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ATP

531: Rock It in the Right Direction

 

00:00:00   I had to re-expand my audio hijack window from the tiny little size that fit on the LG Ultrafine last week.

00:00:07   Oh, the struggle! The struggle with your mere 5Ks, but now you're back with all six of them.

00:00:14   But still not tiny enough. I know they did an update to Audio Hijack, probably partially in response to me complaining that you couldn't make the window small enough, and so they made it so you could make the window smaller.

00:00:24   And I can make it narrow enough now, but I can't make it short enough.

00:00:29   I gotta fit it into the little corner of my screen where it goes.

00:00:33   So, you know, I was gonna unload on you two about how ridiculous you are, that you two with your 6K monitors are somehow pressed for real estate, apparently?

00:00:40   I have a few windows open, I'm not sure if you heard.

00:00:42   Oh, god, yeah, I don't even wanna think about it.

00:00:44   I can't move them all anymore, we'll talk about that in a little bit, but they're still open.

00:00:48   Too soon, John, too soon.

00:00:50   I'm picturing like a tile puzzle, like there's no room to move them all, that's it.

00:00:54   No, that's not what I mean, I'm talking about the thing that got cut out of last week that is returning in this.

00:00:59   Yeah, yeah.

00:01:00   But no, here it is, I was gonna make so much fun of you for you and your 6Ks a piece, but I have two 5K monitors, so do I really have 10Ks in front of me? Like, am I one to throw stones?

00:01:12   I'm pretty sure you, I assume you have significantly more real estate than we do total.

00:01:16   But you can't look at it all at once.

00:01:18   That is true, I do need to turn my head, but I have what I consider to be my primary monitor and then my other stuff monitor.

00:01:23   You should get some kind of like weird glasses binoculars thing so that like one goes to one eye, one goes to the other and you can make like a stereoscopic image with your two 5Ks.

00:01:31   Yeah, I should look into that.

00:01:33   Casey's a predator, he's not prey.

00:01:35   His eyes are in the front of his head.

00:01:37   Always on offense, never defense.

00:01:39   Always on offense.

00:01:40   There it is.

00:01:44   Alright, so speaking of being on offense, guess what time it is baby? It's merch time! The 8 piece store is back and John got a hold of it so nobody's gonna care, but I have to put on the happy face anyway, so here we go.

00:01:57   We have all the Mac Pro shirts you could ever want. We have a brand new design, the Mac Pro Believe shirt.

00:02:06   I have to explain this one Casey.

00:02:08   Okay, please feel free.

00:02:10   So in 2019 when they redid the Mac Pro, one of the things I did, I don't know, what was it? That was the launch of WWDC right? I think I did this for like the holiday store.

00:02:20   I'm like, the new Mac Pro is out, right? At that point I didn't even have one, but you know, we knew what the design looked like, it was all over Apple's website.

00:02:27   I decided I'm gonna try to make some kind of merchandise related to the Mac Pro.

00:02:31   So what I did was I made a big vector drawing of a front view of the big Mac Pro tower with all the holes in it and everything.

00:02:37   At a pretty high level of detail, still just line art, right? But I made the whole thing from top to bottom, front view.

00:02:44   And I could not figure out how to make a shirt out of that, because it just looks weird, I tried all sorts of designs, I tried just showing holes, I tried just showing one of the holes.

00:02:55   It turns out it's a weird design of a computer.

00:02:58   It is, but it was hard to make, it was hard to put it on a shirt in a way that worked in any, I just forgot about it, right?

00:03:04   Well, but I kept the files around. So for this WWDC, I had an idea for a message that I wanted to send to Apple.

00:03:14   And I said, you know what I can use for that message? That old Mac Pro thing.

00:03:19   So I dug it back out and I found a way to make it into a shirt. It's not the world's greatest shirt, but it is a shirt.

00:03:26   You're really selling it, Jon.

00:03:28   Here's the message I'm sending. The message I'm sending, because at this point, so that was 2019, here we are in 2023 and we're all waiting for the Mac Pro that Apple said, what, two years ago at the end of that presentation for whatever they were announcing?

00:03:42   Like, there's one more Mac to go, and that's the Mac Pro.

00:03:45   It's a story for another day, Jon.

00:03:47   That'll have to wait for another day, and we've all been waiting and waiting and waiting.

00:03:51   It could be that WWDC this year, they announced the Mac Pro, or maybe they don't.

00:03:56   Either way, my dream is to have somebody, maybe even me, but right now I'm not currently going to WWDC because I have no ticket.

00:04:03   But I would like somebody or somebodies to be wearing this shirt and to be visible at Apple Park in person at WWDC for their little, we're going to show you the video in person type thing.

00:04:14   Because what's on this shirt is a front view of the top of the current Mac Pro tower, and then a single word underneath it. It says, "Believe."

00:04:23   And what am I trying to say? I'm trying to say, "Apple, we here out in the audience, we believe in the Mac Pro. We want it to exist. We want you to ship it. We don't want you to cancel it.

00:04:33   We don't want to have to wait five years between revisions all the time. We believe, and if we believe hard enough, maybe the Mac Pro will return."

00:04:39   Now, if the Mac Pro has launched WWDC, we're like, "Hey, I was a believer. I was wearing the shirt, and then the announcement, yay, we did it."

00:04:46   And if it's not announced, we can say, "We still believe, Apple. Ship this computer. We want it to exist."

00:04:51   Do we, though?

00:04:53   This is what I feel like. I feel like Apple, at WWDC, granted, there's probably very, very few people who care at all about the Mac Pro.

00:05:01   But I think they exist, and I think Apple doesn't know they exist. Because at what point does anyone ever bring up the Mac Pro to Apple?

00:05:07   It might seem like, "Oh, I hear all these developers are here with their laptops, and they're going to be running their apps for their phones, and that's what it's all about."

00:05:13   I want the Mac Pro people to say, "We exist. We exist in large enough numbers. There's at least one of us at your own Apple Park with a shirt, with a picture of a product you seem not to care about."

00:05:24   And go years between revising, and seem to always want to be canceling or having second thoughts about shipping.

00:05:30   But you said you're going to ship it. We believe you're going to ship it.

00:05:33   So, if I actually end up going to WWDC, I'm going to wear one of these Mac Pro believe shirts.

00:05:37   Every day.

00:05:38   If it's freezing cold like San Francisco, I'll have a long-sleeve shirt on top of it, which will kind of defeat the purpose, but I'll do what I can.

00:05:43   No, no, no. You have to do the long sleeve under it, like it's early 2000s and I'm at college.

00:05:47   I can't do that. I can't pull that off.

00:05:48   You have to. No, you have to. It's the rules.

00:05:50   What I ask is for somebody out there who's listening to this, and who does, who did win the WWDC lottery and is going to be at Apple Park, please, at least one of you, talk amongst yourselves, figure out who it's going to be.

00:06:01   At least one of you. Buy this shirt, wear it prominently, and make sure Apple people see it.

00:06:08   And when they ask you about it, you can either lie and say, "I really care about the Mac Pro and I want you to ship it."

00:06:13   Or you can tell the truth and say, "I don't care about the Mac Pro, but John Saracusa does and I listen to his podcast, so please ship it."

00:06:18   That's my wish. That's why this shirt exists. We've got it in with black ink and white ink. That's why there's two different shirts.

00:06:24   The black ink is on white, gray, and yellow, and the white ink is on a whole bunch of different colors.

00:06:29   I think this will be another one of those shirts that goes down in history, kind of like my Mac Pro trash can avenging angel shirt that not a lot of people bought, but if you have it, if you're in the know, you're in the know.

00:06:38   Anyway, this is my shirt. This is my message for this year.

00:06:42   Jon, you shared privately with us that you had a very specific hope for this shirt. You've shared the broad hope.

00:06:51   But if you had a reach goal for the shirt and the visibility of the shirt, would you like to share what the reach goal is with the class?

00:06:57   I don't remember what you're referring to. What was my reach goal?

00:06:59   Yes, you wanted a particular Apple employee to see the shirt.

00:07:01   I want them all to see it. I don't have...

00:07:04   Yes, but one in particular you were really enthusiastic about.

00:07:06   Did I have to single somebody out? I don't know.

00:07:08   Yes, you did. You said you wanted to see a Mr. Jon Ternes see this shirt.

00:07:11   Well, Jon Ternes, I think he also believes in the Mac Pro. I would like him to see it so he can point to his friends and go, "See? Look at this person. Look, see? I'm not the only one."

00:07:20   Because sometimes it feels like Jon Ternes is the only one at Apple who does care about the Mac Pro. And maybe he can point to it and talk to his peers in the org chart and say, "You want to cancel the Mac Pro."

00:07:30   But there was that one person at Apple Park that one time who wore a shirt with a picture of this product on it, so now we have to ship it.

00:07:36   So maybe if you're not interested in this shirt, maybe what you could do to show solidarity with everyone's favorite podcaster, Jon Saracusa,

00:07:45   you could buy one of these shirts, but have it shipped to Jon Ternes, care of Apple Computer.

00:07:51   You have his home address, obviously.

00:07:52   No, no, no. Jon Ternes, care of Apple Computer at whatever the hell their...

00:07:55   Apple Computer?

00:07:56   Oh, sorry.

00:07:57   Return to center your address on the phone.

00:07:59   Yes, right. So you get what I'm driving at. If you don't want to buy the shirt for yourself, that's fine. Buy it for Jon and send the other Jon, Jon Ternes, and send it to Apple Park, baby.

00:08:08   He's not the one who needs the shirt. I mean, it'd be nice for him to have one. You go there and hand him one and say, "Here's a Mac Pro." He's never going to wear that because he's a fancy executive and they don't wear T-shirts, but whatever.

00:08:16   That's true.

00:08:17   You know, he could give it to one of his kids or use it as a rag to wash his car or something like that.

00:08:21   That's also fun.

00:08:22   It seems like he's the one who was talking about the Mac Pro. I feel like he believes in the Mac Pro. Maybe C-Fed doesn't believe in the Mac Pro. Maybe Tim Cook doesn't believe in the Mac Pro.

00:08:30   Maybe someone should show up at Apple Park at WWC carrying a 2019 Mac Pro like that person was carrying the Mac SE, the store opening in India, and he'll be so happy to see us carrying this 50-pound giant thing of aluminum.

00:08:43   Please, ship this computer. Anyway, that's that shirt.

00:08:47   Seriously, if you're not interested in the shirt, that's fine. If you believe in John Siracusa and his mission for a silly computer that nobody should buy, then buy this shirt and send it to, I think it's 1 Apple Parkway, according to Wedge in the chat. So send it there and address it to whomever you would like.

00:09:02   But yes, so we have the Mac Pro Believe. We have that, like John said, in light ink and dark ink and various different colors.

00:09:08   Then we also brought back the ATP Six Colors shirt, but the logo isn't the six colors. It's different shirt colors. That's a little bit curious naming on our part. Sorry about that. But anyway, the classic ATP logo is the point I'm driving at.

00:09:22   And then in solidarity and celebration of Pro Max, because apparently this is John's propaganda season, then we also brought back from the Disney, I mean from the ATP vault, the Pro Max Triumph shirt.

00:09:36   Again, in white or black material. And that is the six color rainbow silhouette, if you will, of all the different Pro Max, even though I really don't care about the Mac Pro. This is actually a very good shirt.

00:09:47   And also, oh, there it is. The ATP logo shirt is down there. And you are welcome, everybody. I have convinced the boys to allow me to bring back the ATP Polo, mostly because I need one.

00:09:59   And the ATP hoodie, mostly because I need one. And also we still have a handful of mugs left. So check all of this out. You can go to ATP.fm/store. However, if you are a member, Marco, tell us what members should do, please.

00:10:14   Go to your member control panel at ATP.fm/member and you will get a discount code that you can use during the sale. So please, you know, take advantage if you want. I mean, that's, you know, we're not going to force you or anything, but if you can save, what is it, 15% on all this stuff, right?

00:10:30   I believe that's right.

00:10:31   Yeah. So save 15% by being a member. And that also means that if you're about to buy a whole bunch of merchandise, it might make sense to just become a member because you might be kind of getting the membership for no additional net cost for a while if you can save 15% on all your merchandise.

00:10:46   We are good web people. So ATP.fm/store has links to the member page where you get your discount, has links to become a member, has all of this information in a single paragraph of text because we're not hiding this. So you just, ATP.fm/store is the only URL you need to know. All the information you need should be there, including things like, hey, is the mug microwave safe? Yes, the mug is microwave safe.

00:11:07   Is it hand, is it a dishwasher safe? No, it's hand wash only. Anyway, all that info is there.

00:11:12   The mugs, by the way, we didn't order any more of them, so we're just selling through our existing inventory. So if you want a mug, I would get one sooner rather than later. Everything else, don't worry about the stock. You order it, we'll make it.

00:11:22   I would also say, first of all, that page also contains the typo that I just fixed. Thanks, John.

00:11:26   I was in the process of going to fix that and I saw it had already been fixed.

00:11:30   ColorSoul, that one?

00:11:31   Mm-hmm.

00:11:32   Yep. All right.

00:11:33   I went and searched for it and I'm like, oh, it must already be fixed.

00:11:35   Yep. And I would also say that the mugs make very good desk mugs. If you have a mug in your desk to hold pens and scissors and whatever, I've had one on my desk for now, I think two or three years, whenever we made it.

00:11:47   It's great for that because it's kind of squat and wide for a mug in that ballpark, and so it really holds a ton of pens and stuff. And it's nice and heavy, so it stays put. So it's a great desk mug in case your coffee mug collection is totally full, maxed out, or you think your spouse might kill you if you add another one to the cabinet or whatever else. It's also a great desk mug.

