The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► Over the weekend, my coffee grinder broke.

00:00:03 ◼   ► - Oh. (laughs)

00:00:04 ◼   ► - And this is, I've never lost a coffee grinder before.

00:00:08 ◼   ► And I quickly realized this is a single point of failure

00:00:10 ◼   ► at my setup because I only have one.

00:00:14 ◼   ► I have never, I've never had any reason

00:00:16 ◼   ► to have a backup coffee grinder.

00:00:18 ◼   ► I have many different ways to brew coffee.

00:00:21 ◼   ► I have many different collections of coffee beans.

00:00:25 ◼   ► I have redundancy everywhere else in the system.

00:00:27 ◼   ► But the grinder is a single point of failure.

00:00:29 ◼   ► And after 12 years of solid use,

00:00:34 ◼   ► including the last six years

00:00:35 ◼   ► in a highly corrosive saltwater air environment,

00:00:38 ◼   ► it finally kicked the bucket.

00:00:40 ◼   ► - And I believe it's the same grinder I have,

00:00:43 ◼   ► the Baratza Virtuosia.

00:00:49 ◼   ► I just like every single piece of equipment

00:00:52 ◼   ► I'm using to record this podcast,

00:00:55 ◼   ► I just said, "What should I buy, Marco?"

00:00:57 ◼   ► And I bought it.

00:00:58 ◼   ► and I have the same coffee grinder, which I still love.

00:01:02 ◼   ► I don't know what I, you know.

00:01:05 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:01:05 ◼   ► - I've got more local options.

00:01:06 ◼   ► - And there's nothing against them,

00:01:07 ◼   ► 'cause I mean, look, it lasted 12 years,

00:01:09 ◼   ► and you know, again, like the last six

00:01:10 ◼   ► were in a pretty harsh environment

00:01:12 ◼   ► for any kind of electronic thing made of metal,

00:01:15 ◼   ► so I give it full credit, and nothing against them.

00:01:19 ◼   ► But now, see, they don't make this model anymore.

00:01:20 ◼   ► They make a few that are kinda different,

00:01:23 ◼   ► and I don't know, like, they're different in ways

00:01:25 ◼   ► that I'm not sure would be better for me,

00:01:27 ◼   ► So I actually ordered, so first of all,

00:01:29 ◼   ► I overnighted a replacement.

00:01:30 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:01:31 ◼   ► 'Cause I'm like, first of all,

00:01:32 ◼   ► this would, you know, it broke on a Sunday.

00:01:35 ◼   ► And I'm like, well, this is gonna be a long time

00:01:37 ◼   ► before I can get a coffee cracker in my house.

00:01:40 ◼   ► And I could also just, you know, go buy pre-ground beans,

00:01:43 ◼   ► but you know, I'm not gonna do that.

00:01:45 ◼   ► So I'm lucky though, I, you know,

00:01:49 ◼   ► because I live in a beach town and it's the winter,

00:01:53 ◼   ► all of my neighbors are gone for the season.

00:01:55 ◼   ► It's basically an abandoned town.

00:01:57 ◼   ► - Right, it's like--

00:01:58 ◼   ► - And I know my neighbors there,

00:01:59 ◼   ► and we all have keys to each other's houses,

00:02:01 ◼   ► so I actually asked,

00:02:03 ◼   ► and I was able to go borrow my neighbor's coffee grinder,

00:02:06 ◼   ► you know, getting it out of their abandoned house

00:02:07 ◼   ► for the next few days. (laughs)

00:02:09 ◼   ► So I have, like, you know,

00:02:11 ◼   ► back to the regular spinning blade kind of,

00:02:13 ◼   ► you know, the little whirlybird grinder, the old kind,

00:02:16 ◼   ► and I'm really happy that I have it.

00:02:19 ◼   ► It's better than nothing,

00:02:20 ◼   ► but man, do I appreciate bird grinders more now. (laughs)

00:02:25 ◼   ► It's a big difference, turns out.

00:02:26 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:02:29 ◼   ► Yeah, so what's your best local option off season?

00:02:33 ◼   ► I mean, you can't, there's nowhere to go really

00:02:35 ◼   ► for decent coffee, right, or is there?

00:02:38 ◼   ► - Not really, well, I mean, there's like towns on Long Island

00:02:43 ◼   ► that I could drive over the bridge.

00:02:45 ◼   ► - No, that's too far.

00:02:46 ◼   ► - But it's, yeah, it's like a half hour drive,

00:02:48 ◼   ► so it's not something I wanna really do day to day.

00:02:51 ◼   ► So I just normally just brew my own, and it's fine.

00:02:54 ◼   ► I get the beans from Yes Please usually,

00:02:57 ◼   ► or from some kind of rando roaster from Trade.

00:03:00 ◼   ► But I will say that the coffee frozen cylinder thing,

00:03:04 ◼   ► that that's Cometeer.

00:03:06 ◼   ► And I'm really frustrated by Cometeer,

00:03:09 ◼   ► because I first heard about it on All-Consuming,

00:03:12 ◼   ► and I thought, you know, that's probably really stupid.

00:03:16 ◼   ► It's like frozen little capsules of coffee,

00:03:21 ◼   ► and you basically just pour hot water on them.

00:03:23 ◼   ► It's one of those companies that you'd see

00:03:24 ◼   ► on Instagram and you'd be like, that's really fancy,

00:03:27 ◼   ► but that's probably not very good.

00:03:29 ◼   ► And for some reason, I forget why,

00:03:31 ◼   ► but for some reason I decided to try it

00:03:33 ◼   ► after I heard it on All-Consuming.

00:03:35 ◼   ► And it's like stupidly good.

00:03:39 ◼   ► And it's totally ridiculous.

00:03:40 ◼   ► Like it's not super cheap and they have to mail you

00:03:43 ◼   ► this box with a absolute ton of dry ice in it.

00:03:47 ◼   ► Like it does stay frozen, you know, good for them.

00:03:49 ◼   ► Not a sponsorship.

00:03:50 ◼   ► Although I'm kind of hoping they'll sponsor my show

00:03:52 ◼   ► at some point, but it's the most ridiculous way

00:03:56 ◼   ► to get coffee, 'cause they have to basically ship you

00:03:58 ◼   ► this extremely frozen box with these little,

00:04:01 ◼   ► you know, aluminum capsules in it that you, you know,

00:04:03 ◼   ► you defrost, and they're single serving,

00:04:06 ◼   ► but it's frustrating because it's way, way better

00:04:09 ◼   ► than any coffee I've ever made myself.

00:04:11 ◼   ► Like, they just, it's a really, whatever their process is,

00:04:14 ◼   ► it's like a fancy, like, hipster coffee shop made it,

00:04:18 ◼   ► you know, like with the fancy pour-over,

00:04:19 ◼   ► but with actual strength of flavor,

00:04:22 ◼   ► 'cause you get to control how much dilution there is.

00:04:24 ◼   ► So it's stupidly good.

00:04:25 ◼   ► And I treat myself to that every so often.

00:04:29 ◼   ► Maybe a couple times a year, I'll get a box of those

00:04:32 ◼   ► and I'll slowly dole them out to enjoy them.

00:04:35 ◼   ► But to be your everyday pick,

00:04:37 ◼   ► I think it'd be kind of ridiculous.

00:04:38 ◼   ► So normally I'm just using beans, mostly from Yes Please.

00:04:42 ◼   ► - We may have to scrap this.

00:04:47 ◼   ► - What happened?

00:04:49 ◼   ► Trade's one of the sponsors.

00:04:51 ◼   ► No, I mean, that's… I said I also use beans from Trade.

00:04:57 ◼   ► Well, let me take a break here and tell you about our first sponsor,

00:05:07 ◼   ► who Marco seredipitously… is that the right word? … mentioned.

00:05:11 ◼   ► Yeah, something like that.

00:05:13 ◼   ► it's trade coffee. This is not a joke. This was not set up. This show has…

00:05:19 ◼   ► Jared: No, see, what they're good for is variety because like normally, like my usual go-to is Yes

00:05:24 ◼   ► Please! And Yes Please! is really good for if you want consistency. They basically give you the same

00:05:29 ◼   ► thing all the time and it's good. But where I like trade is they give you variety. Like if you want

00:05:35 ◼   ► to like mix it up, get something fresh, get something new. That's why I maintain subscriptions

00:05:41 ◼   ► to both services, and I just have them come in alternate weeks.

00:05:43 ◼   ► Pete: I have had Trade Coffee at your house. That was actually, I remember the first morning over

00:05:51 ◼   ► the summer, I was, you were kind enough to have us over for a couple of nights and I had it there,

00:05:57 ◼   ► but I'd already been subscribed. Often, when I talk about Trade Coffee, I say I'm drinking it

00:06:03 ◼   ► right now, but I can't say that right now because we're recording at eight o'clock at night and I

00:06:08 ◼   ► I no longer am capable of drinking coffee

00:06:11 ◼   ► at eight o'clock at night.

00:06:13 ◼   ► And-- - I mean, you gotta sleep

00:06:14 ◼   ► sometime. - And getting to bed.

00:06:16 ◼   ► I used to be able to.

00:06:18 ◼   ► I used to think I was like one of those,

00:06:21 ◼   ► and they always said that that was one of the things

00:06:24 ◼   ► the Russians used for jet fighter pilots.

00:06:27 ◼   ► Everybody always knows fighter pilots

00:06:29 ◼   ► have to have great eyesight and reflexes and stuff,

00:06:31 ◼   ► and the Russians chose pilots

00:06:33 ◼   ► who had a very low susceptibility to caffeine

00:06:36 ◼   ► so that they could dose them with caffeine

00:06:39 ◼   ► to keep them up for 18-hour bombing missions.

00:06:42 ◼   ► I used to feel like maybe I was like that,

00:06:46 ◼   ► and now I realize I'm not,

00:06:47 ◼   ► and if I drink coffee after five o'clock,

00:06:49 ◼   ► I'm usually up until five a.m.

00:06:52 ◼   ► So I'm not drinking it as we speak.

00:06:56 ◼   ► I'm drinking Hal's Fizzy Water,

00:06:57 ◼   ► but I did have trade coffee here,

00:07:00 ◼   ► which was ground today through a, what is it?

00:07:05 ◼   ► I always forget the name of the goddamn bar.

00:07:07 ◼   ► - Baratza Virtuoso.

00:07:07 ◼   ► - Baratza Virtuoso, which I do, it's beloved.

00:07:11 ◼   ► What is trade?

00:07:12 ◼   ► Trade Coffee is a coffee subscription service,

00:07:17 ◼   ► just like Marco was talking about.

00:07:18 ◼   ► And they make it simple to discover new coffees

00:07:21 ◼   ► and make your best cup of coffee at home every day.

00:07:24 ◼   ► They don't make all this coffee.

00:07:26 ◼   ► They don't think they roast any of it.

00:07:28 ◼   ► What trade does is partner

00:07:31 ◼   ► with the nation's top-rated independent roasters.

00:07:34 ◼   ► And I mean, dozens, maybe hundreds, I don't know,

00:07:38 ◼   ► but certainly dozens.

00:07:39 ◼   ► I've been subscribed to them pretty much all year,

00:07:43 ◼   ► and I'm not sure I've gotten coffee

00:07:44 ◼   ► from the same roaster twice.

00:07:46 ◼   ► And they send you the best quality coffee

00:07:50 ◼   ► as a subscription service exactly at the pace that you want.

00:07:54 ◼   ► You want a bag a week, you want,

00:07:56 ◼   ► maybe you are like in an office,

00:07:57 ◼   ► or you have a family full of coffee drinkers,

00:08:00 ◼   ► you need multiple bags a week.

00:08:02 ◼   ► You want it every two weeks,

00:08:03 ◼   ► You want it every month.

00:08:05 ◼   ► Whatever schedule you want, you can set it.

00:08:07 ◼   ► And whether you already know what you like,

00:08:11 ◼   ► or if you're new to specialty coffee and need help,

00:08:14 ◼   ► Trade's website makes it easy and convenient

00:08:18 ◼   ► to discover new coffees.

00:08:19 ◼   ► They send it fresh to your home on your schedule.

00:08:24 ◼   ► I love their coffee.

00:08:25 ◼   ► I stay subscribed to it, and I would stay subscribed to it,

00:08:27 ◼   ► even if they weren't sponsoring the show.

00:08:30 ◼   ► It is terrific.

00:08:31 ◼   ► I do it for exactly the reason Margo said before,

00:08:34 ◼   ► it's variety, it tastes different,

00:08:36 ◼   ► and it's good, and I like it.

00:08:39 ◼   ► So what do you do to do this?

00:08:41 ◼   ► And again, I mention this every time I talk about coffee.

00:08:44 ◼   ► Coffee is produce.

00:08:46 ◼   ► It is like, coffee beans don't look like fruit or apples,

00:08:51 ◼   ► apples or oranges or something that goes bad,

00:08:54 ◼   ► but they really do.

00:08:56 ◼   ► Even though old coffee beans

00:08:59 ◼   ► don't really look that different

00:09:01 ◼   ► than fresh roasted coffee beans.

00:09:03 ◼   ► The taste difference is dramatic,

00:09:05 ◼   ► and the stuff you buy like on a supermarket shelf,

00:09:08 ◼   ► even from a good brand, is way, way older than,

00:09:12 ◼   ► yeah, you wouldn't buy fruit that's just bagged up

00:09:15 ◼   ► and is not in the produce section

00:09:17 ◼   ► where they're refrigerating it and stuff like that.

00:09:19 ◼   ► Coffee is exactly like that.

00:09:21 ◼   ► It is, among all the other factors

00:09:23 ◼   ► of what makes good coffee different

00:09:26 ◼   ► from mediocre or bad coffee.

00:09:29 ◼   ► Freshness is gotta be number one,

00:09:30 ◼   ► and the stuff you get from trade is super duper fresh.

00:09:34 ◼   ► It is like as soon as it's roasted, it's sealed,

00:09:36 ◼   ► goes into the mail, and is ding dong,

00:09:40 ◼   ► two days later, it's at your door.

00:09:42 ◼   ► Three days for Marco, because it takes an extra day

00:09:44 ◼   ► for everything to get to the sun.

00:09:46 ◼   ► - I'll tell you what though, like the difference,

00:09:49 ◼   ► like you were just saying, like,

00:09:50 ◼   ► oh, the grocery store coffee is much more stale.

00:09:52 ◼   ► I don't think people will fully appreciate to what degree.

00:09:55 ◼   ► So with trade coffee, you're getting it mailed to you,

00:09:58 ◼   ► and by the time it arrives to you,

00:10:00 ◼   ► even when it arrives to me in my crazy place,

00:10:02 ◼   ► it has been roasted maybe four days ago at most.

00:10:06 ◼   ► If you look in the grocery store,

00:10:08 ◼   ► I just did this, 'cause just last week I was out of town,

00:10:11 ◼   ► and I wanted to buy a bag of coffee,

00:10:12 ◼   ► and it was like a Whole Foods or something.

00:10:14 ◼   ► And so, you know, looking at all the fancy brands,

00:10:16 ◼   ► this one's local, this one's fresh,

00:10:18 ◼   ► this one's in New Jersey,

00:10:19 ◼   ► like you know, all these nice local things,

00:10:21 ◼   ► that roasters, some of which I even knew

00:10:23 ◼   ► where their roastery was, and I was looking,

00:10:26 ◼   ► and you turn the bag over, and you can usually see,

00:10:28 ◼   ► there's usually a sticker on any kind of good coffee bag

00:10:31 ◼   ► to see when it was roasted.

00:10:33 ◼   ► I could not find any that were roasted

00:10:35 ◼   ► less than three weeks ago.

00:10:37 ◼   ► And compare three weeks, at the best case,

00:10:39 ◼   ► was three weeks ago, there were many

00:10:41 ◼   ► that were much older than that.

00:10:42 ◼   ► Three weeks ago, compared to three or four days ago.

00:10:45 ◼   ► It's a massive difference.

00:10:47 ◼   ► - What do you do to get started?

00:10:48 ◼   ► Upgrade your morning routine with Better Coffee.

00:10:51 ◼   ► Right now, Trade is offering a free bag of coffee

00:10:54 ◼   ► with any subscription at drinktrade.com/thetalkshow.

00:10:59 ◼   ► That's drinktrade.com/thetalkshow

00:11:05 ◼   ► for a free bag of coffee with any subscription service.

00:11:09 ◼   ► Drinktrade.com/thetalkshow.

00:11:12 ◼   ► I would dare you, dare you to,

00:11:17 ◼   ► you know how like on your show,

00:11:18 ◼   ► you got like a little banjo

00:11:20 ◼   ► that separates the official markers

00:11:22 ◼   ► between the sponsorships and the show.

00:11:24 ◼   ► I would dare you, that was actually Merlin-esque

00:11:28 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:11:29 ◼   ► in terms of blurring what is the show

00:11:32 ◼   ► and what is the sponsor read.

00:11:34 ◼   ► Merlin, with Merlin, I know you listen to my show,

00:11:38 ◼   ► but I think you'd listen, I hope you listen to my show,

00:11:40 ◼   ► but you know with Merlin, I honestly,

00:11:43 ◼   ► to me, it's like I lose track of the show

00:11:45 ◼   ► and the sponsor read just becomes the show.

00:11:48 ◼   ► us talking about those slippers from Mack Weldon.

00:11:52 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:11:53 ◼   ► Honestly, God, I mean, that was like a 45-minute sponsor

00:11:55 ◼   ► read the one time.

