Oh, I'm so sorry. You're right, I was mistaken. I thought that 2+2=5, but when I look now I see that it's actually 4."
00:55:28 ◼ ► So they say, "Yeah, you're not allowed to stream video on your app." And you say, "Uh, my app doesn't stream any video."
00:55:33 ◼ ► And by the way, you're lucky your turnaround time was fast enough because imagine there were days between that because they were busy or something, right?
00:55:38 ◼ ► That's true, that's very, very true. My app doesn't stream any video and they say, "Oh, you're right, I'm sorry. When I look again I realize your app doesn't stream any video."
00:55:45 ◼ ► It's like, when you look again, "Oh, sorry for the mistake." You can understand how I would make that mistake since I put the minimum possible effort into my job of doing app review.
00:55:53 ◼ ► But now that I look again, that's not actually the problem. Actually the problem is this.
00:55:57 ◼ ► And the problem they're talking about, maybe as far as we can tell based on their terrible writing and complete vagueness, makes sense because we don't know what the legal situation is with doing cover art for things like this.
00:56:11 ◼ ► But you're in the situation that I think everyone when we were discussing this app was, is like, "Well, apps like this already exist, so probably this is a thing you're allowed to do."
00:56:20 ◼ ► Because like you said, Casey, it's not as if every single app that is like a tracked client, because I have 50 of them, right?
00:56:26 ◼ ► You know, the one I use is TV, Television Time, which is different from TV Time, which is different from TV Forecast.
00:56:31 ◼ ► There's like a million apps that do this and they sync with the track service. Every single one of them show cover art for every TV show you're thinking.
00:56:37 ◼ ► Letterboxd shows cover art for all the movies that are in the entire thing, like every movie that's put out.
00:56:43 ◼ ► Do we think Letterboxd and Tracked and Television Time and TV Time and TV Forecast all have individual licensing agreements with every single movie made in the entire world for every single year for the entire history of movies and also into the future?
00:56:57 ◼ ► No. So we assume it is possible for a single developer to make an app like this without a team of lawyers to obtain rights for everything.
00:57:06 ◼ ► Because again, TV Forecast is a single developer, just like Casey, and that app is filled with cover stuff.
00:57:13 ◼ ► But still, Casey's never made an app like this. For all he knows, there's some sort of process you have to go through.
00:57:21 ◼ ► "You can't have it in your screenshots. You can't have it in your screenshots. You can't have it in your app, but you have to do this. Explain."
00:57:27 ◼ ► And the reply you sent, Casey, is totally the reply that any sane person would send or any small child would send to because you say, "Jimmy's doing it. How come Jimmy gets to do it?"
00:57:37 ◼ ► And you know what the response to that is if you've ever been a kid. The response from any teacher or parent or also any corporation is, "We're not talking about Jimmy right now. Right now, Casey, we're talking about you."
00:57:47 ◼ ► The App Store always does that. You cannot tell them, but App Over There does the exact same thing.
00:57:53 ◼ ► They'll say to you, "We can't talk about App Over There. That's proprietary. That's between us and them. I can't reveal anything about us and them. I can't tell you whether they did buy the rights to every movie in the world. I can't tell you whether they didn't.
00:58:06 ◼ ► We're talking about you now, Casey, and your app. So just look at me. Look right here at me. Don't look at those other apps. Those other apps don't matter.
00:58:14 ◼ ► Maybe they're all the apps that we just allowed to exist. Maybe they gave millions of dollars to someone who works for us. Maybe we needed to do a deal with them.
00:58:22 ◼ ► Maybe we had a handshake agreement with Bill Gates. Maybe this, maybe that. Maybe Netflix is getting a better rate, but don't worry about what Netflix is doing. Don't worry about what Amazon is doing.
00:58:30 ◼ ► Don't worry about what all those tracked apps are doing. We're talking about you now. And it's so frustrating because it's like, "Is there a common set of rules or is there not?"
00:58:38 ◼ ► You could go over to Matt Comey who does a TV forecast app and say, "Hey, Matt, you got your thing through App Review, right?" And I'd say, "Yeah, I did. It was fine. This is what he did."
00:58:49 ◼ ► And you could say, "Matt, would you mind joining me on this call and saying, 'Look, we can talk about Matt. He's right here on the call with me. He says it's fine.'"
00:58:57 ◼ ► He's ready to talk. He says, "Hey, why did my app get through and you won't let Casey's?" And Apple would be like, "I'm sorry. I can only talk to one of you once. I feel very uncomfortable having you both on this call."
00:59:06 ◼ ► It's like, "For crying out loud." Is this their first day on the job? Are you allowed to have apps on the App Store that show covers for movies and TV shows or are you not?
00:59:14 ◼ ► And if you are, explain how that's supposed to work. I am so mad for you. I'm just going ballistic because what is the purpose of App Review? What are they even doing there?
00:59:24 ◼ ► There are so many apps like this on the App Store. You should not be going back and forth and trying to get a call on three or five business days about the existence of you even having an app like this because there are so many of them out there. What the hell is going on?
00:59:36 ◼ ► I'm so angry. I'm so angry for you, Casey. I've never been this angry for you. Your documentation stuff, it's like whatever bad docs happens all the time, I understand. But this? It's madness.
00:59:45 ◼ ► I'm sure it will get resolved and I'm sure it will be fine, but the maddening thing is why do we have to go through this? And I understand you're begging for a voice call because you're hoping you'll get a human on the end and you'll be able to talk to the human and perhaps curse at the human and say, "What are you doing?"
00:59:59 ◼ ► Even me. I want to do that, but I'm not looking to have some sort of confrontation. I want someone from App Review or perhaps Marco to just say, "Look, this is what we're looking for or not looking for. Do the following or stop doing the following."
01:00:16 ◼ ► Or what you want to hear from them is you want to hear them to affirmatively say, "I understand what your app is, Casey." I would make them say it to me. Say, "Do you know what my app is supposed to do? Can you explain it to me?" Because you have to start from that foundational knowledge of you look up movies and TV shows and see who's in them.
01:00:32 ◼ ► And you can see actors and you can see shows and episodes and movies and have you ever used IMDB? Have you heard of IMDB? It's like that, but not sucky. Then now we can talk about, "Okay, are apps like that allowed on the App Store? Because I totally think they are because there's 50 million of them. Okay, what do I have to do to get my app that's like that through to the App Store? Just tell me and I'll do it."
01:00:51 ◼ ► Yep, exactly. I'll tell you. Here's probably all you have to do. Complaint one, they misunderstood what your app did and thought it would stream video. Oh well, you got some more on with no time. You're not dealing with the same person every time here in all of this. Of course not, there's no continuity of care.
01:01:06 ◼ ► Number two rejection is only about your screenshots that resemble Disney Pixar material. Now, I just looked while Jon was ranting, I just looked at TV forecast, TV time and letterboxd apps in the App Store and what is in their screenshots?
01:01:24 ◼ ► None of them, and I'm not an expert on a lot of these things, maybe some of these are Disney Pixar properties, but none of them appear to have any obvious Disney Pixar shows in the screenshots. Humorously enough, TV forecast has Ted Lasso in one of its screenshots, but that's not Disney Pixar.
01:01:40 ◼ ► That's Apple. So look, you have three to five business days, you have a while, especially since there's a weekend in the middle here. I would say during that three to five business days, resubmit the exact same build or change just the build number and resubmit it again with different screenshots that don't contain anything specifically from Disney Pixar.
01:02:05 ◼ ► I understand Pixar for the Steve Jobs characters, but Disney, because Disney owns Marvel and TV forecast has across the Spider-Verse in its screenshot.
01:02:15 ◼ ► Disney owns everything. Disney owns Marvel, Disney owns Star Wars, Disney owns Pixar, they own everything. There is no, it's very difficult to do a screenshot of a media app without including a Disney property and TV forecast totally does.
01:02:27 ◼ ► Wait, wait, I'm looking at Letterboxd on the App Store. The very first screenshot on Letterboxd is Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantum Mania, I don't know how to pronounce it. That is a Disney property because it's Marvel.
01:02:40 ◼ ► The very first screenshot, front and center, focusing on one movie alone, Ant-Man and the Wasp. That is Marvel, that is Disney.
01:03:00 ◼ ► There was a tiny, tiny, tiny little poster from Elemental that was one of literally 30 posters.
01:03:08 ◼ ► That's the problem, I guarantee it. They're looking for high profile Pixar stuff, I bet.
01:03:12 ◼ ► So look, resubmit it with screenshots that don't have any Pixar stuff in it and maybe don't have any like super big name Disney stuff like Star Wars and see if that's all it is.
01:03:24 ◼ ► It could be, but I also don't necessarily want to lose, like, even though I want to get this through, there's no real urgency behind it.
01:03:32 ◼ ► Like of course I want to get the app out, but there's no immediate urgency behind it, right?
01:03:36 ◼ ► And I kind of don't want to lose the thread of this whole rejection and conversation and whatnot because I want to follow through and see, I'd like for them to define for me what the hell they're looking for.
01:03:48 ◼ ► Yeah, if they could communicate with the English language, they would have said, "You can't have any Pixar or Disney properties in your screenshots, so just redo your screenshots for pictures that aren't Disney or Pixar."
01:04:00 ◼ ► That's two sentences. You know how simple it is to say that? It's so easy to just explain.
01:04:04 ◼ ► Like to say, "Why do they put Disney/Pixar? Are you saying that I can have my screenshot?"
01:04:11 ◼ ► Second, is it all I have to do to pick? You're allowed to have, they should have said, "It's okay for you to have the posters for movies in your screenshots."
01:04:18 ◼ ► So we have special rules for Disney and Pixar. So any property that's owned by Disney and Pixar, and yes, I know Sony kind of owns Spider-Man, but they're doing their thing with Marvel, so it's messy.
01:04:24 ◼ ► Anyway, just tell me what to do in English language. It would take you literally three sentences to do.
01:04:31 ◼ ► Instead, now we have to schedule a call because you don't know how to write an email. You don't know how to communicate with the English language. They're just wasting everybody's time.
01:04:38 ◼ ► They know how to communicate. They know that they should communicate as little as possible in the written form.
01:04:44 ◼ ► These phone calls, I've heard mixed things. Now I haven't had an App Store phone call since a while back. I think it was over the magazine. I forget what it was.