00:12:12   I have to make my pricing pitch/explanation, too. As with everything, prices on all this stuff just continue to go up. I don't know if it's inflation, it's just the passage of time. But yeah, these are expensive shirts. It's just the way it is.

00:12:26   Part of how we tried to mitigate this was the six-color shirt. All the shirts that only have one color of ink on them, they are less expensive than the ones that have seven or eight colors of ink. Because every additional ink color is at an additional printing pass, and that's labor intensive and it costs more to make.

00:12:43   So the shirts with just one ink color are less expensive. That includes both of the Mac Pro Believe shirts and the ATP six-color shirts. Again, the six colors refer to the colors of the shirts, not the colors of the ink. The ones that have lots of different colors on them look really cool, but they're also more expensive.

00:12:58   But in general, if you don't care about any of this merchandise, you have enough t-shirts, you don't care about mugs, you don't want a hoodie, but you're like, "But I just want to give money to the show."

00:13:05   If you want to give money to the show, membership is the way to do it. Even though these shirts are very, very expensive, the profit margins on them are very, very small. So if you want to give money to the show, membership. If you want t-shirts, buy them.

00:13:19   And remember, at least one of you who is going to Apple Park for WWDC has to buy the Mac Pro Believe shirt. Again, I leave it to you to figure out who that's going to be.

00:13:26   Excellent. I will even go so far as to say, this was not planned, I just came up with this, the first 10 people that send me an image of them at Apple Park wearing a Believe shirt that is clearly not photoshopped or photoshopped so well that I can't tell the difference.

00:13:45   No, don't include that second part, because people can fool you pretty easily.

00:13:49   Fair enough. But you know what I'm saying, just be honest, people. Be honest. First 10 people, I will send an ATP sticker. So send me, you can find my email address on the internet, it exists. Send me a picture, send me your mailing address, and if you're one of the first 10 people, I will send you a sticker and I will bill John for the labor involved.

00:14:08   You're pretty optimistic if there's going to be 10 people who buy the shirt and go to WWDC. Well, we'll see if we can pull that off.

00:14:17   And I feel like if you get a selfie with an Apple executive, a prominent Accu-El executive that we recognize, and you show them your shirt in the selfie, Kacen will give you more than one sticker.

00:14:27   I can confirm.

00:14:29   And if you happen to be in the background when Tim Cook takes his PR shot next to whatever the new product is, extra points for that.

00:14:37   Let's just say that if you really go above and beyond and can prove it, we are not above comping you ATP membership for life. I'm not saying we will, I'm saying it is on the table.

00:14:47   You're just making work for Marco, I don't think we have the ability to do that. Marco will quote it for you.

00:14:51   I think we do, I'm pretty sure we do.

00:14:53   Do we? Alright, I don't remember what things we've implemented or not.

00:14:55   We can make it happen. I'm not saying we will, but I'm saying it is on the table if you really, really go above and beyond. So yeah, to recap, ATP.fm/store, if you are a member or become a member, which you can do at ATP.fm/join, then you get a discount code.

00:15:09   You can check for that on your member page. But anyway, ATP.fm/store.

00:15:13   MacPro believe in black or white ink, the ATP in white ink on various color shirts, the Pro Max Triumph on various black or white shirts with rainbow of colors, the OG ATP logo shirt, the ATP Polo is back for the first time in a couple of years, the ATP hoodie, and there are a handful of mugs.

00:15:32   ATP.fm/store. I will do the lecture about not forgetting another week since we've gone on for a while, but don't be that person. Don't do it.

00:15:39   Oh yeah, we should tell them the date. The sale ends on Saturday, May 6th. So that's how long you have.

00:15:44   Indeed. Alright, let's do some follow up. If you are an ATP member and listen to the bootleg, then you got a whole bonus section that we ended up cutting from the released version of the show last week because, Jon, you've been on a journey. So can you recap what's going on here?

00:16:02   Last week I talked about a bug I was experiencing that I thought maybe would get resolved on its own but wasn't getting resolved and so I was taking advantage of the fact that I have a podcast to bring this bug to the attention of Apple. Of course by then I had already filed the feedback with all the information I had available and I just wanted Apple folks to know.

00:16:20   After the bootleg was released, but before the edited episode was released, I thought I had fixed the bug. And I was going to still talk about it in this episode because I thought the way I had fixed the bug was interesting. What had happened was through various back channels, Apple people had been made aware of the feedback I had filed.

00:16:40   And they had sent a message back out of Apple to me to say, "Oh hey, I don't think anyone else has seen that issue. It might just be a you thing. I don't see any similar reports or whatever." And that made me think. That tiny little piece of information, which I got zero information from feedback obviously, but that tiny piece of back channel information made me think, "Huh, if they haven't seen any similar reports and this bug is like 100% reproducible for me, maybe it's a me thing."

00:17:06   So I investigated further and I was like, "Let me just look at what else is on my system. Do I have any weird stuff on here?" And I started disabling system extensions and looking if I had any old keks laying around. And lo and behold, something that I did fixed it. I had removed a bunch of third party software and the problem went away.

00:17:21   And so I was like, "This week's follow up was going to be, see what even just the tiniest bit of feedback can do. This bit of feedback, again, back channeled, not through the actual feedback system because that doesn't work." The only information was, "Huh, we don't seem to have similar reports. We don't see a lot of reports like that."

00:17:40   That tiny piece of information got me to reconsider whether this is actually a bug in the released OS or whether this is a bug that has something to do with me specifically or whatever. I'm like, "Look, that helped me to fix it." That's what I was going to say on this week's episode.

00:17:54   But actually, apparently, whatever I did to "fix it" didn't actually fix it. Shortly after the episode was released, with that part of the episode cut out, the bug came back and it is still with me right now. So I refiled the bug because at that point I had closed the feedback and said, "Oh, this was just a me thing. Here's what I disabled and I fixed it." But no, it's back.

00:18:13   And I double and triple checked everything on my system. I am running no third-party kernel extensions, no third-party system extensions, and the bug is still here. What is the bug? I posted about it on Mastodon. We'll put a link in the show notes, for real this time.

00:18:27   So you can see the video of me experiencing the bug. It's that when I grab a window, any window, and move it around, it lags behind my car so like crazy and jumps all over the place. And it does it in response to how many other windows are visible on the screen, either below it or near it.

00:18:43   So if you hide all other windows, or if you take a window way up in the corner of the screen and push all the other windows away from it, window dragging works fine. But if you drag the window near other windows, it gets super laggy and freaks out and starts jumping all over the place.

00:18:57   And I think it has to do with something, some part of the Mac OS window manager server thingy that does the window snapping. So when you bring windows close to another window, it will snap to the edge before it goes over it or whatever. This started happening immediately after Mac OS 13.3 was released.

00:19:14   So I'm like, "Well, here you go. It's a 13.3 bug. This didn't happen before and now it's happening all the time." I thought I had fixed it because I had been doing all those restarts and removing system extensions. It does stay away after a reboot for a little while, but it always comes back.

00:19:26   Just before the show, in fact, I rebooted just because it was happening. My computer was all laggy with dragging windows all day. I'm like, "Let me just reboot so I have a fresh computer for the podcast."

00:19:35   But I have no doubt that within a few hours, or maybe by tomorrow morning, this bug will be back. And it's terrible for someone like me because all I do all day is open and close the windows and drag them around.

00:19:44   And it becomes almost untenable to drag stuff around because it's really slow and really laggy and really jumpy. I included a spin dump of the window manager process, which jumps to 100% CPU when I drag a window around.

00:19:57   I included a video of me dragging a stickies window around, seeing how incredibly laggy it is. Everything else in the system is fine. There's no other processes that are using CPU, plenty of free RAM.

00:20:07   The system is not stressed, but window dragging freaks out. So please, Apple, figure out what this is and fix it because apparently whatever I thought it was, that's not it.

00:20:17   Is it possible that you have too many GPUs in your fancy Mac Pro?

00:20:21   I suppose I could remove one, but again, this never happened until immediately after Mac OS 13. I updated it to 3.3, so I have to think it's an OS update thing.

00:20:32   Hmm. You know, I got to say that I'm not having that particular problem on my lowly MacBook Pro. Marco, are you having any problems on your piece of garbage MacBook Pro?

00:20:42   No, no, not at all. In fact, my MacBook Pro, which only has, well, depending on how you define it, either one or like 38 GPUs is fine. I don't have this problem at all.

00:20:51   Funny how that was.

00:20:52   That's what the person said, that it doesn't seem to be widespread. But when I talked about it on a mastodon, a bunch of other people said they were also having the problem. Not a lot of people, maybe like four or five, but enough.

00:21:02   And they had all sorts of different computers. Some had MacBook Pros, some of them had, I don't think any of them had Mac Pros.

00:21:07   So I'm the only Mac Pro user, but the other people had regular computers and they were also experiencing this. Some of them said also immediately after updating to 13.3.

00:21:15   So I don't know what the deal is. I'm curious to find out, but I just don't want my computer to work right again. It's a little bit annoying. So please, Apple.

00:21:22   I guess the new feedback number is FB12122106. Link will be in the show notes with the feedback number.

00:21:31   Indeed.

00:21:32   Quote, "I'm the only Mac Pro user, John Syracuse."

00:21:35   Yeah. Remember me?

00:21:37   Remember this is diagnosed? Remember this spin dump? I could spin dump one in a manager all day long.

00:21:43   Good grief. All right, so we were talking about how General Motors hates your phone and CarPlay last week and I stand by everything we said.

00:21:53   And I was talking to a friend of the show, Jelly, about this. And Jelly made a really good point and I got to add a little bit of context.

00:22:00   So both my car and Aaron's car have wired CarPlay. I have a 2018 Volkswagen Golf. Golf, whatever.

00:22:07   Aaron has a 2017 Volvo XC90. Both of them support wired CarPlay, but I have a little box that I use as an adapter, if you will, to give me wireless CarPlay.

00:22:20   In Aaron's car in particular, the infotainment, while good, takes about 13 calendar years to get activated once the car is started.

00:22:29   It is really slow to get going. And then once it gets going, it's fine.

00:22:33   And I was talking to Jelly about this. Jelly has a Polestar 2, which is a sort of kind of but not really Volvo, that has the Android automotive that runs all of the infotainment stuff and it does support CarPlay, I believe, wireless.

00:22:44   And Jelly and I were talking about, you know, the last episode and what we were saying on it and he made a really, really, really good point.

00:22:50   And that part of why having CarPlay is so nice, Jelly said, is that there's no real reliance on the car's onboard CPU.

00:23:00   It's basically just a monitor for the phone. And that is such an obvious thing that I hadn't thought about.

00:23:06   And I'm glad that Jelly pointed it out to me, because in Aaron's car, again, the infotainment, once it gets going, isn't bad, but getting it going is awful.

00:23:13   And one of the nice things about CarPlay, like Jelly had said, is that no matter how bad the infotainment is, as long as it can handle putting stuff on the screen, which pretty much everything can if it uses CarPlay, that takes away a lot of the problems.

00:23:26   Now this gets exacerbated a little bit if you are a wireless only car, because that does introduce a smidgen of latency.

00:23:33   But still, I thought, well, a smidgen of latency on cars that actually have decent implementations of it.

00:23:39   I was going to say, mine's like almost two seconds of latency for everything.

00:23:43   Yeah, that's not good. But nevertheless, it is a good point that I hadn't considered, so I wanted to point that out.

00:23:50   Continuing on, Nathaniel Irons writes that at least for now, GM's decision to yank CarPlay or Android Auto only applies to future EV models, with a carve-out not just for gas vehicles, but also future model years of their EVs now for sale.

00:24:02   There's an artist at Technical Links that discussed this, and Nathaniel continues, "GM will feel no pain in sales figures around this decision for at least as long as they keep selling every EV they're capable of manufacturing."

00:24:13   But optimistically, GM dealers will still have a chance to see people weighing the trade-off between EVs like the Bolt, which continue to support phone projection systems, versus the newer lines, which don't.

00:24:22   Moving on, Sam Tierney writes in, "I recently got the HTA-9 system after your mention, and apparently it's excellent, as per Sam.

00:24:30   They realized, however, that when using Plex, played via the Apple TV 4K, to play their Blu-ray rips, it can't pass through Atmos or DTS X, as in the object-based audio, especially the height elements.

00:24:43   And Infuse, which is a media player that everyone loves to talk about, breaks down the issues here, including a template for submitting a feedback, our favorite thing these days, we'll put a link in the show notes.

00:24:52   But apparently, in short, Apple only supports lossy spatial audio, used in streaming apps, or for Dolby EAC3, for example, and not lossless, again for Dolby TrueHD.

00:25:05   Currently, only the Nvidia Shield Pro, Dune 4K, and some other Android-based media players support true pass-through audio.

00:25:11   Amazon has started to support some of it with the new FireCube, though only for Atmos, not DTS X.

00:25:18   John, make me care about this.

00:25:20   I don't think it makes that much of a difference.

00:25:22   If you have a Blu-ray player or something, you're probably going to need...

00:25:27   I always think that receiver is the solution to all these problems, because receivers, guess what, they support all this stuff.

00:25:32   But this is talking about using the Apple TV with the HD 89, which doesn't need and can't use a receiver, so it complicates things.

00:25:40   This is kind of one of the trade-offs when you buy one of these systems, whether it be a soundbar or the Sony system or whatever, that's like, "This is it! Buy this and connect it to your TV and you're done! You don't need a receiver!"

