The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► have a good story. It's why I'm late. Just two hours and fifteen minutes.

00:00:07 ◼   ► Just two hours and fifteen minutes. Well, number one, you were gracious enough. I told you,

00:00:11 ◼   ► we scheduled this this afternoon, and I had a furniture delivery scheduled for a one to five

00:00:17 ◼   ► window. And I said, "You said I'm kind of flexible." And I said, "Thank God." And I said,

00:00:25 ◼   ► I'll bet you they show up at 4.59.

00:00:28 ◼   ► Pretty close, right?

00:00:31 ◼   ► I think they showed up at 4.40.

00:00:33 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah. 20 minutes before the window closed.

00:00:37 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:00:38 ◼   ► Which, you know, okay, they made it.

00:00:41 ◼   ► Well, but here's the thing. It's nerve-wracking, because we're having renovations done on the

00:00:47 ◼   ► downstairs. Like, my office is downstairs, and we've been here for a couple years, and we've

00:00:52 ◼   ► We'd never really done my office.

00:00:55 ◼   ► That was like to be done later.

00:00:56 ◼   ► And we had the stairs painted.

00:01:00 ◼   ► I mean, just painted.

00:01:01 ◼   ► I mean, like so just painted

00:01:04 ◼   ► that the painters are still painting my office,

00:01:08 ◼   ► but they've already done the stairs.

00:01:11 ◼   ► And we have the, I love this guy.

00:01:15 ◼   ► His name is Oleg.

00:01:16 ◼   ► He was born in Poland,

00:01:19 ◼   ► and he is the greatest painter, house painter

00:01:22 ◼   ► you would ever want because he's obviously got

00:01:25 ◼   ► like Ted Williams 20/40 vision, right?

00:01:29 ◼   ► Like, you know, this guy can spot like a flaw

00:01:34 ◼   ► on a wall or a ceiling all the way across the room.

00:01:38 ◼   ► And he'll be like, "Oh, that was, you know, a patch."

00:01:42 ◼   ► The guy is an absolute perfectionist,

00:01:44 ◼   ► but he works fast, right?

00:01:48 ◼   ► Like, it's like the ideal combination.

00:01:50 ◼   ► - Right.

00:01:51 ◼   ► every day on time, and he's just a delightful, delightful man, and he does meticulous work,

00:01:58 ◼   ► but works fast, right? Like, I'm a perfectionist. I love being a perfectionist. You know what I

00:02:03 ◼   ► don't do? I don't work fast. No. [Laughter]

00:02:06 ◼   ► Pete: Yeah, right. You usually do not see that, both of those in the same person, yeah.

00:02:10 ◼   ► Pete; Right.

00:02:10 ◼   ► Pete; We had great guys. We had our basement redone again, and these guys were Russians,

00:02:16 ◼   ► and they were fantastic. They weren't—they're not perfectionists, but they were certainly good

00:02:21 ◼   ► enough for the basement, and they were quite fast. So, that was good.

00:02:25 ◼   ► Pete: Well, Oleg was still here and was here to watch the guys delivering this big piece of

00:02:32 ◼   ► furniture up the stairs and let them know that he just painted the walls and gave them his Polish

00:02:40 ◼   ► stink eye as they brought it up the stairs, and they have to say they did a great job.

00:02:45 ◼   ► But anyway, that's number one why I'm late, because I had to wait for this furniture delivery, and I

00:02:50 ◼   ► told Amy that I would take care of it, and I did. And then I thought, "Well,

00:02:56 ◼   ► why don't I go get coffee?" My local coffee place is about five minutes away. I told you it would be

00:03:03 ◼   ► five minutes, because Amy wanted a coffee too, and she likes a caramel macchiato thing that you can't

00:03:09 ◼   ► make at home. And I thought, "Wouldn't that be a nice treat for her, because I'm going to disappear

00:03:13 ◼   ► here for two hours to do a podcast. I'll go out. And it's very cold today. It is negative 43 degrees

00:03:21 ◼   ► here in Philadelphia. 36 degrees. But I think the feels-like is negative 40. I don't have the feels-like

00:03:28 ◼   ► on, but that's what it feels like. But I thought this—wouldn't that be a nice thing to do? You know,

00:03:32 ◼   ► it's, you know, it's what you do for your wife. You do nice things. Yeah. I mean, look at me,

00:03:38 ◼   ► husband of the year. I bought her a coffee. Right? And it's only February. Yeah. Right.

00:03:43 ◼   ► You can take the rest of the year off.

00:03:44 ◼   ► All right. So, I think five minutes, which that's normal for getting a coffee. Well,

00:03:55 ◼   ► I'm at the coffee shop waiting for the macchiato and my mom calls.

00:03:59 ◼   ► My dad—

00:04:03 ◼   ► That's not going to take five minutes.

00:04:05 ◼   ► My dad handed her his iPad and she said, "And the thing at the top that you drag down

00:04:13 ◼   ► was already down and I touched something and it went into dark mode."

00:04:17 ◼   ► Now, why he handed her the iPad while control center was down, I don't know.

00:04:25 ◼   ► But what I did is I thought, "Well, I know how to fix this." I was like,

00:04:31 ◼   ► unfortunately, you know, none of the things in control center are labeled. They're all just icons.

00:04:37 ◼   ► And I'm not quite sure how to describe the dark mode icon, right? It's a circle that's half dark

00:04:45 ◼   ► and the other half is inverted. I don't know if that's good enough for my mom. And I thought,

00:04:51 ◼   ► "I got it. I'll just show her on my phone." And I pulled down mine. I said, "Look, I'll just text

00:04:56 ◼   ► you the answer, standby." And I got off the phone, pulled down my control center, took a screenshot,

00:05:01 ◼   ► took out the markup tools, and drew like a red circle around the dark mode icon, and said this.

00:05:09 ◼   ► And then I texted it to her. She calls back as I'm on my way home. Dad doesn't have that icon.

00:05:18 ◼   ► And I said, "Well, but that's," I said, "But this, that whole control center with all these

00:05:26 ◼   ► think she goes yes i know that this that's what it was and it was open when he handed me the ipad

00:05:31 ◼   ► and i touched something and put it into dark mode and i said well then he has to have that icon

00:05:37 ◼   ► i said the colors might be reversed because it's you know don't don't it may not look exactly the

00:05:43 ◼   ► same because the screenshot i sent you was light mode and then i'm suddenly cursing myself for not

00:05:48 ◼   ► not having to put my phone into dark mode

00:05:50 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:05:51 ◼   ► before taking the screenshot, right?

00:05:53 ◼   ► And I wanna, I want to, I emphasize here,

00:05:57 ◼   ► my mom is a very smart woman.

00:05:59 ◼   ► She's a very bright woman, but she is very, very

00:06:03 ◼   ► not good with computers. (laughs)

00:06:05 ◼   ► - Yeah. - And very,

00:06:06 ◼   ► she lacks confidence in them, and that's the thing.

00:06:09 ◼   ► As like, if she-- - Yeah, well, I think,

00:06:10 ◼   ► yeah, that's the huge difference, right?

00:06:11 ◼   ► - If she would just try, she could figure it out, but.

00:06:14 ◼   ► - Yeah. (sighs)

00:06:17 ◼   ► - Well, eventually, and this took several minutes,

00:06:21 ◼   ► I'll skip it, I figure out that his phone,

00:06:24 ◼   ► or his iPad was not in dark mode.

00:06:26 ◼   ► She had turned the brightness all the way down.

00:06:30 ◼   ► - Oh.

00:06:31 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:06:33 ◼   ► - With, but she's the one who mentioned dark mode.

00:06:36 ◼   ► I actually, now that I think about it,

00:06:39 ◼   ► I don't think she actually has any idea

00:06:42 ◼   ► what capital D-- - What dark mode is.

00:06:44 ◼   ► - Yeah, capital D, capital M, dark mode is.

00:06:47 ◼   ► It's just a comedy of errors

00:06:50 ◼   ► that she literally chose the words dark mode

00:06:53 ◼   ► to describe what happens when you turn an iPad's brightness

00:06:57 ◼   ► all the way down.

00:06:58 ◼   ► And then I said, "Oh, okay."

00:07:02 ◼   ► It's the brightness.

00:07:05 ◼   ► - Yeah, there's like another screenshot.

00:07:07 ◼   ► - Well, I didn't take a screenshot

00:07:09 ◼   ► 'cause at this point I was like overdue.

00:07:11 ◼   ► I was already home.

00:07:12 ◼   ► I had given Amy her coffee

00:07:14 ◼   ► and I'm just packing up my MacBook to take it down

00:07:18 ◼   ► to this, you know, my podcast cave to do this with you.

00:07:20 ◼   ► And I'm already a little embarrassed

00:07:22 ◼   ► because I've put you out longer than we're gonna record,

00:07:26 ◼   ► which is actually, you know, possibly a long time.

00:07:29 ◼   ► And I said, it's a larger button.

00:07:32 ◼   ► It's like a capsule-shaped button,

00:07:35 ◼   ► double the height of the regular buttons,

00:07:39 ◼   ► and it has an icon that looks like the sun,

00:07:41 ◼   ► and it's a slider, just drag it up.

00:07:43 ◼   ► And she goes, "He doesn't have that one."

00:07:45 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:07:48 ◼   ► And she said, "He has a moon, he doesn't have a sun."

00:07:52 ◼   ► And at this point, Amy's like dying of laughter.

00:07:55 ◼   ► And she says, "It's right next to the moon."

00:08:00 ◼   ► And I said, "Yes, it's right next to the moon."

00:08:04 ◼   ► And she goes, "No."

00:08:05 ◼   ► And I said, "Well, you probably can't see the sun icon

00:08:10 ◼   ► very well because you have it all the way down in the bottom."

00:08:13 ◼   ► the way down past it. And she goes, "No!" And I said, "I'm telling you, there's an oblong button,

00:08:20 ◼   ► double the height of the moon." I said, "You see the moon one?" "Yes." "To the right, there's

00:08:26 ◼   ► another button. It is twice the height of it. It's probably all dark. Just put your finger on it and

00:08:33 ◼   ► slide up." And then she did it, and it solved all the problems. And she's very gracious. And

00:08:39 ◼   ► And that is why I'm like-- because my mom put my dad's iPad in dark mode.

00:08:43 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:08:44 ◼   ► I didn't realize if you long press that, it opens up and gives you dark mode

00:08:49 ◼   ► on and off and night shift on and off.

00:08:51 ◼   ► I didn't know that.

00:08:53 ◼   ► There we go.

00:08:53 ◼   ► There's a hot tip.

00:08:54 ◼   ► I just tried that.

00:08:55 ◼   ► So she could have turned on dark mode, even though his icon wasn't on there.

00:08:58 ◼   ► How about that?

00:08:59 ◼   ► So you don't need the dark mode.

00:09:01 ◼   ► No, yeah, because it's already there.

00:09:02 ◼   ► I mean, you have to long press, but that's not--

00:09:05 ◼   ► There we go.

00:09:05 ◼   ► --a good deal.

00:09:06 ◼   ► Well, there's the talk show tip of the week.

00:09:08 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:09:11 ◼   ► How you doing, Jon?

00:09:12 ◼   ► I'm fine. Yeah. It's a beautiful day here. It's not—it's, I think it's like 55 today.

00:09:19 ◼   ► It's sunny like crazy.

00:09:21 ◼   ► We've been all over the—you know what? It was very cold here, but it was sunny,

00:09:25 ◼   ► which is, you know, that's all you can ask for in February on the East Coast. And we've had

00:09:28 ◼   ► the most remarkably mild winter you could imagine. We've had some cold weather, but we have had

00:09:34 ◼   ► zero snow, zero ice. Like, I just realized, you know, 'cause some of this renovation work we're

00:09:41 ◼   ► having, we're letting them use our garage, you know, to store stuff around our car, and so it's

00:09:48 ◼   ► like, it's like an obstacle course. And I thought that's where we keep the rock salt. And I was just

00:09:55 ◼   ► reading an article about, "Hey, how come the East Coast hasn't had any snow?" And I thought,

00:10:00 ◼   ► "Hey, shoot, where's the snow? Where's the salt?" And then I realized, you know what, forget it. I

00:10:06 ◼   ► don't even care where it is. Because I remember last year, I ran out of salt, and it was a bad

00:10:11 ◼   ► storm. And I just went to around the corner—this is the advantage of living in the city—I just

00:10:17 ◼   ► walked around the corner, and they had like plenty of it. And I thought, "Well, there's my salt.

00:10:21 ◼   ► I'll just buy it."

00:10:22 ◼   ► Tim Cynova Just store it there.

00:10:23 ◼   ► Dave

00:10:28 ◼   ► store. Oh, that's why they call it a store.

00:10:30 ◼   ► Pete: Right. And I just remember thinking when I went to buy it, you know, it's like,

00:10:35 ◼   ► you know, buying an umbrella in a rainstorm. It's like, either they're gonna gouge

00:10:39 ◼   ► me or they're gonna be out, but it was wonderful. They had like, they had like an entire pallet

00:10:44 ◼   ► piled up with it. They were like ready for everybody in the neighborhood to need salt.

00:10:48 ◼   ► I was like, "Oh, so I don't have to worry about it." But anyway, it just got me thinking

00:10:52 ◼   ► that we have had a very strange winter here on the East Coast.

00:10:56 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, I guess I can't complain

00:10:59 ◼   ► I mean, it's like if we're gonna have screwed up climate and destroy the entire planet for all life

00:11:04 ◼   ► At the very least. I haven't had to shovel any snow. I

00:11:08 ◼   ► Get yeah, I guess yeah

00:11:11 ◼   ► Is that

00:11:15 ◼   ► Is that a thing that we should be happy about

00:11:17 ◼   ► Well, I guess does that does that really make it better?

00:11:21 ◼   ► But I mean, maybe it makes it better in the short term, but I'm long term. It doesn't make it

00:11:24 ◼   ► Well, everybody said, well, I guess everybody says that, you know, calling it global warming was sort of a mistake at the beginning.

00:11:30 ◼   ► Climate change is a better term.

00:11:31 ◼   ► Because that sounds good.

00:11:32 ◼   ► Right, and one of the side effects has nothing to do with the temperature.

00:11:37 ◼   ► Well, it's caused by the temperature.

00:11:38 ◼   ► Overall, it is global warming. It's like a one or two centigrade increase over time,

00:11:44 ◼   ► and that's enough to cause all sorts of havoc with ice caps melting, and extra water, and sea levels rising, and currents changing,

00:11:52 ◼   ► and all of these weird things, including, as predicted, the increase in extreme/weird

00:11:59 ◼   ► weather. Bigger, worse hurricanes and tsunamis and stuff like that. And just weird weather,

00:12:06 ◼   ► like dry, you know, these droughts that are plaguing California with these terrible fires

00:12:11 ◼   ► and etc. etc. So, you know, and again, it could just be, you know, there have been, you know,

00:12:18 ◼   ► like in my childhood, weird winters where there was never any snow, which felt like a ripoff,

00:12:23 ◼   ► you know?

00:12:23 ◼   ► Jared: Yeah. It always felt like, yeah, I feel like when I was a kid, I felt like,

00:12:27 ◼   ► I mean, looking back on it in my memory, it was like it started snowing the first day of November

00:12:33 ◼   ► and it snowed all the way through the first day of April.

00:12:37 ◼   ► Pete: Right.

00:12:37 ◼   ► Jared; Which, of course, was not true in any regard, but, you know, in Connecticut,

00:12:42 ◼   ► we got some good snows and made some big snow forts too. But we don't get that much here in

00:12:50 ◼   ► Washington. Although we've had some snow, I think Hank has had a couple of snow days this year

00:12:55 ◼   ► already. Probably won't have any more, but still, we don't usually get a lot of snow.

00:13:01 ◼   ► And that's, you know, and it's not to say that it was a lot, but it's just that they don't have,

00:13:06 ◼   ► we can't handle it out here. So, when we get any snow, they usually get the day off.

00:13:11 ◼   ► Pete: Hmm. So, how you been? I guess I asked that already?

00:13:16 ◼   ► John: Yeah, you did, but I'm still fine.

00:13:18 ◼   ► Pete and John laugh

00:13:20 ◼   ► John in the three minutes since you asked me last, I'm still fine.

00:13:23 ◼   ► It's a good thing that your mom didn't have a question about multitasking on the iPad.

00:13:36 ◼   ► Pete You know what? I've told, did I, was this on the podcast or when I wrote it? I wrote about

00:13:40 ◼   ► it. She did have problems with it. And she did. She had profound problems with it. And to me,

00:13:47 ◼   ► exhibit A in the case against the multitasking interface as it stands and having it on by default,

00:13:56 ◼   ► where she's a prototypical, very simple iPad user who really just uses Safari mail messages

00:14:05 ◼   ► and you know maybe some games although i think yeah yeah she plays like words with friends and

00:14:11 ◼   ► like a handful of games but i safari lots she's an avid reader consumer of news uh mail and uh

00:14:19 ◼   ► messages and somehow going from mail where she and she's one of these she likes to sign up for like

00:14:27 ◼   ► newsletters from cnn and and stuff like that i mean that's which you know i guess that's why

00:14:32 ◼   ► why they offer them, but somehow would continuously wind up with two instances of Safari, including

00:14:41 ◼   ► one that was in the sidebar, you know, and not having no idea how to get out of it. And

00:14:46 ◼   ► she found the setting in general, settings general, you know, home screen and multitasking,

00:14:53 ◼   ► I think is the section. It's not even inaccessibility. It's like in the home screen and, you know,

00:14:58 ◼   ► multiple apps or something like that and she turned it off and now her iPad works exactly

00:15:03 ◼   ► as she wants it to.

00:15:04 ◼   ► Tim Weiss That's good. So she didn't have to call you

00:15:10 ◼   ► then?

00:15:11 ◼   ► Dave Asprey No. I got a couple of things. You see the

00:15:16 ◼   ► agenda? I'm actually somewhat organized.

00:15:18 ◼   ► Tim Weiss Oh, yeah. Yeah.

00:15:20 ◼   ► Dave Asprey I guess we should start with the sad news,

00:15:22 ◼   ► right? Larry Tesler died unexpectedly.

00:15:25 ◼   ► Tim Weiss Yeah.

00:15:26 ◼   ► What's sad news? 75? 74. 74. And it was sort of unexpected. They didn't say what the

00:15:34 ◼   ► cause was. I saw, I think it was the New York Times obituary from John Markoff

00:15:38 ◼   ► said that he, his wife said they didn't know what caused his death, but that he

00:15:43 ◼   ► had, he apparently had a bicycle accident a few years back and had never quite

00:15:48 ◼   ► been right since. And I guess they, you know, I don't know, I don't want to read

00:15:53 ◼   ► into it, but terribly sad. Too soon, you know. But what a career and what an influence on

00:16:01 ◼   ► the Mac interface. I mean, I had a couple of links on Daring Fireball about his influence,

00:16:06 ◼   ► but it's so odd to me. And again, it's, you know, I don't want to make it all about me.

