00:00:00 ◼ ► When Declan was really little, I'm saying like two-ish years old, Aaron typically would bring him to what I like to call baby gym. It was a place called Romp and Roll, where you would bring your infant or your toddler and you would do like, not gymnastics, but like they would run around and play and sing songs and do games and whatever the case may be.
00:00:21 ◼ ► She did this with him constantly. I went on Sundays with Declan and we would go in the morning and do a Romp and Roll together. We would have lunch together and this gave Aaron some time to not be mom and be Aaron.
00:00:34 ◼ ► And one of the times that I went to this barbecue place with Declan, it was like two or three at the time, I had gotten myself some French fries and I thought, you know what, I'll let him try a French fry because what's it going to hurt if he tries it just once?
00:00:47 ◼ ► And this was early on in dad life when I didn't realize that much like with a dog, if you try something just once with a child, especially of that age, it's not just once, baby.
00:01:08 ◼ ► But fast forward to earlier today, and for reasons unknown, Declan has decided that he would like to listen to at least a little bit of ATP tonight.
00:01:19 ◼ ► And so I believe that through the wall behind me, he and his sister are, and maybe Aaron, are listening to me.
00:01:27 ◼ ► And he was very excited to find the delay between when he hears me laughing through the wall and when I'm laughing on the live broadcast.
00:01:36 ◼ ► So now, I don't know what to do with myself because I love that he's there interested in this, but I don't know if this is a French fry situation where I will regret the monsters that I've created, or if this is nothing but a healthy thing.
00:01:52 ◼ ► So say hi to the rest of the family, you two, because apparently for at least a few minutes, they're here as well.
00:02:01 ◼ ► So let's assume that your amazingly powerful dad uncoolness will repel him eventually, or that our combined three-way dad uncoolness, because we have a potent dose of dad uncoolness here.
00:02:18 ◼ ► Oh, yeah. One or two more years, and he will not be able to tolerate how uncool we all are as dads.
00:02:23 ◼ ► Exactly. Now, Michaela, she is seven and a half now, and so I think I am still at least slightly cool for the most part.
00:02:30 ◼ ► Of course, some of the, oh, dad's so uncool, we'll bleed from him to her at some point.
00:03:01 ◼ ► But they use them as a noise maker when they sleep, and they also can text only Aaron and myself, because we have, you know, parental controls, whatever it's called, screen time and all that set up in such a way that they can only text us.
00:03:14 ◼ ► But earlier today, we relented, and now they are allowed to text each other via, you know, their respective email addresses, which are used only, excuse me, only for this purpose.
00:03:25 ◼ ► And I don't know if this is another French fry situation, where all of a sudden I have created a monster, or two monsters, really, where they will start texting each other, you know, the second they're both awake.
00:03:36 ◼ ► Now, granted, we have, you know, times that I don't think they can use the Messages app until like 7 in the morning or something like that.
00:03:45 ◼ ► But I'm enjoying, as much as I joke, I'm enjoying this surprising amount of interest in what Dad does for a living.
00:03:52 ◼ ► Because usually it's, you know, oh, he clickety-clacks on the keyboard and yaps into the microphone from time to time.
00:04:16 ◼ ► And we, I think it was John quipped last episode, do you think there's anybody listening to this right now who is currently wearing a Vision Pro?
00:04:32 ◼ ► So anyway, so Marco quipped, do you think there's anybody listening to this right now who's currently wearing a Vision Pro?
00:04:47 ◼ ► It's a great device to wear while doing chores, so you can have a floating video while you fold laundry or play pause media with soapy dish hands.
00:04:57 ◼ ► I can see, like, watching, like, a show or something while you're washing dishes or something with the floating window, but it's a podcast.
00:05:22 ◼ ► But, I mean, couldn't he literally just put his phone with the speaker on the counter and do the same thing?
00:05:35 ◼ ► So you can see what he's experiencing, which is a floating ATP window that's playing audio while he does dishes with the Vision Pro on.
00:05:46 ◼ ► I think the thought technology that was new to me was what D. Griffin John said about you can play pause by just, you know, picking up your hands and pinching.
00:05:55 ◼ ► Which, even if you're grabbing the stalk of an AirPod, as I can attest, apparently water damage can occur.
00:06:00 ◼ ► So it is a safer approach, leaving aside the fact that you have a $3,500, you know, thing on your face right above a pile of water.
00:06:16 ◼ ► And as it turns out, there was later an issue with Marco's recording, which, with respect, I thought was hilarious.
00:06:25 ◼ ► But anyways, I briefly mentioned that part of the reason I got this TS5 Plus was because I wanted the 10 gigabit Ethernet.
00:06:37 ◼ ► And I had done, as of last episode, which was just a couple of days ago as we sit here,
00:06:41 ◼ ► I had done some performance testing using Samba and using a command line app called iPerf3.
00:06:53 ◼ ► And we had some theories, which I think, knowing what little we knew at the time, were reasonable theories.
00:06:58 ◼ ► Marco had said, hey, you're not going to get that much data off of a spinning disk, especially a 7,200 RPM spinning disk, which is completely fair.
00:07:45 ◼ ► But at one point, I was definitely getting like nine and change gigabits per second transfers.
00:07:59 ◼ ► John, speaking of things that Marco and I are just deeply concerned about, what's going on with your toaster?
00:08:26 ◼ ► I never bothered to check the manual or call Breville because it doesn't bother me enough.
00:08:36 ◼ ► John F. wrote in to say, I get the E01 on my toaster oven maybe once every one to two months.
00:08:41 ◼ ► It pretty much always occurs when using another kitchen appliance on the same circuit, most frequently my espresso machine.
00:08:46 ◼ ► For that appliance, the toaster freaks out just at the moment I turn off the pump after pulling a shot.
00:08:50 ◼ ► I presume the toaster is hypersensitive to disruptions in power, either from brief voltage shifts or possibly noise introduced from the appliances.
00:09:05 ◼ ► I was just sitting there, but maybe it's the computers are more sophisticated and it's cranky about voltage fluctuations.
00:09:10 ◼ ► Unfortunately, unlike things like television or computer, I don't particularly feel comfortable hooking up my toaster to like a UPS or something to smooth out the voltage because that is probably ill-advised.
00:09:21 ◼ ► And I don't have room for it anyway, so at least I have some anecdotal evidence that, you know, voltage fluctuations in my ancient crappy house with a too small power panel may be to blame.
00:09:37 ◼ ► I'll tell you how many times during that year did I see E01 and then plug and unplug it.
00:09:42 ◼ ► So we have one report of, you know, once or twice a year and one report of once every one to two months.
00:09:53 ◼ ► Like it would, you know, to supply enough power, it would have to be a pretty beefy UPS.
00:10:00 ◼ ► Like you can get UPS that are rated for, you know, 1500 watts or whatever, you know, like whatever it would be.
00:10:05 ◼ ► Like you can you can totally do that and it would be, you know, as long as it's rated for that much current, it would be fine.
00:10:16 ◼ ► I have to put it in the garage or something like through the wall or, you know, get one of the whole house UPS is or.
00:10:22 ◼ ► Yeah, the whole electrical system in my house needs to be updated, but hopefully that will be somebody else's problem.
00:11:03 ◼ ► I got, you know, one whole kid to put through college and one one fourth of a kid to put through college.
00:11:21 ◼ ► We need to talk about sunscreen and Marco's new thought technology with regard to sunscreen.