00:11:56 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:12:00 ◼   ► Couple of things I wanna talk about.

00:12:01 ◼   ► A main reason I wanted to have you on this week

00:12:03 ◼   ► is I wanna talk about the new HomePods,

00:12:05 ◼   ► and I loved your review of them on ATP,

00:12:08 ◼   ► and more or less just wanna steal it

00:12:10 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:12:11 ◼   ► and put it on my show.

00:12:12 ◼   ► And I've been struggling to write my own.

00:12:17 ◼   ► But on the news front, I wanted to talk first.

00:12:22 ◼   ► I've actually spent my whole weekend working.

00:12:25 ◼   ► I haven't written anything about it yet,

00:12:27 ◼   ► but Joanna Stern and Nicole Nguyen

00:12:31 ◼   ► at the Wall Street Journal

00:12:32 ◼   ► published an amazing piece on Friday, a story.

00:12:36 ◼   ► You saw this, right?

00:12:39 ◼   ► - Yeah, I would call it a bombshell.

00:12:41 ◼   ► - Yeah, I really, and I spent all weekend working on it,

00:12:45 ◼   ► But the gist of their story in the Wall Street Journal

00:12:48 ◼   ► is that they found about a dozen people in New York,

00:12:53 ◼   ► maybe some of them are from outside New York,

00:12:57 ◼   ► who had their iPhones stolen.

00:13:02 ◼   ► Like, I think almost all the ones they talked to

00:13:05 ◼   ► when they were out at night socializing at bars

00:13:08 ◼   ► or something like that.

00:13:10 ◼   ► iPhone is stolen, and they realize the iPhone's stolen,

00:13:14 ◼   ► and next thing you know, in addition to being stolen,

00:13:18 ◼   ► they're locked, they're completely locked out

00:13:20 ◼   ► of their iCloud account.

00:13:21 ◼   ► So even if they have a friend

00:13:24 ◼   ► and they can get to a Find My iPhone

00:13:26 ◼   ► or they can get home and get to their iPad

00:13:31 ◼   ► or a MacBook that they might have,

00:13:33 ◼   ► those devices are also locked out of iCloud.

00:13:37 ◼   ► And it's effectively game over.

00:13:42 ◼   ► that the thief has access to everything on their phone,

00:13:47 ◼   ► everything in iCloud, and they can't get it back

00:13:53 ◼   ► or restore it.

00:13:54 ◼   ► This sounds so horrific that my first thought

00:14:00 ◼   ► when I read it was there's got to be some hole

00:14:03 ◼   ► in this story or some,

00:14:05 ◼   ► these victims did something incredibly foolish

00:14:10 ◼   ► reckless or something like that. But the basic gist of what I just said, it is completely true.

00:14:17 ◼   ► And with some caveats, it in theory could happen to anybody. And then in addition to the people

00:14:27 ◼   ► they found in New York and talked to firsthand, they talked to a police detective that she got

00:14:33 ◼   ► in contact with in Minneapolis who has investigated dozens of these cases, maybe more. I forget. I was

00:14:43 ◼   ► talking with Joanna last night. It's not like, oh, a handful. It is like dozens of cases.

00:14:49 ◼   ► Again, like you said, it's a blockbuster.

00:14:53 ◼   ► Jared Ranerelle - It seems like the biggest surprise to this,

00:14:57 ◼   ► because even people like us who are like Apple power users, it's our job to know this

00:15:03 ◼   ► stuff, we think we know it really well. The biggest surprise to me, which I think surprised

00:15:07 ◼   ► most people like us, is that, so you know, the main method of the theft here was that

00:15:13 ◼   ► the thieves would basically like look over their shoulder and see what their passcode

00:15:18 ◼   ► was when they entered it. And then go ahead and steal the phone. And to some degree you

00:15:23 ◼   ► can say, well, that's going to be pretty hard to protect against. But the big bombshell

00:15:27 ◼   ► for this is that you can re, apparently you can reset

00:15:31 ◼   ► an Apple ID password only knowing the passcode to the phone.

00:15:36 ◼   ► - Right.

00:15:37 ◼   ► - So what they're doing is they are shoulder surfing

00:15:40 ◼   ► the passcode, stealing the phone at some point,

00:15:43 ◼   ► and then quickly going and changing the Apple ID password,

00:15:46 ◼   ► and then being able to then log into the Apple ID,

00:15:48 ◼   ► do all the same secure stuff you can do from an Apple ID,

00:15:51 ◼   ► remote change devices, remote revoke devices,

00:15:54 ◼   ► and then have full access to your Apple account.

00:15:56 ◼   ► I mean, that to me, that's the hole right there,

00:15:59 ◼   ► is no, I don't think anyone in our circles knew

00:16:03 ◼   ► that you can reset an Apple ID password

00:16:06 ◼   ► by just knowing the passcode to a phone.

00:16:07 ◼   ► - Right, I don't think so either.

00:16:10 ◼   ► And I knew that there's a lot that you can do

00:16:12 ◼   ► with just the passcode.

00:16:13 ◼   ► And the one thing that's been on my mind for a while

00:16:16 ◼   ► is that with just the passcode,

00:16:18 ◼   ► it gives you access to the keychain,

00:16:23 ◼   ► or on the iPhone, you go into settings and passwords

00:16:28 ◼   ► and anything that's in passwords is visible

00:16:32 ◼   ► and you can see all the passwords,

00:16:34 ◼   ► you can see all the authenticator codes.

00:16:37 ◼   ► There's no other factors involved just to get into Keychain.

00:16:43 ◼   ► But the truth is, so like, again,

00:16:47 ◼   ► trying to explain this out the way my mind works

00:16:51 ◼   ► How I always want to know what these stories how exactly does this work because this seems so fantastic out so fantastic

00:16:59 ◼   ► That it there's got to be some step in here where you're like

00:17:02 ◼   ► Oh, that's the step where it wouldn't affect me because I'm smart and I've turned on blank, you know

00:17:09 ◼   ► like a smart person does

00:17:11 ◼   ► Yeah, like

00:17:14 ◼   ► go back in time to like the original iPhone and

00:17:19 ◼   ► passcodes weren't even a thing. One of the biggest demos of the original passcode was slide to unlock,

00:17:25 ◼   ► right? Because with nobody passcoded their phones, right? They're pre-iPhone. You just opened up your

00:17:32 ◼   ► phone and started doing stuff. And there, you know, maybe there would be like a button you would hold

00:17:38 ◼   ► for a couple of seconds to make sure you don't like pocket dial somebody. And I guess some people

00:17:45 ◼   ► could put a code on their phone if they had like a secure job or something like that, but I don't

00:17:50 ◼   ► recall ever putting a code on my phone pre-iPhone. It was not the norm. Most people didn't do it.

00:17:55 ◼   ► So, we went from, you know, and it makes sense that Apple designed the original iPhone to fit

00:18:04 ◼   ► in that world where it's like a phone and like an iPod where you just take it out of your pocket

00:18:10 ◼   ► and do something to make sure you're not pocket dialing or pocket playing songs or whatever else

00:18:15 ◼   ► could happen accidentally and slide to unlock was the their solution to it like okay this phone

00:18:23 ◼   ► won't do anything yet but here's slide to unlock and it was a in those terms of the pre-ios7

00:18:31 ◼   ► flattening a totally lickable interface like they spent time you know some designer like mike madis

00:18:39 ◼   ► spent like full effort and full power of a great graphic designer designing a little button down to

00:18:47 ◼   ► the pixels and like a little three-dimensional looking channel for that thing to go across and

00:18:53 ◼   ► that got you into the phone and you could do anything right so like if steve jobs had lost

00:19:00 ◼   ► his phone in 2007 and you found it you know like there was a picture of him one time at like one

00:19:08 ◼   ► one of his kids' soccer games or something,

00:19:10 ◼   ► just standing there with an iPhone.

00:19:12 ◼   ► I think it was a famous picture

00:19:13 ◼   ► because it was before the iPhone,

00:19:15 ◼   ► after it had been announced, but before it came out.

00:19:18 ◼   ► And it's like, holy shit, there's Steve Jobs' soccer,

00:19:21 ◼   ► a high school soccer game with an iPhone.

00:19:25 ◼   ► But if he had lost it, you could've gotten

00:19:28 ◼   ► into Steve Jobs' phone with just sliding your thumb

00:19:31 ◼   ► across the screen.

00:19:33 ◼   ► And then we've gone from there to here,

00:19:37 ◼   ► where we've realized, you know, there's, you know,

00:19:40 ◼   ► people have their entire digital lives on these phones

00:19:44 ◼   ► and we've protected them more.

00:19:46 ◼   ► And Apple has developed

00:19:47 ◼   ► Face ID and Touch ID

00:19:53 ◼   ► as these biometric things to encourage people

00:19:58 ◼   ► to have some protection.

00:20:00 ◼   ► Like a big problem Apple solved over these years

00:20:04 ◼   ► was encouraging people to put codes on their phone at all.

00:20:08 ◼   ► Right, like when it first started to become a thing

00:20:10 ◼   ► and Apple clearly realized, oh, everybody,

00:20:13 ◼   ► we should try to encourage everybody to have a phone

00:20:17 ◼   ► or a code on their phone.

00:20:19 ◼   ► I knew people who resisted it.

00:20:20 ◼   ► I'm not gonna name names, but there were people

00:20:23 ◼   ► in my household who didn't see the need.

00:20:28 ◼   ► And they did-- - Well, even now,

00:20:30 ◼   ► like you can still set up a phone without a passcode,

00:20:33 ◼   ► And it's funny 'cause I do it on a regular basis

00:20:35 ◼   ► because all my developer phones that are just,

00:20:37 ◼   ► I need a device that runs iOS 15,

00:20:40 ◼   ► so I have an old iPhone that I use for that.

00:20:42 ◼   ► And I always set those up without passcodes.

00:20:44 ◼   ► And they make it increasingly difficult

00:20:47 ◼   ► if you find the little hidden option to do it

00:20:49 ◼   ► and they yell at you a whole bunch,

00:20:50 ◼   ► like you really shouldn't do this.

00:20:53 ◼   ► You have to try pretty hard.

00:20:54 ◼   ► - It's almost like an anti-dark pattern.

00:20:56 ◼   ► It's like a light pattern of bad user interface,

00:20:59 ◼   ► or not bad user interface,

00:21:02 ◼   ► but obtuse user interface,

00:21:06 ◼   ► where this should be obtuse and discouraging, right?

00:21:10 ◼   ► And we typically think of those techniques

00:21:12 ◼   ► of being ways to like make it hard to unsubscribe

00:21:17 ◼   ► from a service you've already subscribed to,

00:21:19 ◼   ► and they were a real jerk about it,

00:21:21 ◼   ► and they, or just to think about the way,

00:21:25 ◼   ► the dark pattern I run into every single day

00:21:29 ◼   ► is you get a marketing email from somebody,

00:21:31 ◼   ► and the unsubscribe link is in six point type

00:21:36 ◼   ► and it's set to 40% gray at the bottom of the email, right?

00:21:40 ◼   ► It's like, I don't know that the email clients

00:21:46 ◼   ► would render typeset at a smaller CSS point size

00:21:50 ◼   ► and it's gray text on a white background.

00:21:53 ◼   ► They definitely do that to discourage people

00:21:56 ◼   ► from trying to set up a phone without a passcode.

00:22:00 ◼   ► was famous back when Trump was president.

00:22:04 ◼   ► He had Kanye West in his office for some, you know,

00:22:09 ◼   ► of course, nonsensical meeting and clown show,

00:22:13 ◼   ► and with cameras and press and people,

00:22:16 ◼   ► and Kanye had his phone and wanted to show something,

00:22:20 ◼   ► and his passcode was 1111.

00:22:22 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:22:23 ◼   ► And it was completely visible.

00:22:25 ◼   ► Hold that thought, but completely visible to the world,

00:22:28 ◼   ► and I think it was one.

00:22:30 ◼   ► It was either 1111 or 1234.

00:22:32 ◼   ► I'm pretty sure, though, it was 1111.

00:22:34 ◼   ► - That's probably the most common passcode.

00:22:38 ◼   ► Like if you actually had the numbers,

00:22:40 ◼   ► like what are the most common passcodes?

00:22:42 ◼   ► I bet 1111 is by far the most common.

00:22:44 ◼   ► - I don't know that it's, so I haven't done it in a while,

00:22:46 ◼   ► but while doing things like testing review phones,

00:22:51 ◼   ► I've set up phones and tried to make it stupid easy.

00:22:53 ◼   ► Like here's a review phone that I'm not actually

00:22:55 ◼   ► going to put a SIM card in.

00:22:57 ◼   ► I'm just gonna play around with it in my house,

00:23:00 ◼   ► so I'm not even gonna leave the house with it.

00:23:02 ◼   ► And if you try that, it actually will tell,

00:23:04 ◼   ► I think, at least the last time I tried it,

00:23:07 ◼   ► with certain of those passcodes, the iOS will tell you,

00:23:12 ◼   ► that's a weak passcode.

00:23:15 ◼   ► Do you wanna maybe try something that's not easily guessed?

00:23:19 ◼   ► You know.

00:23:19 ◼   ► - You wanna try literally anything else besides 1111.

00:23:23 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:23:25 ◼   ► So we're in a world now where everybody has these passcodes,

00:23:30 ◼   ► but the thing that's not obvious,

00:23:33 ◼   ► it's sort of mind-blowing to me and to you,

00:23:40 ◼   ► probably everybody who's listening,

00:23:41 ◼   ► and I suspect a lot of people who are listening

00:23:43 ◼   ► who didn't spend their entire weekend researching this

00:23:48 ◼   ► are still listening to us thinking, it can't be this bad.

00:23:53 ◼   ► I can't be this exposed if somebody knows my passcode.

00:23:57 ◼   ► But the truth is, if you have the phone

00:23:59 ◼   ► and you know the passcode, you're in God mode.

00:24:05 ◼   ► You have access to anything and everything on the phone.

00:24:09 ◼   ► There is nothing on the phone

00:24:11 ◼   ► that you can't do or change, nothing.

00:24:15 ◼   ► There's every single thing on the phone.

00:24:18 ◼   ► Now, you might use an app, a third-party app,

00:24:22 ◼   ► like a bank app or like a password manager,

00:24:27 ◼   ► or even a notes app.

00:24:30 ◼   ► I remember getting the feature requests from Vesper users.

00:24:34 ◼   ► You know, a notes app sometimes will let you set

00:24:38 ◼   ► your own password within the app,

00:24:41 ◼   ► and that has nothing to do with your key.

00:24:43 ◼   ► It doesn't go in your key chain.

00:24:45 ◼   ► And so something like that,

00:24:48 ◼   ► you still would be protected from.

00:24:50 ◼   ► - No, you wouldn't.

00:24:51 ◼   ► See, I was just thinking about this,

00:24:53 ◼   ► 'cause one of the security things that I do

00:24:55 ◼   ► is I don't store my main banking password

00:24:59 ◼   ► in a password manager.

00:25:01 ◼   ► I don't store it anywhere, I just know it.

00:25:03 ◼   ► And it's a very secure password

00:25:05 ◼   ► and it never goes in a password manager.

00:25:07 ◼   ► 'Cause I figure that's, of all the important passwords

00:25:08 ◼   ► I have, that's probably the most important.

00:25:10 ◼   ► And so I was just thinking, like,

00:25:13 ◼   ► oh, well, at least I'm protected there, but no, I'm not.

00:25:15 ◼   ► Because I've set up Face ID for that app, for convenience.

00:25:20 ◼   ► - And face--

00:25:21 ◼   ► So, face ID, that's the passcode, right?

00:25:24 ◼   ► So if you had my phone and the passcode,

00:25:27 ◼   ► I realized like five minutes ago, I was thinking about this,

00:25:29 ◼   ► I'm like, oh my god, wait a minute, I'm exposed there.

00:25:32 ◼   ► Because if you have my phone and you should reserve

00:25:33 ◼   ► my passcode and you get my phone,

00:25:35 ◼   ► then you could log into my bank app.

00:25:38 ◼   ► Because I have a face ID log in there.

00:25:40 ◼   ► And anything like that, anything where you have face ID

00:25:42 ◼   ► or touch ID protection, that is only as good

00:25:45 ◼   ► as your passcode, and if your passcode is known to somebody

00:25:48 ◼   ► and then they gain physical access to the device,

00:25:51 ◼   ► can get into anything protected by face ID, including not only, you know, any apps that

00:25:55 ◼   ► have it, but also, as you mentioned earlier, all of your saved passwords and Apple's password

00:25:59 ◼   ► thing. Or if you use a password manager like 1Password and you have face ID for that, there

00:26:03 ◼   ► you go. That's also then exposed.

00:26:05 ◼   ► Right. So you're only anything, the only thing that wouldn't be protected would be something

00:26:10 ◼   ► that's protected by a third party separate password and you don't have face ID or touch

00:26:17 ◼   ► enabled to get into that.

00:26:20 ◼   ► I'm gonna just say face ID,

00:26:21 ◼   ► because I think that's what most everybody's on now.

00:26:24 ◼   ► I'll get to, there's some specific differences

00:26:27 ◼   ► with touch ID on some of the implications of this.

00:26:29 ◼   ► But for brevity, I'll just say face ID.

00:26:34 ◼   ► Face ID, the other thing I've learned over the weekend,

00:26:40 ◼   ► and I guess I knew this, but now I know it,

00:26:44 ◼   ► is that Face ID is only an accelerant for your passcode.

00:26:49 ◼   ► It's not two things, like a left hand and a right hand.