00:16:10 ◼   ► It's Larry Tesler who died. But it's so odd that I really have been thinking a lot about

00:16:16 ◼   ► him because I've been thinking and writing so much about this iPad multitasking stuff.

00:16:20 ◼   ► and it really did occur to me before he died this week

00:16:24 ◼   ► that his no modes mantra is sort of at the root

00:16:28 ◼   ► of my complaint about the multitasking,

00:16:31 ◼   ► where it feels like going into a different mode

00:16:35 ◼   ► for different things, like putting two apps

00:16:40 ◼   ► into side-by-side mode.

00:16:43 ◼   ► I mean, there's no other way to call it than a mode.

00:16:45 ◼   ► It's so weird, because the first one,

00:16:47 ◼   ► you just tap the icon, which so far, so good,

00:16:50 ◼   ► And then to get that second one, you have to do a tap and a hold on the icon in the

00:16:56 ◼   ► home tray or the dock, whatever you call it.

00:17:00 ◼   ► Or as I found out from Avid iPad users, you can go to Spotlight and search for an app

00:17:06 ◼   ► and from Spotlight, you can tap and hold the app to put it.

00:17:11 ◼   ► So it doesn't have to be in the dock, which I erroneously thought, but seemingly 90% of

00:17:18 ◼   ► people who even know what iPad multitasking is also thought that you had to have the app in the dock

00:17:23 ◼   ► because you can't just do it from the app on the home screen. So that's weird that the one way to

00:17:29 ◼   ► get an app, the way to get the first app in split screen is one way and the other is another way.

00:17:34 ◼   ► So that's a mode. And then the weird way that like, if you have an instance of Safari next to

00:17:42 ◼   ► messages and another instance of Safari next to notes, you have to go to an

00:17:48 ◼   ► entirely different mode to see them both at the same time. You have to swipe up

00:17:53 ◼   ► and go into that multitasking mode which sort of puts them in a three by two

00:17:59 ◼   ► tiled arrangement that you can, you know, that makes it look like they're windows.

00:18:04 ◼   ► But that the way that they're arranged isn't really spatially oriented in any

00:18:10 ◼   ► way to the normal mode of using the iPad. Anyway, it's very modal, and I think it gets to the

00:18:17 ◼   ► sort of heart of Tesla's life's work, arguing against modes.

00:18:22 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm just playing with it right now.

00:18:26 ◼   ► Because I was trying to figure out what you were talking about with Spotlight, because I've never

00:18:35 ◼   ► even tried that. Yeah, isn't that weird? I mean, I wouldn't have guessed that you could do it from

00:18:39 ◼   ► there but you can't do it from the home screen. I do think that's like the one thing that iPad

00:18:46 ◼   ► multitasking as it stands today does get right is that if you have if you if you have successfully

00:18:55 ◼   ► navigated the maze to get the piece of cheese to have two apps side by side on screen right let's

00:19:02 ◼   ► Let's say you have notes on the left, Safari on the right, and you would like to switch

00:19:09 ◼   ► them to be the other way around.

00:19:11 ◼   ► You would like, you know, just take the one on the left, put it on the right, and have

00:19:15 ◼   ► them go.

00:19:16 ◼   ► You can actually do what you think you should be able to do, which is sort of tap in the

00:19:20 ◼   ► dead space of the toolbar of one of the apps and hold, and then just drag it over, and

00:19:27 ◼   ► it will do exactly what you think.

00:19:29 ◼   ► But very little of iPad multitasking works that way,

00:19:33 ◼   ► where you just tap on the thing, the window, the tile,

00:19:37 ◼   ► whatever you wanna call it on screen, tap it, drag it over,

00:19:41 ◼   ► and then the other one slides over to the other spot

00:19:43 ◼   ► and does it, but very little of it works that way.

00:19:46 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I am one of those people

00:19:48 ◼   ► who has basically just given up on it.

00:19:51 ◼   ► I mean, I haven't turned it off, and maybe I should,

00:19:56 ◼   ► because I really don't use it,

00:19:57 ◼   ► but the only times I initiate it are usually by accident.

00:20:01 ◼   ► So yeah, I don't, so I don't use it.

00:20:04 ◼   ► - I don't either, although I'm keeping,

00:20:07 ◼   ► I still have it on because I wanna write so much about it.

00:20:10 ◼   ► So like if it wasn't my,

00:20:13 ◼   ► on my top of my mind to write about this,

00:20:15 ◼   ► I would just turn that setting off

00:20:18 ◼   ► and relish the simplicity of never having to worry

00:20:22 ◼   ► about anything going into a second instance.

00:20:26 ◼   ► And it is where I and again I there is something about my brain. Maybe it's age

00:20:32 ◼   ► It might be you know, I write about this and it's inevitable that people start calling me the old, you know

00:20:36 ◼   ► Whatever old man, you know because I'm the old guy who only understands the Macintosh

00:20:41 ◼   ► But I do I keep forgetting that

00:20:46 ◼   ► Like when you somehow either purposefully or accidentally wind up with two instances of Safari

00:20:53 ◼   ► How do you get emerged back into one?

00:20:55 ◼   ► and it has nothing to do with the system-wide multitasking interface it is

00:21:02 ◼   ► it's like in the tabs button inside Safari you can press and hold the you

00:21:10 ◼   ► know what I mean the tabs button mm-hmm yeah I think you can press and hold and

00:21:14 ◼   ► if you have multiple instances you can yeah so you press and hold it and

00:21:19 ◼   ► normally it just says like close all tabs close this tab open new window new

00:21:23 ◼   ► private tab, new tab. But if you have multiple instances of

00:21:27 ◼   ► Safari, you can say merge all windows, and it'll merge them.

00:21:30 ◼   ► But which is great. So it's there. But I always forget how

00:21:34 ◼   ► the hell to do it. Because I don't think to do it within

00:21:37 ◼   ► Safari, I feel like I should be able to do it at the system

00:21:40 ◼   ► level. Yeah. Because I feel like it should work the same way for

00:21:45 ◼   ► all apps. Although I guess Safari is different, because it

00:21:47 ◼   ► actually has tabs. And if you have two instances of notes

00:21:50 ◼   ► open, how do you merge them because there's no way within one node. There's no tab interface.

00:21:57 ◼   ► Yeah, right. You can't do it there. But the fact that none of that is consistent system-wide is

00:22:02 ◼   ► the whole thing I'm arguing about. That this is not a small problem with a small solution. This

00:22:06 ◼   ► is something that is fundamentally limited. That everything should be like Safari and have tabs or

00:22:12 ◼   ► something like that. Again, it's not my job to come up with a solution, but it's my job to point

00:22:17 ◼   ► out how problematic this is. I always forget. It's my job to remember stuff. I always forget.

00:22:25 ◼   ► So there's my second, the talk show tip of the week. If you wind up with two Safari

00:22:31 ◼   ► windows in iPad and don't want them, want them merged, go to one of them, go to the tabs button,

00:22:38 ◼   ► press and hold, and there will be a merge all windows that'll do it. The good news is that

00:22:44 ◼   ► it'll merge them in a way that is seemingly random in terms of the way the tabs show up

00:22:49 ◼   ► next to each other. And so, you get to play a game. Where's that tab?

00:23:01 ◼   ► Tim Cynova Find that tab.

00:23:02 ◼   ► Dave Asprey Find that tab.

00:23:03 ◼   ► Tim Cynova Yeah.

00:23:03 ◼   ► Dave Asprey Which is, you know, it's a very fun game.

00:23:06 ◼   ► It's really, it should be part of Apple Arcade in my opinion.

00:23:09 ◼   ► Tim Cynova So it doesn't put it at the end.

00:23:11 ◼   ► Dave Asprey If it does, it does.

00:23:13 ◼   ► It just sticks it someplace in the middle? Is it doing it alphabetically?

00:23:17 ◼   ► I don't know. I don't know. It doesn't seem rational to me. Maybe I'm wrong,

00:23:21 ◼   ► but in my experience it doesn't seem rational.

00:23:24 ◼   ► Is it a function of having opened—I mean, is it still—I wonder if it's still technically

00:23:30 ◼   ► just another tab, and it has an index that's still in—and if you open more tabs, then they come

00:23:39 ◼   ► after that one? I couldn't tell you.

00:23:43 ◼   ► I couldn't tell you to test that several times to figure that out. Yeah, I couldn't tell you.

00:23:49 ◼   ► Let me take a break and thank our first sponsor and I'm very excited. This is the first time

00:23:59 ◼   ► they've sponsored the show. KOLIDE. K-O-L-I-D-E. I would have said KOLIDE. They've been sponsoring

00:24:08 ◼   ► my website during Fireball for at least a year, maybe a little longer. They're a repeat sponsor

00:24:14 ◼   ► on during Fireball, and I thank them for that. And I've been calling them "Colide" in my mind

00:24:19 ◼   ► for a very long time. And then I was listening to the ATP podcast where they sponsored, and

00:24:28 ◼   ► Marco said it was "Colide." And I thought, "Ooh!" And I—because I knew I had an upcoming—

00:24:34 ◼   ► up coming out. I knew they were coming up. I knew they were coming up here on my show. And so,

00:24:39 ◼   ► I emailed them and they were very nice to me, but they acted like it was the dumbest question

00:24:45 ◼   ► they ever heard. But anyway. I would think that these advertisers would start getting to know you

00:24:51 ◼   ► and start sending pronunciations in advance. Yeah, yeah. You know, like you would, you know,

00:24:57 ◼   ► like a kindergarten reading program. Anyway, KOLIDE, K-O-L-I-D-E, they are a software as

00:25:06 ◼   ► a service startup. And oh, here it is in the notes, pronounced KOLIDE. John, I swear to

00:25:12 ◼   ► God, they did put this here. That is working to solve security challenges for tech companies

00:25:18 ◼   ► that run large Mac fleets and use Slack. In the world of Mac management, the current accepted

00:25:24 ◼   ► practice is to buy an MDM and then use it to lock down devices so users can only do

00:25:29 ◼   ► "safe" things. The end result is that your users become frustrated and don't understand

00:25:35 ◼   ► why their devices' features and capabilities are turned off. Do this often enough and they

00:25:38 ◼   ► will start using their personal devices to actually get their work done.

00:25:43 ◼   ► Collide is different. Collide believes that end-user education about device security is

00:25:47 ◼   ► the top priority. Instead of locking down the device, Collide allows you to monitor

00:25:52 ◼   ► it continuously to see if it is compliant with your security policy. If it isn't,

00:25:57 ◼   ► Collide will message your employees via Slack and walk them through the policy, why it is important,

00:26:04 ◼   ► and give them precise instructions on how to fix the issue themselves. Collide will even message

00:26:09 ◼   ► the user the instant they fix the problem so they know they did it right. Collide does all of this

00:26:15 ◼   ► by using an endpoint agent called os query which is 100 open source doesn't degrade the performance

00:26:23 ◼   ► of your max and provides important information to security analysts without violating the privacy

00:26:29 ◼   ► of your end users collide is free for your first 30 days across all of your devices that includes

00:26:37 ◼   ► windows and linux too but they know my audience probably a lot of max and you can sign up on their

00:26:44 ◼   ► website today at collide.com k-o-l-i-d-e.com. My thanks to Collide. What else is on the

00:26:58 ◼   ► agenda here? Are we done with iPad? I kind of think we should be because…

00:27:05 ◼   ► Oh, did you want to mention, did you…

00:27:07 ◼   ► Oh.

00:27:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:27:09 ◼   ► Well, while we're talking about Larry Tesler, I just wanted to say, I thought there was

00:27:13 ◼   ► one of the things I linked to was a tweet thread by Chris Espinosa, who's kind of

00:27:18 ◼   ► been at Apple a long time. I think his employee number is six.

00:27:23 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:27:24 ◼   ► Tim Cynova I was going to say.

00:27:25 ◼   ► Dave

00:27:40 ◼   ► But he had just a wonderful thread, very brief.

00:27:43 ◼   ► I'll put it in the show notes, but I linked it on "Daring Fireball," about how all

00:27:49 ◼   ► of the obituaries for Tesla are sort of leading with the inventor of cut, copy, and paste,

00:27:56 ◼   ► which I think he does deserve credit for.

00:27:59 ◼   ► But he did so much more.

00:28:00 ◼   ► But you know, I don't blame you.

00:28:02 ◼   ► But I mean, how long is the headline going to be for an obituary?

00:28:05 ◼   ► And it's not a bad thing in terms of letting, you know, like the readers of the New York

00:28:09 ◼   ► Times just have a stake in, "Hey, I didn't, you know…" I think cut, copy, and paste

00:28:15 ◼   ► are so ingrained in our minds that it's hard to remember…

00:28:18 ◼   ► I've cut, copied, and pasted.

00:28:20 ◼   ► Yeah! It's hard to remember that they were an invention, you know, and that it was something

00:28:24 ◼   ► worse. But that, you know, like prior… his anti-modality campaign was that, you know,

00:28:31 ◼   ► word processors before the work that he and his team did at Xerox PARC had… they were

00:28:38 ◼   ► so modal that they had different modes for adding text and different modes for editing

00:28:44 ◼   ► text. Like, you know, like think of the contacts app on iOS. You open up a contact and it's

00:28:53 ◼   ► read only, right? And then you hit an edit button at the top and now you can edit the

00:28:57 ◼   ► stuff and delete fields and add fields and there's two modes. And, you know, the modal

00:29:01 ◼   ► thing doesn't mean that all modes are bad. Maybe that's actually a good selection for

00:29:05 ◼   ► iOS because you don't, you know, for something that you tap, maybe you don't want everything

00:29:09 ◼   ► to be editable all the time.

00:29:12 ◼   ► But it's kind of obvious and, you know, I don't want to give short change to all of

00:29:17 ◼   ► his work, but he even, Larry Tesler, would admit that doesn't mean never have a mode.

00:29:21 ◼   ► Just if you need one, don't use one unless you really need it, and if you do, make it

00:29:25 ◼   ► obvious how you get in and how you get out.

00:29:30 ◼   ► And Espinoza's thread just emphasized how thoughtful his stuff was, and it was about

00:29:39 ◼   ► how in the early Macintosh, by this time Tesla was at Apple, like around 1982, they were

00:29:46 ◼   ► implementing copy and paste for text editing, and that they just inserted, they were happy

00:29:54 ◼   ► enough, the Mac team.

00:29:55 ◼   ► And then, you know, this is a team full of real sticklers for, you know, trying to do

00:30:00 ◼   ► insanely great work, as they said.

00:30:03 ◼   ► They were just going to take a string of text and wherever the insertion point is, if you

00:30:06 ◼   ► pasted, it would just add that string right there.

00:30:11 ◼   ► And so, if you were at the end of a word and you were going to paste another word, the

00:30:16 ◼   ► word would be right up against the previous word with no space in between it.

00:30:20 ◼   ► And Tesla was like, "No, no, that's not good enough."

00:30:23 ◼   ► Right?

00:30:24 ◼   ► Right? Like, and Espinosa said, I was thinking like a programmer, and a programmer thinks,

00:30:29 ◼   ► I want the precision. I know that I have the string M-O-L-T-Z on the clipboard, and the

00:30:36 ◼   ► insertion point is right next to the N in J-O-H-N, and if I paste, I expect moles to

00:30:43 ◼   ► be right next to the John with no space, because if I wanted a space, I'd have typed a space,

00:30:49 ◼   ► and that's the way a programmer thinks. And Tesla, you know, insisted, he, and he was

00:30:53 ◼   ► thinking the way people think, and the way people think is I've got a name, I've got a first name,

00:30:59 ◼   ► and I've got a second name on the clipboard, and when I paste, I would like it to look like a

00:31:03 ◼   ► normal name, which is John Space Moltz. And then had the thoughtfulness to write it up in a heuristic

00:31:13 ◼   ► that could be implemented programmatically in a way that wouldn't annoy the programmer types

00:31:21 ◼   ► like Espinoza, who expect it? Like, what do you know? And I think part of that heuristic is like,

00:31:26 ◼   ► if you're in the middle of a word and you paste, then it really does appear without spaces,

00:31:30 ◼   ► because it assumes, well, you're in the middle of a word, right? It's just so many little details

00:31:36 ◼   ► like that that made the Mac great right from day one, and you can attribute them to him.

00:31:41 ◼   ► - Yeah. I did not know until I read your blurb on Daring Firewall that he had worked on the

00:31:48 ◼   ► Newton as well. Oh yeah, yeah, he was a, I think that might have been the last big thing he did

00:31:54 ◼   ► while at Apple. I know he was still in the advanced technology group after that,

00:31:59 ◼   ► but in terms of stuff that actually shipped, that was part of it. Although I guess,

00:32:02 ◼   ► no, that's not true, because the advanced technology group did work that led to Wi-Fi

00:32:07 ◼   ► and stuff like that. But yeah, he was definitely a big part of the Newton,

00:32:11 ◼   ► and the Newton was very, very anti-modal in a great way.

00:32:18 ◼   ► Yeah, I always liked the cut and paste interface for that.

00:32:23 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

00:32:24 ◼   ► Where you drag it to the side, and then you could still see it.

00:32:27 ◼   ► You'd still see the thing that you had that you were going to move someplace else,

00:32:32 ◼   ► and you'd move to the other place, and then you'd just drag it back in.

00:32:35 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:32:36 ◼   ► So anyway, RIP Larry Tesler. I've got more stuff saved up in tabs,

00:32:47 ◼   ► so there'll be more stuff on Daring Fireball. There's so much more to write about, but what a

00:32:51 ◼   ► shame. Next on the agenda, what do we got? How about this? Did you see this Malware Bytes

00:33:02 ◼   ► quote-unquote scandal last week? Yeah, yeah, I tried to ignore it for a while because it just

00:33:08 ◼   ► made me angry. Yeah, it's one of those things where I started writing about it and it was

00:33:17 ◼   ► getting too long. I was like, this isn't worth me spending all this time on. And I wound up—I

00:33:25 ◼   ► didn't link to it until just today, in fact, before we were getting ready for the show. And

00:33:29 ◼   ► I just punted and just linked to Michael Tsai's write-up, which has his usual amazing collection

00:33:37 ◼   ► of commentary from around the web and Twitter. And Jason Snell did the yeoman's work of

00:33:45 ◼   ► actually sort of writing about it intelligently. And it is… so basically, for those who didn't

00:33:54 ◼   ► see it, the Malwarebytes Labs is an anti… they make their money selling antivirus software.

00:34:00 ◼   ► So I think it's fair to say there's a conflict of interest in terms of their interpretation

00:34:06 ◼   ► of Mac users' needs for third-party antivirus software. But they released their report on the

00:34:14 ◼   ► 2020 state of Mac software and said, this is a quote from their report, "Mac threats increased

00:34:20 ◼   ► exponentially in comparison to those against Windows PCs in 2020, while the overall volume of

00:34:26 ◼   ► Mac threats increased year over year by more than 400 percent. That number is somewhat impacted by

00:34:32 ◼   ► a larger malware bytes for Mac user base in 2019. However, when calculated in threats

00:34:37 ◼   ► per endpoint, Mac still outpaced Windows by nearly two to one. Which sounds really bad.