00:11:25 ◼ ► Marco, can you summarize for me what your discovery or assertion was last episode with regard to chemical versus physical sunscreen?
00:11:35 ◼ ► My I quickly gone through the difference between chemical and physical and mineral sunscreen.
00:11:39 ◼ ► And I had summarized it basically as saying chemical sunscreens have chemicals that absorb into your skin and they absorb UV rays, whereas mineral sunscreens use like fine metallic dust to reflect the sunlight off of the top of your skin.
00:11:57 ◼ ► Prodan Stetev writes or points us to a academic research paper, Improving Patient Communication on Sunscreen Choice, Updating Mechanistic Misconceptions.
00:12:17 ◼ ► Linked article is actually a letter to the editor of like some journal, but we'll put a link in the show notes to this letter to the editor from like five different authors.
00:12:24 ◼ ► The main point is that this letter cites academic papers, which are all linked from the document with the weird doi.org thing.
00:12:32 ◼ ► So if you want to see all the papers that are backing this, it's not just a crank writing in saying they have an idea.
00:12:40 ◼ ► So from that letter, many assume that chemical sunscreens absorb UV light and convert the energy to heat, while physical sunscreens such as zinc oxide and titanium dioxide reflect and scatter UV light.
00:12:52 ◼ ► However, this mechanism is at best a historic artifact from when physical sunscreen particle sizes were quite large, though such non micronized and non nanoparticulate physical sunscreens may have had a greater proportion of its perfected protective mechanism from reflection and scatter in the past.
00:13:08 ◼ ► These formulations have largely been abandoned for more commercially viable options with the advent of micronization.
00:13:17 ◼ ► Furthermore, even micro sized physical sunscreen formulations have been increasingly replaced by nanoparticle formulations.
00:13:24 ◼ ► It is important for dermatologists to recognize that the primary mechanism of action for modern physical sunscreen agents is the very same protective mechanism of chemical sunscreens absorption of UV light.
00:13:34 ◼ ► It was recently found that modern particulate sized physical zinc oxide and titanium oxide reflected less than 5% of incoming UV light on average.
00:13:41 ◼ ► Rather than relying on reflection and scatter, the overwhelming majority of the attributable protective effect of zinc oxide and titanium dioxide is by UV light absorption, which excites electrons from the valence band to the higher energy conductance band.
00:13:56 ◼ ► This energy is later primarily dissipated as heat in a manner analogous to chemical sunscreen UV light absorption.
00:14:02 ◼ ► This is another one of those things that's like was probably true at one point, but technology marches on and it sounds like they're making the stuff, the like the metal oxides and stuff smaller and smaller in the sunscreen because that makes for a better product like it's smoother and we we have the technology to make it smaller.
00:14:19 ◼ ► And apparently once you make them that small, probably given the wavelength of UV light or whatever, there's been a bunch of new studies that have shown actually it's not really reflecting that much anymore.
00:14:36 ◼ ► So this may be sort of the cutting edge of research, although this is again, this is a letter from 2023.
00:14:40 ◼ ► But just to clarify from last week, apparently it's not as cut and dried as it used to be.
00:14:48 ◼ ► With regard to Apple security for unreleased devices and the suing of John Prosser because of the leak of the liquid metal design scheme.
00:14:57 ◼ ► And an anonymous person writes Apple employees with pre-release iPhone hardware can or could when I was there expense an Apple approved gun safe to store the phone in and then they are required to store the device in such a safe for not carrying it.
00:15:08 ◼ ► This is a relaxation of the older rules requiring you to be accompanied by a, quote, physical security expert, quote, from Apple while taking unreleased hardware out of Apple secure areas.
00:15:28 ◼ ► Well, what they'll do is they'll let you get run over by the car and then snatch up the phone as quickly as possible.
00:15:38 ◼ ► I don't I don't think I want to read this because I know at least a handful of people from Apple listen to this program and I don't want to give them ideas.
00:15:55 ◼ ► Apple MacBook, paren, fall 2025, comma, with ads, paren, with a $150 option to remove them.
00:16:01 ◼ ► If you're not familiar with this whole shtick, Kindles, Amazon Kindles are sold as a version with ads or a version without ads.
00:16:23 ◼ ► I feel like one is that, you know, and we say this every time we talk about the potential of Apple doing ads and stuff.
00:16:36 ◼ ► They're not incentivized to do that because that's not a big income scream stream for them.
00:16:41 ◼ ► Yes, they have at various time done ads and they still do have like search ads and everything like that.
00:16:46 ◼ ► But the majority of their money comes from other things, even though they don't break down the services revenue, that the parts that we did see the breakdown like during court cases did not lead us to believe that ads are a massive portion of that.
00:16:56 ◼ ► But two, and perhaps more importantly, when Apple has done ads, they're so bad at it, just really bad at it.
00:17:03 ◼ ► Like, are they bad at it because institutionally they kind of like don't want to do ads?
00:17:07 ◼ ► Are they bad at it because people who are really good at doing ads wouldn't go to work at Apple?
00:17:15 ◼ ► And so it's not really a fear for me that that's going to be their go to strategy to extract money for to produce a low cost laptop.
00:17:28 ◼ ► I do see a lot of complaints in the Windows world about the prevalence of ads within the Windows interface.
00:17:37 ◼ ► But if I see like a Geico ad in system settings, that's a whole other line that has been crossed.
00:17:46 ◼ ► But I also think Apple is not really into ads as a main revenue stream and they're really bad at it.
00:17:53 ◼ ► So both of those things I hope will combine to make this continue to be just a joke and not a reality.
00:17:58 ◼ ► I agree that there is a line between what they do now with like promoting Apple Music, Apple Pay, you know, all the like all the different things.
00:18:14 ◼ ► I know, but like but in in the settings and as as like, you know, splash modal screens in their own apps like the music app, like they do heavily have advertisements for their own upsells in those apps.
00:18:29 ◼ ► Like I don't think we can call them anything but ads when they when they have like, you know, the badge on the settings app and you go in and it's like you should add Apple care today, you know, or like the full screen modal and music saying you should really subscribe to Apple music.
00:19:09 ◼ ► That Apple, I mean, when you sell ads, just look at the people who are the best in the world.
00:19:13 ◼ ► It really helps to have a lot of information to sell those ads against so you can target them.
00:19:18 ◼ ► And Apple currently doesn't have that information and doesn't seem to want to collect it.
00:19:21 ◼ ► And also, I think they're bad at selling ads and they're also bad at serving ads like where they do sell ads like the app store search ads.
00:19:28 ◼ ► They sell those, but like that's nothing compared to like selling ads for app installs through Facebook or whatever.
00:19:46 ◼ ► I'm sure someone is willing to put them, but to put them there, you got to sell them first.
00:19:51 ◼ ► So continuing my AirPods, not saga, that's a bit dramatic, but my AirPods story, a few people had written in saying, hey, you know, you need to do either an online chat or, you know, talk to them on the phone.
00:20:09 ◼ ► Well, Patch writes in, you can always talk to Apple support without going through any kind of menu or tree by using their iMessage business account.
00:20:17 ◼ ► Patch writes, if you type a message there within two or three minutes, they'll connect you with the customer service person.
00:20:31 ◼ ► The second way is if you do a search for any Apple store using Apple Maps specifically.
00:20:36 ◼ ► In the three-dot menu, there is an option to message them, which pulls you to an iMessage chat, both on iOS and macOS.