00:26:57 ◼   ► The only thing that protects your phone is your passcode.

00:27:06 ◼   ► And Face ID is a layer above the passcode

00:27:10 ◼   ► that gets you into the passcode.

00:27:12 ◼   ► They're not two equal methods of getting it.

00:27:17 ◼   ► And therefore, every time anything that you do with Face ID,

00:27:20 ◼   ► and I learned this daily during COVID

00:27:25 ◼   ► while I was out wearing a face mask in public,

00:27:28 ◼   ► and at most, 90% of that time

00:27:32 ◼   ► before Apple had enabled Face ID to work with a mask on,

00:27:37 ◼   ► where I'd bring my phone up and Face ID fails,

00:27:41 ◼   ► and then immediately gives you to the passcode entry

00:27:45 ◼   ► as an option.

00:27:45 ◼   ► Everything, anytime you ever are prompted for face ID,

00:27:49 ◼   ► if it doesn't work, you have the option

00:27:51 ◼   ► to use your passcode instead.

00:27:54 ◼   ► And that's because those biometric methods

00:27:59 ◼   ► are just accelerants for the passcode.

00:28:02 ◼   ► So if you have the phone and you have the passcode,

00:28:05 ◼   ► you're in God mode on the phone.

00:28:07 ◼   ► Everything is possible.

00:28:09 ◼   ► The other thing that to me I just didn't know, I really didn't, is what you mentioned

00:28:16 ◼   ► before. And this is the level that takes you out of God Mode just on the phone and lets

00:28:24 ◼   ► you take over the account is you go to Settings, iCloud, which is that thing at the top with

00:28:32 ◼   ► your picture, right? And your name.

00:28:34 ◼   ► and get the terrible UI where you never think

00:28:37 ◼   ► to look there at first,

00:28:38 ◼   ► 'cause it doesn't even look like a button necessarily.

00:28:40 ◼   ► - Right, so you're at the very top of settings,

00:28:43 ◼   ► it has your name, and it says Apple ID,

00:28:45 ◼   ► iCloud, median purchases.

00:28:48 ◼   ► Second level down is password and security,

00:28:50 ◼   ► and, or I think that's where this is.

00:28:55 ◼   ► Is that where this is?

00:28:56 ◼   ► Or no, you have to go down to, where do you do it?

00:28:59 ◼   ► I just did it three times over the weekend,

00:29:01 ◼   ► but I can't figure out exactly where it is now.

00:29:03 ◼   ► But anyway, there's somewhere on the--

00:29:05 ◼   ► - Somewhere it's in there. (laughs)

00:29:07 ◼   ► - You go down there and it says password

00:29:13 ◼   ► and you can go reset password

00:29:17 ◼   ► and then you just enter a new password

00:29:20 ◼   ► and reenter it to confirm it's the same one

00:29:23 ◼   ► and boom, you've changed the iCloud password

00:29:26 ◼   ► without ever entering or being prompted

00:29:31 ◼   ► for the old password, right?

00:29:33 ◼   ► And the surprise thing to me about that

00:29:37 ◼   ► is that I just, I don't think I've ever done it that way

00:29:40 ◼   ► 'cause I don't, I don't know,

00:29:42 ◼   ► I've probably only changed my iCloud password

00:29:45 ◼   ► a handful of times in, I don't know, 20 years, right?

00:29:48 ◼   ► I mean, I've been using it since it was mac.com.

00:29:51 ◼   ► - Yeah, and if I wanted to change my iCloud password,

00:29:54 ◼   ► I would do it on the website, like from a computer.

00:29:56 ◼   ► - Right. - Like I would never,

00:29:57 ◼   ► I would never think to do it on,

00:29:58 ◼   ► I mean, of course you can do it on the phone,

00:30:00 ◼   ► that makes sense, but I would never have thought

00:30:01 ◼   ► to do that, so I would never even

00:30:03 ◼   ► thought to look for this feature?

00:30:05 ◼   ► - Oh, here it is, it's right at the top.

00:30:08 ◼   ► So you go to, at the top of settings, into iCloud,

00:30:11 ◼   ► second level down is password and security,

00:30:14 ◼   ► and the very first item at the top is, it's blue even,

00:30:19 ◼   ► it's even more prominent.

00:30:21 ◼   ► You just hit change password, and it spins for a little.

00:30:28 ◼   ► - And as with everything iCloud.

00:30:30 ◼   ► - But then all you have to do,

00:30:31 ◼   ► it does just let you change it.

00:30:33 ◼   ► What it asks you for is your iPhone passcode.

00:30:37 ◼   ► And you type your iPhone passcode,

00:30:39 ◼   ► which is the only two factors the thief needs,

00:30:43 ◼   ► physical possession of the device

00:30:45 ◼   ► and knowledge of the passcode.

00:30:47 ◼   ► You enter it, here I am entering it.

00:30:49 ◼   ► And boom, I have a field

00:30:55 ◼   ► where I can change my iCloud password.

00:30:58 ◼   ► - Without knowing the old one.

00:31:00 ◼   ► - Right, without knowing the old one.

00:31:01 ◼   ► And the second you complete that,

00:31:05 ◼   ► the second you've entered a new iCloud password,

00:31:11 ◼   ► the very next thing the iPhone does is prompt you,

00:31:15 ◼   ► do you want to lock out all the other devices

00:31:18 ◼   ► that are currently logged into this iCloud account?

00:31:21 ◼   ► - Oh, God.

00:31:24 ◼   ► And there's two options, like decline or accept,

00:31:29 ◼   ► or lock 'em out.

00:31:32 ◼   ► And you hit lock 'em out, and then boom,

00:31:35 ◼   ► the other devices are locked out.

00:31:38 ◼   ► And then that's it, game over for the victim.

00:31:43 ◼   ► And there's no way for them to get back,

00:31:47 ◼   ► certainly can't get back the iPhone,

00:31:49 ◼   ► can't control that the person who has the iPhone

00:31:53 ◼   ► has access to everything on your iPhone but they can't get back their iCloud

00:31:58 ◼   ► account there's nothing they can do nothing Apple can do and you could say

00:32:04 ◼   ► oh but I set up the recovery key and I have it I know I know I have that stored

00:32:14 ◼   ► safely I printed it out and put it in a safe place in my house it's too late the

00:32:20 ◼   ► The recovery key is only for, I tried this over the weekend.

00:32:25 ◼   ► There's no way to get to any area

00:32:27 ◼   ► where you can just use this recovery key.

00:32:30 ◼   ► - Oh, that's interesting.

00:32:31 ◼   ► So you can't go to like a forgot password thing?

00:32:34 ◼   ► - No, you can go to the forgot password thing,

00:32:36 ◼   ► but there's no path at that point

00:32:38 ◼   ► to use the recovery key to get your account back.

00:32:43 ◼   ► Same thing for a recovery contact.

00:32:47 ◼   ► Like if I say I trust Marco so much

00:32:50 ◼   ► that I'm gonna make Marco Arment my recovery contact.

00:32:54 ◼   ► And vacationing in Hawaii,

00:32:59 ◼   ► and while I'm taking a picture of a volcano,

00:33:01 ◼   ► drop my iPhone right into a volcano and it just melts.

00:33:05 ◼   ► And now I don't have an iPhone.

00:33:07 ◼   ► And I've forgotten my,

00:33:14 ◼   ► I've also forgotten my iCloud account password.

00:33:17 ◼   ► So I can't even get into iCloud.

00:33:19 ◼   ► There, you could help me, because what I could do

00:33:25 ◼   ► is go back to, I could go to Verizon,

00:33:29 ◼   ► tell them what happened, and I'll prove that I'm still me,

00:33:33 ◼   ► and I'll get a new phone, and now I've got

00:33:35 ◼   ► my phone number again.

00:33:37 ◼   ► And I can go to IForgot.apple.com, and there's a path.

00:33:42 ◼   ► I won't go through all the DB good. You know, it's not easy, you know, it's not supposed to be obvious

00:33:47 ◼   ► But I go there but they'll say at some point and and they'll say you know, well what you you don't know your password, huh?

00:33:53 ◼   ► Well, how about we'll send?

00:33:55 ◼   ► code to your trusted phone number and then I get the trusted phone number and that lets me into my

00:34:04 ◼   ► my

00:34:05 ◼   ► iCloud account

00:34:06 ◼   ► But I won't have access to any of my encrypted stuff

00:34:11 ◼   ► So I won't have access to my keychain. I won't have access to my health data

00:34:17 ◼   ► They've start right on my right. They've started encrypting your photo library now, right?

00:34:22 ◼   ► Is it that way by default or do you have to opt into the the whole encryption thing?

00:34:28 ◼   ► I can't believe I forgot about this because I've written about it so much

00:34:32 ◼   ► But you don't get access to any of your encrypted stuff if you read it keychain

00:34:40 ◼   ► But what I can do to get access to that

00:34:43 ◼   ► encrypted stuff and then get full access is I can I can say I have recovery contact or I have that

00:34:51 ◼   ► recovery key the 28 digit and number mixed character thing and

00:34:57 ◼   ► I can use that

00:34:59 ◼   ► To as a

00:35:03 ◼   ► Key to decrypt to give you know, I can give that to Apple

00:35:08 ◼   ► Digitally type it in and then that will decrypt my encrypted stuff that they have an iCloud and now I'm back to having a full thing

00:35:15 ◼   ► But you can't do that if you don't have the phone number

00:35:21 ◼   ► There might be I'm not quite sure maybe there's a path here where the thief

00:35:29 ◼   ► You can go to Verizon and prove that somebody stole your phone and you could still get your phone number back even though

00:35:36 ◼   ► you know, even though the thief still has your phone, right?

00:35:41 ◼   ► I think that, you know.

00:35:44 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, that, I mean, that's the whole thing

00:35:46 ◼   ► with like, you know, SIM card cloning attacks

00:35:48 ◼   ► is you go to a carrier store and you say,

00:35:50 ◼   ► oh sorry, I lost my phone, give me a new, you know,

00:35:53 ◼   ► clone my SIM onto this new phone I'm buying,

00:35:55 ◼   ► and that's why like two-factor stuff

00:35:59 ◼   ► to a phone number is not super secure.

00:36:03 ◼   ► but it's calm. So I'm not quite sure. So I'm not quite sure why some of the victims that Joanna

00:36:08 ◼   ► and Nicole talked to still are locked out of their iCloud account. It might be that I'm not

00:36:14 ◼   ► 100% sure on some of these details. Yeah, that's why, like I said, I've been working on it all

00:36:18 ◼   ► weekend. So it might be that that gets you, it might be that that still doesn't help you because

00:36:24 ◼   ► the thief changed the password. It's still, you still might be screwed. I think that that's the

00:36:31 ◼   ► problem. Yeah, that's right. That's the problem. The problem is in my scenario where I dropped my

00:36:35 ◼   ► phone in a volcano, my iCloud password hasn't been changed. And so your recovery key that has my

00:36:42 ◼   ► trust, that's is this is right. You still are, you're fucked. Even if Verizon gives you your

00:36:47 ◼   ► phone number back because in the, in the innocent scenario where the phone was destroyed or lost off

00:36:54 ◼   ► a bridge or whatever, the iCloud password is still there. You just forgot it in your head.

00:37:02 ◼   ► And so your recovery key will still decrypt my stuff or the recovery key that I've printed out,

00:37:08 ◼   ► the 28-digit thing will still work. But in the case where the thief has changed the password,

00:37:14 ◼   ► that invalidates all of those previous things. Oh, and the other thing you can do, once you're

00:37:19 ◼   ► in the phone with this is this is the other thing once this is where it is i should back up i've

00:37:27 ◼   ► just forgotten it there's so many little details here this is why i've been working on it all

00:37:30 ◼   ► weekend this is the thing because you got access to everything on the phone the checklist of things

00:37:36 ◼   ► that a thief and one of these rings will do is immediately go in and when after they've changed

00:37:42 ◼   ► their password they'll go down and just delete the recovery keys because you can always you can

00:37:47 ◼   ► always revoke a recovery key and you can always revoke a recovery contact, right? So, you know,

00:37:56 ◼   ► you and I break up as friends and I no longer trust you, then I, you know, of course I can

00:38:02 ◼   ► remove you as my recovery key, right? Or contact, right? If you get a divorce, of course you can

00:38:10 ◼   ► change your recovery contact so it's no longer the spouse who you've broken up with, right?

00:38:16 ◼   ► Of course, and so it's, you know, there's like a checklist of like seven things that a thief in

00:38:22 ◼   ► one of these rings would do, and one of them would be revoking those recovery keys, which all you need

00:38:27 ◼   ► to do is know the passcode. This is all. Yeah, because if you have a phone with a passcode,

00:38:35 ◼   ► and then you have control of the Apple ID from that, the phone is also a two-factor device,

00:38:39 ◼   ► so you have any two-factor code from Apple. Like, it's just, you have everything at that point.

00:38:44 ◼   ► if you have the Apple ID and a logged-in phone, that's it. That's everything.

00:38:49 ◼   ► Dave: Yep, that's everything. And this is all by design. This is not an oversight or a bug,

00:38:56 ◼   ► right? Remember back in the early days, I mean, like early years, because it would,

00:39:02 ◼   ► every couple, I don't know, once a year or so, one of these glitches would come up.

00:39:06 ◼   ► Remember, there'd be like these lock screen hijacks where it would be

00:39:10 ◼   ► just some kind of weird bug in iOS where if you entered the numbers super fast,

00:39:18 ◼   ► you could somehow get through even if it wasn't the right number.

00:39:20 ◼   ► Some sequence of events you could operate some part of the phone that was supposed to be locked

00:39:28 ◼   ► without unlocking it. Right. Or it was like if you did it right when a notification first arrived,

00:39:35 ◼   ► you could get through without it or the head, you know, something that you would do like

00:39:41 ◼   ► there's always been a handful of things you could do with a locked phone, like the way that you can

00:39:46 ◼   ► take pictures without unlocking it. And you'd go into that mode and swipe up, swipe down,

00:39:55 ◼   ► and then all of a sudden you're in. And they've, you know, they seem to have closed most of those

00:39:59 ◼   ► bugs. This whole scenario we're talking about is not some kind of oversight. It is something that

00:40:06 ◼   ► Apple designed to work this way. And this is simply a known danger in the design. And you

00:40:19 ◼   ► might say, "Well, why in the world would they design it this way?" And the reason is there are

00:40:28 ◼   ► vastly more people who forget their iCloud password,

00:40:33 ◼   ► but of course still know their phone passcode

00:40:40 ◼   ► 'cause they have to, almost nobody forgets that.

00:40:43 ◼   ► So they know how to get in their phone,

00:40:45 ◼   ► they don't know their iCloud password,

00:40:47 ◼   ► and there are vastly more of these people,

00:40:50 ◼   ► and being able to change it this way is by design.

00:40:55 ◼   ► is by design.

00:40:57 ◼   ► And knowing though, so there's like, let's say,

00:41:02 ◼   ► hundreds of people, I don't know, a year,

00:41:05 ◼   ► hundreds or thousands of people who get their phone stolen

00:41:09 ◼   ► and lose everything this way to a thief

00:41:14 ◼   ► and tens of thousands of people or more,

00:41:17 ◼   ► I don't know if it's orders of magnitude or what,

00:41:19 ◼   ► but what I have been told by people who would know,

00:41:24 ◼   ► It is vastly more people are saved and regain access

00:41:29 ◼   ► to their iCloud account than who are victims of thieves

00:41:35 ◼   ► through this, which is why it's designed this way.

00:41:38 ◼   ► And it is the true, and it is the case

00:41:42 ◼   ► that with an Android phone, you can do the same thing.

00:41:46 ◼   ► You can reset your main Google account password

00:41:51 ◼   ► knowing nothing but the passcode to the Android phone.

00:41:55 ◼   ► - I mean, that's the hard part, right?

00:41:58 ◼   ► Like, you know, when you're designing these things,

00:42:00 ◼   ► especially for the mass market,

00:42:01 ◼   ► and especially for something as important

00:42:02 ◼   ► as someone's phone, you know,

00:42:04 ◼   ► there's huge trade-offs with security

00:42:07 ◼   ► that you have to account for the humans being forgetful

00:42:10 ◼   ► and making mistakes, and this is always such a hard balance

00:42:14 ◼   ► in security design, and, you know,

00:42:16 ◼   ► I don't envy Apple's position here,

00:42:18 ◼   ► and I'm not looking at this saying like,

00:42:21 ◼   ► oh, what idiots they were.

00:42:23 ◼   ► Instead, it's more like, oh, wow,

00:42:25 ◼   ► I did not know this hole was there.

00:42:27 ◼   ► And it makes sense, if you think about it,

00:42:29 ◼   ► it makes sense why it's there, as you were just saying,

00:42:31 ◼   ► 'cause lots of people forget their passwords

00:42:33 ◼   ► and passcodes all the time.

00:42:34 ◼   ► And they are more likely to forget the Apple ID password

00:42:38 ◼   ► than they are to forget the passcode of the phone

00:42:40 ◼   ► they're typing in three times a day.

00:42:42 ◼   ► But the big shock here is like,

00:42:44 ◼   ► during COVID, as you mentioned earlier,

00:42:47 ◼   ► when we were all first having a grocery shopping,

00:42:50 ◼   ► all masked up and everything before Apple had face ID

00:42:53 ◼   ► recognizing mask, which really came fairly late

00:42:56 ◼   ► in that process.

00:42:57 ◼   ► We were all having to type in our passcodes all the time.

