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508: Later Is Getting Later and Later

 

00:00:00   Let me post that we're live to Twitter, if it still exists.

00:00:03   [laughter]

00:00:05   Is it still running?

00:00:06   Who even knows? What a disaster. Holy jamoles.

00:00:12   [beep]

00:00:13   What a week. So...

00:00:14   My goodness.

00:00:15   I was slightly optimistic last week.

00:00:19   I think I'm less optimistic now.

00:00:21   Yeah, I don't need to do any navel-gazing other than to say

00:00:25   I regret not pushing back on you a little bit more last week.

00:00:29   It doesn't really matter. I think all three of us can agree. Oh man, things are happening and it's not good.

00:00:35   It's not good. It was today, I believe, that

00:00:40   anyone could start signing up for Twitter Blue, the new version of Twitter Blue,

00:00:45   where you get a check mark, a verified check mark for signing up.

00:00:50   And so any normal person who is reading all these tweets who sees a Twitter user with the, you know, display name,

00:00:57   let's say LeBron James and a blue check mark next to them, they don't need they don't look at the actual handle for this account

00:01:05   They just see that LeBron James is saying

00:01:07   Oh, I want to get traded or whatever the fake thing said earlier today

00:01:10   And so news outlets are now picking this up because that thing is getting retweeted and you see Oh LeBron James with the blue

00:01:17   Check said he wants to get traded, but it's just some dummy who paid $8 for blue checkmark

00:01:22   Yeah

00:01:23   - Yeah, I mean, that's the silly version of it.

00:01:25   The less silly one are the people

00:01:27   who are doing cryptocurrency promotions.

00:01:28   Like somebody imitated the official Twitter account

00:01:32   and said, "New, Twitter Blue is now available,

00:01:35   "and to get it, you just need to get this cryptocurrency

00:01:37   "and go to this link or whatever."

00:01:38   And it had thousands of retweets.

00:01:40   That's real people potentially losing real money

00:01:44   on someone who's just scamming,

00:01:45   trying to take advantage of the fact

00:01:48   that it's pretty easy to make

00:01:49   an imitation Twitter account now.

00:01:51   And they basically were up for two hours

00:01:53   before they got banned, right?

00:01:55   Because the enforcement of like,

00:01:56   hey, you're not allowed to do this is not lightning quick.

00:01:59   And so in that two hours, how much money did they make?

00:02:01   And was it more than $8?

00:02:02   'Cause if it's more than $8,

00:02:03   it's worth their time to just keep doing this forever.

00:02:06   - Right, and then my other favorite thing,

00:02:09   I'm not gonna be able to dig up show notes, entries for this,

00:02:11   but my other favorite thing was Twitter briefly

00:02:15   had the blue check mark,

00:02:17   which used to mean that you have like,

00:02:18   and all three of us are verified,

00:02:20   if it was forever ago for all of us that this happened.

00:02:22   And if memory serves, I had to provide like a copy of,

00:02:24   like a scan of my driver's license to become verified

00:02:27   or something along those lines.

00:02:28   So for the verification, hence verified,

00:02:33   all three of us had to provide some sort

00:02:34   of actual government credential, a scan at least,

00:02:37   of a government credential to Twitter,

00:02:38   which yeah, you could fake that, blah, blah, blah.

00:02:39   But it was still, they were trying.

00:02:42   Now, apparently what they're doing is blue just means

00:02:45   you're either one of the old farts like us

00:02:48   that had already been verified,

00:02:49   or you're paying the $8 to get yourself Twitter Blue and thus verification,

00:02:54   and then certain government accounts and certain important people have briefly had,

00:03:00   I think it's already been canned, a different checkmark that indicates that you're actually who you say you are.

00:03:05   So the way we fixed the checkmark problem was by making more checkmarks.

00:03:11   Like, "Oh, how? Why? Why?"

00:03:14   But then I think they undid the gray checkmark or they took it away from a bunch of people.

00:03:18   I think it's in the process of being unwound now.

00:03:22   So this general chaos or whatever, it reminds me of the discussion we had about this back

00:03:28   when Elon made the offer for Twitter, I don't know, however many months ago that was.

00:03:33   And at that point I was not necessarily optimistic, but I could see a lot of the potential upsides

00:03:40   of Twitter getting new ownership that is not as beholden to just not rocking the boat and

00:03:48   keeping the share price up and growing and all those other things because you have many

00:03:52   more options when you're a private company.

00:03:54   I still think that's true in terms of, you know, pretty much no matter how much Elon

00:03:59   screws this up, like, "Oh, I'm trying this, I'm trying that, I'll try this, oh, it doesn't

00:04:03   work, I'll undo it, I'll do this," you know, doing things haphazardly, not really having

00:04:07   much forethought, doing a cruddy job on a lot of them, causing bugs.

00:04:11   That doesn't really, like, you can do that for a long time because there's no one telling

00:04:16   you to stop as long as you continue to just pump money into the company and he

00:04:20   has sold a bunch of his Tesla shares recently it's easier to have a years

00:04:25   long you could say gradual decline into chaos or you could say a long

00:04:32   runway to try to figure out something that works and in the process of doing

00:04:37   that maybe people flee maybe they go away maybe they come back but the

00:04:40   network effects of social networks are such that it's actually you actually

00:04:44   have to do something to actively send people away, like something that is harmful for them

00:04:49   to be there. If you just slowly remove value, people will stay for a really long time. Witness

00:04:53   Instagram, which I feel like it's not really removing value, but they're less, it's less nice

00:04:58   than it than it was in the past. But the network effect is strong and the habit is strong. So

00:05:03   I do feel like despite all of this silly flailing, as a private company with one random with one

00:05:09   person just making random decisions from day to day, hour to hour, moment to moment, you can do

00:05:14   that for a really long time because no one's going to stop him, right? He's just, you know,

00:05:19   he does it until he gets bored or until everybody leaves and everyone's not going to leave, you know,

00:05:24   people will trickle out, but you know, anyway, so I feel like this is the type of thing that it's

00:05:29   going to be exhausting if you try to keep up with it from moment to moment and it's more just kind

00:05:35   of like sit back and watch it go. I mean and the good thing about making lots of

00:05:41   decisions and trying things that I'm doing them is that probably eventually

00:05:44   you'll find something that's not bad. We'll keep you posted, doesn't happen yet, but you

00:05:52   know it seems like it should happen eventually and having that runway of

00:05:56   just like look I can do whatever I want and no one's gonna stop me and I have a

00:05:59   lot of money allows for a lot of these decisions to take place. I just hope that

00:06:04   it doesn't actually get so bad that Twitter becomes less useful because I really do use

00:06:10   it a ton.

00:06:11   Not that it has replaced RSS for me, but it has supplanted RSS as the primary place where

00:06:16   I get content for the show, where I learn about the world, where I follow the news.

00:06:21   I've always been a big fan of Twitter and I will continue to use it as long as it provides

00:06:25   that value to me.

00:06:26   Yeah, same.

00:06:27   You know, a lot of people are really sitting back and enjoying the shot in "Freud"

00:06:31   of like, oh, look at this jerk

00:06:32   who's making a fool of himself.

00:06:34   And that's true, and he is, and thank God for that,

00:06:36   because he could use it.

00:06:37   And I do think it's kind of amazing,

00:06:39   I saw some tweet earlier that basically

00:06:42   he has turned Twitter into a platform

00:06:44   that is mostly dedicated to dunking on him.

00:06:47   (laughing)

00:06:48   - He's become the permanent main character.

00:06:50   - Yeah, which is, I think, he, I think,

00:06:53   could use some of this.

00:06:55   - Well, you're just assuming that he,

00:06:57   I don't think any of it is penetrating, I mean, really.

00:07:00   When you're as famous and as rich as he is,

00:07:02   people are constantly saying terrible things to you

00:07:04   and eventually you just learn to ignore it.

00:07:08   And then eventually I feel like you learn to ignore it all,

00:07:10   even the valid criticism,

00:07:11   and that's how you get Elon Musk.

00:07:13   - Well, but at this point, I think he is,

00:07:16   the things he's trying are going over like lead balloons,

00:07:18   and I think he can't help but see the backlash on some level.

00:07:23   So I think that's, maybe it'll introduce some

00:07:27   very much needed humility to him, but--

00:07:28   That's the thing about him and people like him and Trump,

00:07:32   to some degree, is that these are people

00:07:34   who care about what the other,

00:07:39   they admire and look up to some other people,

00:07:43   and they care about what those people think.

00:07:45   So Elon Musk cares about what MKBHD thinks

00:07:49   about the new gray checkmark feature,

00:07:51   because MKBHD is a big famous person and a tech person,

00:07:55   and it's not like Elon cares

00:07:57   about what people writ large think,

00:08:00   but he cares about what other famous people think,

00:08:02   what other tech people think,

00:08:04   what other rich entrepreneurs think.

00:08:05   Like there is a cohort of people

00:08:07   that he cares about their opinions of,

00:08:08   and it's a big set of people,

00:08:11   which is why he'll try something like the gray check mark

00:08:13   and then get yelled at by the six people he cares about,

00:08:16   and he'll take what they say seriously.

00:08:17   He'll ignore the million other people

00:08:19   who told him the same things, you know,

00:08:20   weeks and months and, you know,

00:08:22   like it's not like he's listening to quote unquote everybody,

00:08:24   but there are people they care about,

00:08:26   And so if they do something silly and it doesn't work,

00:08:27   he'll be like, "Whoops, that was bad.

00:08:29   "Let me try something else."

00:08:30   And that feels like what the process is going on right now

00:08:32   is he's trying things and listening to the small

00:08:37   in the grand scheme of things, but still large,

00:08:39   set of people that he respects and considers his peers

00:08:43   as captains of industry or famous people or whatever.

00:08:47   I mean, it's what we all do.

00:08:48   We can't listen to everybody,

00:08:49   but we do listen to our peers.

00:08:51   Just so happens that Elon's peers

00:08:52   are other famous people or whatever.

00:08:54   So that acts as a feedback mechanism to let him know, "Hey, the great check mark seems

00:09:00   kind of silly," or whatever.

00:09:02   Unfortunately, a lot of his interactions online are not just with people that he understands

00:09:09   and respects and wants to interact with, but those people may not be the people that everyone

00:09:14   else on Twitter understands and wants to interact with and respects.

00:09:16   So when he gives lots of air times to QAnon conspiracy theorists and alt-right people

00:09:22   or whatever, maybe that upsets other people.

00:09:24   But there is a feedback loop happening here,

00:09:26   it just remains to be seen whether it will

00:09:28   eventually produce better results.

00:09:30   - Yeah, and you know, honestly, like,

00:09:32   a lot of people out there are like,

00:09:33   "Well, this place is over, burn it to the ground."

00:09:35   And I don't have that attitude.

00:09:37   As much as I don't like him as a person,

00:09:39   and I'm liking him less and less as the days go on here,

00:09:44   but as much as I dislike him as a person,

00:09:47   I want Twitter to work, I want it to succeed,

00:09:50   because I still get a ton of value out of it.

00:09:53   And there is no direct replacement.

00:09:56   People think oftentimes, oh, we'll just all go to Mastodon

00:09:59   or whatever, insert thing here, app.net back forever ago.

00:10:02   People think, oh, well I'll go over here

00:10:04   and we'll make a better place there.

00:10:07   That's not really how this works.

00:10:09   First of all, as I mentioned last time,

00:10:10   you're never gonna get everyone to go over

00:10:12   to any one particular place.

00:10:13   So that's problem number one,

00:10:14   and that's the biggest problem.

00:10:16   Problem number two is if somehow you magically succeeded,

00:10:19   you'd have all the same problems that Twitter has.

00:10:21   Like you would have all the same challenges of moderation

00:10:23   and extremism and hate and harassment and misinformation.

00:10:27   Like you'd have all of the same problems

00:10:29   and you'd just have either no company,

00:10:32   if it's some kind of decentralized thing, to deal with it

00:10:34   or you would have a smaller and less effective company

00:10:37   possibly to deal with it.

00:10:39   So ultimately, if we want this form of communication

00:10:44   to persist and to be a thing that exists in the future

00:10:48   which I think enough people get a lot of value out of it

00:10:51   that we probably should want that.

00:10:53   The easiest path to get there

00:10:55   and the most likely path to get there

00:10:57   and possibly the only path to get there

00:10:58   is to make Twitter succeed.

00:11:00   None of us want this guy to succeed

00:11:02   because he's a huge dickhead and we all know that

00:11:04   and nobody wants him to, you know, whatever.

00:11:08   As I mentioned last episode,

00:11:09   I didn't think that highly of the previous leadership

00:11:12   but still I use the platform

00:11:14   because it's where all my friends are,

00:11:16   it's where I get a lot of my information,

00:11:18   It's where I conduct a lot of my business.

00:11:19   And it isn't just trying to sell stuff I make or anything.

00:11:22   It's stuff like posting programming questions.

00:11:25   And like, hey, I got this error.

00:11:26   What does this mean?

00:11:27   And all of their iOS developers are there,

00:11:28   and they're all answering stuff.

00:11:30   Or I can see what other people do, and what other people try.

00:11:33   I can see if something's going on in the world.

00:11:35   I can see stuff there.

00:11:37   It provides a lot of value.

00:11:39   You can't just pick up all of that and move it somewhere else

00:11:41   and have all of our problems magically solved.

00:11:43   Because A, you can't pick it up and move it,

00:11:44   and B, the problems would still be the same.

00:11:46   So as much as it pains me to say anything positive

00:11:49   about this guy, I want this company to succeed

00:11:54   because I want the product to continue to exist.

00:11:57   And my biggest concern is not that they'll do weird stuff

00:12:00   with the product because I think the feedback mechanism

00:12:02   there, as John was just saying,

00:12:04   it's not great but it exists.

00:12:06   And if he really takes a big steaming turd

00:12:10   and everyone reacts the way they've been reacting

00:12:12   and he sees that and takes it back,

00:12:14   okay, well that's iteration.

00:12:16   We'll all dunk on him the whole day, it'll be kind of funny, we'll get some laughs out

00:12:20   of it and then we'll move on.

00:12:21   My biggest concern is it won't stay up because all the people he fired all knew how to run

00:12:26   it and we keep hearing all these stories of like, "Well, this one part of the infrastructure

00:12:32   was basically held together by three people and they're all fired."

00:12:35   And there's all sorts of things like that that he basically like, you know, slice and

00:12:40   dice the company apart with this mass layoff he just did.

00:12:43   a lot of those people were like the only

00:12:46   institutional knowledge of how certain things worked

00:12:49   or they had a process for keeping certain things running

00:12:52   that now no one knows or no one is assigned to do.

00:12:56   And that applies for lots of things.

00:12:57   That applies for technical stuff

00:12:59   all the way to things like policy decisions

00:13:01   and abuse prevention and stuff like that.

00:13:04   There's basically just giant gaping holes

00:13:06   and missing teams 'cause he came in

00:13:08   and slashed everything without fully understanding

00:13:10   what anything did.

00:13:11   And that is where my main concern comes.

00:13:14   It's not the product.

00:13:15   The product, they'll figure out eventually

00:13:18   because there's good feedback on that.

00:13:20   My concern is all the people who are now gone

00:13:22   who are holding the place together,

00:13:24   now it will fall apart in certain ways.

00:13:26   And I think we have a rough year or two ahead

00:13:31   of just infrastructure, policy, content abuse

00:13:36   to deal with on Twitter.

00:13:38   And I think eventually they'll figure it out

00:13:40   and they'll get people in there and people will come up

00:13:43   to speed and problems will be fixed.

00:13:45   And I think eventually, I hope, I mean I'm always an optimist

00:13:48   at this kind of stuff, I think eventually they will

00:13:50   bring it together and it will kind of solidify

00:13:54   and move forward in some clear direction.

00:13:56   But I think it's gonna be a really rough road

00:13:58   between now and whenever that solidifies.

00:14:01   And that, it could take a year, it could take more

00:14:03   than a year, I don't know.

00:14:04   Maybe somehow miraculously it'll only take a few months.

00:14:07   but it's gonna be rough, but I think,

00:14:10   I still maintain the attitude of I want this to work

00:14:13   because Twitter is a platform we all love to hate.

00:14:17   The reality is we all use it,

00:14:19   and I'm finally willing to admit,

00:14:22   you know what, I like it, fine.

00:14:23   I like Twitter, I want it to stick around.

00:14:25   I don't have anything to replace it.

00:14:27   I don't want to replace it.

00:14:28   Nothing can replace it.

00:14:30   I hope it sticks around.

00:14:32   - This is another example of how famous,

00:14:35   much admired billionaires get graded on a curve, right?

00:14:38   Again, if you weren't a billionaire

00:14:40   and you did any of the things he's doing,

00:14:42   you would be so shamed and it would just be like,

00:14:46   you know, you're like,

00:14:47   what do you do when you take over a company?

00:14:48   Well, I obviously have to cut some staff.

00:14:50   Okay, how are you gonna do that?

00:14:51   The clumsiest way possible with no forethought.

00:14:54   And then a day later regret it so much

00:14:57   that you try to hire people back.

00:14:59   It's just like, it's just the dumbest things.

00:15:02   Because he's a billionaire, I was like, no,

00:15:03   he's a secret genius.

00:15:05   It's like, no, he's just doing a bad job.

00:15:08   And again, cutting people, laying off people

00:15:11   from a company that people think had too many,

00:15:14   I don't disagree that maybe Twitter had too many employees

00:15:16   and needed to be thinned down,

00:15:18   but there are good ways to do it and bad ways to do it.

00:15:20   He's just doing it badly.

00:15:21   And there may be consequences to that

00:15:23   or he may get away with it,

00:15:24   but it's like when you are rich and famous,

00:15:26   almost anything you do, people will bend over backwards

00:15:28   to find a way to explain that actually it's great.

00:15:30   When really, if you again took Joe Shimo off the street

00:15:33   said, "Grestin, you're the CEO of Twitter now."

00:15:35   And they did all these things, they'd be like, "Boy, you took this guy off on the street

00:15:37   and he's making a lot of really easy mistakes here."

00:15:39   Like, when you come into a company, sure, you gotta lay people off, but you know, take

00:15:43   a day or two to figure out which people you should lay off, and then don't regret it a

00:15:47   day later and try to beg them to come back.

00:15:48   And it's just, just doing basic things badly is seen as like a badge of honor when you

00:15:54   are a bazillionaire.

00:15:55   When you're not a bazillionaire, it's just seen as being bad at your job.

00:15:58   Well, look at it this way, he is fitting in with the tradition of Twitter management.

00:16:03   he is bumbling about making crummy decisions.

00:16:05   - Well, no, the alternate manager

00:16:06   wouldn't make any decisions, they would do nothing.

00:16:09   - Yeah, they only bumbled about.

00:16:10   - Wow, fair.

00:16:11   It actually is, as much as I am so here

00:16:15   for dunking on Elon Musk, I will say that for better

00:16:19   and for worse, they're at least shipping things, kind of.

00:16:23   - Are they shipping, I don't think anything

00:16:24   that actually got released to the point

00:16:25   where it's extended to all users.

00:16:27   Like I wonder if they start pulling the release back

00:16:29   before it's even just, you know, been visible to everybody.

00:16:32   I can't even keep track of what they think they've deployed and what they haven't.

00:16:34   And yeah, this is going to be probably fairly disastrous in the short term.

00:16:39   And again, there's good ways to do that in bad ways than there is to do it in the bad

00:16:42   way.

00:16:43   But that's the thing of being insulated from consequence.

00:16:44   You're insulated from consequence because A, it's a private company, you don't have

00:16:47   shareholders to do it, and B, he's got a bazillion dollars.

00:16:49   So when you're insulated from all consequence, it's like, well, all consequence for him,

00:16:54   I mean.

00:16:55   Not all consequence from us.

00:16:56   This is the point a lot of people made in the feedback.

00:16:58   It's all well and good to say, oh, well, Elon is insulated from the consequences of his

00:17:01   actions but we're not insulated from the consequences of action.

00:17:04   It's possible for him to do things that affect everyone else really badly, right?

00:17:09   We'll see how that happens.

00:17:11   But for him, it's like he always lives to fight another day.

00:17:14   And so it's like people look at it as admirable.

00:17:17   It's admirable to have no consequences for yourself because you're all sad and you're

00:17:20   a bazillionaire, right?

00:17:22   I guess people wish they were in that position.

00:17:23   They can make as many mistakes as they wanted and never suffer for them because it'll all

00:17:28   be fine.

00:17:29   But there may be consequences for the rest of us.

00:17:31   So hopefully he gets nudged in the right direction and the mistakes he's already made don't end

00:17:36   up being, even just a very simple consequence, which is not a big deal, but like, "Hey, Twitter

00:17:40   goes down again because some infrastructure thing fell over and it takes an hour to come

00:17:43   back up."