00:20:47 ◼ ► I've run across that chat thing several times, but it's not entirely out of as where to find it.
00:20:52 ◼ ► But, you know, I guess if you're going down one of those avenues, like if you're looking for a store only with the Apple Maps app, or if you're in the support app, supposedly it will land in your face.
00:21:07 ◼ ► I definitely don't want to do something to limit user access to the website and the user contributed content, but I had to take action to prevent our CDN bill from being hundreds of dollars higher each month than it was a year ago.
00:21:28 ◼ ► Yeah, so this is something that sort of went unsaid, like why would Cloudflare even have a thing to block AI crawlers?
00:21:41 ◼ ► But the underlying assumption was you'd want to block AI crawlers because AI crawlers are badly behaved and are costing people money.
00:21:51 ◼ ► So this is like the small version of like, I've got a small website and they're costing me hundreds of dollars, which for my small website is significant.
00:21:59 ◼ ► Aaron Zink writes, I'm a consultant who works with many large organizations and government websites.
00:22:06 ◼ ► These are aggressive bots that bring our sites to their knees despite us using caching.
00:22:11 ◼ ► Any site that has dynamic functionality is particularly vulnerable to the problem because there are nearly infinite combinations of parameters and settings that users can choose.
00:22:19 ◼ ► So caching is little to no benefit when a bot decides to go deep exploring every possible combination.
00:22:30 ◼ ► Their proprietary heuristics have been the only things that have enabled us to keep our sites online.
00:22:36 ◼ ► The real bad guy here, my opinion, is not Cloudflare, but the aggressive AI companies who are sending DDoS levels of traffic don't honor robots.txt files and make it nearly impossible to identify and block them selectively.
00:22:51 ◼ ► Additionally, Anonymous writes, when I worked at GitHub, one of the biggest technical challenges we had was the explosive growth of AI crawlers.
00:22:57 ◼ ► Over the course of about six months, we saw traffic increase by about 40% due to AI scrapers.
00:23:04 ◼ ► Intuitively, you'd think it would be a few companies doing this sort of scraping, but it's effectively every AI startup plus everyone that wants to sell data sets to them.
00:23:13 ◼ ► They source traffic from hundreds of thousands of IP addresses, and they are generally smart enough to avoid being blocked with approaches like the JA3 or JA4 signatures.
00:23:25 ◼ ► It's fingerprints that help you profile specific SSL slash TLS clients across different destinations, IPs, ports, and X509 certificates.
00:23:32 ◼ ► I mean, that doesn't really tell you much, but anyway, it's a way to try to identify bots, even if they don't all come from the same IP address or whatever.
00:23:40 ◼ ► I'm not quite sure how it works, but that's why we'll link to the website if you want to look it up.
00:23:44 ◼ ► But the point is, those techniques don't work with the diversity of sources that the AI crawlers are using, apparently.
00:23:50 ◼ ► Continuing from Anonymous, they're buying proxy services from companies like IP Royal, Bright Data, etc.
00:23:58 ◼ ► Sometimes they're paying end users to install what is effectively malware, and sometimes it's sketchier than that.
00:24:07 ◼ ► Cloudflare has a huge advantage over most smaller players like GitHub, precisely because so much of this traffic goes through them.
00:24:12 ◼ ► They can afford to invest compute resources and brain power into identifying and tracking these crawlers.
00:24:20 ◼ ► First of all, characterizing GitHub as a small player lets you know the scale of this problem.
00:24:25 ◼ ► Because, you know, compared to that first person with their personal website or whatever, down to GitHub, it's like, we're just a small player.
00:24:33 ◼ ► But it's something that we're not used to, because you're like, well, what's the big deal?
00:24:41 ◼ ► And I, you know, according to this anonymous person at GitHub, part of it is basically the fact that, you know, pretty rapidly after the advent of Google, it extinguished all the other big search engines.
00:25:12 ◼ ► But imagine if there was 100 Googles crawling, and that, you know, it's, it's in their interest as the crawlers to crawl as much as fast as possible to get the biggest data set to make the most money, so on and so forth, multiplied by 100 of those things.
00:25:25 ◼ ► Everyone who runs a website that is worth crawling is seeing a huge burden from these AI crawlers.
00:25:31 ◼ ► They don't care about robots that tax, which maybe arguably maybe they shouldn't, maybe they should, but whatever.
00:25:40 ◼ ► And they're costing people money, and they're taking down sites because they don't care how fast they go, and they're not throttled.
00:25:46 ◼ ► And this is all just a side effect of, you know, a new influx of venture capital money in an industry that is exploding, where the incentives are to grow as fast as possible.
00:25:57 ◼ ► And no one cares how much damage it's doing to the websites that they're constantly trying to crawl.
00:26:03 ◼ ► So, yeah, that's why blocking AI bots specifically is a feature that, you know, people who run websites would want and see past discussion, last episode's discussion about the difficult situation that puts us all in if one company has the ability to control that spigot.
00:26:20 ◼ ► What, you know, what we're seeing here is like, yes, there are reasons why Cloudflare is useful to website owners right now.
00:26:28 ◼ ► That doesn't mean this isn't a really problematic situation to have that much centralized power in one company over that much of the internet, and they can just change the way things work on a whim.
00:26:40 ◼ ► And so, you know, while there might be decent reasons behind some of this stuff, it doesn't actually fix the problem.
00:26:47 ◼ ► Like, the problem is still that most, you know, smaller companies and DIY projects and things like that just won't be able to crawl pages on the web anymore, you know, before too long.
00:27:00 ◼ ► Yeah, because, like, if you're running a site, like, you need your site to, like, stay up and not have your bandwidth bill double because of non-human traffic that's not giving you anything.
00:27:10 ◼ ► So, that's your main concern, and the email that you're getting from 20 people with their dinky websites is so much lower level concern for you just keeping your stuff online.
00:27:23 ◼ ► And also, as with so many things with AI, this leads to sort of thoughts about sustainability.
00:27:28 ◼ ► It's like, can the web withstand an arbitrary number of AI crawlers constantly crawling?
00:27:47 ◼ ► Like, we've kind of run that experiment, and it's got the percentage of spam has got frighteningly high.
00:27:51 ◼ ► Well, what percentage of traffic on the web can be AI crawlers before it becomes economically unfeasible to run websites because you're not actually running them for humans.
00:28:02 ◼ ► You're just running them for AI crawlers that are extracting value from your site and never sending anything back.
00:28:06 ◼ ► And this is just another version of the same, you know, well, they're taking my content and not sending any people to my site, and I don't want to give them rights to my content.
00:28:16 ◼ ► We need a system where people are still incentivized to make things and publish them, because if not, all those AI crawlers are going to run out of stuff to crawl.
00:28:36 ◼ ► As of, I believe, today as we record this, the 26 betas, the iOS 26, iPadOS 26, et cetera, are all out and available.
00:28:55 ◼ ► I heard the most recent under the radar where you were encouraging people to do that, and I largely agree with you, but we have a couple of pieces of travel coming up that I really do not want to mess with having a beta on my phone, which I know professionally is a little questionable, but personally, I think is a very sound decision.
00:29:12 ◼ ► So, I don't know, Marco, if you would recommend for non-developers to put the beta on their phones, but now would be the time to try to wave people off if that's the case.
00:29:23 ◼ ► I think, you know, what you're doing with signing up for the beta, you know, like in any year, what you're signing up for is some stuff that works now might not work.
