The Museum of Pristine Apple Hardware
John:
Let me just take a pause here so I can adjust my level some more.
John:
I keep messing with my dials.
John:
It's killing me.
John:
All right, this is sounding better.
Casey:
Why are you doing that to yourself?
John:
It's the worst.
John:
It's two dials.
John:
It's a volume dial and a mixed dial.
John:
And like every time I think I have you at the right volume, then I talk and either I can't hear myself or I'm blasting my eardrums out.
John:
I just...
Marco:
So the rule of audio stuff is once you get it working, don't touch it.
Marco:
Never touch it again.
John:
I don't touch the dials, but somebody or something touched my dials, and now I have to.
John:
And the worst thing about these dials is they're tiny little dials that don't even have markings on them.
John:
So even if I did take a picture of them, there's no...
Marco:
Yeah, my next suggestion was going to be like, I actually earlier tonight, yesterday I had to change one of the settings on my audio interface.
Marco:
So today, as I was setting up for the show tonight, I went and looked at my picture that I keep of it set up correctly.
Marco:
And I adjusted the knob that I had changed earlier to match the photo of my correct setup.
Marco:
It's something I highly recommend if you have the ability to have an audio interface where like it has knobs with
John:
lines on them to show you where they are uh so you can actually like kind of basically save and restore state in the most manual way possible you remember what this microphone looks like the one i'm using like it has these tiny little like almost like a little uh they're horizontal they're inside the device and only the little curve part of them is peeking out and there's no markings on them it's no good the only thing i take pictures of in that way is uh how cables are connected in the back of my av setup and how things are arranged on shelves
John:
okay the cables make sense the shelves like first of all how often do things get moved on your shelves that this would even be a problem and second of all who cares surprisingly often enough i mean like what i recently did was flip to one of my shelves these big wooden shelves they're like bowing and i wanted to flip it over right and so i have to take a shot of the shelf so i know where everything goes then take everything off then flip it over and then put everything back on
Casey:
I went to the Apple Store twice, actually, once to buy some dongles just to have them.
Casey:
Even though I haven't really needed them yet for $10 a pop, why not buy a few?
Casey:
So I bought three to sprinkle around the house slash cars.
Casey:
And I briefly looked at the matte black.
Casey:
And I don't remember if this was before or after the show.
Casey:
I want to say it was before the last show.
Casey:
And it was pretty, but I prefer the aesthetics of – oh, I'm sorry, the jet black.
Casey:
It was pretty, but I prefer the aesthetics of the matte black.
Casey:
So the jet black, definitely a good-looking phone, prefer the matte.
Casey:
But then I think it was during the show that you guys, or at least you, Marco, and I were talking about it.
Casey:
And you asked me or somebody asked me if it felt any tackier and tackier in the sense of like stickier, if you will.
Casey:
And it occurred to me I didn't really pay much attention to that, which is kind of crazy.
Casey:
I don't know why I didn't think about it.
Casey:
But I went back to the Apple store and spent about 45 seconds there.
Casey:
And I grabbed the one Jet Black demo unit that they have.
Casey:
And I'll tell you what, based on feel, there is no question that is the one to get.
Casey:
Without a shadow of a doubt, it feels so much better, tackiness-wise, stickiness-wise, if you will, than the matte black.
Casey:
I still think the matte black looks better, but, oh, night and day, the jet black feels so much better.
Casey:
And you are absolutely right.
Casey:
So hashtag MarcoIsRight.
Marco:
Alright, I finally got one.
Marco:
I'm wrong about so many other things.
Casey:
Yeah, well, you can't win them all.
Casey:
Sort of kind of speaking of, last we spoke, you seemed like you were starting to warm to the home button.
Casey:
Have you completely warmed to it?
Casey:
Are you back to giving it the cold shoulder?
Casey:
Where are you standing with the home button?
Marco:
um it's fine you know it's when i when i go back and use an old phone now it feels old like thanks a lot apple you've ruined buttons but uh so so i i suppose that means i like it it is a little bit annoying that it has become that it it took something that was reliable and
Marco:
and and made it just a little bit less than reliable and and that's kind of i mean this is you know the the the motto of so many other things or like this is like the the modus operandi of like so much of the progress we've made in in these areas recently where like yeah you you made the old thing better in a lot of ways but but you know worse in in some other you know smaller maybe or less important to most people way
Marco:
But anyway, overall, I like it.
Marco:
But I do find it unfortunate that it has become a little bit less reliable than a regular button.
Casey:
Do you find yourself running into that often?
Casey:
Because I definitely have had a couple of times, well, maybe more than a couple.
Casey:
But every once in a while, I will find that I think I've hit the button and the phone does not agree.
Casey:
But it's pretty darn rare.
Casey:
But from the way you're talking, it sounds like it's somewhat common for you.
Marco:
No, I mean, I just hit the button a lot.
Marco:
You know, to me, like, this is one of the problems I have with the Force Touch trackpad on the Macs is that the Force Touch trackpad took something, you know, if you were one of the people who clicked in the bottom area of the trackpad, and I recognize the Force Touch is better because you can click anywhere on the surface, but if you were one of the people who came along the old track where the buttons used to be below it, so you'd hit the button with your thumb and you'd point with your index finger or something, or usually your middle finger, I guess.
Marco:
And then when they removed the buttons, they made the whole thing hinge that way so that you could basically leave your hand the same way it always was.
Marco:
You could leave your thumb pushing down on the bottom area where the buttons used to be and have that click and then still move with your index or middle finger.
Marco:
So if you're one of those people who came along, the old button felt great because you were already clicking always in the bottom area anyway.
Marco:
So if you're one of those people, which, of course, I am, because we're all ancient, comparably to people who, like, use Snapchat and stuff.
Marco:
So, like, if you're one of those people, the old one was incredibly reliable.
Marco:
Like, the idea that you would ever... Assuming you don't use touch-to-click, the idea that you would ever, like...
Marco:
accidentally click on something on the trackpad or or think you're clicking but not have actually clicked that literally would never happen with the old ones and with force touch trackpads that sometimes happens similarly with the new home button on the phones like it's really hard to accidentally hit the home button on the old phones like if you mean to hit it you'll hit it
Marco:
And with this one, like you can occasionally accidentally push it where you meant to maybe just touch it or you meant to, you know, grip it a certain way.
Marco:
Or you can accidentally triple click when you meant to double click or single click or vice versa.
Marco:
You can accidentally trigger Siri if you didn't mean to.
Marco:
You can accidentally, this is a frequent one, accidentally trigger reachability by, you know, if you think you're pushing it or think you're holding it or think you're double pressing it, but you actually just double contact it, I guess, whatever the reachability thing is called.
Marco:
So basically, they took something that, again, was a mechanically generally reliable thing and made it do the wrong thing maybe 1% of the time.
Marco:
For me, it's very frustrating when an input device doesn't respond 100% of the time correctly because we use input devices so much on these computers and we use them to command them to do things that if you hit the keyboard, if you hit the same key over and over again,
Marco:
And every like one out of 40 times, like the H throws out a J instead.
Marco:
Like, well, this is the worst keyword ever.
Marco:
Like, why would you tolerate that, right?
Marco:
I feel like I have a very, very high standard for how I expect my input devices to be, how reliable I expect them to be.
Marco:
And it does annoy me when we make progress, but at the cost of that reliability that we used to have.
Marco:
And anything less than 100% reliability for me is annoying.
Marco:
And that's not to say that I won't just deal with it.
Marco:
Like when the new laptops come out forever from now.
Marco:
Whenever the new laptops come out, I'm probably going to buy one.
Marco:
Even though it's almost certainly going to have the same Force Tux trackpad we've had.
Marco:
And I'm just going to have to suck it up and deal with it.
Marco:
And it'll be fine.
Marco:
Just like I'm probably never going to mention...
Marco:
the home button being unreliable a little bit on the iPhone 7.
Marco:
I'm probably never going to mention it again because I'm just going to get used to it and I'll just be a little bit annoyed whenever it doesn't work, but then just move on with my day, right?
Marco:
But we are losing something here by making things that were 100% reliable, 99% reliable.
Marco:
And that's all.
Marco:
But overall, I'm okay with it.
Marco:
I like the idea that you're never going to mention it again.
Marco:
Yeah, maybe I shouldn't guarantee that.
Marco:
Seems very unlikely.