00:43:01 ◼   ► And before that, I had switched to an alphanumeric passcode,

00:43:04 ◼   ► like a password.

00:43:05 ◼   ► And when that happened, I was having to type it in so much,

00:43:10 ◼   ► oftentimes like wearing plastic gloves

00:43:12 ◼   ► in the grocery store and everything.

00:43:13 ◼   ► It was such a pain that I would,

00:43:16 ◼   ► I had switched pretty early in COVID,

00:43:18 ◼   ► but I switched back to a numeric passcode.

00:43:22 ◼   ► And I had kept that numeric passcode until today.

00:43:26 ◼   ► When I heard about this story, I'm like,

00:43:29 ◼   ► "Oh my God, wait a minute."

00:43:30 ◼   ► Because if you can reset the Apple ID password

00:43:33 ◼   ► by knowing the phone passcode,

00:43:34 ◼   ► then effectively, my Apple ID password

00:43:37 ◼   ► was just a six digit number.

00:43:39 ◼   ► And that's not the level of security that I want for that,

00:43:42 ◼   ► or that I think is warranted for that.

00:43:43 ◼   ► And so, Apple has all these requirements.

00:43:46 ◼   ► The Apple ID password has to have certain characteristics,

00:43:48 ◼   ► has to be a certain minimum length,

00:43:50 ◼   ► has to have letters, numbers, whatever the requirements are,

00:43:53 ◼   ► because that's a really high security password.

00:43:56 ◼   ► The Apple ID means a lot.

00:43:57 ◼   ► It's a huge risk surface, right?

00:43:59 ◼   ► But if you can have a phone with a few numbers on it

00:44:03 ◼   ► that might be 1111, and you can then take the Apple ID

00:44:07 ◼   ► from that, well then that's effectively

00:44:08 ◼   ► the Apple ID's password security level.

00:44:11 ◼   ► And so, like many security loopholes or security rules

00:44:15 ◼   ► loopholes or bugs or tricks, you learn,

00:44:19 ◼   ► oh, you have this big wall of security over here,

00:44:22 ◼   ► your Apple ID password, it's really secure.

00:44:24 ◼   ► But you didn't realize that you could just walk around

00:44:27 ◼   ► the wall in this way and have a much lower security version

00:44:30 ◼   ► of something get right around that.

00:44:32 ◼   ► So I think it's wise for nerds like us

00:44:35 ◼   ► to treat your phone passcode the same way you'd treat

00:44:39 ◼   ► your Apple ID password in terms of security,

00:44:41 ◼   ► because they are effectively, one leads to the other.

00:44:44 ◼   ► - Yeah, so I looked it up just for people

00:44:47 ◼   ► who are gonna email me, I've done it.

00:44:49 ◼   ► So it was just a few months ago,

00:44:51 ◼   ► which is why I'm surprised I forgot it already,

00:44:54 ◼   ► where Apple announced advanced data protection for iCloud,

00:44:57 ◼   ► end-to-end encryption for backups, photos, and more.

00:45:01 ◼   ► So if you have that turned on,

00:45:03 ◼   ► that that's included in the stuff that you lose access to

00:45:07 ◼   ► in the case where you would need like a recovery key

00:45:13 ◼   ► recovery contact. So, photos are included. All of this is. I have an alphanumeric password on my

00:45:23 ◼   ► phone and I have for a while. I did the same thing during COVID during the mask. There was just no

00:45:27 ◼   ► way I was going to type that in all the time. Not out of paranoia, but because it's very, this is a

00:45:36 ◼   ► very personal look into my psyche and my chronic procrastination is I've been

00:45:43 ◼   ► meaning to write for probably over a year a daring fireball piece

00:45:50 ◼   ► declaring that a six-digit passcode is actually more than secure enough for an iPhone,

00:46:00 ◼   ► even though you might not intuitively think it is. Thinking only about crackers,

00:46:08 ◼   ► somebody who just has the phone and is using one of those black market devices that can enter

00:46:13 ◼   ► passcodes very quickly. Because once you enter enough passcodes incorrectly, the phone gets

00:46:23 ◼   ► locked you can't try them that often and even if you somehow break the phone with

00:46:31 ◼   ► a jailbreak and get past that circumvention the iOS level of

00:46:37 ◼   ► preventing more than ten attempts the way that the secure enclave works

00:46:47 ◼   ► fundamentally, not in software, but cryptographically, is that I think there's like a theoretical

00:46:55 ◼   ► limit of only six attempts per second or something. I forget. The piece I want to write would

00:47:00 ◼   ► explain it and it would all make sense. But the gist of it is that for somebody who falls

00:47:06 ◼   ► into some trap and somebody with complicated apparatus, some kind of device and a jailbreak

00:47:15 ◼   ► that Apple doesn't know about and hasn't closed to get past iOS and has access to your secure

00:47:21 ◼   ► enclave.

00:47:22 ◼   ► I mean, obviously at this point, almost how many people would anybody target like this?

00:47:27 ◼   ► But let's say you're one of them.

00:47:29 ◼   ► They still a six digit passcode would take like on average, I don't know, like 50,000

00:47:36 ◼   ► years or a million years, some unbelievably safe number.

00:47:41 ◼   ► perspective of an attacker, a six digit passcode is really actually pretty secure.

00:47:46 ◼   ► Well that assumes that you have like you know six random to which most people don't like you know

00:47:54 ◼   ► like if you're making something like people often will overestimate the security value of certain

00:48:00 ◼   ► length strings or numbers whatever because they assume that somebody who's trying to brute force

00:48:05 ◼   ► it would just try, you know, AAA, AAB, AAC, and that's not how they do it. They, you know,

00:48:13 ◼   ► use databases of most common values that people actually use, and they try the most common

00:48:18 ◼   ► ones first. And so oftentimes you have way less entropy than you think you do if you've

00:48:23 ◼   ► chosen something that's, you know, beyond just pure randomness.

00:48:29 ◼   ► So what, here's the look into my psyche. My thing to myself was about a year ago, or

00:48:35 ◼   ► time at right after the mask thing was over. So it's probably been more than a year. But I changed

00:48:41 ◼   ► back to this alphanumeric passcode. Then I decided I looked into this and did the math and proved the

00:48:48 ◼   ► math and thought, "Ah, a six-digit passcode is safe enough for me. And I'm going to encourage

00:48:54 ◼   ► my readers that it's safe enough for them. But I'm not going to change it on my phone until I

00:49:00 ◼   ► write that article. It's like, that's the carrot to prompt me to do it. And obviously,

00:49:06 ◼   ► I haven't written that article. And so I've been using the harder to type alphanumeric

00:49:13 ◼   ► password to get into the phone ever since. And now we're here talking about this story.

00:49:22 ◼   ► And I'm like, huh, I've been feeling bad about this every single time I type my password to get

00:49:29 ◼   ► into my phone every single time I do it every time every time I restart it every time I

00:49:35 ◼   ► you know you don't have to enter it that often when you use face ID but every time I do

00:49:41 ◼   ► every single time I think god damn it I should freaking write that article so I

00:49:45 ◼   ► can't want to stop doing this I want to go to a much easier to type and you know

00:49:51 ◼   ► thumbable passcode and now this story's come out I'm like huh I'm kind of glad I never

00:49:57 ◼   ► encouraged people to switch to a passcode if they already had a password, alphanumeric password,

00:50:04 ◼   ► because I don't think that's a good idea. I really don't. I don't know. I mean, it seems like you

00:50:16 ◼   ► agree since you changed, right? Jared: Yeah, because, you know, I think in addition to the,

00:50:23 ◼   ► you know, probably better security in most ways

00:50:26 ◼   ► for most people for it being a password style,

00:50:29 ◼   ► I think, an alphanumeric password style.

00:50:31 ◼   ► I think it actually helps this particular problem

00:50:34 ◼   ► of somebody like shoulder surfing your code.

00:50:36 ◼   ► It helps if your code looks and works

00:50:39 ◼   ► like typing in a password because, you know,

00:50:42 ◼   ► people, I think, people don't necessarily think

00:50:45 ◼   ► when you're typing your passcode in public

00:50:48 ◼   ► if anyone's looking at them.

00:50:49 ◼   ► - Right.

00:50:50 ◼   ► - You know, if you're just typing in the numbers,

00:50:51 ◼   ► you know, one, two, three, four, you know,

00:50:52 ◼   ► you're used to having it so fast and the buttons are so big

00:50:55 ◼   ► and the screen is visible from all angles.

00:50:58 ◼   ► - Kanye West typed his 1111 in the Oval Office

00:51:02 ◼   ► surrounded by cameras.

00:51:03 ◼   ► - Right, so I feel like people will oftentimes

00:51:10 ◼   ► kind of more casually hit the buttons

00:51:12 ◼   ► for the numeric passcodes and not think too much

00:51:16 ◼   ► about who can see this, whereas when you're typing

00:51:19 ◼   ► in a password field for the alphanumeric one,

00:51:22 ◼   ► Not only is it just physically smaller

00:51:24 ◼   ► and a little bit harder for someone

00:51:26 ◼   ► to see what you're typing,

00:51:28 ◼   ► but also I feel like you might just psychologically

00:51:31 ◼   ► treat that like a password in the sense that

00:51:34 ◼   ► if somebody was looking over your shoulder

00:51:38 ◼   ► at your keyboard as you're typing,

00:51:40 ◼   ► you're not gonna type in your password.

00:51:41 ◼   ► You're gonna be like, "Excuse me,"

00:51:43 ◼   ► or you're gonna move to your back as to them or whatever.

00:51:45 ◼   ► And I feel like if you make your phone passcode

00:51:49 ◼   ► look and work like a password entry,

00:51:52 ◼   ► the way the alphanumeric ones do,

00:51:54 ◼   ► I think you will just kind of automatically,

00:51:56 ◼   ► behaviorally have better physical security around yourself.

00:52:00 ◼   ► You might turn your back to somebody,

00:52:01 ◼   ► or hold it closer to your chest

00:52:04 ◼   ► so no one can see it or whatever.

00:52:05 ◼   ► Like you might just kind of instinctively treat it

00:52:07 ◼   ► like the password that it is.

00:52:09 ◼   ► - I don't think that people,

00:52:11 ◼   ► I still think you could be safe with a numeric passcode.

00:52:15 ◼   ► I really do.

00:52:16 ◼   ► And I'm still thinking maybe after doing,

00:52:19 ◼   ► talking about all this, I still might switch. The thing that I think everybody—the number

00:52:23 ◼   ► one takeaway, to skip to the end, that I think everybody should take from this is that you

00:52:29 ◼   ► should be—and you just touched on it—you should be overly paranoid every time you enter

00:52:37 ◼   ► your iPhone passcode or password in public. Any time you do it, you should treat it as

00:52:45 ◼   ► secret and be a little creepy about it, you know, or reverse creepy about it. I remember,

00:52:50 ◼   ► I'm old enough that I remember when atms were a new invention, or at least newly

00:52:57 ◼   ► universal. I was like an elementary school and all of a sudden atms became a thing and you could just

00:53:06 ◼   ► if you need you know, your dad needed money at the at the mall, there was like a machine over

00:53:11 ◼   ► there and he'd added a thing that looked like a credit card that went in and then type a number.

00:53:16 ◼   ► And when I first got a bank account in high, like a savings account in high school

00:53:22 ◼   ► before I went to college, you know, they were new. And they were actually better machines because

00:53:28 ◼   ► they had like clicky buttons. You know, it's like my clicky keyboard thing. They had really,

00:53:33 ◼   ► they always, they had really good buttons back then. But everybody, it's just instinctively back

00:53:40 ◼   ► in the 80s and 90s or more of a 90s thing when I was actually using it, but I remember them in the

00:53:47 ◼   ► 80s. But it was like a cultural thing. And I remember Amy and I were talking about it this

00:53:52 ◼   ► weekend as I was obsessed with this story when people entered their ATMs codes back then, they

00:53:58 ◼   ► would really physically hunch over the machine and really, really sort of obscure what they were

00:54:06 ◼   ► typing, I mean, as best you can physically. And it was also a cultural norm then, if you were next in

00:54:13 ◼   ► line for the ATM to stand like six feet away, like COVID distance, really. But it was a total social

00:54:21 ◼   ► thing, where if you were closer than about six or seven feet, as the next customer, it seemed like

00:54:29 ◼   ► you were weird. And it was just complete strangers, but the person who was up would look over their

00:54:37 ◼   ► shoulder and the person would be like, "Oh, sorry, sorry," and take a couple steps back.

00:54:41 ◼   ► It was always like, "Oh, somebody who was just like…" I wasn't really thinking, "Sorry, sorry."

00:54:47 ◼   ► And they'd back up. And everybody treated those numbers super secretly because this whole idea of

00:54:53 ◼   ► getting your cash out of a machine, having nothing but a credit card and a four-digit number

00:54:58 ◼   ► seemed so weird. Even though, and again, like all sorts of things,

00:55:05 ◼   ► people freak out when they buy anything financial happens new. I remember when buying

00:55:13 ◼   ► stuff over the web was like, some people thought it's crazy. They're like, you're nuts. You're

00:55:17 ◼   ► typing your credit card into a webpage? You're insane. Meanwhile, they go out to lunch and hand

00:55:22 ◼   ► the credit card to the waiter, you know, when the bill comes. And he walks away with it.

00:55:27 ◼   ► But something novel is naturally—it triggers something in the human brain. And when ATMs were

00:55:35 ◼   ► novel, people treated it like that. That's the mentality, I think, though, that everybody should

00:55:40 ◼   ► internalize permanently for their passcode for their phone. Treat it like we did back then.

00:55:47 ◼   ► Don't enter it within six or seven feet of anybody if you get a lot

00:55:51 ◼   ► You know somehow you need to enter it in public because you know like I don't know

00:55:55 ◼   ► it whatever reason you know or

00:55:58 ◼   ► Go to the bathroom if you're at a bar if somehow like you're you're you're at a bar and you had your phone sitting on

00:56:05 ◼   ► The bar because I think one of the tricks I'm trying I spent the weekend thinking about this is how did the how do you?

00:56:13 ◼   ► Get someone to have to enter their passcode when?

00:56:16 ◼   ► In a normal night out you just you'd never need more than face ID

00:56:20 ◼   ► It's it's unusual

00:56:22 ◼   ► but it's like a it's a classic social engineering thing where the scammers would do things and Joanna even had a

00:56:29 ◼   ► reference to the one guy where one of the tricks was to try to you know

00:56:34 ◼   ► Get get the victims to let let the perpetrator take a picture of them, right?

00:56:38 ◼   ► So like you meet a couple of women who are out celebrating and and you you know

00:56:44 ◼   ► You're there and you're the criminal and you're talking them up and it's cheerful and everybody's having a good time and you find out that

00:56:50 ◼   ► They're you know, it's one of the one of the women's birthday and you're like, let me take a picture of the three of you

00:56:55 ◼   ► For the night here. Give me your phone

00:56:57 ◼   ► I'll take a picture of you and you can the guy your phone and it's locked right?

00:57:01 ◼   ► It's you haven't unlocked the phone. You can just hand them the phone

00:57:04 ◼   ► that's why the camera is there and he can hit the camera button and

00:57:09 ◼   ► Take the picture or take a couple pictures and then as he hands it back all he has to do is squeeze the two side buttons

00:57:17 ◼   ► For two or three seconds and it puts it into the hard lock mode

00:57:21 ◼   ► I've written about this hard lock mode all the time where you squeeze the power button and either of the volume buttons for here

00:57:28 ◼   ► Let me do it to myself

00:57:30 ◼   ► It takes like two seconds maybe two maybe less than two seconds

00:57:36 ◼   ► It's the easily less time than it takes to hand the phone back and your hand positions on the phone

00:57:43 ◼   ► Don't look unusual, right?

00:57:45 ◼   ► it look it's exactly how you'd be holding the phone as you

00:57:48 ◼   ► politely hand it back to the person and they hand it back and now it's on this slide to power off and

00:57:54 ◼   ► You can or you can it maybe you hit cancel if you're clever so they don't yeah

00:57:58 ◼   ► You just hit the hit the sleep wake button again

00:58:00 ◼   ► I think then I think it you know, it'll dismiss that screen

00:58:03 ◼   ► but it's still then locked.