00:29:34 ◼ ► And stepping back from the beta is possible, but it requires basically, you know, a reformat of your phone, and you can't just migrate everything back from your current installation to it.
00:29:45 ◼ ► So, going back from a beta is such a high pain in the butt for most people that unless you have a second device, you're probably not going back.
00:30:04 ◼ ► And, you know, what I was saying under the radar is, like, anybody who's a developer or a designer responsible for the design of an app on iOS should definitely have the beta installed on their carry phone now.
00:30:14 ◼ ► Because there is a lot that you kind of have to live with, with the new design, to get a feel for what your app, how your app should be designed.
00:30:30 ◼ ► So, it's not a great beta season, but it is one that if you have any tolerance for beta problems, you should get in it now, if you aren't already in it.
00:30:41 ◼ ► Because it is very illuminating, especially, again, if you are a developer, it is very helpful.
00:30:46 ◼ ► And the more people use it, the more problems that will be found, and the more noise will be made about them.
00:30:57 ◼ ► And if we have any chance of Apple sanding off some of the rough edges, or fixing some of the bugs, we're going to need as many people as possible.
00:31:29 ◼ ► You do still have significant rendering and animation glitches all over the UI, all over the system.
00:31:40 ◼ ► I'm no longer having to do things like reboot my phone to connect to my AirPods, or force quit apps in the middle of typing a text message because the keyboard crashes.
00:31:53 ◼ ► So, you know, the really big bugs are gone, but there's tons of visual glitches all over the place.
00:32:00 ◼ ► And that's not even counting, like, the design itself being pretty controversial and rough in a lot of places.
00:32:06 ◼ ► But there are still tons of animation bugs, tons of little glitches, occasional layout bugs that do require, you know, apps to be force quit or something.
00:32:31 ◼ ► You have, like, I, frankly, I don't know how Apple is going to land this plane by early September.
00:32:39 ◼ ► I think it's going to be a really rough release in terms of just a huge number of mostly tiny bugs.
00:32:51 ◼ ► So, if you can tolerate that and you want to see the new design and you want to experience it, jump in.
00:33:12 ◼ ► So, if you have an older device that you were going to maybe think about testing this on,
00:33:23 ◼ ► People around our circles are saying, like, users are going to, you know, hate this design
00:33:38 ◼ ► If you recall, that was one of the big criticisms of iOS 7 is, I put this on my iPhone and now it is much slower.
00:33:49 ◼ ► Literally, if we're already in beta 4 and their current fastest phone available can't run the animation smoothly, you know we're in for a rough time in that front.
00:34:03 ◼ ► And if you do, if you are really curious about the new design everywhere or if you are responsible for software design of an iOS app, you really should jump in now.
00:34:17 ◼ ► Yeah, just a couple of quick hits from this before we go into our first topic, which is tied to this.
00:34:22 ◼ ► When beta 4 came out, you know, the only beta still I'm running is macOS, but I'm running it a lot to test my apps and stuff.
00:34:28 ◼ ► Waiting oh so patiently for Apple to fix some of the bugs, one of which is a showstopper for me, which actually has been fixed, but it isn't out on beta 4 yet.
00:34:38 ◼ ► Anyway, just wandering through the OS because I'm living in it and one of the things that you do when you're living in the OS and booting from your internal to your external drive and stuff is you're changing the startup disk.
00:34:48 ◼ ► And I happened upon the startup disk screen in system settings and was struck by the fact that I'm not sure if it's a backslide from beta 4, although some things are, especially in iOS and other betas that I'm not running.
00:35:03 ◼ ► But I was struck by the fact that this system setting screen seems to be part of some sort of contest within Apple to figure out how low contrast can we make something while it's still technically selected.
00:35:26 ◼ ► There's text underneath it with a big rectangle around it and the selected one has a background and the non-selected one does not.
00:35:37 ◼ ► After I posted it, I did some investigation to see just how slight is the highlight in that rounded rectangle highlight.
00:35:48 ◼ ► So here's the thing, the rounded rectile highlight, which is big, it's like one inch by two inches on your screen.
00:36:32 ◼ ► So I figure, like, whatever they're doing with the screenshot, I'm going to trust the color values.
00:36:39 ◼ ► So the RGB values are 0 to 255 for the R, the G, and the B, the red, the green, and the blue.
00:36:59 ◼ ► So I think the only reason a lot of people can see the rounded rectangle is because the
00:37:05 ◼ ► This is one of those, you know, I put, I put it on Mastodon, uh, both as a joke and not as
00:37:10 ◼ ► Many people said, I cannot see the selection on my screen because my screen is a crappy
00:37:18 ◼ ► Startup disk system setting in Sequoia also doesn't have a lot of contrast, but it's still
00:37:35 ◼ ► Why I find this baffling is because as far as I can tell, it's not like they redesigned
00:37:41 ◼ ► Just something about Tahoe came by and sideswiped the already bad startup disk thing to make the
00:37:58 ◼ ► It's, I mean, again, there is a increased contrast option and accessibility, but this is a perfect
00:38:06 ◼ ► One that this, it needs to be higher contrast, even when that setting is not turned on because
00:38:14 ◼ ► And two, what Marco just said, do you think anyone has time to worry about the contrast
00:38:27 ◼ ► So I'm really concerned that stuff like this is just forget about this being fixed or changed
00:38:34 ◼ ► or improved in any way before this thing releases, because it's, they have so much bigger fish
00:38:42 ◼ ► I, I encourage you to look at the images that we will link in the show notes, um, and see
00:38:53 ◼ ► I'm telling you that that's the case and still you may not be able to see it depending on your
00:39:01 ◼ ► Like I, and so what has probably happened here is, you know, the, the Mac APIs and the iOS
00:39:15 ◼ ► It's R this G this B this most colors in the UI, especially in Apple's apps, presumably are
00:39:28 ◼ ► Do you have the thing on, uh, on iOS, the constants on Mac OS are called primary, secondary,
00:39:41 ◼ ► Um, so, so basically like, you know, the, the colors, the colors are not specified on everything
00:40:03 ◼ ► And what John was just saying is like, they're not going to have time to go through every single
00:40:14 ◼ ► Or like, I mean, what they could do is perhaps say, Hey, does primary on top of secondary,
00:40:25 ◼ ► If there was a contest to do this, given just plain RGB values, integer RGB values, let's
00:40:51 ◼ ► But like, you're really getting up to like, seriously, it's either the same color or it's
00:40:56 ◼ ► It's, you know, how close can we get to the same color without it being the same color?
00:40:59 ◼ ► And if you have two constants, whether it's the primary, secondary, tertiary, or like window
00:41:03 ◼ ► background, light, lighter, lightest, whatever, like whatever sequence of constant names that
00:41:08 ◼ ► you have, the distance between one constant name and the other that you expect to be next
00:41:15 ◼ ► So there should be some kind of like acceptance test to say, Hey, if you're going through the
00:41:19 ◼ ► U S and changing all these colors, make sure you change them in a way that two colors, that
00:41:23 ◼ ► the two of the colors aren't like literally the same when they're supposed to be used on
00:41:26 ◼ ► This is all setting aside whether the fact that the startup system setting uses these colors
00:41:31 ◼ ► at all, because for all we know, the person who programmed this 55 years ago, uh, just did
00:41:35 ◼ ► RGB values because they felt like it, or just did opacity, like a, a, a black with an opacity
00:41:53 ◼ ► was released, I mean, that was a hundred years ago, everything was less, everything was smaller.