Marco:
But, you know, just again, just to restate the summary here, overall, I like the new button.
Marco:
I do like the Taptic Engine a lot overall.
Marco:
And when I go back, the old one does feel old.
Marco:
So, you know, they got me, right?
Marco:
And I'm sold.
Marco:
However, it is a little annoying that it can't be 100% reliable.
John:
So I don't know about this home button because I still haven't tried it, but as for the trackpad, I continue to say that you will eventually look back on the mechanical ones and think they're barbaric.
John:
And I would add that for most people, maybe not you, but for most people I've seen, and myself included, using the mechanical one, whether it was the button or the one where it didn't have a button but the whole thing slanted, not 100% reliable.
John:
Very frequently attempt to click and not actually click if you're not using tap to click.
John:
Happens to me every once in a while.
John:
I see it happen to people all the time.
John:
So...
John:
it's not as there's more to the reliability than just like if you successfully actuate the mechanism you will uh you will do a click i mean because that's true of anything you successfully successfully accurate the mechanism on the non-moving button you will successfully get a home button uh press or whatever it's just a question of do people sometimes go for it and fail to do it and the answer for those real buttons is yes i mean maybe the percentage was different for you but uh it's it's not as if anything is 100 reliable
John:
When it comes to translating intention and hand action into like the desired result.
Casey:
Yeah, I got to say, I almost never run into problems.
Casey:
Like I said earlier, a couple of times a new home button because I've hit it in such a way that maybe I've hit solely the quote unquote button itself and I haven't had any contact with the ring around it.
Casey:
But very rarely do I have any problems with the home button.
Casey:
And I cannot remember a time where I've had an unintentional fire or a lack of fire on the Force Touch trackpad.
Casey:
So you must be a trackpad wizard in a bad way because you are the only one that can find these issues.
Casey:
Well, not the only one, but the only one I've heard of that has found these issues.
Casey:
So congrats, I guess.
Casey:
I'm not really sure where to go from here.
John:
Right.
John:
You still don't have a four star trackpad other than the one you use for podcast editing, right?
John:
The magic trackpad.
John:
That's right.
John:
So I think that's also influencing you because we have one of those magic trackpads too.
John:
And I hate trackpads in general, and I don't really like that magic trackpad either.
John:
But I think once you get the new laptops that we're assuming they will someday release and it has the trackpad, that's I think that's when your real transition is going to be.
John:
Because I was wondering, like, why is your opinion of this not getting better?
John:
And yet the only thing you're using is that thing.
John:
I find that thing frustrating in that very frequently I'm, I'm trying to press anywhere on the thing to make it click.
John:
And it just doesn't, it feels like I'm pressing against a wall that doesn't move.
John:
I know it does the little vibration thing and you know, it eventually works, but it just, it feels so much more awkward to me to press it anywhere in a way that it doesn't when I use the four star track pads on the big laptops.
Marco:
I mean, look, like the home button turns out after you use it for like a day, you completely stop noticing it as as a thing that is different, except for when it is the wrong thing.
Marco:
But overall, it is really not a substantial problem at all.
Marco:
And in some ways, it's a benefit.
Marco:
So it is not a if you don't yet have an iPhone 7, the home button change is not a good enough reason to not get one if that was your only reason.
Casey:
Well, I would say, yeah, I mean, I prefer it now.
Casey:
And as we spoke about last episode, I hated it for the first, I don't know, day or so.
Casey:
And then I've quickly come around and now I freaking love it.
Casey:
And like you said, the little Taptic touches that are throughout the OS, like on spinners and things like that, I really, really like them.
Casey:
I think they're really well done.
Casey:
I'm looking forward to those little Taptic touches kind of proliferating through third-party apps as well.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
We'll see.
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
Listener Sid sent me an email, and I think this went only to me earlier today.
Casey:
They had the same weird issue with their iMac, with their 5K iMac and OWC RAM.
Casey:
And apparently they had gone back and forth with OWC trying different sticks.
Casey:
And then...
Casey:
Just recently, they sent an email to me, forwarded an email to me from OWC, and it said a few things.
Casey:
But most interestingly, this is from OWC.
Casey:
We have recently located a coding fault in these modules and are currently refreshing our stock in order to rectify this.
Casey:
I don't know what a coding fault is in terms of RAM.
Casey:
Maybe one of you guys do.
Casey:
But it seems that something genuinely was broken with the RAM and they've recognized it and they're trying to fix it.
Casey:
My computer had been up, I think, 10 or 15-ish days before I installed Sierra.
Casey:
It's been eight days since then.
Casey:
I wouldn't call that...
Casey:
An absolute victory for my replacement sticks, which I did get from OWC.
Casey:
But certainly all signs are pointing to good news.
Casey:
And so I just thought that was kind of interesting.
Casey:
Do you guys have any idea what a coding fault would mean in terms of RAM?
Marco:
I mean, there's probably some kind of like...
Marco:
timing and stuff like you know ram obviously everything every component in a computer is now way more complicated than it used to be or way more complicated than we think it is so like there's probably you know a ram stick could have firmware for all i know who knows i it you know the ram has all these like tight timings and controllers and everything in them so it you know it could be it could be lots of things like that fair enough john you don't have anything to add i assume
John:
I got no idea what a coding fault is.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
At least I'm not alone.
Casey:
That makes me feel slightly better.
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
We also got word from Scott O'Reilly, among other people, that the headphone jack issue that he had reported in 10.0.0 has been fixed in 10.0.2.
Casey:
So if you recall, if you had your, I believe it was only with the dongle, is that right?
Casey:
Or generally speaking, it was with the dongle.
Casey:
You had some headphones like perhaps the older earbuds plugged into the lightning to headphone dongle and you paused something and let it sit for five or more minutes.
Casey:
Then the buttons on the headphones would not allow you to unpause them or unpause the playback.
Casey:
And so Scott O'Reilly has reported in that this is now fixed.
Casey:
So good news.
Casey:
Cool.
Casey:
I'm excited about that.
Casey:
Eduardo Pellegrino wrote in to talk to us about how volume works on Bluetooth.
Casey:
So, I don't know, Marco, do you want to take care of this?
Marco:
Yeah, we'll go over it quickly.
Marco:
Basically, we were discussing in previous episodes about the question of whether Bluetooth was re-encoding the audio to be sent over the air between the phone and Bluetooth headsets.
Marco:
One of the issues raised if you tried not to re-encode the audio was that we said you probably couldn't change the volume.
Marco:
Eduardo Pellegrino wrote in to basically tell us that with any modern Bluetooth peripheral, the digital signal is at full amplitude and the volume controls being applied only at the headset.
Marco:
The volume level is negotiated between the phone and the headset.
Marco:
There's all sorts of stuff involved in the AVRCP spec.
Marco:
In almost every case of modern Bluetooth headphones, the signal is being sent at full volume from the phone and the headphone itself is applying the volume reduction or whatever to it.
John:
So that shows you could be sending the AC more easily.
John:
But like the the important part of the volume thing is we're talking about like, oh, sometimes you can just like the volume.
John:
You control the volume on your phone.
John:
It changes on your headphones that that's actually working in the opposite direction.
John:
And that when you do that, it's the headset and the phone negotiating that when they press the volume buttons on the phone, send a signal to the headphones like the phone is controlling the headphone volume.
John:
The headphones are not controlling the phone volume.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Right.
John:
Like when you press that button, you're actually sending a signal to the headphones to say, oh, back over at the phone.
John:
They said they want the volume lower.
John:
And then the phone, the headset, the Bluetooth device itself lowers the volume.
Casey:
Then we also heard word or we've already heard word that there are three digital to analog converters in the iPhone seven.
Casey:
And we weren't really sure why.
Casey:
And we got some feedback with the theory.
Casey:
Marco, do you want to talk about this?
Marco:
Yeah, this was, I think, my favorite thing I heard this week.
Marco:
So we got an email back, and it was from somebody who wanted to remain anonymous, but it seemed like they kind of had this as known information, not speculation.
Marco:
So there were basically three audio chips in the iPhone 7, and we couldn't figure out what the third one was for.
Marco:
We're like, well, maybe they're using it just for convenience, for cable routing, whatever else.
Marco:
So this person wrote in to tell us that what it's actually used for is the Taptic Engine.