00:17:45   That's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things and it might be a blessing for some

00:17:47   people depending on how well Twitter is going that day, but it is a consequence.

00:17:52   And if you were the CEO of the company and you took over and then in the first month

00:17:55   you had a bunch of downtime, people would say, "Boy, that new CEO did a bad job."

00:17:58   But when it's a private company and you're Elon Musk and you don't care, so what?

00:18:03   Yeah, and that's something like, again, I want this to work because Twitter is, again,

00:18:11   as much as we love to crap all over it, it is very important to a lot of people and it

00:18:17   provides a lot of very important functions to a lot of people and a lot of businesses

00:18:20   and a lot of our friends.

00:18:23   It's a very important site.

00:18:25   of important stuff happens on Twitter.

00:18:27   And this is why I'm not rooting against it.

00:18:28   I really want to succeed.

00:18:30   People think, oh, we'll just go back

00:18:32   to blogging and everything.

00:18:33   It's like, well, yeah, some people will.

00:18:36   But the world you think you're going to go back to,

00:18:40   it doesn't exist anymore.

00:18:41   It's like a ghost town of rotting wreckage

00:18:44   of what was there that's been neglected for 15 years

00:18:46   or whatever.

00:18:47   People think they're just going to go somewhere else

00:18:49   and have all the same functions or features.

00:18:51   And I'm telling you, it's not that way.

00:18:55   The best chance for most of us is for Twitter to succeed.

00:19:00   And that way we can choose to keep using it or not.

00:19:02   But that decision isn't forced upon us.

00:19:04   That's the easiest decision because we

00:19:05   don't have to change anything.

00:19:06   But over the history of the internet, things do go away.

00:19:11   There used to be extremely popular Usenet groups that

00:19:13   eventually just became ghost towns, like you said,

00:19:16   because everyone used to move to Web Bulletin boards.

00:19:19   And Web Bulletin boards had years in a heyday

00:19:21   where it was a big, great place to be and everyone loved

00:19:23   hanging out there and had great features never understood them and they had they figured

00:19:26   out the moderation but then those web bulletin boards most of them or many of them became

00:19:30   ghost towns because everybody moved to Facebook or to Twitter or to whatever and eventually

00:19:34   these places will become ghost towns and it's not like so the thing that replaces them will

00:19:37   be like Twitter but better because web forums was not the same as usenet different technology

00:19:42   different atmosphere different people different like pros and cons it was fairly different

00:19:46   but it was like a place to hang out online right just like Facebook was myspace usenet

00:19:52   today. So if Twitter does go down in flames eventually and becomes a ghost town, the thing

00:19:57   that replaces it will not be, it's just like Twitter, but a different. It'll be something

00:20:00   entirely different because that's the way these things go. We all collectively find

00:20:04   a place to hang out online that we enjoy and we all don't want it to end or change or be

00:20:09   different but in my lifetime alone there's been like five or six different places that

00:20:13   I've hung out online with small groups of people, large groups of people on the entire

00:20:18   internet and most of them have gone away and what they've been replaced with has not been

00:20:22   been just like that but with a different masthead on the top, but it's been entirely different.

00:20:27   You could argue that Slack is kind of like Hotline, if any old school Mac users know

00:20:32   that, and you could argue that web forums is kind of like Twitter, or of course there's

00:20:38   Discourse, the modern reinvention of web forums, so everything old is new again, but yeah,

00:20:43   I don't think Twitter is forever, but if you wanted to say what's the shortest distance

00:20:48   to not causing tons of disruption,

00:20:51   it would be like make Twitter good.

00:20:52   But failing that, if Twitter does fail,

00:20:55   something will replace it eventually,

00:20:57   and what does probably won't look like Twitter does,

00:21:00   because that tends to be not the way these things go.

00:21:03   - Well, and I think what is most likely to replace Twitter

00:21:05   is not having its value as a public square.

00:21:10   Like, you know, the Twitter founders use this phrase,

00:21:13   and it's kind of douchey when they do a lot of times,

00:21:16   but there is some value to it,

00:21:17   in the sense that on Twitter,

00:21:19   you can just like @mention someone,

00:21:22   and first of all, every important person

00:21:25   you can think of is probably there.

00:21:26   Every, like, the owner of different companies is there,

00:21:30   like different executives, celebrities, sports figures,

00:21:34   politicians, they're all there.

00:21:36   Whoever writes the app that you wanna have a question about

00:21:40   or anything, they're probably there.

00:21:42   Almost everyone who you might want to contact is there.

00:21:46   Now, in the grand scheme of things,

00:21:47   it's way smaller than something like Facebook,

00:21:49   but it's different.

00:21:50   It's like the people who you would want to interact with

00:21:52   in public in some way or have a public question,

00:21:55   any company you might want to interact with,

00:21:56   they're all there.

00:21:58   And you can just like @mention them

00:21:59   or DM them if they're open,

00:22:01   and you can like reach these people.

00:22:03   And maybe they'll respond, maybe not,

00:22:04   but they'll probably at least see it,

00:22:06   or somebody will see it who works for them or whatever.

00:22:08   And that's something that it doesn't really exist

00:22:12   in any other platforms in that way.

00:22:14   Facebook is a giant black hole of,

00:22:18   we're gonna hide almost everything by default

00:22:20   from everybody until, unless you pay us to boost your post

00:22:23   so the people who wanna see it actually will see it.

00:22:25   It's all this mess at Facebook.

00:22:27   And all these algorithmic filters that they can

00:22:30   extract money from people trying to reach their own audience.

00:22:33   - And Elon made a couple of faints in that direction

00:22:35   to say, oh, if you pay for the $8 thing,

00:22:37   your replies will be more prominent

00:22:39   in the algorithmic timeline.

00:22:40   It's a time-tested thing, it's just that Facebook

00:22:42   has billions of people and Twitter has a few hundred millions.

00:22:45   - Right, but if Twitter goes away,

00:22:48   what's most likely to happen is everybody will flee

00:22:52   partly to private things like Slacks and Discords

00:22:55   and everything, which people have already been doing.

00:22:58   And so now if we wanna just kinda say something

00:23:00   to our friends, we have other places to do that.

00:23:02   We have chat groups, we have message groups,

00:23:04   we have WhatsApp or iMessage or we have Slack

00:23:07   or we have Discord or whatever.

00:23:09   There's all different ways that people have private chats

00:23:11   between themselves that is not trying to be some kind of broadcast.

00:23:16   If you're going to have a broadcast, Twitter's the best place for that.

00:23:20   It's way better, and for most audience types, it's way better than the other platforms,

00:23:25   and because it's much more reliable in a lot of ways, it's simpler in a lot of ways, and

00:23:28   if you have the kind of audience that uses Twitter, which is not most of the world as

00:23:32   I was saying, but if you have the kind of audience that uses Twitter, and we do, then

00:23:38   that's where these people all are.

00:23:39   And it would be a shame if that went away because, you know, suppose you go over to

00:23:44   Macedon or whatever, app.net, you know, it's like if you go to some smaller Twitter network

00:23:50   clone, then you can try to broadcast stuff there, but you just have way fewer people.

00:23:57   Way fewer people.

00:23:58   And so the value of having it be public at all is diminished.

00:24:03   And then at that point you have the liability of things being public without a lot of the

00:24:07   the benefit of things being public because it isn't a large enough group. If you're going

00:24:10   to talk to a small group, you're better off having that group be private. That way you

00:24:14   don't have the liabilities and problems of it being public. If you're going to talk to

00:24:17   somebody in public, you want it to be the biggest public area you can find. Twitter

00:24:22   is that for a lot of people, and us included, and most people who would listen to a show

00:24:26   like this. That is where most people who like information, that's usually where they are.

00:24:32   And so it would be a massive loss if that went away.

00:24:35   And nothing is out there to replace it right now.

00:24:38   And on the infinite timescale, John's right.

00:24:41   Something will come along and replace it,

00:24:43   because that happens over time.

00:24:44   But that happens after something has become irrelevant

00:24:47   and people have left voluntarily,

00:24:49   not when a popular platform implodes

00:24:52   while it's still popular.

00:24:54   Well, Google Reader and RSS, I mean, that's not just--

00:24:58   that's not that that's what made RSS go away.

00:25:00   RSS and blogs had a slow fade to sort of less prominence, partly because new things came

00:25:06   along and were exciting and people would tweet instead of blog.

00:25:10   But anyway, it's just if younger people listening have never been through this, all I just wanted

00:25:16   to point out is this stuff does happen.

00:25:19   Nothing is forever.

00:25:20   Even Facebook, even though it seems like it's forever, is probably not forever.

00:25:23   I feel like the timelines are getting longer as the internet has matured.

00:25:25   In the early days of the internet, things would last like a month or a week and come

00:25:29   and go and they'd seem like the biggest thing ever. Now things are lasting way longer because

00:25:32   these companies are so big, but even IBM, which seemed unstoppable in my youth, eventually

00:25:37   didn't go away. IBM still exists, but boy is it different than it was. The concept that

00:25:41   I have in my head at IBM has no match to what they are today. Mostly for the better for

00:25:48   the world, I think, but not for the better for IBM.

00:25:51   Oh, stop it. IBM wasn't bad for the world.

00:25:54   Big Blue.

00:25:55   - Yep, hey Big Blue, as I've said many, many times

00:25:58   on the show, Big Blue paid for basically my life

00:26:00   until I was an adult, so I will always have a,

00:26:03   I will always defend them, even if they made

00:26:05   a lot of questionable choices.

00:26:07   Speaking of questionable choices,

00:26:08   if you haven't already gone to ATP.fm/store,

00:26:12   now is the time, you are basically out of time.

00:26:14   We are going to close the store, what is it,

00:26:18   Saturday, Sunday, sometime this week,

00:26:19   it doesn't matter, sometime this weekend, so--

00:26:21   - The shirts are going back in the vault.

00:26:23   - Walt Disney would be so proud of us.

00:26:24   So yeah, so the ATP store, it is up, but it is not up for much longer.

00:26:30   So now is the time.

00:26:31   If you are at all interested in an M2 shirt, either the colorful logo on black or the monochrome

00:26:39   logo on very colorful shirts, or the classic ATP logo shirt, or the hoodie, now is the

00:26:46   time.

00:26:47   You are running out of time because all of this stops on Sunday the 13th.

00:26:50   So go to ATP.fm/store.

00:26:53   Now, Marco, if you wanted to save a little bit of money,

00:26:56   is there a way you could do that

00:26:57   while still getting excellent, excellent merchandise?

00:26:59   - Yeah, so first, if you live outside of the US,

00:27:01   move to the US.

00:27:02   - No, that's true.

00:27:04   - You'll save a lot on shipping.

00:27:05   - That's a tough sell lately, but okay.

00:27:07   - Yeah. - Yeah, oh goodness.

00:27:09   - Barring that, you could, or in addition,

00:27:12   you could join us as a member at atb.fm/join,

00:27:16   and you will get a coupon code in your membership panel

00:27:19   for 15% off your merchandise order.

00:27:22   Excellent. So you can go to ATP.fm/store and ATP.fm/join.

00:27:28   Now, this is where Jon would say, "Well, here's what you can do.

00:27:31   You can join for just a month, and then you can cancel because we're gentlemen,

00:27:35   and we let you cancel, and we don't hassle you about it.

00:27:38   And you can just cancel and get your 15% off and then move on with your life.

00:27:41   But if you're already joined, why don't you check out the bootleg?

00:27:45   Why don't you check out the ad-free version of the show?

00:27:47   You might like either one of those, or both even.

00:27:49   Hey, listen to all three versions, listen to version with the ads, and then listen to

00:27:52   the bootleg, and then listen to the one without the ads, you get the full experience.

00:27:55   It's perfect.

00:27:56   And don't forget our Movie Club episodes, and maybe there'll be something we'll make

00:27:58   in the future.

00:27:59   You never know.

00:28:00   So you don't have to cancel, don't listen to Jon.

00:28:02   Jon isn't always right, usually yes, but not always, don't listen to Jon.

00:28:05   Just let that ride, just let that baby ride.

00:28:07   So anyway.

00:28:08   And again, the end date is Sunday, November 13th.

00:28:12   The time is clearly marked on the site, they'll tell you how many days, hours, minutes that

00:28:17   are left.

00:28:18   One thing to remind people if they're listening to this later, if you go to AGP.FM/store and

00:28:23   the sale has already ended, you will see stuff for sale there.

00:28:26   We sell our leftover merchandise, but also we sell the on-demand versions of certain

00:28:30   shirts.

00:28:31   I'm not sure which ones they're going to be, but as I say every time we have these sales,

00:28:34   the on-demand ones, they're less expensive, but they're also not as nice.

00:28:39   They're less expensive because they're not as nice.

00:28:40   The printing process is not the super fancy, extremely expensive printing process that

00:28:45   we do use for the shirts that we're selling here now.

00:28:47   So if you want a shirt, don't be fooled

00:28:49   into getting the on-demand ones.

00:28:50   Like again, when the on-demand store is there,

00:28:52   it'll be clear, it won't say there's limited time,

00:28:54   blah, blah, blah.

00:28:55   It's a different store, it has different text

00:28:56   at the top of the page, but the shirts will look similar.

00:28:59   We're probably going to sell some similar designs

00:29:01   to the ones you see up here now, and it'll just be shirts,

00:29:03   it won't be hoodies or anything like that.

00:29:06   So don't accidentally buy an on-demand shirt

00:29:08   if you come to the store on November 20th or something.

00:29:10   Be aware that the store does change over

00:29:12   and we drain old merchandise and put the on-demand shirts on.

00:29:15   So this is telling you if you have any desire to have this shirt, get it for yourself and

00:29:20   give it to someone else to give to you as a Christmas present.

00:29:23   They'll be happy they don't have to shop for you and you'll be happy that you got the good

00:29:25   version of the shirt.

00:29:28   We haven't mentioned the chicken hat, the pint glass, or the mug because hey, they're

00:29:30   already sold out.

00:29:31   So if you snooze you lose and that's why you need to go to ATP.fm/store.

00:29:37   Now's the time because you're almost out of time.

00:29:39   And don't forget to click through on the hat, the pint glass, and the mug and click the

00:29:43   the bring it back button to let us know if you want one of these the next time we sell

00:29:48   them which will probably be like I don't know the spring or whatever whenever whenever do

00:29:51   the next sale sometime next year that bring it back thing will let us know how many people

00:29:55   want more hats if we sold every check in that we're ever going to sell and we don't need

00:29:57   to make anymore or there's still people who missed out on it and want one the only way

00:30:00   we know that for sure is if you enter your email address and then click the bring it

00:30:04   back button yes I know it's annoying to enter email address we're not going to take that

00:30:09   value at face value because we know some people won't click it or whatever but just it'll

00:30:12   give us a rough idea.

00:30:13   All right, let's do some follow up.

00:30:16   We were talking about rewind.ai last week.

00:30:19   This is the lifestream thing.

00:30:22   And apparently the CEO caught wind of it and listened.

00:30:24   So hi, Dan.

00:30:26   And clarified for us that since we recorded, in fact, he had a tweet about it, when we

00:30:33   launched two days ago, we shared that we would use a cloud transcription service.

00:30:37   That didn't go over so well with some folks.

00:30:38   You don't say, Dan.

00:30:40   So today we decided that we would entirely ditch the cloud transcription and only do

00:30:44   transcription locally on your Mac.

00:30:45   And then there was another tweet where Dan pointed us to that tweet.

00:30:49   So thank you, Dan, for following up.

00:30:52   And yeah, not going to the cloud, which I am in full support of.

00:30:54   Isn't it weird that like, if you are running this company, like you know that people are

00:30:58   going to look at your product and be scared of it for security reasons.

00:31:02   And you're surprised when people don't like the fact that you're sending the audio that

00:31:06   you're constantly recording to a cloud transcription service.

00:31:08   I don't I didn't that meeting I guess you say like look people aren't gonna like it

00:31:11   But I guess people are used to this anyway. I mean they do with their Amazon echoes and stuff

00:31:14   I think though I think they'll just be okay with it. It's like why not like just not do that

00:31:19   Like better like it's got to come up right you got to have to have the meeting and someone's gonna say no

00:31:23   I think it will be okay. I think people will choke this down

00:31:26   It's like just why why not you know they do so well everything else like we're all privacy security

00:31:31   Trying to say all the right things whenever take money

00:31:33   It's like don't use a cloud transcription service like you know that's gonna come up

00:31:37   and they reverse so quickly.

00:31:38   And maybe they just didn't have the local transcription ready in time, and that's why

00:31:42   they had the cloud one in the first version.

00:31:43   It's hard to know, but it just definitely seems like a silly fumble for a launch.

00:31:48   So Jon, speaking of screen recording, let's talk about some enterprise spyware, baby.

00:31:52   And we mentioned this on the last show, and I talked about this similar stuff on a recent

00:31:56   episode of RecDiff, and someone wrote in to say that there's a corporate security product

00:32:00   called D-TEX that watches what you do using the screen recording APIs and macOS to try

00:32:05   Try to identify if you're leaking or stealing data to calculate how productive you are.

00:32:08   So this is from Alex and this is a whole genre of software that is basically corporate spyware,

00:32:14   corporate malware that is trying to watch the employees, especially if they're remote

00:32:18   employees, who knows what they're doing there.

00:32:20   Up to and including doing exactly what Rewind is doing is like literally recording your

00:32:24   screen all the time and I guess having somebody or some machine learning thing review it to

00:32:29   make sure you're not playing mind sweeper all day.

00:32:32   Yeah, corporate spyware is not great, it doesn't reflect well that you don't think you can

00:32:35   trust your employees, but it is definitely a thing.

00:32:38   So again, Rewind is the kinder, gentler version of that where you do it to yourself.

00:32:44   And hopefully the company that you choose to buy the software from, you trust in some

00:32:48   way, whereas enterprise software is someone else does it to you, and like all enterprise

00:32:51   software, the person who buys it is not the person who has to be subjected to it.

00:32:56   We had some breaking news just before recording.

00:32:58   a friend of the show, Jason Snell, has done some research for us because we're not allowed

00:33:02   to.

00:33:03   Yeah, so last week I was complaining about the smart folders and the sidebar of photos

00:33:07   and how they seem totally disconnected from the sort of machine learning powered search

00:33:10   field in the upper right.

00:33:11   And I also think I said that people are excluded from that, but that's not true.

00:33:14   You can, person is one of the things in the pop-up menu.

00:33:17   But Jason figured out, as I requested, if someone knows how this works, please tell

00:33:20   me.

00:33:21   Jason figured out that if you say in the smart album field, if you say "text is," like that's

00:33:28   That's what you pick from left menu, you pick text.

00:33:30   If you type a word in the field, text is whatever, it's like you had put that term into the upper

00:33:38   right search field.

00:33:39   It does also search the OCR text, like that's what you might think it is, like oh, this

00:33:44   photo has text in it.

00:33:45   It does do that, but it also understands the concept of like what is a dog or whatever.

00:33:51   So Jason wrote an article about it at sixcolors.com, we'll put a link in the show notes.

00:33:54   He did an example of searching for a person is,

00:33:58   or he did person includes.

00:33:59   Person is John Syracuse,

00:34:00   so 'cause he's got pictures of me.

00:34:02   And text is microphone,

00:34:04   or I think he did text is camera in the example thing.

00:34:07   And what it'll do is it'll find pictures

00:34:09   where the machine learning thinks have a camera in them,

00:34:11   and also pictures where the person is labeled as me.

00:34:15   And so I'll find pictures of me with a camera,

00:34:16   and that's exactly what it did.

00:34:18   It doesn't do the autocomplete thing

00:34:19   like the search field does,

00:34:20   so you can't tell that what you're typing,

00:34:22   if it's a search, if it's like a keyword,

00:34:24   or if it's like an ML keyword or if it's like OCR text,

00:34:27   if you type it in the upper right,

00:34:28   it shows you like an icon next to each one

00:34:30   to let you know what you're doing.

00:34:31   And also in my brief experimentation,

00:34:34   when you type in that text is field,

00:34:36   every time you type a character,

00:34:37   it wants to update the number of items matched

00:34:39   and in my library, there's like a two second pause

00:34:41   each time I type a character.

00:34:42   So the performance is not great either.

00:34:44   - Nice.

00:34:44   - But at least it's possible.

00:34:45   And then for people who don't know,

00:34:47   the icing on this cake is that smart albums

00:34:49   don't sync to iOS, so they're invisible

00:34:51   to most of the world.

00:34:51   I will enjoy using this feature on my local instance.