00:42:10 ◼ ► Now, the number of like possible areas that changing these system constants and metrics
00:42:25 ◼ ► And that, like, that's why I was saying, you know, a couple of months ago when, when there
00:42:29 ◼ ► were rumors of a big redesign coming, that's why I was saying it's a really big deal because
00:42:46 ◼ ► Oh, that button is now an ellipsis because the text is being cut off because the metrics
00:42:50 ◼ ► changed or, oh, this, this button over here that used to be like, you know, a contrast button
00:43:00 ◼ ► We're going to have a year or two of that across not only the OSs and Apple's apps, but
00:43:07 ◼ ► Because like when third party apps compile against the new API, there is a flag that you can opt
00:43:22 ◼ ► And so as soon as you want any of the new design, all of these like little subtle constants
00:43:44 ◼ ► So like the, the workload for both Apple and its apps and for third party developers is massive.
00:43:58 ◼ ► feel like the design team is doging through the system here, just ripping stuff out and just
00:44:03 ◼ ► rushing to change things that have huge effects that they either don't fully appreciate or
00:44:11 ◼ ► whatever, whatever their reasons are thinking behind it, it takes a lot of time to adapt
00:44:24 ◼ ► So that's why I think it's just going to be a year of UI bugs everywhere across everyone's
00:44:35 ◼ ► I have a thing in my appearance setting that lets you pick where the palettes are on the
00:44:39 ◼ ► screen and it shows a little rectangle that's supposed to represent your screen with, uh, radio
00:44:43 ◼ ► buttons and the, the cardinal directions, top, bottom, left, right, upper, right, upper left,
00:44:48 ◼ ► Uh, and it shows a desktop background and it's, it's hard to believe for as such an old school
00:44:54 ◼ ► Mac user, but the idea of having a desktop background image and then putting a radio button
00:45:00 ◼ ► on top of that image, it seems like you should always be able to see the radio button because
00:45:19 ◼ ► When I put a radio button control on top of your desktop background image, you should still
00:45:28 ◼ ► If you put a Tahoe radio button on top of lots of different kinds of desktop backgrounds,
00:45:38 ◼ ► Like I'm drawing a custom drawing of a opaque circle around the radio button when it's not
00:45:43 ◼ ► selected to say, here's the radio button because Apple's own controls are not visible on many
00:46:00 ◼ ► I bet there's a lot of screens that are going to come up even during the setup process.
00:46:06 ◼ ► It's kind of like iOS seven all over again, only instead of not drawing the borders around
00:46:16 ◼ ► And in our final piece of follow-up for tonight, Apple intelligence news summaries are back,
00:46:20 ◼ ► baby, with a big red disclaimer that reads, summarization may change the meaning of the
00:46:26 ◼ ► Reading from Ars Technica, Apple intelligence notification summaries for news apps are back
00:46:33 ◼ ► Upon installing the new update, users of Apple intelligence compatible devices will be asked
00:46:40 ◼ ► Those for news and entertainment apps, for communication and social apps, and for all other apps.
00:46:54 ◼ ► Incorrect summaries circulating on social media prompted news organizations to complain to
00:46:57 ◼ ► Apple, particularly after one summary said that Luigi Mangione, the alleged murder of United
00:47:08 ◼ ► So this screen is interesting because that red text that you read, it says summarization may
00:47:21 ◼ ► So this is, you know, again, when Apple disabled this feature because people were complaining,
00:47:26 ◼ ► you know, it's like, as I said at the time, the reason they disabled is because they can't
00:47:31 ◼ ► Like there's no way to make an LLM that doesn't make mistakes when trying to summarize stuff because
00:48:12 ◼ ► But I saw Gruber say online, he said, well, it doesn't matter because if I see anything
00:48:30 ◼ ► But if it was closely contested and they say team A won when really team B won and it was
00:48:54 ◼ ► And can you get that information without going to our website and reading a bunch of text on
00:49:15 ◼ ► If you want to hear the ads, you can because some people like them, but you don't have to
00:49:23 ◼ ► There's another topic that we talk about that's usually pretty good and juicy that you don't
00:49:29 ◼ ► If you want to hear the quote unquote bootleg version of the show, which is the unedited feed
00:49:43 ◼ ► Also, we do once a month, roughly bonus episodes where we talk about all sorts of stuff.
00:49:54 ◼ ► And then finally, when we have our merch sales, you get 15% off during those time limited sales.
00:50:09 ◼ ► It's not really an ad because I'm just trying to tell people to pay for the show that I'm on.
00:50:22 ◼ ► My angle on it, just behind the curtain, my angle on it is to tell people what they're getting.
00:50:44 ◼ ► And if you like the show a lot and it's a big part of your life and you can fit us into
00:50:51 ◼ ► It's not just you pay us like because you feel like it and you're like being nice to us or
00:51:21 ◼ ► And, you know, I can't say enough good things about all the members that we have been lucky
00:51:31 ◼ ► I mean, it's no secret that ads have been down, particularly in podcasts, for a long time.
00:51:38 ◼ ► In fact, I just listened to Backstage, which is the Relay members podcast earlier today, and
00:51:43 ◼ ► they were lamenting the same problem and saying much of the same thing, that if it wasn't for
00:51:49 ◼ ► And I can tell you for certainty, if it wasn't for the members of ATP, ATP may or may not even
00:52:04 ◼ ► And we can't say enough good things for how much we appreciate any of you who have signed
00:52:14 ◼ ► position to pay us, I don't even remember what we charge, but pay us whatever it is that
00:52:52 ◼ ► At the end of the year, I do the thing where I thank the patrons, which I'm not going to
00:53:03 ◼ ► If you're not a member, you should also be thankful to the members because they're helping
00:53:09 ◼ ► Lots of times I'll listen to a podcast that I'm not a member of because I only listen to
00:53:18 ◼ ► So if, you know, like I said, when I pitched the patron thing at the beginning of the year,
00:53:32 ◼ ► But like part of the thing that makes patrons possible is some people like, I like the show.
00:53:44 ◼ ► And even though I don't have a lot of money, it's worth it for me to pay, you know, $8 a
00:53:54 ◼ ► But if you can pay for it, we thank you because you're making the show possible for us to make
00:54:05 ◼ ► If you are hearing this, it is the members who keep the show going in addition to the very
00:54:12 ◼ ► And it is the member, it is the success of the member program that has allowed us to keep
00:54:21 ◼ ► You know, there's a lot more ads to be had in the podcast space if we basically do dynamic
00:54:46 ◼ ► So if there's some sponsor that like, we're like, I don't really want to, you know, shill
00:54:54 ◼ ► And that's all thanks to members because we, we have the little bit of headroom there to
00:55:09 ◼ ► I think the world needs more podcast ads and whenever a show is offered in an ad free version,
00:55:16 ◼ ► I will almost always splurge for it because I, I really don't love listening to podcast
00:55:23 ◼ ► Um, you know, we try to make them as good as we can, but at the end of the day, they're
00:55:27 ◼ ► If you also are not super crazy about podcast ads, we are giving you that option and it's
00:55:33 ◼ ► You get more of us, you get better of us and, uh, all that other fun stuff plus cheaper
00:56:12 ◼ ► Yeah, I've been thinking about this since we've been talking about all the liquid metal
00:56:16 ◼ ► stuff, and it's kind of, kind of like the thing with the AI crawlers causing large bandwidth
00:56:29 ◼ ► Um, but I do feel like as time passes on, like part of the reason we're in this situation
00:56:35 ◼ ► with liquid glass and everything is because institutional knowledge and historic knowledge
00:56:42 ◼ ► So I want to just give like a brief refresher on, um, some of the foundational things that
00:56:52 ◼ ► Um, and that is the idea that trying to make interfaces for computers so people can use them.