Marco:
it seems like it might just behave like a speaker coil, you know, because, you know, you have like the coils that move the stuff around inside to make the field vibrate.
Marco:
The commands that the phone is sending to the Taptic Engine, it seems like it's doing it via audio signaling.
Marco:
It's not a speaker.
Marco:
It's just a vibrating, you know, weight or whatever it is in there.
Marco:
But isn't that, like, that to me, that sounds really cool.
Marco:
Like, that's such a brilliant hack.
Marco:
Like, is that what you guys assume that meant too?
John:
That's what I assume the Taptic Engine always was, because it's basically a speaker without the cone.
John:
When you have a speaker, it's the thing moving back and forth, but there's no paper cone or whatever moving air.
John:
So that's what it always looks like.
John:
It looks like a big magnet coil of wire type thingy.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
And so if you think about like, you know, like how how the phone would drive that.
Marco:
It's basically sending it like MIDI notes almost, you know, like, you know, whatever you're feeling, the phone's going like, and then like, it's instead of being a cone that's providing that sound, it's just vibrating the thing inside at probably like, you know, one or two fixed frequencies and just like dealing with the timing and the strength and everything that I think that's really cool.
Casey:
Yeah, I never thought of it that way, but that is super awesome.
Casey:
And is there some difference in the way the Taptic Engine is working that maybe the new one is much better and that's why you don't get that control and that API for the 6S Taptic Engine?
Casey:
Because isn't that the case, that the 6S Taptic Engine you don't get any control over as a developer, but the 7 you do?
Marco:
Yeah, basically.
Marco:
Or at least the 6S you have very little control and the 7 you have basically full control.
John:
Well, you should look at the 7 to see if it has an audio thing for the Taptic Engine 2.
John:
Maybe it does, or it could be that the old ones are just basically on-off, and the only way you get different sort of vibration themes or sequences is by going on-off in different frequencies, whereas this one, if you could dig through iOS, maybe you could find the audio samples that they send to the virtual speaker that is the Taptic Engine, rather than just going on-off, on-off, on-off, just send...
Marco:
tones or frequencies or sounds that'd be it would be a good jailbreak hack if you could play music through the haptic engine and see what it does like the uh floppy disk performances of the olden days oh that's the start no but you could you could like feel a song you know you probably at least feel the basic rhythm you know because like it basically is like a like a fairly imprecise and different output type of speaker and that's pretty cool i think this is a really cool thing to to learn
Casey:
Yeah, I'm curious to see if they give us any more control over time.
Casey:
I can't imagine that they would, but man, would that be neat to be able to do, you know, have some more fine grain control over it.
Casey:
Assistive touch.
Casey:
So we've been talking about this quite a bit.
Casey:
And there's been a couple of new theories as to why I guess this is happening.
Casey:
John, do you want to talk about this?
John:
This is just a couple that we left out in the last discussion of why sensitive touch is so prevalent in East Asia.
John:
And one idea was that the parts that are in the iPhones in that region, sort of in the non-United States, Europe regions, are the crudier parts.
John:
Now, I can understand why this would be something that happens when you're selling into markets that...
John:
you sell less in that you make less money in.
John:
And if you have parts that are not as good, you might sell the cruddy ones into the market where you make less money.
John:
It doesn't seem like a thing that Apple would ever do.
John:
It seems to me that Apple has a certain quality control procedure and they just apply it to all their products.
John:
And that's that, but, but who knows, maybe they know better than I do.
John:
Um, but this also sounds like one of those things, like so many companies have done it that they just assume everybody does it.
John:
I'm not sure if it's true of Apple.
John:
Um,
John:
But that would explain, like, you know, our home buttons are worse than yours, essentially.
John:
Like, I live in Thailand and our home buttons break more than yours do because we get the crappy home buttons and you don't.
John:
Setting aside that, like, you know, the iPhone 4 was bad for everybody, right?
John:
So that's one idea.
John:
Another idea I heard put forth is it's really humid here and the humidity destroys our electronics sooner than yours.
John:
Like, all this going towards the notion that...
John:
But empirically, home buttons do not last as long in this region of the world, either because they're getting cheaper parts or because they're getting the same parts and they get messed up by humidity.
John:
Now, both of these sound like things that sound plausible, but don't really...
John:
Don't don't really make that much sense to me, because I can tell you in the United States, at least we have plenty of humidity.
John:
Just ask Casey.
John:
We have we have places that have lots of humidity and you don't hear about people in Louisiana and Georgia having home buttons that fail more often than people in Arizona.
John:
Right.
John:
So I don't think that's it.
John:
And the cheaper parts thing only Apple knows for sure.
John:
Right.
John:
It's not like they're going to admit this, but it just doesn't seem like a thing that Apple would do.
John:
I think they have, you know, for all their suppliers have quality control standards and they just apply them universally.
John:
And if they don't meet the quality standards, they send them back around and recycle the things and try again.
Casey:
That makes sense.
Casey:
So we've gotten word that in iOS 10, iCloud backups, or really restores, I guess I should say, now include passwords.
Casey:
Now, if you recall, and I think I'd first heard this from Marco years ago, but all three of us had recommended that if you're going to backup your phone, the most reliable or maybe perhaps easiest way to do it is to backup with iTunes and ensure that you've checked the encrypt backups checkbox.
Casey:
And so this password protects your backups.
Casey:
And then because it's password protected, Apple feels like, oh, in this case, I guess we can include like Wi-Fi passwords and things like that in the backup.
Casey:
If you don't encrypt your backup, then the backup will not include Wi-Fi passwords and things of that nature, which makes sense.
Casey:
Now, apparently in iOS 10, iCloud backups and restores now include passwords, which is excellent.
Casey:
I didn't know that was a thing.
John:
You have to learn to read the code of the notes, the show notes.
John:
What do the show notes actually say?
John:
They don't say iOS 10 iCloud restores now include passwords, right?
John:
What do they say?
John:
I see a question mark at the end of that sentence.
John:
iOS 10 iCloud restores now include passwords?
John:
There's a question mark at the end because I have heard this as well.
John:
None of us have actually confirmed it, but I've seen a couple of tweets to that effect.
John:
I've not tried it myself, but in theory...
John:
they now include passwords i was hoping one of you knew for sure if you had done it but anyway no but i've heard this independently several different times now yeah i know i'm just i'm just saying i didn't go and look it up on apple site and i haven't done it myself so i don't want to tell people hey don't worry about it just use icloud we'll have everything but uh it seems like fingers crossed this will be the last update where we where you have to hear the
John:
the spiel from everybody who's on a tech podcast saying oh make sure you do an encrypted itunes backup and i like this because i hate itunes backup i hate the fact that i connect my thing and half the times it says oh fail to connect a device or backup fail for some reason that you can't control and just reboot everything and cross your fingers i hate it so much really yes it's the worst you know maybe you should get a newer mac because i don't have any this is on the 5k iMac this is a 5k iMac with it with an iphone success plus is what i'm doing like my my wife's device and my kids devices
John:
it's completely inscrutable and i kind of know like that when it can't connect to the process on the phone and they're just messed up you just have to like reboot them both and just get it's just it's the worst and half time it fails in the middle and for some reason it's like well i couldn't do it sorry and it's always after like 20 minutes of incredibly slow transfer over usb2 speeds from this i hate it so much so i'll be
John:
very happy to have this be an icloud thing that that is first terrible as icloud restore is where it takes forever to your apps to come back and everything at least in my experience it runs unattended so i could start the restore and then go to sleep and leave it plugged in and wake up and hopefully it will be done whereas now with itunes it's like make an attempt come back in 5 10 15 minutes to see if it failed if it has do a bunch of rain dances make another attempt i really don't like
Casey:
iTunes interaction with iOS devices at all never really liked it and it's just getting worse that's so weird to me because I almost never have any issues with with iTunes backups and I have heard although I've not seen this with my own eyes I have heard numerous people complaining and moaning about how terrible and flaky iCloud backups are well backups and restores and I mean it doesn't mean you're wrong it doesn't mean I'm right it's just surprising that your experience seems to be the opposite of everything I've heard
Marco:
Well, also, I mean, we have a lot of friends and at least two of the hosts of the show are early adopters who like to buy things on day one.
Marco:
And on day one, sometimes the iCloud servers get overloaded or the App Store servers get overloaded and things don't quite work reliably.
Marco:
And so, you know, we, day one people, will usually have...