00:25:49   And that's true, but whatever limitations that setup has, you're stuck with them forever.

00:25:54   Whereas if you buy a receiver, the whole point of the receiver is a component, and they tend to support all the things that they could possibly support.

00:26:00   So you have flexibility in the future in exchange for having this big giant box that costs a lot of money.

00:26:05   So when I see things like this, "Oh, here's this limitation of that," just look at the limitations of the setup.

00:26:10   And if you don't care about them, if you're like, "I don't even know the differences and I can't hear the difference between AC3 versus DTS X,"

00:26:17   and honestly I can't either and most speakers aren't good enough to tell either way, you probably shouldn't care.

00:26:22   But if you do care, one way to deal with that is to just get a receiver and make sure it includes all the alphabet soup of stuff that you care about,

00:26:31   often to the future, buy as future-proof a receiver as you can, and then you don't have to worry about this.

00:26:37   That is not the answer I was expecting, but I will allow it.

00:26:40   Gilbert Tang writes in to tell us about how to keep dust off your sensors. Tell me about this, please, Jon.

00:26:46   I do wonder if this is one of those traditions passed on among photographers with potentially not too much scientific testing to see whether it does anything,

00:26:59   but it doesn't seem like it's harmful. Anyway, here it is.

00:27:02   Gilbert says, "Provided your lenses and sensors have enough clearance, and Sony E-mount ones do,

00:27:08   it's common to add a square of double-stick tape to the interior of the lens back and body caps to capture dust during normal movement."

00:27:15   So you see what they're saying here is there's like a little cap that goes on to both your camera body and also on the part of lenses that attach to your camera body,

00:27:23   and he's saying, "Put a square of double-stick tape there to catch the dust."

00:27:30   He says, "I've been doing this for around 25 years." See, this is already suspect.

00:27:33   "Are you doing anything for 25 years?" Like, hmm. "25 years ago, did we have science?"

00:27:37   Anyway, "Wow, I've been doing this for about 25 years with my Nikon Hasselblad and Select Leica."

00:27:42   Some simply don't have the clearance. "And Sony gear, and it's astounding how much sensor cleaning it has saved me.

00:27:47   Plus, it helps sensor shake work even better during cleaning operations."

00:27:50   Also, some cameras close the shutter over the sensor.

00:27:53   We didn't talk about this last time, but there is a mechanical shutter in these cameras that goes up and down over the sensor.

00:27:59   And I always wondered, why don't they just close the shutter when you twist off the lens?

00:28:02   Well, a whole bunch of them do, including the Sony A1, A9, A9II, A7R5, a bunch of the recent Sony cameras do that.

00:28:09   Good work, 10U. Because the lens back and body cap double stick technique, if I've been doing swaps in dusty environments,

00:28:17   I'll actually disable this feature on my bodies that have it simply because the shutter could otherwise keep dust captive.

00:28:23   This, I also think, is suspect. It's like, "I want the dust to be free so it can hit my magical double stick tape."

00:28:29   It's like, I'd rather just have the shutter. Because, like, where's the dust coming from? It comes from, I don't know.

00:28:34   Like, if the little thing, curtain goes down over the sensor when you take it off, I guess dust could get in there,

00:28:40   and then the shutter goes back up, and then the dust is free again, and you want it to hit the tape.

00:28:44   I just, I really need to see some simulations of, like, whether it's better to run through the raindrops or walk slowly, right?

00:28:50   Is it better to have the shutter closed over your sensor for dust? Anyway.

00:28:55   So, 10Us. To be clear, it's very temporary, and I only do it after the shoot is over,

00:29:00   and the good vibrations from returning travel help knock stuff loose.

00:29:03   Again, more sort of magical thinking here, like, the double stick tape is for when it's traveling,

00:29:08   so when the cameras are shaking, it'll knock the dust off and the dust will fly around and it will hit against the double stick tape.

00:29:13   Alright. He says, "And no, I've never once had a piece of double stick tape dislodge itself.

00:29:18   I suppose this is a risk with poor application or crappy tape, but yeah, people are doing this with $50,000 ARRI Signature Primes, too.

00:29:25   When it's dirty, I remove the tape, clean the cap interiors with alcohol, and reapply. I'm pretty diligent about it."

00:29:31   So there you go. One endorsement of the 25-year-old technique of sticking double stick tape to catch the dust like it's a Venus flytrap for dust flies.

00:29:41   I mean, I suppose it couldn't hurt, because as long as the tape doesn't come off, it's not doing anything bad, but I am very suspicious of the technique.

00:29:49   I am, however, very interested in eventually getting a camera that closes the shutter over the sensor when you change lenses.

00:29:56   Good talk. And then a couple of people wrote to point out to us last week tonight, which is a show I enjoy, or at least watching the segments on YouTube anyway,

00:30:06   they did a 25 and a half minute thing on homeowners associations. And it is just as bad as you would expect.

00:30:17   It is quite funny, and if you have 25 minutes to kill, I definitely recommend it. We'll put it in the show notes.

00:30:22   But yeah, if you're not American and you're not familiar with this, I was whining about this a year or two back, because I kind of got guilted into being on my homeowners association.

00:30:31   And basically, in America, if you threaten people's perceived wealth, then they feel justified in doing whatever they want.

00:30:38   And homeowners associations are usually like neighborhood groups that have some amount of authority/control over what the homeowners in that neighborhood do.

00:30:47   And if the homeowners do anything that these people think will "ruin their property values," then they get to retaliate with any means necessary, and it's garbage.

00:31:00   So if you have 25 minutes to kill, it is quite funny and worth watching.

00:31:03   A couple of surprising things that I learned from this was how prevalent homeowners associations are in the US now.

00:31:10   When I was growing up and even when I was looking for a house, it was like, "Yeah, some places have homeowners associations, but it's kind of like for the ritzy areas with the obnoxious people who don't want you to be able to paint your house any color you want, and we just won't look in areas like that."

00:31:24   But apparently, something like 82% of new home sales in the US now have homeowners associations.

00:31:30   You have no choice. If you buy the house, you agree to be subject to the homeowners association. There is no opting out.

00:31:38   But if you buy the house, you agree to be subject to the homeowners association. There is no opting out.

00:31:42   So if you buy the house, you agree to be subject to the homeowners association.

00:31:46   If you buy the house, you agree to be subject to the homeowners association.

00:31:50   If you buy the house, you agree to be subject to the homeowners association.

00:31:54   If you buy the house, you agree to be subject to the homeowners association.

00:31:58   If you buy the house, you agree to be subject to the homeowners association.

00:32:02   The incentives are all aligned for everything to go horribly wrong. So private companies should not run prisons, private companies should not run homeowners associations.

00:32:09   The one thing I felt like this segment left out was an explanation of what is the accountability mechanism for these homeowners associations.

00:32:17   It did point out that the government can't do anything. If you have a crappy homeowners association, that's your problem.

00:32:22   It's a private company, private thing that you agreed to, like tough luck. So don't go crying to the government because they can't help you.

00:32:28   These organizations are not governmental organizations.

00:32:32   Sometimes the homeowners associations do things that in other countries with competent governments are run by the government.

00:32:38   Like water, sewer, street paving. Sometimes the homeowners associations do that.

00:32:43   So it's not like these associations have no power. They have tremendous power.

00:32:46   In fact, the program shows them foreclosing on people's homes because they fell behind on the fines they incurred by having shutters that were the wrong color.

00:32:55   That's ridiculous, right? But what is the accountability? Presumably the homeowners association is appointed or elected by the people, by the neighborhood that they run or whatever.

00:33:05   So if you do get a homeowners association that is doing terrible things, what is their accountability? And the program didn't quite make that clear.

00:33:11   I guess that's a question for Casey. Say your homeowners association goes evil. What is the recourse that you have? Do they get elected for some period of time? Can you vote them out? How does that work?

00:33:21   I haven't looked at our bylaws in a long time, but generally speaking to the best of my recollection, they are elected typically annually.

00:33:29   And yeah, the homeowners could band together and vote out the jerks. And that in principle is fine.

00:33:35   But taking my neighborhood, for example, and I want to say there's like 50 to 100 houses in my neighborhood. I forget exactly how many.

00:33:43   Literally nobody wants to be on the HOA, but we are legally compelled to keep an HOA. And if we don't, then the bylaws state that we have to hire one of these HOA firms to do the work.

00:33:55   And everyone assumes that that will be a fortune, either because we will have to, you know, the neighborhood as a group will have to pay the firm to do it.

00:34:02   Or like you were saying, they will fine us for everything just so they can earn their money.

00:34:07   And so as far as I know right now, our neighborhood, which is supposed to have an HOA like leadership board of like five or six people.

00:34:16   I think it's a president and a treasurer and that's it. Because that is the bare minimum that we can do to keep from having to farm it out to some other company.

00:34:24   And it's been this way for like two or three years now. It's basically since I left.

00:34:27   Yeah. And I'm assuming the reason the evil ones don't get voted out then is, you know, this is kind of a workaround for, I forget what the laws used to be. There's tons of laws in the United States that would keep minorities out of the neighborhood, basically.

00:34:39   It was illegal to sell a house to somebody who was Jewish or not white or whatever. That was incredibly common in the US because that's what our country is founded on.

00:34:47   And that became illegal at some point ridiculously late like the 70s or something. HOAs give you a way around that because you can't put that into the contract for your home ownership.

00:35:00   But what you can do is find the people who all the other neighbors decide are undesirable and find all the things that are wrong in their property and then levy fines against them in an amount that you decide.

00:35:12   And if the whole neighborhood decides, it's kind of like speeding laws, you know, like you could pull over anybody for speeding on any given highway, right? But who do you choose to pull over?

00:35:21   So you make the bylaws that say, hey, it's a $10,000 fine per day if your shutters are the wrong color. Then you find the person you don't want to be in the neighborhood and you tell them the shutters are the wrong color.

00:35:29   Everyone shutters are the wrong color, but you just enforce that on this person. And you're like, well, why wouldn't the neighbors vote out that HOA? Well, they all don't want minorities in the neighborhood either.

00:35:37   And so what have you done? You've recreated, I forget what it's called, redlining or whatever. You've recreated the unconstitutional, recently made illegal practice of legally keeping minorities out of your neighborhood.

00:35:47   You've just done it in a different way with a private company and there's no recourse in the government. So America, anyway, sorry to get depressing.

00:35:53   Yeah, it's like if you hate your local governments, well, the alternative is worse.

00:35:58   Yeah, private companies, as bad as local government is, private companies are usually worse.

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00:38:03   [Music]

00:38:06   Apparently my purchase of the studio display, which I never had buyer's remorse over, although I flirted with it a little bit after the camera debacle, which never really got that better.

00:38:16   But I also had a little bit of remorse, or I flirted with remorse when like weeks after I took delivery of mine, there was reports that,

00:38:24   "Oh, there's going to be a super hot, like high refresh mini LED promotion version coming out any minute now."

00:38:32   And apparently, no it's not. Because according to some people who watch the supply chain, we'll put a link to 9to5Mac in the show notes, apparently that's not happening.

00:38:42   And we aren't going to be getting this new 27-inch display with mini LED in ProMotion after all. Which selfishly, at least right now anyway, sounds good to me.

00:38:51   I mean you probably are eventually. Like this is the thing, like it's so hard to put a lot of faith in what the rumor mill says about any product that's more than like a couple of weeks out.

00:39:01   Usually when stuff is imminent, you get rumors about it and that's usually fairly accurate. But when somebody says, "Oh, Apple's working on this new kind of display for release in 2025."

00:39:12   Well, is that really, like how accurate is this forecast? And then the rumors start treating it as fact, and then when somebody gets different information that conflicted that,

00:39:23   then they report that and then the rumors start to say, "Apple cancelled this display." It's like, "Well, did they?" Or, "Was your information already bad and you just got different information that might itself also be bad?"

00:39:33   So it's this whole storytelling that we do with these rumors that oftentimes is based on not a lot of reality. Or it's people who have information that they interpret the wrong way.

00:39:48   Or that is actually a different product or telling a different story than what they're reporting.

00:39:54   So all this stuff, it's wise to not put a ton of time and thought into these far out product rumors.

00:40:02   It was a ridiculous concept and we said so at the time that immediately after this new display came out that there were rumors that they were going to, sometime soon, make a much better one.

00:40:12   We know how Apple updates their displays. The answer is they don't. They update their displays about as often as they update the Mac Pro. Maybe less.

00:40:22   Oh, sick burn. That's a twofer.

00:40:24   We're lucky they still make displays and we know they don't offer them very much, very frequently.

00:40:29   See, also the Mac Pro on both counts. So the idea that they were going to follow up the studio display which came out a year ago, they were going to follow that up fairly soon with something that is significantly different and better but replaces that same product category.

00:40:45   That doesn't make a lot of sense. And it didn't make a lot of sense then. It doesn't make a lot of sense now.

00:40:50   And if they do ever update this product, I think they eventually will as long as they keep making them at all. But if they do update this product, it's probably still a few years away.

00:40:59   And at that point, nothing you hear from the rumor mill today is going to be very accurate about what the details of that might be.

00:41:05   I think the reason this particular rumor had legs is, well first of all, when it originally came out, the rumor was, "Hey Casey, you just bought a studio display. Well, they're going to release a better one in a month."

00:41:19   Yeah, it was within a couple of months for sure.

00:41:22   Yeah, it was ridiculously close. It was the type of thing where the only way it could possibly be true is if they wanted to launch both of them but couldn't and so they delayed one of them or something, which occasionally happens.