00:57:10 ◼ ► Uh, put a link, uh, in the notes to a couple of books from, uh, Bruce Tognizini, who was
00:57:15 ◼ ► a user interface expert who worked at Apple many, many years ago and was very influential
00:57:30 ◼ ► Uh, you've probably heard of some of the science things if you're kind of an old school Mac user
00:57:33 ◼ ► like Fitz law, which is like, okay, well with graphical user interfaces, we have pointing
00:57:37 ◼ ► devices, the user has to put the pointing device on a target to, you know, click on it or do
00:57:43 ◼ ► So that whole task of targeting, how easy is it for people to get a pointing device onto
00:57:50 ◼ ► Um, and you can imagine similar things for using your finger on a screen and stuff like
00:57:54 ◼ ► And they, you know, use science to say, okay, well that turns out to be a function of the
00:57:59 ◼ ► size of the target, the distance from you are like the, the, the, how does the interface
00:58:06 ◼ ► You can do science, come up with ideas, test them, run experiments and try to determine
00:58:15 ◼ ► Um, Apple in, especially in the early days around the era of the early days of the Mac,
00:58:20 ◼ ► a lot of the things, uh, in both in the Mac and subsequently following on from the initial
00:58:30 ◼ ► And this also includes user testing saying we have an idea for an interface, but it's, does
00:58:37 ◼ ► Some of the ideas that are in the original Mac are like, let's make a standardized interface.
00:58:46 ◼ ► Every app has a standard window with a title bar and a closed box so that when you learn one
00:58:52 ◼ ► This was a revolutionary idea in user interface design from the previous days when every application
00:58:59 ◼ ► But the Mac was like every Mac app has Mac windows and Mac scroll bars and Mac buttons and
00:59:07 ◼ ► That it sounds boring now, but this was a, this was an advance and it was, you know, it's,
00:59:25 ◼ ► Apple's Aqua introduction, which I don't have a video of because maybe they didn't give that
00:59:40 ◼ ► I watched it earlier today and I don't think I'd ever seen it before because I was not in
00:59:46 ◼ ► I will briefly sidetrack us and say that a direct quote from Jobs during this presentation
00:59:59 ◼ ► It just made me think of all the liquid glass discourse of these days and how that relates
01:00:06 ◼ ► Again, I wish there was a higher quality one, but I think the Aqua introduction, this is
01:00:17 ◼ ► That shows some of the art because there's lots of things that are in Aqua that are there
01:00:23 ◼ ► not for scientifically backed user interface reasons, but because they want to evoke an emotional
01:00:32 ◼ ► As Jobs said in the keynote, one of the design goals was that when you see the interface,
01:00:46 ◼ ► And that is an important part of interface design because the, you know, there's, you know,
01:00:55 ◼ ► I forget what the name of it is, but they always talk about the different aspects of taste of
01:01:24 ◼ ► There's all the taste factors that go into a food, but there's always the human element
01:01:41 ◼ ► And so ideally any good computer interface is, has ideas that are founded in science that
01:01:49 ◼ ► we found to be a good way to let people use a computer, that it makes them be able to be
01:01:54 ◼ ► successful, makes them make fewer errors, makes it understandable, makes it easier to use,
01:01:58 ◼ ► makes it, makes it powerful so they can do the things they want to do without lots of effort.
01:02:02 ◼ ► And also the art of interface design that makes it attractive and makes you want to, uh, play
01:02:08 ◼ ► with it and makes you excited about using it and makes it feel like a pleasant place to
01:02:14 ◼ ► And that whole science aspect of interfaces sometimes feels to me entirely forgotten by
01:02:21 ◼ ► everybody, not just Apple, not just people who work in the industry by users, by journalists,
01:02:28 ◼ ► by everybody has like forgetting the idea that there even is an aspect of user interface design
01:02:40 ◼ ► And you can have ideas about how you might make the interface better that are founded in reason.
01:02:44 ◼ ► Maybe if we have standard scroll bars everywhere, then once someone learns how that scroll bar works,
01:02:55 ◼ ► That's an idea and then they can test that idea and the idea there's reasoning behind it.
01:03:00 ◼ ► Let's have an idea for improving the interface founded in some kind of logic that seems like it should make sense.
01:03:33 ◼ ► you don't know anything about the science of user interface design or it sounds boring or whatever,
01:03:36 ◼ ► I encourage you to either buy or find an e-book or PDF download or whatever of these very old,
01:03:42 ◼ ► like they're thrown in the 90s, this Tog on interface and Tog on software design and just read them.
01:03:47 ◼ ► Not really, but it will give you the mindset of like, how do I think about interface design?
01:03:52 ◼ ► If I want to use logic and reason to come up with ideas that I think will make the interface better
01:04:12 ◼ ► The reasons they give for it, as Marco has said in past shows, like the reasons they give don't make any sense
01:04:22 ◼ ► And even if it did do it, it doesn't, it doesn't make any logical sense why that would make the interface better.
01:04:39 ◼ ► And then part of it is, you know, so when Jobs came back, he was so heavily into the art and he didn't like all these nerd eggheads doing the science part of it.
01:04:49 ◼ ► And I feel like it has only accelerated to the point where now Alan Dye, who apparently comes from like a, a Marcom background, which is marketing, communication, like in print design, doesn't even have a background in user interface design.
01:05:01 ◼ ► But I assure you, user interface design still is a field of study, at least in the academic world, where people try to make, you know, interfaces more usable to people by using reason and testing things and not just, you know, having a whim and deciding I want, you know, stitched leather because I think it's cool and reminds me of the, the seat backs on my private jet or whatever the heck the story behind that was.
01:05:27 ◼ ► And I feel like the balance is way, way, way, way, way too far in the direction of the art and emotion side, which again is an important factor, but it's can't be the only factor.
01:05:39 ◼ ► And if you're on way on the art side and you make an interface that people don't find appealing, now you've got a real problem because it's not usable.
01:05:48 ◼ ► It's like you're making the interface worse and people don't even think it's cool looking.
01:05:51 ◼ ► So hopefully lots of people will think liquid glass looks real cool because I think in many aspects the usability of it has gotten worse and the supposed foundations of its design don't make any sense and surely weren't tested in any way because we're using the interfaces and finding all these obvious problems and they don't care and they're, they're not fixable because the design itself is fundamentally just flawed.
01:06:20 ◼ ► It's mostly, I said this since the beginning, since I've been using Tahoe, like I don't particularly like it.
01:06:24 ◼ ► I see that it is doing dumb things for dumb reasons, but in the end you mostly get along, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't stop you from using your Mac.
01:06:32 ◼ ► It's not some kind of fundamental change that like, now I can't even use my Mac or whatever.
01:06:41 ◼ ► And what I'm craving is a return of a better balance between the science of interface design and the art of interface design.