01:04:53 ◼ ► Anyway, I had one of those phone calls where you get the Agent Smith guy calling, and I don't know if he...
01:04:58 ◼ ► I later learned this one guy made all those calls, and he was apparently a really hardcore... I think he was a veteran of the military, and he was able to do it super dispassionately and keep everything cool, keep everything from getting elevated.
01:05:15 ◼ ► I had a couple of those calls early on in my career, and they were really quite something because it was like talking to a really stern lawyer from California. So you couldn't get him to budge.
01:05:30 ◼ ► You would ask a question, and there would be a momentary pause, and then he would very calmly basically just say the same thing over and over again.
01:05:38 ◼ ► He was able to never put Apple in any kind of uncomfortable situation, never admit more than necessary. He would call and say something like... Let me read your exact line here.
01:05:49 ◼ ► "Your app includes content that resembles Disney Pixar material without the necessary authorization."
01:05:54 ◼ ► So you would say something like, "Okay, well, but look, do you understand that it does this?" And then pause.
01:05:59 ◼ ► "Your app includes content that resembles Disney Pixar material." It was that kind of conversation.
01:06:04 ◼ ► And you would say, "So can I include content that's not Disney Pixar?" And what he would say is pause.
01:06:10 ◼ ► "Well, your app includes content that looks like Disney Pixar, and we reject it because of that, so please do not include that in future submissions."
01:06:16 ◼ ► "Okay, so I won't include that. I'll do that." Great. And he'll say, "Thank you. That's what we want."
01:06:20 ◼ ► "But can I include other movie posters?" And you would say, "Well, I can't tell you anything about your submission until I see it, so please submit it, and then we'll tell you what's wrong with that one."
01:06:33 ◼ ► It actually is not 100% of a waste of time, because when you learn how to talk to Apple people, you can start reading between the lines a little bit.
01:06:52 ◼ ► And usually, usually, as long as you are, you know, keep your--keep civil and polite and everything, because, you know, you've got to figure, like, a lot of the people you're talking to are not going to be doing that.
01:07:02 ◼ ► So as long as you keep civil and polite and everything, you can usually figure out what they actually want you to do.
01:07:13 ◼ ► They're basically screaming, "How much more obvious can I be while still keeping my job?"
01:07:17 ◼ ► Right, exactly. Although, I would consider calling him from Canada with one-party consent recording.
01:07:26 ◼ ► I--in the depths of my anger about this yesterday, I might have looked up Virginia's laws, and Virginia is a one-party consent state. I'm just going to throw that out there.
01:07:45 ◼ ► The only reason I would record it is not to be like, "Oh, do gotcha," whatever, but just because, honestly, when you have calls like that, and I've had them as well, not for the App Store, but for other reasons, you often find yourself forgetting what was actually said.
01:08:01 ◼ ► So it is actually useful to have a recording that you can play back to yourself and say, "What did they say?"
01:08:06 ◼ ► Because, again, like Marco said, they're basically saying, "I can't tell you the sentence that would help you, but I'm trying to help you while still keeping my job."
01:08:19 ◼ ► And so if you could play it back and say, "Oh, no, I see this," you know what I mean? Because in the moment, it's hard to tell.
01:08:27 ◼ ► Yeah, and I mean, I don't think I have the deftness and the ability to be as dispassionate as, you know, Christian was with the Reddit stuff.
01:08:37 ◼ ► And I don't, even if I were to record something, it's exactly for that reason. It's not because I want to leak it or anything like that.
01:08:44 ◼ ► And like we said about Apple, they're not going to trash you. Like, that's not what Apple does. You don't have to worry about that.
01:08:49 ◼ ► Exactly. It's just so frustrating because, like both of you, I think, have said, if they were explicit about what the problem was, or maybe "specific" is the word I'm looking for, about what the problem was,
01:09:02 ◼ ► I would be happy to rectify the problem and get to a position that makes us both happy. But because they're so hand-wavy about it, and they're just, well…
01:09:12 ◼ ► Oh, no, they're direct. The problem is, their response, or their initial response at least, is basically, "We don't want to deal with apps that show content from big publishers of media."
01:09:25 ◼ ► Like, look, I am right there with you because my app does that. It's just not movie producers, but I'm not that far off.
01:09:34 ◼ ► And I know that at any time I could get rejected and possibly have a problem with the App Store because they might come to me and say, "I have to get rights from every single podcast in my directory."
01:09:46 ◼ ► Or they could say, "I found one podcast that had pornographic content, and pornographic content is not allowed on the App Store. Please resubmit without pornographic podcasts, Marco."
01:09:58 ◼ ► We're not talking about our directory right now, Marco. We're talking about Overcast. Your app contains pornography.
01:10:03 ◼ ► When you have an app showing third-party content, that's always a risk. You always run the risk of, like, this might snag an app review because of this weird technicality.
01:10:13 ◼ ► And the answer really is, like, if this ever goes before a human who has a little bit more authority to make a judgment call, which it might. Like, you know, it might get kicked up the chain a little bit as you go through the different processes.
01:10:27 ◼ ► As soon as somebody has a bit of a judgment call they can make about it, they can look and say, "Yeah, this is fine."
01:10:32 ◼ ► But the hard part is getting to that person or banging your head against this wall enough to get through the lower-level people and just then have them mostly leave you alone after that.
01:10:42 ◼ ► Honestly, I really do think if you just submit different screenshots that don't have that particular movie in them, I think that might be enough to get through.
01:10:51 ◼ ► I mean, you could just pick five different Disney properties and roll the dice and hope you get a different reviewer.
01:10:56 ◼ ► Because that's what it is. Like, people get rejected and then they get approved for, like, they didn't change anything or they changed things in a way that shouldn't have made a difference and it's just who you get.
01:11:04 ◼ ► And maybe it's an automated tool looking for the Pixar stuff, but who knows? It's not consistent. That's another wonderful thing about it.
01:11:11 ◼ ► Yeah, and I mean, the other frustrating thing about it is, like, I have never done subscription stuff before.
01:11:18 ◼ ► And genuinely, even though I do believe, I can look in the mirror with an honest heart and say, "I genuinely believe that I'm doing everything right. I'm doing it by the book. I'm doing it with the user's needs and wants in mind.
01:11:33 ◼ ► I really am trying very hard to do the right thing here." But I was actually looking forward to having Apple tell me, you know, "Yeah, we've looked at it and you're handling subscriptions the way you're supposed to."
01:11:47 ◼ ► That was the whole point of this build in the first place. And that is what I think is the point of the App Store.
01:11:53 ◼ ► To me, as a user and as a developer, the point of the App Store is to make sure that I'm doing right by what I would call my customers, what is really Apple's customers as they're often reminding us.
01:12:05 ◼ ► You know, I'm doing right by whoever's customers and making sure I'm not accidentally or deliberately hoodwinking them.
01:12:10 ◼ ► And that's what I wanted out of this review. But now I'm in this, like, legal hell that I'm not entirely clear how to get out of.
01:12:18 ◼ ► And, like, someone's in the chat room saying, like, "Marco's right. That's what it is. Don't show blatant copyrighted brand content." Okay, how?
01:12:25 ◼ ► Every movie poster is copyrighted content. Every television show poster is copyrighted. Of course, every single thing that any app shows.
01:12:36 ◼ ► The names are all trademarks. The art is not art that Casey made. And, again, I'm not saying that this is such a legal open and shut case, but the fact is tons of apps on the App Store do this.
01:12:48 ◼ ► And we're pretty sure they don't all have rights to all content for all movies for all time. So there must be a way for Casey to be successful. And Casey just wants to know, "What is that way?"
01:12:59 ◼ ► That's the only way I have to do it. And the answer is not just don't show copyrighted content. Because if he shows no copyrighted content, his app has no graphics.
01:13:11 ◼ ► It would be, but it's not the app that people want. It's like, just don't show copyrighted content. Then his app can't exist.
01:13:18 ◼ ► Oh, wait. Oh, my God. Okay, look, everyone loves nostalgia, right? What if you make it like one of those, like, '90s library card catalog look-up computers that had, like, the monochrome green or yellowish screens? Remember those?
01:13:32 ◼ ► It was all text-based, and you would type in your library thing you were looking for, and it was so cool because it wasn't the card catalog. And it was like those ancient terminal, whatever the heck system that was.
01:13:44 ◼ ► No, they don't. But, yeah, whatever the heck kind of, like, you know, computerized, whatever.
01:13:47 ◼ ► That was. If you end up not being able to use any images in your app, you can just re-theme the whole app to look like one of those cool look-up things. That would be awesome.
01:13:59 ◼ ► Well, and, I mean, again, I think for now, because there's no dire urgency, I'm just going to let it chill until I have this phone call.
01:14:05 ◼ ► And then I suspect what's going to come of this phone call is nothing, like Marco said.
01:14:10 ◼ ► And so then I'll just be, you know, I'll just stick my thumb in the wind and see what happens. I'll try to submit with, you know, with no Disney/Pixar stuff and see if that gets through.
01:14:20 ◼ ► And if that doesn't get through, I'll try something else. You know, somebody else in the chat is like, "Hey, just put in a bunch of placeholder things."
01:14:30 ◼ ► Right, exactly. Like, why, if I'm a customer, a potential customer, why would I be interested in this app with a bunch of useless data?
01:14:35 ◼ ► It would be like, "What are these movies? I've never heard of any of these. This is weird."
01:14:39 ◼ ► And here's the thing about the screenshots for the App Store. Obviously, they care what you put in your screenshots, but not in the way that you might think.
01:14:44 ◼ ► I'm sure everyone has seen screenshots in the App Store that don't—you say screenshots. Like, they don't actually show the app in use, or they show something that's not really in the app.
01:14:56 ◼ ► You could show—you can just, like—basically, you can make a black background and put white text on it and say, "My app is cool. You should buy it."
01:15:01 ◼ ► That counts as a screenshot. It doesn't have copyrighted material. It's fine. You can put anything you want there, including—
01:15:05 ◼ ► Up to and including, like, the little, you know, those little templates that they have that show, like, an iPhone.
01:15:10 ◼ ► Like, have an iPhone, like a little virtual iPhone, and then on the screen of the iPhone, put any old thing you want.
01:15:15 ◼ ► Put a screenshot from Marco's app in there. Put literally anything. It does not have to be your app in that shot. It's just a picture.