00:58:04 ◼   ► Right. And then all of a sudden, and that's a powerfully great feature of the iPhone,

00:58:10 ◼   ► and everybody should know that feature. I always recommend every time you go through

00:58:14 ◼   ► TSA or any time you go through customs, any time you deal with any kind of law enforcement,

00:58:20 ◼   ► just squeeze those buttons for a second or two. You get a little bit of haptic feedback

00:58:25 ◼   ► when you know that it's kicked in. You don't have to look at the screen. You could do it

00:58:28 ◼   ► when it's in your pocket or your purse. But at that point, the phone needs the passcode to do

00:58:35 ◼   ► anything. And then, you know, then you just, that's when you shoulder surf. And the next time

00:58:41 ◼   ► the person you're trying to steal the phone from unlocks their phone or wants to, it's like,

00:58:47 ◼   ► huh, I have to enter my passcode, huh? There it is, passcode. Joanna's story said that some of them

00:58:53 ◼   ► worked in pairs. The group in Minnesota was a group of 12. So you could imagine it might be

00:59:01 ◼   ► easier to have the person who took the photo on one side hand the phone back, have the shoulder

00:59:09 ◼   ► surfer on the other side, and say like, "Hey, look at the photos. What do you think? Did I get

00:59:15 ◼   ► it right?" And, "Oh, I have to unlock my phone first before I can even see this photo. I'll

00:59:21 ◼   ► unlock it and the shoulder surfers right there. Yep. Oh, man. I think that scenario, the "let me

00:59:29 ◼   ► have your phone to take a picture and then squeeze the buttons as they hand it and then the shoulder

00:59:35 ◼   ► surfer is right there" is probably the most common way of doing it. You know, there might be

00:59:42 ◼   ► other scenarios, but I think they all rely on similar things. And like I said, people like

00:59:49 ◼   ► sometimes leave their phones on the bar or on a tabletop, you know, when you're at like a,

00:59:54 ◼   ► you know, sitting at a four top. And if all you have to do, you don't have to take the phone

01:00:01 ◼   ► and people put their phones face down. All you have to do if you can surreptitiously just get

01:00:05 ◼   ► your hand on those buttons and squeeze them for like a second and a half, the phone suddenly

01:00:10 ◼   ► locked and then the next time that person picks up the phone, that's when you're looking to see

01:00:14 ◼   ► if you can glean the number and you can get a couple guesses. So if you think it's 1234,

01:00:20 ◼   ► but it's really 1233, you know, it might be, you know, you'd still have a good chance

01:00:26 ◼   ► of getting the guess. So my that's my top recommendation for anybody like me, who's

01:00:33 ◼   ► completely freaked by this is to treat entering your phone passcode as like state secret when

01:00:40 ◼   ► you're out in public, just if you ever need to do it. And I think back to how many times

01:00:44 ◼   ► I did it in line during COVID. And it's—

01:00:48 ◼   ► Oh, yeah. So, so often.

01:00:50 ◼   ► Oh, my God. It is—

01:00:51 ◼   ► Because we had to, you know?

01:00:52 ◼   ► Right.

01:00:52 ◼   ► And, you know, everyone—you know, the only thing is nobody was seeing our code because

01:00:56 ◼   ► they kind of had to look down at their phone and have them in their code.

01:00:58 ◼   ► Well, the other—the only thing we had going on in COVID to protect us from this was that there

01:01:02 ◼   ► was—all the stores had those, like, tape markers six feet apart. So everybody—your next customer

01:01:08 ◼   ► was six feet behind you. But the number one thing you can do to protect yourself—well, I mean,

01:01:13 ◼   ► I guess a longer passcode or an alphanumeric passcode would help too because those are

01:01:19 ◼   ► certainly harder. Something you type on the keyboard is sort of hard to glean.

01:01:23 ◼   ► There's talk of, I don't think anybody that, you know, none of the criminal cases that she

01:01:30 ◼   ► uncovered seemed to do it, but there's talk of what if, you know, can you use a camera to record

01:01:39 ◼   ► the person doing it and then zoom in and see it and do it in slow motion. In a bar scenario where

01:01:45 ◼   ► the the crooks hopefully don't own the bar, I think a camera would be tough, right? It's not

01:01:54 ◼   ► like you're going to get in there and place a camera in the bar and it would look weird if

01:02:00 ◼   ► somebody you just met is standing there with their phone camera on shooting video at a way

01:02:08 ◼   ► that would look at the level of your hand. Maybe though, if you practice and do it, and

01:02:15 ◼   ► then you can use that video footage to decode it. But an alphanumeric password would be

01:02:22 ◼   ► really hard to get, even if you had video of it. Although, as you type on an iPhone

01:02:29 ◼   ► keyboard, every letter you press pops up the letter you hit.

01:02:34 ◼   ► Yeah, that's not great. It's not. It's great for the innocent case of knowing that you typed the

01:02:42 ◼   ► right letter. It's not great for the case of somebody shooting 4K video of you typing

01:02:49 ◼   ► your password and figuring out exactly which letters and replaying it in slow motion, right?

01:02:56 ◼   ► 4K 60 video and then replaying it in slow motion. Really, really just mind blowing.

01:03:04 ◼   ► And what should Apple do differently?

01:03:07 ◼   ► - That's the thing.

01:03:09 ◼   ► - Right.

01:03:10 ◼   ► - It's really hard to, 'cause again,

01:03:12 ◼   ► they have this massive support and data loss issue

01:03:16 ◼   ► for people who are forgetful of their stuff,

01:03:18 ◼   ► so they do have to make these things easy to recover from.

01:03:21 ◼   ► They have to make password forgetting easy to recover from.

01:03:25 ◼   ► I've developed a lot of web login stuff,

01:03:30 ◼   ► and one of the things that surprised me over the years

01:03:33 ◼   ► was quite how many people just hit forgot password

01:03:37 ◼   ► every time they log into something.

01:03:39 ◼   ► Because they don't even bother trying to remember it.

01:03:41 ◼   ► And, or they have so many passwords to remember,

01:03:44 ◼   ► they're just like, ah, this will be faster

01:03:46 ◼   ► than me trying a bunch of passwords

01:03:47 ◼   ► and forgetting anyway, you know.

01:03:48 ◼   ► So they just go straight for forgot password.

01:03:50 ◼   ► Like, people don't remember passwords, it's simple as that.

01:03:52 ◼   ► And especially, you know, your Apple ID, you figure,

01:03:55 ◼   ► well, that's, again, they have all those security

01:03:57 ◼   ► requirements for the Apple ID password,

01:04:00 ◼   ► and so that makes it easier to forget.

01:04:02 ◼   ► and it makes it more likely that you won't be able to use

01:04:07 ◼   ► your one password in your head that you use for everything.

01:04:10 ◼   ► I know that's bad, but that's what everyone does.

01:04:12 ◼   ► So they need ways for people to easily reset

01:04:16 ◼   ► their Apple ID passwords, and man,

01:04:19 ◼   ► this is just a hard problem.

01:04:21 ◼   ► And I think, did your research indicate,

01:04:24 ◼   ► I think I saw floating around earlier that like,

01:04:27 ◼   ► even if you have your account in the full encryption

01:04:30 ◼   ► end-to-end mode, whatever mode you can put your Apple ID in,

01:04:34 ◼   ► there is no mode that disables that, right?

01:04:35 ◼   ► - Nope, there is no mode that disables that.

01:04:39 ◼   ► - And I think that would be like,

01:04:40 ◼   ► the one thing I can think of is what Apple should do here

01:04:43 ◼   ► is maybe if you have end-to-end encryption on,

01:04:46 ◼   ► maybe that can be one of the things

01:04:48 ◼   ► that's different about your account,

01:04:49 ◼   ► that you cannot reset your Apple ID password

01:04:52 ◼   ► with a phone passcode.

01:04:53 ◼   ► - Maybe, and I can confirm that,

01:04:57 ◼   ► And I can confirm that Apple from, you know,

01:05:02 ◼   ► I reached out, I had some questions.

01:05:06 ◼   ► In addition to questions about this story

01:05:10 ◼   ► that Joanna reported, I was very confused over the weekend

01:05:16 ◼   ► by the fact that I could not figure out how to

01:05:20 ◼   ► even enter a recovery key or use a recovery contact.

01:05:26 ◼   ► Like I have a, not fake, but a testing iCloud account

01:05:31 ◼   ► that I've used for years to have like,

01:05:34 ◼   ► if I'm reviewing two iPhones at once,

01:05:37 ◼   ► or just wanna set one up with default settings

01:05:41 ◼   ► for everything, so I have a sort of throwaway

01:05:44 ◼   ► iCloud account, so I was trying to,

01:05:47 ◼   ► I set myself, my real iCloud account

01:05:50 ◼   ► as the recovery contact for that phone,

01:05:52 ◼   ► pretended that phone was stolen,

01:05:54 ◼   ► and I couldn't even enter those things.

01:05:56 ◼   ► There was no, I couldn't, there's no path to get to

01:05:59 ◼   ► where you just type the 28 characters

01:06:02 ◼   ► or use the recovery context, say I vouch for this person

01:06:05 ◼   ► and give it back to them.

01:06:06 ◼   ► So I had questions about that.

01:06:08 ◼   ► And talking to people at Apple,

01:06:10 ◼   ► I can confirm that they are thinking of,

01:06:13 ◼   ► and I've long been thinking about

01:06:16 ◼   ► things they could do for this,

01:06:17 ◼   ► but at the moment, this is the best balance

01:06:21 ◼   ► between the needs of the vast number of people

01:06:26 ◼   ► who forget their iCloud account password

01:06:30 ◼   ► and the terribly unfortunate but lower number of people

01:06:35 ◼   ► who fall victim to this path for crime.

01:06:39 ◼   ► It's really, it's, and I think the fact

01:06:44 ◼   ► that Google does it the same way with Android

01:06:47 ◼   ► is, you know, two doesn't prove it,

01:06:51 ◼   ► But both companies are known for,

01:06:55 ◼   ► justly so, for very good security policies towards users.

01:06:59 ◼   ► Google perhaps even more so.

01:07:03 ◼   ► And they do it the same way.

01:07:06 ◼   ► It's just sorta, and I think one of the reasons

01:07:10 ◼   ► we don't know about it is that we just didn't think about it

01:07:15 ◼   ► but the people at Apple who think about these security things

01:07:19 ◼   ► known this. This is not a surprise to them. But I think that, you know, for obvious reasons,

01:07:26 ◼   ► they don't like warn people about it because they'd rather, maybe they'd rather people

01:07:32 ◼   ► don't, the general public doesn't know how dangerous this is, right? It's like finding

01:07:40 ◼   ► out that we've been…

01:07:41 ◼   ► Jared: They know now.

01:07:42 ◼   ► Michael O'Toole Right. It's like finding out we've been

01:07:43 ◼   ► walking around with a powerful M80 firecracker in our pocket all the time, unbeknownst to us,

01:07:50 ◼   ► and it might go off. Again, protecting your passcode and not entering it in front of somebody

01:07:58 ◼   ► is the best thing I can say. The downside to that or the hole in that is the other scenario,

01:08:09 ◼   ► the mugging scenario where you are out in the street

01:08:13 ◼   ► and somebody, a mugger comes up with a weapon

01:08:18 ◼   ► and demands your phone and demands your passcode,

01:08:23 ◼   ► right there on the street corner.

01:08:25 ◼   ► Give me your phone, give me your passcode right now.

01:08:30 ◼   ► It's catastrophic.

01:08:37 ◼   ► That's always, like a week ago, I would have said,

01:08:40 ◼   ► "Yeah, you're kinda screwed at that point.

01:08:42 ◼   ► You're really screwed."

01:08:44 ◼   ► Now I realize you're really, really screwed

01:08:49 ◼   ► in that scenario.

01:08:50 ◼   ► I don't know, what do you do?

01:08:53 ◼   ► It's worrisome.

01:08:57 ◼   ► It's had me obsessed for like 72 hours.

01:09:01 ◼   ► The good news is, at least from the people Joanna

01:09:05 ◼   ► Nicole talked to. I don't think any of them had their phones taken by force that way. They all

01:09:11 ◼   ► had them, you know, in this or at least not their passcode. Sometimes, you know, they'd take the

01:09:18 ◼   ► phone by force but not the passcode. And the other thing about this is all these victims were

01:09:23 ◼   ► so confused because they didn't understand how this happened. They didn't know their passcode

01:09:29 ◼   ► had been gleaned over their shoulder. All they know is their phone was missing. I don't know

01:09:32 ◼   ► where my phone is, where is it?" And next thing they know, $10,000 have been taken out of their

01:09:41 ◼   ► bank account. And they're like, "How did that happen? All I did was lose my phone,

01:09:45 ◼   ► and all of a sudden I've lost stuff in my bank account." I wrote a story, and Joanna told me,

01:09:51 ◼   ► it sort of inspired part of her obsession to dig into this. This was in August of 2020.

01:09:58 ◼   ► So, actually, in the middle of COVID, there was a guy named Anriq Prong—I hope I'm pronouncing

01:10:04 ◼   ► his name right, or probably not—but on Twitter. I swear to God, I will put a link to this thing

01:10:10 ◼   ► in the show notes. The headline on Daring Fireball was "Can Thieves Crack 6-Digit iPhone Passcodes?"

01:10:17 ◼   ► On Twitter, this guy wrote, "Stop using 6-digit iPhone passcodes. Do you think I am overly paranoid?

01:10:23 ◼   ► Keep reading. Last week, a friend of mine had his iPhone stolen. What follows is the secret

01:10:27 ◼   ► events that started as an unfortunate event and ended up with $30,000 in unauthorized wire

01:10:32 ◼   ► transfers, $2,500 spent on the App Store, and accounts of multiple services compromised. So,

01:10:39 ◼   ► how could the wrongdoers do all of that in less than five hours? After considering many options,

01:10:44 ◼   ► the only reasonable explanation is they cracked the six-digit passcode on the stolen phone using

01:10:49 ◼   ► some kind of device like GrayKey. The passcode gave them access to the keychain. They searched

01:10:55 ◼   ► for iCloud credentials, disabled the lost mode, and turned off the fine line. That's this guy's

01:11:01 ◼   ► story of his friend. And what I wrote was, "Did the thieves really crack his passcode with a gray

01:11:10 ◼   ► key or a gray key-like device? Impossible to say. We know it exists. Blah, blah, blah." But I wrote

01:11:18 ◼   ► all this, and it never occurred to me that I think it's exact. I think what happened to this guy's

01:11:24 ◼   ► friend on Twitter is exactly what is I think somebody probably just saw him enter the passcode.

01:11:30 ◼   ► That's it. It wasn't. Yeah, we all jumped to so I did we all jumped to some kind of mission

01:11:36 ◼   ► impossible style thing where the thieves have this complicated device and those devices do exist

01:11:41 ◼   ► right these these there's that a great keys I think the Israeli company there's a Florida

01:11:47 ◼   ► company you know and they make these devices and supposedly only sell them to law enforcement

01:11:53 ◼   ► And we all jump to this Mission Impossible scenario

01:11:55 ◼   ► where the thieves have this complicated thing.

01:11:58 ◼   ► And it's so much easier to think about the scenario

01:12:01 ◼   ► where you just saw the shoulder swipe,

01:12:05 ◼   ► shoulder glean the guy entering his passcode

01:12:08 ◼   ► and then stole his phone and now you've got his passcode

01:12:10 ◼   ► and now you've got all of this.

01:12:12 ◼   ► - Yeah, 'cause again, that's the hole

01:12:16 ◼   ► that most people I don't think knew about,

01:12:18 ◼   ► that you could turn an iPhone passcode into an Apple ID.

01:12:21 ◼   ► No one, I don't think any of us knew that.

01:12:23 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:12:25 ◼   ► Yeah, I was onto it, honestly.

01:12:27 ◼   ► This article makes me so mad.

01:12:28 ◼   ► It's like here, I wrote, it never simply,

01:12:31 ◼   ► this is my words from August 2020.

01:12:33 ◼   ► It simply never occurred to me that if a thief

01:12:35 ◼   ► or law enforcement or any adversary has the device passcode

01:12:40 ◼   ► and your iCloud password is in your keychain,

01:12:43 ◼   ► they can get your iCloud password from your keychain.

01:12:46 ◼   ► That's what we were thinking.

01:12:48 ◼   ► All you need is the device passcode to access

01:12:52 ◼   ► all of the passwords in iCloud Keychain.

01:12:55 ◼   ► Try it, you can.

01:12:57 ◼   ► Now where I'm wrong there is you don't even have to go

01:12:59 ◼   ► into passwords, there's that feature we talked about

01:13:02 ◼   ► a couple minutes ago where you don't have to even

01:13:05 ◼   ► get the old passcode.

01:13:06 ◼   ► That's how ignorant I was though in August of 2020.

01:13:12 ◼   ► I thought you had to get the old iCloud passcode

01:13:15 ◼   ► to change it to a new one.

01:13:18 ◼   ► You don't, you just go into the top part,

01:13:20 ◼   ► the top thing in settings and the top thing in iCloud,

01:13:25 ◼   ► passcode and security,

01:13:27 ◼   ► and the top thing in that is change passcode.

01:13:30 ◼   ► And you just change it to something new and that's it.

01:13:33 ◼   ► Although I do know, this is a nice reminder,

01:13:36 ◼   ► I am now reminded, here's what I wrote.

01:13:38 ◼   ► So now I'm back on an alphanumeric passphrase,

01:13:41 ◼   ► inconvenience while wearing a mask be damned.

01:13:43 ◼   ► So that's what I did.

01:13:45 ◼   ► I changed back to an inconvenient alphanumeric passcode

01:13:48 ◼   ► in August of 2020 because of this story.

01:13:51 ◼   ► But I was thinking about, again,

01:13:56 ◼   ► Mission Impossible-style complicated villains

01:13:59 ◼   ► and not common street criminals

01:14:02 ◼   ► who just saw me enter the passcode.

01:14:04 ◼   ► But that's how long I've been using

01:14:05 ◼   ► an alphanumeric password.

01:14:08 ◼   ► Really, really unbelievable story.

01:14:11 ◼   ► I just can't stop thinking about it.

01:14:14 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's why I said this is a bombshell.

01:14:18 ◼   ► Like this, no one knew this, and this is very,

01:14:22 ◼   ► you know, this changes things.

01:14:24 ◼   ► - You know what it reminds me of,

01:14:25 ◼   ► and I don't mind the catastrophe,

01:14:28 ◼   ► and you know, you can go to your bank

01:14:29 ◼   ► and get the charges returned and, you know,

01:14:32 ◼   ► overturned and, you know, fraud detection

01:14:35 ◼   ► and stuff like that.