00:34:45 ◼   ► And it's not nonsense or bullshit or made up, right?

00:34:50 ◼   ► Right. It's not great either.

00:34:52 ◼   ► Yeah, it's not great.

00:34:54 ◼   ► It's, yeah. I mean, do you prefer the numbers would go down?

00:34:57 ◼   ► - Right.

00:34:58 ◼   ► But it involves a broad interpretation of threats

00:35:05 ◼   ► or what you call malware.

00:35:10 ◼   ► It's catnip for the tech press, right?

00:35:17 ◼   ► And it has been, I mean, forever.

00:35:19 ◼   ► I mean, going back 'til you and I started writing

00:35:24 ◼   ► the public, it has never not been a thing to try to make that the conventional wisdom

00:35:33 ◼   ► is that Macs don't get malware and Windows gets malware and that's the conventional

00:35:45 ◼   ► wisdom.

00:35:46 ◼   ► And then anything that refutes that is catnip to the tech press because it's a man by

00:35:54 ◼   ► by its dog story, right? And it always comes down to, at some point, there's somebody who

00:36:07 ◼   ► will say, "Mac users," or somebody says that Macs "can't get malware," right? Which is

00:36:15 ◼   ► something that nobody who knows what the hell they're talking about has ever said, right?

00:36:21 ◼   ► ever said it. It has never been true. Nobody's tried to say it's true. It does require nuance,

00:36:29 ◼   ► and then so therefore we're already screwed. But basically—

00:36:35 ◼   ► I feel like maybe early on, because the different disparity was so great, it did seem like,

00:36:41 ◼   ► to some people, that the reason must be because Apple's coding was better, that Apple had fewer

00:36:49 ◼   ► exploitable flaws or whatever, which was not really not the

00:36:53 ◼   ► case. Well, I think it was a lot of it was mostly because Windows

00:36:57 ◼   ► just had the larger market share. And if you're going to

00:36:59 ◼   ► write something, you're gonna write something against winds

00:37:01 ◼   ► it. No, no, I think it was true. At one point, I think there was

00:37:05 ◼   ► a point where where Windows was easily more easily exploited by

00:37:10 ◼   ► poor security practices on Windows part that there were

00:37:13 ◼   ► exploits like exploits that would actually let a remote

00:37:17 ◼   ► intruder take over the machine. To me, the canonical example of it is Word Office macro

00:37:24 ◼   ► viruses, which were insidious. All you had to do was open a Word document with a macro

00:37:35 ◼   ► virus. You just opened the .doc file and your machine was screwed. And it would spread,

00:37:43 ◼   ► right? And that's the thing is we've sort of lost the meaning of virus in the computer sense,

00:37:49 ◼   ► where it, you know, in the real world, the biological virus, which unfortunately we're

00:37:54 ◼   ► going to—it's on the agenda for today's show. But, you know, as we're reminded by the news

00:38:01 ◼   ► around the world right now, a virus is a thing that spreads on its own, which is what makes it

00:38:08 ◼   ► so insidious. And a computer virus should be—that's a term that should be used for a type of malware

00:38:17 ◼   ► that spreads on its own. And there was a time when—and Max used to—a long time ago, Max had

00:38:26 ◼   ► a terrible problem with viruses. There was a great app—what was his name? John Norstead. He had an

00:38:33 ◼   ► app, free app called Disinfectant. Were you using a Mac back then? Do you remember Disinfectant?

00:38:38 ◼   ► Disinfectant. Disinfectant was amazing because Disinfectant was totally free and it was totally

00:38:49 ◼   ► unobtrusive on your Mac and it totally worked. But there were viruses on the Mac that spread

00:38:58 ◼   ► just by inserting a floppy disk. I mean, so it was literally the computing equivalent of an STD.

00:39:04 ◼   ► That if you, if there was an infected Mac and you put a floppy disk in, that Mac would write the

00:39:13 ◼   ► virus to the floppy disk, and then you would pop it out, and then you would put it into your Mac,

00:39:20 ◼   ► And just by putting it in, your Mac would get the same virus. And it really was that little

00:39:30 ◼   ► interactivity. Just put a floppy disk in an infected Mac, take it out, put it in another one,

00:39:34 ◼   ► and the other Mac would have it. Disinfectant nuked all of them, and he kept it up to date.

00:39:41 ◼   ► It was really great. But that was a real problem that the Mac faced in the early '90s, like when I

00:39:48 ◼   ► was at Drexel University. And we didn't really—we didn't have a network at the time. We had to get

00:39:52 ◼   ► software. You'd go to the computer lab, and the way you got, like, software that was site licensed

00:39:59 ◼   ► for the whole university for Mac users or even courseware, like, you know, like your professor

00:40:04 ◼   ► would say, "Go to the computer lab with a floppy disk and, you know, put in your course number,

00:40:08 ◼   ► and you'll get all this stuff." Like, you know, some courses, you know, had, like, custom hyper

00:40:12 ◼   ► card stacks. It was kind of an amazing time to be a Mac user at college. But part of the thing was

00:40:19 ◼   ► that if you had to have disinfectant because, you know, and all of the lab machines had disinfectant.

00:40:25 ◼   ► But they would tell you sometimes. Like, you know, I was, you know, didn't happen to me because I'm

00:40:30 ◼   ► me. But I had friends who'd be like, "Holy shit, I put my floppy in and it told me my floppy was

00:40:35 ◼   ► infected, you know? And I was like, "Yeah, you got to get disinfected." So anyway, I've never,

00:40:41 ◼   ► ever, ever—I mean, this was—that was like 1991, 1992. Like, I've known for,

00:40:47 ◼   ► God, that's close to 30 years that Macs have never, quote-unquote, not gotten malware.

00:40:54 ◼   ► But the stuff that faces the Mac today is not viruses. It's not things that spread without

00:41:01 ◼   ► you doing anything like you just you know it's all i don't know what you want to call it scamware

00:41:08 ◼   ► trick where yeah i think they use adware um but it's a but it's a variety of different it's not

00:41:14 ◼   ► just things that show pop-up ads or something yeah dan gooden at ours technica had a good piece just

00:41:20 ◼   ► at the end of january about this this sort of uh and some of them they look so bad but but basically

00:41:28 ◼   ► there's a whole bunch of them are just fake Adobe Flash installers and that's particularly

00:41:34 ◼   ► insidious, kind of obvious, kind of clever. But for anybody who is a non-expert Mac user,

00:41:41 ◼   ► who's been a non-expert Mac user for, let's say, 10 years or more, which at this point

00:41:46 ◼   ► is an awful lot of people, right? There was an awful lot of people who became Mac users

00:41:50 ◼   ► in the mid 2000s, the aughts as we call them, you know, right around, you know, when the

00:41:56 ◼   ► Intel switch happened. And in that era, it was very common for you to be browsing the web and

00:42:04 ◼   ► be told your flash is out of date, go here, and a flash, you know, and you weren't being tricked,

00:42:11 ◼   ► you were getting a legitimate update to the flash installer, and it would show a dialog box that you

00:42:16 ◼   ► had to click through to get an updated version of flash installed because you needed…

00:42:22 ◼   ► Because Flash itself was telling you, right?

00:42:24 ◼   ► Because you'd go to a site and it would automatically start playing something in Flash, and Flash

00:42:29 ◼   ► would say, "Oh, you can't see this because you're out of date."

00:42:33 ◼   ► Right.

00:42:34 ◼   ► And then it would download a thing and show you a Flash.

00:42:35 ◼   ► So that's a thing that Mac users, non-expert Mac users, have thought is, you know, have

00:42:41 ◼   ► done and needed to do.

00:42:43 ◼   ► And so now, even though Flash is—I think it's—

00:42:46 ◼   ► Well, that's what's so funny about it now.

00:42:48 ◼   ► It's in a way, I mean, every time I go to a site

00:42:50 ◼   ► and something like that pops up,

00:42:52 ◼   ► I just, I think it's so cute because

00:42:54 ◼   ► I haven't run Flash in 10 years probably.

00:42:57 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:42:58 ◼   ► - It's like telling you you need to install disinfectant.

00:43:01 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:43:03 ◼   ► I mean, it belongs in a museum.

00:43:06 ◼   ► - Your zip drive is out of date.

00:43:07 ◼   ► - Right, I mean, it's almost like,

00:43:10 ◼   ► it's like we have, as an industry,

00:43:14 ◼   ► successfully eliminated Adobe Flash like 99.9% of it. I can't remember the last time I've

00:43:23 ◼   ► seen anything that wants it. I don't even know. I don't think it runs on the latest

00:43:26 ◼   ► versions of Safari. I don't even think you can install it if you wanted to.

00:43:30 ◼   ► Tim Cynova Oh yeah, I don't know about that actually.

00:43:33 ◼   ► That may be true. I mean, it hasn't come in default for years and years.

00:43:37 ◼   ► Dave Asprey I don't think it even runs anymore. I can't

00:43:39 ◼   ► remember the last time anything has ever even asked me to install it legitimately. But it's

00:43:44 ◼   ► the gift that keeps on giving in terms of people, you know, again, to go back, does

00:43:50 ◼   ► my mom know that she doesn't have Flash anymore? That she doesn't need Flash? Of

00:43:53 ◼   ► course not. You know, she has no idea what the hell Flash was except that every once

00:43:57 ◼   ► in a while she needed to update it or else she couldn't, you know, watch video on CNN.

00:44:03 ◼   ► And so that's one of the ways they do it. So they trick you. It's not actually Flash.

00:44:07 ◼   ► is some kind of scam adware, but they get you to click through it and give the permission

00:44:14 ◼   ► to do it, and it's insidious. Apple is on it. That's the other thing that Malwarebytes

00:44:19 ◼   ► doesn't—that's sort of disingenuous about the whole story that, "Hey, you need Malwarebytes

00:44:24 ◼   ► third-party antivirus."

00:44:25 ◼   ► Apple, for all the complaints we have about Apple software of late, Apple is on top of

00:44:31 ◼   ► this. And if anything, in my opinion, my complaints have been that they're too on top of it and

00:44:36 ◼   ► and making things too difficult for expert Mac users

00:44:40 ◼   ► who really do trust and are careful about what they install

00:44:45 ◼   ► outside the App Store on their Macs,

00:44:47 ◼   ► that they've gone too hard, too far in the direction

00:44:50 ◼   ► of protecting against stuff like this.

00:44:53 ◼   ► And even just in November, they've changed the rules

00:44:56 ◼   ► on what they're saying is disallowed

00:44:59 ◼   ► through the mandatory notarization process

00:45:01 ◼   ► and what they're going to revoke the license to.

00:45:06 ◼   ► It's pretty much anything that is a scam is what they're saying.

00:45:11 ◼   ► And there's a document that Apple published in November that, to me, they're on top

00:45:15 ◼   ► of it.

00:45:18 ◼   ► And basically, Michael Tsai's conclusion is mine as well.

00:45:22 ◼   ► I really don't think that anybody, expert or typical Mac user, needs third-party antivirus

00:45:31 ◼   ► software and that it causes more problems than it fixes, that what the best course of action for most

00:45:38 ◼   ► people is to run with Apple's default settings, which are pretty strict about… Does the Mac now

00:45:46 ◼   ► default to only installing from the App Store? I think you even have to click something.

00:45:50 ◼   ► Tim Cynova I think so, yeah. I think that's right.

00:45:52 ◼   ► And then the only other option is, well, without futzing around, right, is the Mac Store and

00:46:00 ◼   ► verified developers, right? Right, and the thing that if you download from outside the app store,

00:46:06 ◼   ► you have to like control click the app and choose open or go select it and go to the gear menu in

00:46:14 ◼   ► the finder and select open. If you just double click it, it'll give you a dialog that says you

00:46:19 ◼   ► can't run it because it can't be verified. And that is a very good and that's a very good solution

00:46:27 ◼   ► in my opinion, to keep typical users from accidentally opening something they shouldn't,

00:46:34 ◼   ► but allowing an expert user to open, like, a homemade app that you just wrote for yourself,

00:46:42 ◼   ► or a friend wrote in Xcode, or like an AppleScript applet that isn't signed, or something like

00:46:47 ◼   ► that, but you know you can trust it, and you're just enough of a Mac nerd to know what control

00:46:53 ◼   ► clicking on an app is and you can choose open and then it'll still give you a confirmation dialogue

00:46:59 ◼   ► but that confirmation dialogue will give you the extra button that says openness anyway I trust it

00:47:04 ◼   ► I mean that's not the exact terms but it's what it means but but not letting you do it by simply

00:47:10 ◼   ► double clicking the app is it is a terrific defense anyway apple's on top of it and I don't

00:47:17 ◼   ► think I think it's kind of kind of BS you know and I pity you know I pity them I guess because

00:47:24 ◼   ► they're the ones who chose to get into the Mac antivirus software thing but you really don't need

00:47:30 ◼   ► it yeah I mean I have not I mean I personally have not had a you know knock on wood had a virus

00:47:36 ◼   ► yeah probably since the probably since the 90s right since the early 90s since that time and I'm

00:47:43 ◼   ► Now, my kid is another matter because during his Minecraft

00:47:49 ◼   ► heyday, of course, he was going to any and every site

00:47:51 ◼   ► that he could find to download mods and things like that.

00:47:54 ◼   ► And so he managed to screw up a Mac really badly.

00:48:01 ◼   ► But that's a whole other set of impulses.

00:48:06 ◼   ► And that was a number of years.

00:48:10 ◼   ► That was at least three or four years ago.

00:48:12 ◼   ► But there is a good power tool analogy that, you know,

00:48:17 ◼   ► some people need, you need to be able to make a mess of things

00:48:20 ◼   ► with a saw to be able to use a saw, right?

00:48:22 ◼   ► I mean, there's certain tools that need, you know,

00:48:26 ◼   ► you need to be able to shoot yourself in the foot.

00:48:31 ◼   ► That's maybe a bad example, but--

00:48:32 ◼   ► Right.

00:48:33 ◼   ► You need to be able to--

00:48:34 ◼   ► You won't respect a gun until you've been shot by one.

00:48:40 ◼   ► You need to be able to drill a screw into your own hand.

00:48:45 ◼   ► But you do.

00:48:46 ◼   ► I mean, a hammer is a perfect example.

00:48:49 ◼   ► I mean, you can't build a hammer that

00:48:52 ◼   ► would function without making a hammer that would

00:48:54 ◼   ► allow you to smash your thumb.

00:48:56 ◼   ► But it would be nice if you don't ever actually

00:48:58 ◼   ► need to drive a nail into the wall

00:49:00 ◼   ► to have a similar tool that would never

00:49:03 ◼   ► allow you to smash your thumb.

00:49:06 ◼   ► The analogy breaks down, I guess, at some point.

00:49:09 ◼   ► We do need to have computers that we can mess up.

00:49:12 ◼   ► But most people ought to have a computer that they can't mess up,

00:49:17 ◼   ► is a broad way of putting it.

00:49:21 ◼   ► I would say the same thing.

00:49:22 ◼   ► My son has a gaming PC now as well.

00:49:27 ◼   ► And I think it's true of modern Windows as well.

00:49:31 ◼   ► And I did some research on it, and so far so good.

00:49:33 ◼   ► But the old mantra-- and I think a lot of Mac users,

00:49:38 ◼   ► people who've lived their lives in the Apple ecosystem and internalized it, that Windows

00:49:43 ◼   ► is virus-ridden and exploit-ridden and you can't use Windows without some kind of third-party

00:49:50 ◼   ► antivirus. I don't think that's true either. I think Microsoft Defender, which is their

00:49:54 ◼   ► built-in antivirus, and Jonas has had his PC now since Christmas of last year, so what,

00:50:04 ◼   ► 14 months and, you know, it seemingly is in tip-top shape. You know, we had to remove

00:50:11 ◼   ► Norton. That was fun. And I, you know, I did just enough. I wish that Jonas was more, I

00:50:21 ◼   ► don't know how Hank is, but Jonas just wants to play the games. He really is.

00:50:27 ◼   ► That's exactly how Hank is.

00:50:30 ◼   ► And so, and Jonas is nerdy about the games, and he and his pals, even though they're...

00:50:38 ◼   ► Jonas and Hank are either very similarly aged or identically.

00:50:41 ◼   ► Yeah, they're pretty close, yeah.

00:50:42 ◼   ► Jonas is in 10th grade.

00:50:44 ◼   ► Yeah, that's Hank is also in 10th.

00:50:46 ◼   ► Yeah, so they're, yeah.

00:50:47 ◼   ► And I thought it was really cool, is that Jonas and his pals got back into Minecraft

00:50:52 ◼   ► this year.

00:50:53 ◼   ► Like, Minecraft is like such an epic game.

00:50:56 ◼   ► Oh, really?

00:50:57 ◼   ► I mean, it's ridiculous to think that we spent, you know, we both got license for it for like

00:51:02 ◼   ► 26, 28 bucks or something like that. And the amount of gameplay.

00:51:06 ◼   ► Pete: It's insane! It is absolutely insane.

00:51:08 ◼   ► Jim; And they've never asked for an upgrade. It's just like, you get a license and then,

00:51:12 ◼   ► you know, sure, you're okay, you got the game. And then they just keep pumping out updates to it.

00:51:17 ◼   ► Pete; Yeah.

00:51:18 ◼   ► Jim; For like, nothing.

00:51:19 ◼   ► Yeah, and Jonas and his pals they they know

00:51:23 ◼   ► Minecraft the way like I knew the Mac and like knew how to use resedit to go in and change icons. Oh, yeah

00:51:31 ◼   ► The way that I knew how to deconstruct the classic Mac and thought it endlessly

00:51:37 ◼   ► Fascinating is you know like and he'll get into games like that

00:51:41 ◼   ► But he has absolutely zero interest in getting into the computer itself that way

00:51:46 ◼   ► and

00:51:48 ◼   ► And you know, so I, it was up to me,

00:51:51 ◼   ► who has no interest in Microsoft Windows at all,

00:51:54 ◼   ► like to figure out, is this, am I right that we wanna,

00:51:58 ◼   ► we don't want any third party antivirus,

00:52:00 ◼   ► we wanna just use this Microsoft Defender,

00:52:04 ◼   ► and is the right way to do it to just de-install

00:52:07 ◼   ► this crapware that came installed,

00:52:09 ◼   ► or do I wanna wipe the computer and start over

00:52:12 ◼   ► with a fresh installation, blah, blah, blah.

00:52:15 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:52:16 ◼   ► - I was like, well, it's a Christmas gift,

00:52:17 ◼   ► so I guess it's, you know, my gift to you

00:52:20 ◼   ► is I'll do the work for you and figure it out.

00:52:22 ◼   ► But anyway, that's true.

00:52:24 ◼   ► It seems to be true, and I've read other people's faces.