01:15:23 ◼ ► Yeah, as long as it doesn't have Disney Pixar content, or like, whatever the heck—those doesn't have a giant Apple logo in the middle of it, as long as it doesn't have a naked picture of Tim Cook that you AI generate.
01:15:31 ◼ ► Like, they're checking for stuff, but they're not checking for the stuff that, like—they're not looking for truth in advertising.
01:15:36 ◼ ► Like, "We don't want customers to be misled." Your screenshot shows a screen that's not even in your app. They do not care.
01:15:41 ◼ ► Yep. And so, we'll see what happens. Like, it's frustrating. Honestly, I wasn't even the one that put this in the show notes to talk about today.
01:15:51 ◼ ► Well, and I appreciate it. I genuinely do. And I'm very—yesterday I was angry. Today, I'm just very frustrated, because I just—like you both had said, I just want to understand what the way forward is.
01:16:06 ◼ ► Like, honestly, I think if you—you know, you said a second ago, if you have that call, you're pretty sure you're going to get nowhere. I don't think so.
01:16:11 ◼ ► I think if you have that call, you're going to come out of it knowing exactly what the problem is, even though they won't directly say it in all likelihood. But you will know it.
01:16:19 ◼ ► And then when you get your next rejection, you can say to them, "But I had a call, and they said if I did this, I would get approved." And they would say, "We're not talking about the call now, Casey. We're talking about the call because you submitted it. Your app has submitted it. Blah, blah, blah, section blah, blah, section blah, blah, blah. Please resubmit."
01:16:34 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah, yeah. In three to five days. I don't know. It's just—it's frustrating, and it's tough. And again, like, I kind of almost wanted a rejection in Hear Me Out.
01:16:44 ◼ ► I wanted the rejection because I wanted to know that they really looked, particularly at the subscription flow, and they looked and they gave it their stamp of approval.
01:16:52 ◼ ► Because I genuinely, hand on heart, I really don't want to mess this up. And I've tested the snot out of it. I've done everything I know how to do to test it.
01:17:01 ◼ ► But I'm one guy. I don't know if I've gotten it right. And I really wanted them to look at the subscription flow and really, really, really try and make sure that this is good.
01:17:10 ◼ ► That, to me, again, as a user, as a developer, that's what the purpose of review is. Is to just be another system of checks.
01:17:17 ◼ ► To make sure that I, as a developer, am not doing something nefarious. I'm not hoodwinking people, either deliberately or otherwise.
01:17:26 ◼ ► That's the whole point. And I'm really sad that I'm mired in this other stuff. And I have zero indication that anyone's used the app for more than a couple minutes.
01:17:45 ◼ ► Alright, moving on, let's turn this round upside down. When I went and moved to FastMail, one of the things I did was talk about it, because it genuinely is very, very good.
01:17:56 ◼ ► And I also looked up my referral code, and I made a convenient URL for it, like we were talking about with hypercritical.co/shirt, and what I did was caselists.com/fastmail.
01:18:10 ◼ ► And that will refer you to signing up for FastMail, and it uses my, you know, not promo code, but referral code.
01:18:18 ◼ ► And if one signs up for FastMail using that code, I get a small kickback. It turns out, enough of you have done that, that they gave me a couple hundred bucks.
01:18:32 ◼ ► And so, I treated myself to a set of AirPods Pro 2, even though they were completely frivolous.
01:18:37 ◼ ► I have perfectly functional AirPods Pro 1s that are only, might even be less than a year old. I think it was this past Christmas that Aaron got them for me.
01:18:45 ◼ ► I had zero reason to buy these AirPods Pro 2, but they were quote-unquote free, so why not?
01:18:50 ◼ ► So, I got myself some AirPods Pro 2. Here's the thing, I don't think that Marco necessarily needs to put in a spoiler horn here, but if you are a happy AirPods Pro 1 owner, just go ahead and skip to the next chapter, because this is not going to make you happy, I guarantee you.
01:19:10 ◼ ► Why didn't anyone tell me that the AirPods Pro 2 were so much better than the AirPods Pro 1? Not any of the seven podcasts that have talked about this over the last year repeatedly.
01:19:31 ◼ ► The swipey-uppy downy for the volume, I actually do like that, but I've barely used it because I'm not used to having it.
01:19:40 ◼ ► I guess it's a transparency, I don't have them near me, I think they're in the other room, but whatever it is with the noise cancellation that's intelligent, they had a term for it, like a marketing term for it.
01:19:53 ◼ ► The adaptive noise cancellation, where it cancels all the junk you don't want, but lets through when people are talking to you.
01:20:00 ◼ ► All I can think about now, just having received these after being aware of the Vision Pro, it seems a lot like that breakthrough thing, again I forget the marketing term for it,
01:20:11 ◼ ► but where somebody walks up and they bust through your virtual reality so you can see them in the Vision Pro.
01:20:26 ◼ ► And not only that, in the AirPods Pro 1, it was active noise ducking, in my opinion, or deafening I don't think is the word I'm looking for, but you know what I mean?
01:20:39 ◼ ► It would bring down the noise level of a fan, or like an HVAC system, or something like that.
01:20:51 ◼ ► Hand to God, most of the times I've had a fan nearby when I have the AirPods Pro 2 in, it is literally gone.
01:21:25 ◼ ► I would have paid, I think, an additional $50 for them, because they seem to be perpetually on sale at Amazon, which is a very un-Apple thing, but nevertheless.
01:21:40 ◼ ► Even though they're only a few months old, and even though I am cheap, I mean frugal, as they get,
01:21:50 ◼ ► When Marco says you should spend money on something, I always say, "Okay, sure, whatever."
01:22:00 ◼ ► I cannot even begin to tell you, they are so good, and I am so incredibly impressed by them.
01:22:05 ◼ ► You should consider doing what I'm doing with my also, apparently, accidentally unneeded pair of AirPods 3.
01:22:12 ◼ ► Remember I said I was going to get AppleCare Plus on them, because they seem to go wonky after a certain period of time, so I should just pay for it.
01:22:19 ◼ ► I can't do it on a subscription, so it's just a one-time chunk of purchase you could buy.
01:22:23 ◼ ► I was about to buy it when I got them, but then I looked at the fine print, and it's like,
01:22:28 ◼ ► "Oh, your AppleCare begins, and it lasts for one year after the date of purchase of AppleCare."
01:22:38 ◼ ► I think it said one year after you purchase the AppleCare, not after you purchase the AirPods themselves, but when you make the AppleCare purchase.
01:22:51 ◼ ► If the clock starts ticking, it's only one year, and if the clock starts ticking, I don't remember the year, but whatever, it's a fixed period of time.
01:22:57 ◼ ► If the clock starts ticking when I buy the AppleCare, why don't I wait until the last possible minute to buy the AppleCare?"
01:23:03 ◼ ► And I'm wondering, "All right, so how long can I wait?" Apparently, you can wait 60 days or something.
01:23:09 ◼ ► It's a long period of time. Or whatever, 90 days, 60 days. I don't remember what it says.
01:23:13 ◼ ► But here's the good thing. For once, Apple's stupid nags in the Settings app on your iPhone come in handy, because right in the Settings screen, it says, "AppleCare coverage available.
01:23:26 ◼ ► Right in Settings, right at the very top of the screen, so I always know what the countdown is. I'm not going to miss the date. I put it in my calendar and I put a reminder for it anyway.
01:23:37 ◼ ► So when there's one or two days left, I'm going to buy it and get the maximum possible AppleCare time on my AirPods.
01:23:43 ◼ ► I'm debating whether or not I want to do that, because I actually have not yet, knock on wood, had any sort of crinkle or failure or anything like that.
01:23:53 ◼ ► But I know it's a very common occurrence, so I am thinking about doing the AppleCare+, and I think it was like 30 bucks or something like that.
01:24:04 ◼ ► So I might, but one way or another, I cannot say enough good things about these AirPods Pro 2. They are so freaking good.
01:24:14 ◼ ► Yeah, we both do. Oh man, they're so good. There was a whole bunch of, like, I would say the AirPods Pro 2 over the 1, they're not like three times better.
01:24:26 ◼ ► They're not even two times better. But I would say they're close to two times better, I really would.
01:24:33 ◼ ► What's great about them, in my opinion, is not that like, no single feature about them is mind-blowingly better than the predecessor's version of that feature, they just have a bunch of little improvements.
01:24:45 ◼ ► So I think the noise cancellation is decently better. I don't think it's, you know, it's not like massively better, it's decently better.
01:24:52 ◼ ► I might disagree with you there. Granted, I'm in the honeymoon period, but it is starkly better, in my opinion. Like, noticeably, easily noticeably better.
01:25:07 ◼ ► But, you know, so that's, and all that aside, there's little improvements there. I even like, I love the improvements to the charging case.
01:25:13 ◼ ► Like, that it makes sound when you charge it. Like, so, you know you've aligned it correctly, you know it's starting to charge when it goes ding, you know.
01:25:20 ◼ ► Little things like that. They've made a bunch of little improvements. And overall, the AirPods Pro 1 were also an amazing product besides that crackle flaw that many of them had, including both of mine.
01:25:34 ◼ ► And Tifs, actually. We had to go through a few of those, like through warranty repairs and everything, as I think many AirPods Pro 1 owners did.
01:25:44 ◼ ► But the AirPods Pro 1, I would say if yours still work, I don't think you need to be super rushing out there to get the upgrade.
01:25:52 ◼ ► But as soon as you have a reason to, if you can justify, like replacing them for some reason or handing them down or whatever, or if they do die, go right for the 2s. They're awesome.
01:26:03 ◼ ► But I don't think you have to feel too bad for not having them yet if you have a perfectly working pair of 1s.
01:26:09 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean they are very, very good and I am very impressed by them. And it was a frivolous purchase and I obviously resisted until I had what was effectively free money.
01:26:21 ◼ ► But, goodness, I am very glad I spent this sort of free money in order to get them because I am deeply impressed by them. I really am.
01:26:32 ◼ ► Hello listener. Please consider becoming an ATP member. Membership comes with some interesting cool perks.
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01:27:05 ◼ ► But Casey and I make tons of them. You get to hear all of them. And it's kind of fun. And then you get to hear our post-show discussion about title selection, any little bits here and there at the beginning or end that don't fit into the main show.
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01:27:34 ◼ ► Any way you listen, you support us. Whether you hear the ad version like this or whether you have a membership version. But either way, we love you. Thank you for listening.