00:34:55   And the jury's still out as to whether there's a way

00:34:57   to do nested Boolean logic, like instead of just saying

00:35:00   and all these conditions together or all these conditions,

00:35:02   basically to be able to have parentheses

00:35:03   with sub-expressions with different logic.

00:35:06   Not sure if that's possible, but if it is,

00:35:07   there'll probably be a few next week.

00:35:09   - Indeed.

00:35:10   All right, and then with regard to my confusion

00:35:13   on the iPad volume buttons,

00:35:15   Andre Aguilar shared that there is indeed a setting,

00:35:18   which I think I had made brief mention to,

00:35:21   mention of last week you go into settings then sound and the setting is called fixed position volume controls which defaults to off

00:35:28   But what's interesting is an unnamed listener who has been listening since neutral points out that this is not available on my iPad the m2

00:35:36   iPad nor on the iPad 10th generation and there's an Apple support document about this which reads on most iPad models with iPad OS

00:35:42   15.4 and later you can allow the volume controls to change based on how you hold your iPad

00:35:46   With iPad Pro 11 inch 4th gen, iPad Pro 13 inch 6th gen, and iPad 10th gen, the dynamic volume buttons are always on.

00:35:53   And I also thought it was kind of interesting,

00:35:55   and I think somebody else pointed this out to me, that it's reversed for right-to-left languages.

00:35:59   So in the same document,

00:36:01   with languages that have writing that goes from right to left, you increase the volume with the button on the left or top, and

00:36:06   decrease the button with the bottom button, decrease the volume with the button on the right or the bottom, which is a nice touch.

00:36:12   So yeah, it turns out I can't change this back

00:36:15   Even if I wanted to even though a lot of people have this still have this ability and are apparently using it because they were

00:36:21   All reporting in to me that that's what they did real-time follow from Jason reminding of the the old ways

00:36:26   From back in the iTunes days to get nested boolean logic

00:36:30   One of the ways you do it is you would make a playlist and then you would reference that playlist in your smart album

00:36:34   So every sub expression you'd have to make a separate entity

00:36:37   I mean you can do it with albums you can if you make a smart album and then reference that within your thing

00:36:42   The problem is you have to have a bunch of these sort of sub-expression albums or smart

00:36:47   albums in your sidebar.

00:36:48   I guess you could bury them in a folder or something.

00:36:50   But yeah, that old technique from iTunes continues to work.

00:36:53   It's just super gross.

00:36:54   Apple should just stay at that.

00:36:55   That's the billion logic.

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00:38:29   So thank you so much to Memberful for sponsoring our show.

00:38:33   (upbeat music)

00:38:35   - Jon, you got some excellent news about the,

00:38:39   How do you pronounce it?

00:38:40   It's not XNU.

00:38:41   Is that, what is the verbalization of this?

00:38:44   - Znu?

00:38:44   - I don't know.

00:38:45   I think I've only ever read it.

00:38:46   No, I must have heard it in a WWZ thing.

00:38:49   It's not XNU, that's for sure.

00:38:51   If you work on Darwin and you know how to pronounce

00:38:54   the name of the kernel that's spelled XNU,

00:38:55   write in and tell us.

00:38:57   I'm sure there's no controversy about how to express

00:39:00   a computer term that most people read and never speak.

00:39:02   - Yes, exactly.

00:39:03   - Anyway, this is a tweet from Longhorn,

00:39:04   who has never_released on Twitter.

00:39:06   a good follow who knows lots of deep technical stuff.

00:39:10   And it was tweeted in response to the kernel sources being released for Mac OS 13.

00:39:16   For people who don't know, the core OS of Mac OS, iOS, iPad OS, TV OS, audio OS, reality

00:39:24   OS, am I missing any OSes?

00:39:26   Maybe the car OS, maybe not, is Darwin, which is like a BSD Unix-like derivative with the

00:39:34   the mock microkernel with the BSD layered on top of it.

00:39:37   That's all open source.

00:39:38   And every time Apple comes out with a new operating system,

00:39:40   like when they come out with a new version of Mac OS,

00:39:42   shortly after that, they post the open source version

00:39:45   of like here's the version of Darwin

00:39:48   that is underneath Mac OS 13 Ventura.

00:39:51   So they just did that.

00:39:52   And then people come over it to see what they can find.

00:39:54   And what Longhorn found is something that

00:39:57   they didn't point out directly, but they just said this

00:39:59   and I follow them enough that I trust them.

00:40:02   ECC support is coming to ARM 64 Mac OS

00:40:05   with page-level granularity retirement on faults.

00:40:08   That is what Longhorn says.

00:40:09   And you know what that means?

00:40:11   Mac Pro Day is getting closer.

00:40:13   'Cause why would they add ECC support to Darwin

00:40:16   for ARM 64 and Mac OS?

00:40:18   What kind of Mac might benefit from ECC?

00:40:21   Arguably all of them would benefit from ECC.

00:40:23   - There it is.

00:40:24   - But the Mac Pro is the most likely to have one

00:40:27   and Apple itself has already preannounced the Mac Pro.

00:40:30   A long time ago, lest we forget,

00:40:31   They said there's one more machine that needs to move to Apple Silicon, and that's the Mac Pro.

00:40:35   But we'll talk about that later, and later is getting later and later.

00:40:38   But sometime in 2023, probably, we'll get to see the new Mac Pro, and it seems like

00:40:42   it might have ECC memory, and I'm excited.

00:40:44   Now remind all of us why ECC memory is important and useful.

00:40:48   So RAM is not perfect.

00:40:51   Sometimes RAM has faults, and you'll try to read some bits, and the bits you get will

00:40:55   not be the same bits as the bits that were written there.

00:40:57   And as you can imagine, that can really screw things up on your computer.

00:41:01   There are lots of parts of the computer that try to help make that not happen.

00:41:06   One of the many ways that you can help with that is called ECC, or error correcting code.

00:41:11   And it's a very old way of essentially putting a bunch of redundant data in the data that

00:41:17   you store so you can tell when the data you read is not the data that you wrote.

00:41:22   Sometimes you can also correct the error if you have enough information to fix the one

00:41:27   bit that you know is flipped based on these the extra information you could put in there

00:41:31   and when you have as the amount of ram you have increases uh if your percentage of error stays the

00:41:37   same you're much more likely to hit an error because if you know if the percent is like one

00:41:41   in a million bits well what if i told you you have 500 million bits that's much worse odds than if

00:41:46   you had 500 bits right so big computers with big memory where you really care about there being any

00:41:51   kind of fault have historically employed ECC for error correction.

00:41:56   There are other techniques in hardware that also help with this.

00:41:59   ECC is a very specific one, but until and unless it's replaced by something better,

00:42:05   it's one of the most important tools we have in the toolset for making sure that the RAM

00:42:10   in your computer is reliable.

00:42:11   Didn't the iMac Pro have ECC RAM, did it?

00:42:15   Sure did.

00:42:16   As someone was pointing out in the chat room, the later DDR standards, I think I talked

00:42:19   about this on an episode of ETC like a year or two ago.

00:42:21   The later DDR standards incorporate ECC-like functionality

00:42:25   within them just to function,

00:42:26   because that's just how they're made.

00:42:28   But again, I trust Longhorn to know this stuff.

00:42:31   And so if there is evidence of ECC stuff in RM64 on Mac OS,

00:42:35   I think that just take it at face value.

00:42:37   And I think there's just gonna be some kind of ECC RAM

00:42:40   in whatever SOC is coming in the Mac Pro.

00:42:43   - I can't wait.

00:42:44   I can't wait.

00:42:44   Even though I'm probably not gonna buy it,

00:42:45   I still can't wait.

00:42:47   Ventura and third party preference pains.

00:42:50   What's the deal with that?

00:42:51   - So my first question when I was writing line item is,

00:42:54   I've been calling them preference pains since 2001.

00:42:58   But now that it's called system settings,

00:43:00   what the hell is it called?

00:43:02   What are they called?

00:43:03   What we mean is the little icons on the left

00:43:04   that you click on to see stuff like mouse

00:43:06   or users and groups or privacy.

00:43:08   And like, what are those called?

00:43:10   Go to the--

00:43:12   - Sections?

00:43:13   - Go to the privacy and security section?

00:43:15   - No, they're settings gears, obviously.

00:43:18   If it's a preference pane, then it must be a settings gear.

00:43:20   - Go to the network settings, I guess it's just network.

00:43:22   Anyway, we used to call them preference panes.

00:43:24   It was nice alliteration there,

00:43:26   and now I don't know what the heck they're called,

00:43:27   so that's one thing.

00:43:28   - Settings sections, it rolls right off the tongue.

00:43:30   - Yeah, we had some questions from people like,

00:43:31   "Hey, system settings is overhauled.

00:43:34   "What about my third-party preference panes?"

00:43:37   The third-party software can make

00:43:38   little preference panes in there.

00:43:40   For example, Backblaze, frequent sponsor of our show,

00:43:43   used to put a little icon that was amongst all your other icons in System Preferences.

00:43:48   What happens to it in Ventura?

00:43:50   For the most part, if you had a third-party preference pane installed, it will continue

00:43:55   to work in Ventura.

00:43:56   It's just at the bottom of the list alongside, you know, they're kind of grouped together,

00:44:00   all the third-party ones.

00:44:02   Backblaze in particular has basically decided they're out of the preference pane game.

00:44:08   So if you are running the latest version of Backblaze, it still shows up in your little

00:44:13   sidebar in Ventura, but when you click on it, all it loads is basically an empty preference

00:44:18   pane with a button that says Backblaze preferences.

00:44:20   And when you click it, it just launches a Backblaze app.

00:44:23   So it's still there for you to find it so you didn't say, "Hey, where the heck did Backblaze

00:44:26   go?

00:44:27   Is it still installed?"

00:44:28   But they basically moved their functionality out into an app, and a lot of the functionality

00:44:31   was outside of the preference pane before anyway.

00:44:33   Preference panes are weird, especially weird like when you're running on an ARM Mac and

00:44:37   Then you have an x86 preference pane and it has to run through Rosetta and it's being

00:44:41   launched and trying to show the content inside an ARM process which is the system settings

00:44:46   app itself.

00:44:47   So third party preference panes have been not out of favor but just sort of marginalized

00:44:52   over the past few years.

00:44:53   I still run some important ones like my mouse acceleration software, Steer Mouse is still

00:44:59   a preference pane.

00:45:00   It seems a little bit weird in Ventura but it does work and it does, you know, I just

00:45:05   clicked it and I and I guess the next part of this item here I just clicked it

00:45:10   while I was talking and it crashed in exactly the same way as I have pasted

00:45:14   into our show notes nice legacy loader x86 died when trying to look at this

00:45:20   deer mouse preference pane sometimes it works but sometimes it doesn't anyway

00:45:24   isn't your entire computer a legacy loader x86 oh why is it doing why is it

00:45:29   doing like legacy look because it's not like it's I'm not running the arm

00:45:32   version of system settings. I don't have an ARM CPU, so what is going on? Anyway, it crashed. It's

00:45:37   a little bit janky like many things in Adventurer's system settings, but for people wondering,

00:45:42   preference panes are still a thing, barely, and it seems like some of the companies that are more on

00:45:48   top of their game, like Backblaze, are kind of moving out. We got an excellent, excellent,

00:45:54   excellent tweet from Mark Yu. This is one of those things where incredible brevity is exactly

00:46:01   what you need in order to make this great, which is something that I'm not good at. But Mark writes,

00:46:05   here's, I'm filling in actually, so the context here is what is a smart versus magic versus cover

00:46:12   versus folio on the keyboards? How do we decode this? We were talking about this like two or three

00:46:16   weeks ago. Mark writes, "Smart. Screen turns on when opened. Magic has full travel keys, not the

00:46:22   nubs. Cover. Screen side only. Folio. Both sides. Combine those as needed." Boom. Nailed it. As far

00:46:29   As far as I can tell, this is accurate.

00:46:31   - I mean, you're just back solving

00:46:32   for the products they release.

00:46:33   When they release a new one, you have to get a new map.

00:46:35   So it's not as if this helps you parse anything,

00:46:37   but it is a nice retroactive taxonomy.

00:46:41   - Yep, this was extremely well done,

00:46:43   and I am very impressed.

00:46:46   And speaking of nomenclature,

00:46:47   what's going on with Stage Manager?

00:46:49   - Yeah, we were asking a couple shows ago,

00:46:50   what do you call those piles of things

00:46:52   on the side of the screen?

00:46:53   Stage Manager and Mac OS.

00:46:55   What are they called?

00:46:56   Well, according to the menus, apparently, they are called sets, because the menu item

00:47:03   in the window menu in the finder is you can say "remove window from set."

00:47:07   So I guess that makes some sense, but it's still kind of weird.

00:47:10   Like what set did you put the thing in?

00:47:12   I don't know.

00:47:13   It would be nicer if they had a branded name that made more.

00:47:14   I mean, they can call the thing the Dynamic Island, but they decided the things on the

00:47:17   side of StageMatter are just called sets.

00:47:19   Anyway, that appears to be what they are.

00:47:23   news. Earlier today I wanted to do something on my iPad where I was flipping back and forth

00:47:28   between two different windows and I wanted each of these, or two different apps, and

00:47:31   I wanted each of these apps to take up most of the screen and it occurred to me, "Ah,

00:47:36   I could use Stage Manager for this." Sure enough, I turned on Stage Manager. I was only

00:47:40   using it for about five minutes, but not only did it not crash, it was actually kind of

00:47:45   nice. I only used it for a few minutes and I quickly turned it off as soon as I was done,

00:47:51   But for those five minutes, I actually kind of enjoyed it.

00:47:53   So that was a neat moment.

00:47:54   - I feel like stage manager for the Mac,

00:47:56   as I said many times, it's basically spaces

00:47:59   for people who want more visibility.

00:48:02   They don't want stuff to be hidden off to the side

00:48:05   that they can't see.

00:48:05   Like mentally, I have to know that there are

00:48:07   these various spaces.

00:48:08   I have to bring in Mission Control to see them.

00:48:09   It's like, "Why don't we just put it all on one screen

00:48:10   "and you can cycle through sets of windows?"

00:48:12   And you sacrifice some screen space for those little sets,

00:48:16   and you can even hide those if you want

00:48:17   and make them appear just when you need them.

00:48:20   But I think it's easier for people to manage

00:48:22   because it's like, it doesn't suddenly make

00:48:24   a bunch of virtual screens all around them.

00:48:25   People, you know, if you like Spaces,

00:48:27   you're probably already using it,

00:48:28   but if you don't like virtual screens,

00:48:30   Stage Manager tries to be, it's like virtual screens,

00:48:32   but a little bit more comfortable

00:48:34   if you don't like having virtual screens.

00:48:36   - Yeah, as someone who really, really, really likes Spaces

00:48:40   and uses them heavily,

00:48:41   when I've tried Stage Manager on the Mac,

00:48:43   its mental model does not match my mental model

00:48:47   for how things should work.

00:48:48   so I really didn't care for it on the Mac.

00:48:51   But in limited use on the iPad,

00:48:52   when you have a very constrained problem,

00:48:55   it actually was reasonably nice.

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00:50:39   (upbeat music)

00:50:43   - Jon, tell me, you've got scare quotes around the word new,

00:50:47   but in the show notes it says you've got,

00:50:49   quote, new, quote, phone and mouse.

00:50:51   What did you break?

00:50:53   - Well, I talked about it on the mouse before,

00:50:55   that it was being wonky again,

00:50:56   and then I figured out that sticking the Post-It note

00:50:59   under the little shaky button,

00:51:00   but I still had the one that was being wonky, right?

00:51:02   Because I fixed the noisy one with the Post-It note,

00:51:03   but then it was the wonky one.

00:51:04   So I decided to just do another warranty repair

00:51:07   on the wonky one, 'cause why not?

00:51:09   This time they did not ask me

00:51:11   to send them a video of it not working.

00:51:12   I have no idea why because they have no idea who I am.

00:51:16   I had no record of my previous returns.

00:51:19   Everything is new.

00:51:20   It was all done through chat.

00:51:21   It took a long time and it did require me to dig up the original receipt and send them

00:51:25   a picture of that and a bunch of other stuff.

00:51:28   It got done.

00:51:30   They sent me a shipping label, so I have to send the old mouse back, which I did.

00:51:36   They eventually sent me a new mouse.

00:51:38   This is a Microsoft computer mouse, pictured in your mind.

00:51:41   They came to my house in a box that was 19 inches by 14 inches by 6 inches.

00:51:46   What?

00:51:47   I was like, what is this?

00:51:48   It was huge.

00:51:49   I recently ordered a bike handlebar that came in a smaller package than that.

00:51:54   Inside the box was a smaller box and inside the smaller box was a mouse wrapped in bubble

00:51:57   wrap.

00:51:58   I have to say, every time I've gotten one of the, you know, I've done it twice now,

00:52:01   both of these mice that I've gotten replaced, when the replacement one has come, they all

00:52:06   look just like dirty and scuffed up.

00:52:10   They do not look new the whole thing with like Apple refurb stuff is there's like every part of it that you can see your touch

00:52:15   Is brand new not the case when getting a mouse replaced by I don't know what they do like I again

00:52:20   I didn't pay enough attention to look at the serial numbers, but did they just replace the guts of my mouse?

00:52:24   No

00:52:24   this is this is scuffed up in a way that my mouse wasn't in different places like it just seems dirty and

00:52:29   Grimy and not like I'm getting a new mouse and again

00:52:33   It just comes wrapped in bubble wrap like literally the bear mouse

00:52:36   with bubble wrap wrapped around it.

00:52:37   Not even any tape to hold the bubble wrap on.

00:52:39   Just, ah, wad it into the bubble wrap,

00:52:40   shove it in the box, shove it in the bigger box.

00:52:43   I'm glad I got it replaced for free under warranty,

00:52:45   but now I've had two of these

00:52:46   and they've both been replaced under warranty,

00:52:47   so it's not going too well over here on Microsoft Mouse Land.

00:52:50   But anyway, that is my quote unquote new mouse,

00:52:52   which is absolutely not new.

00:52:54   And in fact, I'm not sure if they even still sell this mouse

00:52:57   'cause a bunch of people are like,

00:52:58   oh, I have a Microsoft discount.

00:52:59   Do you wanna get a discounted version of this mouse?

00:53:01   And they all look at their store,

00:53:03   they're like, oh, I guess you can't get this mouse discounted.

00:53:05   Well maybe when it comes back to the store.

00:53:06   You can still get the Surface Precision Mouse which is as far as I can tell, this mouse

00:53:11   but grey.

00:53:12   But I want the black one.

00:53:13   The Microsoft Precision Mouse.

00:53:14   It's black.

00:53:16   And maybe they're just not selling that anymore.

00:53:18   Maybe it's because they all die within a year.

00:53:19   I don't know.

00:53:20   Maybe they're just giving me, rotating through this batch of cruddy ones that they have in

00:53:25   their factory.

00:53:26   Anyway, I'm using my quote unquote new mouse.

00:53:29   And the phone thing.

00:53:30   So I think last episode I complained about the camera on my iPhone 14 Pro.

00:53:37   I think I said it gets a lot of glare from the sun and I wish I had a lens hood to stop

00:53:41   the glare from the sun.

00:53:42   I was using my hand over the...

00:53:44   I would hold up the phone to take a picture, walking around in the fall and the sun is

00:53:48   low and I would get this glare and I'd put my hand over it to try to make a lens hood

00:53:50   and my fingers would go in the picture.

00:53:52   It was annoying me.

00:53:53   I'm like, "Well, it's just this new camera with the big lenses and lots of lens elements.

00:53:57   They're just catching a lot of glare."

00:53:58   I guess that's why, you know, I use lens hoods on my real cameras.

00:54:01   But then a couple people wrote in to me and said, "I had the same problem with my iPhone

00:54:06   14 Pro camera, and I brought it into the Apple store, and it turns out my camera was messed

00:54:10   up and they replaced it for me."

00:54:12   So I'm like, "Huh."

00:54:13   So I took a bunch of test pictures.

00:54:15   I just put in our little Slack channel, and Marco can use this in the show thing if he

00:54:19   wants because it's not incriminating.

00:54:21   It's a picture of some mushrooms growing on some random person's lawn in my neighborhood,

00:54:24   right?

00:54:25   So it's not even my house.

00:54:26   And you can see at the top of the photo,

00:54:28   like I have a gray haze coming down,

00:54:31   like sun glare basically.

00:54:33   And that gray haze, like you can make something

00:54:36   like that happen with any iPhone camera or any camera at all

00:54:39   especially without a lens hood on it.

00:54:41   But it is much more severe on my iPhone 14 Pro camera

00:54:45   than on my wife's iPhone 13 Pro

00:54:47   or any other iPhones in the house.

00:54:48   And I just thought it was part of this camera.