00:41:31   But that was the rumor. They never update the displays and you're saying they just released a display and they're going to release an even better one within a month or two? That seems impossible and it turns out not to be true.

00:41:42   So that was kind of ridiculous. But the reason this rumor kept going is the one they released was less than we thought it might be.

00:41:51   Not that it was bad or anything. It was a 5K display just like in the 5K Mac and they put it in a display. Good job.

00:41:57   And it was weird with the all A13 and the bad camera. But in other words, it was fine.

00:42:01   But we know that in the world of technology that Apple is competing in, better display technology exists.

00:42:07   Other manufacturers and even Apple itself have better displays like the mini LED ones that are in their laptops and the fancy ones in their big iPad.

00:42:16   Lots of third party manufacturers make displays that have dynamic backlights. So we know that's out there.

00:42:21   We know it's not just an advanced technology. Existing products are like that. So we're like, "Okay, Apple came out with a pseudo display." It's like this.

00:42:29   There's obviously room for them to make a better version of this that has mini LED backlight for better blacks or whatever.

00:42:37   Or higher refresh rate because ProMotion is a thing. So it's one of those things where there will eventually be a better...

00:42:44   Again, like Marco said, if they keep making monitors, which is not a given. But if they keep making monitors, we know they're going to come out with that eventually.

00:42:51   So that's why this rumor, despite it saying, "Oh, it's coming out next week in case it's going to be sad." That was unbelievable and didn't happen.

00:42:58   But the rumor that there will eventually be a better one makes sense. And it's just a question of when.

00:43:02   And when it's two or three years out, you're like, "Yeah, I can see that happening." Couple years from now, they'll probably come out with a new one.

00:43:07   But a couple years pass in Appleland, which as happens when you're waiting for the Mac Pro or a monitor, and we start approaching the date that everybody said this thing's supposed to come out.

00:43:15   And then you start with the rumors of like, "Oh, remember we said it was supposed to come out? Well, it looks like it's not going to."

00:43:19   And that feels like the rumor was, "It's on, and now it's off." Combine this with the persistent rumors ever since the 24-inch iMac came out that Apple's going to make a bigger iMac, which they also haven't done.

00:43:33   But anytime there's leaks from the supply chain of a 27-inch display, people are like, "Is this for a monitor? Is this for a 27-inch iMac?"

00:43:40   Lots of rumors about 27-inch iMac is like, they made a bunch of prototypes, they were thinking of making one.

00:43:45   It never got to the point where they said there's going to be one, but they said that this is a thing Apple has toyed with internally, made prototypes of.

00:43:53   Which makes sense, it makes sense that they would do that, but they haven't actually released anything and don't actually have any plans to release anything.

00:44:00   But that complicates all the rumors of better 27-inch displays, because every single one of them you could be, maybe that was just for the big iMac that they were toying with and decided not to make.

00:44:10   So, if they still keep making 27-inch 5K monitors, if there is eventually another studio display, it will be better in these ways.

00:44:22   And it will be good. It's just a question of when that happens.

00:44:25   If they ship a mini-LED backlight ProMotion 27-inch display five years from now, that'll be a little bit late.

00:44:32   But not out of the realm of possibility for Apple and the way they handle monitors.

00:44:39   Should they have shipped one two months after Casey got his? No, that seems silly.

00:44:43   Should they ship one now? I think it's perfectly reasonable to ship one now.

00:44:46   And I think it's reasonable to ship something like this and still keep the old studio display around.

00:44:50   Because A, then you can price this one even higher, and Apple loves that.

00:44:54   And B, some people don't care about mini-LED or ProMotion and they should be able to get the cheaper one.

00:45:00   So, I have my fingers crossed that something about this rumor comes to fruition at some point in the next year or two.

00:45:06   But for now, it's an example of one of those stories that stayed in the news because it makes sense technologically.

00:45:12   It's not a fantasy. It's not ridiculous. It makes perfect sense.

00:45:15   It's just that with Apple, what makes perfect sense doesn't always happen.

00:45:19   Indeed. I mean, I would love to have a monitor like this.

00:45:22   And my dream scenario is that I bump the studio display to be my accessory display, which is the most privileged thing in the world.

00:45:31   But nevertheless, and then I have this new fancy mini-LED ProMotion Studio display, too, as my new primary display.

00:45:37   And that would be amazing. But yeah, it sounds like it's not happening imminently. And that's all right.

00:45:44   You could always get that Samsung thing.

00:45:46   Yeah, that's true.

00:45:47   I just said that the thing that makes sense that this would happen, but Apple doesn't always do what makes sense.

00:45:52   Well, this next bullet item is a thing that never really made sense to me and it looks like it's not happening.

00:45:57   Carry on.

00:45:59   So this is the rumor we talked about it many, many shows ago about the quote-unquote "solid state buttons" in the new iPhones.

00:46:07   This would be buttons that are like, we keep using this analogy and I wonder how people listening don't know what this is, but there was a phone called the iPhone 7 once.

00:46:14   And it had a thing called the home button.

00:46:16   And the iPhone 7 switched the home button from a button that would move up and down like a regular button, right, to a button that did not move, kind of like the track pads on modern MacBooks and MacBook Pros,

00:46:27   but would just vibrate when you pressed it. And that sounds awful, but it turns out Apple did an amazing job and the home button on the iPhone 7 felt great.

00:46:36   It didn't exactly feel like the actual physical home button, but in many ways I thought it felt better.

00:46:43   By the way, for whatever it's worth, not only did I use that home button today, but I also just today arrived in the mail a brand new iPhone, well not brand new,

00:46:55   but a modern iPhone that I just purchased that has that button. It is the iPhone SE3 that, for reasons that are too long to get into now,

00:47:06   I bought a really cheap iPhone SE3 from Amazon to serve, basically we are killing Apple Watch family setup from our child's Apple Watch thing.

00:47:19   It's outgrown it, and also it's really buggy.

00:47:21   Oh my god, it's so bad! Sorry for the rest. Quick diversion, us.

00:47:27   The Apple Watch family setup, this is the feature they launched back with the first Apple Watch SE a couple of years ago,

00:47:34   where you could set up an Apple Watch for a family member without having a paired iPhone for it.

00:47:40   Normally, of course, Apple Watches require them to pair to a particular iPhone.

00:47:44   You can't pair them to iPads, you can't pair them to iPod touches, it has to be an iPhone.

00:47:48   So if you wanted to get a watch for your kid or a family member or whatever, they had to have a paired iPhone, so that didn't work for a lot of people.

00:47:54   So right at the time when my kid was getting a watch, it made sense for various reasons we described back then.

00:48:00   He didn't and still doesn't have his own iPhone, so we thought, great, this is perfect.

00:48:04   And it has been so buggy for the last few years. We've had problem after problem with family setup.

00:48:12   Most common problems are the watch basically doesn't back itself up at all. It thinks it does sometimes, it never actually is.

00:48:20   Whatever your kid does on the watch, consider it very temporary data, because it will be lost at some point.

00:48:26   Usually next time you have to move it to a different OS version or whatever.

00:48:30   Or move to a different watch if that one gets upgraded or breaks or dies or whatever.

00:48:34   So that's problem number one. All the data on the watch is even more ephemeral and temporary than Apple Watches usually are,

00:48:40   because it doesn't back up to a phone. Even the phone that you set it up doesn't really back it up.

00:48:44   Number two, any app that has a phone counterpart where the watch app cannot be installed by itself,

00:48:51   like directly from the little tiny watch app store, any app like that cannot run on a phone with family setup,

00:48:57   because there is no paired iPhone effectively. So there are no iPhone counterparts.

00:49:02   So like for instance, we just as a family, we've started running together.

00:49:06   Tiff is a Nike Run Club person, trying to make Adam a Nike Run Club person, just using their app.

00:49:12   We were trying to get Run Club on his watch and you can't really do it because it needs the phone paired app.

00:49:17   So there's all this stuff. I'm like, you know what, at this point this has caused us so many problems.

00:49:22   Oh, and family setup is super buggy with cellular, which is the whole point of it.

00:49:26   I don't know why it's so buggy. Super buggy with cellular. A lot of times you just can't reach the person.

00:49:30   Some of it is the fault of watch OS and the way it handles cellular.

00:49:33   Some of it is, I think, due to family setup because of weirdness there.

00:49:37   So anyway, I just needed a phone. Any phone to pair to Adam's watch.

00:49:43   And we're not, to be clear, the phone is staying in a drawer at my office. We're not giving him the phone.

00:49:48   But it is just any phone that can be paired so it can be treated like a normal Apple Watch with all the regular code path.

00:49:54   That way it can at least be the regular level of Apple Watch bugginess,

00:49:58   because at least Apple engineers use the watches this way.

00:50:00   Instead of the extra buggy level of family setup where I don't think anybody who works at Apple uses that feature.

00:50:06   You can kind of tell when there's a feature like that with Apple.

00:50:09   So anyway, stay on the commonly used path for Apple success and happiness.

00:50:13   And that is pairing it with a phone.

00:50:15   And normally I have a drawer full of old phones.

00:50:18   And the problem is, all of my old phones, my two old phones that would have been perfect candidates for this,

00:50:25   are an iPhone 7 with the wonderful home button and an iPhone SE first gen.

00:50:30   Neither of which can run iOS 16.

00:50:33   And Adam's Apple Watch is on watch OS 9 and it can't be paired to iOS 15 phones.

00:50:39   So it's like, okay, now I got to find something that can run iOS 16 that I also don't need for anything else ever.

00:50:45   Because it'll be signed into his account and I'm not going to be putting betas and crap on it.

00:50:49   So it's like, so I basically went and bought an iPhone SE.

00:50:53   Pretty much for this purpose. I can occasionally use it for OS testing here and there.

00:50:58   Or testing on this old form factor.

00:51:00   But it works fine. It was like $200. It was super cheap for like a refurb for Amazon.

00:51:06   So I'm very happy with that.

00:51:09   And it's kind of amazing. I pick up this phone and this thing has, I think it's either an A14, I think it's an A15 in this.

00:51:16   It has such incredibly modern computing guts in this thing.

00:51:20   But to use a phone today as somebody who's used Face ID style phones since the iPhone X.

00:51:28   To use a new iPhone today that has the new guts but still has Touch ID and the home button and the rectangular screen.

00:51:39   It feels so weird and so unbelievably old.

00:51:44   It is shocking how much I feel like I'm going in the past with this brand new, well mostly new phone that is the current model that Apple sells.

00:51:53   That I'm pretty sure has an A15 in it.

00:51:56   Anyway, that's my rant. Family set up, goodbye.

00:51:59   So out of curiosity, you're not getting any cellular service for the phone then?

00:52:04   So far, I don't think I need to. I was worried that I would need to.

00:52:10   So we just left the plan on the watch and restored to the new phone.

00:52:16   And I haven't quite figured out location tracking yet. I might have to do some weirdness there.

00:52:22   But so far, he was at the playground yesterday and was able to call us with his watch after it was compared to this phone.

00:52:31   The number, it came from a random phone number instead of his Apple ID.

00:52:35   It was like a FaceTime call but it came from some random phone number that the watch was assigned by AT&T a million years ago.

00:52:42   So I don't know if we're going to be able to keep it that way or if you can set it up new that way if you didn't first set up a family set up.

00:52:50   I don't know but right now, the phone has no cell plan.

00:52:53   The watch has its whatever $10 a month cell plan and he's able to call with this phone number.

00:53:00   So we'll see if this is a stable situation or if at some point AT&T or Apple are going to end this for us.

00:53:08   But right now, we don't need a cell service.

00:53:10   Fascinating. Where were we? Solid state buttons.

00:53:13   Yeah, the solid state buttons on the SE3 or whatever they're still selling because they still sell phones in that form factor.

00:53:19   Like I said, it's a thing that Apple customers deal with all the time.

00:53:24   Probably primarily on the trackpads on their MacBooks and MacBook Pros because they're all like this.

00:53:30   They don't actually move up and down to hit some kind of sensor.

00:53:33   You just press on them and your pressure initiates a vibration motor that makes you think you clicked it or something.

00:53:39   So the rumor for the iPhone 15 was that the volume up and down and the sleep/wake buttons on the iPhone 15

00:53:46   or maybe it was just the Pros, I forget. But anyway, the new iPhones that are coming in the fall, they would be like this.

00:53:52   They wouldn't actually go in and out and press something. They would be pressure sensitive.

00:53:57   And when you press them, there'd be a little vibration motor that would give a little wiggle inside there and make you think you have clicked the buttons.

00:54:04   And when we talked about this originally, we were like, "All right, I mean, sure, I guess, but that's like two more vibration motors and there's not a lot of space in there."

00:54:12   And it seems really tricky and complicated to do because you've got to make sure the buttons work to turn on a phone.

00:54:19   So there has to be some power going all the time to sense the pressure in them. And what happens if the battery goes dead.

00:54:26   And since then, there's been all sorts of stories saying, "Oh, Apple solved this. They have a new super duper low power tiny little chip in there."

00:54:32   That even when the phone battery itself is 100% dead, still this other presumably tiny dedicated battery should the super low power system make sure the volume and power buttons still work

00:54:43   so you can put it into DFU mode and stuff like that. Like that they had found solutions to all these problems.

00:54:48   Still, I was always wondering, "Okay, but to what end? Is this just for waterproofing? Is it easier to seal them when the buttons don't move?