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01:27:50 ◼ ► Alright, let's do some Ask ATP. A friend of the show, Dan Provost, who is one of the two co-founders of Studio Neat. I freaking love Studio Neat stuff. If you're not familiar with it, you should go check it out. I should put a link in the show notes. I think I did under his name. Yes, I did.
01:28:07 ◼ ► So look at Dan's name in the show notes and get a link to Studio Neat stuff. He did not ask me to say that, but their stuff is excellent.
01:28:14 ◼ ► Anyway, Dan writes, "In 2023, how important are time machine backups? I feel like cloud services have matured to the point where they can be trusted as safe data storage.
01:28:22 ◼ ► Every important file I have on my computer I have in Dropbox. I backup my entire computer to Backblaze. My most precious digital files, my photos and videos are on my computer's SSD.
01:28:32 ◼ ► Backblaze, iCloud Photo Library, and additional all of my favorited photos that I edit are also in Adobe's cloud service for Lightroom. So basically four places.
01:28:41 ◼ ► The main reason I ask is I need a new drive for time machine, but like John, I want to leave the era of spinning disks behind.
01:28:47 ◼ ► But a large enough SSD is quite pricey. How are we feeling about cloud backups only these days?"
01:29:06 ◼ ► I have in the last two years that I've had my laptop tried to do restores via time machine maybe once, maybe twice.
01:29:16 ◼ ► I do think it's nice to have a redundant copy on some sort of disk, even a spinning one, somewhere locally.
01:29:28 ◼ ► Especially, and granted, Backblaze is a former, probably future, and frequent sponsor of ours, but truly Backblaze is very good.
01:29:36 ◼ ► It works very well. And given that they'll ship you a hard drive, not an ad, believe it or not, but given they'll ship you a hard drive with all your data on it, like overnight,
01:29:51 ◼ ► I think, John, you're going to have the most opinions about this. Let's leave you for last. Marco, your thoughts?
01:29:55 ◼ ► As long as your stuff is other places and you have the Backblaze as the failsafe, the just-in-case, oh crap solution, I think you're probably okay.
01:30:07 ◼ ► I still use time machine. I also do it to my Synology. And there are a few upsides to that.
01:30:15 ◼ ► Number one, I have found since the M1 era of Apple computers, the problems that I encounter occasionally by trying to use USB external SSDs are significant.
01:30:31 ◼ ► And literally, just yesterday, I had to unplug my external SSD because Finder was just beach-balling and everything was beach-balling and being weird on my computer until I unplugged that SSD.
01:30:41 ◼ ► And this is not the first time that's ever happened. And maybe I'm just getting weird ones, I don't know. I don't want spinning disks on my desk or in my office even at all, so it's SSDs only.
01:30:50 ◼ ► Although, on the shopping holiday that just occurred from the Washington Delivery Service, there were some really cheap 8 terabyte SSDs that I was kind of tempted by.
01:31:03 ◼ ► But instead of getting those, I got a pair of really cheap 16 terabyte hard drives for much less money that I'm going to put in my Synology.
01:31:12 ◼ ► The whole reason I was looking was that my Synology was running out of space, in part because we use it for time machine for both mine and my end TIFs laptops.
01:31:20 ◼ ► Quick aside, actually, quick aside related to that. I noticed, actually, my friend Sam had pointed out to me that the Western Digital Reds that I think all three of us have tended to use in our Synologies,
01:31:31 ◼ ► those were deeply discounted, I think, two days ago. And so I am due to, I would argue we all are, but I am definitely due to upgrade or replace my Synology sometime in the next couple of months.
01:31:43 ◼ ► And so I grabbed four 18 terabyte drives, which is something like, even with two drive redundancy, it's something like, what, 36 terabytes of space, which is considerably more than I'm using right now.
01:31:55 ◼ ► It's like, I think I'm using like 10-ish terabytes, maybe a little less than that. Anyways, I grabbed these four drives for, in sum, quite a lot of money, but given the price of these drives, it was something like $210, $220 a drive, which was stunningly cheap.
01:32:14 ◼ ► Well, that was, it's hard to derail this further, but I think that was a bad decision for two reasons. Number one, I'm always tempted to do exactly what you're doing, but what I say to myself to prevent myself from doing this is that the longer you wait, the more megabytes you're going to be able to get for your dollars.
01:32:30 ◼ ► Anytime you buy hard drives, if you don't need them immediately, then you're just wasting money. And I know it's a sale.
01:32:40 ◼ ► It's not going to go, in general, the trend is you get more megabytes for your dollar the longer you wait. So even though it looks like it's a great sale, if you don't end up buying a new thing for a year, you still might have saved money on this.
01:32:50 ◼ ► But the second reason is going to make you sad, and this is why you should read our feedback. We haven't talked about this, maybe we'll talk about it more later, but the latest Synologies all say that you can only use Synology branded drives in them.
01:33:04 ◼ ► If you put a Western Digital drive in there, it will complain to you that that drive is not supported and will throw up a bunch of errors and warnings and generally be annoying to you.
01:33:14 ◼ ► That's partially true. Let's not get derailed and spun around the axle on that. That is more true than it is not, but I don't think it's quite as widespread as you thought. But let's save that for another time.
01:33:22 ◼ ► No, it is. For a future show, go to the Synology website and they have a compatibility checker and just pick any Synology that you want and then pick shows which drives it's compatible with. And if you only see drives by the brand Synology, make sure you pick the place where you can pick Synology or third-party drives.
01:33:39 ◼ ► If the third-party option isn't there or you go to it and you only see one IBM drive or something, you can't use those Western Digital reds in there without being nagged knowingly at things. I think it doesn't even let you rebuild an array if one of those drives is in it because it's like, "Oh, no, this isn't a supported drive." It's very bad.
01:33:53 ◼ ► My Synology is fairly young, so I don't think it's one of the absolute most current models.
01:34:11 ◼ ► I think the model that I was planning to buy, which is the 1823 XS+, which is probably more than I need, is pretty much Synology only.
01:34:36 ◼ ► My understanding is there are definitely scripts that you can find on the internet that will add pretty much any drive to their bespoke compatibility list, so it'll shut up and leave you alone.
01:34:49 ◼ ► I generally agree with your point of waiting for hard drives, but I genuinely think I'm going to be purchasing a new chassis sometime in the next month or two, so I'm not going to be waiting long. Poor Dan has been waiting for us to answer his question.
01:35:09 ◼ ► Time Machine over the network is really nice in the sense that you can still use spinning disks if they can be somewhere else in your house that you don't need to hear it.
01:35:19 ◼ ► If you put a Synology in a basement or a garage or something, then it's out of your way. You don't have to hear it, so you can use big, cheap hard drives if you want to.
01:35:27 ◼ ► And it's nice that, for whatever reason, Network Time Machine, I've been running Time Machine to Synologies for a very long time, and I've never had a problem, whereas running it direct-attached, I've often had the drive will run out of space in some way, the Time Machine doesn't know what to do and can't proceed, or things like that.
01:35:47 ◼ ► Because over the network, it's rock solid. Whatever open source package this thing is probably based on, it properly enforces disk quotas for users, it never runs out of space, Mac OS knows how to handle it, it's still encrypted and mounted as a sparse whatever or something.
01:36:01 ◼ ► And so it actually works really reliably. The one major downside is that it is slow as crap. It is unbearably slow. So if you need to restore from it, it's going to take days to restore a whole drive.
01:36:18 ◼ ► So it's not great for whole drive recovery. It is really nice for, "Oh, what was that file I had on my desktop that I accidentally deleted?" For point-in-time recovery, or point-in-time browsing, it is really nice for that.
01:36:32 ◼ ► And I don't need to pull something off a Time Machine frequently, it's maybe twice a year. But for those twice-a-year times, I am really glad I have it, and it is useful to me.
01:36:43 ◼ ► If I had to cut one of these backup methods out of my life, I would cut Time Machine long before I would cut Backblaze.
01:36:51 ◼ ► But since I already have the Synology and everything set up to do it, and hard drives are so insanely cheap, I continue to do it. But yeah, if push came to shove, I would probably let it go.
01:37:06 ◼ ► Here's why you shouldn't let it go. So in the olden days, we had a saying, "Raid is not a backup." Because raid is a redundant array of inexpensive drives. Or independent disks, depending on who you ask.
01:37:18 ◼ ► Independent disks or whatever. We would say raid is not a backup because people would get a raid array and they would be like, "I'm going to make a volume out of multiple drives, and I have redundancy so that if one of my drives fails, my array is still valid, and I can take out the failed drive and put in another one, it will resilver itself, and I'll have my thing back up again."
01:37:35 ◼ ► And they're like, "I don't need backups, I've got one drive redundancy, I've got two drive redundancy. Who needs backups?"
01:37:40 ◼ ► Raid is not a backup because that's your actual real data that you're using. And if you delete a file, and remember, like you were saying Marco, "Oh, there's a file I deleted that was on my desktop last week, can I go get that again?"
01:37:52 ◼ ► On raid, the answer is no, because you deleted it. And back in the Windows and DOS days, you use undelete programs to try to find it. But stuff like that, those kind of heroic measures, that's not what you want to be doing when you want that file back.
01:38:02 ◼ ► You want to be able to go to your backups and pull that file. Raid is not a backup because raid is where your live file is. A lot of those things you listed are also not backups.
01:38:11 ◼ ► iCloud Photo Library is not a backup. That's the live place where your photos are. And yeah, they have the recently deleted photos there for 30 days and so on and so forth, but if something goes wrong with that, or much more likely, if you accidentally delete something and don't realize it for more than 30 days,
01:38:24 ◼ ► iCloud Photo Library is not a backup. It's your live data. Your SSD is not a backup where you're actually using it. It's like, "Well, it's on my SSD and it's on my iCloud Photo Library." First of all, they sync with each other. And second of all, if you deleted off your SSD and that syncs to iCloud and you wait more than 30 days, it's not there.
01:38:39 ◼ ► Backblaze is a backup. So one, you've got one backup because Backblaze does take your stuff, puts it elsewhere, and if you forget about it, it will be in Backblaze. Backblaze has its own retention policy and you could do this.
01:38:48 ◼ ► They have an advanced versioning thing to keep longer versions, but you do have to keep in mind a retention period. But Backblaze will have, for example, multiple snapshots of your desktop if you have that multiple version thing, right? And you can go back in time and get that.