Marco:
more reliable experiences with iTunes backup and restore in that case because we're avoiding all those day one server hassles.
Marco:
Whereas John, who buys phones when they're three to four years old, wants he's really sure that everything is safe about them.
Marco:
By that point, everything has calmed down with the servers and he doesn't run into those issues.
John:
Yeah, the main reason I would say for people to, if iOS 10 iCloud restores now have passwords in them, as we think, the main reason to do it is to save SSD space.
John:
Because the backups are big.
John:
True.
John:
Like, they're not the full size of your storage, you know, because of various, you know, app thinnings and maybe not transferring purchases or whatever.
John:
But they're big enough that if you have a family full of iOS devices and you have a single Mac with a regular person size SSD, you are wasting a huge amount of your SSD space.
John:
You're not wasting, right?
John:
But you're using a huge amount of your SSD space for device backups.
John:
Say you get a family with a bunch of 128 gig devices and you back them all up to a single Mac that you said, oh, I'll just get the 500 gig SSD.
John:
You will use all of your space for iOS device backups.
John:
I'm not, you know, the cloud is not a perfect backup and that cloud can be used to.
John:
And if you really care about the stuff that's on your phone, have multiple backups, so on and so forth.
John:
But it always annoys me when I run like Disk Inventory X, that ancient program that still works or any other programs that show you like the tree map of your hard drive with, you know, area on this little area of the rectangles representing size.
John:
And I see the giant thing for, you know, mobile backup or whatever that folder is.
John:
I think, do I need all those backups?
John:
How many backups do I have?
John:
And I just, you know, you can just go in iTunes and delete them and thin them out, but they take up a lot of room.
John:
So I will be very happy when I can sort of allow iCloud to be my main backup for my thing and only backup to my Mac periodically as like a belt and suspenders type thing, like once every few months and only keep one backup, not keep like backups, you know, seven recent backups, just one in an emergency.
John:
Because for the most part, most of the data that's on my phone,
John:
should be elsewhere all the photos go to photo stream photo streams goes to photos photos gets backed up in 17 million places because of my crazy photos and backups so those photos are fine everything else like notes and stuff like that is in theory backed up locally on my mac because they're syncing to the same accounts and back to multiple macs so i feel like i still have multiple backups and i'm totally ready to not waste my ssd space with itunes backups as soon as i can
Marco:
Transcription by CastingWords
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Marco:
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John:
Last week, we talked about the rumors of Apple investing in and or buying McLaren and whether we thought that was a good idea or what Apple would get out of it.
John:
And we got a lot of feedback about it.
John:
And I would say the vast majority of the feedback was telling us that we don't understand what an awesome company McLaren is, that Apple would be happy to have them.
John:
Common threads there pointed out is, did you know McLaren has an F1 team?
John:
And the F1 is really technically advanced and computers and engine control units and telemetry data from all the F1s.
John:
Like basically the idea that Formula One is a very high tech thing.
John:
McLaren is a high tech company.
John:
It's not a bunch of people with greasy overalls slapping together cars.
John:
They're a tech company.
John:
A second angle on that is.
John:
You know, they're not they're not actually even a car company.
John:
They're basically a technology company, just like Apple.
John:
They happen to make cars.
John:
Their manufacturing expertise in terms of pushing the limits on new materials and how to build build cars in new ways that have new materials was touted by many people.
John:
Other people also pointed out a BMW and their their carbon fiber stuff for their electronic cars and everything like that.
John:
um so in general and i don't know if every single one of these emails was coming from like the the town in england where they're based or where are they in scotland i don't even know anyway it's obvious none of us follow f1 so you got us there it's not uh we do not follow and i think in general it's not nearly as popular in america kind of like soccer
John:
Or football, if you will.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Forgive us.
John:
We're American.
John:
Right.
John:
We don't know about F1.
John:
I do know a lot about McLaren, though.
John:
And most of the things they're saying about carbon fiber and the technology and all that stuff.
John:
Yes, that's all true.
John:
But I still go back to what I said on the last show, which is...
John:
investment partnership yeah totally like there's a million companies they can invest and have partnerships with and there's certainly things they can get from them and from every other company that they've in the auto industry that might have something they could build something for them or whatever but in terms of buying them outright um that's that's a whole other story like
John:
But let's put it this way.
John:
It's kind of like when I was talking about Nintendo.
John:
Half of it is I think it wouldn't be a great idea, but the other half of it I have to admit is that I think it would be a shame to buy McLaren and not let it continue to do what it has done for most of my life, which is...
John:
No, not most of my life, but since the 90s or whatever, like they make supercars, right?
John:
And I like that they make supercars and I don't want them to stop doing that, even though that may not be their most important business or their main business or their area of expertise or whatever, you know, whatever aspect you think that is not an important part of their business.
John:
Apple's not interested in selling $200,000, $300,000 cars, I don't think, right?
John:
Maybe Johnny Abb will have the Apple Car Edition that will be expensive, made of solid gold.
John:
But I don't want someone to buy McLaren and stop it from doing what it does.
John:
And I bet the people who like F1 don't want Apple to buy McLaren and say, yeah, we're not doing that F1 thing anymore.
John:
Right.
John:
If they only want them for their expertise in car telemetry and engine control units and manufacturing stuff, then just partner with them.
John:
But I don't want them to buy them because I feel like what McLaren is doing does not fit with Apple.
John:
I can imagine Apple ever wanting to do.
John:
And so you either buy them and just let them continue to be McLaren, which is weird, like a Beats kind of thing, but not with not as much synergy because Beats is closer to Apple's business than what McLaren does.
John:
Or you just partner with them.
John:
So and then the other part is that the mass manufacturing, a lot of people like they know how to build things.
John:
They're great at it.
John:
Like those supercars are not built in the same way as Toyota's.
John:
You cannot build hundreds of thousands of cars the way that they build the P1.
John:
You just can't.
John:
It's a different technique.
John:
Now, it's great that they're advancing the state of the art and finding new ways to build things.
John:
there are a hell of a lot people more people doing things with their hands and when building a mclaren car than there are when building a honda or toyota and and many people are like apples need to buy a company like that yes they can just partner right but that's but that's something apple doesn't know how to do they know how to make lots of computers and lots of you know they know how to help other companies make lots of computers uh you know they know how to invest in machinery that boxcar can use to build their computers but
John:
Foxconn doesn't know how to build cars, and Apple doesn't know how to build half the stuff.
John:
That's why they outsource it.
John:
So again, if you're going to outsource or partner and have somebody, one of these builders, a magnet company, build your stuff, fine.
John:
But buying outright just doesn't seem like a good idea.
John:
So let McLaren be McLaren, is what I say.
Casey:
Makes sense to me.
Casey:
A lot of people wrote in that.
Casey:
Very, very enthusiastic about McLaren.
Casey:
A lot of F1 fans that are also nerds, it seems.
John:
Did you know they made a car called the F1?
Casey:
I did.
Casey:
You know, I've heard it's very nice.
John:
People who have never listened to Neutral and don't know, like, we don't know F1, but we know McLaren.
John:
Or maybe Marco doesn't.
John:
What?
John:
He doesn't know they made the F1.
John:
I don't know anything about McLaren or F1.
John:
You've never heard of the McLaren F1?
Marco:
Of course not.
John:
Why would I?
John:
You've never heard of the Millennium Falcon?
Marco:
I mean, that, yeah.
John:
It's the car that did the Calciron 12 parsecs.
John:
That doesn't even make sense.
Casey:
No, you have heard of the McLaren F1, which is the one that had three seats and you drove in the center seat.
Casey:
You know what I'm thinking of.
Marco:
No, but that sounds like a terrible car.
Casey:
Oh, my God, Mark.
John:
It was like the greatest car ever made, but you're close.
Casey:
Pretty much.
Casey:
I mean, this is coming from a Ferrari fanboy that the McLaren F1 is the greatest car ever made.
John:
No, I was disappointed in the P1 because that's why they didn't make a success for so long.
John:
How can you follow that up?
John:
Yeah.
John:
well the mini neutral the McLaren F1 as a supercar made to be like one of its important goals was it was going to be the fastest not just the quickest but the fastest so top speed was a big deal um they usually don't do that these days you know the Bugatti Veyron did a little top speed stuff as well but in general supercars are staying away from the top speed because once you get up into the high 250 mile per hour things it becomes a real aerodynamic and power challenge which is why the stupid Veyron has this gigantic gasoline sucking engine 16 cylinder engine in there
John:
Um, but the F1 was, it was quick, not as quick as modern cars, obviously, but it was quick, but it had a very high top speed.