00:52:26 ◼   ► - I mean, you are in effect using some sort of antivirus.

00:52:29 ◼   ► You're just using what came with the,

00:52:31 ◼   ► you're not using third-party antivirus.

00:52:32 ◼   ► - Right, and I think that what comes with it

00:52:34 ◼   ► is actually superior.

00:52:35 ◼   ► It's not like, you know, you're,

00:52:38 ◼   ► it's not like you're using TextEdit

00:52:41 ◼   ► instead of a proper word processor

00:52:43 ◼   ► like Pages or Microsoft Word.

00:52:46 ◼   ► you're not using a cut down thing, you're using something that is expertly designed

00:52:51 ◼   ► to have no impact on your computing while doing anything legitimately but to identify

00:52:57 ◼   ► you with anything that is actually problematic if you download it and double click it or

00:53:01 ◼   ► something like that. And gets regular updates automatically with no interaction on your

00:53:08 ◼   ► own to stay up to date. I would honestly say that Microsoft and Apple have are very much

00:53:15 ◼   ► on equal footing and deserve A grades for staying on top of this stuff and protecting

00:53:21 ◼   ► most users in a way that's unobtrusive. It's always the complaint. And I say this with

00:53:38 ◼   ► sympathy to people who get Sherlock'd, you know, in the, you know, as we say in the Mac

00:53:44 ◼   ► community from the Watson app that did something, and then Apple came out with an app called

00:53:50 ◼   ► Sherlock. I mean, it is pretty bad that that was the name.

00:53:55 ◼   ► Kyle: Yeah, the naming choices is particularly egregious.

00:53:58 ◼   ► Pete: Right. So it's, you know, but that makes it a long story that would, you know,

00:54:03 ◼   ► to fully tell. But anyway, there was an app called Watson, if you weren't around, in

00:54:06 ◼   ► the mid 2000s and it was sort of a way to intelligently search things on the

00:54:11 ◼   ► web without just being textual like searching through a search engine it

00:54:17 ◼   ► delivered things into I don't know what you call it little nuggets like you know

00:54:22 ◼   ► the weather would show up as an actual you know weather thing that would tell

00:54:26 ◼   ► you the weather and it was a third-party software and from what was it Carolina

00:54:32 ◼   ► and then Apple came out with a big Mac OS X update that included an app called Sherlock,

00:54:37 ◼   ► which pretty much did the same thing. And it was included in the system. And ever since,

00:54:43 ◼   ► having a piece of third-party software be obviated to at least some degree, if not entirely,

00:54:52 ◼   ► but enough to make it untenable as a commercial effort, the verb is "Sherlock'd." And my

00:55:01 ◼   ► I have sympathy for it, but my rule of thumb is if it belongs in the system, it will eventually

00:55:09 ◼   ► be in the system.

00:55:16 ◼   ► I don't know if I'll find it.

00:55:18 ◼   ► I'll try to make a note and see if I can find it.

00:55:20 ◼   ► But there was a thread recently about this.

00:55:22 ◼   ► I forget what the context was on Twitter.

00:55:25 ◼   ► But somebody with longer memory than me was bringing up ads from the early PC era, like

00:55:31 ◼   ► 1983, like a 1983 ad and byte magazine where there was a third-party utility you could buy

00:55:39 ◼   ► that would allow you to print Lotus 1, 2, 3 spreadsheets in portrait or I mean landscape.

00:55:47 ◼   ► Because at the time Lotus could only print, you know, in 8.5 by 11 would be 8.5 by 11 as opposed

00:55:57 ◼   ► to 11 by 8.5. And if you had a widespread sheet, well, then it didn't work, and you

00:56:02 ◼   ► could buy a third-party utility that would let you do it. Well, should—

00:56:07 ◼   ► Yeah, right. Exactly.

00:56:11 ◼   ► Is it a rip-off? Is it some kind of unethical act when Lotus added the ability to print

00:56:18 ◼   ► a portrait? No. If it belongs in the system or belongs in the app, the third-party opportunity

00:56:23 ◼   ► you know, isn't going to last for long. And so if you're a third-party developer,

00:56:29 ◼   ► you should either recognize if your product is a great idea, you should recognize it,

00:56:37 ◼   ► that if it seems like such a great idea that it might be part of the system, then you should

00:56:42 ◼   ► recognize that and be prepared to move on, or do it in such a way that it has such depth

00:56:48 ◼   ► that the solution from Apple would never have that much depth, but the power users will continue

00:56:54 ◼   ► wanting, you know, there'll still be a market for your solution.

00:56:56 ◼   ► Brian "B

00:56:56 ◼   ► I don't know if it's just retrospective, if it seems so obvious that you should be able to print a spreadsheet in landscape.

00:57:06 ◼   ► Uh, but then, cause you run, that seems, that seems like, yeah, of course you should be

00:57:13 ◼   ► able to do that.

00:57:14 ◼   ► But then you start thinking about like the tile thing and whether or not does, does it,

00:57:20 ◼   ► does it make sense for a, you know, a little do hickey that you can attach to things that

00:57:27 ◼   ► you can find them to be sort of baked into the operating system too.

00:57:31 ◼   ► Right.

00:57:32 ◼   ► Right.

00:57:33 ◼   ► So you're talking about that.

00:57:34 ◼   ► like, you know, is that really something that necessitates being in the operating system?

00:57:38 ◼   ► Pete: Yeah, I think that's the context of the Twitter discussion I was thinking of,

00:57:42 ◼   ► was this antitrust case where Congress had invited Tyle, among others, to

00:57:48 ◼   ► levy their complaints about Apple and other tech giants and, you know.

00:57:55 ◼   ► I mean, it seems, I don't know. It's a weird question, and it seems like the kind of question

00:58:03 ◼   ► about what is art. You know, I mean, I don't know. The spreadsheet thing seems obvious to me,

00:58:13 ◼   ► and this seems less obvious. But, you know, to me, it seems like it's perfectly fine for Apple

00:58:22 ◼   ► to ship this thing. But it also seems like maybe it should be something that you might

00:58:27 ◼   ► have to download from the App Store instead of it coming with the operating system.

00:58:34 ◼   ► Pete: Yeah, and we could go on and on and on about it and skip the rest of the show and talk about

00:58:40 ◼   ► how, you know, I know that I went back and forth with Nielai Patel from The Verge on it where he's,

00:58:49 ◼   ► you know, and again, it's not a bad—this isn't like, "Oh, I disagree, and we're on opposite

00:58:53 ◼   ► sides, and we hate each other. Let's, you know, let's get in a fistfight." It's, you know,

00:58:58 ◼   ► it's a rational discussion, which is actually, isn't it enjoyable? We can still have a discussion

00:59:04 ◼   ► where we— Tried to work it out.

00:59:06 ◼   ► Yeah, and acknowledge that both have good points. But Apple Watch is a good example,

00:59:13 ◼   ► where Eli's perspective is that it's—I don't know if he would call—I don't want to put words

00:59:18 ◼   ► in his mouth but anti-competitive at least in the lowercase a sense not the capital a like this

00:59:23 ◼   ► should be legal illegal but that is anti-competitive that apple watch integrates with ios on your phone

00:59:32 ◼   ► at a level that no third-party watch can access right so like you know no matter what samsung does

00:59:43 ◼   ► with a smartwatch, the only thing that they could get installed on an iPhone is an app

00:59:51 ◼   ► from the App Store.

00:59:53 ◼   ► And there is no way that an app from the App Store, sandboxed, can offer the level of integration

01:00:01 ◼   ► that iOS and Apple Watch have, which is way outside the bounds of what an app can do.

01:00:10 ◼   ► But the reason for that isn't anti-competitive.

01:00:15 ◼   ► The result is anti-competitive, but it's not like Apple is spiting these companies.

01:00:19 ◼   ► It's because if apps from the app store were allowed to install system-level background

01:00:28 ◼   ► daemons that do the things like, "Hey, I'll just install the watchOS at four in the morning."

01:00:37 ◼   ► Once your watch is on the charger and your phone is on the charger, and I know that I

01:00:43 ◼   ► can tell from the patterns of when you're – that's very likely that you're asleep.

01:00:49 ◼   ► I'll just do the software update then.

01:00:54 ◼   ► It would be great if you could promise that the third parties would only use it for features

01:00:59 ◼   ► like that.

01:01:00 ◼   ► But if that potential was there, it would be used for all sorts of havoc, which we know

01:01:05 ◼   ► from the last 20 years of computing.

01:01:08 ◼   ► I mean, it calls back to the malware bytes thing

01:01:09 ◼   ► where people would install software

01:01:14 ◼   ► and it would install all sorts of shit in the background

01:01:17 ◼   ► and the lack of sandboxing and apps,

01:01:21 ◼   ► it was just out of control in terms of how much stuff

01:01:23 ◼   ► apps would do that was running in the background.

01:01:26 ◼   ► And you don't want that.

01:01:30 ◼   ► So what's the solution?

01:01:31 ◼   ► I mean, it sort of stinks.

01:01:33 ◼   ► I mean, I don't think there's any way that Apple could offer third parties the level

01:01:37 ◼   ► of integration between devices that Apple Watch enjoys because it's integrated without

01:01:44 ◼   ► also opening up a can of worms that would allow Facebook to install stuff that would

01:01:51 ◼   ► observe every website you visit.

01:01:53 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:01:54 ◼   ► On your watch.

01:01:57 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:01:59 ◼   ► [laughter]

01:02:01 ◼   ► But that leads us into Mark Gurman's story this week.

01:02:07 ◼   ► Oh, what was—I have that open in a tab and haven't read it yet.

01:02:11 ◼   ► So the rumor is that Apple is considering allowing third-party apps to be default apps

01:02:21 ◼   ► for—specifically, I think it just mentions web browsing and mail and music.

01:02:28 ◼   ► music, at least it talks about music on the HomePod, but something that people have been

01:02:38 ◼   ► talking about forever.

01:02:39 ◼   ► Darrell Bock Yeah, and that's been a complaint with, I

01:02:44 ◼   ► think, Spotify in particular, that Apple has favored Apple Music by having – there's

01:02:50 ◼   ► an entire product called HomePod that only works with Apple Music.

01:02:53 ◼   ► Yeah. And that is, yeah, that's mentioned specifically is, is the possibility of

01:02:59 ◼   ► running Spotify on the HomePod as the default music app.

01:03:03 ◼   ► Right.

01:03:03 ◼   ► And it seems, you know, it seems like this is, I mean, I don't know, we'll see if they do it

01:03:12 ◼   ► or not. But the fact that they're considering it, if that is the case,

01:03:19 ◼   ► doesn't seem like it's a coincidence that it's coming after they've been dragged in front of

01:03:25 ◼   ► Congress. Yeah, probably not. I'll take the devil's advocate side on this, which is that

01:03:35 ◼   ► I've long been sympathetic to Apple's perspective on not allowing you to choose a third-party app as

01:03:45 ◼   ► as your default for web browsing or mail or contacts or calendar.

01:03:52 ◼   ► Not as a diehard, that would be a terrible mistake, but as a,

01:03:58 ◼   ► all right, let me give you the other side.

01:03:59 ◼   ► Sort of like the one button versus two button mouse thing,

01:04:03 ◼   ► which again goes back to Larry Tesler, who wanted one button

01:04:05 ◼   ► mice because the original mice at Xerox had three buttons

01:04:11 ◼   ► and five chord keys.

01:04:15 ◼   ► I don't even know what that means. Did you hear the story? Did you read the story? Just

01:04:19 ◼   ► let me put a finger on this thing. The other story I saw, I think in the John Markoff obituary

01:04:29 ◼   ► in the Times, was that Larry Tesler, while still at Xerox, was against mice completely.

01:04:37 ◼   ► He thought they were too complicated and wanted to show that they were wrong. He thought cursor

01:04:43 ◼   ► keys were the way to go. And so he brought people for word processing in particular,

01:04:48 ◼   ► he brought people in off the street who had never used a computer word processor,

01:04:51 ◼   ► and showed them how to do it using a there's the Xerox system with no mouse installed just using

01:04:58 ◼   ► cursor keys. And they all took to it very quickly thought this is great. This is so much better than

01:05:04 ◼   ► a typewriter because you can, you know, go back and correct mistakes and you can copy and paste

01:05:08 ◼   ► and they got it they could do they could they typical people learn to do it. And his thought

01:05:13 ◼   ► and now I'm going to teach him, I'm going to show him how to do it with a mouse, and they're going

01:05:17 ◼   ► to hate it, and I can show everybody that this is the worst." And he plugged the mouse in and

01:05:22 ◼   ► showed him how to do it with the mouse, and they all said right away, "Oh, I don't want to use

01:05:27 ◼   ► that. I don't understand it." And then he said, "Well, let me show you how it works." And he showed

01:05:30 ◼   ► him how it works, and as soon as he showed him how it works, they're like, "Oh, this is way better.

01:05:33 ◼   ► Oh, this is great!" And he then—this is the part, this is what makes—this is why

01:05:42 ◼   ► Larry Tesler is, to me, a hero, and we need more—I mean, we're losing this sort of

01:05:47 ◼   ► thinking in this world. Today, he was like, "Okay, I was wrong." You know? And—which

01:05:56 ◼   ► is exactly what you write! That's what you want. You want—you know, the true scientific

01:06:00 ◼   ► method is come up with a hypothesis, test it, and then accurately gauge the results

01:06:08 ◼   ► the test, whereas our modern world has gone to come up with your hypothesis and then—

01:06:14 ◼   ► Pete: And sell it.

01:06:15 ◼   ► [Laughter]

01:06:18 ◼   ► Pete; Exactly! No matter what the evidence says—

01:06:21 ◼   ► Pete; No matter what it is—

01:06:22 ◼   ► Pete; Spend all of your mental effort coming up with a way to justify it—

01:06:26 ◼   ► Pete; Get a few rounds of VC funding and sell it.

01:06:30 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:06:32 ◼   ► So we were talking about, oh jeez.

01:06:39 ◼   ► - Default apps.

01:06:40 ◼   ► - Default apps, all right.

01:06:41 ◼   ► So my defense about it is,

01:06:47 ◼   ► and I would like to see them do it.

01:06:49 ◼   ► I mean to say overall, I would like to see them do it.

01:06:52 ◼   ► I use Fantastical as my main calendar,

01:06:54 ◼   ► although I think on all the other ones they might do it.

01:06:59 ◼   ► Well, I also have Cardhop installed, which is also from Flexibits, which is an alternative

01:07:04 ◼   ► to the contacts app. I guess if I could, I might set Cardhop as my default contacts app,

01:07:11 ◼   ► but I definitely would set Fantastical as my default calendar. But I use Safari and

01:07:17 ◼   ► Mail. But I get it, you know, that it would be nice when you click an email address and

01:07:22 ◼   ► you use something like the Gmail app or Spark or, you know, there's a bunch of great third

01:07:28 ◼   ► third-party email apps for the iPhone.

01:07:30 ◼   ► Wouldn't it be great if it opened?

01:07:32 ◼   ► And I know there's people who use Chrome.

01:07:35 ◼   ► But I think Apple's thinking on this

01:07:37 ◼   ► is the historical scarring

01:07:40 ◼   ► of allowing third-party software to be indispensable

01:07:45 ◼   ► and then holding them up.

01:07:49 ◼   ► And the best example of this is the influence,

01:07:53 ◼   ► the outsized influence that Microsoft Office

01:07:55 ◼   ► the Adobe suite had in the transition from classic to

01:08:01 ◼   ► classic Mac OS to Mac OS 10 and

01:08:06 ◼   ► Microsoft and Adobe essentially got to dictate an awful lot of what became carbon because they're basically they were both like we've you know

01:08:14 ◼   ► We're not going to this cocoa thing all in

01:08:18 ◼   ► You know come up with something that lets us you know do a lot less work and keep our code base most

01:08:25 ◼   ► you know, mostly in shape. And those aren't the only examples. But like, here's my example

01:08:31 ◼   ► with iOS. Some of Google's apps, it may be a lot of Google's apps on iOS, are to me

01:08:39 ◼   ► inexplicably slow to update to things like new screen sizes, right? I've had a couple

01:08:46 ◼   ► of Google apps that I've used that like when, I forget which years, but like when the iPhone

01:08:51 ◼   ► has changed shape, I've had black bars at the top and bottom for months after the iOS

01:08:59 ◼   ► update shipped or the new iPhone hardware shipped and was in my hand until Google updated

01:09:03 ◼   ► the apps to actually update to the new screen sizes.

01:09:09 ◼   ► And I think Apple is loathe to allow, let's just say, you know, the elephant in the room

01:09:15 ◼   ► would be Chrome, right?

01:09:17 ◼   ► there's an awful lot of people who I think would rather use Chrome than Safari as their

01:09:23 ◼   ► browser because they're in the Google ecosystem and it syncs their Chrome tabs across because

01:09:27 ◼   ► they're using Chrome on the Mac. I think Apple's loathe to do that in some ways because they're

01:09:34 ◼   ► loathe like what happens if they update iOS to have some feature. Maybe it's hardware and it has

01:09:42 ◼   ► a new screen size, maybe it's software, and there's like a totally new multitasking

01:09:49 ◼   ► method for iPad, right?

01:09:51 ◼   ► [laughter]

01:09:51 ◼   ► Pete: Just as an example.

01:09:53 ◼   ► Pete: Just as an example, if they do. But it would require apps to be updated to support it.

01:09:59 ◼   ► And months and months go by, and Chrome isn't updated to support it. And 30% of iPad users

01:10:07 ◼   ► are using Chrome. Well, then 30% of iPad users are using a browser that isn't updated for this.

01:10:13 ◼   ► That is, I think, a large part of Apple's thinking on this, that it's not—you know,

01:10:22 ◼   ► they don't make money by people using Safari instead of Chrome or Firefox on iOS, right?

01:10:30 ◼   ► They're not selling access to—

01:10:32 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, not email and not web browsing, right? They do music.

01:10:37 ◼   ► Right, so music is a much better example. But music isn't a—there's a conflation here between

01:10:46 ◼   ► two different issues. There's default apps, which I think only applies to

01:10:50 ◼   ► utility apps, contacts, calendar, mail, and—

01:10:59 ◼   ► Well, there's the question of what Siri uses.

01:11:02 ◼   ► Right, but that's different than a default app? I mean, I guess that is…

01:11:07 ◼   ► Well, sort of, right?

01:11:09 ◼   ► Well, I think of default apps in a URL context, right? What happens when you click an HTTP link?

01:11:16 ◼   ► It's supposed to go to your default web browser. A mailto colon link goes to your mail calendar,

01:11:21 ◼   ► or mail app. A cal—I forget the name of the URL, but it's like cal dot, or cal colon something.