01:38:59 ◼ ► Time Machine is also a backup. It's not your live data and it will store multiple versions of everything that it's backing up until it runs out of space. It won't just say, "I save it for 30 days," or whatever. It's like, however much space you have, that's how far back you'll be able to go.
01:39:14 ◼ ► So adding more space lets you go back farther depending on how much you change on a daily basis or whatever.
01:39:18 ◼ ► So I would say, your first thing is, make sure, I mean, you know, make sure, but like the more backups you have, the better. And cloud services, Dropbox is not a backup, iCloud Photo Library is not a backup, your actual SSD where it is is not a backup.
01:39:30 ◼ ► You have one backup and that's Backblaze. And that backup is good to have and you should because it's an offsite backup if your house burns down, but it's pretty far away from you.
01:39:38 ◼ ► And yes, they'll mail you a hard drive, but it's a little bit inconvenient. I would want to have at the very least one local backup and one cloud backup. Right now you have one cloud backup, you have no local backups.
01:39:48 ◼ ► Time Machine is one form of local backup. SuperDuper Clone, Carbon Copy Cloner, that's another form of local backup without versioning.
01:39:55 ◼ ► You know me, I have all those things and multiple Time Machine backups, but having a local backup is convenient, not just for when you want to pull that one file, which you can also do from Backblaze,
01:40:03 ◼ ► but if you ever have to do a full restore, waiting for the drive to come in the mail is kind of a pain and then you got to send it back. If you have the hard drive right there.
01:40:13 ◼ ► Yeah, that's true. What he's talking about is direct connected, like that's why he doesn't want a spinning disk, like a direct connect thing.
01:40:19 ◼ ► That will always be so much faster to restore from. The fastest thing is not to have to restore at all and just to be able to reboot from a clone that was made last night, right?
01:40:26 ◼ ► And yes, you're missing the data that was in between and you can pull those individual files in your back, right? But multiple backups, one onsite, one offsite.
01:40:34 ◼ ► Right now you have one offsite. It's not about the reliability of the cloud things, it's the Dropbox is not a backup because it's the live place where your data is.
01:40:40 ◼ ► Dropbox also saves versions too, but it's not really a backup service. It's not made to do that.
01:40:44 ◼ ► iCloud Photo library, recently deleted folder, but still not a backup service. So that's what I would say.
01:40:49 ◼ ► And you'll be okay if you just have a cloud backup like Backblaze and as long as the retention period is enough and the versioning is enough, but it's more convenient to have a local backup and a cloud backup.
01:40:59 ◼ ► And if you want to go further, I would say, you know, have a second cloud backup. You can count the Lightroom thing as a second cloud backup if you want.
01:41:06 ◼ ► Although I don't know if that counts as a backup. If you're syncing things there, then it's just another live copy of your data.
01:41:10 ◼ ► But have multiple local backups because multiple local backups, chances are that you're going to accidentally delete something more often than your house burns down.
01:41:18 ◼ ► Cloud backup is just to save it in the case of a disaster in your entire house. But within your household, you're more likely to accidentally delete something and to be able to pull from local backups that are fast and local.
01:41:28 ◼ ► And one thing you can do, I mean, you can't really do this with a Synology, but like if you want to do like a... I think you can just do this with Mac OS, like a time machine server, like make a Mac be a time machine server for other Macs.
01:41:37 ◼ ► I think you can do that. And then what you could do is if you ever needed to restore, shut down that Mac, disconnect the drive from that Mac and plug it directly into your Mac and restore from that time machine disk locally instead of doing it over the network to save speed, which again, you can't really do with the Synology NAS or whatever.
01:41:51 ◼ ► So I would say local backups are still a thing. There are other software that does them besides time machine, but time machine comes with your Mac. It does a pretty good job.
01:41:59 ◼ ► And if you have it locally connected, it's way faster than network. And now that I have all my local backups are internal, I have a local internal clone and a local internal time machine backup that are both on SSDs.
01:42:10 ◼ ► And they're way faster than Synology, but they're not as fast as I thought they would be. I really wish time machine would go faster.
01:42:16 ◼ ► Again, certainly faster than doing it to Synology, which I'm also still doing. That's why I can compare. But I really thought that, I mean, granted, it's just on SATA, so it's bottlenecked by the interface.
01:42:26 ◼ ► But when I look at the transfer speeds, the transfer speeds over SATA are not the limiting factor. The limiting factor is just how slow time machine runs.
01:42:33 ◼ ► Part of it is because it's I/O throttled because all the time machine stuff runs at low priority. That is not really a good way to change that without eliminating low priority I/O across the entire system, which you don't want to do because you do want some things to be low priority.
01:42:46 ◼ ► But part of it is just because it's grinding over the disk to find out what the changes it's made. It's got three different strategies to figure out what has changed since my last backup.
01:42:53 ◼ ► And apparently all those strategies are slower than I think they should be. Using the Spotlight database as one, using snapshot diffing as another. Shouldn't there be one of these that's lightning fast?
01:43:05 ◼ ► Especially if I have it being backup every hour. If I'm not touching my computer and an hour goes by and it runs a time machine backup and it's searching for changes, I've found 700,000 changes.
01:43:18 ◼ ► Really? In the past hour when I wasn't using my computer, you found 700,000 changes? I haven't taken a single photograph. No one in my family has taken a photograph. Nothing has synced. No new email has arrived. My email is in Gmail anyway. I don't have a local mail.
01:43:29 ◼ ► 700,000 changes, really? Time machine is not perfect, but it is included. It's free. It does do the job. It is well supported by Apple. I would encourage you to continue to have a local one.
01:43:41 ◼ ► All right. Tor Brights, do you think a third party ARM chip provider could be the solution for the Mac Pro? Things like the Fujitsu A64FX or Ampere?
01:43:59 ◼ ► Thank you. At least show that ridiculously scaled up ARM solutions can exist. Feel free to apply the "on an infinite time scale" quote to this question.
01:44:12 ◼ ► There's that. Let's set that aside. Obviously Apple is not going to want to do third party stuff. This gets to what we were talking about before. When Apple was buying Xeons, they'd have to pay these hefty profit margins to Intel and they couldn't determine what was in the chips. But they had the advantage that Intel sold those Xeons to tons of people. So Apple benefited from the "volume discounts" of the fact that Intel wasn't just making those chips for Mac Pros.
01:44:37 ◼ ► Because if Intel just made a chip specifically for the Mac Pro, they would charge so much more money. Because basically zero Mac Pros sell. As far as Intel is concerned in terms of volume.
01:44:47 ◼ ► If Apple was not Apple, to Marco's point, if Apple was not Apple and did not want to own and control the primary technologies that contributed to their computers, yes, I think they could. Especially for massively multi-core stuff, use a third party ARM chip to give them a chip that is worthy of the Mac Pro. It would be crappy single core performance, but if they found some specific task that you really need massively multi-core, they could buy a third party chip, pay the profit margins, and do that. But they're never going to do that.
01:45:16 ◼ ► And honestly it would be worse. Because setting aside what they're doing now, that chip is not going to have any of the stuff that Apple wants out of its chips, in terms of the neural engine, the specific features of the GPU to support Metal, the multi-processing stuff they put in.
01:45:31 ◼ ► Apple, the media engines for encode and decode for the specific codecs that fit directly with their libraries, that synergy would not exist with the third party thing. If a company other than Apple was running Apple, they could do this and it would be better than it is in some ways, but this is not going to happen.
01:45:48 ◼ ► Unless they did some sort of "it's an Apple chip but we partnered with some other company" because if you look at Apple's GPUs, then they buy Imagination Technologies or something for the GPUs and they bought PA-SEMI to design their ARM chips to begin with with the A7.
01:46:02 ◼ ► It's not like Apple is above partnering/buying companies and doing stuff, but they have to be the ones in control. And it has to end up being called Apple Silicon. So whatever they do, that's what it's going to be.
01:46:13 ◼ ► David Loring writes, "The server market is the biggest market for very large CPUs in the rumored quad. Could Apple use their own high-end chips and custom servers like Amazon does with their Graviton processors to improve the economies of scale and make the high-end desktop processor a more viable product? Or does Apple Silicon simply not make sense for servers?"
01:46:36 ◼ ► Margo should just say the same thing you said last time. This is never going to happen.
01:46:43 ◼ ► It's not that Apple Silicon wouldn't make sense in servers. It's just that this is a business that Apple not only doesn't want, but I think would be ill-suited to serve, just kind of personality-wise.
01:46:52 ◼ ► Has been ill-suited to serve. They've literally done this. We saw it. They were ill-suited.
01:46:57 ◼ ► Yeah, Apple and the server market, I think, is an even worse fit than Apple and the gaming market. It's not really in their DNA to serve that market very well.
01:47:07 ◼ ► Although they did try. They gave a better try than gaming because the Xserve line. They made servers before the Xserve, but Xserve was their first rackmount server. Even the Apple Network Server 400 or whatever, it wasn't rackmount. It came on wheels, though.
01:47:20 ◼ ► They've made a couple runs at it, and the Xserve error was by far their most serious run at it. It was not particularly successful, and they don't do it anymore.
01:47:31 ◼ ► If they wanted to say we can get more economies of scale by making an awesome server chip and selling it to people who want awesome server chips, you're left with the same problem.
01:47:40 ◼ ► First of all, A, Apple doesn't want to give their chip to anybody else because why would they? And B, the chips Apple makes are highly custom-tailored to exactly what they want. Not just like, oh, they want them for their hardware.
01:47:52 ◼ ► They're software. Apple makes their chips to work well with their software and vice versa. Nobody else on the server has the same software needs as Apple does.
01:48:00 ◼ ► Apple has software and libraries, their Accelerate framework, Metal, all that stuff that runs the headset, the watch, the phone, all the Mac stuff, that is basically useless to most servers and super essential to Apple.
01:48:12 ◼ ► So if Apple made a Mac Pro-type thing and offered it to Amazon, do you want any of these? They'd be like, what the hell is all this stuff in the CPU? We don't want any of that.
01:48:20 ◼ ► We want a million tiny little cores for our gigantic service where we sell CPU power to people to run stuff. Or maybe we want gigantic GPUs so we can farm them out to GPUs.
01:48:30 ◼ ► And Nvidia makes those giant GPU cards for us already and companies that make these ARM chips for us just make tons of tiny little cores that we run Linux on.