01:14:37 ◼   ► So I'm not drawing, I swear to God,

01:14:39 ◼   ► I'm not drawing any kind of comparison

01:14:42 ◼   ► to the repercussions.

01:14:44 ◼   ► But it reminds me of 9/11 in the sense of

01:14:49 ◼   ► that before 9/11, it just never occurred to anybody

01:14:54 ◼   ► that our airline policies for decades,

01:14:59 ◼   ► because like in the '60s and '70s,

01:15:01 ◼   ► there was a rash, it was common for

01:15:04 ◼   ► protest groups to hijack airplanes.

01:15:08 ◼   ► There were airplane hijackings

01:15:12 ◼   ► happened you know cup like every year in the 60s and 70s and they you know they'd

01:15:19 ◼   ► you know some group would want some somebody who's in prison in some country

01:15:24 ◼   ► released or something like that some kind of protest type thing and every

01:15:28 ◼   ► time all of these times when airplanes were hijacked they just the policy was

01:15:33 ◼   ► you just placate the hijackers land the plane keep everybody safe tell them you

01:15:40 ◼   ► will listen to your demands and every time they'd get out of it without people being killed.

01:15:47 ◼   ► I don't know if every time they didn't kill any passengers. But that was the policy. If somebody

01:15:54 ◼   ► tries to hijack the airplane, you say, "Okay, okay, how about this? We'll land the plane,

01:15:58 ◼   ► blah, blah, blah." You don't fight them. You don't do anything like that.

01:16:05 ◼   ► So it just never even occurred to anybody that all these all you'd have to do is go on an airplane

01:16:11 ◼   ► with box cutters

01:16:14 ◼   ► and

01:16:16 ◼   ► Demand that the that the flight crew comply with you

01:16:20 ◼   ► And if they do that and they know how to steer an airplane

01:16:25 ◼   ► That all of a sudden they could use a

01:16:30 ◼   ► Boeing 747 full of cross-continental tank of jet fuel as a bomb. It just never occurred to anybody.

01:16:41 ◼   ► Yet after they did it, it seemed like, "How did nobody ever think of this?"

01:16:48 ◼   ► How did nobody ever think of that? And to me, this is sort of that sort of psychological…

01:16:57 ◼   ► it's like the way optical illusions work. Like our brains just weren't hooked up

01:17:01 ◼   ► to see what was right in front of us. This is right in front of us when you look at the way

01:17:05 ◼   ► the settings app works on any iPhone or any Android phone.

01:17:10 ◼   ► Jared "Seth" Johnson Yeah.

01:17:12 ◼   ► Pete "Seth" Johnson I hope I know. You don't think I'm

01:17:14 ◼   ► going to get in trouble for comparing it to 9/11, do you? Because it's not the 9/11.

01:17:18 ◼   ► Jared "Seth" Johnson No, well, it's,

01:17:18 ◼   ► right, but it's a, yeah, like, it's, it reveals a vulnerability that we didn't know about,

01:17:25 ◼   ► really or that we didn't think about right it's just the most bizarre thing

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01:19:54 ◼   ► My thanks to Squarespace

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01:20:00 ◼   ► but I know they sponsor this one a lot

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01:20:02 ◼   ► The only funny thing about this whole,

01:20:06 ◼   ► that whole iPhone, this whole iPhone,

01:20:09 ◼   ► hey, if you've got the passcode and the phone,

01:20:11 ◼   ► you're totally screwed.

01:20:13 ◼   ► if a thief has that, you're totally screwed. It's that. It works exactly the same way on Android,

01:20:23 ◼   ► but all of the victims had iPhones in Joanna's story. And when she talked to this detective in

01:20:29 ◼   ► Minneapolis, I docked it up. It was 40 cases. Just one detective had dealt with one detective

01:20:37 ◼   ► had dealt with 40 cases of the exact same thing. And he told her 99% of them are iPhones.

01:20:43 ◼   ► And that he thinks it's because iPhones have resale value and nobody wants to steal Android

01:20:52 ◼   ► phones or thinks that the people who have Android phones have anything worth stealing.

01:20:57 ◼   ► Oh God. Wow. Yeah, that's, I mean, that is both funny and also, you know, probably not

01:21:08 ◼   ► entirely untrue. It's not that, you know, obviously, yeah, we can poke fun as Apple

01:21:13 ◼   ► fans and, you know, but there is, you know, the markets are not equivalent. We know that.

01:21:19 ◼   ► We know in lots of ways they're not equivalent. It isn't just like, you know, a random selection

01:21:24 ◼   ► of whatever the market share is, 60, 40, 70, whatever it is.

01:21:28 ◼   ► It isn't a random selection of people

01:21:29 ◼   ► that go to one side or the other.

01:21:31 ◼   ► It's actually very different markets.

01:21:33 ◼   ► This is why I have a podcast app that is iPhone only.

01:21:37 ◼   ► And that doesn't really hurt me at all

01:21:39 ◼   ► in any meaningful way because

01:21:42 ◼   ► while there are more Android devices in the world

01:21:45 ◼   ► than there are iPhones,

01:21:48 ◼   ► the reality is that the podcast listening market

01:21:51 ◼   ► is extremely iPhone dominant still.

01:21:54 ◼   ► And so even though it is a bigger number

01:21:59 ◼   ► over on the Android side, it's way fewer

01:22:02 ◼   ► of my actual potential customers there.

01:22:05 ◼   ► And the markets aren't the same.

01:22:07 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:22:10 ◼   ► - There was, I think 9to5Mac had the story

01:22:13 ◼   ► that Apple should make an ad campaign out of it.

01:22:15 ◼   ► I know you're not heavily into sports,

01:22:17 ◼   ► but you might have seen the news

01:22:18 ◼   ► that LeBron James broke the all-time scoring record

01:22:22 ◼   ► in the NBA a week or two ago, which is a major record.

01:22:27 ◼   ► In other words, to be the one basketball player,

01:22:29 ◼   ► more than Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or Wilt Chamberlain

01:22:33 ◼   ► or Michael Jordan, the most points any player's ever scored.

01:22:37 ◼   ► And there's this picture, a really great picture

01:22:39 ◼   ► of him taking the shot that wound up

01:22:44 ◼   ► putting him over the record.

01:22:46 ◼   ► and of course a full crowd in the LA arena.

01:22:51 ◼   ► And you look, you can see the picture's big enough

01:22:55 ◼   ► and crisp enough and you can see that almost,

01:22:58 ◼   ► everybody's got their phone out there,

01:23:00 ◼   ► everybody's trying to take a picture of it

01:23:01 ◼   ► and they're all iPhones.

01:23:03 ◼   ► Or if they're not, or they're,

01:23:07 ◼   ► there aren't many of these.

01:23:10 ◼   ► But I think there's more of them in China.

01:23:13 ◼   ► but in theory they could be the rare Android phone

01:23:17 ◼   ► that is designed to have an iPhone lookalike camera array,

01:23:21 ◼   ► but as many ways that Android phones copy

01:23:26 ◼   ► or follow Apple's lead in design,

01:23:29 ◼   ► like oh, Apple's gone to flat sides,

01:23:31 ◼   ► we're gonna start making our phones with flat sides.

01:23:33 ◼   ► Oh, Apple's going back to rounded sides.

01:23:35 ◼   ► Next year all the Android phones have rounded sides,

01:23:37 ◼   ► but the camera arrays usually look very different.

01:23:42 ◼   ► It's, you know, and again, it's just the sort of people

01:23:46 ◼   ► who pay the tickets to that event were,

01:23:50 ◼   ► I don't know what they cost.

01:23:52 ◼   ► You know, they were hundreds and hundreds of dollars.

01:23:54 ◼   ► It was super expensive.

01:23:55 ◼   ► - More than the phone, probably.

01:23:56 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, but the ticket, oh, the tickets down close enough

01:24:00 ◼   ► to the floor that you would be in this photo

01:24:03 ◼   ► were probably thousands of dollars.

01:24:05 ◼   ► All of them were, you know, unless you had

01:24:08 ◼   ► like season tickets, but LA Lakers tickets,

01:24:11 ◼   ► Season tickets are very expensive anyway.

01:24:13 ◼   ► So the sort of people who get really good seats

01:24:16 ◼   ► to a Lakers game all have iPhones.

01:24:19 ◼   ► It's really, you know, like you said, a different market,

01:24:24 ◼   ► but kind of funny.

01:24:27 ◼   ► All right, HomePod.

01:24:30 ◼   ► HomePod 2, what should we call it?

01:24:32 ◼   ► What do we wanna call the new HomePod?

01:24:33 ◼   ► - Yeah, the new HomePod.

01:24:36 ◼   ► - How many do you have?

01:24:39 ◼   ► - Only two so far.

01:24:41 ◼   ► - Okay, but you have to,

01:24:43 ◼   ► you did side-by-side testing, same,

01:24:49 ◼   ► you set up a thing, did you do it in the kitchen?

01:24:54 ◼   ► - Yep, sure did.

01:24:54 ◼   ► - 'Cause that's where you listen to music.

01:24:55 ◼   ► - Yeah, I did, side-by-side.

01:24:57 ◼   ► Yeah, it's like, as much as a fan as I am of the HomePods,

01:25:01 ◼   ► you use different speakers for different purposes

01:25:04 ◼   ► and in different environments, and for me,

01:25:06 ◼   ► where the HomePod is by far the class leader,

01:25:11 ◼   ► where it defeats all of the competition,

01:25:13 ◼   ► is as a kitchen counter speaker.

01:25:16 ◼   ► It is so much better than everything else in that market

01:25:20 ◼   ► for a kitchen counter speaker.

01:25:22 ◼   ► And it's also good in lots of other ways

01:25:24 ◼   ► and lots of other uses, but that's where I use mine,

01:25:26 ◼   ► and that's where I've had the least luck

01:25:30 ◼   ► with anything else trying to replace it.

01:25:32 ◼   ► And that's where the HomePod really kicks

01:25:34 ◼   ► to everyone else's butts really pretty significantly.

01:25:37 ◼   ► - So what do you think?

01:25:40 ◼   ► - It's pretty good.

01:25:42 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:25:44 ◼   ► Yeah, so basically, I've used lots of things in this role,

01:25:49 ◼   ► I've tried them out.

01:25:50 ◼   ► I have, obviously I have the current HomePod,

01:25:53 ◼   ► I had the previous HomePod, I've had the HomePod Mini,

01:25:57 ◼   ► I've had stereo pairs of all of those,

01:26:00 ◼   ► I've had the Sonos One,

01:26:02 ◼   ► and a couple of ridiculously expensive things

01:26:05 ◼   ► from B&O that I briefly tried and quickly returned.

01:26:08 ◼   ► And I think I tried a couple of things.

01:26:11 ◼   ► Oh, and the original Amazon Alexa, or Amazon Echo, rather.

01:26:17 ◼   ► And then one of the, I think the current mid-range model,

01:26:21 ◼   ► Amazon Echo, which is kind of the big ball-shaped one.

01:26:23 ◼   ► So I've tried all of those.

01:26:25 ◼   ► - You had the B&O one when we were there this summer.

01:26:28 ◼   ► - I did, yeah. (laughs)

01:26:29 ◼   ► - It wasn't bad.

01:26:31 ◼   ► - It wasn't bad, but it sounded about as good

01:26:35 ◼   ► as the HomePod Minis, and it was substantially

01:26:38 ◼   ► more expensive than them, and so it wasn't really worth it.

01:26:40 ◼   ► So, and B&O had like, they had like a larger one

01:26:43 ◼   ► that actually sounded about as good as the HomePod,

01:26:45 ◼   ► but it was way bigger and way more expensive,

01:26:48 ◼   ► and so that also did not stick around.

01:26:51 ◼   ► So, you know, in other areas of the house,

01:26:54 ◼   ► I think you can find things that are a little bit

01:26:57 ◼   ► competitive if you're willing to adjust things a little bit. If you want great sounding speakers

01:27:04 ◼   ► for your TV, you have lots of options. They're mostly going to be way larger and they're

01:27:10 ◼   ► going to require a receiver or some kind of amplification setup that's going to be larger

01:27:15 ◼   ► or more complicated. If you want something on your desk, I actually don't use HomePods

01:27:20 ◼   ► on my desk because there is no good way to have them be speakers for your Mac. There's

01:27:24 ◼   ► There's a few bad ways, but there's no good way.

01:27:28 ◼   ► And so on my desk, I have regular speakers

01:27:31 ◼   ► with a little amp stuck to the bottom of the desk.

01:27:34 ◼   ► And so there's places where HomePods are not as competitive.

01:27:38 ◼   ► But when you want to beam sound in all directions

01:27:42 ◼   ► from a kitchen counter where you're frequently

01:27:44 ◼   ► going to be working to the side of it,

01:27:46 ◼   ► not right in front of it, and you want to fill a space

01:27:51 ◼   ► like that with good quality sound,

01:27:53 ◼   ► nothing is like the HomePod, the full-size HomePod.

01:27:56 ◼   ► The HomePod Mini actually does better

01:27:58 ◼   ► than most of the competitors do at any price

01:28:00 ◼   ► for that kind of use, but the full-size HomePod

01:28:03 ◼   ► really takes it to another level compared to the Mini also.

01:28:06 ◼   ► So it's a really great product line

01:28:08 ◼   ► for a few areas of my life that I really want them.

01:28:11 ◼   ► They're also really good as bathroom and bedroom speakers.

01:28:15 ◼   ► If you want just something to play a podcast

01:28:17 ◼   ► while you're in the shower, or you want to listen

01:28:20 ◼   ► to some music in your bedroom quietly

01:28:21 ◼   ► before you go to bed for some reason.

01:28:25 ◼   ► They're great for that as well.

01:28:26 ◼   ► And again, they're small and they're low needs.

01:28:29 ◼   ► You don't need a big box.

01:28:31 ◼   ► You only have the one power cable come out of it.

01:28:33 ◼   ► You have nothing else to deal with, no other wires.

01:28:35 ◼   ► And the HomePods themselves are small and tasteful looking.

01:28:39 ◼   ► If you have anyone else in your house

01:28:41 ◼   ► that has to approve of the look of things

01:28:45 ◼   ► that are going into these areas of your house,

01:28:47 ◼   ► the HomePods are pretty inoffensive looking.

01:28:50 ◼   ► come in the two different colors. We are a white HomePod family. I think they look very nice,

01:28:55 ◼   ► and it's just great for that. And there are alternatives from other brands. Most commonly,

01:29:03 ◼   ► people tell me to try the Sonos series, and I have. And they are good at many things. They are

01:29:10 ◼   ► not competitive on sound quality. And that's really important to me.

01:29:15 ◼   ► Right your pal Casey is on Team Sonos now newly

01:29:19 ◼   ► So I've been a huge fan of the home pods ever since they came out now. I don't have

01:29:25 ◼   ► Good taste in audio like you do. I just know that I don't you know and

01:29:31 ◼   ► In the way that I

01:29:35 ◼   ► Think you would probably admit I have a finer-tuned taste for

01:29:41 ◼   ► Autography than you do right? Oh, yeah, you might come to me and ask and you well that I actually you have come to me and asked

01:29:48 ◼   ► Yeah, typographic taste questions. I

01:29:51 ◼   ► Would come to you and I have for audio

01:29:56 ◼   ► Taste questions. It's it's it's almost it's not even that I have bad hearing

01:30:01 ◼   ► It's just that I don't my taste doesn't run that way and I've long been obsessed with the fact that people who?

01:30:08 ◼   ► lack taste in an area

01:30:11 ◼   ► sometimes fall into the trap of thinking who anybody who does have good taste in

01:30:17 ◼   ► that area is actually just full of shit and pretentious even though sometimes

01:30:20 ◼   ► that's true right like the people who buy thousand dollar gold cables to hook

01:30:26 ◼   ► up their speakers and think that that makes them sound better than copper

01:30:30 ◼   ► cables right the cables you know it's just running electricity it's you know

01:30:35 ◼   ► that there's there's scams in audio right there's audio many right I mean we

01:30:41 ◼   ► We could do a whole show about the scams in audio.

01:30:43 ◼   ► But there actually is refinement in headphones

01:30:49 ◼   ► and you've written super extensively about headphones.

01:30:54 ◼   ► But I do know what sounds,

01:30:56 ◼   ► I'm not completely without taste in audio quality.

01:31:01 ◼   ► And I think HomePod sound great.

01:31:03 ◼   ► One area, and I've been listening to you guys on ATP

01:31:06 ◼   ► talk about them for weeks now.

01:31:08 ◼   ► One area where I disagree, or at least I disagree personally, is I've been using HomePods for my

01:31:15 ◼   ► living room home theater since early 2020. Yeah, a while.

01:31:20 ◼   ► Yeah, we completed a home renovation by coincidence. Well, 98% completed a home renovation

01:31:28 ◼   ► before the world shut down for COVID, or 99%. It was, you know, literally like,

01:31:35 ◼   ► our contractors were in on the Friday that was the last day where it was legal

01:31:41 ◼   ► to be out in the world cleaning up some stuff and doing some final work. Now, one little bit of that

01:31:49 ◼   ► work is actually very specific to HomePod by pure coincidence. But on the last day, that Friday,

01:32:02 ◼   ► in March 2020, one of the last things I had the contractors do was we've got the living room,

01:32:12 ◼   ► the couch faces a wall, and that wall is very obvious. The whole design is that's where a TV

01:32:18 ◼   ► would go. I guess you could hang a big, somebody who doesn't watch TV and bought our house could

01:32:24 ◼   ► put some kind of very large painting there, but it's a wall with an inset, and in the inset goes

01:32:32 ◼   ► the TV. And then underneath it is a built-in cabinet, like knee-high, where the components

01:32:40 ◼   ► can go. And I knew that all of the components that we use now don't require line of sight for

01:32:47 ◼   ► the remote controls. So none of them, they slide and they can be covered up and it's nice and neat

01:32:53 ◼   ► looking and you don't see the TiVo, you don't see the Apple TV, you don't see the switch. It's all,

01:32:59 ◼   ► you know, you just slide a thing open. But what I wanted was on top of that cabinet,

01:33:04 ◼   ► I think they're called grommets or maybe the grommets are the things you put on,

01:33:08 ◼   ► but you drill holes on the top so that I could put cables through.