01:06:50 ◼ ► And I, you know, I, this has been an industry trend for everybody for ages and within Apple it's, you know, it's, it's, it's like epidemic proportions of too much art, not enough science.
01:07:04 ◼ ► Yeah, I don't even, I don't even know if the really, really high ups even know that this is a science or, or respect it as one.
01:07:13 ◼ ► Or have any people who work at Apple whose degree is in user interface design who are doing it.
01:07:19 ◼ ► I mean, like, and I'm sure, I mean, I hope some of those people are still there, but it's very clear that they are not the ones making the big decisions anymore.
01:07:48 ◼ ► Because unless they're just, I mean, either they're really bad at it, or they don't even know this is a thing that they should be respecting.
01:08:00 ◼ ► I think, I think a lot of it is the hangover from jobs because he, he eventually had such a disdain for that thing because he would have an idea in his head about something that he thinks is really cool.
01:08:13 ◼ ► Like he really intentionally pushed Apple in the other direction, which is, you know, I, I have good taste.
01:08:28 ◼ ► And in many respects, he was right that the pendulum had swung too far the other direction, but he's such a forceful person.
01:08:39 ◼ ► And the company was so successful that I think he was, uh, very able to drive out the power and influence of the science-based user design within Apple.
01:08:49 ◼ ► And then when he left, everyone's like, well, we should just keep doing what jobs is doing because he's great and we're great and everything.
01:08:55 ◼ ► And I think now the company is reaping the, uh, uh, non-benefits, uh, reaping what they sowed.
01:09:02 ◼ ► Like they, they've, they, uh, successfully expunged all people who know how to make user better user interfaces in exchange for artists.
01:09:14 ◼ ► Uh, a couple of days ago, yesterday, maybe I think it was as we record this, uh, Apple announced services, services, services.
01:09:22 ◼ ► And this one is Apple care one, uh, writing or excuse me, reading from Apple's announcement, Apple today on the 23rd unveiled Apple care one, a new way for customers to cover multiple Apple products with one simple plan for just $19.99 per month.
01:09:37 ◼ ► Customers can protect up to three products in one plan with the option to add more at any time for $5.99 per month for each device.
01:09:43 ◼ ► Devices must be less than four years old and headphones must be less than one year old.
01:09:52 ◼ ► Starting tomorrow, customers in the U S can sign up for Apple care ones directly on their iPhone, iPad, or Mac, or by visiting their nearest Apple store.
01:09:59 ◼ ► Apple care one includes all of the benefits that come with Apple care plus, including unlimited repairs for accidents like drops and spills, 24 seven priority support, quick and convenient Apple certified service and battery coverage.
01:10:11 ◼ ► Apple care one also expands the theft and loss protection beyond iPhone to also cover iPad and Apple watch fees and deductible supply.
01:10:20 ◼ ► Apple care one pricing is the same regardless of the products that are covered, meaning a customer can enroll their phone, iPad, and Apple watch and save up to $11 a month over enrolling in separate Apple care plus plans for each device.
01:10:31 ◼ ► Additional items can be added for $5.99 per month each with Apple care one customers can now add products they already own that are up to four years old if they're in good condition to verify good condition products may be required to undergo a diagnostic check using a customer's iPhone or iPad or at an Apple store prior to being added to the plan.
01:10:47 ◼ ► This provides customers with more opportunities to protect their devices even beyond the current 60 day window to purchase Apple care plus.
01:11:00 ◼ ► Apple claims the customers can save $11 per month by enrolling in a phone watch and pad in Apple care one compared to paying for three individual Apple care plus plans for those devices.
01:11:10 ◼ ► For example, the monthly cost of for iPhone coverage with Apple care plus starts at $9.99 for the cheapest and oldest eligible models, whereas the iPad and Apple watch start at $4.99 and $2.99 respectively, totaling $17.97 per month.
01:11:22 ◼ ► In this case, Apple care one is a slightly worse deal than buying the plans a la carte.
01:11:26 ◼ ► Where the new service shines is if you own some of Apple's most expensive products like the iPhone 16 pro, the Apple vision pro and the 12.9 inch iPad pro with the M4 chip.
01:11:35 ◼ ► Paying for a monthly Apple care plus plan for each of these three would cost 47, 47 total per month.
01:11:43 ◼ ► According to a list of prices, Apple PR manager, Anna Mitchell shared with the verge Apple care one.
01:11:47 ◼ ► On the other hand would still be $19.99 for any mix of three products Mitchell confirmed, which is obviously the better deal by a huge margin.
01:11:53 ◼ ► What's important to keep in mind is that just like Apple care plus with Apple care one, you still have to pay deductibles and fees for each and every repair.
01:11:59 ◼ ► And those costs vary depending on the device, as well as the type of repair you need, how much you can expect to pay, which is in addition to your monthly Apple care.
01:12:05 ◼ ► Their fee is listed on Apple's website and we will link to a couple of things with regard to that.
01:12:10 ◼ ► So the service fees and deductibles tells you like, like Casey had to pay 29 bucks or whatever for his AirPods thing.
01:12:23 ◼ ► And then we'll link to the main Apple care page, which has the plans of the prices, which will become relevant in a moment.
01:12:38 ◼ ► That was one of my biggest questions because a lot of like the, you know, what is it called?
01:12:49 ◼ ► But as for Apple care one, the answer is Apple care one plans covered devices that are on the same Apple account as the subscriber.
01:13:01 ◼ ► But if you're thinking of like, oh, I'm just going to put my whole family's devices under one Apple care one plan.
01:13:23 ◼ ► You just you can do it online or through your app or, you know, through your device or whatever.
01:13:41 ◼ ► I did that on my phone and it brought up a nice little after I said, yes, I want to try upgrading my plan, brought up a nice little thing that says, hey, given these devices, I think it just picks three random devices or maybe picks like the most attractive random devices.
01:13:54 ◼ ► So it says you can save up to $17.98 per month when you protect John's iPhone 16 Pro, Tina's iPhone 15 Pro and John's iPad Pro M4.
01:14:08 ◼ ► It's saying right there, if you upgrade, if you go to this instead of what you currently have, you will save money.
01:14:37 ◼ ► Because after you do this, after you see that it'll come on and says you can save $18 a month.
01:14:47 ◼ ► But then after you've done that, so now I'm paying $19.99 in a month for these three devices and I'm saving $18 a month.
01:14:59 ◼ ► But the question is, if I add this device to my Apple Care 1, is it cheaper or is it more expensive?
01:15:20 ◼ ► So you have to go to the Apple Care.com, Apple.com slash Apple Care, scroll down to the plans section, click on the thing that you have like Mac or iPhone or display or whatever, and then click on all model pricing and then look for the model that you have.
01:15:47 ◼ ► So you have to do a little bit of math in your head and figure out how many of my devices should I add to my Apple Care 1 plan so that I'm not losing.
01:16:02 ◼ ► It's nice that on the very first come on, they will say, do this and this is how much you'll save for these three devices.
01:16:12 ◼ ► But the other devices I added, I only added devices where after I looked up the pricing and everything, I determined that it would be cheaper to add the device than to leave it.
01:16:21 ◼ ► So I had to leave a bunch of devices on their existing plans either because they're on multi-year plans that are cheaper or because they're monthly plans that are less than $5.99.
01:16:32 ◼ ► You should not add that at $5.99 a month because when you do add it, it cancels your old Apple Care and it refunds you any, you know, fees that anything for like the remainder of the time that you aren't going to use or whatever.