00:54:50   But then I've seen, you know,

00:54:52   someone said they got the thing repaired.

00:54:54   They showed a close-up picture of the main camera

00:54:57   on the back of their phone,

00:54:57   and they said the lens actually looked cloudy.

00:54:59   So I turn over my phone, I look at the main camera lens,

00:55:01   which is like the biggest one, and you know what?

00:55:03   It did look a little bit cloudy,

00:55:05   almost like there was condensation on it

00:55:06   or oil covering it or whatever,

00:55:08   something you wouldn't notice

00:55:09   unless you had light hitting it at an angle.

00:55:12   And so I took a whole bunch of test pictures to say,

00:55:15   I was gonna bring these with me to the Apple Store

00:55:17   and say, "Here, this is what my camera's doing,

00:55:18   "and it seems like it shouldn't be like this."

00:55:21   And it doesn't take much to make this happen.

00:55:23   You just need the sun to be a little bit low

00:55:24   and you don't even need the sun in the photo.

00:55:27   Like this mushroom picture, the sun is not in the photo.

00:55:29   The sun is above the frame of the camera,

00:55:31   but it's producing so much glare

00:55:33   and just gray haze coming down.

00:55:35   And I tried it with all the cameras.

00:55:36   3X camera didn't have it.

00:55:38   The 0.05 had it and the 1X had it.

00:55:40   But the 3X was, and that's part of the reason

00:55:42   I could tell that it wasn't quite the same.

00:55:43   Now, obviously focal length changes

00:55:45   how much glare you're gonna get and stuff like that.

00:55:48   So it's not like an apples-to-apples comparison,

00:55:49   but I thought I had enough

00:55:50   to make a Genius Bar appointment.

00:55:52   And I did, and I brought the phone in,

00:55:54   and the good thing is I sat down at a table and I said,

00:55:57   let's just grab a 14 Pro right here

00:55:59   and let's do a comparison.

00:56:00   Let's find something glarey here

00:56:03   and take a picture of it with these two cameras side by side,

00:56:05   the 14 Pro that's security chained to this table,

00:56:08   and mine, and see if there's a difference.

00:56:11   One thing I learned is it's surprisingly hard

00:56:13   to find a place to demonstrate this inside an Apple store,

00:56:16   because yes, there are glarey lights in the ceiling,

00:56:18   but they're not that glarey, they're pretty gentle.

00:56:20   And if you aim the camera up at the ceiling lights,

00:56:23   everything up there is gray.

00:56:24   So you're never going to see a gray haze, right?

00:56:27   So the technique we came up with was have one iPhone 14 Pro

00:56:30   turn on the flashlight on the back

00:56:32   and point it at the other one and then reverse it.

00:56:35   And you could see it was pretty clear

00:56:37   that the one in the Apple store did not suffer from glare

00:56:40   as much as mine did.

00:56:41   So the person did take the camera into the back

00:56:42   and ran it through their camera tester thing

00:56:44   and said the camera tester thing didn't find anything

00:56:46   malfunctioning in terms of color reproduction or whatever,

00:56:49   but they could see that it was clear from the photos

00:56:51   that they were taking that comparing my 14 Pro

00:56:54   to the 14 Pro in the store, there was a difference.

00:56:57   They could not replace the camera

00:56:59   because they just don't have camera parts.

00:57:01   I don't know if this is a, you know,

00:57:03   Shanghai zero COVID shutdown thing,

00:57:06   or just like early on in the production run of any phone,

00:57:08   they don't have parts.

00:57:10   So they said, "But we can replace the whole phone."

00:57:11   I said, "Okay, do that then."

00:57:13   So, you know, and they said,

00:57:16   "Okay, well, we'll replace the whole phone,

00:57:17   but we don't have this phone,

00:57:18   So you have to come back when we have it in stock.

00:57:19   So eventually they got it in stock.

00:57:21   And I knew it was coming next, and I was dreading it.

00:57:23   I even discussed it with the person when I was there.

00:57:26   I'm going to go pick up a new, basically a brand new version

00:57:29   of my exact same phone, a black iPhone 14 Pro with whatever,

00:57:32   256 gigs or whatever.

00:57:35   But I can't just hand them my old phone.

00:57:37   I can't just erase my old phone and hand it to them

00:57:39   and take the new one because I have too much multi-factor

00:57:42   authentication crap on here.

00:57:44   And some of it cloud syncs, like Apple's multi-factor cloud

00:57:48   but some of it doesn't.

00:57:50   We went through this before.

00:57:51   Last time I got my phone two years ago,

00:57:53   and I was complaining that the Google Authenticator app

00:57:55   didn't have a way to transfer stuff.

00:57:56   Now Google Authenticator does have a way to transfer stuff,

00:57:59   but it's a manual way.

00:58:01   So you see where this is going, don't you?

00:58:03   I'm going to go to the Apple Store to "pick up my phone."

00:58:07   And then what's going to happen?

00:58:09   I'm going to sit there and have to do device-to-device transfer

00:58:13   for my old phone for the new phone,

00:58:15   wait for that to complete,

00:58:17   And then do a 30-second export import from Google Authenticator, right?

00:58:23   Oh my god.

00:58:24   And I couldn't think of a way around this. They're not going to let me leave the store with two phones.

00:58:29   Nope.

00:58:30   I should have just asked them and said, "Can I just take both of them and bring back the old one later?"

00:58:34   Because I don't need to be here for this, right?

00:58:36   Not a chance. Nope.

00:58:37   But it's not really happening. And there's no way to make it go faster.

00:58:41   the Google Authenticator thing, like, I mean,

00:58:44   I guess I could have done, taken like screenshots

00:58:47   of the QR codes, but like that's a terrible security.

00:58:51   Don't do that.

00:58:52   Do not, don't write down your passwords

00:58:53   and don't take screenshots of the QR codes

00:58:55   for your multi-factor authentication.

00:58:56   Like I could have done that, but I just didn't want to.

00:58:59   Anyway, I went to the Apple store

00:59:01   and I did device device transfer.

00:59:04   - And of course the new iPhone, when it came out of the box,

00:59:05   wasn't running 16.1 and my new phone was.

00:59:08   So first I got to do an OS update.

00:59:09   - Oh God.

00:59:11   I started doing the OS update and the person,

00:59:13   I mean these people do this all day

00:59:14   so they know what they're doing.

00:59:15   They said, if that progress bar doesn't seem

00:59:17   like it's moving, let me just bring out the computer.

00:59:19   And they had like a computer running Apple Configurator 2

00:59:21   and they'll just, with the 16.1 already downloaded.

00:59:24   And so we waited for like three minutes

00:59:26   and said, "No, that progress bar is not satisfactory."

00:59:28   They just brought out a MacBook Air,

00:59:32   plugged my phone into it and did, you know,

00:59:34   blasted on 16.1.

00:59:35   Still took a while, but it was way faster

00:59:37   than waiting for the update to run.

00:59:38   Then I had to do a device-to-device transfer,

00:59:40   which took forever.

00:59:41   And then after that was finally over,

00:59:43   then at that point I'd been there so long,

00:59:45   I was like, you know what,

00:59:46   I'm gonna install my test flight apps,

00:59:48   and I'm gonna do the multi-factor thing.

00:59:50   And after you do device-to-device transfer,

00:59:53   I'm still shocked when I pick up my phone

00:59:54   and it has a whole bunch of grayed out icons

00:59:56   that say "Waiting" underneath them.

00:59:57   Like, wait, you just did, oh, it doesn't do the apps.

00:59:59   It just always downloads the apps from the app store.

01:00:02   I needed to download Google Authenticator ASAP.

01:00:05   I don't care about all the other apps.

01:00:07   And there's a way to do that.

01:00:08   We may have even talked about it on this very program,

01:00:10   but it was so long ago that I forgot about it.

01:00:12   If you hold down your finger on one of those grayed out icons

01:00:15   that says Waiting, a pop-up menu appears,

01:00:17   and you can select Prioritize Download.

01:00:20   And your phone will bump that app to the front of the queue.

01:00:23   So I did prioritize download on Google Authenticator

01:00:25   and a bunch of my other authenticator apps,

01:00:27   and downloaded them, and I transferred all the stuff.

01:00:29   So I spent a little bit over 3 and 1/2 hours

01:00:33   sitting in an Apple store.

01:00:35   I had the forethought to bring my iPad with me,

01:00:37   because both my phones would be out of commission during this whole time.

01:00:40   And I just sat there and dorked around on my iPad and listened to other people's tales

01:00:44   of woe with their computers and iPads and stuff.

01:00:49   And I got to look at all of the current crop of Apple hardware.

01:00:53   And yeah, that was how I spent an entire day.

01:00:55   It was great.

01:00:56   It was awesome.

01:00:57   See, this is why Funemployed Jon is very helpful.

01:01:02   Because what would you have done if you had an actual job?

01:01:04   I would have had to go on a weekend.

01:01:05   But like, I thought of this, it's like,

01:01:07   this is why I'm kind of all in on iCloud keychain

01:01:10   for multi-factor stuff.

01:01:11   I don't wanna ever have to do this,

01:01:13   but like, if I need to get a new phone,

01:01:16   if something happens and I get like a warranty repair,

01:01:18   I'm gonna have to do this again, right?

01:01:20   And I know there's other ways about it.

01:01:21   Like I can and have transferred my multi-factor stuff

01:01:24   to other secure devices in the house,

01:01:26   so I could just trust that it's all gonna be there

01:01:27   and then bring the new phone home and do that.

01:01:29   Maybe I'll do that next time,

01:01:31   but like, you know what I mean, redundancy.

01:01:32   I just feel like I don't wanna just have the stuff

01:01:35   The whole point of me having backups,

01:01:37   like having this on this device

01:01:38   and also on another iPad or something,

01:01:40   is that it's in more than one place.

01:01:41   And if my phone falls in a lake,

01:01:43   I don't lose all my multi-factor stuff, right?

01:01:44   So having it in one place, even for a short period of time,

01:01:47   makes me a little nervous,

01:01:48   but after three and a half hours in an Apple store,

01:01:51   breathing through a mask the whole time, of course,

01:01:53   maybe I'll think better of it.

01:01:54   - Yeah, that's painful.

01:01:57   But don't worry, it's not like you've wasted any time

01:02:00   doing any sort of login or setup of Apple products,

01:02:02   because you didn't get a new Apple TV, right?

01:02:05   Well, device-to-device transfer on the phone is the,

01:02:08   as we learned last time I made a terrible mistake,

01:02:10   is the best chance you have of all your apps

01:02:13   not requiring you to log in.

01:02:14   If you get one of the new Apple TVs, which I did,

01:02:17   you have no chance of protecting your login information.

01:02:21   There's nothing you can do apparently.

01:02:23   You get a new Apple TV, I got one, it's smaller, it's cute.

01:02:27   One of the funny things about the new Apple TV,

01:02:30   'cause people do reviews of it online,

01:02:32   and very often they would take a picture of it

01:02:34   next to the old hockey puck,

01:02:35   'cause what else are you gonna take a picture of?

01:02:36   Look, it's smaller, right?

01:02:38   I think I saw at least two reviews that made me think,

01:02:42   is the new Apple TV matte black instead of glossy black?

01:02:46   It's not matte black,

01:02:47   but there is a matte black protective piece

01:02:50   of plastic around it.

01:02:51   And like every protective piece of plastic

01:02:53   on every electronic device ever,

01:02:54   sometimes people don't notice it and forget to take it off.

01:02:58   And people had actual product shots in their reviews

01:03:01   on reputable tech sites where they forgot to,

01:03:04   I would assume forgot to, peel off the matte black,

01:03:08   the carefully precision cut, almost invisible matte black

01:03:11   wrapper around the brand new Apple TV,

01:03:13   and it looked like the new Apple TV was matte.

01:03:15   It's not as glossy.

01:03:16   Take off the sticker.

01:03:17   - Doesn't it cover up the ports on the back?

01:03:20   - Yes, it does. - I thought it did.

01:03:21   - But they were just taking, you know,

01:03:22   they were just taking like the pictures of it.

01:03:23   Like any picture of merchandise,

01:03:24   you don't show the cords, right?

01:03:26   No cords on the Sony TVs on the Sony site,

01:03:28   no cords on the Apple TV.

01:03:29   - Yeah, but you would think like if they're reviewing it,

01:03:31   they would at some point try to plug a cord in and realize,

01:03:33   "Oh crap, I have to peel this whole thing off."

01:03:35   - They did, but by then the photography people

01:03:37   had already taken all their pictures probably.

01:03:39   Like I don't know, multiple different things.

01:03:41   Speaking of the cords though, that's one of the things.

01:03:44   They changed the cord layout on the back.

01:03:45   Obviously I got the one with Ethernet.

01:03:48   And I think, now I'm gonna have to remember.

01:03:50   I think the layout used to be Power HDMI Ethernet.

01:03:55   And now it is Power Ethernet HDMI.

01:03:58   So basically previously HDMI was dead center in the thing

01:04:01   And now HDMI is not dead center.

01:04:02   And HDMI cable is the thickest and stiffest cable

01:04:05   that connects to this tiny little puck.

01:04:08   I kind of understand why they did it,

01:04:09   because most people don't have ethernet.

01:04:11   And so with the old arrangement, it

01:04:13   would be one cord in the middle and one cord on the left,

01:04:15   if you're looking at it from the front.

01:04:17   Now it would be one cord on the left and one cord on the right

01:04:19   with empty ethernet in the middle for most people.

01:04:21   But honestly, if you buy the one with the ethernet,

01:04:23   maybe you--

01:04:23   I don't know.

01:04:23   Maybe you just want the Thread Radio.

01:04:25   But anyway, they changed the cord arrangement.

01:04:27   But yeah, you plug that thing into your TV,

01:04:29   And it says like, "Oh, bring your phone nearby," or something.

01:04:32   It's one of those like weird come ons of some magical technical thing.

01:04:35   Like, "We'll just do the magical thing, so just come here."

01:04:38   And it says, "Oh, I found your phone.

01:04:40   I think I know who you are.

01:04:41   I'll set this up for you."

01:04:42   And I have the home screen syncing configured so it remembers all the apps I had installed

01:04:46   and where I put them on the home screen and does it all.

01:04:48   And you're like, "Wow, this is awesome.

01:04:49   Really easy Apple setup experience and my Apple TV is back exactly how I left it.

01:04:54   Look at this."

01:04:55   It's like you can tell, almost nothing changed except the box got smaller and in a completely

01:04:58   an audible fan has been eliminated.

01:05:00   - And if you have TestFlight, because remember,

01:05:02   TestFlight is just not a thing to Apple.

01:05:04   If you have TestFlight apps, then they are not installed

01:05:07   by default, just like on the phone.

01:05:08   - You have TestFlight apps on Apple TV?

01:05:11   - Plex and channels, Plex and channels,

01:05:13   I think are the only ones, but yes.

01:05:14   - Why am I not on the Plex TestFlight?

01:05:16   - I don't know, because you didn't evangelize

01:05:18   as well as I did, apparently.

01:05:19   - Apparently not.

01:05:20   Anyway, but no, that's all, as Jason Snell said

01:05:24   in another article, he's not really on top

01:05:25   of his game lately, at sixcellars.com,

01:05:27   that's all an illusion.

01:05:28   Don't be fooled into thinking your Apple TV is back

01:05:30   exactly the way you left it,

01:05:31   because every single one of those icons,

01:05:32   if you click on it, has no idea who you are.

01:05:34   And you have to log back in.

01:05:36   And every one of these apps has a different way

01:05:38   to log back in.

01:05:39   Sometimes it wants you to enter your username and password.

01:05:42   Why can't Apple TV, one of Apple's own platforms,

01:05:46   use iCloud Keychain for the Apple ID

01:05:48   that you are logged into the Apple TV with

01:05:50   to get your username and password?

01:05:52   I don't know, but it doesn't.

01:05:54   Instead, you have to use your phone as a remote,

01:05:56   and your phone is also logged into your Apple ID

01:05:59   and can read your iCloud keychain,

01:06:00   and so your phone will look up your username and password

01:06:02   in iCloud keychain and send it as text to the text field

01:06:06   that it is being used to enter.

01:06:08   Why can't you do the Apple TV?

01:06:09   I have no freaking idea why, it drives me nuts.

01:06:11   Sometimes you'll have to go to servicename.com/activate

01:06:15   and type in a four digit code and get in that way.

01:06:18   Sometimes it will say, hey, just launch the Disney+ app,

01:06:20   and if it's on the same network as us,

01:06:21   it will let you log in.

01:06:22   - Allegedly.

01:06:24   - I'm glad Jason said in the article,

01:06:25   That has never worked for him.

01:06:26   It's never worked for me either.

01:06:27   Remember last time I said maybe it's because I'm not on Wi-Fi

01:06:30   and it says you have to be on the same Wi-Fi network

01:06:32   and there's like the technologist in me saying,

01:06:34   do they mean Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi?

01:06:36   Or is that just like the catch-all word for network

01:06:39   because people don't know that there are other kinds

01:06:40   of networking than Wi-Fi?

01:06:41   'Cause my TV isn't on Wi-Fi,

01:06:44   it's connected through ethernet only

01:06:46   and it's not connected to Wi-Fi

01:06:47   because Google TV OS doesn't let you do both of them

01:06:50   at the same time.

01:06:51   And so it never worked for me,

01:06:52   but it also never worked for Jason.

01:06:53   So then you gotta do using your own password.

01:06:55   So laborious and you know, poor me, just like Jason, I have subscribed to way too many streaming services.

01:07:01   Yeah, I know it's such a terrible thing to do. But anyway, I spent not three and a half hours, but at least probably

01:07:07   45 minutes, maybe an hour,

01:07:09   going through all my services and logging them all back in, reconnecting my Plex,

01:07:14   finding all my shares on Infuse, logging into all the different services, log in with TV provider, get redirected to the Verizon page,

01:07:21   Log in, bounce back, pick up your phone,

01:07:24   enter this thing in, pull things out of the key chain.

01:07:27   So laborious.

01:07:28   I'm glad new Apple TV doesn't come out very often.

01:07:31   - Yeah, it is a real, real pain.

01:07:34   And I went through it when I got my new Apple TV

01:07:36   with ethernet.

01:07:37   Disney Plus sign in thing did not work for me for Beans.

01:07:41   So just like you said, I'm glad Jason had said something.

01:07:44   Like in the grand scheme of things, it's fine.

01:07:45   All my stuff is in one password,

01:07:47   but the inconsistency across all these apps,

01:07:49   not surprising but frustrating nevertheless like you know again some

01:07:53   sometimes it's slash activate slash pair then it's oh I need a username password

01:07:56   and and the Apple TV does remember you know an email address that it that any

01:08:01   email addresses that you use to sign into stuff which is nice but then you

01:08:05   still got to be on your phone or your iPad and you got to go and grab the

01:08:07   password from one password and be ready to paste it in the field it's like it's

01:08:11   none of this is a big deal but it's just frustrating and we're not gonna have

01:08:15   time to talk about the ads thing but this is just another one of those like

01:08:18   paper cuts that seem to be appearing more and more often in in Apple stuff or

01:08:22   or maybe a more complimentary way of looking at it is so many other paper

01:08:26   cuts have gone away that these ones that are left stand out more I'm not sure

01:08:30   which one it is it doesn't really matter but you know in the same way that if

01:08:33   they add ads everywhere in these OS is it's gonna be you know more and more

01:08:38   frustrating well something like this is just frustrating it's not a big deal is

01:08:42   just frustrating it's weird though because like they write tvOS it's their

01:08:47   own platform. You sign in with your Apple ID. One of the options you have is to not

01:08:51   be prompted for further authentication when making purchases. That's an option in the

01:08:56   settings. You can say, "Hey, I'm signed into my Apple ID, and I just want to be able to

01:08:59   buy stuff. Don't prompt me for my password when I buy stuff." So you can spend money,

01:09:03   real money, without entering anything, but somehow the platform has no ability to do

01:09:09   what every other Apple platform can do, which is look up your passwords in iCloud and Keychain

01:09:14   and stick them into fields when you're logging into something.

01:09:17   And this is on--

01:09:20   maybe in version 1, they don't have that fine,

01:09:21   but eventually it will come.

01:09:22   Now it's way past overdue.

01:09:24   I don't call this a paper cut.

01:09:25   I would call this a feature that should have been there

01:09:27   a long time ago.

01:09:28   And there must be some reasonably sound

01:09:30   technical reason for why they just don't want to do that.

01:09:32   But I cannot think of what it might be not knowing

01:09:35   the details.

01:09:36   And it just-- and not that that's the greatest thing.

01:09:38   That's the minimum of, hey, just auto-fill my passwords

01:09:40   from my keychain like I do on my phone, on my Mac, on my iPad,

01:09:43   on anything else.