00:54:55   Are the buttons a failure point? Maybe Apple knows something that we don't about it turns out that the sleep/wake button or the volume buttons end up failing because people press them a lot.

00:55:04   What's motivating this?"

00:55:07   But anyway, the most recent rumor is, "Hey, remember those 'solid state' buttons on the iPhone 15?"

00:55:13   Yeah, they're not doing that this year. And the rumor is that they were testing them and they just basically had "unresolved technical issues."

00:55:21   And so, I mean, that happens sometimes. You're pushing the envelope, you want to do something that is not particularly common in the industry, and you want to ship literally hundreds of millions of iPhones with this thing.

00:55:30   Buttons better work and better be reliable. So if they tested this and it turns out there are some issues they couldn't resolve, by all means go back to regular buttons.

00:55:38   Now, the thing I think is interesting about this is this is another one of those rumors, kind of like the display, where it's like, "Rumor of thing that's coming? Actually, the thing we rumored is not coming."

00:55:47   And the story is like, "Apple cancels this thing they never announced."

00:55:50   I'm sure Apple tries all sorts of things with their phones, but as iPhones, which are heavily leaked products, get closer and closer to their launch day, or more precisely, closer and closer to the point where the factories start churning these things out to be ready for launch day, so they can ship hundreds of millions of them all over the world,

00:56:04   we learn basically everything about them, sort of their names, colors, and prices and stuff like that, although I bet it's going to be called iPhone 15.

00:56:11   In this case, we're getting close enough to the point now where people are like 3D printing the exact shape from the "CAD" files for the things so you can see exactly what the phones are going to look like, down to the curvature of the case,

00:56:25   so that people who make iPhone cases can manufacture them to fit exactly on the stuff like what the cameras are going to look like, the gigantic camera mount, and how much they're going to stick out, and everything about that.

00:56:36   One of the things that all the 3D models that people have done is they share a common trait that the volume buttons on the side of the phone, instead of there being two little holes, one for the volume up and one for the volume down,

00:56:47   there's one long skinny hole that would have been presumably for the solid state button that would act kind of like a seesaw rocker, where if you press the top of the button, that would mean volume up and you press the bottom, it would mean volume down.

00:56:58   And when I saw that, I mean you can see it very clearly on the case, there's just one long opening instead of two little ones, right?

00:57:04   I hate things like that. I don't want to go into a car rant, but car manufacturers seem to love this idea and I want someone to shake them and say "please don't do this."

00:57:13   The thing that car manufacturers do is they want to have a bunch of buttons, but they don't want to have real button buttons.

00:57:20   So first they did capacitive touch, where there would be this big expanse of shiny black plastic and there would be these light up symbols, right?

00:57:26   And if you just touch your finger to one of the light up symbols, it's not a screen mind you, it's just a light up symbol like the individual stenciled out little light up symbols.

00:57:34   You touch your finger to that light up symbol, it's capacitive and it will sense the u-touch and it will activate it.

00:57:39   And then you put those controls in the steering wheel, which is a terrible idea because when your bare hand swipes across one of them you turn on cruise control or something.

00:57:45   So you're like "alright, that was a bad idea." It takes them five years to learn this.

00:57:48   Oh no, it's still happening, look at the new Golf.

00:57:50   They still do, but some manufacturers figured out that's a bad idea, let's do something better.

00:57:54   I know what we'll do, let's have a big expanse of shiny plastic with light up little areas that you also touch.

00:58:00   But instead of them being capacitive, why don't we make them pressure sensitive?

00:58:04   I'm like "but wait a second, it's a giant sheet of plastic, how are you going to make it pressure sensitive? How will I know how it works?"

00:58:09   "I've got an idea." We'll make it capacitive to figure out where your finger is, and then we'll make it pressure sensitive to figure out that you're pressing.

00:58:16   And then some other genius says "I've got an even better idea, let's make it not pressure sensitive, but let's make it a regular button."

00:58:23   So now they have a huge piece of plastic that when you press anywhere on it, the entire piece of plastic goes in by like 2mm.

00:58:31   They have capacitive sensors to figure out "hey, we know the whole big giant thing went in, but what part of it was your finger touching when it went in?"

00:58:40   So basically it's one big button, but with like, it knows where you pressed the one big button.

00:58:46   And it's like "guys, come on, you can just use individual buttons, I swear!"

00:58:50   Just make six buttons instead of one giant button with a capacitive sensor, so that it knows where it is. Anyway.

00:58:57   I'm pretty sure my Defender's steering wheel buttons are this.

00:59:01   Yeah, no, they love it.

00:59:02   And it works fine about 95% of the time, but that other 5% is really frustrating.

00:59:08   And I guess they're saving cost, because instead of having six buttons you have essentially one button and the capacitive stuff is cheap enough, but it's such a terrible idea, especially in something that's supposed to be fancy.

00:59:18   Anyway, getting back to the phone, when I look at this long skinny single volume button, where you just rock it from side to side, I hate that because it's like "okay, I pressed it but I pressed too close to the middle, so what I actually did was I actuated volume up and down at the same time, or I actually did volume up and then volume down."

00:59:36   When they're separate buttons and you find the one you want to press, if you just press that button, the other button doesn't get pressed at all, but when it's a single piece and it's supposed to rock like a seesaw, you have to make sure you press enough on the edge to rock it in the right direction or whatever.

00:59:51   It just seems like such a bad idea.

00:59:52   So, given this rumor that they were going to be the kind that don't move but now they're not going to be, they're going back to regular buttons, I do wonder, does that mean that they're redesigning the case as well to have two openings, one for volume up, one for down, or are they sticking with the single long volume button only now is just going to be a regular button that rocks back and forth?

01:00:11   Didn't the iPhone 3G and 3GS have a single big rocker button?

01:00:14   I think so, yeah.

01:00:15   I think they did it where they had a divot in the middle, and the new rumors are that there will be a little line in the middle as well.

01:00:22   You make a divot. It's still one piece, but there's a raised part and another raised part, which helps you a little bit to make sure you know you're pressing on the half that you're pressing on.

01:00:30   But it just seems to me like such a weird choice, like what's broken about the two separate buttons that they need to fix by having one.

01:00:37   It seems like the same amount of surface area for water ingress as having two buttons, but I don't know.

01:00:41   So anyway, we'll see when this phone actually comes out. Does it have pressure sensitive buttons or not?

01:00:47   Or does it have a single long volume rocker or two separate volume buttons?

01:00:52   And of all the things to change, again, I'm still kind of curious about this.

01:00:56   Apple perhaps knows something that we don't.

01:00:58   My only guess is water and dust ingress and reliability of moving buttons.

01:01:04   But given the track record with the home button, it seems like they could probably do a good job of the solid state buttons, but just maybe not for this year.

01:01:13   The other rumor is that the mute switch is going to be a button, which still that's that's still on.

01:01:17   That rumor is still on. I think that'll be great because I'm already thinking about what I'm going to use that for.

01:01:21   Because the mute switch, I just always have it on silent, so I don't need that switch to be there.

01:01:25   I would love that to just be a small button. And I'm pretty sure my day one attempt to map that button.

01:01:31   Not that I'm going to have this on my wife will. But anyway, what I would map it to is a rotation lock.

01:01:37   You know the good old days when the iPads had a rotation lock?

01:01:39   I would probably map the button to rotation lock because I do rotation lock and unlock my thing.

01:01:43   Usually I'm laying down. I want it locked when I'm sitting up, whatever.

01:01:47   But I'm I'm willing to imagine that I might find a better use for it.

01:01:51   I'm sure lots of people will hook it up to some kind of shortcut or do the same function that you currently have mapped to like triple tap on the back of your phone.

01:01:57   So adding another button to the phone basically by making the mute switch into the ring silent switch or whatever the hell it's called.

01:02:03   By making that into a button, solid state or otherwise, I think that's going to be a big upgrade.

01:02:08   And that one is a separate button and not just a weird rocker thing.

01:02:11   Yeah, I think the most obvious thing to do with that is have it launch the camera app of your choice.

01:02:17   That would be amazing. I think a lot of people would do that.

01:02:21   Oh, that's interesting.

01:02:22   Launch the camera. I mean, there's all the, you know, launch the flashlight maybe. Whatever you use.

01:02:26   It could launch the default camera app. I know there's 50 ways to do that. You can swipe sideways. You can press the little icon.

01:02:32   But you can't do really any. Well, I guess you could do the swipe sideways without looking. But still, you kind of got to make sure the screen is active or whatever.

01:02:38   I think maybe if I find that rotation lock is not worthwhile, maybe I would use camera because I just spent the day today.

01:02:44   I was touring a college with my daughter and I was taking lots of pictures on my phone because I'm an embarrassing dad and she wouldn't let me bring a real camera.

01:02:52   And so you got to take out your phone and you got to activate the camera a lot because I'm trying to do it stealthily.

01:02:57   Activate the camera, take a picture, put it back. Right. Because I don't embarrass anybody.

01:03:00   And I have traditionally been a hold down on the little camera icon on a lock screen person.

01:03:05   But I tried to start being a sideways swipe person because it seemed like it might be easier.

01:03:09   But I don't know if it's easier. It seemed like it really wanted me to swipe a long distance.

01:03:13   Sometimes there's notifications there and I'm afraid I'm going to accidentally swipe it on the way.

01:03:16   So either one of those actions, though, I think the upcoming action button, whatever the hell they call it on the iPhone 15 series will be better.

01:03:26   So I guess I'd try that as well.

01:03:27   Yeah. I can also I think by far the most common use for it will be camera.

01:03:33   And I think, again, a lot of people probably use it as a flashlight.

01:03:36   If you currently use the triple tap accessibility shortcut for things like magnifier or things like that, like I think that'll also be a very common use for people who use those features.

01:03:45   There's a lot of features I can think of that people would love that.

01:03:49   And if they do open it up to things that can be done with the phone, that would require the phone to be unlocked, such as launching a third party app or running a shortcut.

01:03:59   That would also that would add some complexity because, you know, you'd have to let Face ID run first before it would finish the task.

01:04:07   But that would also, I think, dramatically open it up.

01:04:10   And that would do especially that would be great for third party camera apps, because then they could have themselves be the ones that launch when you hit that button instead of the built in one.

01:04:19   And that, you know, if you use a third party camera app, that would be probably your holy grail.

01:04:23   And even if you don't and if Apple just lets it be their own stuff that can run with the phone locked, even if it's just launching camera or flashlight or magnifier or changing the mute status, those are all very, very nice features for almost everyone who uses them.

01:04:39   So I think that's the plan for the mute switch to become an action button basically sounds awesome.

01:04:47   And we'll see we'll see what Apple does with it. Like, you know, what they actually allow us to do, how it actually works.

01:04:51   But that sounds awesome because I think most people are not flipping that switch frequently.

01:04:59   Most people, I think, typically have it in one state or the other.

01:05:03   So it I think it's totally fine to make that a bit more of like a software based thing.

01:05:09   Also, hitting that switch the way almost everyone uses their iPhone, which is in a case is terrible.

01:05:17   Like trying to flip that switch one handed when it's in a case with most cases is difficult to impossible.

01:05:24   It's an any belly button. It just collects.

01:05:26   Yeah, and collect tons of it.

01:05:27   And it's hard to operate. So, you know, I recognize if you are if you are a caseless unicorn and you, you know, you want to be able to hold and feel it in your pocket or flip it in your pocket.

01:05:37   That's great. But you also probably recognize that you are the minority of phone users by not using the case.

01:05:43   And so when you are using a case, it's depending on how the case is shaped around that.

01:05:47   It's very difficult to operate that switch or to detect what state it's in without just taking out your pocket and looking at it.

01:05:53   So making it a button that that would be just you just push it in and then the phone does something in response.

01:05:58   Maybe it gives a little vibrate, you know, to indicate whether if you if you leave it on mute mode, maybe it gives a little vibrate to indicate muted status.

01:06:05   So you could still do it in the pocket 100 percent by feel.

01:06:08   That's the kind of thing that's how I would expect them to do it.

01:06:11   And that I think would be totally fine and similar to, you know, when the iPhone seven came out and it didn't have a real physical pushing in home button.

01:06:19   We all thought that was going to be bad. We all thought it was going to be somehow worse than having the physical home button.

01:06:24   And by the way, remember, the physical home buttons in the iPhones that preceded the iPhone seven often died during the time you use the phone.

01:06:32   They often wore out and led to this whole world of people who use like the what's the onscreen little blobby thing.

01:06:40   But, you know, a little blobby thing where you put a home button thing on your screen.

01:06:43   Yeah, it's an accessibility feature. I don't remember the name of it, but it basically was it's an onscreen incarnation of the home button for people whose home buttons broke.

01:06:49   Right. And then and what turned out happening was like huge places like I believe this was big in China.

01:06:54   Huge places, huge amounts of people would assistive touch.

01:06:58   Thank you to veg in the chat room. Huge populations of people would turn that on right from the start.

01:07:04   They would just always use the phone that way because they didn't want to wear out the home button.

01:07:08   It was like people who put plastic over their furniture so to be protected.

01:07:11   Right. But they would never take the plastic off of the furniture. So I wanted to furniture to look good forever.

01:07:15   But now it's going to look like it has plastic on it forever. So you'd preserve your home button, which you would never use, I guess, for resale value or whatever.

01:07:20   Right. That's that's how my grandparents' formal living room always was.

01:07:23   There was there was a whole room of the house filled with furniture and we could never go into it except on Christmas Day.

01:07:29   And on Christmas Day, we would go into the room, but the plastic would still be on the couches. We would just sit on it.