01:16:44 ◼ ► And by the way, I think it refunds it to you as an Apple gift card, which is kind of janky, but whatever, I'll end up spending it.
01:16:50 ◼ ► And then like for the family thing, one of the devices that I put on after looking up the price, it was a MacBook Air 13 inch, which its monthly fee is $6.99.
01:17:07 ◼ ► As long as it's less than four years old, you can put it back on warranty, which I don't think you think you'd ever be able to do.
01:17:16 ◼ ► Normally after your Apple Care expires, you can, you know, you can put it back into Apple Care.
01:17:51 ◼ ► And eventually I realized it's that rule that we said before, Apple Care One only applies
01:18:01 ◼ ► So what I had to do was go to my son's MacBook Air, make an account for me, sign into my Apple
01:18:20 ◼ ► That works great for Macs where I can make a second account and sign in with a different
01:18:24 ◼ ► It doesn't work so great for phones because if your kid's got a phone, you're not going
01:18:39 ◼ ► Anyone who's listening to this who has any Apple Care on anything, especially if you have
01:18:43 ◼ ► expensive devices, like they said in that Verge article or whatever, if you have something
01:18:53 ◼ ► You can add your kid's devices, especially if they're Macs, if you have an account on it
01:18:58 ◼ ► But just be careful that you do the math with all the links we'll put in here to figure
01:19:04 ◼ ► Oh, and I was very disappointed to learn that like for what I don't think I could get month
01:19:37 ◼ ► My 2019 Mac Pro and my XDR that I bought at the same time, they're both more than four years
01:19:51 ◼ ► It's less than four years old, but it doesn't show up anywhere in the UI for me to add it
01:20:28 ◼ ► And this week's Overtime is an amazing exploration of the Mac control panel through this amazing.
01:20:40 ◼ ► We're going to talk about it in the after show and kind of all the joy around exploring the
01:21:30 ◼ ► And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's K-C-L-I-S-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U
01:22:00 ◼ ► all right john do you have a correction or an addition to an earlier topic yeah my bad i should
01:22:09 ◼ ► put more detailed notes for myself when we were i was talking about apple and interfaces and the
01:22:13 ◼ ► science and outer interface one other point that i wanted to make about the aqua introduction which
01:22:17 ◼ ► again i encourage everybody who either wasn't alive then or or or has just never seen it um
01:22:24 ◼ ► to watch that video because it is it is a trip when they introduce aqua they talk a little bit
01:22:30 ◼ ► about some of their reasoning behind things but also in their human interface guidelines of the day
01:22:35 ◼ ► they talk more about it maybe we'll find a link to that and shove it in the show notes but you can
01:22:39 ◼ ► probably find it somewhere and actually it might be difficult you might have to go to archive.org
01:22:43 ◼ ► or something anyway an example of uh a combination of art and science with some kind of rationale behind
01:22:51 ◼ ► it which may or may not have worked out but but anyway it's an example of something with a rationale
01:22:56 ◼ ► that makes some kind of sense aqua has transparency in it that was one of its innovative features
01:23:01 ◼ ► there's transparency in the interface which was new for mac os and new for desktop os's to the degree
01:23:07 ◼ ► that aqua did it it was a compositing window manager that you could have like soft shadows that are
01:23:11 ◼ ► transparent laid on top of stuff the title bars of windows when are inactive or transparent pull down
01:23:17 ◼ ► menus for transparent stuff like that part of apple's pitch about hey why are these things in the os transparent
01:23:25 ◼ ► and these things not had a logic behind it sheets which were an innovation in mac os 10
01:23:33 ◼ ► or um they still exist they're basically little dialogues that are attached to windows so for example
01:23:40 ◼ ► if you have a document window and you want to save it back in the old days in classic mac os
01:23:44 ◼ ► they would throw up an app modal dialogue which means a dial a save dialogue will come up and say
01:23:49 ◼ ► where do you want to save this document and that would block the whole app even if you had five
01:23:53 ◼ ► documents open on a big screen because you were saving one of them you couldn't say oh before i
01:23:58 ◼ ► decide where to save this let me go over to this other document it's like nope this document is app
01:24:02 ◼ ► modal means this entire app is currently in the mode that's saying you are now saving pick a directory
01:24:07 ◼ ► to save this document and give it a file name right totally block it you can go to other apps and use
01:24:12 ◼ ► them but this dialogue will block the entire app the innovation of sheets was it would be attached
01:24:17 ◼ ► to the document window and yeah that window is blocked until you decide to save or hit cancel but other
01:24:23 ◼ ► document windows are fine um and so the sheet sort of came out of the uh with an animation sort of like
01:24:31 ◼ ► vertically sort of came out of the document window towards you and then curled down to let you know
01:24:36 ◼ ► unambiguously this sheet is attached to this window first of all it's it's within the bounds of this
01:24:42 ◼ ► window but also you saw it come out of this window it is clearly like a like a like a necktie for this
01:24:47 ◼ ► window so it is document modal right and why is the sheet transparent because it's temporary same thing
01:24:56 ◼ ► with pull down menus from the menu bar they appear briefly on top of something else and they're
01:25:02 ◼ ► transparent parent not because it looks cool not to highlight your content but because in the original
01:25:09 ◼ ► aqua interface transparent meant temporary meant i'm going on top of stuff briefly but then i'm going
01:25:16 ◼ ► away i'm pulling down a menu but when i'm done it will go away they violated that sometimes certain
01:25:22 ◼ ► things were transparent that weren't temporary like the dock which was there all the time um
01:25:27 ◼ ► similar but yeah and they use it for other things like the title bar of the of an active window was
01:25:32 ◼ ► opaque but title bars of background windows were transparent one of the things they learned after
01:25:37 ◼ ► they released it was you can't read the titles of background windows because they're all transparent
01:25:42 ◼ ► and the titles overlay each other so they walk that back right but i do want to highlight like the
01:25:47 ◼ ► combination of art and uh and science here of saying we think transparent stuff looks cool it's a
01:25:53 ◼ ► cornerstone of our lickable user interface that's part of the art of this it is very appealing to
01:25:56 ◼ ► people people are dazzled by it it's great right but when and where should we use transparency let's come
01:26:03 ◼ ► up with some kind of rationale and that rationale of temporary interface elements that briefly appear and
01:26:10 ◼ ► then go away those should be transparent to highlight their transient nature whereas more permanent things are
01:26:17 ◼ ► opaque and yes they violated that in a few areas here or there but that's an example of combining those
01:26:22 ◼ ► two things of coming up with something that you think is cool but then deciding how and where to
01:26:27 ◼ ► deploy it with some kind of rationale that makes some kind of sense and yes they should have user
01:26:32 ◼ ► tested the transparent inactive window title bars and realized that it makes it so you can't read the
01:26:36 ◼ ► title bars of windows because they all jumble up as i think i did a screenshot of that in my original
01:26:39 ◼ ► mac os 10 review right so there were infallible aqua is not perfect i complained about you know i
01:26:44 ◼ ► arguably made an entire career complaining about the usability problems with aqua right but i you know
01:26:50 ◼ ► it's it's such a even aqua for all the things everyone hated about it all the things i complained about it is such a
01:26:56 ◼ ► contrast in that they at least try to explain why they were doing things and when you hear the explanation
01:27:03 ◼ ► you go yeah all right that makes sense and still you get to then try it and see how it works out and they probably