01:09:44   just auto fill for my key chain, right?

01:09:45   But on top of that is every other effort Apple

01:09:48   has ever done to like sign in with your TV provider

01:09:51   or universal sign in for everything

01:09:53   and all those different approaches that they've touted

01:09:56   in various keynotes have not been adopted universally.

01:09:59   So now every time you launch an app,

01:10:01   it's just like, gee, I wonder how this Apple

01:10:02   want me to log in.

01:10:04   Will it try to use Apple thing?

01:10:05   Will it try to use sign in with provider?

01:10:07   Some of the apps I discovered,

01:10:09   if you sign in with like one app,

01:10:11   like one Fox affiliated app,

01:10:12   other Fox affiliate apps already know that you're logged in

01:10:15   'cause they probably do the application group sharing thing

01:10:17   or whatever behind the scenes, right?

01:10:19   It's just super weird and you know,

01:10:21   and like this is, not that people buy new Apple TVs

01:10:25   very often, but this is one of the main

01:10:27   and only friction points for regular people

01:10:31   to use Apple TV because people do subscribe

01:10:35   to streaming services and sometimes they subscribe

01:10:37   and unsubscribe, but you're like,

01:10:37   you're gonna have to do this.

01:10:38   There's no avoiding, you have to sign in to Netflix.

01:10:41   You have to have something like,

01:10:41   you can't use these streaming services without signing in.

01:10:43   If you pay for one, you have to authenticate.

01:10:45   So everyone's gonna have to go through this.

01:10:47   And it's not a simple process

01:10:49   if you haven't done it 50 times.

01:10:50   And even if you just subscribed

01:10:51   to two or three streaming services,

01:10:53   it's not a good sort of like first impression, right?

01:10:56   That's why the first impression of a device,

01:10:57   device transfer on the phone is like,

01:10:59   "Oh, I got a new phone.

01:11:00   "It knows that I got a new phone.

01:11:01   "It'll bring all my junk to the old phone."

01:11:02   Most people don't use TestFlight, so it's not a big deal.

01:11:04   Most people don't have two-factor outside of Apple stuff.

01:11:07   That's a good experience.

01:11:08   TV is like, not a decade away from that,

01:11:11   but at least five years behind the times.

01:11:13   - Yeah.

01:11:15   I also was very confused.

01:11:17   I don't recall how much I talked about this last episode,

01:11:20   but I wasn't sure the right way to accomplish

01:11:24   what I wanted to do with my Apple TVs,

01:11:26   because what I wanted to do was trickle down, right?

01:11:29   So take the 4K Apple TV that was in the living room,

01:11:31   put that in the bedroom,

01:11:32   take the 1080 Apple TV that was in the bedroom,

01:11:34   that becomes a travel Apple TV.

01:11:36   But I wasn't sure the right-est way to do this, because--

01:11:40   I can tell you the wrong way to do it,

01:11:41   which is to have a plan to carefully rename them

01:11:44   to what they're going to be when they get in their proper homes,

01:11:47   and then forget to do that.

01:11:48   That's the way.

01:11:50   See, I did only the first step.

01:11:52   I had the plan, and then I executed the plan.

01:11:55   And that seemed to work just fine.

01:11:56   So what we're saying is basically,

01:11:58   go to the living room one, and then go to general settings,

01:12:01   whatever, and rename your living room one

01:12:03   from whatever it's called now, which may mention living room.

01:12:06   rename it to bedroom.

01:12:07   But oh, you can't rename it to bedroom

01:12:09   because if you try to rename it to bedroom,

01:12:10   it'll put bedroom parentheses two at the end.

01:12:12   So first, go upstairs to the bedroom

01:12:14   and either shut that one down,

01:12:16   no, there is no shutdown function for Apple TV,

01:12:18   I searched for it.

01:12:19   (laughing)

01:12:20   Just yank it from the plug,

01:12:21   it's just like a TiVo or whatever,

01:12:22   or rename it away from being bedroom.

01:12:25   Then go back downstairs and rename the one downstairs

01:12:28   into bedroom, then bravely unplug everything

01:12:32   because there's no way to shut down.

01:12:33   I guess you can put it to sleep if you wanna unplug it,

01:12:35   but honestly it doesn't make a difference,

01:12:36   I don't think then hook up your new one and then you can name your new one living room

01:12:40   And it won't be home living room parentheses, too

01:12:41   If you're lucky if you're unlucky like me and forget to do that you're you know, you just gotta go through this again

01:12:46   But even if you remember to do it, I think you need some time for it to like settle

01:12:50   Otherwise they forget what they were named and you'll end up with the parentheses - anyway cool

01:12:55   Yeah, so I did do exactly what you described because I thought about it for probably longer than I should admit

01:13:01   Hey

01:13:01   I was like I guess what I can do is I could start the bedroom TV and rename them and go to the living room

01:13:05   and rename that and then add the new one

01:13:07   and hopefully it'll all work out.

01:13:08   And it did, but I don't know,

01:13:10   I almost feel like I expected or it certainly hoped

01:13:15   that when I set up the new Apple TV,

01:13:17   it could be like, oh, am I taking over for the old one?

01:13:20   And I guess the difficulty there is that I would have

01:13:22   to have both of them online simultaneously

01:13:24   and often in an entertainment center

01:13:25   that's not something that's easy to do.

01:13:27   - But these are Wi-Fi, so you just plug them both in.

01:13:29   Like the thing I'm thinking of as an example,

01:13:31   I mean, I already just mentioned the phone,

01:13:32   but the great example of doing this right is,

01:13:34   again, frequent sponsor, Eero, replacing your router,

01:13:37   the thing that provides internet to your entire house,

01:13:40   seems like it would be the most fraught example of,

01:13:43   hey, I wanna swap one device from another,

01:13:45   or Indiana Jones, "Raid of the Lost Ark" style,

01:13:48   with the bag of sand and the idol.

01:13:49   'Cause the thing needs to talk to the internet

01:13:52   to figure out who you are and what your info is.

01:13:54   Like Eero has like a cloud sync notion of your identity,

01:13:57   you have an Eero account, right?

01:14:00   It needs to talk to the internet to do that,

01:14:01   but it is the internet,

01:14:03   It is providing the internet, it's providing IP addresses,

01:14:05   we're doing all the routing.

01:14:06   I got a new Eero and I plugged it in and I said,

01:14:08   "Hey, you're the new Eero, here's the old one."

01:14:10   And it said, "Okay, I'll replace the old one."

01:14:12   And it's like, "Done."

01:14:13   Nothing, didn't have to do anything.

01:14:15   It swapped itself in as my router with no errors,

01:14:18   no problem, it understood what it was doing

01:14:20   and it was like, and I get a new Apple TV

01:14:23   and it's like an all-day project, what the hell?

01:14:25   - Yeah, that's so true.

01:14:26   That's all right.

01:14:28   I am liking the new Apple TV.

01:14:30   I can't say I notice anything that's particularly different,

01:14:33   but I mean, I like it.

01:14:34   And now my 4K bedroom TV, which is not fancy at all,

01:14:39   but now it has a 4K Apple TV attached to it.

01:14:41   So that's kind of cool for the once a month

01:14:43   that I actually use it.

01:14:45   Speaking of settings, I was thinking of noticing

01:14:47   a difference.

01:14:48   It didn't remember how I had configured

01:14:51   in terms of audio/video.

01:14:52   So I had to go back through and do all those settings again

01:14:55   that we talked about before, like match content on or off,

01:14:58   What do you want the menu screen to be, HDR or no, Dolby Vision, screen size, audio format,

01:15:04   like every single one of those options.

01:15:05   It had no recollection of what they were previously, so it just had to start, you know, reset everything

01:15:10   again.

01:15:11   Fun.

01:15:12   You want to tell me about your boy Bono and what he's been up to recently?

01:15:17   This is a funny bit from it.

01:15:19   So Bono's got a new book out, it's like an autobiography about, I don't know, about,

01:15:24   you know, his life and his band.

01:15:25   He's the lead singer of the band U2.

01:15:27   And there was a, going around a couple weeks ago, it was excerpts from it in the various

01:15:31   reviews.

01:15:32   One of them was about the infamous album that Apple distributed for free onto everyone's

01:15:38   iPhone or into everyone's iTunes library, more precisely, whether you wanted it or not.

01:15:44   And Bono had an apology in the book about that, quoting from the book.

01:15:51   As one social media wisecracker put it, "Woke up this morning to find Bono in my kitchen,

01:15:55   my coffee, wearing my dressing gown, reading my paper. For the less kind, the free U2 album

01:16:00   is overpriced." Bono said he was sorry. He said, "If just getting our music to people

01:16:08   who like our music was the idea, that was a good idea. But the idea was getting our

01:16:11   music to people who might not have had a remote interest in our music, and maybe there might

01:16:15   be some pushback. At first I thought it was just an internet squall, but quickly realized

01:16:18   we'd bump into a serious discussion about big tech. I'd take full responsibility,"

01:16:22   bonuses. Not Guy O, not Edge, not Adam, not Larry, not Tim Cook, not Eddy Cue. I thought if we could

01:16:27   put our music within reach of people, they might choose to reach out toward it. Not quite. I think,

01:16:32   who cares about the U2 album or whatever, but I think it's interesting why we still remember it,

01:16:37   and why was it such a big deal. Giving stuff away for free is usually not frowned upon. Even if you

01:16:44   don't want it, people will take free stuff just because it's free. I mean, that's why you end up

01:16:48   tasting all those weird free samples at Costco. Yeah, it's free, whatever. And that's something

01:16:52   you're putting inside your body but like you know free anything here it's a free thing whatever

01:16:56   why did everyone hate the free album i'm not entirely sure that bono really understands why

01:17:02   people hated it so much because he as a famous rock star who's not particularly tech savvy

01:17:07   probably doesn't know or care about these intimate details he knows it was a mistake

01:17:11   and he takes responsibility for it because he argued for it or whatever uh but like why why

01:17:18   Why did everyone get so angry about the U2 album being on their devices?

01:17:23   I think it's instructive, again not that we're going to talk about it this week but we probably

01:17:27   will later, about the ad stuff, of how it feels to have a powerful entity that doesn't

01:17:34   know or care that you exist do something to one of your personal technology devices without

01:17:41   your consent that you didn't ask for and can't undo.

01:17:48   And if the thing that they're doing is putting free music in your iTunes library, who cares,

01:17:52   not a big deal.

01:17:53   It is probably the smallest deal you can think of.

01:17:56   It's like all that means is that there is an album in your iTunes library that I didn't

01:18:00   put there and maybe I'm not interested in.

01:18:02   But even that tiny bit is like every time you go in there, you're like, "That stupid

01:18:08   U2 album is there again.

01:18:09   I don't even like them."

01:18:11   Or maybe, worst case scenario, it's the only thing in your library and every time you connect

01:18:14   it up to your car, it starts playing a song and it starts playing one of those songs from

01:18:18   the YouTube album because that's all you've got in there because you use Spotify.

01:18:21   It's the tiniest thing, but that tiny thing put in literally every single person's iTunes

01:18:27   library whether you want it or not and you couldn't get rid of it until they get that

01:18:31   thing later where you get to delete it before all the big blowback.

01:18:35   That just makes everybody go off the deep end.

01:18:38   And I think justifiably, because it reveals the control that the large companies have

01:18:44   over our lives.

01:18:45   They mostly don't exercise, or they exercise for good, like stopping malware or putting

01:18:49   signatures for malicious software or whatever.

01:18:52   Just to do this...

01:18:53   And you know, we're trying to do the nice thing.

01:18:57   We're trying to give people free music or whatever.

01:19:00   Doesn't matter what the motivations are, it's just like that album just sitting in there,

01:19:05   Even if you didn't care about it when it came out,

01:19:07   a week later, two weeks later, a month later,

01:19:09   especially if you're not into the tech news

01:19:10   and you miss the story where it's like,

01:19:11   hey, go to this page where you can delete it

01:19:12   from your library, which that page, I'm assuming,

01:19:14   is still up at Apple's website somewhere

01:19:16   because there could still be people

01:19:17   who have this in the library

01:19:18   and don't know that you can delete it.

01:19:19   We should probably try to find it for the show notes.

01:19:21   But most people don't know or care about that.

01:19:23   They just know that every time they look

01:19:25   in their iTunes library, there's this album

01:19:26   that they didn't want there,

01:19:27   and they just get madder about it and madder about it.

01:19:29   Someday there's gonna be some person

01:19:30   who's had that in their iTunes library for 20 years,

01:19:32   not knowing how to get rid of it,

01:19:33   and they're gonna be so angry about it,

01:19:35   if they ever meet Bono,

01:19:36   that's the first thing they're gonna yell at him about.

01:19:38   So I understand why Bono apologized,

01:19:40   but I do think it's an instructive lesson about

01:19:44   the smallest, most well-intentioned thing

01:19:49   can cause a complete open revolt,

01:19:52   whereas other things that companies do

01:19:54   that people don't notice that are way, way worse,

01:19:57   nobody cares.

01:19:58   Selling access to your demographic information

01:20:02   to advertisers and tracking you across multiple sites.

01:20:04   That's invisible to people.

01:20:06   They don't even see it, and they don't care about it

01:20:08   and is in general way worse.

01:20:09   But the U2 album, every time I see it,

01:20:11   I feel like people just get madder and madder.

01:20:13   It wasn't even very good.

01:20:14   - No, it wasn't.

01:20:15   March 14th, 2020, Blackguard91 writes,

01:20:20   "How could I remove U2's Songs of Innocence

01:20:23   "from iTunes and iPhone in 2020?

01:20:25   "I'm doing a little long overdue maintenance

01:20:27   "on my iTunes account, thanks to coronavirus/social

01:20:29   distancing and I still have Songs of Innocence album stuck on my phone. I never really cared

01:20:33   for YouTube with constant ambush of their music over the years has elevated them to

01:20:37   Nickelback levels of discomfort. Web searches have revealed a web tool that I missed by

01:20:41   about six years that Apple provided to remove the album, but it was engineered prior to

01:20:44   the advent of two factor authentication and does not properly work with modern Apple infrastructure.

01:20:49   How can I get rid of it?" To which Joseph_S writes, who is apparently a community specialist

01:20:54   for Apple, "Hey there, thanks for using the Apple Support communities, blah blah blah

01:20:58   blah blah, you need to contact Apple Support, here's how you can do it."

01:21:03   So that's the answer.

01:21:04   That's nice.

01:21:05   So, you know, at a company that cared more about the web, that page would both still

01:21:10   exist and still work.

01:21:12   I guess it hasn't worked for six years and I guess you can contact Apple so they can

01:21:15   get rid of it, but man, like, and that's the other thing about this.

01:21:19   They realize the mistake they made from the blowback and they introduce the tool to remove

01:21:22   which most people don't know about

01:21:24   because most people just are not following the tech press

01:21:26   and who cares, right?

01:21:27   And then, like, that was it.

01:21:29   Like, you know, they said, "Well, this problem is,

01:21:31   we'll never have to worry about this again

01:21:32   because people who want to remove it will use the tool,

01:21:34   and people who don't care don't care."

01:21:36   It's like, no, most people care

01:21:38   and have no idea you introduced that tool.

01:21:40   So you should have a solution for that long term, right?

01:21:43   Whatever hack they did to give this to everybody,

01:21:46   there should be an accompanying hack,

01:21:48   which is basically like a button

01:21:49   on every single person's Apple ID page

01:21:51   that never goes away, and the only thing that button does

01:21:53   is delete YouTube Apple.

01:21:55   Like just, that's gotta be there forever now.

01:21:56   That's your price for this mistake.

01:21:58   It's forever on every account.appleid.apple.whatever,

01:22:01   like you have to have the delete YouTube album button,

01:22:03   and you can never get rid of it,

01:22:05   and you have to test it every time

01:22:06   you do any kind of change to iCloud.

01:22:08   - This is such classic Apple.

01:22:10   So I found what is allegedly the link.

01:22:12   And you know how Apple is really good

01:22:14   about having really clean and pretty URLs?

01:22:16   I mean that genuinely, like they really honestly do.

01:22:19   The URL here is buy.itunes.apple.com/webobjectsbaby/mzfinance.woa/wa/offeroptout.

01:22:30   That is your URL.

01:22:31   - Yeah, that's the Steve Jobs equivalent.

01:22:34   You want a bumper case?

01:22:34   Fine, have a bumper case.

01:22:36   You wanna be able to delete the thing?

01:22:37   Fine, go to a WebObjects URL.

01:22:39   - Yep, and for the record, it's a 404.

01:22:41   - I always pronounce it "woe" in my head.

01:22:43   Mzfinance.woe.

01:22:45   - WebObjects application?

01:22:48   - Probably.

01:22:49   - The WOA extension, some web object, Guru probably knows.

01:22:52   - So apparently the iPhone 15 buttons allegedly

01:22:56   are going to be quite a bit different.

01:22:58   Ming-Chi Kuo writes, "My latest survey indicates

01:23:01   that the volume button and the power button

01:23:03   on two high-end iPhone 15, the new iPhone models,

01:23:08   may adapt a solid state button design

01:23:09   similar to the home button design

01:23:10   of the iPhone 7, 8 SE2 and 3.

01:23:13   To replace the physical mechanical button design,

01:23:15   there will be taptic engines located

01:23:17   on the internal left and right sides

01:23:18   to provide force feedback to make users feel

01:23:20   like they're pressing physical buttons.

01:23:22   Due to this design change,

01:23:23   the number of Taptic Engines used in each phone

01:23:25   will increase from the current one to three.

01:23:27   As a result, the existing Taptic Engine suppliers,

01:23:29   LuxShare ICT, which is the first one in AAC technologies,

01:23:32   the second one will be significant beneficiaries.

01:23:35   It is expected that high-end Android smartphones

01:23:37   will also follow Apple's design

01:23:39   to create new selling points,

01:23:40   which is a structural positive

01:23:42   for the mobile phone vibrator industry.

01:23:44   - I love the way people tweet when they're like,

01:23:46   their beat is like part suppliers for the iPhones.

01:23:49   It's such a different perspective.

01:23:50   Like, what's important about this?

01:23:52   It means more phone vibrators.

01:23:54   It's really good for these companies that make them.

01:23:58   I find this fascinating.

01:23:59   Is there something wrong with the power

01:24:03   and volume buttons on our current phones?

01:24:05   I guess because they move, it makes waterproofing harder.

01:24:09   What else is wrong with them?

01:24:10   - Anything on an iPhone that moves

01:24:12   or that is an entry point for dust and stuff

01:24:15   is also a service liability in the sense

01:24:17   that it's something that can break,

01:24:18   it's something that people will break on their phones

01:24:21   or that will fail on the phones

01:24:22   and that either the person or Apple

01:24:24   will be responsible for repairing it.

01:24:26   So there's that angle too, but is this plan,

01:24:30   I mean if this is real, which I think it's plausible.

01:24:32   - Yeah, we'll see.

01:24:33   - Yeah, you gotta think like,

01:24:35   are they really gonna be saving that much?

01:24:38   Like so they have the cost of two new Taptic engines,

01:24:40   they have to put them somewhere and I--

01:24:42   - Yeah, the space.

01:24:43   - Yeah, I have to imagine that they're gonna take up

01:24:45   up more space than the buttons do.

01:24:48   Maybe I'm wrong, but I mean, that's what I would assume.

01:24:52   - And then the battery power to every time

01:24:53   you hit the button, your little burst of electricity

01:24:56   to move a little mechanical thing.

01:24:57   - I mean, that being said, when they moved the home button

01:25:01   to a haptic, a taptic engine, which I think it was,

01:25:04   was that the iPhone 7, or was it before then?

01:25:06   - Yeah, I think it was a 7.

01:25:06   That was great, I love the iPhone 7.

01:25:08   - Yeah, like, we had our doubts when that information

01:25:12   came out back then, and it came out and it was fine.

01:25:16   I would even say possibly good.

01:25:18   - Yeah, I think it was better than the physical one,

01:25:19   but that physical button was like,

01:25:21   I mean, forget about tiny dust particles.

01:25:23   You could fit an entire cat inside there,

01:25:25   and people did shove their entire cat,

01:25:26   and like those home buttons would break all the time

01:25:28   'cause you were pressing it constantly, and it really moved.

01:25:31   You could put cereal in there, cookie crumbs,

01:25:34   potato chips, whole pets, like,

01:25:37   just everything would go in there.

01:25:38   You know, you think the lightning port

01:25:40   is bad for collecting stuff.

01:25:41   the home button was a nightmare.

01:25:43   But I do wonder how much of your pet

01:25:45   you can shove into the crevices

01:25:47   on the side of the power button on a modern iPhone.

01:25:50   - I think from a product quality perspective,

01:25:53   I would trust Apple to do this well

01:25:54   because they already have done it well.