John:
I think it was up in the two fifties.
John:
You sat exactly dead center in it, which is something that always annoyed me about like supercars.
John:
Like if this entire car is about performance, why am I sitting off to the left?
John:
Right?
John:
Like it should be like a race car where you sit in the middle.
John:
You did in this one.
John:
It looked great.
John:
Um, and it was just, it was just the epitome of like, let's make the best car in the world.
John:
Like what Apple, not Apple didn't used to do.
John:
Some companies, some computer companies have done it.
John:
let's make the best x in the world like in every possible way it can be the best in terms like let's think it's the best performance car is it faster than every color of the car yes is it quicker around the track than every other car yes it's better looking than every other car yes like just aim for the top um and it was on the top for a really long period of time and the successor the p1
John:
is not the same thing.
John:
But anyway, it's kind of like the SR-71 of the car world, where for a brief moment, they made the best car in the world, and everyone recognized it and said, yep, you did it.
John:
And that's why they go for huge amounts of money now.
John:
They also have an unfortunate penchant for killing their owners and or destroying themselves in a hail of carbon fiber because very rich people get essentially the best car in the world.
John:
That's reputation precedes it.
John:
That is more car than they can handle.
John:
And they...
Marco:
go out in blaze of glory drive carefully see i'm looking at this car and it like mclaren is is is a company that makes cars that are exceptionally well regarded by everybody else in the world but yet i look at them and just immediately forget about them
Marco:
If you would have asked me before this conversation started to name supercar brands, I would have forgotten about them.
Marco:
They don't even cross my mind.
John:
So they made the F1, which is like the best supercar ever made, right?
John:
And then today they make a line of cars that look like fish, fine, but they're really good.
John:
Supercars, right?
John:
The P1 and the 650 and all the other...
John:
with the old unfortunate name was mp12 4c whatever the hell it was i think that's right they have terrible names uh but they're good supercars like they're not they're not bad they're right up there with the whole rest of them right that's why when they did like the the various car challenges was like the p1 the 918 and the la ferrari right they're right they're right in there they're the top three they're one of those other cars and you may think they're forgettable because the styling is interesting but the and the f1 does look a little bit dated but you know it's it's an old car from the 90s
Marco:
Maybe the problem is just that I don't really care as much as most car enthusiasts do about supercars.
Marco:
To me, a supercar is just like, okay, great.
Marco:
It can go really fast.
Marco:
It is completely impractical for any use ever and costs a billion dollars.
Marco:
And you drive it 10 miles and it needs a $5,000 clutch.
Marco:
I don't really know why I should care about this world.
John:
He's just not into supercars.
John:
All right.
John:
To bring this back to tech topics, I don't know how Mark is going to edit this.
John:
Speaking of my potential pristine jet black iPhone that I was speculating about possibly taking out of the case and then carefully putting in my clean room wearing my Intel bunny suit into a leather case where no part of it that is not exposed to the outside will get damaged if I'm very careful with it in theory.
John:
A couple of people made snarky comments like, isn't that like getting an iPhone and then never using the home button?
John:
But it doesn't matter because you're never going to use the home button.
John:
What good is a jet black phone that you keep pristine if you never see the jet black phone because it's always in a case?
John:
And I hope these aren't longtime listeners to the show.
John:
I would hope that people who are longtime listeners like you two who are always here.
John:
why why it is not analogous why why is that not a valid analogy in my specific case we're saying oh john says you know you shouldn't if you never use the home button it doesn't matter but he's doing the same thing with jet black phone why is that not the case
Marco:
I thought that was amazing feedback, and I was disappointed we didn't think of it during the show.
John:
Same here.
John:
You guys can't figure it out.
John:
Switch your brains from that mode to the other mode and say, assume that it is not the case, as I can tell you that it's not.
John:
Why?
Casey:
Well, with the new home button, it's irrelevant because it doesn't move.
John:
No, like, why is it not the same as my jet black iPhone situation?
John:
That's me specifically.
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, because there's a huge difference in effectiveness here.
Marco:
The people who are not using the home button will actually succeed in their goal.
Marco:
But John, you will not succeed in not scratching the jet black.
Marco:
It is impossible.
John:
I don't know if that's the case.
John:
We'll see.
John:
But no.
John:
No, see, what they were trying to say is the absurdity of, look, if you're never going to use the home button and you're never going to sell your phone, that was the whole thing.
John:
Like I was saying, if you're not going to resell it, because obviously it retains resale value by not breaking the home button.
John:
If you have a pristine home button, maybe your phone is worth more later.
John:
So there's value in that.
John:
But if you're never going to resell it and you're never going to touch it, what the hell do you care if it works?
John:
And so with Jet Black, if you're never going to see it because you're always going to keep it in a case, what the hell do you care if it's scratched up?
John:
Right.
John:
And.
John:
I don't understand why people don't know me from now, and you two are always making funny about this.
John:
When I'm done with my phone, I'm not going to resell it.
John:
What's going to happen to it?
John:
It's going to go into the museum of pristine Apple hardware.
John:
And there is value in a museum of pristine Apple hardware for the hardware to be pristine.
John:
Why do you think I'm protecting it in the case?
John:
Not just so I can go to sleep at night thinking it's safely ensconced there.
John:
It's when I'm done with the phone, it's going to come out of that case and be a beautiful, pristine object along with my other Apple hardware and stuff.
John:
Now, you could say, like many people do, that all that junk in your attic will never be displayed in such a beautiful way, deserving of.
John:
But you have to, like, that's my plan right now.
John:
So it has value in my plan, right?
John:
Whether it has value in actuality, you can argue with, but it's not an analogy.
John:
Now, if someone's preserving the home button because they're never going to resell it, but then when they're done using the phone, they're just going to press that pristine home button once a day for pleasure, then they have a reason to do it as well.
Marco:
We're also sponsored this week by Fracture.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
If you always heard these ads before on podcasts and you thought you're getting this photo printed on glass, that sounds like, first of all, it sounds like it would break in the mail.
Marco:
Second of all, it sounds like it would be really heavy.
Marco:
And you'd be so concerned about hanging it, you'd probably break it, right?
Marco:
These are not concerns in practice.
Marco:
First of all, we've gotten so many fracture prints of many different sizes.
Marco:
They pack it so well, I've never heard a single one break.
Marco:
Of course, if it does, they'll cover you.
Marco:
You know, they'll send you another one.
Marco:
But I've never heard, not only have none of mine broken, I've never heard from any of my friends or our listeners that theirs have broken.
Marco:
And we've sent them overseas.
Marco:
I mean, we sent them lots of places.
Marco:
And they don't break, really.
Marco:
And for weight, you know, you think there's a giant pane of glass that has a picture on it.
Marco:
It's not what you'd think based on the weight of a picture frame that has a glass front and wood all around it.
Marco:
It's not that way.
Marco:
It is a very, very thin layer of glass with a little bit of foam board behind it so that the screw has something to hook into when you hang it up.
Marco:
And the glass itself is so thin that it is incredibly lightweight for its size.
Marco:
So basically...
Marco:
It is an incredibly practical way to hang pictures on your walls and stuff.
Marco:
You can have little desk stands, too, but they look fantastic on walls.
Marco:
All the downsides you could think of for why this might be impractical or risky, they're not real in practice.
Marco:
Those downsides are gone.
Marco:
Fracture prints look amazing.
Marco:
They're well-priced.
Marco:
I highly recommend them.
Marco:
And they want you to know, as we're now getting into the fall and soon the winter and the holiday season...
Marco:
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Marco:
how is this possible?
Marco:
This is great.
Marco:
If you give it to parents or relatives who have never heard of this, you get really a quite amazing reaction.
Marco:
So I recommend giving them as gifts or getting them for yourself or both.
Marco:
Give it a try.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So we didn't get any time to talk about it last week, but macOS Sierra is out.
Casey:
It's a thing.
Casey:
And I have installed it on my iMac.
Casey:
I have not installed it on my work computer because we got the standard, oh, God, oh, God, we knew it's been coming for months, but we haven't tested any of our software with it message from work.