01:11:28 ◼   ► thing. And you can download a contact in a standard format that opens in your default

01:11:37 ◼   ► on your Mac, opens in your default contacts app. I guess in this context of Siri, it's

01:11:45 ◼   ► not URLs, but it is sort of a—if you say, "Hey, Dingus, play some Rolling Stones,"

01:11:54 ◼   ► the effectively right now if you if dingus is Siri it is only going to play

01:11:59 ◼   ► Apple music and I get it you know and that Spotify Spotify's complaint before

01:12:05 ◼   ► regulators around around well maybe not around the world but at least in the US

01:12:09 ◼   ► and Europe mm-hmm and it's important in certain contexts right I mean if you're

01:12:15 ◼   ► driving you want to be able to do that and if you have if you have contexts

01:12:21 ◼   ► that are important enough that you can't futz with it at the time, you are more likely to

01:12:27 ◼   ► go with whatever the default is.

01:12:29 ◼   ► Yeah, but I don't understand how that would work on the HomePod, because at least on the

01:12:33 ◼   ► Mac or on iOS, or for the contacts calendar, web, and email, we all know how that will

01:12:42 ◼   ► work.

01:12:43 ◼   ► You would just be able to specify effectively the URL handler for it, and somewhere in the

01:12:50 ◼   ► settings app it would say you know default apps and the default you know you'd go to email and

01:12:58 ◼   ► the the list of apps would be all of the apps you've installed that you know probably just

01:13:05 ◼   ► through metadata in the like an info.plist probably wouldn't even be an api per se but just

01:13:10 ◼   ► you know would say you know i'm registering with the system as an app that can be a default email

01:13:17 ◼   ► app. You know, like you do with content blockers. Like when you install a Safari web content

01:13:25 ◼   ► blocker, there's a section in Preferences that you go to, Safari content blockers, and

01:13:30 ◼   ► it'll just list all of the content blockers you have installed. Presumably, there would

01:13:35 ◼   ► be a list of email clients, and you could tap one of them, and it would change. And

01:13:41 ◼   ► then when you ever tap a mailto link, it would open in that app instead of mail. With the

01:13:47 ◼   ► music, I'm not quite sure how it would work, because there are no apps for HomePod, right?

01:13:52 ◼   ► Like, at a technical level, I'm not quite sure how in the world you could talk to your

01:13:59 ◼   ► HomePod and say, "Hey, Dingus, play the Rolling Stones," and have it go through a Spotify

01:14:05 ◼   ► account because there's no apps on the HomePod.

01:14:08 ◼   ► it's weird, right? Because the HomePod version of Siri is a little bit different, isn't it?

01:14:13 ◼   ► Darrell Bock Yeah, because a lot of times she will say,

01:14:16 ◼   ► "I can't do that on this device." I forget what I just did the other day, and it was weird. Oh,

01:14:23 ◼   ► I know what it was. I wanted to do a division problem, and I said, "What's $500 divided by

01:14:36 ◼   ► 12 or whatever it was. And she said she couldn't do it on this device, which I thought was weird,

01:14:42 ◼   ► because I know I've done math. And it was because I said dollars. And even though technically that

01:14:48 ◼   ► doesn't involve any kind of currency conversion. Did you see what I mean? So in a sense, it's a

01:14:56 ◼   ► bug because there was no currency conversion involved. So she should have just been able to

01:15:01 ◼   ► to do the division, but because I said dollars,

01:15:04 ◼   ► it triggered a, this is a currency conversion thing,

01:15:08 ◼   ► so it can't be done on a HomePod,

01:15:09 ◼   ► you have to do it on an iOS device.

01:15:12 ◼   ► I don't know, it was something like that.

01:15:14 ◼   ► But there's definitely things you can't do on HomePod

01:15:16 ◼   ► that you can do on other devices.

01:15:18 ◼   ► I don't understand how Siri integration would work

01:15:20 ◼   ► with a HomePod like that, because,

01:15:22 ◼   ► and HomePod isn't like Apple Watch,

01:15:25 ◼   ► where it's tethered to an iPhone or an iPad

01:15:29 ◼   ► to do all the work, right?

01:15:31 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:15:32 ◼   ► - It's not like, oh, you have Spotify on your phone,

01:15:36 ◼   ► so therefore you could talk to your HomePod

01:15:38 ◼   ► and it'll just work 'cause it'll get it from your phone

01:15:40 ◼   ► because, you know, what happens if you go to work

01:15:43 ◼   ► and your spouse wants to--

01:15:47 ◼   ► - Too bad.

01:15:48 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:15:49 ◼   ► - Oh, you can't listen to music until John comes home.

01:15:52 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:15:54 ◼   ► That would not be considered an upgrade to HomePod.

01:15:57 ◼   ► - No.

01:15:58 ◼   ► But there has to be--

01:16:02 ◼   ► I imagine that these are separate systems, though, right?

01:16:05 ◼   ► I mean, Siri is a separate system from Apple Music.

01:16:09 ◼   ► And at some point in Apple's back end,

01:16:15 ◼   ► it is parsing out what you're saying to--

01:16:17 ◼   ► Siri is parsing out what you're saying to it,

01:16:19 ◼   ► and then passing certain values to the music server.

01:16:26 ◼   ► I guess.

01:16:27 ◼   ► And then that's what you get, you know, and then you get what you get in return.

01:16:30 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, I guess it's all—

01:16:31 ◼   ► So it should be able to pass those values to another provider.

01:16:36 ◼   ► As my friend Rich Siegel of BB Edit fame, who was recently on the show and it was a great show,

01:16:41 ◼   ► and I really thank him for it. But he would always—he had this saying when I worked at

01:16:45 ◼   ► Barebones and I would come in and I'd, you know—he just had this saying about programming that,

01:16:52 ◼   ► Well, it's all just typing.

01:16:53 ◼   ► He's not wrong.

01:16:58 ◼   ► You know, and he's not that he was the sort of--

01:17:01 ◼   ► not that he ever has been the sort of person to just by default say yes to feature requests.

01:17:05 ◼   ► But if it came down to it and it was like the argument was, well, but that would be hard,

01:17:09 ◼   ► he would be like, well, it's all just typing.

01:17:11 ◼   ► So it is, you know, it's not like, you know, there's some sort of technical limit that

01:17:16 ◼   ► HomePod couldn't offer some kind of integration with, you know, or like a plug-in API,

01:17:22 ◼   ► and you know it would obviously you know i guess if german is correct that must be what they're

01:17:28 ◼   ► working on though there must they must be what was interesting was that he just mentioned it on

01:17:35 ◼   ► the home pod did not talk about music on ios i don't think yeah and that would be easier in my

01:17:41 ◼   ► opinion because there you'd already you know there's already a concept is already an app yeah

01:17:45 ◼   ► right and the app would just offer serie you know this the spotify app could be updated with a new

01:17:50 ◼   ► API to offer, you know, here's the, you know, if you're a music—maybe it would even be specific

01:17:56 ◼   ► to music or something, I don't know. I mean, I guess audio would be a better way to think of it

01:18:00 ◼   ► so that—because I would think you would want podcast apps to be able to integrate just as well

01:18:06 ◼   ► so that you can say, you know, "Hey, Dingus, you know, play the latest episode of the talk show,

01:18:13 ◼   ► and the right thing would happen even if you use Castro or Overcast instead of Apple's podcast app."

01:18:20 ◼   ► So hopefully he's right. I think that would be a great idea, honestly, and not even as an

01:18:25 ◼   ► anti-competition regulatory zealot. It would just be a great feature for users.

01:18:33 ◼   ► Because it's good that you're allowed to use Castro and Overcast and prefer those as your

01:18:39 ◼   ► podcast player, and it's good that you're allowed to use Spotify instead of Apple Music.

01:18:43 ◼   ► And they should compete on the merits, not on the integration.

01:18:47 ◼   ► But I'm not the sort of person who thinks that Apple should somehow hold back on those integrations

01:18:56 ◼   ► until it puts everything on equal footing with third parties.

01:19:00 ◼   ► Yeah, and I suspect that, you know, if they—I would think it would probably be more, you know,

01:19:06 ◼   ► kind of like the keyboard thing where, you know, you'd get it, but it wouldn't quite work as well.

01:19:11 ◼   ► Right.

01:19:12 ◼   ► As the default did.

01:19:15 ◼   ► So anyway, hopefully it will. Do you use a third-party keyboard? That third-party keyboard

01:19:19 ◼   ► thing?

01:19:20 ◼   ► No, I don't.

01:19:21 ◼   ► I guess I don't really hear much about it anymore. And I know Apple added swiping in

01:19:26 ◼   ► iOS 13. Do you use the swiping?

01:19:29 ◼   ► No.

01:19:30 ◼   ► Yeah, me neither.

01:19:31 ◼   ► I can't. I'm too old to.

01:19:33 ◼   ► Me too. I don't find it faster.

01:19:37 ◼   ► I tried swiping. I believe I downloaded before it came to the default keyboard. I tried.

01:19:45 ◼   ► tried it on another keyboard and I just never liked it.

01:19:48 ◼   ► It's not the way, I don't think that way and I found it extremely clumsy to use.

01:19:53 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

01:19:54 ◼   ► But it's great that it's an option and I can see how some people it would, but I really

01:20:00 ◼   ► do think of the keyboard as a mini version of a keyboard, a physical keyboard, and so

01:20:05 ◼   ► I want to peck away.

01:20:07 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:20:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:20:09 ◼   ► Do you use an iPad while we're talking keyboards?

01:20:14 ◼   ► - What's your iPad? - Do I use an iPad?

01:20:15 ◼   ► - Yeah, what iPad do you use?

01:20:17 ◼   ► - I have the 11-inch iPad Pro from last, well, 2018.

01:20:22 ◼   ► - Yeah, so I've got that too.

01:20:26 ◼   ► I cannot type on it at all.

01:20:29 ◼   ► I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.

01:20:31 ◼   ► - Well, you like the split keyboard, right?

01:20:33 ◼   ► - I like the split keyboard because even--

01:20:35 ◼   ► - And you can't get it on that one.

01:20:36 ◼   ► - And you can't get it on the iPad.

01:20:38 ◼   ► - For some reason. (laughs)

01:20:40 ◼   ► - I don't know what the hell happened.

01:20:41 ◼   ► I don't know what the hell they're thinking

01:20:43 ◼   ► because I can only type on iOS with my thumbs.

01:20:45 ◼   ► And when they added the split keyboard to iPad,

01:20:48 ◼   ► I was like, now I can type.

01:20:50 ◼   ► It was like the iPad came out.

01:20:52 ◼   ► And I've always liked the iPad a lot.

01:20:54 ◼   ► I mean, a lot.

01:20:56 ◼   ► But I really had trouble typing on it.

01:20:59 ◼   ► Although the earlier ones were small enough

01:21:01 ◼   ► where I could kind of stretch my thumbs.

01:21:03 ◼   ► You know, like the growth from 9.7 to 11,

01:21:07 ◼   ► it stretched it so that my thumbs

01:21:11 ◼   ► don't quite reach the middle.

01:21:12 ◼   ► It's just big enough to not be able to reach the middle comfortably.

01:21:17 ◼   ► For a couple of years after the iPad Mini came out, my eyes were still great enough

01:21:24 ◼   ► that it was fine.

01:21:25 ◼   ► I loved the iPad Mini for a couple of years.

01:21:27 ◼   ► I mean, I just, the first time I ever met Tim Cook was during a hands-on after one of

01:21:39 ◼   ► of Apple's keynotes, and it was when, I think it was the second generation of the iPad Mini

01:21:45 ◼   ► came out, and maybe it went from like non-retina to retina or something like that. I don't

01:21:49 ◼   ► know, but it was like Tim Cook recognized me and we had just a brief, and you know,

01:21:54 ◼   ► he did this, of course, you know what this question was, "So what'd you think?"

01:21:57 ◼   ► That's a great question! It's absolutely, it is, it's just a, you know, that's

01:22:03 ◼   ► all, you know, Steve Jobs used to do the same thing when he went around the hands-on. If

01:22:08 ◼   ► you were deemed worthy of Katie Cotton saying, "Steve, this is so-and-so from Time magazine,"

01:22:15 ◼   ► and then he would go up and then he would say, "So what'd you think?" That's what he'd say,

01:22:18 ◼   ► which is great. And then he'd tell Walt Marsburger to get off his damn table.

01:22:24 ◼   ► Get off the damn table. No, he didn't tell him. That's the best part.

01:22:28 ◼   ► I know. I know. He just sat there and stewed. I love that story.

01:22:33 ◼   ► But I loved the iPad mini. I loved it. And the only reason I still don't use one is it's just

01:22:39 ◼   ► a little too small for my eyes right now. And I like the Pro. I wish there was a Pro. I like

01:22:44 ◼   ► my pencil. So, you know, I actually love the pencil. But you can use the first generation

01:22:50 ◼   ► pencil, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. You don't like them. Yeah, I don't like it. I know. I know.

01:22:55 ◼   ► I know. I know. But we got Karen got the base, whatever that, you know, she got the iPad, iPad

01:23:01 ◼   ► laugh for Christmas and a pencil and she, you know, the original pencil and she loves that thing.

01:23:07 ◼   ► Oh, it is when you, it's so great. It is.

01:23:10 ◼   ► It's cheap.

01:23:11 ◼   ► Oh, it is so cheap.

01:23:12 ◼   ► It was 250 bucks at Costco. And then, you know, the pencil was not hard, but still it was.

01:23:17 ◼   ► In some ways, it's the most unappley priced product ever.

01:23:22 ◼   ► It really is.

01:23:23 ◼   ► I mean, going back to like 1978, it is.

01:23:25 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

01:23:27 ◼   ► It's the only time that Apple has made a truly fantastic personal computer that is at

01:23:33 ◼   ► what can only be described as a truly low price. It's the greatest bargain that Apple has ever

01:23:45 ◼   ► offered, maybe ever will. But anyway, one of the things I loved about the Mini was the fact that

01:23:50 ◼   ► I could thumb type on it so great. It was like better for thumb typing, or it probably still is

01:23:55 ◼   ► better for thumb typing than the iPhone because it's small enough that it's like no stretching

01:24:02 ◼   ► and the keys are big enough that you like never hit the wrong key. It loved it for that.

01:24:08 ◼   ► The fact that you can't – and then the split keyboard on the bigger ones was like, "Oh,

01:24:12 ◼   ► this is great. I love it." I just used the split keyboard and then I could still thumb

01:24:14 ◼   ► type and it was – I could do it. Now I can't split the keyboard. I can't type. I literally

01:24:21 ◼   ► type like they say Tolkien did, which is like one finger. I guess he supposedly used two fingers.

01:24:30 ◼   ► That's what I use. I usually hold it with my left hand or like on my arm and just type with

01:24:40 ◼   ► the fingers, whatever fingers I can use on the right hand. So I'll use multiple fingers.

01:24:44 ◼   ► I type with one index, my right index finger, and it's maddening, and I just either switch to

01:24:50 ◼   ► to a different device or if I'm in an iPad mood,

01:24:55 ◼   ► it's a digression, but I just bought,

01:25:00 ◼   ► son of a bitch Jason Snell.

01:25:03 ◼   ► - Are you talking to a keyboard?

01:25:05 ◼   ► - Yeah, another mechanical keyboard,

01:25:08 ◼   ► but this one's Bluetooth,

01:25:09 ◼   ► which is all the difference in the world with an iPad.

01:25:13 ◼   ► Like using a cable connection to the thing,

01:25:16 ◼   ► it just sort of defeats the purpose.

01:25:18 ◼   ► but I have a new mechanical keyboard

01:25:20 ◼   ► that's really pretty nice, and so I just use that.

01:25:23 ◼   ► But I either use a hardware keyboard

01:25:25 ◼   ► or I just don't type at all on the iPad anymore.

01:25:28 ◼   ► - Yeah, I have a hardware keyboard too, hardware keyboard.

01:25:32 ◼   ► - Oh, I'm trying to think, I'm trying to think selfishly.

01:25:35 ◼   ► If somebody from Apple wrote me a confidential email

01:25:39 ◼   ► and said, "You can have one or the other.

01:25:42 ◼   ► "You can have a radically fixed multitasking for iPad."

01:25:46 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:25:48 ◼   ► And we'll sync all the man hours,

01:25:51 ◼   ► we'll sync thousands of man hours into this and do it.

01:25:56 ◼   ► Or we'll put, we'll keep multitasking as it is,

01:26:00 ◼   ► but put the split keyboard on the iPad Pro.

01:26:03 ◼   ► - Yeah, you're Sophie's choice.

01:26:05 ◼   ► - Yeah, and we'll let you pick and we'll never,

01:26:07 ◼   ► and I'll be like that guy who didn't vote for Jeter,

01:26:10 ◼   ► and we'll keep it anonymous.

01:26:12 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:26:15 ◼   ► - I don't know why, yeah, I mean,

01:26:16 ◼   ► I figure there has to be, I don't know,

01:26:18 ◼   ► sort of assumed there was maybe something with the camera that they thought if you were holding the

01:26:21 ◼   ► key the the ipad with both hands like that they would cover the camera up or something

01:26:26 ◼   ► i don't i don't know my working theory is that it has something to do with the extra keys they added

01:26:32 ◼   ► you know like like there's a tab tab key now like the the old like when they made the keyboard a

01:26:39 ◼   ► little bigger they added extra keys like you used to not be able to type the tab character

01:26:44 ◼   ► you know, like the phone, and now they did. But I would just say, I don't care, just when I go to

01:26:49 ◼   ► split screen, get rid of those keys. I don't care. Yeah, just return it the way it was, yeah. Yeah,

01:26:53 ◼   ► my theory was, that's my theory, is that there was some argument inside where they're like,

01:27:00 ◼   ► "Well, if we keep split screen, we're going to lose these extra keys," you know, whereas on the

01:27:06 ◼   ► devices where split screen still works, you don't lose keys. I would rather just, I would just say,

01:27:11 ◼   ► you lose the keys, you lose the keys. I don't care. Just let me tell you.

01:27:16 ◼   ► I never used the split screen keyword. But I know there's some people who

01:27:22 ◼   ► really relied on it like you. And the guy who does the Johnny Ive parody, he also...

01:27:28 ◼   ► I didn't know that was a parody.

01:27:34 ◼   ► Maybe I've said too much.

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01:31:10 ◼   ► fantastic product. My thanks to Away. What else? What else next on the agenda?

01:31:16 ◼   ► I just, just to interject this briefly, but I'm just looking at this. There's a,

01:31:20 ◼   ► did you know there was a command that you can run that will return the startup sound?

01:31:23 ◼   ► No. What do you, what is it?

01:31:25 ◼   ► sudo nvram startup mute equals %00.

01:31:34 ◼   ► Will you paste this in the show notes?

01:31:37 ◼   ► Sure.

01:31:37 ◼   ► [Laughter]

01:31:41 ◼   ► And it really plays the startup sound? But what if you have one of the new Macs that doesn't have

01:31:47 ◼   ► a startup sound? That's the thing. That's where you want it. That's where you play it and put it.

01:31:52 ◼   ► Oh! That's where you run it. That's what it's for.