01:07:35   Well, you don't want to mess it up. You want it to always look good. Ignoring the fact that it always looks bad because it has plastic on it.

01:07:40   Right. And it's totally unusable as furniture. Anyway, so when the iPhone 7 came out with that home button, you know, virtually done with Taptic Engine, again, we all thought it was going to be worse.

01:07:52   But it turned out it was, I wouldn't say way better, but it was it was fine. It was it was exactly as good as the old home button in terms of how it felt and everything.

01:08:00   But then it worked pretty much 100 percent of the time. Like it was way more reliable.

01:08:04   I liked it better because it required less travel. So it felt less onerous.

01:08:08   Like the old people remember the old home buttons moved a lot. They didn't just move like a half a millimeter in and out, like they moved up and down a lot.

01:08:14   That's true. The thing about the old home buttons is like that we were all aware of home button failures.

01:08:20   So it made perfect sense to us why Apple would want to make that solid state, setting aside waterproofing, which which also kind of came around.

01:08:27   And I think the seven was the first one where they really advertised the waterproofing stuff. But that made sense.

01:08:32   But the volume power buttons, like I'm willing to believe that there's reliability and waterproofing benefits, but I don't I don't see them myself in like my my my overview of the iPhone market and my usage of the iPhone.

01:08:45   Like it doesn't seem like there's a crisis of volume up and down and sleep wake buttons dying on iPhones.

01:08:52   And Apple needs to address this. So, I mean, maybe it's not that pressing. Maybe they bailed on it because they couldn't figure it out.

01:08:56   But they'll return to it in the future. The action button, on the other hand, I think is a great example of Apple discovering that buttons are useful.

01:09:02   I mean, people look at it and say, oh, it's just like on the Apple Watch Ultra.

01:09:06   But I feel like it's the same ethos that put the HDMI and SD card back on the Pro Max, like that.

01:09:12   Hey, having a clean appearance is one thing, but features pay dividends every single day.

01:09:18   So you want to strike a balance between not having a million buttons and things sticking out of it, but also having enough functionality.

01:09:26   Can the iPhone support one more button? I believe it can. I mean, they're not adding a button.

01:09:30   They're just changing something that used to be a switch, turning that into a button.

01:09:33   But still, it's a big win, especially if they let us, you know, assign things to it for like what's single tap, double tap, triple tap, tap and hold.

01:09:41   Like, I don't think they're going to go hog wild with it. But if you think, oh, well, then once I pick one thing for that button, it's game over.

01:09:47   Apple does have the ability to be fancier. And we just mentioned the triple tap on the back of your phone.

01:09:52   That's a triple tap action, which is fairly rare for Apple to go single tap, double tap, triple tap.

01:09:57   So if they're willing to do that, I really hope they'll be willing to let people assign things to single tap on an action button, double tap on the action button and hold down the action button.

01:10:06   Like there's lots of potential flexibility there, depending on how far Apple wants to go.

01:10:10   I mean, I can tell you why it's triple tap on the back of the phone. At least I'm pretty sure I know why.

01:10:15   A long time ago, as I was brainstorming how, you know, features for Overcast for how could I use this while walking?

01:10:23   This is before the Apple Watch came out. How could I control Overcast?

01:10:26   So I actually prototyped tapping the back of the phone while it's in your pocket as some kind of gesture to detect and, you know, maybe make it like track skip or whatever.

01:10:36   It was extremely difficult to get that to work reliably and not have false positives because, you know, just as you're walking, the phone is being shocked by every step you take.

01:10:47   And so to try to try to detect the difference between regular motion while walking or running or jogging or whatever and a tap or a double tap, your error rate is significant.

01:10:58   Whereas triple tap, if you do that within a fast enough time, that gives much more data, a much more identifiable pattern of vibration with accelerometers and everything.

01:11:07   To the point where they can probably detect that pretty reliably with almost no wrong false positives.

01:11:14   So that's probably why that's a triple tap.

01:11:16   They should have done it like they should have required Mario 64 timings for the triple tap for the triple jump.

01:11:21   Yeah, right.

01:11:22   Tap, tap, tap.

01:11:24   Oh, sorry, you didn't do the timing right. You did a double jump and then just jumped it, did a single jump after. Try again.

01:11:30   I believe you're thinking of Mario, John.

01:11:32   I'm not actually.

01:11:34   Yes, you are.

01:11:35   Anyway, yeah, I don't know. I like the idea of some sort of action button or, you know, smart button.

01:11:41   I do use my silent switch as a fidget toy, which I know I should not do, but as of yet, I have not broken one.

01:11:50   I never flick it otherwise. So like my phone, certainly since I got my first watch in like 2014, and I think even mostly before that, my phone was always on silent.

01:12:01   Just always. And again, once I had an Apple watch on my wrist, pretty much always.

01:12:06   There seemed to be no purpose to ever have it not on silent.

01:12:09   And I'm not one of those absolute monsters that has a chime on their watch.

01:12:14   You know, that's why I wear a watch. I can be silently notified if something needs my attention.

01:12:19   And so anyways, I don't really have a need for switch.

01:12:23   I don't do the rotation lock often.

01:12:27   I tend to leave my phone on rotation locked to portrait pretty much always.

01:12:33   And I will occasionally turn that off, you know, if I need to like show a photo in landscape or something like that.

01:12:39   But I like the idea of having that as the action button activator.

01:12:44   I love the idea of having the camera as what gets activated in this mythical action button.

01:12:49   And certainly for the iPad, I would love to bring back the switch.

01:12:53   It used to be that, you know, the thing that's a silent switch on your phone, there was something similar on the iPad.

01:12:59   And that would be your orientation lock. And it was amazing! And I miss it all the time.

01:13:04   And I would love to have that back.

01:13:06   But anyways, I love this idea. I hope that maybe these reports are wrong, although I doubt they are.

01:13:11   And maybe it will land on the iPhone 15. But we'll see what happens.

01:13:15   Everyone agrees the action button is coming. It's just a question of whether the buttons will be solid state or not.

01:13:21   And I think it's tricky with the solid state because when you look at how they did,

01:13:26   like if you look at a teardown of any of the Touch ID phones from iPhone 7 forward,

01:13:30   you can see like how they achieved that pressure button was that the Taptic Engine,

01:13:36   which is kind of like a big subwoofer in your phone,

01:13:38   like it's basically a relatively large, low frequency driver that goes back and forth, like a speaker driver, sort of.

01:13:46   But it's such low frequency that you just feel the vibration instead of like hearing audible sound.

01:13:52   So what's interesting is that the way they did this is that the Taptic Engine just happened to be in the design of the phone at the bottom.

01:13:59   And so they realized, oh, well, we can just use that since the home button is already right there,

01:14:04   let's just move the Taptic Engine a little bit over and boom, boom, there's our click.

01:14:09   Because you have to feel it when you're close to it to really maximize the way it feels right.

01:14:15   The problem is Taptic Engines are big. And in order to do this for the iPhone volume buttons,

01:14:22   you would have to move it up there and then maybe even have a second or third one.

01:14:28   And so that takes up a lot of internal volume.

01:14:30   And in the iPhone, they can't really spare internal volume very often.

01:14:35   If there's space in the iPhone, they want to use it for battery if they can.

01:14:39   So it seems like a bit of an odd choice unless they found a way to either use one Taptic Engine to do all of this,

01:14:47   or to have much smaller ones that still have like enough of a feel.

01:14:52   Plus, the home button wearing out thing, as we were talking about a minute ago,

01:14:55   you think about how many times is a home button pressed, even in light use of a phone,

01:15:00   maybe it's pressed 50 times a day. And if you're a heavy phone user, more than that.

01:15:05   Whereas how many times do you press the volume buttons on your phone?

01:15:08   Even if you are just in the volume all the time, you're probably not pressing them 50 times a day.

01:15:12   So sleep/wake might be pressed a lot because people press it before they put it back in their pocket.

01:15:16   Yeah, maybe. I mean, it depends on like, some people don't even realize it's there.

01:15:22   But even then, yeah, so maybe 20 to 50 times a day for that.

01:15:26   Not as much as a home button, because a home button, you know, you press it every time you switch to apps.

01:15:30   And everything will be able to unlock the phone. So it was very, it's pressed a lot.

01:15:35   So I don't know that it's necessarily needed for like, you know, resilience purposes on those buttons.

01:15:42   I think what it would be for would be for water resistance.

01:15:44   Because keep in mind too, Apple has dual reasons for wanting to make the phones durable.

01:15:50   One is that they want people to be happy with their phones.

01:15:55   And if their phones are too fragile, see also the reason why they make the backs out of glass, God knows why.

01:15:59   If their phones are too fragile, people don't like them.

01:16:01   But number two, if Apple has to repair a lot of the phones that are under warranty or AppleCare,

01:16:08   they eat the cost and they lose money.

01:16:11   Anything they can do to reduce like, service needs, to reduce warranty failures, they have a pretty strong incentive to do that.

01:16:18   So ideally, you know, they want to, that's why they removed the headphone jack, that's why they try to make everything as solid as possible.

01:16:25   That's why there's always these rumors about, oh they're going to remove all the ports and everything like that.

01:16:29   Because Apple has strong incentives to make their phones not fail, at least while they're under warranty or AppleCare coverage.

01:16:35   So, you know, again, glass aside, that still makes me mad.

01:16:40   But if Apple does eventually not use glass on the back of their phone, it's probably going to be for that reason mainly.

01:16:49   And then secondarily, maybe about weight. I would love these phones to get lighter.

01:16:54   You'll be happy to know the rumor is titanium instead of stainless steel on the Pro, so that'll be lighter.

01:16:59   I know, that'll be great. I hope that's real.

01:17:01   But anyway, as for like, if they actually do this Taptic Engine volume rocker and sleep button thing, I bet it will feel totally fine.

01:17:11   I bet we won't really notice a big difference.

01:17:13   They did show with the iPhone 7 and forward home button, they can do that.

01:17:18   They can achieve that and the illusion works.

01:17:20   Again, the track pads on the laptops, we've had that illusion since about 2015 on every model.

01:17:24   Like that illusion works fine.

01:17:26   So the illusion works, they can do it, I trust them to do it.

01:17:31   I just question whether they will do it because of the interior space constraints that they probably have while doing it.

01:17:38   Yeah, the reason we know that they were going to use two additional Taptic Engines was because the rumor was from a supply chain about like who was awarded the contract.

01:17:45   Like there was like, this is a big win and the stock price of the company that makes the Taptic Engines is going to go up because now instead of selling them one Taptic Engine per phone, they're going to be selling them three, right?

01:17:55   And the rumor was that the Taptic Engines for the volume button and the sleep/wake button were very small.

01:18:02   Like they weren't the size of the big one because they didn't need to shake the whole phone like when it rings or whatever.

01:18:06   They just needed to provide feedback for the buttons and they would be right next to the buttons.

01:18:10   Still taking up space but right next to the buttons.

01:18:12   And that was part of what was bothering my mind is like you said, they're going to take space out of that.

01:18:16   I can't imagine it taking less space than physical buttons.

01:18:18   So they're going to take space and power for these little Taptic Engines, two additional Taptic Engines just to pull off this feature that nobody really wants that presumably make the phones a little bit more durable.

01:18:27   I do wonder if the technical issue they couldn't resolve has nothing to do with the low power thing and what do you do when the battery dies and is instead related to like the experience I think a lot of people had with the original Apple Watch.

01:18:39   That the tiny Taptic Engine and the Series Zero very often sort of gave up the ghost and just could not shake your watch anymore.

01:18:45   I think it still happens occasionally with later generations that the very small Taptic Engines sometimes just can't even and they stop.

01:18:53   They stop doing their little wiggle.

01:18:56   And you don't hear about that so much with the big Taptic Engine that's underneath the track pads or inside your phones at the bottom, right?

01:19:03   So maybe something about making a very tiny Taptic Engine and making that reliable is what the technical issue was because we've definitely seen that specific technical issue with the very small Taptic Engine that's in the Apple Watch.

01:19:15   We won't know until they announce the product but this was definitely something that seemed like it was very heavily rumored to the point where they were talking about which supplier was awarded the contract and they were excited about there would be more Taptic Engines and then this latest rumor from the same source from Ming-Chi Kuo saying, "Yeah, it doesn't look like that's happening."

01:19:32   Which is the thing that happens. You try a feature out, you put it in prototypes, if you can't get it up to the reliability levels that you want, your fallback is to just do regular buttons.

01:19:42   It's a fallback that you can have readily available because it's not like they don't know how to make regular buttons.

01:19:48   We'll see how this ends up but if it doesn't come this year, if there really are benefits like you were saying, like the reliability or water intrusion or whatever, they'll try again.

01:19:59   They'll try with the 16, they'll try with the 17. Eventually they'll get there.

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01:21:53   Let's do some Ask ATP and Xerxes wants to know, do any of you run third party anti-malware on your Mac?

01:22:02   It's that time of year again.

01:22:04   Yeah, everyone asks at least once or twice a year.

01:22:07   And the reason I keep putting it back in there is because I always want to see, has our answer changed?

01:22:12   We probably answer this maybe once a year, once every year and a half or whatever.

01:22:15   And it's not safe to assume that things will stay the same forever in the technology world.

01:22:21   So here we are 2023. Are any of us running anti-malware on our Mac?

01:22:26   In the past we had said we were not. So let's see now. Casey says no.

01:22:30   Nope. I also like to me, you know, first of all, I think anything that is a significant threat of malware to the Mac, Apple will most likely use their XProtect system and block it and that, you know, so that will be fine.