Casey:
um so anyway so it's not on my work machine but it is on my home machine and uh so far so good i really like it um i think but anyway um glowing endorsement from casey list right there all right uh are you running it on your imac marco no okay no i mean yeah basically normally i i have jumped into things like this quickly in the past um
Marco:
In almost every case, I have regretted it because something that I use breaks.
Marco:
Often it's audio-related or related to some kind of hardware driver type of app.
Marco:
People have reported issues with Fujitsu ScanSnap software, which actually wouldn't impact me because I have that running on my Mac mini server.
Marco:
It's not on my main computer.
Marco:
But I do have audio running on my main computer.
Marco:
I have external audio devices.
Marco:
I edit with Logic.
Marco:
And we've heard various rumblings from people like Jason Snell that this has had occasional problems during the beta period and it might not still be fixed.
Marco:
So basically, the question is, and this will probably get into, hopefully, John's review of it, but the question for me is, like, what's new in Sierra?
Marco:
What is worth risking things breaking and dealing with the inevitable instability that almost every .0 release of the OS brings?
Marco:
And in iOS, the differences are larger, and also I'm an iOS developer, and so I feel like I need to pay more attention there and use the betas and get my app ready for the betas and everything else.
Marco:
On OS X, I never ever run the beta Mac OS on my main computer.
Marco:
If anything, I run it on my laptop, and even then, I don't usually do that.
Marco:
So, basically, I have to look at the features that are new, and I have to say, you know, what among these features am I just dying to use that will make it worth the period of potential instability up front for a new OS release?
Marco:
And in Sierra's case, it's just not compelling for me.
Marco:
The features people are talking about, the changes, the improvements...
Marco:
are just things that either either i i wouldn't really use or that would be nice but but i'm not sure it's worth it yet so i'm not saying i'm never going to upgrade i'm probably going to upgrade within the next couple of weeks but i i kind of just want like a 0.1 to come out or or just to hear from people that these issues that were in the betas might be fixed or whatever else there's not enough here for me to be an early adopter of it but i'll upgrade soon enough john what are your thoughts
John:
So I've got two incompatible computers.
John:
My work computer and my home computer, in theory, aren't supported.
John:
In practice, my home computer runs it fine because I've ran the betas, albeit on a separate drive.
John:
I've waited long enough to hear if there's anything disastrous, and there wasn't so upgraded my wife's iMac while she's away.
John:
surprise oh geez it's fine that's a bold move i also control all the backups so don't worry if anything was wrong i just would have restored from one of the umpteen backups i made before before doing this and it would have been fine but it's it's fine i did the only scare i've gotten so far and i don't even know i can blame this on sierra because it's one of those things that occasionally happens
John:
where you get a dialogue asking for a password and you enter the password and you get another dialogue that says like a keychain system could not be found or something like that you know in keychain you've got all these different you get your login keychain and the system keychain all of this stuff
John:
Keychain corruption is like one of the worst things can happen.
John:
It's just such a pain in the ass.
John:
You just you can wipe it all out and just type in the passwords if you have them someplace else, like in one password or whatever.
John:
But it's just so annoying.
John:
And you just want it to be like, just go back to working state.
John:
So anyway, once I saw that dialogue once, I'm like, nope, that means reboot.
John:
And so I rebooted everything and it's been fine, which is the worst kind of problem to have.
John:
Who knows what it was.
John:
Very often when you update the OS, it updates the bundled apps and sometimes they don't.
John:
They have different signatures or whatever.
John:
Don't look up the same.
John:
They can't get access to the same key chain items.
John:
They want to be reauthorized.
John:
Like this is a thing that I'm kind of used to by now.
John:
But other than that, which only happened once, everything else is mostly fine.
John:
Also, her computer is the one with the real family iPhoto library.
John:
So I wanted to I wanted it to do its thing with the photo searching so I could actually use that.
John:
And so I was motivated enough to upgrade her computer.
John:
And like I said, it's fine.
John:
um i'm kind of in the same situation as marco with mine only actually even worse because i have unsupported computers uh in both situations i have to ask do i want to risk like you know oh what if a point update comes out and i run the updater and then it hoses my thing and i got to go through some little dance to get it back because it's unsupported do i want to deal with that um and what is there in the operating system that makes me
John:
uh feel like i'm missing out essentially like if i feel like i can't use something like today i downloaded a developer build of an application and had the little circle with the line through it on it and i realized oh this must be uh this must be sierra only that's the type of thing that makes me go you know what i should upgrade right because i want to be able to run the new software um or the features like if everyone's like oh picture picture is amazing it's you know i use it all the time and you know like or
John:
tab documents and all these applications didn't previously support them now magically do because of os uh you know ns document uh features right if i feel like i'm missing out on what everyone else is doing i probably will bite the bullet but at home i'm motivated not to upgrade because i might screw up my audio you know like my podcasting setup here
John:
and at work i'm motivated not an upgrade because in any way that i screw up my work computer is a delay in doing my work and my work doesn't go away while i'm futzing with my computer and it's not like i can stay at work an extra three hours when i'm wrangling the kids even though my parents are here just you know i have to get back so i don't know what i'm gonna do i i may i mean like i'm not really waiting like i feel like i'm not missing out missing out because i the 5k iMac has it and whenever i do photo stuff i use it like i'm i'm seeing all the features and of course i use all the beta so it's not a mystery to me i'm not like don't know what it is but on the other hand i'm
John:
I couldn't give you a review of it at this point because I'm not using it every day on the two main computers that I use my home computer and my work computer.
John:
Um, I don't know.
John:
I'm, I might, by the time I bite the bullet, maybe they're on their 0.2 or 0.3 or whatever.
John:
Uh, I'm sure I will.
John:
Eventually I'm very bad at resisting these types of things, even though I've got it on, maybe because I have it on the 5k iMac that I'll see it over there and realize like things are nicer or I, or I just want this thing that's over there.
John:
It's not over here.
John:
Even if it's just like some new feature in the terminal application or something, um,
John:
I'll probably upgrade, but I haven't done it yet.
Casey:
All right, good talk.
Casey:
No, I mean, I've been using it at home, and I like it.
Casey:
I think the thing that I interact with most that I like the most is probably some rudimentary support for new messages features, like the big emoji, the inline...
Casey:
I have like rich content stuff.
Casey:
So if you say paste a tweet and messages, it'll actually go and expand that tweet for you kind of Slack style.
Casey:
I have been using the watch unlock.
Casey:
The first two times I used it, I had a 50% success rate.
Casey:
Since then, it's been nearly 100% success rate.
Casey:
But that being said, it takes longer than it takes me to type my like 10 or 15 character password, which is a little bit of a bummer.
Casey:
But maybe that'll get better in the future.
Casey:
If I'm really that in that much of a hurry, I can certainly just type my password.
Casey:
But
Casey:
do you think it's because you have the old slow watch that's taking a while or is it just like inherent in the you know like what are you waiting on i think it's because it's just trying to figure out if the watch is close enough physically close enough so it's probably i dug into this or maybe somebody told me about it but i guess it's doing uh like a round trip time of some sort of packet or communication between the watch and the computer to make sure you are very physically close to it that someone was craig federighi on the talk show live oh okay
Casey:
So anyway, so point being, it takes a little time for that computation or that maybe not the computation, but that round tripping to be computed.
Casey:
So I'm not saying it's like a CPU intensive thing.
Casey:
It's just it takes time to send a little bit of data, see how long that takes, wait and just wait for it to come back or whatever the mechanism is that's making this work.
Casey:
But anyway, it is fairly reliable, but I haven't been able to say that it's much quicker than just typing my password.
John:
That was one of the features that was making, by the way, before you get off the watch unlock, that was one of the features that was making me think, oh, that's going to be the one that's going to make me install it at work.
John:
Because at work, I don't know if you do this, Casey, but in most corporate jobs, they want you to lock your computer whenever you're not sitting in front of it.
John:
And I do, like, just out of habit.
John:
Like, I always lock my computer the second I get up.
John:
We have an unfortunate culture at work that is fading a little bit of if you do leave your computer unlocked when you get up.
John:
you are punished for it by your coworkers who will email everybody something embarrassing from your email account.
John:
I think that is inappropriate and should not be done.
John:
And rather you should just remind them that they should lock their computer.
John:
But in practice, what actually happens is much worse.