01:31:55 ◼   ► I thought you meant that you type this in the terminal and it'll just play it for you right

01:32:00 ◼   ► now. No, no, no. No, no. It'll reset. So that's just the—

01:32:06 ◼   ► Which makes sense, I guess. I mean, that, you know.

01:32:09 ◼   ► Yeah. What is it? Control-G is the bell, right? Or...

01:32:13 ◼   ► Well, I don't remember. But there used to be a way, you know, some kind of control

01:32:17 ◼   ► sequence you type just to play a beep. I thought you were saying you could do it.

01:32:20 ◼   ► Oh, isn't that great? I should have actually listened. Once you started getting into the...

01:32:24 ◼   ► Once you started getting into... Do you know that... Have I ever mentioned this? Do you know

01:32:29 ◼   ► that I really cannot spell audibly like you know how like when you have a little

01:32:37 ◼   ► kid oh yeah yeah yeah and you'll be like hey should he get D E S S E R T because

01:32:44 ◼   ► you know maybe you know your kid was had been naughty or something like that I I

01:32:49 ◼   ► I cannot you like when Amy would do that I would have trouble follow I have

01:32:54 ◼   ► trouble following along. I'm a very visual person.

01:32:58 ◼   ► So you'd say it out loud and then he'd say, "Yeah, of course I should."

01:33:02 ◼   ► Well, I was better—I'm much better with Pig Latin, although I'm not good with Pig Latin either.

01:33:07 ◼   ► I end up—I'll get like two words in and then just start saying real words.

01:33:12 ◼   ► And she'll be like, "What are you doing?"

01:33:14 ◼   ► Hank has always been better at Pig Latin than me. Hank is fluent in Pig Latin.

01:33:17 ◼   ► Aw, I'm terrible.

01:33:18 ◼   ► "Wait, what? What?"

01:33:19 ◼   ► No, you start telling me something about a command line thing and I'm like,

01:33:23 ◼   ► law. You might as well be telling it to my mom, you know. But if you showed it to me,

01:33:29 ◼   ► I'd get it instantly. And now that you mentioned NVRAM, of course you're talking about it. I'm

01:33:34 ◼   ► going to turn that on today. I think it's a crying goddamn shame that they took the startup

01:33:43 ◼   ► sound out of it. I think so too. And then the stupid thing is they put them all at the beginning

01:33:47 ◼   ► of the Apple TV shows. Like, I understand that. Like, you have this iconic sound,

01:33:54 ◼   ► and you take it off the Mac, and then you still use it on your TV shows?

01:33:59 ◼   ► It's not quite the same sound, or else it just sounds different to me.

01:34:03 ◼   ► Yeah, no, it's not exactly the same sound, but it's—

01:34:07 ◼   ► Right. But in the same way that, like, you know, I get it that—it's clearly inspired by, you know,

01:34:14 ◼   ► and maybe they—I think that the thinking behind it was, "Well, let's make it a little bit more

01:34:18 ◼   ► appropriate for the beginning." You know, there's some kind of psychological semantic difference,

01:34:23 ◼   ► you know, in the same way that maybe the Apple logo's a different size, too, you know.

01:34:27 ◼   ► Let's make it perfect for the shows. Anyway, I'll put that in the show notes, I promise.

01:34:33 ◼   ► I will try to remember to put it in the show notes. Let me see if—did you actually paste

01:34:40 ◼   ► it into the show notes somewhere? I did. I don't see it. Can I edit these? I think so.

01:34:46 ◼   ► Oh, there's something just showed up.

01:34:49 ◼   ► NVRAM. I'm looking for NVRAM. Oh, there it is. There it is. Ah, I can't wait.

01:34:58 ◼   ► This is the third tip and trick of this episode of the talk show. This is...

01:35:05 ◼   ► My first.

01:35:07 ◼   ► This is absolutely... No, you...

01:35:09 ◼   ► Can I run it right now?

01:35:11 ◼   ► Do you think it'll take my computer now?

01:35:13 ◼   ► Well, I wouldn't do it.

01:35:17 ◼   ► I wonder.

01:35:20 ◼   ► I won't do it.

01:35:24 ◼   ► I won't do it.

01:35:25 ◼   ► Just to be on the safe side.

01:35:26 ◼   ► We got enough problems.

01:35:28 ◼   ► I don't want to go off on too big of a tangent on it.

01:35:33 ◼   ► Are you updated to Catalina?

01:35:36 ◼   ► I am, yeah.

01:35:39 ◼   ► Because I was going to say something.

01:35:40 ◼   ► Like, I don't have the problems.

01:35:42 ◼   ► People have been complaining about being asked

01:35:45 ◼   ► by the operating system all the time,

01:35:47 ◼   ► if you really want to do that and stuff like that.

01:35:49 ◼   ► I don't really have that problem.

01:35:51 ◼   ► I don't consider myself much of a--

01:35:53 ◼   ► I mean, I know how to do things, but I

01:35:55 ◼   ► don't feel like I'm a real big power user.

01:35:57 ◼   ► I don't exercise that muscle a lot, really.

01:36:02 ◼   ► Only if I'm writing about something

01:36:05 ◼   ► that I want to try out and figure out how it works.

01:36:08 ◼   ► So I get the thing most often the thing that I get is the, you know, do you want to let

01:36:14 ◼   ► this website access downloads?

01:36:18 ◼   ► Which I don't find really that annoying.

01:36:19 ◼   ► I actually don't either and I actually enjoy that one.

01:36:23 ◼   ► And I get the point of it too.

01:36:25 ◼   ► That's the other thing, you know?

01:36:26 ◼   ► I mean, a number of times I have accidentally like, you know, where you do that thing where

01:36:30 ◼   ► you like control click and you do and it downloads like an HTML, it downloads the HTML instead

01:36:36 ◼   ► of like the file that you, I mean, I've done that, you know, fat finger by mistake. And

01:36:41 ◼   ► so in those instances, well, I guess if you've already given a permission, it's going to

01:36:45 ◼   ► download it anyway. But at least the first time it's not going to.

01:36:48 ◼   ► There's so many, you know, there's, there's so many security problems or that aren't,

01:36:56 ◼   ► you know, the technical ones are way beyond my can I even have a degree in computer science

01:37:01 ◼   ► And I don't understand the true genius level you have to be at.

01:37:08 ◼   ► Okay, if you do, I understand like a buffer overflow.

01:37:12 ◼   ► I understand the idea that if there's some program that accepts input and is allocated a fixed amount of memory for the input,

01:37:21 ◼   ► and takes anything from the input and doesn't check the size and just throws it into memory,

01:37:30 ◼   ► that it overwrites the bounce.

01:37:32 ◼   ► You know, it's like the analogy of like the cup is a fixed size

01:37:36 ◼   ► and you're going to accept any amount of beverage from the thing that you're,

01:37:41 ◼   ► you know, the beverage dispenser, it's going to overflow the cup, right?

01:37:45 ◼   ► That's exactly what happens with memory.

01:37:47 ◼   ► I understand why that makes apps crash, but I don't understand, it's just beyond me,

01:37:56 ◼   ► the black magic of being able to use that to craft the overflowed memory in such a way

01:38:03 ◼   ► that it gets to actually start doing things. Like, I understand that layperson's explanation

01:38:09 ◼   ► of it, but how you would be so talented at programming and finding these things that

01:38:14 ◼   ► you would take advantage of it is just beyond me. But that's how a lot of software technical

01:38:18 ◼   ► exploits are. The ones that I think are—it's like, I fully understand it, and it's like,

01:38:25 ◼   ► "Oh, you clever rat bastard," are the ones that are just, they're not really technical

01:38:33 ◼   ► at all. They're just exploiting things that the people who made the software never even

01:38:39 ◼   ► considered because you think, "Why would anybody ever do that?" And I've told this

01:38:43 ◼   ► story on the show before, but about two or three years ago, Jonas encountered a bug that

01:38:51 ◼   ► that has since been fixed in Safari,

01:38:54 ◼   ► but I think it was there since the beginning of time.

01:38:56 ◼   ► But somehow he wound up on a website

01:38:59 ◼   ► that had some kind of like,

01:39:04 ◼   ► you have to call us to get,

01:39:07 ◼   ► your Mac has been infected with malware,

01:39:10 ◼   ► and this is why it's slow, call us and we'll fix it.

01:39:15 ◼   ► And he thankfully called me for help,

01:39:18 ◼   ► but his computer really was dreadfully slow,

01:39:23 ◼   ► like almost unusably slow,

01:39:25 ◼   ► but that dialogue was there with the 1-800 number,

01:39:29 ◼   ► and what the website was doing

01:39:33 ◼   ► was sending a nonstop endless stream

01:39:38 ◼   ► of four-byte files to download.

01:39:43 ◼   ► And the four-byte files, they all had like the same text,

01:39:48 ◼   ► just like abcd or something like that like they were just you know you could open they were just

01:39:52 ◼   ► like four byte text files they were all identical but they all had a new name or something or i

01:39:57 ◼   ► guess the browser will just start adding numbers you know if they have the same name and it was

01:40:00 ◼   ► just sending them endlessly an endless stream of them and safari was just trying to keep up but

01:40:08 ◼   ► couldn't you know that the website could send these files faster than safari could take them

01:40:13 ◼   ► and write them. And so it actually did render his Mac too slow to use. And so it's very

01:40:21 ◼   ► easy to see how a very rational person would think, "Holy shit, they're right. My computer

01:40:25 ◼   ► must be infected. I'll call this number." Right? But I can totally see how it might

01:40:33 ◼   ► never have occurred to the engineers of Safari to not try to accept downloads as fast as

01:40:40 ◼   ► they can. If you're accepting 10 downloads, why not get them as fast as you can?

01:40:46 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:40:47 ◼   ► You know, there's so many exploits that are like that. It's not really technical,

01:40:51 ◼   ► but it's, you know, a layperson can imagine the JavaScript programming behind, you know,

01:40:56 ◼   ► just repeat forever, send the download of a text file, and, you know, the text files

01:41:05 ◼   ► themselves weren't any kind of virus or anything. They were just four-byte text files,

01:41:09 ◼   ► and it was just sending them as fast as they could.

01:41:11 ◼   ► Well, it's like a denial of service, right?

01:41:13 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:41:13 ◼   ► I mean, it's like you just-- yeah, you're-- yeah.

01:41:15 ◼   ► Yeah, and the trick is if you-- you could just force quit Safari

01:41:18 ◼   ► and then open it back up with-- either if you don't already

01:41:23 ◼   ► have the setting to reopen existing web pages,

01:41:25 ◼   ► there's like a keyboard shortcut so that it doesn't reopen the pages that

01:41:29 ◼   ► were already open so that that page doesn't open and start

01:41:32 ◼   ► the thing all over again.

01:41:34 ◼   ► But anyway, I filed a radar on it and wrote to a friend

01:41:37 ◼   ► who I know is on the Safari team and got fixed.

01:41:40 ◼   ► But I think now, a better, even broader solution is the,

01:41:45 ◼   ► do you wanna accept downloads from this file,

01:41:48 ◼   ► this website in the first place, right?

01:41:50 ◼   ► 'Cause you don't even want one unwanted download

01:41:53 ◼   ► that you didn't ask for by being tricked

01:41:57 ◼   ► into clicking something that you just thought

01:42:00 ◼   ► it was gonna open a new page or something like that

01:42:02 ◼   ► or whatever and it's gonna download stuff.

01:42:04 ◼   ► I think it's a great, you know,

01:42:05 ◼   ► that's a warning I'm happy about.

01:42:07 ◼   ► But like when a random app that I haven't used

01:42:10 ◼   ► in two hours suddenly pops up a dialogue

01:42:14 ◼   ► in front of everything I'm working on that says,

01:42:16 ◼   ► "Do you want to allow whatever this app is

01:42:18 ◼   ► "to access the desktop?"

01:42:21 ◼   ► I find that very annoying.

01:42:22 ◼   ► And I kind of get the thinking,

01:42:24 ◼   ► I do get the thinking behind it,

01:42:26 ◼   ► and I've complained about this desktop warning,

01:42:28 ◼   ► and somebody was like, "Well, I keep, you know,

01:42:30 ◼   ► "right now I've got my, I'm doing my wife's and my taxes

01:42:33 ◼   ► for 2019 and the files are on the desktop.

01:42:36 ◼   ► So I don't want any random app to be able to read the desktop.

01:42:41 ◼   ► You know, I kind of get it.

01:42:42 ◼   ► I do get that people put everything they're working--

01:42:46 ◼   ► you know, the desktop is what probably a majority of Mac

01:42:50 ◼   ► users use for, like, here's the thing I'm working on right now.

01:42:52 ◼   ► I'm not going to file it away until I'm done.

01:42:55 ◼   ► And in the meantime, I'm going to keep it on the desktop

01:42:58 ◼   ► because the desktop is so easy to get to.

01:43:01 ◼   ► So I get it, but it's like so many of these apps

01:43:06 ◼   ► that I'm getting prompted for are apps

01:43:08 ◼   ► that I trust completely and implicitly.

01:43:12 ◼   ► I wanna be able to just say, you know,

01:43:14 ◼   ► I don't have any apps on my system that I don't trust.

01:43:17 ◼   ► Or at least, you know, like the Mac way of doing it

01:43:20 ◼   ► and Apple doesn't really do things this way

01:43:22 ◼   ► would be, I would like it if it was as simple as like,

01:43:26 ◼   ► if there was a, I'm gonna come up with the dumb name,

01:43:30 ◼   ► there's gotta be a better name.

01:43:31 ◼   ► But if there was a way to have a,

01:43:34 ◼   ► inside your applications folder,

01:43:36 ◼   ► if there was another folder that was called trusted,

01:43:39 ◼   ► and it was a magic folder,

01:43:41 ◼   ► and any app you put in applications trusted

01:43:44 ◼   ► was just guaranteed,

01:43:47 ◼   ► and do the thing where apps can't install themselves there,

01:43:51 ◼   ► the only way to get an app there

01:43:53 ◼   ► is to actually drag it using the Finder,

01:43:56 ◼   ► and when you drag an app there,

01:43:58 ◼   ► have a dialog come up and say,

01:44:00 ◼   ► by moving an application here, you are, you know,

01:44:03 ◼   ► trusting it with the access to the full contents

01:44:06 ◼   ► of your home directory.

01:44:08 ◼   ► - I guess that, yeah, I mean,

01:44:09 ◼   ► that would obviously solve your problem,

01:44:10 ◼   ► but I mean, you also end up with apps that would say,

01:44:15 ◼   ► you know, in order to run this app,

01:44:17 ◼   ► you must install it in Trusted.

01:44:18 ◼   ► - Well, but I still wish, you know,

01:44:20 ◼   ► but I wish that were possible.

01:44:22 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:44:23 ◼   ► Anyway, what was the, oh, but I get stuff that,

01:44:28 ◼   ► I keep getting things,

01:44:29 ◼   ► 'cause I do enough AppleScript stuff,

01:44:31 ◼   ► I just keep getting so many goddamn warnings

01:44:34 ◼   ► about apps to get

01:44:36 ◼   ► permission to do inter-application communication and stuff.

01:44:44 ◼   ► And some of them are Apple's own apps.

01:44:48 ◼   ► I guess fair's fair,

01:44:50 ◼   ► in the sense that we often complain

01:44:52 ◼   ► that hey, Apple lets their stuff get away.

01:44:56 ◼   ► Xcode is distributed through the App Store and Xcode obviously has permission to do things

01:45:03 ◼   ► that are outside the sandbox, you know. So Apple has apps in the App Store that aren't

01:45:08 ◼   ► limited by the same rules as third-party apps in the App Store and in a sense that's not fair.

01:45:13 ◼   ► I totally get that.

01:45:19 ◼   ► And so if Apple's apps are asking for this permission,

01:45:23 ◼   ► I guess that's fair, but it just seems crazy to me.

01:45:28 ◼   ► Well, I can't.

01:45:32 ◼   ► - You'd think, yeah, you'd think that it would be,

01:45:36 ◼   ► we've pre-approved certain apps for,

01:45:41 ◼   ► and maybe even the stuff in the Mac App Store.

01:45:45 ◼   ► - Right.

01:45:46 ◼   ► - Like if they did that at that level,

01:45:48 ◼   ► then you could be, you know, sort of, you'd get through a lot of things and you'd be assured

01:45:54 ◼   ► that it was done in a way that was, you know, somebody took a look at it.

01:45:59 ◼   ► Well, and then the other thing is that there's just so many things that, it's like, I don't

01:46:04 ◼   ► even remember, they're scattered, you know, the permissions are scattered all over the

01:46:08 ◼   ► place in System Preferences where there's like full disk access and there's this other

01:46:14 ◼   ► type of access. And I just want to say, like, so there's an accessibility system preference

01:46:22 ◼   ► pane, right? That's a top level of system preferences. But then there's also in security

01:46:28 ◼   ► and privacy, an accessibility item in the left hand column of privacy that has allow

01:46:35 ◼   ► these apps to control your computer. And it's like, isn't that confusing that there's access,

01:46:42 ◼   ► an accessibility pref pane and then there's an accessibility section in the

01:46:46 ◼   ► privacy section of security and privacy and it uses the same icon but that's

01:46:50 ◼   ► where I've got things like in there there's an app called a server and I was

01:46:55 ◼   ► like a server I never even heard of that what the hell is that and I reveal it

01:47:00 ◼   ► you can control click and it says like show and finder and you show it and

01:47:03 ◼   ► finder and it's at system library frameworks core services dot framework

01:47:08 ◼   ► versions a frameworks a e dot framework versions a support that aren't you glad

01:47:15 ◼   ► you asked but that's you know that's like the holiest of holies in the

01:47:19 ◼   ► operating system anything in system library is like ought to be implicitly

01:47:23 ◼   ► trusted and then there's another one here it the icon looks like the terminal

01:47:28 ◼   ► icon it's just called launcher with a lowercase L and I it was asking me for

01:47:32 ◼   ► permission I was like well that seems like it might be sketchy you know and

01:47:36 ◼   ► And let me do my expert thing here that I want to be able to do, which is I'm going

01:47:40 ◼   ► to be the Mac nerd who knows how to check if something should be trusted or not.

01:47:46 ◼   ► Lowercase L launcher, which wants permission to control my computer, is at—it's inside

01:47:53 ◼   ► the system preferences app.

01:47:56 ◼   ► System preferences, contents, resources, there's an app, a little process called launcher.

01:48:01 ◼   ► Well, it's almost like you're—it's like Inception at this point, where something

01:48:08 ◼   ► inside system preferences is asking for a preference that I can only set inside system

01:48:13 ◼   ► preferences.