01:25:56   So I think it would feel fine and we wouldn't notice

01:25:58   and we'd get used to it.

01:25:59   It'd be one of those weird things that everyone says like,

01:26:01   oh, remember when it was a real button

01:26:02   and now you can't even tell unless the phone's off

01:26:04   or whatever, like, you know, it'd be one of those things.

01:26:06   - Yeah, like I don't object to it

01:26:08   'cause I think it's gonna be bad,

01:26:09   but boy, in terms of cost of parts, complexity.

01:26:13   - And space, that's the thing, internal space,

01:26:15   that to me, I can't imagine this is worth it.

01:26:17   - Internal space, I mean, we'll see,

01:26:19   maybe these things have gotten way smaller

01:26:21   and you just need to be little for this,

01:26:23   but it's so fascinating, it makes sense

01:26:27   because look, if your job is to waterproof the iPhone

01:26:29   and you're sick of your weak point was the headphone jack

01:26:32   or your weak point is the home button,

01:26:34   you're knocking them down one by one.

01:26:35   Every year it's like, what's the next thing

01:26:36   that can make this phone more waterproof, right?

01:26:39   And maybe these just came up on the list, right?

01:26:42   I hope.

01:26:44   Yeah, the fascinating thing is the last bit here, again,

01:26:46   from the perspective of someone who's

01:26:48   talking about parts manufacturers for iPhones.

01:26:51   It is expected that high-end Android smartphones will also

01:26:54   follow Apple's design.

01:26:55   It's just expected that whatever Apple does,

01:26:57   even if it doesn't make any sense,

01:26:59   even if it seems to be dumb, they'll

01:27:01   copy it because Apple does it.

01:27:02   Like, there's no other reason you need to do it.

01:27:05   They could have done it five years ago

01:27:07   if it was a good idea.

01:27:09   They could have done it, but as soon as Apple does it,

01:27:11   well they'll do it too just because Apple did it

01:27:14   and they can say, oh whatever Apple has, we have that too.

01:27:16   Like don't just, you know, give Apple a year to do this

01:27:19   to see if it actually is a good idea

01:27:21   and then you can copy it, but it's just fascinating.

01:27:24   Anyway, maybe this is all just a rumor

01:27:26   put out into the world by the manufacturers

01:27:28   of tiny Taptic engines for phones, we'll see.

01:27:30   - We are sponsored this week by Collide.

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01:27:49   Old school device management tools, like MDMs,

01:27:52   force disruptive agents onto employee devices

01:27:54   that slow performance and treat privacy as an afterthought.

01:27:57   That way of doing things turns IT admins and end users

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01:29:18   [Music]

01:29:19   All right, let's do some Ask ATP, which we haven't had time for lately, and I apologize,

01:29:27   but let's start with James Agge, who writes, "I'm building a house to be completed within

01:29:30   the next few months.

01:29:31   This is a great opportunity to upgrade my home tech, and with matter in the news lately,

01:29:35   I'm thinking a lot about smart home options. There are plans for in-wall ethernet wiring

01:29:39   to any place there might be a stationary internet connected device, connections for external

01:29:44   wired ethernet cameras and ceiling mounted Wi-Fi access points. But I'm dubious of some

01:29:48   of the other smart home products and how useful they are. My life does not feel burdened by

01:29:51   turning on lights manually, for example. How useful are things like smart switches, thermostats,

01:29:55   door locks, garage door openers, and other options really? Is all of this smart home

01:30:00   really that great, I have no idea. So for me, I've dabbled with a reasonable amount

01:30:08   of this stuff. I haven't done a lot of like smart locks, I haven't really played with

01:30:11   any of those or some of the really invasive stuff, but with regard to like light switches

01:30:15   and things of that nature, I've dabbled with a fair bit of it. For my money, they are a

01:30:20   past sponsor, but I swear I freaking love them. Lutron, Caseta stuff, and they actually,

01:30:27   The ones that were current at the time we sponsored

01:30:30   are fine, but they actually have a new dimmer

01:30:32   that's aesthetically much better looking

01:30:34   than the ones that they had up until recently.

01:30:37   - Oh, I envy the new one.

01:30:38   - It's the Diva Smart Switch, which the guts,

01:30:41   the insides are the same as all the other

01:30:43   Lutron Casada stuff that I've been singing their praises

01:30:47   both when they paid me and when they haven't

01:30:48   because it's so damn good.

01:30:50   But this one, the Diva stuff,

01:30:51   and I think it's just a dimmer so far,

01:30:53   is so aesthetically, so much better looking

01:30:56   than the existing stuff.

01:30:57   And I didn't find the existing stuff bad,

01:31:00   but this is way better.

01:31:01   - But it doesn't pop out and become a remote though,

01:31:03   does it?

01:31:04   - No.

01:31:05   - Well, no, none of the Caseta stuff, well.

01:31:07   - They have remotes, but the in-wall switches don't pop out.

01:31:11   - But you can, like they give you a little plate,

01:31:13   'cause that's what I have.

01:31:13   They give you a little plate that you can take the remote

01:31:15   and mount it to your wall.

01:31:16   It's not actually going into your wall.

01:31:17   It just looks like a switch,

01:31:19   but you shove the little remote in there.

01:31:21   And so that is a dimmer switch,

01:31:22   just not connected to anything.

01:31:23   - You can also get a dimmer switch that is wired.

01:31:26   - It's wired. - It's wired.

01:31:27   - Yeah, yeah. - Yeah, yeah, exactly.

01:31:28   Anyways, we're getting off into the ether here,

01:31:31   but the Caseta stuff is really, really good.

01:31:33   Like, honest to goodness, it's really, really good.

01:31:36   Obviously, I can sing for hours

01:31:39   my praises of Sonos equipment.

01:31:41   Not everyone on the program agrees, but that's okay.

01:31:43   But the Sonos stuff has worked out really well for me,

01:31:45   and as I spoke about a few episodes ago,

01:31:47   integrates to some degree with some of the Caseta stuff,

01:31:49   which is super delightful.

01:31:51   I haven't, some people have asked,

01:31:53   sometimes snarky and sometimes in the not snarky way.

01:31:56   What's going on with the Ethernet project

01:31:58   or maybe the fiber project?

01:31:59   That is still something I want to work on

01:32:01   but I've mostly put aside for now.

01:32:03   I've just been distracted by a bunch of other stuff

01:32:05   and this is the busiest time of year for the List family

01:32:07   because not only do we have regular holiday stuff

01:32:10   but Declan and Mikayla's birthdays are both like

01:32:12   before and after the holidays.

01:32:14   So from basically mid-October to mid-January,

01:32:17   life is crazy busy around my house.

01:32:20   So I'm probably not gonna do anything more

01:32:21   with the Ethernet stuff anytime soon

01:32:23   But I will say that one consistent piece of advice,

01:32:27   and I got a lot of advice,

01:32:28   a lot of which conflicted with other pieces of advice

01:32:31   that I was given, like it was all in conflict

01:32:34   with each other, but the one thing

01:32:36   that almost everyone agreed on was anywhere you want

01:32:40   an internet drop, ethernet drop,

01:32:42   you want at least two ethernet drops.

01:32:44   Don't put in one, put in at least two,

01:32:46   'cause you'll never know what else you're gonna want there.

01:32:49   So I will say, James, that if you're putting ethernet

01:32:52   in the walls, which you say that you are,

01:32:54   put at least two Ethernet drops in the wall.

01:32:57   They can be in the same panel.

01:33:01   I'm not saying one on one wall, one on the other,

01:33:03   but wherever there's Ethernet, put at least two.

01:33:05   That's what you gotta do.

01:33:06   - Yeah.

01:33:08   I would say on the front of,

01:33:11   I think the most interesting part of this question is,

01:33:13   is smart home stuff really worth it?

01:33:15   - Oh, yes, yes, yes.

01:33:16   - Like as James says, to quote,

01:33:17   "My life does not feel burdened

01:33:18   "by turning on lights manually, for example.

01:33:20   How useful are all these things?

01:33:22   And first of all, it depends so much on your situation,

01:33:26   how many smart things you're going to do,

01:33:28   what smart things you're going to do.

01:33:29   To me, whether it's worth it or not comes down to

01:33:33   how much effort and cost and setup fiddling

01:33:37   does it take to actually get it to work,

01:33:40   and then how much time does that save me over time,

01:33:42   and how long does it last before it breaks.

01:33:45   Now, the reason why I've been such a fan

01:33:47   of the Caseta stuff is that it does have

01:33:50   a fairly strong uphill route to get there in the sense that most of the Lutron Quesada

01:33:57   products are on the higher end price wise compared to competitors and to really do it

01:34:01   right a lot of these have to be like hard wired switches in the wall and stuff like

01:34:05   that. So there's a bit of a curve to get there. However, I've tried a bunch of other stuff

01:34:11   before. I've tried like other smart home products. I've tried stuff that can be controlled via

01:34:15   a home kit or via the Alexa ecosystem.

01:34:19   I tried a bunch of other stuff from a bunch

01:34:20   of different brands and all the other ones

01:34:23   were just flaky and they would either have to be

01:34:25   like unpaired and repaired and reset up every so often

01:34:29   or they would only work like 90% of the time

01:34:32   and everything, whereas Quesada works every single time.

01:34:37   And once you set it up, you don't need to touch it.

01:34:39   It just works all the time forever.

01:34:41   That's why I have stopped using all the other stuff

01:34:44   and I go with it because whether it's worth it or not,

01:34:47   if you get some value out of something,

01:34:49   but then after four months, you gotta reset the whole thing

01:34:52   up and repair it with HomeKit and all that crap,

01:34:55   that's gonna really eat into the value

01:34:57   that it created for you and you're gonna question,

01:34:59   should I just throw all this crap away

01:35:00   and just go back to dumb switches?

01:35:02   But if you set it up once and it just always works

01:35:04   and it works every single time reliably and quickly,

01:35:07   which is what Kostada does and which frankly,

01:35:09   nothing else I've tried does,

01:35:11   then the value burden it has to overcome is lower.

01:35:16   And so I like, for smart switches,

01:35:19   I don't have everything in my house on a smart switch.

01:35:23   I have them in kind of like key areas.

01:35:25   So here's some situations where they're great.

01:35:28   So number one, automation.

01:35:31   You can have like certain lights outdoors,

01:35:34   turn on 10 minutes after sunset every night

01:35:37   and turn off right before sunrise or whatever.

01:35:40   And all this stuff, because of the way

01:35:42   Kaseya stuff works, you can, you know,

01:35:44   there are just, there are switches on the wall

01:35:47   that, or little remotes that you can put around.

01:35:49   And so you can, you know, just hit them manually.

01:35:52   You don't have to like tell the other people

01:35:54   in your family like, hey, to turn this light off,

01:35:56   don't touch the switch 'cause you'll ruin my smart light.

01:35:59   You have to instead speak this one command

01:36:02   to our voice cylinder and hope it works.

01:36:03   No, it's not like that 'cause, again,

01:36:05   that raises the annoyance level

01:36:07   and that decreases the value you get.

01:36:09   So if you do smart switches, like, you know,

01:36:11   Caseta stuff and everything, you're on a good path.

01:36:13   And then where it helps is for, you know,

01:36:15   first of all, the automation angle.

01:36:17   Whether it's like, you know, occupancy sensing in a room,

01:36:21   motion sensing, or, you know, time triggered things,

01:36:25   temperature triggered things, like there's all sorts

01:36:27   of things you can do with, you know,

01:36:29   both the built-in Caseta functionality

01:36:31   and when you tie it to HomeKit or whatever else.

01:36:33   Like you can do all sorts of fun stuff there.

01:36:35   - Yeah, like a really good example of that very quickly

01:36:37   is on weekdays, Erin is the first one downstairs,

01:36:41   and it used to be, up until a few days ago,

01:36:45   it used to be pitch black when she would get up.

01:36:48   And I recently put a Casada dimmer switch

01:36:51   on the little pendant lamp, or whatever it's called,

01:36:54   that's sitting above our kitchen sink.

01:36:56   And so what I figured was, well, wait,

01:36:57   why is she going downstairs to a pitch black kitchen?

01:37:00   I'll just have that thing turn on

01:37:03   around the same time that her alarm

01:37:05   wakes her up every weekday.

01:37:06   So Monday through Friday,

01:37:07   I forget exactly what time it is, call it six o'clock.

01:37:09   Monday through Friday at six o'clock,

01:37:11   the little pedestal lamp comes on at like 50% brightness,

01:37:16   or pendant or whatever it's called, doesn't matter.

01:37:17   It comes on at like 50% brightness,

01:37:19   and this way she walks downstairs and she's not,

01:37:22   A, she's not blinded by full brightness LED light,

01:37:25   and B, there's a little bit of light already there for her

01:37:28   so she's not bumping into things.

01:37:29   And that is very silly.

01:37:32   I'll be the first to tell you it's silly,

01:37:33   but it's actually a kind of nice quality of life

01:37:36   improvement because it's just something that automatically happens that that makes your life just a teensy bit better a big deal

01:37:43   No, but convenient nevertheless. Yeah, and I would also say like, you know

01:37:48   The the value in just having voice control or or home kick control for a lot of the stuff is pretty significant

01:37:56   So for instance like every night I walk around to like turn off these two lamps in our living room that you know

01:38:02   We turn these lamps on when we're hanging out there at night and then every night when we go to bed

01:38:05   I walk around and I turn these lamps off

01:38:07   and I lock the door and you know,

01:38:08   you do these things like, you know,

01:38:09   these routines are part of your life.

01:38:11   Well, if you can just trigger a scene

01:38:14   or use an electric command or whatever

01:38:17   to say goodnight or turn everything off,

01:38:20   turn off living room, whatever it is,

01:38:22   you can save yourself from walking around the room

01:38:25   and that saves you, you know, 15 seconds every day for,

01:38:30   you know, indefinitely into the future.

01:38:31   So, you know, the very first time you set it up,

01:38:33   you're gonna feel like, well, is this really worth it?

01:38:35   But after a while, that really adds up.

01:38:37   So again, if the barrier to entry is not too bad for you,

01:38:41   and if it doesn't require ongoing fiddling,

01:38:43   that can be very valuable.

01:38:45   Another thing, like right now on my desk,

01:38:48   I have three Lutron Caseta Pico switches,

01:38:50   which are little wireless switches,

01:38:51   I'm just talking, so these three little wireless switches,

01:38:54   they control the two banks of lights in the room,

01:38:57   and the heated rug.

01:38:59   They're just little wireless battery-powered things

01:39:01   on my desk that control other Lutron Caseta products,

01:39:03   like the switches that are by the door of the room,

01:39:06   which is not within reach as I'm sitting here podcasting,

01:39:09   and the rug, which is down under my desk

01:39:11   on a smart switch down there

01:39:13   that's also temperature controlled.

01:39:14   So I was just sitting here, and as we were podcasting,

01:39:18   my feet were getting cold.

01:39:19   So I turned the rug on,

01:39:20   and I didn't have to get up out of the chair,

01:39:21   I didn't have to take my headphones off,

01:39:23   and I didn't have to do a whole thing.

01:39:24   It's great.

01:39:25   I can also, if I'm in the middle of a show,

01:39:28   and I'm too hot or too cold,

01:39:31   I can open up the Home app,

01:39:32   but I can change my thermostat from here,

01:39:34   from my computer or from my phone or from anywhere.

01:39:36   So that's another thing, smart thermostats,

01:39:38   which also James asked about, are amazing.

01:39:41   Like if you only Smartify one thing in your house,

01:39:44   make it smart thermostats.

01:39:45   And it's not because you can like use their

01:39:49   automatic learning behaviors, no those are crap,

01:39:51   it's just so you can control it remotely.

01:39:53   And that's incredibly nice.

01:39:55   So not only can you control it from within your house,

01:39:59   like I was doing a workout, I had to do these FaceTime

01:40:02   workouts, and I was doing a workout with my trainer,

01:40:04   and I was getting a little hot, and I realized,

01:40:07   oh, I forgot to turn the heat down.

01:40:08   And so I just raised my wrist and told my watch,

01:40:13   turn off downstairs heat, and it worked.

01:40:16   That kind of stuff is amazing.

01:40:17   As I mentioned, it's great when you're just at your desk,

01:40:19   you don't want to or can't easily get up,

01:40:21   you can adjust it there.

01:40:23   Or if you are out on a trip or something,

01:40:25   suppose you went to visit your family for a holiday,

01:40:28   You could be gone for a few days, you turn the heat down.

01:40:31   Well, when you're coming back,

01:40:33   you can turn the heat back up a couple hours

01:40:36   before you actually get home,

01:40:37   so your house is not freezing when you get home.

01:40:39   Or if you leave for a trip and forgot to turn the heat down,

01:40:42   you can go do that when you're on the trip.

01:40:44   So stuff like that, there are high value things like that.

01:40:48   And then also there is just kind of the,

01:40:50   those little everyday conveniences of

01:40:53   I don't have to walk around

01:40:54   and turn off two or three lamps anymore,

01:40:55   I can just do it all from one button or one command,

01:40:57   and that's it.

01:40:58   or you can automate things with sunset or motion

01:41:01   or whatever else, so there's that kind of value.

01:41:03   So you don't have to automate or smarten everything

01:41:06   in your house, every light switch, that's overkill.

01:41:08   But to do them in certain places where you have

01:41:11   potential high value really can be worth it.

01:41:15   - The thing that got me over the edge of getting this,

01:41:17   'cause I don't really want most of the smart stuff,

01:41:20   is that I have an older house and I don't have

01:41:23   the luxury of having as many outlets,

01:41:27   in particular not as many switch controlled outlets.

01:41:29   So basically in our main living room,

01:41:31   the lights that are in there,

01:41:33   two out of the three main areas of lights

01:41:38   aren't controlled by any wall switches.

01:41:40   You have to walk up to the lamp and turn it on

01:41:42   with a switch on the lamp itself.

01:41:44   And they're kind of in the corners of the room.

01:41:46   And every time we go into the room,

01:41:49   we gotta walk all the way to one side of the room,

01:41:51   turn on the lamp, walk to the other side of the room,

01:41:53   turn on the lamp, and then there's a switch

01:41:55   the third one that's on another wall right and it doesn't seem like a lot but it's kind

01:42:00   of annoying and it just it got it was got tiresome for me or even if you're just on

01:42:04   the couch and you want to turn one or both the lights off when you're watching you gotta

01:42:06   get up off the couch you gotta walk over the corner of the room turn the light off walk

01:42:09   over you know and yeah you could rewire the house and put those things on a switch or

01:42:12   whatever but also you can just use one of the smart outlet things and so now i don't

01:42:16   have to do that i can yell into the air i can do it on my phone they are automated to

01:42:19   turn off at night when we're in bed so if we go upstairs and people forgot to turn the

01:42:23   They'll turn themselves off.

01:42:25   Like that seems like a small thing.

01:42:27   Oh, you don't want to walk an extra 10 feet

01:42:28   to turn off a light, but that kind of little thing,

01:42:31   like, you know, multiply it over how many times per day

01:42:35   that I turn those lights on and off.

01:42:37   I mean, it's at least once turning them on,

01:42:39   at least once turning them off and usually more

01:42:40   because you probably want to, you know,

01:42:42   turn them off when you're not in the house.

01:42:44   It's pretty convenient.

01:42:45   And the cost of it was small,

01:42:47   like one of the little smart outlet things.

01:42:49   There's some initials, you know,

01:42:50   set up to buy the little thingy,

01:42:51   I think the first one I got was like 50 bucks

01:42:53   and had two outlets on it and it integrated

01:42:55   with every single one of these services and it was fine.

01:42:58   As for Lutron specifically,

01:42:59   I recently bought one of their things.

01:43:01   And the smart hub, like I think that's what you need

01:43:06   to sort of start having a Lutron thing.

01:43:08   - Yeah, it is hub based.

01:43:09   They're not Wi-Fi and it's actually is a very good thing.

01:43:13   They use their own RF protocol

01:43:16   that uses the same frequencies as wireless microphones,

01:43:20   roughly, and so it's this part of the frequency spectrum

01:43:24   that is very reliable, goes through houses and walls

01:43:28   very well and very easily, has great range,

01:43:30   has pretty much no interference,

01:43:33   and their protocol is such that,

01:43:35   it's kinda like what Matter's trying to do now,

01:43:37   but their protocol is such that their devices

01:43:39   all talk to each other, and there is a hub

01:43:43   for them to interact with the rest of your WiFi network

01:43:46   and the internet, but the hub is not required for operation,

01:43:48   like for the devices to talk to each other.