John:
Anyway, I always lock my computer.
John:
Which means that every time I come back to my desk, I have to unlock my computer.
John:
Even if I'm just getting up and walking one desk over, I have to, you know, I'm typing in my unlock password over and over and over again.
John:
And so I thought maybe this will, you know, get me to wear my watch again and, you know, save me from typing my password a million times.
John:
But even before I heard your story, I was like, come on now.
John:
This is based on the same tech as handoff, which never works.
John:
And it can't possibly be fast anymore.
John:
And I'll just be sitting there in front of my computer, like the same way you're yelling things to Siri and it's not understanding you.
John:
It's like at a certain point, it would have been faster if you just typed and typing always works.
John:
So I will just continue to type my password.
John:
The work makes me change on a ridiculous interval.
John:
And I can't reuse any of the last 100 passwords I used.
John:
It has to be different than the last password in 17 million different ways.
John:
On the bright side, we can upgrade to Sierra at work because everything we use is now upgraded to work with it, including the terrible antivirus software that we run.
John:
So yay for work.
John:
Which antivirus are you running?
John:
Symantec antivirus.
John:
Symantec antivirus slash kernel panic causing.
Casey:
Peace out.
Casey:
We're using Sophos.
Casey:
I don't know how you pronounce it, but S-O-P-H-O-S.
Casey:
I don't know if that's the problem.
Casey:
A coworker upgraded to Sierra either before the IT department warning or perhaps in spite of the IT department warning.
Casey:
And he was telling me that our god-awful VPN, which is Checkpoint Security VPN, that the VPN software, by the way, hey, guess what, includes a firewall that, hey, guess what, prevents outgoing VPN connections.
Casey:
Outgoing connections.
Casey:
Not incoming.
Casey:
Outgoing connections.
Casey:
Not that I'm bitter.
Casey:
Prevents airdrop from working, which, by the way, I have very rarely had airdrop issues.
Casey:
Well, I shouldn't say very rarely.
Casey:
I've had a comfortable success rate with AirDrop, but it blocks that as well.
Casey:
So anyway, so I install our VPN software on command like an animal because it's easier to do that than have half of the things I want to use not work when it is installed.
Casey:
Anyway, not that I'm bitter, this software apparently hadn't been updated for Sierra, but this coworker that did upgrade to Sierra found an installer.
Casey:
This is the same sort of thing like with Cisco.
Casey:
You have to go spelunking into the deepest, darkest part of the website of the vendor in order to find an installer, DMG.
Casey:
But eventually they found one.
Casey:
And supposedly it works.
Casey:
So I've been debating whether I want to be that guy that doesn't listen to the IT department and just install it anyway.
Casey:
So far I haven't, but we'll see.
Casey:
And the reason I haven't, I think, is because like Marco said, there's nothing that...
Casey:
I was going to say impressive, but that's nastier than I mean it.
Casey:
There's nothing that's really pulling me to immediately want to install it.
Casey:
Compelling.
Casey:
Compelling is a great word, yeah.
Casey:
That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's certainly not a great thing either.
Marco:
Okay, first of all, let me tell you guys how to deal with your workplaces.
John:
Sure, go ahead.
Casey:
Here we go.
Marco:
John, the people who you work with are animals.
Marco:
The correct answer to when somebody leaves their computer unlocked and they shouldn't is not to email things off their computer.
Marco:
That is barbaric.
Marco:
The correct answer is to change their desktop wallpaper to something funny or shocking and then put a bunch of windows over it so they don't actually see it for a while until they hide a window and then bam.
Marco:
Okay, Casey, just ignore the IT department.
Marco:
Do what you want.
Marco:
You know, life is short.
Okay.
Casey:
Oh, I didn't realize it was that easy.
Marco:
Yeah, it is.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
I mean, come on.
Casey:
That's how jobs work, right?
Casey:
Totally.
Casey:
I'm trying to be a nice guy right now, but man, I'm putting holes in my tongue.
John:
Anyway, so yeah.
John:
I was going to say, for upgrading, the thing I think makes most people do it in the end is they're not able to do something with their computer that they want to do.
John:
Now, the thing they want to do might be frivolous.
John:
All my friends are using tabs on all their windows, and I see them doing it, and they're all talking about tabs, and I don't have them on my windows because I don't have Sierra that includes the new tab window manager, right?
John:
That's a frivolous example.
John:
A more concrete example is everybody's using this new Twitter client, and I'm going back in time here when there was Twitter clients.
John:
Everyone's using this new Twitter client, but it's Sierra only, and I can't use it.
John:
Right.
John:
If you feel like you're not able to do things with computers and your computer, you know, you're into computers is one of your hobbies.
John:
And everyone else, you know, in the computer, you know, your little computer circles is doing this cool thing.
John:
And you can't do it because you're operating system.
John:
So that I feel like in the end is what makes people in our circle upgrade.
John:
Sometimes right off the bat, there's things for that.
John:
And the other one is maybe you could say, even if I was the only computer user in the world, this one has such nice performance improvements that I want it.
John:
Don't think Sierra has that.
John:
At least Apple's not touting it.
John:
Again, I didn't test it.
John:
I didn't review it, though.
John:
There are a lot of good reviews out there.
John:
Performance increases are not a big selling point.
John:
I'm sure it's better in many performance measures and there's huge performance improvements across the board, which is always in the back of my mind as a recent upgrade.
John:
Because anyone who writes software for a living knows what it feels like to ship a new version of your software that you realize is so much better than the version that your users out there are using.
John:
The old version is a piece of crap.
John:
It's like, do you realize how much code I deleted?
John:
You don't understand how I refactor this.
John:
You don't understand that.
John:
How I changed this code path from being like, you know, 17 levels deep in subroutine calls to now just being like two.
John:
And this used to be called every 10 milliseconds, and now it's called like once a second.
John:
And just everything is so much better about it.
John:
You're disgusted by the idea that anyone could be using it.
John:
Well, operating systems like this are filled with that stuff.
John:
So I...
John:
i get the warm fuzzies real or not of give me the new version of the software because i know there must be things about this that are just better than they were now sometimes they also break crap to see discovery d or whatever but uh in general i want the new version of the software although i think i'm a little bit weird in that in that respect but i think most of the reason people upgrade is everyone's doing the thing and i can't do the thing and i will get to that point and i think marco will too but we're both not there yet with sierra
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
I mean, I don't have anything bad to say about it.
Casey:
I hope I don't sound too negative.
Casey:
It's not that I have anything bad to say.
Casey:
But I can't say that I've found any features that have really changed the way I use my computer so far.
Casey:
The watch unlock is the closest, but I'm not relying on it.
Casey:
The one thing that I think I really do like and I do miss on my work computer, like I said, is having those rich text or those rich previews.
Casey:
in messages.
Casey:
Those are really, really great.
Casey:
And I wish I had that on my work computer.
Casey:
But other than that, there's nothing really that's knocking my socks off.
Casey:
And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Casey:
I mean, it's not rare for all of the three of us to beg and plead for Apple to just kind of take a breath and try to improve reliability.
Casey:
And I mean, it seems stable so far.
Casey:
I mean, I'm only a few days in now, but it seems okay.
Casey:
The one thing that I will tell you that I have been scared to do, though,
Casey:
and doesn't really solve a problem i have anyway is this um icloud um drive hey we'll move things to the cloud on your behalf don't worry your pretty little face we've got you covered yeah this looks like a from everything i've heard this is a dumpster fire like this is no good i should have saved this clip in the tradition of now and this is my new thing now i look up stuff in old podcasts and make overcast timestamp links
John:
So Marco better never make that site go down or at least add me somehow.
John:
Anyway, I was thinking like we talked about this before and how we're all scared of this feature and everything.
John:
I'm like, when was that?
John:
Turns out it was the WWDC show.
John:
Like as soon as they announced this feature.
John:
That very day, we walked back to the hotel and recorded an episode, and it was like, no, no.
John:
Like, we'd never touched this operating system.
John:
We'd never even seen it in action.
John:
We'd just seen slides promising this feature that, like, we will take your documents in desktop folder and magically sync them across all of your Macs if you want us to.
John:
Like, no, don't do that.
John:
It will not turn out well.
John:
Yeah, that's bad.
John:
Right.
John:
And I'll find the audio clip of saying that in no uncertain terms.