01:48:14 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

01:48:17 ◼   ► And Apple has done this thing in Catalina, which is great, where there's at a technical

01:48:24 ◼   ► level your startup disk is now actually two disks, a read-only system partition, and then

01:48:31 ◼   ► the read-write system partition where your user directory and stuff like that is, and

01:48:36 ◼   ► therefore while you're booted in regular non-emergency safe mode, whatever you call

01:48:42 ◼   ► it, you can't write to that read-only system partition, which is fantastic. So that like

01:48:49 ◼   ► the file system itself is protected against some bugs that Apple could make. There's

01:48:57 ◼   ► a whole class of bugs that could maybe be exploited that would allow bad guy software

01:49:02 ◼   ► to overwrite the system software itself. It's great that it's not even possible that it's

01:49:08 ◼   ► blocked at the file system level. But a process that's in that, like this launcher, ought

01:49:13 ◼   ► to be implicitly trustworthy, right? And how the hell is a normal person supposed to look

01:49:19 ◼   ► at a dialog that says, "Allow this app." And the icon looks like the terminal app because

01:49:26 ◼   ► just like a background daemon, and the name is just lowercase l launcher, right? How is

01:49:32 ◼   ► a normal person supposed to do this? And know that what they really want to do is say, "Yes,

01:49:37 ◼   ► I want to give you permission to control my computer."

01:49:39 ◼   ► Kyle: So is that—it asks you to do that?

01:49:44 ◼   ► Joe: Yeah.

01:49:45 ◼   ► Kyle. Okay.

01:49:46 ◼   ► Joe. I got a dialer.

01:49:47 ◼   ► Kyle. I got it—oh, I don't have launcher in there, but I have the other one. I have

01:49:49 ◼   ► the—

01:49:50 ◼   ► Joe. AE server?

01:49:51 ◼   ► Kyle. AE server one.

01:49:52 ◼   ► Joe. Yeah.

01:49:53 ◼   ► Kyle. Yeah. And it never—it's never asked me.

01:49:55 ◼   ► I don't know. I just feel… I get it. I'm not saying that we should go back to the old

01:49:59 ◼   ► days where anything you install on your Mac can do anything it wants willy-nilly. I get

01:50:03 ◼   ► it. Those days are gone. But I just don't think stuff should be hidden.

01:50:11 ◼   ► I had a thing—I guess I should bring it up. I'm going to write about it. I didn't

01:50:15 ◼   ► quite get it done before we recorded, but the location of media files on Mac OS 10.5

01:50:20 ◼   ► So I ran into this problem. So you know like where does iTunes, well iTunes doesn't exist anymore,

01:50:27 ◼   ► but where did iTunes put your music files? Well it was in your home folder in a folder called music.

01:50:32 ◼   ► Well that was, that's pretty obvious right? Like so if you ever wanted to like actually get to

01:50:37 ◼   ► your music, you know, there you could get to it. I had a thing, I'm trying to think how I can make

01:50:47 ◼   ► this short enough. But I don't use Apple's podcast app. I listen to all podcasts that

01:50:55 ◼   ► I normally listen to in Overcast. And I do all on my iPhone. I don't ever listen to podcasts

01:51:03 ◼   ► on any device other than my iPhone. That's just the way that I listen to podcasts. But

01:51:10 ◼   ► I subscribe to my own podcast in Apple podcasts, because I know lots of people use it and I

01:51:16 ◼   ► I want to just every once in a while I want to make sure it looks right. Does this work

01:51:21 ◼   ► the way I think it does in this very popular, very important and it's a very good app.

01:51:26 ◼   ► I can see why lots and lots of people like the Apple podcast app. And I was looking at

01:51:31 ◼   ► it this week. I hadn't looked at it on my Catalina Mac really since that breakup between

01:51:39 ◼   ► iTunes being busted into these separate apps. I thought, "Well, I should do that." I

01:51:45 ◼   ► periodically take a look at how it looks on the iPhone and I looked at it and I

01:51:49 ◼   ► was scrolling down and I there were four episodes that didn't appear it was like

01:51:54 ◼   ► episodes like 245 to 248 which is like roughly a year ago and they just weren't

01:52:02 ◼   ► listed in the all episodes and so I was like hmm and my first thought was there

01:52:07 ◼   ► I'll bet there's something wrong with my RSS feed for the podcast I and then

01:52:10 ◼   ► before I even finished the thought in my head I was like no I'll bet it's the

01:52:14 ◼   ► podcast catalyst app. I was like, "I'm not gonna go and debug my RSS feed for the

01:52:22 ◼   ► talk show yet. Let me see." And I thought, "I know what I'll do. I'll unsubscribe

01:52:26 ◼   ► from the show in podcasts and delete all of the ones that it's already had all through

01:52:33 ◼   ► the podcast app. And then I'll quit the podcast app and I'll relaunch it and I'll

01:52:37 ◼   ► resubscribe to the talk show." And I did that and I went to all episodes and the same

01:52:42 ◼   ► four episodes were missing. And I thought, "Hmm." Then I went to my phone and looked

01:52:46 ◼   ► in Apple's podcast app, and I scrolled through all episodes, and those episodes are right

01:52:50 ◼   ► there. They're listed fine. And I went to, you know, Overcast, and there they are. They're

01:52:56 ◼   ► fine. And I thought, "It's not my feed. There's something cached locally on this

01:53:02 ◼   ► Catalyst podcast app, how do I delete all the files?

01:53:07 ◼   ► And they're not in /home/music anymore.

01:53:13 ◼   ► Where the heck are they?

01:53:16 ◼   ► And I went and I figured out that there's a whole bunch

01:53:19 ◼   ► of stuff, because it's a Catalyst app, by default,

01:53:24 ◼   ► instead of storing stuff in your library folder,

01:53:26 ◼   ► it stores it in library/containers/stuff,

01:53:30 ◼   ► and you go into library/containers,

01:53:32 ◼   ► and there's all sorts of stuff,

01:53:33 ◼   ► but there were four com.apple.podcasts directories in there.

01:53:38 ◼   ► And I just deleted all four of them,

01:53:41 ◼   ► put them in the trash, deleted the trash

01:53:43 ◼   ► while the app was quit, relaunched the app,

01:53:46 ◼   ► and son of a bitch,

01:53:48 ◼   ► still was missing the same four episodes.

01:53:50 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:53:52 ◼   ► So I started, and this is really hard to Google for,

01:53:54 ◼   ► and then I found an article from Kirk McElhern.

01:53:59 ◼   ► Again, I hope I'm not, he's a long time Mac writer,

01:54:02 ◼   ► or a Kirkville is his website.

01:54:03 ◼   ► - I think that's at least close to him, right?

01:54:06 ◼   ► - And has long been, and literally has written the book.

01:54:10 ◼   ► His most recent book that he's written

01:54:13 ◼   ► is "Take Control of macOS Media Apps."

01:54:17 ◼   ► Literally, long time, decade or longer,

01:54:20 ◼   ► expert on Apple's iTunes and the various media apps.

01:54:24 ◼   ► He had an article right after WWDC,

01:54:27 ◼   ► "Where does Catalina store your media files?" Well, here's where Catalina's podcast app

01:54:36 ◼   ► stores your media files. Home/—your home folder, meaning—/library/groupcontainers/—so

01:54:47 ◼   ► far so good, I guess—slash—

01:54:49 ◼   ► Tim Cynova—Well, not really, because library is hidden to most people.

01:54:52 ◼   ► Yeah, the library is hidden. Although I'm okay with that decision to make it invisible,

01:54:59 ◼   ► you know, and that you have to goo—and it—'cause it's not too hard to get into it even though

01:55:03 ◼   ► it's invisible 'cause there's like a go to command in the finder and you can type

01:55:06 ◼   ► it and it'll auto-complete even. So I'm okay—that's a decision that Change Apple

01:55:11 ◼   ► made that I'm okay with 'cause most people shouldn't be—if they don't know what

01:55:16 ◼   ► they're doing, you shouldn't be dicking around in your library folder.

01:55:19 ◼   ► All right, library/groupcontainers/243lu875e5.groups.com.apple.podcasts.

01:55:34 ◼   ► Now…

01:55:36 ◼   ► I don't think I have that.

01:55:40 ◼   ► I'll bet you do, and I bet it's just sorting in a weird order.

01:55:44 ◼   ► No, it's a different number.

01:55:45 ◼   ► Oh, is it?

01:55:46 ◼   ► Yeah, it ends with groups.com.apple.podcasts. It's got a different number in the front.

01:55:54 ◼   ► Well, mine is exactly the same as Kirk's for some reason. And my thought was, wait—

01:55:58 ◼   ► Wait, did you—maybe, no, maybe it's the same. Maybe I'm just misreading—

01:56:02 ◼   ► Two, all right, 243LU875.

01:56:07 ◼   ► It's the same, sorry.

01:56:07 ◼   ► Yeah, so it is the same. But I saw Kirk's article, and I thought, oh, maybe this is where I should

01:56:13 ◼   ► ago. So not library/containers, but library/group containers. And I deleted that folder and then

01:56:21 ◼   ► restarted podcasts. And then I had resubscribed to my show and it worked. It was something was

01:56:26 ◼   ► cached in there. It had a bad memory of my feed with four episodes missing. You know, and this is

01:56:32 ◼   ► this is a decades-long trick of troubleshooting stuff. Like, if your app is acting up, you want

01:56:38 ◼   ► find out where is it where might it be storing bad information or a cache go

01:56:44 ◼   ► there move that file to the trash and restart the app and see if that fixes it

01:56:48 ◼   ► right this is there this is like troubleshooting 101 right yeah I can't

01:56:54 ◼   ► believe that there's a single person listening to the show who hasn't used

01:56:58 ◼   ► that as a basic user level debugging technique and it worked it's great but

01:57:04 ◼   ► But when I first saw the article, I thought, "Kirk, that's got to be – that has to

01:57:09 ◼   ► be some kind of randomized number per user."

01:57:12 ◼   ► Right?

01:57:13 ◼   ► And then, lo and behold, it's the same for everybody.

01:57:16 ◼   ► Why?

01:57:17 ◼   ► Like, that's so ugly and gross.

01:57:20 ◼   ► And if it's the same – if it's different for everybody, I still don't – there would

01:57:27 ◼   ► be no security thing, though, because it still matches group.com.apple.podcast, right?

01:57:32 ◼   ► Right.

01:57:33 ◼   ► Right.

01:57:34 ◼   ► randomized but if it's not randomized why is it there why it's so ugly and part of my mac nerd

01:57:43 ◼   ► superiority complex is that everything on the mac is supposed to be elegant right that is the the

01:57:49 ◼   ► grossest most inelegant thing i've ever seen or imagined i think i mean i think the lots of things

01:57:57 ◼   ► in the library folder are very inelegant. But they used to be—it started, like, from the next era,

01:58:04 ◼   ► everything was very elegant. And it's like, slowly over time, Apple, like, internal engineering-wise,

01:58:11 ◼   ► has given up. The first level is fine, but then when you get down further than that, it

01:58:16 ◼   ► turns into a bit of a mess. Right, but it offends me in the sense of that, you know,

01:58:21 ◼   ► the back of the cabinet is supposed to look nice way. Right? It offends me that for whatever reason

01:58:30 ◼   ► this folder is there. But anyway, I had to delete that and it worked.

01:58:35 ◼   ► Jared: I can't believe you didn't find that.

01:58:39 ◼   ► Pete: It's not too hidden until you get to that stupid number.

01:58:44 ◼   ► Jared.

01:58:44 ◼   ► Right.

01:58:44 ◼   ► Pete. But anyway, Marco had a tweet. Marco Arment had a tweet this week where he was in the finder

01:58:51 ◼   ► and had a folder full of big video files or something, you know, but they

01:58:57 ◼   ► actually were actually quite large. I think he was like hand-breaking some

01:59:01 ◼   ► video files or something and had done a get info on the parent folder and the

01:59:05 ◼   ► get info window in the finder was showing that the folder was zero

01:59:10 ◼   ► bytes. And his screenshot that he tweeted was like the actual finder window with

01:59:15 ◼   ► the file sizes, you know, and it's a whole bunch of like, you know, 100 megabyte

01:59:19 ◼   ► video files, the selected folder, parent folder, and then the get info panel

01:59:24 ◼   ► showing zero bytes, and he was like, "Trust me, Catalina, this folder has more than

01:59:29 ◼   ► zero bytes." And I pinged him privately about it, and he said, like, at some point

01:59:38 ◼   ► he was not quite sure when, because he, you know, like, took the time to take the

01:59:41 ◼   ► screenshot and tweeted it, and then eventually the get info window did show

01:59:45 ◼   ► the correct number. But that, to me, is a very emblematic bug of what I think is wrong with

01:59:53 ◼   ► today's Apple software and their mentality, where it did catch up eventually, you know, but it should—

02:00:01 ◼   ► Kyle: Well, it's the same thing. It's sort of—well, I don't know if it's—it's not

02:00:04 ◼   ► what I'm saying. It's exactly the same thing. But it's also, from a user perspective, it's the same

02:00:09 ◼   ► thing when you empty the trash and your available disk space doesn't change.

02:00:13 ◼   ► Yes, yes, yes. It is exactly the same class of bug where it's like, all right, tenant

02:00:23 ◼   ► one of anything related to the file system should be the actual bytes written to disk

02:00:32 ◼   ► are maintained with the utmost integrity. So rule one, don't corrupt data. Actually

02:00:41 ◼   ► corrupt it, right? Don't, you know, whereas corruption could be –

02:00:46 ◼   ► Don't overwrite things.

02:00:47 ◼   ► Don't overwrite it. Don't flip a bit. Don't have a – even, you know,

02:00:51 ◼   ► just files that could be, you know, ruined with one zero turning into a one.

02:00:55 ◼   ► Don't accidentally delete files. You know, don't – you know, the actual – you know,

02:01:03 ◼   ► any way that the actual bytes on disk could go wrong, don't do that. But rule two – and it

02:01:09 ◼   ► should actually be like rule 1a not even rule 2. 1a should be whatever you show to the user must be

02:01:20 ◼   ► as accurate as possible. And the idea there is how is the user supposed to know if what is on their

02:01:31 ◼   ► disk and I'm using disk to mean the thing you know it could be an SSD. What is it written to

02:01:38 ◼   ► to permanent storage, how are they supposed to know that it's accurate? And the only way

02:01:43 ◼   ► they can know is what is presented to them in the user interface. And so what's presented

02:01:48 ◼   ► to them in the user interface should always be as accurate as possible. And in the old

02:01:56 ◼   ► days of the Mac, I can't remember that ever being wrong. I can't remember there ever being

02:02:02 ◼   ► a bug where getinfo would show you the wrong information. And it would, and you'll remember

02:02:10 ◼   ► this, in the old days both a combination of the speed of spinning hard disks and the nature of

02:02:17 ◼   ► the HFS and HFS+ file formats, you know, if you're an ATP listener insert your own ding there. Ding

02:02:27 ◼   ► ding-dong, ding-a-ling, whatever they played. It was expensive, right? Like if you had a—especially,

02:02:34 ◼   ► you know, the bigger the folder and the more items that were in it, it wasn't a very fast thing.

02:02:40 ◼   ► Nature of the disk, nature of HFS Plus, that it wasn't, it automatically, you know,

02:02:45 ◼   ► automatically computed what a folder size was. But it would never show you the wrong number.

02:02:52 ◼   ► it would show you a placeholder. It might, you know, maybe like in a file listing, it

02:02:57 ◼   ► would just be a dash. It wouldn't say zero, it would say dash. And if you did get info,

02:03:03 ◼   ► it would spin while it was computing, which is exactly accurate, right? What does the

02:03:09 ◼   ► spinner mean? The spinner means the computer is…

02:03:13 ◼   ► I'm figuring it out.

02:03:14 ◼   ► I'm figuring it out, which is exactly right. It would be better if it gave you the answer

02:03:18 ◼   ► instantaneously, but it's still 100 percent truthful and accurate to show an animated

02:03:25 ◼   ► spinner, right? It would be bad if that spinner just suddenly stopped, right? Because that

02:03:34 ◼   ► would say to me, the user, "Oh, God, something's wrong with my disk." Right? Right? I mean,

02:03:41 ◼   ► all of us who grew up in that era, we've probably shortened our lives to some extent.

02:03:47 ◼   ► I've taken some amount of longevity out of my heart with actual disk problems and suspected

02:03:58 ◼   ► disk problems, right? So if I, you know, in the old days, if I opened, if I'd selected a folder

02:04:04 ◼   ► and did "getinfo" and it started spinning, and then the spinner just locked up, my heart would

02:04:10 ◼   ► skip a beat. And then I, you know, I don't recall that actually happening, but that's what would

02:04:14 ◼   ► have happened. You know, or like I always say, like, remember if you, like, when you'd hear,

02:04:18 ◼   ► like, a clicking noise? If your hard disk started clicking, that was not good. It was a race against

02:04:26 ◼   ► time. It was, you know, "Oh my god, what's the most important file on this disk?" It was like getting,

02:04:32 ◼   ► you know, it was like getting, you know, your house is on fire. Well, first get the people out,

02:04:37 ◼   ► get the dog out. Yeah. And now you start thinking, "What else can I get out of the house?

02:04:44 ◼   ► What do I take? Right? That's what it was like if your hard disk started clicking. Showing

02:04:51 ◼   ► zero bytes for a selection is, even if you eventually catch up 30 seconds later and show

02:04:57 ◼   ► the right thing, is so wrong. It's so fundamentally wrong because it casts doubt on the integrity

02:05:06 ◼   ► of your file system. And that is…

02:05:09 ◼   ► I, yeah, I mean, that's, I would rather it's, even with the thing where you empty the trash

02:05:12 ◼   ► and it's not, I would rather it would say, it would say "updating" or something, you know,

02:05:16 ◼   ► like it's, it doesn't currently know. Although I think maybe they don't do it because it takes

02:05:22 ◼   ► too long and it looks weird if it's updating for that. That also looks a little strange if

02:05:26 ◼   ► it's updating for an awfully long time. But it's, it's much more accurate.

02:05:31 ◼   ► Pete: It's worse than, it's downright wrong to show the wrong number.

02:05:35 ◼   ► Brian: Yes.

02:05:36 ◼   ► And it makes no sense like what you're saying

02:05:38 ◼   ► I know what you're talking about like you think like you have like a disc like

02:05:40 ◼   ► That's like almost out of space and you but there's like a giant thing you can throw out

02:05:44 ◼   ► And you're like, oh that'll free up enough space you put it in the trash. You know, nothing happens

02:05:48 ◼   ► And it's like what and and you can get different results different ways

02:05:56 ◼   ► Like if you go to the new thing in the you know about this Mac that shows

02:06:03 ◼   ► Storage, you know and it shows it like with a graph and you know, you go to about this Mac

02:06:08 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, and then you hit manage and it's like it can show you different different numbers

02:06:14 ◼   ► Then you get in the finder like that's insane

02:06:18 ◼   ► it's absolutely insane and I just think that it's sort of indicative of a

02:06:24 ◼   ► That

02:06:27 ◼   ► inside Apple they've sort of lost sense of what should be at an utmost priority. And

02:06:33 ◼   ► I think like accurately reflecting the current state of the file system in the user interface

02:06:40 ◼   ► should be just a half step behind the importance of the actual integrity of your file system.