01:22:46   So far, life on a Mac has repeatedly shown that malware is not a massive concern for most of us who run things at all responsibly.

01:22:55   And so we are, I think, pretty, it's a pretty low risk for us.

01:22:59   Secondly, the reality of anti-malware software, like third party anti-malware software, the reality of what that does to your computer is itself, in my opinion, kind of like what malware does.

01:23:16   And so, like, I don't want those negative effects and I don't want my computer to be slowed down and messed up and giving some weird company, like, you know, what are these companies like Norton and whatever?

01:23:28   They're weird companies too. Why am I giving them access to everything on my computer? Do I really trust them? Should I really trust them? Do I trust them not to have their own security holes?

01:23:36   Like, if I'm opening the door to them to give them, because, you know, these things need, like, you know, root access or whatever, how do I know they aren't going to introduce their own security hole that somebody can exploit?

01:23:46   Like, it's just, it's adding risks to my computer. It's taking away risks that I don't think are very big and, you know, in the sense of not just the total malware risk to a Mac, but the delta between what could Apple protect against directly versus what these can protect against.

01:24:04   I think that's a very, very small gain in practice. And then the downside of having them is they make my computer worse. They make it perform worse.

01:24:13   They introduce privacy questions. They, you know, I have to pay for them in some way. Like, it's like, well, that isn't, that's kind of like what malware does.

01:24:22   So I'd rather, I just would rather not do that. And as long as the, as long as the risk of Mac malware continues to be as low as it is, and as long as Apple can do a good enough job with their built in stuff to protect against, you know, anything that actually gets big, I'm fine with that.

01:24:38   I'm not as pessimistic as Marco is about anti-malware software. Like, the big difference is the reputable anti-malware software vendors, their intentions are good. They're trying to protect your computer.

01:24:49   It always amazes me that Apple-

01:24:51   They're trying to sell you a protection scam. Let's be honest.

01:24:54   But they're not, you know, they're not trying to like encrypt all your stuff and then send you a ransom. Historically, and I think still currently, Apple has had in Mac OS X/Current version of Mac OS, various places for anti-malware software to hook into the system.

01:25:09   For example, I think there has been and probably might still be the hook that says, hey, every time anything tries to access a file anywhere, here's a part where you third party developer can insert your anti-malware thing to make sure that the file access is not malicious or whatever.

01:25:26   You know, like that there are really deep low level hooks at like the kernel level for anti-malware software to intercept things like network requests or file access or whatever to perform the function of anti-malware.

01:25:39   And over the years, Apple, I think has made those hooks safer so that if there is a bug in anti-malware, it doesn't itself become a security exploit. Like the network stack stuff is now used and moved into user space, I believe.

01:25:50   Anyway, all that said, I don't run anti-malware software. I never have and I continue not to.

01:25:58   Not because I think anti-malware software is like bad for my computer or whatever, but for example, the thing that sprang to mind immediately is this bug I talked about at the top of the episode where my window dragon got all messed up.

01:26:10   If I had any of those things installed, that would be my first thing that I would look for. What is in my operating system that's third party at the lowest level messing with literally everything that happens, every file access, every network request or whatever, that's going to be my first culprit to say, "Alright, uninstall that and see if the problem went away."

01:26:29   Not because they're doing anything bad or wrong, but just to perform the function of anti-malware, you have to be so deep in the system and you have to watch every single thing of a particular type that happens.

01:26:40   You can't just watch some network request or some file I/O. You would miss the malware. You have to be there and catch it all.

01:26:48   Apple itself already has an anti-malware system built into Mac OS at the lowest level. It's limited and there's not a lot of surface area to it, but Apple uses it and periodically updates it with new malware or whatever.

01:27:01   It's not like I'm running entirely unprotected, but the main reason I don't run any anti-malware stuff is that there is a cost to running it. I was forced to run anti-malware stuff when I had my various jobby jobs, so I know what it's like.

01:27:12   There is a cost to running that stuff. Some of it can be worse than others, and the benefit is just not there in my opinion. It's not as if I'm like, "Well, it's okay for you not to run it because you're a savvy user and you won't do anything dumb."

01:27:23   No. I'm not much more savvy than the average user. Malware exploits human weakness and exploits your complete unawareness.

01:27:33   I load web pages. I don't have some magical knowledge that knows, "Hey, I'm sure this web page doesn't exploit some zero-day thing in my web." No, I don't know that any more than anybody else does.

01:27:41   I've been using Macs without anti-virus, without anti-malware since 1984, and I've never had a problem with it.

01:27:49   Until that changes, there's no way I'm going to voluntarily run some software that I know has downsides in exchange for an upside that I just do not see.

01:27:58   The answer to, "Has this changed? Are we still running it?" We're still not running it.

01:28:03   I know companies have to run it probably for liability reasons, and if your company forces you to run it, I'm sorry. I've been there. It happens.

01:28:09   But for regular people, I still think the correct answer is, "Don't install third-party anti-malware software unless you find that you need it."

01:28:19   And I don't think you will find that you need it.

01:28:22   Jesse Wilson writes, "In your discussion of lifestreams, John noted that rewind.ai doesn't encrypt local application data. Does Mac--"

01:28:29   I don't know if that's still true, by the way, but at the time this was written--

01:28:32   Yeah, at the time this was written, that was true.

01:28:34   "Does MacOS allow apps to keep encryption keys and data private from one another? Do you use any Mac apps that encrypt their local data?" John?

01:28:42   Yes, MacOS does allow apps to keep data private from one another. That's what Keychain is for.

01:28:47   Applications can store stuff in Keychain that other applications can't see.

01:28:51   Obviously, on the Mac, there's always the top-level root privilege where you can see everything, and you as a user can unlock your Uchain and look at all the contents.

01:29:00   But there are mechanisms that application developers can do to try to keep their stuff separate from other people's stuff.

01:29:06   Sandboxing helps with that. Not every Mac app is sandboxed, but the ones in the Mac App Store are.

01:29:11   And a sandbox Mac app really has very limited access to reach into what other apps are doing.

01:29:17   Non-sandbox apps can reach pretty far and wide, so you have to trust the developer that's making them.

01:29:24   But the operating system does provide mechanisms to try to keep data private, and Keychain is the ultimate one of those.

01:29:31   But you can't just say, "Oh, because this mechanism exists, I'm sure every Mac app is safe." No, because developers have to use these APIs, they have to opt into sandboxing, and so do other apps.

01:29:39   And in the end, because it's a Mac, you do have the ability to say, "Well, I'm just going to become root and bypass all of these protections and just get it what I want."

01:29:49   There is a higher level of that, like system integrity protection and having a read-only system volume, so it is more secure than it was, so just keep that in mind.

01:29:57   But yes, applications like Rewind can do better than leaving all their data on encrypted on disk.

01:30:03   And I'm assuming that since this SKDP question was sent to us probably many months ago, that actually has changed with this specific application.

01:30:12   It's tricky on the Mac, because you can say, "Well, I'm using an encrypted disk, my laptop comes and I'm using encryption on the entire disk, it was in everything encrypted and safe."

01:30:22   Yeah, but you have to unlock it to use the computer, and when you're logged into it, and your screen is unlocked, and everything is unlocked, and your Keychain is unlocked,

01:30:31   yeah, it's all encrypted, what we call encrypted at rest, as in on the disk it's encrypted, but right now, live on the computer, it's ready and able to be read by anyone who sits in front of your keyboard and your mouse

01:30:41   because your computer is unlocked, your Keychain is unlocked, so security is complicated.

01:30:45   But yeah, the standard is, actually make it encrypted on the disk, because that way if you shut down your computer, and someone yanks out the SSD chip and tries to read stuff from it or whatever,

01:30:56   there are many levels of protection that's preventing them from getting at it, but the final one would be, "Oh, and by the way, if you actually do manage to read it, it's all going to be encrypted anyway."

01:31:04   Indeed, and finally, True writes, "If you hadn't already gotten the MacStudio for your wife, John, would you now opt for the M2 Mac Mini instead?"

01:31:13   I wouldn't, because my goal with buying her computer is to, you know, like, buy my computer or my Honda Accord or whatever, just get one, and then make sure it is good for many, many years.

01:31:26   So, the M2 Mini, I think, doesn't come with the Mac's chip, the M2 Macs. Correct, it goes up to the Pro only.

01:31:34   Right, you can't outfit it with 64GB of RAM, that is a big future-proofing thing, because, you know, things just get more RAM-humbery over time.

01:31:41   And there's no SD card, which seems silly, but her previous 5K iMac had an SD card slot, and so does her MacStudio, and I actually use it by sticking SD cards through my cameras into it.

01:31:50   Even though it's under the desk, I can still get it at the SD card slot, so I personally wouldn't, but for a lot of people who don't care about any of those things and aren't trying to buy some sort of future-proof computer, you can save a lot of money by buying an M2 Mac Mini with some decent specs rather than the Studio.

01:32:04   Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Backblaze, and thanks to our members, you can support us directly at atp.fm/join.

01:32:12   Don't forget our cool new merch sale, atp.fm/store, and we will talk to you next week.

01:32:19   Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, 'cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.

01:32:30   John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, 'cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.

01:32:41   And you can find the show notes at atp.fm, and if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, A-N-T, Marco, R-M-N, S-I-R-A-C, U-S-A, Syracuse, it's accidental.

01:33:09   Accidental, they didn't mean to, accidental, accidental, tech podcast so long.

01:33:20   I have a bit of an odd problem.

01:33:23   Oh no.

01:33:24   I don't quite know how to fix it.

01:33:25   Let me guess, let me guess, the fix is throwing lots of money at it.

01:33:29   In this case, I don't think so, because dog treats are pretty cheap.

01:33:33   Not the ones that I get advertised on Instagram.

01:33:36   Yeah, I was gonna say, I'm sure you can find like the super fussy ones.

01:33:39   Does your dog eat grass? Does your dog ever lick its own paw? Does your dog ever look at you?

01:33:44   Your dog is probably dying from parasites, buy these $40 treats last week.

01:33:47   Oh my god.

01:33:48   That's all I get on Instagram is sick dog ads.

01:33:52   So, you mentioned earlier, Casey, that you're, you know, you have all your phones on mute, because why would you ever need to hear sound effects?

01:33:58   I have started doing this myself. I actually have had my phone on loud mode much over the last few years, just because I live in the middle of nowhere in the winter, and there's no one around, and so who cares?

01:34:13   And so I'll just like leave it on, because, you know, sometimes maybe it's out of my pocket or something.

01:34:18   Somehow, something has changed in the last couple of weeks where my wonderful dog, Hops, who is a tiny little 12 year old diabetic shit-poop, has started really freaking out with phone notification noises.

01:34:36   And this is new. He's not usually like a nervous dog. This is a new thing. I don't, I can't figure out what was the inciting incident here.

01:34:46   Like, you know, I thought like, okay, maybe, maybe like a phone notification noise preceded some like traumatic event or nervous event for him, but I can't figure out what that would be.

01:34:56   My only theory is like maybe, maybe every time the phone dings, I subconsciously like look alert towards it, and maybe that makes him nervous that he thinks, oh no, something, something that requires alertness is happening.

01:35:11   Maybe it's something bad, you know. That's the only thing I can think of, but even like, I don't think I'm that bad about it, honestly.

01:35:16   But anyway, so it's gotten to the point where, the thing is we have a lot of devices in our house. We have all my stuff, we have all Tiff's stuff, all of Adam's stuff.

01:35:25   And so trying to make sure that no devices unnecessarily play Apple's default dings and doodle-oo-ts, and like that, that's actually very difficult.

01:35:34   And this sounds, there's a lot of, you know, things that can cause that.

01:35:38   You can be a mute switch family. I mean, I realize that I don't actually know all the sounds that a phone might make because my phone is set to silent all the time and so is every other device in the house.

01:35:50   And the few times I've turned it off, I'm like, oh my God, it makes a sound every time a message comes in and every time you send one, and I immediately turn it off.

01:35:57   So I know how Hopps feels because anytime I hear that sound, I also want to break something.

01:36:01   Yeah, and to be clear, it's not making him like aggressive, it's making him nervous.

01:36:08   It's making me nervous too. I'm upset about the idea of your house.

01:36:11   Bloop, bloop, ding, bloop, bloop. No, it's like a giant video arcade. Please just go around the house and put all the switches into mute.

01:36:18   And it doesn't have to be in your pocket because when it vibrates and it's on a hard surface, you can still hear it.

01:36:23   Yeah, but also, my Mac makes these sounds and sometimes I have it playing through speakers or at least open backed headphones so he can definitely still hear it.

01:36:32   What is your alert sound set to?

01:36:34   I just, what are the defaults are? So what I hear a lot of...

01:36:37   I don't know what the default is. Look it up. What is it? Is it funk? Is it glass?

01:36:40   So glass is the one that's, ding, right? Is that that one?

01:36:43   Yeah.

01:36:44   That one is definitely one that gets it. So as far as I can tell, it's at least that he hates that and I think he also hates the standard iOS notification sound.

01:36:54   So there's two problems. Number one, we have a ton of devices in the house and three of them are Macs and so that's going to be difficult to never play these sounds.

01:37:06   The second problem is we've watched TV shows from Apple TV+.

01:37:12   Yeah, product placement.

01:37:14   Yeah, so we've been watching Ted Lasso and Shrinking recently, both of which take place like in the modern day.

01:37:19   I do like the fact that at least on Ted Lasso, I don't watch Shrinking, but at least on Ted Lasso, they use the dynamic type features of the OS to make the text readable on screen rather than faking the stuff.