01:43:51   So like if you have like, in my bike area downstairs,

01:43:55   where we pull our bikes in at night,

01:43:57   I have a motion light setup,

01:43:58   where I have a Lutron motion sensor,

01:44:01   and maybe 10 feet away,

01:44:04   I have a Casada smart switch in the wall.

01:44:07   And I have a setup so that that motion sensor

01:44:09   triggers the lights to turn on when it detects motion.

01:44:11   So we pull our bikes in under the house,

01:44:13   and bing, lights turn on so we can see what we're doing.

01:44:15   It's super fast, and the reason, and it's super reliable.

01:44:18   And the reason is because when the motion sensor

01:44:22   detects motion, it doesn't have to relay the signal

01:44:25   through the hub to then have the hub

01:44:27   tell the light turn on.

01:44:29   Instead, when you set it up, it programs it

01:44:31   such that the motion sensor talks directly to the switch

01:44:35   and doesn't relay through the hub.

01:44:37   So the devices can talk to themselves directly

01:44:40   when necessary and that dramatically improves

01:44:42   performance and reliability.

01:44:44   - Yeah, I was kind of surprised when I was setting up

01:44:45   the hub, although if you think about it, it makes sense.

01:44:49   The hub doesn't connect with Wi-Fi.

01:44:50   It's Ethernet, which I guess is another reliability thing,

01:44:53   because one of the things that tends to be flaky

01:44:54   with home automation stuff is, surprisingly,

01:44:56   they fall off your Wi-Fi network.

01:44:57   I don't know why they do, but it's the thing that happens.

01:45:00   I don't know, they get confused if Wi-Fi inherently

01:45:02   is not a type of protocol,

01:45:04   where you're gonna have a device that's constantly connected

01:45:05   to your Wi-Fi for years at a time.

01:45:07   But yeah, the Smart Hub plugs into Ethernet only,

01:45:10   which is not a problem for me,

01:45:11   'cause I have Ethernet in lots of places.

01:45:12   But one complaint about this is that Smart Hub,

01:45:15   it has like a strip of LED light up thing around it,

01:45:20   and you can't turn that light off.

01:45:21   So I had to put a piece of black tape

01:45:23   around the entire Smart Hub,

01:45:25   just so I wouldn't see a stupid light glowing at me

01:45:27   from behind the TV.

01:45:28   'Cause I put it behind the TV,

01:45:29   I have ethernet to the TV area.

01:45:30   It's very small, it plugs into ethernet and power,

01:45:34   that's it, and it's not a complicated thing,

01:45:37   but it has a light that you can't turn off.

01:45:38   It's another thing that Eero gets right, by the way.

01:45:40   This is just the time

01:45:41   where we talk about all our past sponsors.

01:45:42   Eros has lights on all their hub things,

01:45:45   but you can turn off the lights.

01:45:46   So the Ero that's upstairs doesn't have light on

01:45:49   'cause I don't want a light shining

01:45:50   that is visible from our bedroom, right?

01:45:52   So, yeah.

01:45:53   Lutron, you gotta let people turn off that light.

01:45:55   Like, it's no point.

01:45:56   I'm hoping I'm not making a thing overheat,

01:45:58   what if I put tape around it,

01:45:59   but I'm not blocking any events or anything.

01:46:00   But anyway, yeah.

01:46:02   I think the utility of smart home stuff is undeniable.

01:46:07   It's just a question of not overdoing it

01:46:09   because you do have to have that balance.

01:46:11   how annoying is this versus how much benefit do I have?

01:46:14   And that's why we tend to like the things that, you know,

01:46:17   don't require you to teach people who enter your home

01:46:20   how to operate your home.

01:46:22   You don't know, have to know anything about smart home

01:46:24   to press a switch on a wall.

01:46:25   Even if it's like I said earlier,

01:46:27   like there's the Lutron switch that's on the wall.

01:46:30   It's not actually a switch.

01:46:31   It's just one of those little remotes

01:46:32   that Marco was talking about stuck to your wall.

01:46:34   It's literally all it is.

01:46:35   Behind it is just your wall.

01:46:36   It doesn't do anything, right?

01:46:37   But it fools people who don't know anything

01:46:39   about home automation and think,

01:46:40   "Oh, that's a switch, 'cause I see a switch plate,

01:46:42   and I see a thing that looks like a switch,

01:46:43   and it's got a light bulb on it,

01:46:44   and I press it, and the lights turn on."

01:46:46   That's all anyone needs to know.

01:46:47   They don't have to know that you can talk into the air

01:46:49   and let the lights turn on, but you can.

01:46:51   - Yep, and I think that just to put a period

01:46:55   on the end of this whole topic,

01:46:56   the thing with Lutron that's so great,

01:46:57   and this isn't unique to Lutron,

01:46:59   but they do the best at it that I've seen,

01:47:01   is that they're physical, traditional switches first,

01:47:04   and smart switches second.

01:47:05   So you don't have to have the hub on and active and whatnot

01:47:09   in order to turn your lights on and off.

01:47:11   If you don't have an internet connection,

01:47:13   your lights will still work

01:47:14   because these are traditional light switches first

01:47:18   that just so happen to be able to communicate via RF

01:47:20   to smart stuff elsewhere in your house.

01:47:23   So I think that's very important.

01:47:25   Gentlemen, if you wouldn't mind, I've put a link in Slack.

01:47:29   Can we all go to this website?

01:47:31   Because apparently we're going to figure out,

01:47:33   because Mark Richard wants to know,

01:47:35   which of the three of us is the fastest typist?

01:47:38   - Oh no.

01:47:38   I already did this because I put this in the show.

01:47:41   Well, I didn't do it.

01:47:42   Oh, this website's stinky.

01:47:43   How do I know?

01:47:44   I was trying to find the classic one that is better than this.

01:47:47   It's telling me I'm ready.

01:47:48   I don't want to race yet.

01:47:49   Don't want to race yet.

01:47:51   All these guys are doing this.

01:47:52   The chat room, do you remember the good type racing game

01:47:56   that used to be on the internet?

01:47:57   It was a web page.

01:47:58   And you'd go in, and it would say, ready, go.

01:48:00   And it would show you a bunch of text.

01:48:01   And you'd have to type it exactly as it appeared.

01:48:03   And it wouldn't let you keep typing if you made a mistake.

01:48:06   There's a million of those sites now,

01:48:08   and all of them are just scummed up with ads and scams,

01:48:11   and just like, they're all ugly and not fun.

01:48:14   And I tried to find one that was tolerable,

01:48:17   that more or less did what I wanted it to do,

01:48:19   but I don't, you know.

01:48:20   - Yeah, we're playing Type Racer.

01:48:23   It's not, this is a terrible site.

01:48:25   - Yeah, it really is.

01:48:26   I think I got 85 words per minute.

01:48:27   It already cleared itself.

01:48:28   - Oh yeah, mine cleared too.

01:48:29   Well, you beat me slightly.

01:48:31   - I think it was 85 and 81.

01:48:33   - I don't know.

01:48:34   Anyway, it doesn't matter.

01:48:34   I'll tell you, the fastest typist is Jon, probably.

01:48:37   - Yeah. - It's like--

01:48:38   - Why would you say that?

01:48:39   I'm a terrible typist.

01:48:40   - So what was your speed then?

01:48:42   - Well, you guys just played, so tell us what you got.

01:48:45   - I said 85 for me and 81 for Marco, I'm pretty sure,

01:48:47   with like 96% accuracy for me,

01:48:49   and I don't think Marco looked.

01:48:50   - Yeah, 'cause I like hit one wrong letter at the beginning

01:48:53   and I kept typing ahead of it,

01:48:54   thinking it would just not matter, and it totally mattered,

01:48:57   and then I had to backspace all the way back.

01:48:59   Like, so it was just--

01:48:59   - Oh, you can take a second run

01:49:01   if you feel like your first one was messed up

01:49:03   'cause you were just in the game, but--

01:49:04   - To me, who's the fastest typer?

01:49:08   Like, eh, I don't really care.

01:49:09   It's probably Jon, and I don't care.

01:49:10   - So what did you get, Jon?

01:49:11   - I don't know why you would think it would be.

01:49:12   Have you ever seen, you've seen me type.

01:49:14   I'm a terrible typist.

01:49:15   I don't type the right way.

01:49:16   I am, I mean, I'm a touch typist

01:49:20   in that I don't have to look at my fingers most of the time,

01:49:22   but I'm not a touch typist in that I do not type

01:49:25   the way you're supposed to type if you're a touch typist.

01:49:26   I don't use all my fingers.

01:49:28   I don't do it right.

01:49:29   That's why I'm such a slow typist.

01:49:32   I'm a weird typist.

01:49:33   The one I can most relate to is Matt Panzorino of TechCrunch.

01:49:36   When I first met him, we were sitting next to each other,

01:49:39   WODC, and I noticed that he typed the same way I did,

01:49:41   which is the wrong way, using not enough fingers

01:49:45   on all the wrong keys.

01:49:46   And I was like, hey, we're typing buddies.

01:49:48   We both type, and it's totally messed up.

01:49:51   If you're watching me do it,

01:49:52   it's like the least efficient thing.

01:49:54   For touch typing, there's fingers assigned to each key.

01:49:59   If you look at the key in the keyboard and you say,

01:50:00   what finger should I use to hit that key?

01:50:02   Maybe in some cases there's debate where you could maybe use one or two different fingers

01:50:05   I use all the wrong fingers for all the wrong keys and lots of my fingers are doing nothing. So

01:50:10   I'm a terrible typist, but based on this brief run on typewraiser here. We're kind of all in the same ballpark

01:50:17   I got 84 words per minute at 97.6% accuracy and that was just on my first run

01:50:22   I did not like do multiple runs to try to get better

01:50:24   I'm sure I could go faster and I'm sure I could also do worse

01:50:27   So we all seem to be in the mid 80s on this test and this test I think was pretty easy because it didn't

01:50:31   give you lots of weird words. So a lot of it is just us activating macros, where we,

01:50:36   you know, our brains have macros for the common English words. You don't have to think about

01:50:40   typing letters. Whereas if it was a bunch of proper nouns of cities we'd never heard

01:50:43   of, we'd be like transcribing them a letter at a time. And that would really reveal how

01:50:46   crappy we are. But none of us are particularly fast typists in the grand scheme of things,

01:50:50   because if any of us actually touch typed, we'd be going much faster.

01:50:54   I do. Do you do it right with the right fingers

01:50:57   on the right keys? I think for the most part, the only thing is

01:50:59   I will say that I only ever use my right thumb for spacebar and I only ever use the left shift key

01:51:04   Which is not correct other than that though. I think I pretty much use the right fingers in the right spot

01:51:08   You should take a recording with the center stage camera of like the look down at your desk

01:51:13   What is that feature called like the thing where it looks down at your desk? Yeah, like desk view or something

01:51:16   Yeah, why are you not so much faster?

01:51:18   I'm doing 84 words per minute using using three fingers. Let me try again then good grief. All right, you know what I'll do

01:51:25   Let's do it again. I'm gonna do it

01:51:28   - So while you erase yourself,

01:51:29   so I will answer Mark Rachard's second part of the question,

01:51:31   which was, how much typing do you feel you do

01:51:34   while writing code, particularly when using an IDE

01:51:36   with autocomplete, et cetera?

01:51:37   So for me, I do not that much typing when writing code

01:51:42   because most of writing code is not limited

01:51:45   by your typing speed, it's limited by your thinking speed

01:51:48   and your debugging speed later.

01:51:51   So that's not, where I do a lot of typing

01:51:53   is server administration, because that's,

01:51:56   If I have to type in different repetitive commands

01:52:01   or if I'm typing in SQL queries to try to figure out

01:52:04   what's going on with my database or whatever else,

01:52:06   that's where I do a large volume of repetitive typing.

01:52:10   But for actual code writing, it really isn't that much

01:52:14   because I'm not actually writing that many lines of code

01:52:17   per minute or whatever.

01:52:19   - Yeah, part of the reason my weird typing

01:52:22   isn't that much of a problem for programming

01:52:26   because part of it is you're not really typing much,

01:52:27   but also I think typing speed is important to programming,

01:52:31   but in a weird way, like in your iteration speed,

01:52:34   'cause what you're typing in your programming is not prose.

01:52:37   It's lots of square brackets and curly braces and hyphens

01:52:41   and greater than and less than signs

01:52:42   and dollar signs and at signs if you're in Perl.

01:52:45   It's weird characters that are not in convenient places

01:52:48   in the keyboard.

01:52:49   So my totally wrong typing doesn't impair me there,

01:52:53   but I can type those program reconsticts really fast.

01:52:56   And where it helps in terms of iteration is,

01:52:58   if you're trying to do a thing,

01:53:00   especially if you're an experienced programmer

01:53:01   and you're working in a language that you know,

01:53:03   you're like, I should do it like this.

01:53:05   No, maybe I should do it like that.

01:53:06   Maybe I should do it like that.

01:53:06   And you're working in just like a little,

01:53:07   like a little, you know, not a paragraph,

01:53:09   but a little, you know, five, 10, 15 lines of code,

01:53:12   and you're having different ideas

01:53:13   about how you should do things.

01:53:15   Even if you're just half the times

01:53:16   you're hammering on the autocomplete, you know,

01:53:18   like tab return, whatever the autocomplete thing,

01:53:20   and riding, sort of riding the auto-complete in your IDE,

01:53:24   to quickly be able to say, I'm gonna do a loop like this.

01:53:26   Oh, I need a variable here.

01:53:27   Oh, I need a property here.

01:53:28   Oh, I need a thing like that.

01:53:29   Oh, I need to navigate my IDE up here to put this property,

01:53:31   and I'm gonna come back in.

01:53:32   If you're an experienced programmer,

01:53:33   and you're doing something fairly trivial,

01:53:35   you know what you wanna type,

01:53:36   and your brain absolutely can outrun your fingers,

01:53:39   'cause you're like, okay, I need this property,

01:53:40   I need this for loop, I need this thing over here,

01:53:42   I need to call this method, I need to make this new method,

01:53:44   I need to make this new class.

01:53:46   If you're good with your tools,

01:53:48   your brain can go faster than your fingers,

01:53:49   and that's where being a fast typist helps.

01:53:51   It's not like you're doing that sustained.

01:53:52   You do that in tiny little bursts

01:53:54   over the course of an hour

01:53:55   of you banging your head against the wall

01:53:56   trying to figure out why someone doesn't work, right?

01:53:57   Like that's programming, right?

01:53:59   But for those little bursts,

01:54:00   it is nice to be able to close the gap

01:54:04   between your brain and your fingers.

01:54:05   When you're a beginner, there is no gap

01:54:08   because you don't even know what you have to type yet.

01:54:11   But eventually, as you gain experience as a programmer,

01:54:14   you do repetitive things.

01:54:16   You get familiar with the API,

01:54:17   you get familiar with your tools,

01:54:19   And it's nice to make that connection faster,

01:54:22   because then it lets you have the thought

01:54:24   and have the code for it appear

01:54:26   so you can get to your next thought.

01:54:28   So you don't waste any time sort of waiting

01:54:30   for the curly braces to fall out of your fingertips.

01:54:33   - All right, real time follow up,

01:54:33   I've raced the chat room a couple of times.

01:54:35   I got 100 words per minute the first time,

01:54:37   97 words per minute just now,

01:54:39   accuracy hovering at between 97 and 98%.

01:54:42   - Yes, I think you're probably the fastest one,

01:54:43   unless Marco makes another run.

01:54:44   But I honestly, I don't think I could do much better

01:54:46   than 80, 90.

01:54:47   I doubt I could crack a hundred.

01:54:49   Whereas like Jason Snell, what is he at like 120, 130,

01:54:52   like accurate, you know, he's an actual real typist.

01:54:55   - Yeah, he is bananas fast.

01:54:58   - Yeah.

01:54:59   - All right, then finally, Brian Hamilton writes,

01:55:00   "Home screen widgets are still just app launchers

01:55:02   without any real interactivity.

01:55:04   Why hasn't Apple okayed buttons yet?

01:55:06   What makes the dynamic island and live activities

01:55:08   use less power than a full pcal calculator widget

01:55:11   or more interactive overcast widget?"

01:55:14   I think a lot of this is because of the tech

01:55:16   they use to do it. To the best of my knowledge, they serialize the SwiftUI view. And so basically

01:55:24   they it's not exactly a snapshot, but for the purposes of this discussion, they take

01:55:28   a snapshot of a SwiftUI view, right like, oh, here's what you need in order to reconstruct

01:55:34   this to kind of deserialize it later. Here's what we'll need. And then they just compute

01:55:41   it once, put it on screen, it stays static. If they have to recompute this constantly,

01:55:45   that's incredible. I shouldn't say it's incredible battery drain, but when you're operating at

01:55:50   Apple's level, every little teeny, teeny, tiny bit counts. And I have a few engineers

01:55:54   that work on some of this stuff. And it's fascinating listening to them talk about perf.

01:55:59   Everything is about perf, which is performance. And I forget what they call, like, how battery-efficient

01:56:05   things are, but I think they have a funny term for that as well. But anyway, the point

01:56:09   is that having something that's interactive, you know, suddenly you're causing far more

01:56:15   battery drain than you would otherwise.

01:56:17   Not to mention that this whole serialization dance

01:56:19   of the SwiftUI views doesn't,

01:56:21   I don't think it really lends itself well to interactivity

01:56:25   because then you're talking about more than just

01:56:27   a static view, you're talking about logic

01:56:29   and what do you do when it's interacted with

01:56:31   and so on and so forth.

01:56:32   It is a bit of a bummer, like I wish that these things

01:56:34   were interactive, but I do understand from a technical

01:56:37   perspective why it isn't the case.

01:56:40   I don't know if you two have any other

01:56:41   further thoughts on this.

01:56:42   - Yeah, the actual thing I'll add, and it gets even more

01:56:43   technically esoteric here but to understand that to have interaction and

01:56:47   I think they eventually will but like the reason they've been holding off so

01:56:50   far is actually more complicated problem than you think to have any kind of

01:56:53   interaction on the phone or anywhere in a GUI you need an event loop right and

01:56:57   that event loop needs to send events to code that's going to process those

01:57:01   events and there is an event loop on all the screens that's how it catches your

01:57:04   swipes and your taps and all your other things but remember what you're asking

01:57:07   is hey Apple on this screen that you control the lock screen or the control

01:57:12   or whatever, you know, wherever you want it to be, widgets.

01:57:15   That's not a third-party app. That's an Apple app.

01:57:17   Springboard is an Apple app.

01:57:19   Whatever the heck runs all that stuff, like, that's Apple apps.

01:57:21   And you're saying you want third-party code

01:57:23   to participate in processing of events

01:57:26   from the event loop on those things?

01:57:27   How do you get the third-party code

01:57:29   to process events coming from Apple's app?

01:57:32   Well, there's a million ways to do that.

01:57:33   You can do it with XPC. You can do it with the plugin architecture.

01:57:35   You can do it with all sorts of things.

01:57:37   But that is, all of a sudden, way, way more complicated

01:57:39   than the data-driven approach of,

01:57:41   of, "Hey, third-party app, give me a Swift view setup,"

01:57:45   which you can think of as data and not code, right?

01:57:48   And then the event loop that runs those screens

01:57:51   does not need to send events to third-party code

01:57:54   that can then do whatever the heck it wants.

01:57:56   Forget about power usage. Forget about, like,

01:57:58   "Oh, I'm afraid I'm going to send a tap event

01:58:00   to third-party code, and it's going to go

01:58:01   into an infinite loop and drain the battery

01:58:02   and freeze the screen," which is a problem

01:58:04   and difficult to defend against.

01:58:05   But setting that aside, once you allow third-party code

01:58:10   to run within the context of, you know, the home screen or the lock screen, even if it's

01:58:16   an external service and you're using XPC, the cross-process communication to do it,

01:58:20   you've now let third parties into your application in a way that they can impact reliability

01:58:27   and functionality of your app.

01:58:29   And doing that has to have a big enough trade-off that you're willing to build the infrastructure

01:58:34   required to protect Springboard, to protect Control Center from the third-party bugs,

01:58:41   right? You got enough of your own bugs that are screwing things up, right? And so I think that

01:58:45   has mostly been the barrier is like to do this right we can't just sort of load you as a plug-in

01:58:50   or load you as an external process and funnel events to you because both of those things have

01:58:55   yes, you know, battery life concerns and stuff like that but security concerns and reliability

01:59:01   concerns. And so it seems just like, well, you've got this stuff, just let me tap on

01:59:05   it. The just let me tap on it is sort of the success of the user mental model of a

01:59:11   GUI is like, oh, it's just a button and I press it. But under the covers, the actual

01:59:14   machinery of accepting events, processing them and handing them off to code and who

01:59:18   wrote that code and where it came from and how they all run the same process, how they

01:59:22   can affect each other is things users don't have to worry about. But programmers and platform

01:59:26   owners do and it is actually slightly more thorny than you think. All that said, I think

01:59:31   it's going to come eventually. It's a useful thing. They're going to make it happen. But

01:59:35   it is, it's definitely not a 1.0 type thing. And I think it's going to be a while before

01:59:41   they get around to tackling that task in a way that they feel comfortable with.