01:48:38 ◼ ► I don't really need a neural engine, thank you very much. I don't even know what Metal is, so that doesn't help us. So no, we're not interested in your chip.
01:48:46 ◼ ► I don't think they would do this. I think they'd be ill-suited to it. And if they did try to make something, they'd either have to compromise what they want for their computers or they'd have a chip offering that would be of no interest to the server market.
01:48:58 ◼ ► Patrick Melody writes, would it be worthwhile or even feasible for Apple to put a dedicated DRAM back to "drive" on some kind of hardware fast path to be a RAM drive for virtual memory backing store to help make up for the fact that we can't expand RAM in SoC systems? Wow, that was a lot.
01:49:16 ◼ ► Would could this help or is this just a trash idea? John, can you start by explaining what the theory is here, please?
01:49:22 ◼ ► What they're just describing is can we put another tier in the cache hierarchy? Every computer has a cache hierarchy of essentially how distant, both physically and metaphorically, how distant is this piece of memory that I want to get?
01:49:38 ◼ ► The least distance are registers, which are right there in the CPU. You don't have to go anywhere to get them, they're right there.
01:49:44 ◼ ► And then you've got a level one cache, which is the slightly less distant cache that's also on the CPU and made with very fast transistors that are faster than the ones that you use in RAM because they use like six transistors for each bit of memory or whatever instead of one or a half or whatever.
01:49:58 ◼ ► Anyway, there's a cache hierarchy. There's a level two cache, which is cheaper, larger, but more distant. Level three cache sometimes, which is still cheaper, still larger, and still more distant. And then you get RAM, which is way bigger, much more "distant" because it's at the other end of a bus or even in Apple's things it's a bus that leads to someplace else in the same package.
01:50:16 ◼ ► And what this person is saying is, "Okay, but what if we add another level to the cache hierarchy that's farther away than, I guess it would be another pool of RAM that is not on the package, but it's off package RAM?" And we've talked about this, and Apple has patents for it.
01:50:31 ◼ ► They could have external DRAM in slots, but also RAM on the CPU. And if you put that in one giant hierarchy of memory, you'd pull things in and as you use them more often, they would move in closer and closer and they would push out less used data and all sorts of cache population algorithms.
01:50:46 ◼ ► Yeah, you could do that. What that would do is if you overflowed into that slower, more distant RAM, it would make things slower. And you'd say, "Well, we could use that as like a RAM disk, but that dedicated RAM would just be used for disk, so instead of when we swap, we wouldn't be swapping to disk."
01:51:02 ◼ ► That's not a great idea. Using a RAM disk is swap. I mean, you can speed things up a little bit, but the problem is then you're going through the whole disk I/O subsystem and running software to get data. You don't want to be going to swap. Even if that swap is RAM disk, if you look at the code path that leads to you pulling a page from "disk," the actual I/O part where you pull it, because honestly, in a good drive, even a spinning disk, it's probably in RAM anyway what you're pulling if you used it frequently because the spinning hard drives have RAM caches on them.
01:51:31 ◼ ► SSDs have caches on them as well. But it's all that code path you're going through to get to the point where you're reading something from "disk." That's what's killing you as opposed to pulling it over the bus.
01:51:42 ◼ ► So, coming up with new, novel hierarchies of memory is good, but there's a reason every single thing and every single computer doesn't have 75 levels of cache. You have to sort of balance cost and efficiency to say, "How big should the caches be? How far should they be, and how many should we have?"
01:52:02 ◼ ► And I think using what this thing is describing, using a RAM disk for swap, would be a poor choice of the expense for that.
01:52:12 ◼ ► Making a separate expandable pool of DRAM and having that be part of RAM but not part of swap may be a better choice, but only for applications that need like 1.5 terabytes of RAM or something.
01:52:22 ◼ ► Alright, Arian Anaha writes, "I wanted to know, why doesn't Apple consider using a dual-socket CPU design for the Mac Pro? I know they did this before for our PC. Is it not an easy way to bump performance, especially with their thermal headroom?"
01:52:38 ◼ ► It's not really, because back in the old days when we had dual-socket CPUs, there was an interface between the CPUs for things like cache coherency and cross-CPU communication. And what Apple does now by putting multiple core CPUs or using the Interposer thing, or having multiple cores in the same die, all of that is so much faster than communicating over the logic board.
01:53:07 ◼ ► Between two socketed CPUs. Just so much faster. It's physically closer, the signal path is shorter, and the speed of data transfer is faster because you don't have to go out of the chip package into traces on the motherboard and into another chip that's busy doing something else. You can much more tightly integrate them.
01:53:24 ◼ ► The Interposer is as close as we can think of that, but still faster because there's so many more connections and they're so much closer to each other and everything runs so much faster.
01:53:32 ◼ ► So the world has moved on from that. What we have now are these chiplet packages where even if you have multiple dies on the same package, they're still closer together and more tightly integrated than two socketed ones.
01:53:42 ◼ ► So I don't think that's a great solution. I think it would be slower than doing the quad the right way or slower than the Ultra because the Ultra is like, "Oh, why not have two socketed Maxes?" The Ultra is faster and better integrated than that.
01:53:55 ◼ ► Then Jan Lenart writes, "Does the Mac Pro have any supercar aspects to it anymore? The technology that could trickle down is getting scarce at this point."
01:54:04 ◼ ► What do you two think? Is there any supercar aspects that you can think of of the Mac Pro? Maybe wheels? Yeah, there you go. What other Mac has wheels?
01:54:13 ◼ ► I think having any sort of internal expandability is something to be... I think that's something to be... not congratulated, but to be lauded, I guess, is what I'm looking for. But I don't see that as being a thing in basically any other Mac. So I don't know. I can't think of anything.
01:54:30 ◼ ► Honestly, in my opinion, not knowing much about recording studios and specialty I/O cards and everything, it almost seems like the Mac Pro is a giant PCI Express dongle. We have the new world of Apple Silicon and we really want everything to be as on-chip as possible.
01:54:46 ◼ ► We want to use external expansion as much as possible through Thunderbolt to have these nice clean computers like the Mac Studio. And then for you legacy folks out there who need PCI cards, here's a giant dongle for you. That's kind of how it feels.
01:54:59 ◼ ► And hopefully in the future, as we talked about, if they are able to do the quad chip, then they can raise the performance ceiling more and that becomes kind of its own Halo-type justification of like, you know, look how fast we can make this for people who really need it.
01:55:13 ◼ ► But the way it is now, it's honestly super unexciting. I don't think it inspires anybody to do anything except complain about the price and the lack of GPU expansion and the lower RAM ceiling and lack of other forms of expansion.
01:55:28 ◼ ► The idea of a Halo computer or Halo car, I think, is to excite your fans. To really show, like, look at how awesome things could be if you had infinite money to afford this thing.
01:55:42 ◼ ► Yes, yes. And this Mac Pro, I understand the reason they make it. It does seem to serve a very small market. But I don't think this excites anyone. In fact, I think it actually discourages a lot of people who want Apple to make really high-end hardware.
01:55:59 ◼ ► Because this kind of shows that crowd, you know, we're not really interested. Slash, we don't think you matter. And to whatever degree that's true or not. And I say this as somebody who doesn't want this anymore.
01:56:13 ◼ ► Like, I'm extremely happy with my MacBook Pro and if I ever did want to have a massive upgrade from this in terms of performance, I would go with the Mac Studio, which would roughly double my performance.
01:56:25 ◼ ► But even that, my needs are covered. So I don't need them to do this for my own personal needs, but it is, I think this product, this particular revision of this product, does not contain any supercar, Halo car excitement to me.
01:56:42 ◼ ► It is just one giant PCI dongle. But that doesn't mean that it can't ever contain those things. It's this version that doesn't, but I can foresee a future in which, if they're able to do the quad and really push that performance even higher and push the capacities even higher as a result of doing that, that could be more interesting.
01:57:02 ◼ ► So I think even this one does still have some supercar aspects to it. They just are not as exciting as they could be. So first of all, on the PCI thing, I wouldn't just call it a PCI dongle because the difference between this and like a breakout box is this is on the same motherboard.
01:57:17 ◼ ► The path between the SOC and the PCI things is faster and wider than it would be if it was in a separate box because it's literally all on the same motherboard. You can't do that with any other Mac. It's obvious it's not supercar in the wider sense, but in the Mac world, no other Mac has this much, has an expansion slot with this much bandwidth to the SOC.
01:57:37 ◼ ► And so why does that matter? I was looking at the MKBHD video where he was pulling a Marco and justifying what he's going to get one of these, which you were like, well, I can't wait to hear this. What is your, what is your who's going to be? And what he came up with, which I think is valid in a Marco way, is this is the only Mac that you can buy that I can put this in.
01:57:57 ◼ ► And he holds up like what must be a hoejillion dollar PCI card that you, you fill with SSD, like M M.2 SSD things. And they all, it's like an SSD raid that connects to like a sick, a 16 X PCI slot.
01:58:11 ◼ ► And he's like, this is like 16 terabytes of massively redundant SSD thing storage that is so much faster than any one SSD drive you can get.
01:58:21 ◼ ► And so he's like, now I can do my video. And instead of this gigantic promise rate array with like a million spinning hard drives, all my video is on this card that I shove inside my Mac pro.
01:58:30 ◼ ► And now I have access to my like eight K raw data of this crappy Android phone that no one wants. And now I can grind through it at a million frames per second. Smooth.
01:58:40 ◼ ► Like it's basically like no other Mac can have disc IO this fast because you can't attack it. Thunderbolt, forget about it. It's not, it's too slow. It's like stepping through a star straw internal SSD. No other Mac can touch this because it is essentially a massively redundant,
01:58:55 ◼ ► parallelized set of SSDs of like, think of the fastest SSD you can buy and put like seven of them or eight of them in parallel and read and write from all of them at the same time.
01:59:04 ◼ ► And God only knows how much that card costs, but you can't put that card in any other Mac. So if, if you know, that's a super hard aspect, massive, it's not massive storage, like lots of space.
01:59:14 ◼ ► It's how fast can you read and write? Like if you do like a disk benchmark on it, it's going to have numbers that are way bigger than any other Mac. So there's one.
01:59:21 ◼ ► The other one I would say is the case. It's all because we've seen it before. This is a supercar case. It's expensive for no reason, right? It's over-designed. It's expensive to produce. It's fancy. Supercars do that.