01:33:13 ◼   ► Yep.

01:33:15 ◼   ► And I had them already on the built—I have a desk in my office that's built into the wall,

01:33:21 ◼   ► and it has holes that are drilled in the top where I can snake cables through them because the

01:33:28 ◼   ► cabinet is built into the wall. You can't go behind the wall. And the guy said, "Okay, I got

01:33:36 ◼   ► and did them. Well, they are just not quite big enough to put the power cable of a HomePod through.

01:33:51 ◼   ► Because I was thinking of things like HDMI cables and power cables and every cable I could think of,

01:34:02 ◼   ► I thought, well, I thought he was like, how about the, you know, I was there with him.

01:34:06 ◼   ► I right there over his shoulder. He was like, how about this big? And I thought, I thought

01:34:10 ◼   ► of all the things I thought I'd ever want to go through that would easily be a big,

01:34:15 ◼   ► large enough diameter. And I was like, sure, because I'm also thinking I don't want it too

01:34:21 ◼   ► big. I don't want Amy to come in here and say, well, why the hell did you put a, you know, a

01:34:27 ◼   ► a golf hole size, grapefruit size hole on this thing, right?

01:34:32 ◼   ► And it was a hurry.

01:34:35 ◼   ► Like I couldn't like double check with her.

01:34:38 ◼   ► I couldn't wait.

01:34:39 ◼   ► It was, you know, we weren't like in a mad dash,

01:34:42 ◼   ► but it was like the guy was here.

01:34:44 ◼   ► He wasn't gonna be able to come back for,

01:34:46 ◼   ► well, at the time we thought weeks.

01:34:48 ◼   ► Turned out it was forever.

01:34:52 ◼   ► I was like, sure, that's big enough.

01:34:54 ◼   ► And then when I didn't know at the time

01:34:57 ◼   ► that I'd use HomePods for the audio,

01:35:00 ◼   ► it was weeks, a week or several weeks later during COVID

01:35:03 ◼   ► where I thought, let me try using a HomePod

01:35:05 ◼   ► as the home theater.

01:35:07 ◼   ► And lo and behold, the goddamn power cable

01:35:10 ◼   ► wouldn't go through the hole.

01:35:12 ◼   ► Just not quite enough, right?

01:35:14 ◼   ► But like definitely not the sort of thing

01:35:19 ◼   ► where there was like, oh, this is so close

01:35:21 ◼   ► I could maybe shave off plastic on the power cable or you know, no it just wouldn't fit and

01:35:27 ◼   ► One of the design aspects curious design aspects of the original home pods is that the power cables are built into the home pod

01:35:35 ◼   ► Well, they're not really removable right not not not reasonably so at least I don't know

01:35:42 ◼   ► I don't I forget if I pointed this out to you when you were at my house, but so one of the

01:35:46 ◼   ► Things I've heard about from other people in the house

01:35:51 ◼   ► is that our power cables for our home pods have to be pretty visible, even though the home pods are

01:36:00 ◼   ► literally sitting inches away from those grommets or holes. They're inches away from them. Those

01:36:07 ◼   ► holes are in the corners where the home pods sit, but the power cables have to go around them,

01:36:15 ◼   ► you know, in four or five feet away to the nearest power outlets that are not inside this cabinet.

01:36:22 ◼   ► So if…

01:36:23 ◼   ► Oh my god.

01:36:23 ◼   ► So my very favorite feature of HomePod 2, very favorite of all the differences,

01:36:30 ◼   ► is the fact that the power cable is removable. It's just a standard little… that figure

01:36:36 ◼   ► eight style power cable.

01:36:38 ◼   ► Yeah, like a C8, I think, or C7.

01:36:41 ◼   ► Right. So I can go the other way. I can now plug the power thing into the power outlet

01:36:49 ◼   ► that's hidden inside the cabinet and then snake the cable out and then replug it into the HomePod.

01:36:55 ◼   ► And if they had changed nothing else, it just brought back the one that they discontinued

01:37:03 ◼   ► two years ago with no other changes but that, I would still buy two new ones

01:37:10 ◼   ► because it would make some people in the house very happy.

01:37:15 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:37:16 ◼   ► - So that's amazing.

01:37:17 ◼   ► - So that's one thing.

01:37:19 ◼   ► - Like at no point did you figure like,

01:37:21 ◼   ► why don't I like, you know, just widen the hole a little bit

01:37:24 ◼   ► like I know aesthetically it's tricky,

01:37:26 ◼   ► but like look, I'm not a handy person.

01:37:28 ◼   ► - See, I'm not a handy person.

01:37:30 ◼   ► It just doesn't--

01:37:31 ◼   ► - But one of the few tools I know how to use is the drill.

01:37:35 ◼   ► And I learned a few years ago

01:37:37 ◼   ► about this thing called a hole saw,

01:37:39 ◼   ► which is basically like a circle of teeth

01:37:41 ◼   ► you attach to a drill to make holes

01:37:43 ◼   ► that are bigger than drill bits.

01:37:44 ◼   ► And I figured out how to do that,

01:37:46 ◼   ► and so I went, the first thing I did

01:37:48 ◼   ► when I learned how to do that

01:37:49 ◼   ► was I went to our TV stand, which is made of wood,

01:37:51 ◼   ► and it has this cabinet under it,

01:37:53 ◼   ► and I went in the back, and I drilled some giant holes

01:37:56 ◼   ► to snake a bunch of cables through.

01:37:58 ◼   ► You know, it was glorious.

01:38:00 ◼   ► - You know, if I had heard more about this exposed,

01:38:04 ◼   ► these two exposed power cables,

01:38:06 ◼   ► I probably would have looked into it,

01:38:08 ◼   ► but eventually I stopped hearing about it.

01:38:10 ◼   ► And so I didn't look into that.

01:38:12 ◼   ► But who's the smart guy now?

01:38:14 ◼   ► I don't need it 'cause I'm gonna buy two new HomePods.

01:38:17 ◼   ► I have been a happy user of HomePod.

01:38:22 ◼   ► Now, again, maybe it's because my taste in audio

01:38:25 ◼   ► isn't good enough, but I previously,

01:38:28 ◼   ► and our other home theater setup,

01:38:30 ◼   ► which is upstairs in our guest room study area,

01:38:34 ◼   ► which we had used for years, had a Sony audio system.

01:38:39 ◼   ► It has a receiver.

01:38:41 ◼   ► It's the traditional home theater type thing.

01:38:44 ◼   ► It has a Sony receiver.

01:38:46 ◼   ► It has two left and right front speakers,

01:38:51 ◼   ► a separate subwoofer, a center speaker,

01:38:56 ◼   ► and two rear speakers for surround sound,

01:39:02 ◼   ► which I'd given up on at some point

01:39:04 ◼   ► 'cause I never, I actually thought it was less pleasant.

01:39:08 ◼   ► It actually, to me, movies and TV shows sounded better

01:39:13 ◼   ► with everything coming from the TV in the front

01:39:16 ◼   ► and then from the rear.

01:39:17 ◼   ► But it's, you know, I don't know what I,

01:39:19 ◼   ► I didn't spend a fortune on it

01:39:20 ◼   ► 'cause I bought it a long time ago

01:39:22 ◼   ► and didn't have a fortune to spend.

01:39:23 ◼   ► But I mean, it's, I don't know,

01:39:24 ◼   ► probably a thousand dollar system or, you know,

01:39:27 ◼   ► maybe more, I don't know, all told.

01:39:29 ◼   ► And it was good and I was happy with it

01:39:32 ◼   ► for many, many, many years.

01:39:33 ◼   ► all the years I used my pioneer,

01:39:36 ◼   ► I can't believe I forgot Pioneer's name,

01:39:37 ◼   ► my beloved Pioneer Plasma TV.

01:39:41 ◼   ► You ever hear of any? - Those are so good.

01:39:44 ◼   ► - Do we have any mutual friends

01:39:45 ◼   ► who are fans of Plasma TVs?

01:39:47 ◼   ► I'm drawing on the tip of my tongue.

01:39:49 ◼   ► - We might have a few.

01:39:51 ◼   ► So but like, what often gets lost in that

01:39:53 ◼   ► is that I also had one just a long time ago

01:39:56 ◼   ► and it was amazing.

01:39:58 ◼   ► It wasn't amazing as John's, of course,

01:39:59 ◼   ► but it was, oh man.

01:40:02 ◼   ► Plasmas were great and for the time,

01:40:04 ◼   ► just so much better than everything else.

01:40:08 ◼   ► - They really, really were.

01:40:09 ◼   ► So much better than generations of elves.

01:40:11 ◼   ► I skipped, so I've never owned an LCD TV.

01:40:14 ◼   ► I went from plasma to OLED.

01:40:17 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's the wise move, LCD is awful.

01:40:20 ◼   ► - Which again, I think is exactly what Syracuse did, right?

01:40:23 ◼   ► Is he went directly from plasma to OLED.

01:40:26 ◼   ► But I had-- - 'Cause he knew

01:40:27 ◼   ► LCDs are awful.

01:40:28 ◼   ► But I had this Sony home theater system,

01:40:32 ◼   ► and I had been complaining,

01:40:34 ◼   ► I've mentioned it on the show for years,

01:40:36 ◼   ► that especially with like HBO shows,

01:40:38 ◼   ► as like I could never understand

01:40:40 ◼   ► what the hell people were saying.

01:40:41 ◼   ► And I had a center, I had it,

01:40:43 ◼   ► and people would say,

01:40:44 ◼   ► "Oh, it's 'cause the dialogue's on the center channel."

01:40:47 ◼   ► And it's like, "I got a center speaker.

01:40:50 ◼   ► "I still get the,

01:40:50 ◼   ► (mumbles)

01:40:52 ◼   ► "you know, and I'm like, what the hell did they say?

01:40:55 ◼   ► "I can't understand it."

01:40:56 ◼   ► And then after COVID for a while,

01:40:59 ◼   ► what we did is we were only using the speakers that were,

01:41:03 ◼   ► 'cause I wanted to get a good home theater system

01:41:06 ◼   ► 'cause this was all part of the plan.

01:41:08 ◼   ► We spent a lot of money to redo the living room

01:41:10 ◼   ► and get it exactly the way we wanted.

01:41:12 ◼   ► And I got exactly the LZG OLED giant 77 inch

01:41:17 ◼   ► or whatever the hell big it is, OLED,

01:41:21 ◼   ► whatever the biggest OLED they make or made in 2020.

01:41:25 ◼   ► it was the best TV I could buy. It was great for me as somebody who's paralyzed by choice,

01:41:32 ◼   ► because all I knew was I wanted the biggest OLED I could get, and LG was the only company that made

01:41:40 ◼   ► one like that. And I didn't want a Samsung. I knew I didn't want Samsung. So it was this model from

01:41:45 ◼   ► LG, that was it. And I got it, and it's beautiful. But for months after we got back into our living

01:41:52 ◼   ► room when COVID started, we just played all the audio through the TV speakers. And they're not

01:41:59 ◼   ► bad. They really—and my wife and son agreed that the audio quality was really surprisingly good for

01:42:08 ◼   ► just coming out of the TV. Although I guess when you spend a lot on a TV, maybe that's not

01:42:13 ◼   ► surprising. But I was like, it wasn't good enough. And so I thought, well, let me try the HomePods

01:42:18 ◼   ► before I go and buy something expensive and tried the HomePods. And I was like, "This is fantastic.

01:42:27 ◼   ► I love it." And to me, this is the thing that I think—maybe I'm not 100% caught up on the very

01:42:33 ◼   ► latest ATP. I forget if I finished it or not. But I don't think—no, you're in the after show talking

01:42:37 ◼   ► about Rivians. So the thing that you guys were talking about and that Syracuse was talking about

01:42:47 ◼   ► Is if you only have two home pods something something blah blah blah the center and the center is where you get the dialogue

01:42:52 ◼   ► Mm-hmm. I'm telling you with two home pods and I have a big living room pretty big living room in an open floor plan

01:43:00 ◼   ► The whole it's a big because our dining room is right behind us. So it's not a contained room. It's a it's a

01:43:07 ◼   ► harsh audio scenario and

01:43:09 ◼   ► Because the TV is so big and it is a fairly big room. I

01:43:15 ◼   ► I think it's acoustically challenging. Two home pods left and right of the TV,

01:43:20 ◼   ► it sounds like stuff comes from the center. And I think that the complexity of modern

01:43:28 ◼   ► prestige TV and movies, audio mixes, and then just watching generic stuff on TV like sports

01:43:38 ◼   ► or whatever, whatever the home pods are doing computationally in the same way that they compute

01:43:45 ◼   ► the echo acoustics of the room. They fake the center better as good. There's no way that I

01:43:56 ◼   ► could spend $5,000 on an audio system and I wouldn't, it certainly could be louder I'm sure,

01:44:03 ◼   ► but I don't think it would sound better. And I'm sure I could get a lot more bass with an actual

01:44:08 ◼   ► subwoofer, no doubt about it. There's no question about that. And I know that we used to have more

01:44:13 ◼   ► bass with our previous system that had a dedicated subwoofer that wasn't even like super premium

01:44:19 ◼   ► model. I know we're missing out on bass.

01:44:21 ◼   ► Jared Ranerel And that's, and that's, by the way, that's

01:44:23 ◼   ► not really a fair comparison. It's like, the HomePod is really small. Like people, I don't

01:44:28 ◼   ► think people realize who don't have them, how small they are for the amount of audio

01:44:33 ◼   ► and quality you get out of them. Like, they have a four inch woofer, you know, a subwoofer

01:44:38 ◼   ► for a home theater, you're gonna you're looking at at least six inches and usually much larger

01:44:42 ◼   ► of a driver. For what it is, it's incredible, and you can't get anything that has that kind

01:44:51 ◼   ► of sound in anything that is that size or smaller. It's the same way in the 90s when

01:44:59 ◼   ► everybody was blown away by Bose and how Bose managed to make these really tiny speakers

01:45:05 ◼   ► that had really big sound, and part of that was good engineering, part of that was they

01:45:09 ◼   ► introduced the external subwoofer to the world for the most part. And so they have these

01:45:14 ◼   ► little tiny tweeters that would be your surround feeders and they have the giant subwoofer

01:45:17 ◼   ► that you tuck in the corner somewhere. But you know, for home pods are incredible for

01:45:23 ◼   ► their size. They're also really good in absolute terms. But of course, you know, when you have

01:45:28 ◼   ► a bigger room or when you when you're comparing it's much larger speakers, yeah, you can get

01:45:32 ◼   ► better than a home pod. But you cannot get anywhere near what the home pod offers. Anything

01:45:38 ◼   ► close to its size. Right. And you remember, you might remember this, but while I was doing this,

01:45:45 ◼   ► I was, of course, picking your brain over what I should be, might be, maybe should be looking

01:45:52 ◼   ► at speaker-wise for this setup. And you had sent me multiple selection, multiple possible things,

01:45:59 ◼   ► and I'd show them to Amy and got some pretty quick thumbs down.

01:46:06 ◼   ► Yep.

01:46:08 ◼   ► Visually now and I'm not making fun, you know, nobody's pickier about the way some things look than me

01:46:13 ◼   ► I'm pickier than I'm pickier about things

01:46:16 ◼   ► I'm picky about then Amy is about a way our living room looks so I'm not making fun of her. I love her for it

01:46:22 ◼   ► I love that. She's that you know, I I appreciate it, but some of them were very tall

01:46:28 ◼   ► and they all were

01:46:31 ◼   ► Forward and would have to be on the floor in front of it and the way that our living room is set up

01:46:38 ◼   ► up, it's not how it was designed.

01:46:41 ◼   ► And so visually, two white home pods

01:46:46 ◼   ► in the corner on this cabinet under the TV,

01:46:51 ◼   ► it looks like the room was designed for that to be,

01:46:56 ◼   ► in terms of the visual effect,

01:46:59 ◼   ► it wasn't just, okay, that's fine, we'll go with that.

01:47:02 ◼   ► She was like, that would be great, that looks awesome.

01:47:06 ◼   ► But I'm 100% satisfied with the sound

01:47:10 ◼   ► that I get out of them.

01:47:11 ◼   ► And especially the simulated center channel

01:47:16 ◼   ► that they produce for dialogue

01:47:19 ◼   ► and the what the fuck did that person just say

01:47:23 ◼   ► is it only happens to me now when I know that it's a show

01:47:28 ◼   ► that is deliberately produced to have mumble mouth dialogue

01:47:34 ◼   ► like Game of Thrones, right?

01:47:36 ◼   ► like famously, for whatever reason,

01:47:38 ◼   ► Game of Thrones makes everything way too dark.

01:47:42 ◼   ► I like the show, I don't like the new one that much,

01:47:44 ◼   ► but I like the other one.