01:37:30   No way, it's all faked. It's all faked.

01:37:33   No, they fake it with actual video footage. It is composited in the sense that it's faked that way, but it's actually using iOS it looks like.

01:37:42   Yeah, it's the real apps and the real OS and the real dynamic type feature, which I think looks so much better than when they try to take an interface and blow up the text for the purposes of it reading on the screen, but it's not actually a supported thing on the feature.

01:37:55   And yes, the screens are composited on, so they read on camera, but I'm just saying the actual software is real Apple software only with, you know, you just assume everyone on Ted Lasso has bad vision because the fonts are all cranked up.

01:38:05   But yeah, so, you know, in all, in Ted Lasso and in Shrinking, there are, and I think the morning show also had this, that hasn't come back yet, but when we watch that, I think they have a lot of like, you know, showing iPhones having text chats.

01:38:18   And so you end up hearing a lot of ting and doodle doot, you hear and the whoo, whatever the, you know, the iMessage sound.

01:38:25   I feel like that is a bad character moment because granted some characters would be terrible people who have the sounds on, but some characters would have the sound and they just, I feel like Apple's branding overrides everything.

01:38:34   Look, everybody has to be, has to have the mute switch, you know, set to, to the noisy mode. Right.

01:38:39   And that's not true. Some characters, I feel like it should be a character moment when we see what kind of character is a terrible person who lets their sounds go on their phone.

01:38:46   Agreed. But setting that aside, it doesn't solve my problem. So like, it's getting like, it's very hard to watch these shows now without, you know, some ting will happen on the show.

01:38:54   And then like, Hobbs is, he's basically, he likes, you know, he, he leaves his normal, his normal TV state for years has been, you know, tipped over power save mode, you know, as we're, as we're watching TV at night.

01:39:05   And he's now like, you know, climbing on me nervous, like that. And this is so unlikely. So I'm, I'm trying to like, how, like, what do I do?

01:39:11   So I thought, you know, at first I'm like, oh, maybe, maybe I should like start playing the sounds and giving him a treat.

01:39:17   Yeah. Every time the sound plays, give him a treat. Yeah. Yeah. Like resensitize it to be a positive thing.

01:39:21   But then like, I'm worried. I'm like, am I going to break my doll? Like, am I, is he going to then want to treat every time my computer actually makes the dings sound?

01:39:30   Like, I don't know. Or am I going to like confuse his association and then make him hate treats? I don't, I don't know. I don't know what to do.

01:39:36   Yeah. I mean, the other, the thing you should, you should actually do from a dog training perspective that I don't actually know how to do, but I think this is what dog trainers would tell you is what you want to reward is not, Hey, when you hear the sound, you get the treat.

01:39:46   What you want to reward is the behavior you want. And the behavior you want is sound goes off and dog remains calm.

01:39:53   And so you have to find the, the, the smallest reproduction of that phenomenon where he can actually remain calm.

01:40:01   Cause right now we can't remain calm. The sound goes off and he isn't calm. So you have to find something like some noise that is like that noise, but not that like, basically you have to say a noise happened and you remained calm.

01:40:13   And that's what you reward the calmness after the noise. Then you'd work your way up to the actual noise that he is now coming.

01:40:18   And I don't know how to do that because like, what do you use as the, you want the dog to be successful essentially.

01:40:23   So you need a scenario where I can make a noise that is close to the ding noise, but it is not the ding noise such that I know hops will successfully be chill about it.

01:40:31   And when he's chill, you reward him for the chillness. And what that trains him to do is then eventually you work your way up to want to hear the noise.

01:40:38   His reaction is, Oh, when I hear that noise, if I'm chill, I'll get a treat. And then he's chill. And then you give him the treat.

01:40:44   So that's the theory behind what you're quote unquote supposed to do. And in theory it would work. I just have no freaking idea how you would do that.

01:40:50   I'm not sure his stack is that big. Like I don't think he can actually...

01:40:54   No, this is how dog training works. It is, for the people who know how to do it, somehow they're able to train their dogs to like do their taxes for them using this technique through a series of very tiny steps.

01:41:05   So like I started out just by, you know, like I would knock on the floor with one finger and if the dog didn't bark, I would give it a treat.

01:41:11   And now a marching band can come to the front door and the dog's just, their reaction is, we're just going to be so relaxed and calm because we know if we just lay here and snore, we'll get a treat.

01:41:20   Yeah. I don't know if those are ever shitsus though.

01:41:24   I mean, you know, you say that and you're like, well, sure it works for your dog. Your dog is magic, but it's not going to work for my dog or my breed or whatever.

01:41:32   But the dog training people, I've seen them train all sorts of dogs that you think should not be able to do taxes and they're just filing returns.

01:41:38   So I don't know. I don't know what magic they know how to do that we don't know how to do, but purely with positive reinforcement and a series of minute mind numbingly boring steps over the course of months, they train these dogs to do amazing things.

01:41:50   I watch too much of this on YouTube.

01:41:52   Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I just like, cause I don't, I don't want to like, it's been a while since we've had to train him for anything cause he's such a chill dog in every other possible way.

01:42:03   He always has been. So he's actually, he's been a very easy dog to keep on the good path. And so, I mean, he's 12 and so we've had, we haven't really had to train much of anything since he was a puppy.

01:42:15   People get older, you have the same problems.

01:42:17   I know. And the problem, and he's never really been nervous about stuff. So like that's another thing where it's like, I don't really know how to handle this yet.

01:42:24   But one thing for sure, like, you know, it's really hard to watch any Apple TV plus shows with this problem.

01:42:31   The other thing I get, I get advertised on people talking about the chat room, I get advertised on Instagram is the like basically pot for dogs, right? The little doggy drugs.

01:42:38   Like, oh, my dog used to be so nervous, but now I give him these little druggy treats and he's chill on a car ride.

01:42:43   Oh, the CBD. I'm not doing that. That's, that sounds like a terrible idea.

01:42:47   I mean, hey, you should try it. I mean, if you try it and your dog likes it and it solves the problem, like, you know, I don't know.

01:42:53   You'd have probably talked to your vet about like, are any of these actually effective? Which one of them will not kill my dog? Like I would say talk to your vet.

01:43:00   Yeah. Well, the other thing too is like, he has diabetes. I don't want to like mess with stuff too much.

01:43:03   Like, I don't even, like, it's already, like, I don't even give him a lot of treats normally anyway, just because of that.

01:43:08   So I like, I already, if I'm going to like set, you know, train him with, with treats, I got to figure out like, okay, what's like the, you know, the lowest calorie density treat I can give him that will actually work.

01:43:18   And, you know, fortunately, you know, dogs aren't that picky.

01:43:20   You know, I can give him like a one millimeter square of bacon.

01:43:23   No, I mean, he's a small dog, so it's hard.

01:43:24   Like his current treat, yeah, I know his current treats are these like, you know, they're basically like chicken dust balls. Like there's not much, they're basically like.

01:43:32   That's not an appealing brand name.

01:43:33   I know. It's like dried chicken, like formed into like a little disc.

01:43:36   Their logo is a tumbleweed.

01:43:38   Yeah. That's where they look, they don't look appealing at all, but he's fine. He has low standards, you know.

01:43:43   Yeah. The treats we give our dog, I break up into like a thousand pieces because dogs just love the smell of the treats so much.

01:43:49   The fact that they're getting a piece of treat that's the size of like a period at the end of a sentence, they're still just as happy.

01:43:54   And then that one treat lasts for like, you know, seven days as you break off tiny pieces of it.

01:43:59   Yeah. I guess he's not, he doesn't even like chew or enjoy. He just inhales whatever treat you get.

01:44:04   Yeah, yeah, exactly.

01:44:05   His diabetic food keeps him so, he's so hungry all the time. Poor guy.

01:44:09   Well.

01:44:10   All right. I'll have to give that a try. I'll have to like, you know, look at like what dog trainers say and I don't know.

01:44:16   I don't understand how the dog training thing would work. I'm just saying that if you look online, you will find people saying try to do this.

01:44:23   But like they always have scenarios that are just simpler. Like, you know, my dog barks whenever someone knocks at the door.

01:44:28   And you can see the series of steps that you would do to like, how can my dog be successful? What is like knocking but is minimally invasive?

01:44:34   What if it's not a stranger? What if it's me? What if I tap one finger on the floor? And you can see them building up to it.

01:44:38   But they do it like in a time lapse or like fast forward and now the dog knows how to do it.

01:44:42   And you didn't get to see me spending hours a day, not hours a day, but like it's only like five minutes a day every single day for six months.

01:44:50   And then the dog. But that's how dog training actually works and sticks.

01:44:54   And, you know, I don't know if doing with old dogs is more difficult or not.

01:44:58   But I would say talk to your vet about like calming treats. Like there are many, I know because I get them advertised all the time.

01:45:04   There are many calming treats for like dogs that get nervous in car rides or, you know, freak out when you're not there or so on and so forth.

01:45:11   I personally have not had any success for them with my dog, but mostly I was, we tried them a couple of times when my dog was a puppy and she was, you know, a puppy.

01:45:20   But like that's, she grew out of that. Right. But for your dog with a new thing, especially with senior dogs, maybe your vet knows like, oh, you can actually try this and it will not be in conflict with the diabetes and has been shown to work on older dogs.

01:45:34   But do ask your vet.

01:45:35   Yeah. Thanks.

01:45:36   I wonder kind of building on what John was saying, I wonder if maybe the approach would could be you have Hopps do something he's good at, like stay or sit or something like that and just almost act as though.

01:45:49   He's a 12 year old shit boo. His default behavior is staying.

01:45:53   What is he good at? What is his major skill set? He's, he's, he mostly does UI kit, but he's learning Swift.

01:46:00   Yeah. He used to be our doorbell, but I think he's been recently caring a lot less about that. So I think he might be retiring from that job.

01:46:06   Well, so the point I'm driving at, whatever it may be, you know, so let's suppose that you're in the, in the context of doing like sit training, which obviously is kind of silly because he already knows how to do that.

01:46:15   But in the midst of that, okay, hop, sit, here's your treat, hop, sit, here's your treat. In the middle of that, then have, you know, one of the glass tones or tri-tone or whatever fire off.

01:46:25   And if hopefully he's distracted enough to not lose his mind and then maybe you say, okay, good job, here's your treat. You know what I mean? And like, it's almost like a background thing.

01:46:36   And he only gets the treat if he doesn't lose his frigging mind. But if he loses his frigging mind, then you say, no, no, no, you know, go and sit and whatever.

01:46:43   And then try it again in a few minutes and see what happens. I don't know. That's what I would do.

01:46:47   Not getting the treat because he lost his mind has no effect on dogs. Like that, like if you don't get the behavior you want and they don't get the reward, that has no effect.

01:46:56   The only thing that has effect is the, is rewarding the correct behavior, which is so frustrating. That's why you have to find someplace where your dog can be successful.

01:47:03   What is a thing that is like the thing I'm trying to train, but I know a dog will be successful because if your dog fails, that's your failure as a trainer.

01:47:10   They're learning nothing from that. They only learn from success. They have to succeed. Whatever it is you're trying to get them to do, whatever increment, they have to succeed and you can only reward the success because you're training them.

01:47:19   This is the behavior I want you to perform. Everything else, they do not make enough of a connection to understand like you're not getting the treat because you didn't do the behavior.

01:47:28   Like there's a million things I could have done. I have no logical connection to not getting a treat. All I know is I didn't get one.

01:47:33   So it's all about reinforcing what you want. The opposite, punishing what you don't want or withholding from what you don't want is not as successful.

01:47:41   But I would imagine it's difficult to let the dog succeed in something where they're getting anxious about something.

01:47:46   Yeah, that's what I'm saying, like the knocking at the door or the strangers or whatever. It's like a version of training for people who are afraid of spiders.

01:47:53   You show them a picture of a spider from across the room on day one and you work your way up over the months to touching a spider.

01:48:00   You have to find those increments. Unlike people where you can explain this logic and everything, dogs have to succeed.

01:48:07   So whatever it is you're trying to get them to do, you have to find the thing where they succeed and so you can reward it.

01:48:12   And then you keep cranking it up and if you crank it up too fast and they fail, you go back a level. Let's go back to where you're successful.

01:48:18   And that's how you ratchet up that ladder. Or you could just mute all your computers and silence all your phones.

01:48:24   And not watch any Apple TV shows.

01:48:28   And then does your dog ever go into a deep enough sleep where the sounds on the TV show does not wake him up?

01:48:37   I mean, I have to observe more. Oftentimes his regular tipped over power state on the couch watching TV at night, oftentimes that's when he'll start the adorable sleep barking.

01:48:49   Little twitchy dreams.

01:48:52   Oh God, the best is when he wags his tail and he's slapping against the couch.

01:48:56   The little paw twitchy dreams.

01:48:58   And the little "woop, woop" barking without opening his mouth. It's so cute.

01:49:04   Yeah, that's usually during that time. So I think he's in deep sleep a lot of that time, but I think it still gets through.

01:49:09   The good thing is these noises are not difficult for us to reproduce.

01:49:13   Any Mac I have, I can just write a shell script in two seconds and just play it every five seconds if I have to.

01:49:19   It's not difficult to generate the noise if that needs to be part of the training, which it probably does.

01:49:26   That's like the end of the training. Maybe super low volume? I'm trying to think of what would approximate.

01:49:30   Yeah, something like that. Or have it just play it at random times every few seconds for a few minutes and just try to sit with them.

01:49:39   I don't know what it is. I gotta figure it out.

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