01:59:36 ◼ ► They have, you know, they have like carbon fiber bodies and things that are totally impractical and you know, might not even help the car's performance in any way, but they're fancy and they look cool and they cost a lot of money.
01:59:44 ◼ ► So that's another one I would say. I think that's about it. Maybe you could say cooling, which kind of ties into the thing, but yeah, you can put cards in here and some of these cards give this thing supercar like capability.
01:59:57 ◼ ► And the case is like a supercar, but in most other aspects, it's, it's not really doing its job. So we hope they do better next time.
02:00:04 ◼ ► Finally, David Saunders writes, do you think the vision pro is so ambitious and contains so much new tech design, UX ideas, et cetera, that is now effectively Apple's halo car product? That's a pretty good argument in my book.
02:00:15 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, if you look at the, just the basic, like to get the vision pro, I mean, we talked about this before when they announced, but like to get the vision pro from, you know, from, from not existing to being able to show you effectively like an empty desktop, you know, like just put this thing on your head and show the room and make it look like you're looking through it and show an empty screen that you can open up windows into.
02:00:44 ◼ ► Like that, just that, just before you've even done any application usage or experiences with entertainment or whatever with the vision pro, just the simple task quote, I'm using simple here very loosely.
02:00:57 ◼ ► Just the simple task of show your empty desktop that took so much for this product. It's so many disciplines had to come together to not only do that passively, but to do a good job of that. And then you think about the eye tracking, the gesture recognition, the audio processing, what it's doing, how it's mapping, how it's looking at the lighting in your room and figuring out where your walls are.
02:01:23 ◼ ► And there's like, there's so much going into this product to effectively just create the empty environment for you to then later, you know, put applications into that is both profoundly wasteful and profoundly over engineered and really cool.
02:01:44 ◼ ► And nothing to me says Halo Car like profoundly over engineered, logically wasteful, but really cool technology usage. So I think that actually is a better Halo Car than any Mac Apple makes.
02:01:58 ◼ ► Yeah, I don't think so because I think when we talk about Halo Cars, car companies make cars. They don't make dishwashers or swimming pools or other things. When you make lots of different kinds of things, like making a, you know, a really fast car is not the same as making a transparent 16K television that rolled up from a slot.
02:02:21 ◼ ► But within their categories, those are both Halo products. So you make a bunch of TVs, but you also make this like ridiculous TV that costs $60,000 that no one can afford to buy. But it's amazing. Like you said, Mark, like it, you know, it rolls up out of the thing and it's clear.
02:02:36 ◼ ► And it's like, just to get a picture on this TV, like so much technology, so much advanced technology and expenses involved. And in the end, like it's just showing a picture on a television. It's such a waste of resources and technology to do this. And in the end, you're just watching like streaming Netflix on your 16K TV. That's a Halo Car TV.
02:02:53 ◼ ► But it's not a Halo Car sports car. So if that same company made cars, because it's a conglomerate or whatever, I think you have to do it in different categories. Now, I think the headset does have some aspects of like advanced technology, kind of like the iPhone did.
02:03:06 ◼ ► Like, it's Apple doing something one notch better than everybody else, especially when it all comes together. Like the iPhone is like, was the iPhone screen amazing? Was the iPhone like processor amazing? Was the operating system in it particularly amazing? It was the combination of all those elements that gave you the iPhone experience. And that was amazing.
02:03:25 ◼ ► And so you could say when the iPhone came out, it's, is that Apple's Halo product? Well, it was certainly the Halo phone in the whole industry. Like everyone looked at that phone and it was like, people thought it was fake because it was so amazing. But if you look at the constituent pieces, it's not that amazing. So same thing with the Vision Pro.
02:03:40 ◼ ► It's maybe one step ahead of all the other headsets. But you know, Sony will sell those screens to other people. But it's the synergy of like, okay, well, Apple makes that and they make the processors which are low power and fit in there and don't get too hot. And also, they make the software that brings all this together.
02:03:55 ◼ ► So I think within headsets, the one and only one Apple makes that is suffixed with Pro is Apple's Halo headset. But it's different than a personal computer and it's different from a phone. And that's just with an Apple with a bunch of products that are very similar to computer products. If Apple made a car, it would be much easier because we would say this is a Halo car. And if they made something that was like the i3, we would say, does it do stuff better than like if they made something like the i3, but it literally drove itself and had no steering wheel?
02:04:20 ◼ ► We would probably call that a Halo car of a different kind. But if they made just an i3 that you had to drive yourself, it would say, maybe not a Halo car. So I feel like the Vision Pro, I mean, it's only $3,500. Not that I say the Halo cars have to be really expensive, but it doesn't hurt like they usually are.
02:04:34 ◼ ► $3,500 is expensive, but it's not a $50,000 Mac Pro. So I would say some very advanced technology and amazing work is in the Vision Pro, but I do kind of separate it. That's why I was talking about Apple should make the world's fastest personal computer. Don't say anything about their phones or their iPads or their headsets. I think they should make the world's best headset too. And I think they are. So good job with that so far. But I think they should continue to do so.
02:04:58 ◼ ► I also think they should make the world's best phone. Although in the realm of phone computing speed doesn't matter that much. But in general, Apple pretty much always has been in the running. And we say this with the Mac Pro as well. Like I'm not saying like I say you should aim to make the world's fastest personal computer. You're probably not going to. Let's be real, especially if you don't update it for three years, you're going to fall behind.
02:05:15 ◼ ► In the realm of phones, Apple's phones are often the fastest phones, but if they're not, they're always in the running. And by the way, they do it with smaller batteries. So we just want being in the conversation, being in the running, being comparable to your peers, being in the fight for best of the best.
02:05:32 ◼ ► They're doing that with the headset, they're doing that with the phone, they're definitely doing that with the tablet. With the Mac, they're the best of the best in laptops, but in high-end desktop personal computers, they're not really in the conversation anymore. And that's where I want them to go.
02:05:48 ◼ ► So I don't know if that bifurcation makes sense because people just think of Apple as one big company and they just want the company to have a Halo car, but they make lots of different things. Not currently including a car, but I kind of separate them mentally.
02:06:04 ◼ ► Please don't make a car. Thank you so much to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Collide. And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm/join. And we will talk to you next week.
02:06:17 ◼ ► Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
02:06:40 ◼ ► 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.
02:06:59 ◼ ► A-N-T-E-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A. It's accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Tech podcast so long.
02:07:19 ◼ ► So Casey, I lied to you. Oh gosh. And I feel bad about it, but I lied to you for the sake of this moment on the show. Oh gosh, okay.
02:07:32 ◼ ► A couple of episodes ago after we went off the air, you asked me if I knew yet what we were doing for my kids' school after he finishes the elementary school here.
02:07:45 ◼ ► And I said no. That was a lie. I actually did know exactly what we were doing. Okay. And that is why yesterday we bought a house on Long Island.
02:07:57 ◼ ► Oh! Congratulations. You mean the second one? I knew you were going to do this again. Jesus. Okay, so explain to me what's going on.
02:08:11 ◼ ► We've built quite a life for ourselves out here at the beach. And since we came out here full time for COVID, and our Westchester house was where we were going to go back for, you know, whenever we moved back after COVID and whenever we moved back for schooling.
02:08:26 ◼ ► Out here there is an elementary school, but it's only an elementary school. And my kid is about to exceed the elementary-ness of the school. And so we were faced with, you know, do we go back to Westchester this fall and take our house back from the spiders that have taken it over in the meantime?
02:08:44 ◼ ► Or do we look at maybe somewhere else? And because we've built such a life for ourselves out here, we want it to be close because driving for, you know, it looks like Westchester and Fire Island are close to each other.
02:08:59 ◼ ► But when you actually have to make that trip, not only is it not brief, but it's terrible. It's a terrible drive. It's really grueling and it can greatly vary in how long it takes.
02:09:10 ◼ ► On a good day, it's two hours. Whereas Long Island is full of communities that have really good school districts. Like Long Island in many ways, I always call it the south of the north. It's really very southern culturally in a lot of ways.
02:09:38 ◼ ► I guarantee you there's more pickup trucks driving around Long Island than there are in the south.
02:09:46 ◼ ► Yeah, so anyway, there's lots of delightful places on Long Island that are significantly closer. Like the order of 20 minutes instead of two hours.
02:09:56 ◼ ► And so we've been looking for, I've been looking secretly for a house there. I didn't want to tell you until on the show because I knew John would give me crap about it and that might be funny.
02:10:07 ◼ ► I could have given you some suggestions for good areas, but I'm assuming you wanted to get someplace close to Fire Island or no?
02:10:14 ◼ ► Yes, we wanted somewhere close. And so I don't think I want to get too specific, but yeah, we bought somewhere on the bottom of Long Island.
02:10:22 ◼ ► It's funny, we actually, there was a chance for us to potentially buy a place that was on a canal. And the question came up of should I get a boat?
02:10:35 ◼ ► You're like that cat with the newspaper. The cat with the newspaper meme, I should buy a boat.
02:10:40 ◼ ► We've talked about this before on the show. It's just a path between where we are now and Marco eventually getting a boat and we're traveling down it.
02:10:46 ◼ ► And everyone keeps telling me that and this was the clearest chance I had yet. This was the clear like, look, if you ever even think you might want a boat, this is it.
02:10:56 ◼ ► And I had to really seriously consider like, should I get this house and get a boat and then just zip over whenever I want? And the thing is, because I have lived here for a few years, I know lots of people with boats.
02:11:13 ◼ ► And then the best thing is, every time I'm actually on someone else's boat that's not a ferry, I realize I don't think I like being on boats. I don't think I like this even.
02:11:27 ◼ ► Not only do I not want to deal with the pain and the buttery of owning a boat, but even the activity of riding a boat, I don't even like that.
02:11:35 ◼ ► Can't make a living as a bay man anymore. Oh, well done. Not on that town, Easter, Alexa, I tell you that.
02:11:41 ◼ ► So anyway, so yeah, we didn't buy that house for lots of reasons, but I did have a clear opportunity to become a Buddhist and I chose not to.
02:11:51 ◼ ► And by the way, what I would have said is, so you're thinking of buying a house on a canal, so both of your houses will be extremely susceptible to hurricane damage?
02:11:59 ◼ ► Yeah, right, that also factored into the decision making, yes. But anyway, so we got a house yesterday. It needs some work.