02:06:47 ◼   ► Because from the user's perspective, how else are they to know? Yes, it would absolutely

02:06:51 ◼   ► be worse if the actual file system were corrupted. And, you know, Apple, by all accounts, the

02:06:58 ◼   ► whole transition to APFS has been a glorious success, right? It's, you know, I guess there's

02:07:06 ◼   ► some hiccups at the outset, you know, there's some aspects of it that maybe haven't been

02:07:09 ◼   ► completely perfect. But overall, millions and tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions

02:07:16 ◼   ► of devices, maybe, yeah, probably hundreds of millions of devices of Mac and iOS around

02:07:20 ◼   ► the globe have been updated from the HFS+ file system to the APFS file system without

02:07:29 ◼   ► anybody knowing and it all just worked and the APFS is better in a whole slew of ways

02:07:37 ◼   ► and it's really and seemingly is terrific in terms of data integrity.

02:07:44 ◼   ► It's a terrific success which is everything you'd want from an operating system vendor

02:07:48 ◼   ► shipping a new file system. But their commitment to making sure that everywhere in the user

02:07:55 ◼   ► interface that the file system can be reflected is always up to date or shows that it's in progress

02:08:03 ◼   ► of getting up to date is, to me, inexcusable. Yeah. And I don't know what the technical—I mean,

02:08:10 ◼   ► obviously, I don't know what the technical reason behind why it takes longer.

02:08:17 ◼   ► I don't know either.

02:08:18 ◼   ► - Now would be, I mean you'd think that,

02:08:20 ◼   ► well, I don't know.

02:08:21 ◼   ► - All right.

02:08:22 ◼   ► - You think you're deleting 10 gigabytes.

02:08:24 ◼   ► I mean, I know, I can see how big a file is.

02:08:26 ◼   ► - Right.

02:08:27 ◼   ► - You know?

02:08:28 ◼   ► And if I delete that file,

02:08:29 ◼   ► I can do the math practically in my head.

02:08:31 ◼   ► - Well, if it's gonna take a while,

02:08:35 ◼   ► tell me it's gonna take a while, you know what I mean?

02:08:37 ◼   ► Don't, you know.

02:08:39 ◼   ► - Right.

02:08:39 ◼   ► - All right, on that upbeat note,

02:08:41 ◼   ► let's take a third break here

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02:11:07 ◼   ► Enough ranting about Catalina.

02:11:11 ◼   ► What else we got?

02:11:12 ◼   ► Let's go speed mode, right?

02:11:15 ◼   ► Apple results warning due to coronavirus.

02:11:18 ◼   ► So Apple last week had to correct their,

02:11:21 ◼   ► just from January 28th estimate for the next quarter,

02:11:25 ◼   ► for two reasons.

02:11:26 ◼   ► Supply chain is messed up in China

02:11:31 ◼   ► because of this coronavirus and the lockdown within China.

02:11:36 ◼   ► - So they basically have closed plants

02:11:38 ◼   ► in order to not further spread the virus, right?

02:11:40 ◼   ► - Right, and this is at some, you know,

02:11:44 ◼   ► somehow three weeks, in the three weeks

02:11:46 ◼   ► since they issued their estimates,

02:11:48 ◼   ► they've gotten a much more pessimistic viewpoint

02:11:52 ◼   ► on both suppliers.

02:11:54 ◼   ► It seems like some of it's suppliers

02:11:56 ◼   ► as opposed to Apple's own factories at Foxconn,

02:12:01 ◼   ► but you know, that's probably a little bit of column A,

02:12:03 ◼   ► a little bit of column B.

02:12:05 ◼   ► And then the other factor is retail demand within China

02:12:10 ◼   ► because people aren't going out and stores are closed,

02:12:13 ◼   ► and including Apple stores, and so,

02:12:15 ◼   ► all of it not good, but I guess,

02:12:21 ◼   ► it sounds to me like following the news,

02:12:23 ◼   ► I know I'm not following it as closely as some people,

02:12:25 ◼   ► but it seems like it's sort of under control,

02:12:28 ◼   ► and being conservative about this,

02:12:32 ◼   ► and taking it seriously seems like the right path,

02:12:35 ◼   ► but it's not good for a company

02:12:37 ◼   ► with a big foothold in China like Apple.

02:12:38 ◼   ► and it sort of went through a phase where it was like, oh, this seems like a problem, but maybe

02:12:43 ◼   ► it's not too big a problem. And then there was like a little bit of a floodgate opening where it

02:12:47 ◼   ► seemed like, oh, it looks like the Chinese government maybe wasn't telling us all about

02:12:52 ◼   ► every case that happened. And so, that prompted some further reaction.

02:12:58 ◼   ► Pete: Yeah.

02:12:59 ◼   ► Brian: And hopefully now, you know, they have

02:13:03 ◼   ► gotten ahead of it.

02:13:05 ◼   ► - Forward, yeah, I mean, they're now like,

02:13:08 ◼   ► okay, this is the real deal

02:13:09 ◼   ► and not what we were saying before.

02:13:11 ◼   ► - Yeah, but it does seem like Apple's warning

02:13:14 ◼   ► that iPhones might be short, in short supply.

02:13:18 ◼   ► Who knows what else will be in short supply?

02:13:19 ◼   ► I mean, AirPod Pros have been in short supply for months.

02:13:24 ◼   ► - Yeah.

02:13:25 ◼   ► - I mean, they're primarily warning about iPhones, but.

02:13:28 ◼   ► - I need a new phone, John, that's all I know.

02:13:31 ◼   ► (laughs)

02:13:33 ◼   ► I want people to take care of themselves.

02:13:34 ◼   ► you know, I don't want anybody going into a factory that's sick. I'm just also saying that I need new

02:13:40 ◼   ► phones. Uh, Apple stiffing store employees. So Apple took a case to the California Supreme Court

02:13:49 ◼   ► that the bay—it seems like a pretty simple story where they're either at all or most or some Apple

02:13:55 ◼   ► retail stores in California, they've had a years-long policy of for security reasons requiring

02:14:02 ◼   ► employees who come in with either bags or Apple devices to have them inspected every time they

02:14:10 ◼   ► leave. I guess leave, I don't think it was. Yeah, I think it was just, yeah, it was just on the way

02:14:15 ◼   ► out. Right, on the way out. But that includes like a lunch break. So like you leave for lunch,

02:14:20 ◼   ► you still have to do it. And, but that you would clock out before you got in line. So in other

02:14:26 ◼   ► words, you'd go to leave for lunch, you'd clock out, you're off the clock, and then you would have

02:14:30 ◼   ► to wait in a line that could take upwards of 20 minutes at some point. Hopefully, hopefully that

02:14:36 ◼   ► that 20 minutes is the exception rather than the norm, but that was—

02:14:40 ◼   ► Pete: Wait, did they actually have a line or did they just make you stand in an area?

02:14:43 ◼   ► Pete: Well, I guess it was stand in an area. Well, but if you're not in a queue—

02:14:47 ◼   ► Pete; Stand over here. Someone will be with you shortly.

02:14:49 ◼   ► Pete and Pete laugh.

02:14:54 ◼   ► Pete; Because we don't want any lines.

02:14:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, that would be a, I guess you're right,

02:14:58 ◼   ► it would be unfair if it was a line

02:14:59 ◼   ► because they should get a little dose of their own medicine.

02:15:02 ◼   ► Yeah.

02:15:03 ◼   ► That would be funny too, and if it was like,

02:15:06 ◼   ► if it was hard to tell who the inspectors were.

02:15:09 ◼   ► - Oh, right, right, because they're wearing the same,

02:15:11 ◼   ► well, wearing the same kind of shoes.

02:15:12 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, but I don't have the checkout machine,

02:15:15 ◼   ► so you need that guy over there.

02:15:17 ◼   ► - You're gonna have to wait over here.

02:15:19 ◼   ► Someone will be with you.

02:15:21 ◼   ► - That is the most Mac Apple nerd,

02:15:23 ◼   ► insider-y joke I can imagine.

02:15:26 ◼   ► It is perfect for this show.

02:15:28 ◼   ► I can almost imagine it as like an SNL skit

02:15:32 ◼   ► and it's an SNL skit that would be funny

02:15:36 ◼   ► to about 150 people.

02:15:38 ◼   ► - Exactly, yeah.

02:15:39 ◼   ► But this is dumb, right?

02:15:41 ◼   ► I mean, this is Apple being stupid.

02:15:43 ◼   ► - It's incredibly stupid, I cannot understand it.

02:15:46 ◼   ► I have heard from a couple of readers

02:15:50 ◼   ► around the country at least that this security policy

02:15:54 ◼   ► is not at every Apple store.

02:15:57 ◼   ► There are some stores where people have said,

02:15:59 ◼   ► hey, I've been working at an Apple store for a while,

02:16:01 ◼   ► I bring my phone to work every day,

02:16:02 ◼   ► and of course I bring my phone to work every day,

02:16:05 ◼   ► and there is no line.

02:16:08 ◼   ► So maybe it's at stores where there have been

02:16:11 ◼   ► security problems.

02:16:12 ◼   ► I'm not quite sure what, and Apple unsurprisingly

02:16:17 ◼   ► isn't forthcoming about it, but it apparently is not

02:16:21 ◼   ► a policy at every Apple store.

02:16:23 ◼   ► May or may not even be the policy at most stores,

02:16:25 ◼   ► but it's just common sense that if it's,

02:16:28 ◼   ► even if it's just one store,

02:16:30 ◼   ► that the clocking in and clocking out should happen

02:16:33 ◼   ► after you get through the goddamn line.

02:16:35 ◼   ► It's-- - Yeah.

02:16:37 ◼   ► That's not cool.

02:16:40 ◼   ► - I understand how it happened,

02:16:42 ◼   ► how maybe they got into this, right?

02:16:44 ◼   ► Like I'm sympathetic to, okay, this store seems

02:16:49 ◼   ► to have had a problem where we suspect employees

02:16:52 ◼   ► might be walking out with merchandise or something.

02:16:55 ◼   ► So we're gonna have to inspect bags.

02:16:58 ◼   ► Okay, I kinda get that.

02:17:00 ◼   ► - And maybe logistically it's like, well, you,

02:17:04 ◼   ► the clock out thing is over here and we can only put that,

02:17:09 ◼   ► I mean, maybe there's something in there, but still.

02:17:11 ◼   ► - And you optimistically, the security people

02:17:14 ◼   ► optimistically think this will never take anybody

02:17:17 ◼   ► more than 30 seconds to a minute.

02:17:19 ◼   ► And they didn't foresee that like a whole,

02:17:25 ◼   ► you know, 10 employees, 10 or 20 employees

02:17:28 ◼   ► at big store maybe, you know, 20 employees

02:17:31 ◼   ► all leave at the same time because their shift ends

02:17:35 ◼   ► or maybe more, you know, and therefore there's a line

02:17:38 ◼   ► and the line can take a while

02:17:39 ◼   ► and you wound up with these employees

02:17:43 ◼   ► who should be getting paid,

02:17:45 ◼   ► spending 15, 20 minutes in a line not getting paid.

02:17:49 ◼   ► I mean, it's obviously enough of a problem

02:17:50 ◼   ► that they brought a lawsuit.

02:17:51 ◼   ► I mean, I know some people, you know,

02:17:54 ◼   ► you can complain about some frivolous lawsuits.

02:17:57 ◼   ► This doesn't seem like a frivolous lawsuit at all.

02:17:59 ◼   ► This seems like the system working.

02:18:01 ◼   ► This is a legitimate lawsuit

02:18:03 ◼   ► and what a class action suit is for.

02:18:08 ◼   ► I understand how they got there.

02:18:09 ◼   ► But once this got to the point where it became a lawsuit,

02:18:13 ◼   ► And there was even a thing where it trickled up,

02:18:15 ◼   ► you know, and apparently Tim Cook's first awareness of it

02:18:18 ◼   ► was him, and it got entered into evidence,

02:18:21 ◼   ► him emailing somebody, "Is this true?" question mark.

02:18:25 ◼   ► I totally understand how, you know, Tim Cook might not,

02:18:28 ◼   ► you know, I saw some people saying like,

02:18:29 ◼   ► "That just shows that Tim Cook is, you know,

02:18:31 ◼   ► "out of touch because he didn't know it was going."

02:18:34 ◼   ► Tim Cook could not possibly be aware of the intricacies

02:18:38 ◼   ► of day-to-day policy at every single Apple store

02:18:40 ◼   ► in the world.

02:18:41 ◼   ► That would be insane, right? You cannot be the CEO of Apple and be aware of things like

02:18:47 ◼   ► that. But once it gets to the point where it does trickle up and it becomes a lawsuit,

02:18:51 ◼   ► right, and it does cross his desk, I cannot for the life of me see how Apple's leadership

02:18:58 ◼   ► cooked to their legal team at the executive level how they decided to fight this to the

02:19:05 ◼   ► California Supreme Court rather than just pay. It just seems so wrong on the face of it.

02:19:11 ◼   ► Right. I mean, what is it? It's like it's a few million dollars or something, isn't it?

02:19:17 ◼   ► Well, I forget. It might be tens of millions.

02:19:20 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, something—yeah, but still, it's not in the range of something that Apple—that's

02:19:25 ◼   ► really going to impact their bottom line.

02:19:28 ◼   ► It's impossible to empirically measure PR value.

02:19:35 ◼   ► But my spidey sense says that they've already lost way more than $20-30 million of PR value

02:19:44 ◼   ► by losing this lawsuit and having news sites publicize that Apple, literally the richest

02:19:53 ◼   ► corporation in the world is making retail employees wait in security lines off the clock,

02:20:00 ◼   ► you know. And the part that I thought was so absurd is that it left fighting this, left

02:20:06 ◼   ► Apple's own lawyers arguing that it's a, you know, you don't have to bring your iPhone

02:20:12 ◼   ► to work. Right? And like somebody else pointed out to me, like, what about Apple Watch, right?

02:20:19 ◼   ► like presumably you know you would think Apple would say that you know that the

02:20:27 ◼   ► type of people who they want working in their stores are the type of people who

02:20:30 ◼   ► they would like to own an Apple watch right and I've I've observed it myself

02:20:35 ◼   ► it seems to me like just about everybody who works at Apple Store wears an Apple

02:20:39 ◼   ► watch I don't know if that does is outside the inspection thing or whatever

02:20:43 ◼   ► but it's like the phone though who doesn't go to work with their phone I

02:20:46 ◼   ► I mean, it's insane.

02:20:48 ◼   ► That's an absolutely, on its face, an absurd argument for Apple of all companies to be

02:20:55 ◼   ► arguing.

02:20:56 ◼   ► You know, like if 7-Eleven wanted to argue that its employees don't need to bring their

02:21:01 ◼   ► cell phones to work, it's still a BS argument.

02:21:04 ◼   ► But 7-Eleven isn't selling iPhones.

02:21:06 ◼   ► It's selling the actual thing.

02:21:10 ◼   ► Yeah.

02:21:12 ◼   ► It's just a ridiculous argument.

02:21:15 ◼   ► Yeah, no.

02:21:16 ◼   ► Or the argument that, you know, I don't know of a single woman who doesn't take a purse with her to work.

02:21:23 ◼   ► I mean, it's, you know, and plenty of men bring bags to work, you know, it's, you know,

02:21:29 ◼   ► there's all sorts of, you know, it's just ridiculous to say that it's some kind of ridiculous,

02:21:33 ◼   ► you know, you know, it's a privilege to be able to bring a bag with you to work. Like,

02:21:39 ◼   ► well, I mean, this is, this is nuts. I mean, that's like, you know, maybe it's a privilege

02:21:44 ◼   ► to be able to bring a bag with you to work if you're working in a prison camp making

02:21:48 ◼   ► license plates. But yeah, I don't know. I thought that was a very strange story. And

02:21:56 ◼   ► just I just don't understand. I mean, and you know, it wasn't like it got lost in some

02:22:00 ◼   ► small court. I mean, this is the California State Supreme Court. Apple's home state. I

02:22:06 ◼   ► mean, it's, it seems very odd to me that they decided to fight this. Yeah. I mean, I there

02:22:14 ◼   ► must be some—

02:22:15 ◼   ► Darrell Bock More to it than we're—something we're

02:22:19 ◼   ► missing.

02:22:20 ◼   ► Adam Boff Maybe, or that, yeah, like there's some

02:22:21 ◼   ► precedent that they're worried about, or something, I don't know. I mean, maybe there's

02:22:24 ◼   ► another aspect to it that we, you know, haven't considered. But on the face of it, it certainly

02:22:28 ◼   ► seems extremely stupid.

02:22:30 ◼   ► Darrell Bock Yeah, and I have to say that one of the privileges

02:22:33 ◼   ► of me having the platform that I have is if I'll say something, if I'll post something

02:22:40 ◼   ► that says, "This is stupid. I don't see any—this is no possible explanation for

02:22:43 ◼   ► this." And there is, but I didn't see it. Usually, there's at least—you know, somebody

02:22:49 ◼   ► will tweet or email me with the, "Yeah, well, but…" And I'm like, "Oh, okay."

02:22:54 ◼   ► You know, I haven't seen one person propose a good reason for Apple to fight this. It's

02:23:00 ◼   ► just a miniscule amount of money for them. You know, and if their retail stores were

02:23:07 ◼   ► were eking out 3% margins.

02:23:09 ◼   ► I guess I could kind of see it.

02:23:10 ◼   ► And I realized that there are a ton of retail businesses

02:23:14 ◼   ► that that's true for, right?

02:23:16 ◼   ► Everybody knows that restaurants,

02:23:18 ◼   ► it's a really hard business.

02:23:20 ◼   ► Everybody knows that a new restaurant opens up

02:23:22 ◼   ► and you fall in love with it and then it closes.

02:23:24 ◼   ► It happens all the time because it's a hard business.

02:23:27 ◼   ► It's really, really hard business.

02:23:28 ◼   ► - I brought this steak to work.

02:23:30 ◼   ► This is my steak.

02:23:33 ◼   ► - Apple's retail stores are literally

02:23:35 ◼   ► most profitable per square foot of any store in the world. They could afford to pay people to wait

02:23:42 ◼   ► in the line that they're making them wait in line for. Oh, man. All right. Last but not least on my

02:23:50 ◼   ► list of topics is Apple TV. You use Apple TV, right?

02:23:56 ◼   ► I do, yeah.

02:23:57 ◼   ► Do you…

02:23:58 ◼   ► I have, um, I mean, do you mean just use the Apple TV app or watch the shows?

02:24:04 ◼   ► Apple TV Plus.

02:24:05 ◼   ► Well, both, but, you know, you use the device, right?

02:24:09 ◼   ► Yep.

02:24:10 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, the physical device.

02:24:12 ◼   ► Yeah.

02:24:13 ◼   ► Yeah.

02:24:14 ◼   ► But, you know, they added multiple users with the TVOS 13.

02:24:17 ◼   ► Yeah.

02:24:18 ◼   ► And it's…

02:24:19 ◼   ► And I've set that up, but I don't think anybody's been using it.