01:47:46 ◼   ► But it's a very dark show, your TV isn't busted,

01:47:50 ◼   ► you don't have to turn the brightness up,

01:47:51 ◼   ► it's supposed to be that dark,

01:47:53 ◼   ► and they deliberately garbled the dialogue.

01:47:56 ◼   ► I don't know why, I don't know why you would do that.

01:47:58 ◼   ► It's like, to me, it's like there's certain,

01:48:01 ◼   ► there's always certain cinematic trends

01:48:04 ◼   ► that you can look at a movie,

01:48:05 ◼   ► if you've even if you've never seen the movie before you can say oh that movie was made in the

01:48:10 ◼   ► early 80s 100 you just know it you don't have to look at hairstyles you just there's just certain

01:48:16 ◼   ► you know cinematic things and mumble mouth dialogue is going to come across as like oh

01:48:24 ◼   ► that was like in the late 2010s guaranteed yeah so other than that though i love the center channel

01:48:31 ◼   ► for it. I think it's a fantastic home theater thing. And I do love and appreciate, and this

01:48:39 ◼   ► is like the sort of Casey List angle, I love the 100% simplicity of setup. One cable, it goes to

01:48:49 ◼   ► power, and that's it. I've always been, it's always been in the back of my mind with my other stereo

01:48:56 ◼   ► that I was never sure if I was hooking it up the right way, right? Because you can hook up like the

01:49:02 ◼   ► red, yellow, and green cables, or you could go buy an optical cable, optical lens. Should I use

01:49:09 ◼   ► optical? What am I doing? And it, okay, I've hooked this up, turned it on, and it sounds

01:49:15 ◼   ► great to me, and it's loud, but should I use the other type of cable? And then you've got all these

01:49:23 ◼   ► cables. There's all these cables running all over the place. And what do you do with them?

01:49:28 ◼   ► I love the just, and it, to me, it is epitomizes the Apple mindset towards things where it's just,

01:49:39 ◼   ► there's, there's just one way that's it. It's, and then you just hook it up to your Apple TV,

01:49:46 ◼   ► you know, through the Apple TV interface. And for me, and it might, here I am knocking on wood,

01:49:53 ◼   ► although I think this IKEA desk I sit at for the podcast isn't really wood, but you know, whatever

01:49:59 ◼   ► IKEA made this out of. I've had no problems with any, with like the Apple TV maintaining

01:50:08 ◼   ► connectivity to the HomePods. I think there was one time, so what was it, sometime in the spring

01:50:15 ◼   ► a 20 20. So we're just call it three years. It's short of three years. But in three years,

01:50:22 ◼   ► there was one time where one of the two home pods was sort of lost,

01:50:29 ◼   ► sort of confused and off, you know, unpaired and somehow refused, started wandering away. Yeah.

01:50:39 ◼   ► And the trick was to unplug both of them, because maybe the problem was with the other one,

01:50:46 ◼   ► and you know, the one that didn't seem to be, you know, was still playing the TV audio. I don't know,

01:50:52 ◼   ► unplugged them both, plugged them back in, and that's one time in three years where I had any sort of

01:50:57 ◼   ► reliability of, you know, does this thing still work? Really fantastic for home theater. Now,

01:51:08 ◼   ► We also have a pair in our kitchen that the kitchen one we put you that's where we play music and that's where I listen to

01:51:14 ◼   ► podcasts

01:51:16 ◼   ► And do those sort of things with home pods

01:51:18 ◼   ► Those have been pretty reliable to more than most in my testing

01:51:24 ◼   ► I've had a pair of the home pods to ever, you know since before they came out whatever they announced them and I've been testing them

01:51:30 ◼   ► I haven't written a review because I've I

01:51:33 ◼   ► Struggle because I feel like I don't have the audio

01:51:37 ◼   ► taste to review that aspect of them properly

01:51:40 ◼   ► These two have a hundred have been a hundred percent reliable for me once they were paired and I've had them paired non-stop ever since

01:51:48 ◼   ► and I've been

01:51:51 ◼   ► Doinking around with them testing things

01:51:53 ◼   ► 100% reliable and I will say this

01:51:58 ◼   ► The Siri response time really is faster. Yes, definitely. I

01:52:05 ◼   ► I guess that's going to the S7 chip or whatever the second generation chip is.

01:52:12 ◼   ► Skipping a few years in chip to get a faster CPU and faster whatever else,

01:52:20 ◼   ► whatever audio signal, whatever they're doing to make it faster. They absolutely did. It's not

01:52:27 ◼   ► marketing trickery or that Apple set up optimized ones. It is noticeably faster. And I know that

01:52:34 ◼   ► that it's faster because I'm testing these new ones

01:52:38 ◼   ► in my office and I've got the old ones upstairs.

01:52:42 ◼   ► And so I'm, you know, it's like having,

01:52:46 ◼   ► spending half your time on a brand new iPhone

01:52:49 ◼   ► and half your time on a five-year-old iPhone every day.

01:52:53 ◼   ► Every day you're like, "God damn, this old iPhone is slow."

01:52:58 ◼   ► So for me, for me, I wanted,

01:53:03 ◼   ► I want you to talk more about audio quality,

01:53:05 ◼   ► 'cause I don't notice it.

01:53:06 ◼   ► I can't tell any, to me it sounds just as good

01:53:10 ◼   ► as the original HomePods.

01:53:11 ◼   ► What I notice is it's faster.

01:53:14 ◼   ► And so that's enough for me.

01:53:18 ◼   ► But it sounds to me like, or from your review on ATP,

01:53:23 ◼   ► that you think they sound better.

01:53:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, and they do sound different.

01:53:29 ◼   ► Overall, they sound, they're in the ballpark of each other.

01:53:34 ◼   ► If you don't have them side by side,

01:53:38 ◼   ► if you just upgrade from the first one to the second one

01:53:41 ◼   ► and just start playing stuff,

01:53:42 ◼   ► you might not notice the difference.

01:53:44 ◼   ► It's that relatively small of one.

01:53:48 ◼   ► What you will most likely notice

01:53:50 ◼   ► is that the new one has less bass than the old one.

01:53:54 ◼   ► And that, honestly, I wish they would have that be

01:53:58 ◼   ► kind of EQ control because I would love to turn it up a little bit on the new one because

01:54:03 ◼   ► the old one, the old one, they often got complaints that it was too bassy, especially if you live

01:54:08 ◼   ► like in an apartment or if you're putting it in a smaller room where you'd really hear

01:54:12 ◼   ► a lot of that bass resonance or your neighbors might hear it. So it was good that they had

01:54:17 ◼   ► a setting called reduce bass that they added shortly afterwards, which basically is just

01:54:21 ◼   ► like a hard low pass filter. So it just cuts out all of the bass. It's a pretty coarse

01:54:27 ◼   ► I would love to have that be an actual, you know, a setting.

01:54:32 ◼   ► Maybe a slider that has like three or four positions on it,

01:54:35 ◼   ► you know, so that you can have a little bit less

01:54:38 ◼   ► or a little bit more.

01:54:39 ◼   ► I don't know, people have developed EQs and bass knobs

01:54:43 ◼   ► for decades and, you know, I know Apple doesn't like

01:54:47 ◼   ► adding unnecessary settings, but I think this is such

01:54:50 ◼   ► a situational and taste variable here of how much bass

01:54:54 ◼   ► you want your HomePod to have.

01:54:56 ◼   ► I would love to see a setting for that.

01:54:58 ◼   ► - Well, and--

01:54:58 ◼   ► - The new ones are a little bit lighter.

01:55:01 ◼   ► - They give you a little bit of that with AirPods, right?

01:55:03 ◼   ► And AirPods have a little bit of EQ settings, right?

01:55:08 ◼   ► - There's like a few things you can do,

01:55:10 ◼   ► but they're pretty limited.

01:55:12 ◼   ► - Right, but that's what I would imagine

01:55:14 ◼   ► they might do with HomePod,

01:55:16 ◼   ► would be a limited, very limited number of tweaks.

01:55:20 ◼   ► And like, a little more bassy, a little less bassy,

01:55:25 ◼   ► or just two settings, you know, like a little less

01:55:28 ◼   ► or a little more, I could see them doing, you know.

01:55:32 ◼   ► Just AirPods like, right?

01:55:34 ◼   ► AirPods certainly aren't fiddly

01:55:37 ◼   ► in terms of the amount of control you get

01:55:39 ◼   ► over their sound quality.

01:55:40 ◼   ► Just a little bit, I agree, would be nice.

01:55:46 ◼   ► - Yeah, and they still won't add my,

01:55:48 ◼   ► the one setting I want AirPods to have so badly

01:55:54 ◼   ► is I want to be able to, for a particular pair of AirPods,

01:55:58 ◼   ► to say never automatically jump to any other device.

01:56:02 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:56:03 ◼   ► - Oh, yes.

01:56:03 ◼   ► - 'Cause right now, the way AirPods work is

01:56:08 ◼   ► each pair of AirPods, by default,

01:56:10 ◼   ► will intelligently connect to any of your devices

01:56:13 ◼   ► that are nearby and the things you might be wanting to use.

01:56:15 ◼   ► And it'll also offer, it'll put that little dialogue thing

01:56:18 ◼   ► in the corner saying, hey, connect to, you know,

01:56:20 ◼   ► Marcos AirPods number two or whatever.

01:56:21 ◼   ► Like it'll offer that on Apple TVs, on Macs.

01:56:26 ◼   ► And it currently, if you want to have your AirPods

01:56:30 ◼   ► not auto switch, you have to go to every single device

01:56:35 ◼   ► that they might pair to.

01:56:37 ◼   ► Every phone, every iPad, every Mac, every Apple TV

01:56:41 ◼   ► I think even, like you have to go to every single device

01:56:43 ◼   ► they might pair to and go and connect to it first

01:56:47 ◼   ► and then go to the AirPod settings

01:56:48 ◼   ► and the Bluetooth settings and say,

01:56:50 ◼   ► Don't automatically connect this device,

01:56:51 ◼   ► like only when it's last paired or whatever.

01:56:54 ◼   ► And you have to go through that for every single device.

01:56:56 ◼   ► If you get a new pair of AirPods,

01:56:58 ◼   ► or if you get a new Apple device

01:56:59 ◼   ► that the AirPods might connect to,

01:57:01 ◼   ► you have to do it again.

01:57:02 ◼   ► Watch, you have to do it for everything.

01:57:05 ◼   ► And also, that setting conveniently

01:57:08 ◼   ► seems to get forgotten sometimes.

01:57:10 ◼   ► That's the most infuriating part,

01:57:11 ◼   ► is that you can go through the hassle

01:57:13 ◼   ► of setting this all up to say,

01:57:15 ◼   ► all right, I never want my AirPods

01:57:16 ◼   ► to automatically guess what I want them to connect to.

01:57:18 ◼   ► just connect to the last thing I had them connected to

01:57:20 ◼   ► all the time.

01:57:21 ◼   ► - Well, and the-- - You can do all that,

01:57:23 ◼   ► and then two weeks later, it'll forget that setting.

01:57:25 ◼   ► - Yeah. - And then you have to do

01:57:26 ◼   ► it all again, or just eventually give up and say,

01:57:28 ◼   ► fine, I'm just gonna have these be buggy.

01:57:30 ◼   ► Like, I cannot tell you, as an AirPods user myself,

01:57:34 ◼   ► how often it connects to the wrong thing,

01:57:36 ◼   ► and then also, again, being an audio app developer,

01:57:39 ◼   ► I get bug reports from people all the time,

01:57:41 ◼   ► saying something to the effect of,

01:57:44 ◼   ► Overcast just randomly stops playing sometimes.

01:57:48 ◼   ► And I actually, and I went and I added logging to the app,

01:57:52 ◼   ► and there's like, you know, when you send in a feedback

01:57:54 ◼   ► email to me, you can attach the logs if you want to.

01:57:57 ◼   ► And part of the logs, I log every play and pause event

01:58:02 ◼   ► for the last, you know, couple hours or whatever.

01:58:05 ◼   ► I log every play and pause event,

01:58:07 ◼   ► and I started logging what caused them,

01:58:10 ◼   ► why did this pause?

01:58:11 ◼   ► And there's different things like,

01:58:12 ◼   ► you tap the button in the UI, or a phone call came in,

01:58:16 ◼   ► or different, you tap the control center button,

01:58:20 ◼   ► and I can tell when it's most likely AirPods

01:58:23 ◼   ► disconnecting and reconnecting to something else,

01:58:25 ◼   ► because the most common case is someone has their AirPods in,

01:58:29 ◼   ► they enter their house or a device becomes available

01:58:33 ◼   ► within range, just barely or something,

01:58:35 ◼   ► and then the AirPods get automatically taken off

01:58:38 ◼   ► of their phone that was playing Overcast,

01:58:40 ◼   ► and it goes in pairs to their computer or something.

01:58:44 ◼   ► and I can see right on my log that it says their device name

01:58:47 ◼   ► and it's like, you know, Joe's AirPods, no longer available.

01:58:51 ◼   ► And I see that and people are emailing me constantly.

01:58:54 ◼   ► - 'Cause they don't know how it happened.

01:58:55 ◼   ► - Blaming me, blaming my app, saying that it's buggy,

01:58:57 ◼   ► it just stops randomly, when really,

01:59:00 ◼   ► it's AirPod auto switching doing something

01:59:02 ◼   ► that they didn't expect or want.

01:59:04 ◼   ► And I just, give me a setting so I can say,

01:59:08 ◼   ► on a particular pair of AirPods,

01:59:10 ◼   ► never auto connect to other devices.

01:59:13 ◼   ► just stay connected to whatever I last connected you to.

01:59:16 ◼   ► That's it.

01:59:17 ◼   ► And I, God, that one setting would make AirPods

01:59:21 ◼   ► so much better.

01:59:22 ◼   ► In the same way, I want one setting on HomePods,

01:59:27 ◼   ► in addition to the base boosting, that's one thing,

01:59:29 ◼   ► but HomePods have this mode that,

01:59:32 ◼   ► by far the most bugs that I've seen on HomePods

01:59:36 ◼   ► relate to this behavior, that if you are playing

01:59:40 ◼   ► from your iPhone and you wanna play something

01:59:43 ◼   ► on your HomePod.

01:59:44 ◼   ► There's two different modes this can be sent in.

01:59:47 ◼   ► There's AirPlay and there's Handoff.

01:59:49 ◼   ► Or I think, I don't know if they,

01:59:50 ◼   ► they don't really describe it,

01:59:51 ◼   ► so I'm gonna call it Handoff

01:59:53 ◼   ► because it seems to work like Handoff.

01:59:56 ◼   ► But so in AirPlay mode, your phone continuously streams

02:00:00 ◼   ► the audio of whatever you're playing to the HomePod.

02:00:03 ◼   ► Your phone remains the source, it remains in full control.

02:00:06 ◼   ► And there's a buffer, you know, so you can like,

02:00:09 ◼   ► you know, take the trash out, come back in

02:00:10 ◼   ► probably won't skip because it's a buffer of about two minutes, but your phone is still

02:00:15 ◼   ► in control. So if your phone has to reboot or something or whatever, the music will stop.

02:00:23 ◼   ► Then there is handoff mode where if you have something from Apple Music in particular,

02:00:32 ◼   ► not the service, the app, if you're using Apple's Music app and you tell it to play

02:00:37 ◼   ► on a HomePod. Your phone does not keep that connection alive itself. Your phone tells

02:00:43 ◼   ► the HomePod, "Hey, go play this thing from Apple Music or from my Apple Music collection,"

02:00:49 ◼   ► or whatever it is. It works with iTunes Match and stuff too, but it's, you know.

02:00:52 ◼   ► - But how-- - Go play this thing using Apple Music. And

02:00:53 ◼   ► then the HomePod kind of like wakes up its own software stack to launch some version

02:00:59 ◼   ► of a music app on the HomePod, and then your phone is out of the picture. So your phone

02:01:04 ◼   ► is then your phone is, your HomePod says,

02:01:07 ◼   ► "All right, I got this from here,"

02:01:09 ◼   ► and it takes over and it plays.

02:01:10 ◼   ► And then this does allow some convenient behavior.

02:01:13 ◼   ► So for instance, when the HomePod has taken over

02:01:15 ◼   ► the session like this for Apple Music playback,

02:01:19 ◼   ► anyone on your WiFi network can go into Control Center

02:01:22 ◼   ► and take over the HomePod and see all the things

02:01:25 ◼   ► it's playing, what it's about to play.

02:01:26 ◼   ► You can take over the whole session,

02:01:27 ◼   ► the same way like when you connect to a HomePod

02:01:31 ◼   ► from Control Center and it opens it up in your music app

02:01:34 ◼   ► and then you're controlling it.

02:01:36 ◼   ► Anyone in your house can do that.

02:01:37 ◼   ► So it doesn't have to have been the phone that started it.

02:01:39 ◼   ► Anyone can do it.

02:01:40 ◼   ► And you can also do it if you have it play

02:01:43 ◼   ► through a Siri command.

02:01:44 ◼   ► If you tell it via Siri,

02:01:47 ◼   ► hey, go play the Rolling Stones,

02:01:48 ◼   ► and Apple Music is not down that hour,

02:01:51 ◼   ► if it actually works,

02:01:53 ◼   ► then anybody in your house can then connect to it

02:01:56 ◼   ► from their phone, take over the session,

02:01:57 ◼   ► and direct it or edit it or change what's up next

02:02:00 ◼   ► or whatever else.

02:02:01 ◼   ► The problem is, this behavior is really slow,

02:02:06 ◼   ► and historically has been really buggy.