02:12:11 ◼ ► And I think this will provide a decent amount of possible topics for the slow news summer as we go through this.
02:12:20 ◼ ► Because already, because it needs a decent amount of work, we're not going to be able to move into it for a little bit. Already, I am so glad I resolved my iPad situation days earlier.
02:12:33 ◼ ► Because now we just close on the house. We walk in. This house has been vacant for some time and needs some work.
02:12:42 ◼ ► So we don't have, there's nothing in it. We can't really move into it yet because we're going to be doing a bunch of construction.
02:12:50 ◼ ► So it's just going to be mostly vacant as we do all this crap. And so I'm looking at things like, okay, well, because we are going to be doing construction while not living there,
02:13:02 ◼ ► and so we're going to be 20 minutes away for a lot of the time. Do I want to put in some kind of basic cameras? Do I want smart smoke alarms so I can learn if anything goes wrong?
02:13:12 ◼ ► Stuff like that. But then you need internet service for any of those things to work, really.
02:13:24 ◼ ► Yes, I made sure of that. And yeah, so I got to go through like, I can bring over a lot of my Westchester stuff slowly, like once we can actually start moving stuff in.
02:13:33 ◼ ► But, you know, all my networking gear there is all super old Ubiquiti stuff. So I figure like, I might as well get the new Wi Fi 6 stuff.
02:13:41 ◼ ► Yeah, might as well. Marco gonna Marco, you know, perfectly good network equipment rather than moving. It's like this is an opportunity to buy new equipment.
02:14:03 ◼ ► I know. So the system, the old Ubiquiti system I have back there, I have like this giant old switch, which is fine. It still works.
02:14:11 ◼ ► And one of those this was before the dream machine error, they have like the cloud key. And then like the router is a separate box. And the cloud key is almost like the it almost looks like a POE injector.
02:14:23 ◼ ► Like it's this thing that kind of just hangs off your rack and like, you gotta like stick it somewhere. And there's multiple pieces to it, like more parts than usual.
02:14:31 ◼ ► And I had to order the FiOS yesterday. And I'm, I'm looking like I gotta get my own router there somehow. What router do I have lying around like that I could bring there for the connection.
02:14:39 ◼ ► And I was like, you know, it's Prime. Let me see how cheap is Eero right now. And the basic Eero router was normally is 200 bucks. And yesterday during Prime whatever was 160 or 180.
02:14:58 ◼ ► No, and that and that includes the Wi Fi six built in access point. It includes the whole controller thing that they have. And it includes a built in switch that also has four POE ports.
02:15:09 ◼ ► That's a no brainer, like 200 bucks for all that. And I have the previous version of that, like the like the blue cylinder thing that before they put the POE ports in.
02:15:19 ◼ ► I'm using that now here at the beach. And it's been great. So I'm like, all right, that I know this is a good setup. And now and you know, I know the Ubiquiti system.
02:15:28 ◼ ► And I know that it this is going to be a situation where like, you know, I'm going to have this thing in the garage where the cable comes in.
02:15:34 ◼ ► And then I got and then I'm going to like staple an Ethernet cable along the roof or something to get to the office on the other side of the house.
02:15:42 ◼ ► That's somehow I don't know how this is going to be. This is going to be quite an ordeal. Getting this house worked on.
02:15:49 ◼ ► And because of various logistical reasons, I'm actually going to probably be like using it as an office for the first few months of school because we won't be able to move.
02:16:04 ◼ ► I don't know if we're probably not going to be able to live in the house when school begins.
02:16:10 ◼ ► So I will probably be driving him off the beach every day on the sand for the first couple of months of school.
02:16:19 ◼ ► Well, that's I mean, that part's fine. I can deal with that. But it's not going to be worth driving all the way back here to work all day and then driving all the way back to school.
02:16:26 ◼ ► So I'll probably just stay over there all day during the school day and I'll like use my gutted house as an office if it's at all possible to do that.
02:16:42 ◼ ► I don't know. It's fine. The whales don't have lights, but you know, you just use yours and it's it's fine.
02:16:47 ◼ ► I'm always amused like when when I when I'm driving on the sand, I'm like how many people's commutes involve a non-trivial risk of hitting a whale?
02:17:01 ◼ ► You have to look out for seals in the tracks and stuff. It's it's really weird. Anyway, so I think I'm going to I'm actually going to be a Long Islander for real this time.
02:17:18 ◼ ► Well, you still got a you already beat me back because it's far as part of Long Island as you know.
02:17:22 ◼ ► But I think the number of years I spent there, I still have quite a bank that you need to catch up to.
02:17:30 ◼ ► No, I keep going to your pizza place. I'm calm. You're eating all my pizza. That's true. I am. Yeah. You keep my pizza place in business.
02:17:36 ◼ ► I appreciate that. Yeah, they're fine. You should go at branch and always a couple times to they need some love.
02:17:41 ◼ ► It's not too far away. It's here's the thing about branch and always like, oh, it's a different restaurant, though.
02:17:45 ◼ ► But if you are the pizza there, you're like, but the pizza tastes the same. Why? And there's like a family connection.
02:17:50 ◼ ► There's some kind of feuding thing, but it's always fascinating. There's two pizza places that have basically the same pizza.
02:17:55 ◼ ► It's really weird. Yeah. Anyway, so yeah, that's going to there's going to be a bunch of tech stories about this.
02:17:59 ◼ ► I'm thinking like, you know, like I got to figure out the network stuff. I got to figure out smart home stuff.
02:18:05 ◼ ► Some of my smart home stuff I would I would love to use again. Some of it I will not use again.
02:18:13 ◼ ► I'm I did I actually for just coincidence today I was I spent a good part of today moving around some of my Logitech circle view cameras,
02:18:38 ◼ ► Now, of course, USB plugs are not weatherproof. In fact, they're they have tons of metal and they're not you know,
02:18:44 ◼ ► and they're fully exposed. So you have to put that put it in some kind of like weatherproof housing or or tuck that inside somewhere to actually plug it into the power adapter or whatever.
02:18:54 ◼ ► We had one of these that was in a part of the house that was a hundred percent shielded from the wind and the rain.
02:19:02 ◼ ► It was under like a this like, you know, this kind of like little tucked in area under the deck.
02:19:08 ◼ ► This camera stopped working. I turned on what happened? The other ones all work. I think I have four of them.
02:19:14 ◼ ► They all work. What happened to this one? And I look at the cable and it's stuck to its power adapter.
02:19:27 ◼ ► How long do you have to live the shore to learn how this works? It's not exposed to the wind and the rain.
02:19:36 ◼ ► Here, I'm going to paste into our slack group. What does USB power connector look like?
02:19:44 ◼ ► That's what I mean. That's what your bicycles look like. Like unless it's in a hermetically sealed container where no air from the seashore can get to it.
02:19:55 ◼ ► I think outdoor is a relative term and it's this is definitely not not an outdoor outdoors in other places.
02:20:05 ◼ ► Maybe outdoors like in Arizona in the middle of no in the middle in the middle of land with no humidity.
02:20:15 ◼ ► Well, this is very exciting. Congratulations. We should post the address in our Slack so we can look at it.
02:20:20 ◼ ► Well, no, I completely and strongly agree with your desire to be vague about where it is.
02:20:27 ◼ ► However, I am a little bit sad that the listeners won't be able to hear John heftily judging you and angrily judging you for whatever particular town you have ended up in.
02:20:37 ◼ ► There's lots of good places. I'm looking at the map. But things within that distance of where he lives and far around plenty good places to choose from.
02:20:43 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, the thing is, like in general, like Long Island has a lot of really good towns with really good public school systems.
02:20:50 ◼ ► That's what we were looking for. Like, that's it's kind of an embarrassment of riches. Like, there's a lot of good choices.
02:20:54 ◼ ► Like, as much as I give it crap. And it depends on like what kind of lots of good choices.
02:20:58 ◼ ► Like, do you like really dense population? Like a cute little town? Do you like things to be more spread out?
02:21:02 ◼ ► How close do you want to be to a highway? Like, there's you have a wide variety of choices.
02:21:07 ◼ ► How big a school do you want to go? Like, you want your kids to go to a little school or a giant school.
02:21:11 ◼ ► All those choices exist. Yeah. And all within pretty like, I always joke, like, you know, Westchester was built, you know, all the rich people from the city moved to Westchester or built houses there before we really had much of a strong car and highway culture.
02:21:27 ◼ ► And so Westchester was designed with the car really as an afterthought and pretty much everywhere you go in Westchester, you are constantly bottlenecked by local traffic on little skinny roads that happen to be like the only way to get from here to there.
02:21:42 ◼ ► Long Island is not. Long Island is the opposite of all of that and way cheaper in taxes.
02:21:50 ◼ ► Wasn't always that way. It's time for you to read the Power Broker, Marco. Now that you have all this Long Island stuff, read the book.
02:21:56 ◼ ► That being said, getting anywhere on Long Island and shopping and go like if you have to like, oh, I got to go to like a Best Buy to pick up this thing today or whatever.
02:22:05 ◼ ► That kind of stuff is such a pain in the butt in Westchester. On Long Island, it's like, oh, I got to go to Target. They have this exclusive thing I have to go get.
02:22:12 ◼ ► Oh, this Target doesn't have it. It only took 20 minutes to get here. I'm not mad. And then in another 10 minutes, I can get to the next Target and get it there.
02:22:19 ◼ ► And everything is like easy and flat and there's parking lots and everything is no matter where you're going on Long Island, it's 20 minutes away.
02:22:27 ◼ ► Back in the day, though, in my day, there was no Target. There was no Walmart. There was no Kmart on the entire island. Can you imagine that?
02:22:34 ◼ ► The days before the sort of hegemony of giant big box retailers, like it was the same parking lots. It was the same roads. It was the same shopping centers.
02:22:42 ◼ ► But the stores that were there were not. There were zero Targets. Zero Kmart. I didn't even go to one of those stores until I went away to college. Different time.
02:22:50 ◼ ► And look, obviously, living in suburbia, basically, there are certain downsides to that kind of culture and that kind of civic design for sure.
02:23:00 ◼ ► But the reality is modern American life requires a lot of that stuff and it is just so much easier on Long Island than it is in Westchester.
02:23:16 ◼ ► Really? I guess it depends on where you are. Westchester must have horrendous property taxes.