01:59:45   So I think it's actually more fundamental than that. I mean, you know, you're right,

01:59:49   those are complexities that have to deal with, but you know, they have ways to deal with

01:59:51   and I think it would be fine overall.

01:59:54   The bigger problem is that the way that widgets work on iOS,

01:59:59   the apps that you're seeing the widgets for are not running.

02:00:02   That's very important to realize.

02:00:06   That what you're seeing, like what Casey was saying,

02:00:08   they wake up a part of your app,

02:00:10   an extension of your app every so often,

02:00:14   and they allow it to run for a brief few seconds

02:00:18   of background time to give them a timeline of new views

02:00:22   to say, all right, at this time, show this view,

02:00:24   and then at this time, change it to this,

02:00:26   and at this time, change it to this.

02:00:28   And they'll wake you up every so often in the background,

02:00:30   they'll wake up your extension,

02:00:31   and you have a few more seconds to generate

02:00:34   the next set of those timeline snapshots.

02:00:37   So what you're looking at with widgets

02:00:39   is things that the app rendered at some point in the past.

02:00:43   It could be a few minutes ago, it could be a few hours ago.

02:00:47   That way, if you have a screen that has six widgets on it,

02:00:50   you don't have to keep six apps running

02:00:52   because that would be a much more significant drain

02:00:56   on battery and performance and everything else.

02:00:58   So what you're looking at with a widget

02:01:01   is not anything that the app has live access to.

02:01:06   Now, that's a little bit different with live activities.

02:01:08   They have more access, but it's still,

02:01:10   in general, the way the widget system works

02:01:12   is like the app can't really do much live in that widget.

02:01:17   It can simply provide the system with a timeline

02:01:21   of snapshots to show at certain times

02:01:23   and the app gets woken up periodically to update those.

02:01:26   And overall, again, this is kind of, you know,

02:01:28   the reason why iOS is generally more power

02:01:32   and memory efficient than macOS or Windows or Linux

02:01:36   is because it has these very aggressive

02:01:39   app lifecycle management things happening

02:01:41   in the background where you think you're running

02:01:43   a bunch of apps but you're really not.

02:01:44   You're really running like one or two apps

02:01:46   at a time on iOS really.

02:01:48   And so anyway, so changing, making widgets more interactive

02:01:52   would basically require that those apps were running

02:01:56   and ready to respond to your touches and respond

02:02:00   dynamically and possibly run animations or whatever else.

02:02:02   And so it's a totally different life cycle of the apps.

02:02:06   That's a much, much greater thing.

02:02:08   Like right now, the little bit of activity

02:02:10   or the little bit of interactivity you have with widgets

02:02:13   is you can basically define rectangles and say,

02:02:16   all right, when this rectangle is tapped,

02:02:18   open this URL in the main app.

02:02:21   And so it's much more of a launcher kind of response

02:02:26   than a live interaction kind of response.

02:02:28   - And it's data driven, you just give them data.

02:02:30   You give them the regions, you give them the URL,

02:02:32   you can see how the data, it just gets all the data.

02:02:35   And to do this the right way and the way that is efficient,

02:02:38   you wouldn't actually run all six apps for such widgets.

02:02:40   You'd come up with some kind of approach

02:02:42   where you make that more efficient,

02:02:44   whether it's a single sort of firewalled off place

02:02:48   where all the third party ones run in a single process

02:02:50   where they load all this stuff,

02:02:51   or it could even just be more data-driven approach

02:02:54   where you still don't get to write arbitrary code,

02:02:57   but you can provide more data

02:02:59   than just this region in this URL.

02:03:01   You could provide a slightly richer format

02:03:05   of what you want to happen.

02:03:07   All the way up to and including, like I said,

02:03:09   a single process that runs all the widgets.

02:03:12   And when that process crashes,

02:03:13   it takes out all the third-party widgets,

02:03:14   but it doesn't affect Apple stuff, right?

02:03:15   And then you get to load some small,

02:03:18   extremely constrained amount of code into there,

02:03:21   and there's memory limits,

02:03:22   and there's something watching it

02:03:23   to make sure it doesn't spin the CPU.

02:03:24   Like, it's a pain to do,

02:03:25   'cause you have to sort of cordon them off

02:03:27   and confine them and separate them from the Apple code,

02:03:30   and you can't run, like, you can't have,

02:03:32   say, oh, you can have 24 widgets,

02:03:33   and then we'll run 24 actual processes

02:03:35   and do XPC to them.

02:03:36   That's not good either, right?

02:03:37   So it's not impossible.

02:03:39   You can do it, but it's just doing it right.

02:03:41   It's kind of like doing stuff with the web.

02:03:42   Like all the stuff that I'm talking about

02:03:43   has happened within web browsers,

02:03:45   'cause web browsers have a whole bunch of code

02:03:46   all running in one big stew,

02:03:47   and how do we protect the user and the browser

02:03:50   and the OS from that big stew?

02:03:52   And the answer is Safari and WebKit

02:03:54   have been broken off into these little islands

02:03:56   of limited functionality that communicate with each other,

02:03:58   but there's only one of them.

02:03:59   There's not, well, it gets multiplied

02:04:01   by the number of web pages, but still.

02:04:02   It's not like they have a separate process running

02:04:05   for every single GIF animation on a webpage, right?

02:04:10   There's some engine that runs all the image decoding

02:04:13   and processing that's firewalled off from everything else,

02:04:15   but you don't have to have one for every image.

02:04:17   - Thanks to our sponsors this week,

02:04:18   Hover, Collide, and Memberful.

02:04:21   And thanks to our members who support us directly.

02:04:22   You can join at atp.fm/join.

02:04:25   We will talk to you next week.

02:04:28   ♪ Now the show is over ♪

02:04:33   They didn't even mean to begin, 'cause it was accidental.

02:04:37   (Accidental)

02:04:38   Oh, it was accidental.

02:04:40   (Accidental)

02:04:41   John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, 'cause it was accidental.

02:04:48   (Accidental)

02:04:49   It was accidental.

02:04:50   (Accidental)

02:04:51   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm.

02:04:55   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

02:05:06   So that's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

02:05:10   Auntie Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A

02:05:18   It's accidental (It's accidental)

02:05:21   ♪ They didn't mean to ♪

02:05:23   ♪ Accidental ♪

02:05:24   ♪ Accidental ♪

02:05:26   ♪ Tech podcast ♪

02:05:28   ♪ So long ♪

02:05:30   - I went to John's Pizza Place.

02:05:33   - Was it everything you dreamed of and more?

02:05:38   - So this is, so, you know, John being from,

02:05:41   but not currently residing in Long Island,

02:05:44   has of course his pizza place from when he was here

02:05:50   that he thinks is the best pizza place.

02:05:52   - Two of them, he went to one of them.

02:05:53   They're basically the same though, it's fine.

02:05:54   - Okay. (laughs)

02:05:55   And we've learned over the last couple of months

02:05:59   that not only have I never been to it,

02:06:02   but that I coincidentally constantly run errands

02:06:06   very close to it. (laughs)

02:06:08   Which has frustrated John to no end

02:06:10   that I have had the chance to go to this pizza place

02:06:13   many times and never had.

02:06:15   - Yeah, well we were talking after the show

02:06:17   like a month ago, and I was following along on Google Maps

02:06:22   as the two of them were discussing where things were

02:06:24   and what was going on, and we realized,

02:06:27   or Marco and I at least realized live,

02:06:30   as we're talking to each other,

02:06:31   although we were not broadcasting live at that point,

02:06:33   that oh my goodness, one of these pizza places,

02:06:36   like you said Marco, you're basically driving

02:06:37   directly by it all the time, and neither you nor I,

02:06:41   I mean obviously I wouldn't know,

02:06:42   but even you didn't have any idea.

02:06:44   - You both had an idea 'cause I pointed this out to you

02:06:46   multiple times in the past.

02:06:47   - Well, we ignored it the other time.

02:06:48   But once I realized it was like across the street

02:06:52   from the Whole Foods that I go to,

02:06:54   it's like, okay, that's pretty close.

02:06:57   So John said over and over again,

02:07:01   get the Sicilian, a corner piece preferred,

02:07:04   and get garlic knots.

02:07:05   And we sure enough, we decided to get a whole bunch

02:07:08   of stuff and kind of share it all, try it all.

02:07:11   And included in that whole bunch of stuff

02:07:12   was a couple of corner pieces of Sicilian

02:07:15   and a whole bunch of garlic knots

02:07:17   and a whole bunch of, you know,

02:07:18   maybe like three or four other slices.

02:07:19   - You got the Crispino too, right?

02:07:21   - Yeah, that little like thin square thing.

02:07:24   - Yeah, with like the fresh tomatoes on top of it.

02:07:26   - Yeah, yeah, it was like fresh tomatoes

02:07:27   and like, you know, a little red pepper

02:07:28   and fresh mozzarella.

02:07:30   So anyway,

02:07:31   I'm really annoyed

02:07:36   because it was really fricking good.

02:07:39   And I don't want Jon to be so right about it,

02:07:42   but dammit, he was right about it.

02:07:44   Like when we were first taking bites,

02:07:46   were like, huh, all right, this is decent, okay,

02:07:50   maybe it's not the best pizza I've ever had,

02:07:52   but it's pretty good, okay, and then like,

02:07:53   as we're going through, we're like,

02:07:54   you know, this is actually, this is really good.

02:07:56   Like, I hate to admit it, but like,

02:08:00   this is actually really good pizza.

02:08:01   Like, and I was like, I'm trying to think,

02:08:03   like, what pizza have I had that was better in certain ways?

02:08:06   I'm like, hmm, there's actually,

02:08:08   there's certain elements of this

02:08:10   that I actually like better than other pizza.

02:08:12   I'm like, hmm, I would maybe give it a nine.

02:08:16   Like, it was very, very good.

02:08:18   - Wow.

02:08:19   - And it's not fancy pizza.

02:08:21   It is utilitarian pizza, so it is not trying to be gourmet,

02:08:24   despite the Crispino being a little bit fancy or whatever.

02:08:26   It is very kind of, I'm not gonna say junk food pizza,

02:08:30   but it is like staple pizza,

02:08:32   'cause the type of pizza you can get all the time

02:08:34   and it's not good for you and it's greasy

02:08:36   and it's way too much bread

02:08:38   and you're probably gonna eat too much

02:08:40   and make yourself sick, but it's like, that's what it is.

02:08:41   And that's, that's, you know, it's not, I never say this is the best pizza.

02:08:45   For a different example, Casey's, you know, John's at Bleecker Street, undoubtedly better

02:08:49   pizza.

02:08:50   But this is the pizza that I grew up near, and this is a really good example of neighborhood

02:08:55   pizza.

02:08:56   And in particular, the Sicilian is junky in exactly the junky way that Casey loves, in

02:09:01   that it is just unapologetically a giant wad of dough with too much sauce and cheese on

02:09:07   it, and it's all greasy.

02:09:08   And that's exactly what I want for it.

02:09:10   Now that I have this pizza once every year at most, I'm probably down to once every 0.74

02:09:17   years or whatever, because I didn't go last time I was on an island.

02:09:21   That's the perfect frequency for me, and I'm just so glad that this place and the other

02:09:25   place that is sort of its sister restaurant that have the same pizza manage to still be

02:09:30   there so many years after.

02:09:32   So many things like when you're a kid and the restaurant closes down and they bulldoze

02:09:36   the whole thing and they build something else in its place and now everything is a whole

02:09:40   or whatever, this place looks very different,

02:09:44   but it's still there.

02:09:45   And apparently, I mean, I know for a fact,

02:09:47   'cause I've had it like, you know, two or three years ago,

02:09:50   last time I was there pre-COVID, still good pizza

02:09:53   and it still tastes like it did when I was a kid.

02:09:55   And I love that.

02:09:56   - Yeah, like, and the only thing I would suggest to you,

02:09:58   Jon, is that I actually don't think the Sicilian

02:10:01   was their best pizza.

02:10:02   I was extremely impressed with their white with spinach

02:10:07   and with their kind of margarita style slice,

02:10:10   where it's like kind of regular pizza,

02:10:12   but it's like the fresh mozzarella, you know.

02:10:14   - Sicilians, not for everybody, it is just my favorite.

02:10:17   But all their pizzas are good.

02:10:18   The white pizza, by the way, was very popular

02:10:21   with the high school students when I was growing up.

02:10:22   It was super popular, so it is a good slice.

02:10:25   - Yeah, but yeah, the margarita slice,

02:10:27   I think, was my favorite one.

02:10:29   But they were all, unfortunately, they were all really good,

02:10:31   and I hate to tell you that I think you were right,

02:10:33   but yeah, I think in this case.

02:10:35   - And garlic knots, it's hard to screw up.

02:10:37   It's just like dough and--

02:10:38   - No, no, no, it's very easy to screw up garlic knots.

02:10:41   Many places screw up, 'cause there's two,

02:10:44   I'd say three main ways you could screw up a garlic knot.

02:10:46   Number one, you could overcook it.

02:10:47   Number two, you could have way too much bread, you know,

02:10:52   as like the ratio could be way, way off.

02:10:56   And number three, I forgot how to count it,

02:10:58   I think it's just those two.

02:10:59   But anyway, so like, you can really mess it up

02:11:02   with just like sloppy ratios.

02:11:05   - Number three is you could drench it too much in oil,

02:11:07   Like it's just, you know, it's just like soggy.

02:11:10   - Yeah, maybe, but usually, when I've had bad ones,

02:11:12   they've either been burnt or they've been like

02:11:14   way too bready and like the ratios are off.

02:11:16   - No, I wouldn't, yeah, I'm not saying

02:11:17   that they're easy to get.

02:11:18   Like I'm saying in the New York metro area,

02:11:20   garlic nuts are hard to screw up.

02:11:21   Any place else in the country that don't even know

02:11:22   what garlic nuts are, don't, if you see them,

02:11:23   don't buy them 'cause they have no idea

02:11:25   what they're doing.

02:11:27   - Right, but yeah, I gotta say, man, that's,

02:11:30   I'm glad I don't live really close to this

02:11:32   because that would be a very bad thing for me

02:11:35   'cause I would go there a lot.

02:11:36   They do have like this. It's a pizza place, but they do have an attached sit-down restaurant, which also had some pretty okay dishes

02:11:42   But I have no idea what their menu is like anymore

02:11:44   And it was honestly was always a little bit of weird the weird thing about this

02:11:47   So this is this place called Emilio's will put a link to it Emilio's in Comac and the sister restaurant was branch and Ellie's

02:11:53   Which is right across the street from my high school

02:11:54   And that's obviously the one I went to way more often

02:11:56   But they were both basically equal distance from the house that I grew up on so we go

02:12:01   To both of them all the time and the restaurants could not be more different

02:12:05   There's like no shared item on the menus for the restaurant,

02:12:08   but the pizza is exactly the same.

02:12:10   And I don't know the history behind that.

02:12:12   I don't know, I don't even know if like one family

02:12:14   started the restaurant or two families did,

02:12:16   or are they just totally unrelated

02:12:18   and they copy each other's pizza, but I'm so glad that,

02:12:21   and that place still exists too.

02:12:22   I'm so glad both of these places are still there

02:12:24   and very jealous that you got to eat all that good pizza.

02:12:28   - I will say it was kind of funny, you know,

02:12:29   this place was a, it's a good like 45 minute drive for me.

02:12:34   And like going there to eat a whole bunch of bread,

02:12:38   like it's like a Sicilian and garlic knots.

02:12:40   Like just like, this is just a wad of bread basically.

02:12:43   - And cheese and oil.

02:12:44   - Yeah, to eat all that bread before having to drive

02:12:47   for 45 minutes was, you know,

02:12:49   it's a bit challenging of like a, you know,

02:12:51   stay awake situation, but it was worth it.

02:12:54   - Yeah, the other move that, so when I go to it,

02:12:56   I'm going from out east on the island.

02:12:58   So it's like, I'm driving for like two hours

02:12:59   to get to the island and then you drive it back.

02:13:01   And of course, by the time you get it back,

02:13:02   It's just stone cold, right?

02:13:04   Like the heat has been gone from it,

02:13:05   but this is the good thing about it,

02:13:06   especially the Sicilian.

02:13:08   It is great warmed up again in a toaster oven.

02:13:11   The next day or after two hours of driving,

02:13:14   just so, so good because it's so big,

02:13:17   it can handle being warmed up for 15 minutes

02:13:19   in like a 325 toaster oven on top of a piece of foil.

02:13:22   'Cause then the little bits that the edges

02:13:24   get all kind of like crispy or whatever,

02:13:26   by the time it's heated all the way through, so good.

02:13:28   Awesome leftover pizza, totally a different thing

02:13:30   leftover just you know regular Neapolitan pizza but god I need to I need to have some of that this

02:13:35   this next summer I need to make a trip out there it is so onerous though like because you know if

02:13:40   you're driving you know two hours in each direction through long island traffic to get pizza really

02:13:44   does make the experience less nice but you get to go at off hours and you're going to Whole Foods

02:13:48   anyway so you should always just pick up it you know an entire Sicilian pie throw it in the back

02:13:53   of your car and then like don't even bother eating that day just put it directly into the fridge

02:13:57   wrapped individual pieces in foil and then for that week whenever you want to

02:14:01   be super unhealthy you take a piece out in the foil and you unfold the foil the

02:14:05   foils already you know put it right on top of your toaster oven tray put it in

02:14:08   there for 15 minutes 325 you're good to go so first of all I love that you've

02:14:12   managed to take this easy thing and turn it into a whole bunch of pork but what's

02:14:17   work about that just eat the pizza at the pizza place yeah you said eat it and

02:14:22   then you can't move because you just have like 20 pounds of dough and sauce

02:14:25   - Well anyway, and I will say also though,

02:14:28   I did a couple times reheat pizza in my dumb steam toaster

02:14:33   and it's really very good at reheating pizza.

02:14:36   Like you would think a little bit of steam

02:14:38   would make it soggy, no.

02:14:40   It just softens the crust a little bit

02:14:42   so it doesn't get like that rock hard

02:14:44   reheated crust texture.

02:14:45   - If it's rock hard, you're overcooking it.

02:14:48   - I mean, Sicilian would be harder,

02:14:49   but I'm talking about like a regular pizza slice.

02:14:51   If you put a regular pizza slice in an oven

02:14:54   or a toaster oven to reheat,

02:14:56   you run a pretty significant chance

02:14:58   of the crush getting pretty hard.

02:15:00   And if you have a dumb steam toaster

02:15:03   and you can somehow cram a slice of pizza into it,

02:15:05   which it really doesn't fit gracefully in,

02:15:08   it's really good.

02:15:09   Like I strongly recommend it.

02:15:11   It's amazing.

02:15:12   - For the proponents of the skillet technique,

02:15:15   overrated, too fidgety, you're dirty a pan,

02:15:19   and the difference between doing it

02:15:20   in a toaster oven is not worth.

02:15:23   There are pros and cons of both approaches.

02:15:25   I would never choose the set of trade-offs

02:15:28   for the skillet heating up a pizza.

02:15:30   - I mean, frankly, the best way to eat pizza

02:15:32   is to just eat it fresh.

02:15:33   The second best way to eat pizza is cold.

02:15:36   - You and your cold pizza.

02:15:38   My wife is into the cold pizza.

02:15:39   I don't completely object to it, but I do not prefer it.

02:15:43   And I love reheated pizza,

02:15:45   like not as much as reheated lasagna,

02:15:46   which everyone knows is the best way,

02:15:48   literally the best way to have lasagna.

02:15:49   - Oh, facts.

02:15:51   - You can't have that fresh.

02:15:52   Yeah. Reheated pizza is, uh, is I love it. It's amazing.

02:15:56   Like part of the fun of getting pizza is to have the re it's different than the

02:15:59   fresh pizza. And I like the fresh pizza better, but I still like,

02:16:02   it's like Turkey leftovers. It's like the second version of the meal.

02:16:05   I'm glad you went on your pilgrimage.

02:16:07   This is making me want to like figure out a way to

02:16:12   have the three of us come together and do like Johnson bleaker and do

02:16:17   Emilio's and somehow make like a video or a podcast out of it or

02:16:21   something I don't know how but I don't want to see a star face on healthy food

02:16:25   oh I bet they do I want to stop my face but I don't think people need to watch

02:16:29   it it's a private it's a private time between me and my pizza my garlic nuts

02:16:35   (beep)