John:
And a lot of people who have reviewed Sierra have said this feature has all sorts of problems.
John:
Now, one category of problems are even when it's working perfectly.
John:
as far as anyone can tell, it does things that the user doesn't expect in ways that scare people.
John:
Like, as in, where did all my documents go?
John:
Even when it's working correctly, it has some strange behaviors where rather than just merging things together, as soon as you turn it on or if you turn it back off or whatever, very frequently everything on your desktop is the one that people notice because people know what's on the desktop or they know, like, if you're a messy desktop person, you have icons everywhere.
John:
If you saw all those disappear, it doesn't matter if, like, the files aren't actually gone.
John:
You have that moment of panic.
John:
And you're like, where'd everything go?
John:
Or if everything disappears from your documents folder, you open your documents folder and there's nothing in it.
John:
Doesn't matter at that point whether that data is actually gone.
John:
All that matters is that people briefly think it is.
John:
And that makes people hate you, Apple.
John:
So don't do that.
John:
So it does do that.
John:
It has a thing where it moves your actual files aside and then like uploads them and then pulls them back down from the cloud and tries to like...
John:
I'm not sure why it does that.
John:
Certainly things like Dropbox or Google Drive don't have to do that to function.
John:
They just badge your icons and slowly make them, oh, this one has successfully uploaded, oh, here's a merge conflict.
John:
Dropbox is the dumbest thing that will possibly work with renaming your files, but...
John:
At no point does it delete your crap.
John:
At least I haven't tried the Project Infinity thing, but the regular one doesn't.
John:
So that's that.
John:
And then the other aspect are just plain bugs, where it's supposed to do the thing where it moves aside your files and puts them up to the cloud and pulls them back down and merges all together.
John:
But many people say, I actually didn't do that.
John:
And when I tried to turn off the feature, my files went away.
John:
And since they hadn't been successfully upgraded, I couldn't get them back.
John:
And I had to restore from a backup.
John:
Or it started trying to sync them, but then all of a sudden numbers couldn't open my spreadsheet file because of that wonderful error that I was getting from pages where it says, can't open file because reasons.
John:
Sorry, and you can never open it again.
John:
And I had to just, like, turn everything off and delete all my files and restore from backup.
John:
Like...
John:
It is not a successfully launched feature.
John:
Every single review and every person I've heard who has used it has had some kind of issue.
John:
Now, maybe there's millions of people using it out there with no issues.
John:
I don't know.
John:
But there are enough people reporting problems that I absolutely positively cannot recommend that anybody listening to this podcast use that feature, even if you only have five files.
John:
Just don't use it because it's not worth the risk.
John:
It's weird.
John:
It works strangely, and apparently it has bugs.
John:
And there are other solutions that do similar things that are proven to be more reliable.
John:
Dropbox, Google Drive, even plain old regular iCloud Drive, maybe.
John:
But giving your documents folder and your desktop to this, places where people store tons of stuff, I think is a very bad idea.
John:
And honestly, at this point, based on how it launched, like I was saying that WBC half snark, but half like predicting, like based on past history, this is going to be a disaster.
John:
But who knows?
John:
They could have pulled it off.
John:
You know, prove me wrong, Apple.
John:
I probably said at some point in that big rant,
John:
They have not proved me wrong.
John:
And given that that's the case, I have to now think, was Sierra crying out?
John:
Like, was the Mac operating system crying out for this feature?
John:
Like, they already did iCloud Drive, which is like, hey, we can do Dropbox, too.
John:
And in general, it's not as good as Dropbox.
John:
But, like, I feel like they tick that checkbox.
John:
Like, hey, if you buy a Mac, we give you everything you expect from a modern computer, including a cloud-based drive that syncs, that you pay more for more.
John:
Like, they give you that.
John:
They have that.
John:
And I think it's important for them to have that.
John:
And I'm glad they're finally going to that instead of what they were doing before with the documents in the cloud and everything.
John:
Like, this is better.
John:
Do they need to also add, by the way, we'll transparently sync your documents and desktop?
John:
Because desktop is a place that people love and people feel comfortable with and safe.
John:
And if you make that feel remotely unsafe, that's terrible betrayal.
John:
And the documents folder can potentially contain a huge number of things.
John:
I should go look here.
John:
I want to see how many...
John:
documents i have in my document folder you want to take a guess while we're waiting for the calculating size to finish oh geez i mean do you because you carry it over between installs right so this is like years and years and years of accumulated documents and stuff i wish it had been carried i was thinking the other day about all the computers in my attic and how like they probably don't work anymore because the caps have all exploded but i was thinking like maybe i can salvage stuff from the hard drives because hard drive sizes have gone on that hockey stick type of curve i always imagined and it's never quite paid off for me but i always imagined that
John:
I would be able to take every document I had on my five megabyte hard drive and put it on my 32 megabyte hard drive and every document out of my 32 megabyte hard drive and put it on my hundred megabyte hard drive and like, you know, just basically bring everything along with me forever and ever because I could take everything
John:
all the documents on every single computer in my attic from like the 68k era and put them on you know in a tiny little folder on my cd because storage space has gone up so much that there's no reason i just can't have everything that i have but it hasn't happened that way like i've gone through discontinuities where i upgrade to a bigger computer but don't bring over every single thought because they're not relevant anymore like oh my god
John:
all my confabulator themes and my icon collections for 32 by 32 icons and stuff like that i i've kind of left those behind and i want to go retrieve them because i feel like the total size of that is only going to be like a couple gigs or something and it'll be great to have all that but uh in practice i don't have a lot of the old stuff and it's kind of a shame anyway um my thing just finished i want to guess how many how many documents how many things are
John:
Files are in my documents folder.
Casey:
Oh, jeez.
Casey:
I would guess easily $100,000.
John:
Margo?
Marco:
I'd go a little lower.
Marco:
I'd say more like... Your price is right.
John:
$1, $1.
Marco:
I'd say more like maybe $20,000.
John:
My documents folder contains...
John:
1,897,958 items.
John:
Oh, my gosh.
John:
Is that one per Chrome tab?
John:
Can you imagine pointing, like, checking that checkbox on this computer and saying, oh, yeah, no, sure, iCloud, go ahead.
John:
Go ahead with that.
John:
Like, there's virtual machines in there, multiple virtual machine files.
John:
There's huge numbers of things there.
John:
My Dropbox doesn't contain that.
John:
I'm not insane.
John:
Like, even if I had, like, a one terabyte, like...
John:
but the documents folder is essentially where every, and this doesn't include, uh, you know, movies are mostly on my Synology and photos are mostly my photos library.
John:
So the movies and photos libraries have really pared down.
John:
Although there is some old crap in there, like I movie things I made of the kids and everything, but documents like that is, that is potentially limitless.
John:
Like that's where for most normal people, uh,
John:
Now that, you know, Photos puts everything in your library folder and everything, documents should contain all of your documents.
John:
And maybe you don't have 1.8 million of them.
John:
Fine.
John:
Whatever.
John:
But it's enough that I wouldn't say, you know, go ahead.
John:
Sync this with your unreliable syncing system.
John:
I'll sure it'll be fine.
John:
So...
John:
As I was saying before, this is the type of feature I'd be like, did we really need this feature?
John:
Is this a net win for the Mac as a platform?
John:
Reputation?
John:
It must have taken a lot of effort to make this feature.
John:
It's complicated.
John:
It's hard to do well.
John:
You spent that time and money, and what you got out of it was a thing that makes people not trust you in the same areas they didn't trust you before.
John:
And it's not making a better product.
John:
If you could have taken that time and energy and put it towards something else, I think it would have been a better use of your time.
John:
Or maybe you're just dedicated to this and say, look, even though the first one's going to be crappy, we're going to work on it until it gets better.
John:
Which, you know, to Apple's credit, they have been improving the cloud stuff slowly, but surely the trajectory is the correct direction.
John:
The slope just isn't particularly high and there are lots of backsliding.
John:
So, I don't know, this is not a... If I had written a Sierra review, I would have spent a long time sort of condemning
John:
So this feature specifically and everything surrounding it and how Apple can't get his act together on this going off into like my usual rants about why is this such a fundamental incompetency for the company?
John:
And even though improving there, why are they improving slowly?
John:
Why can everybody else do this so well relative to Apple?
John:
I don't know.
John:
All I know is that my worst fear with Sierra was that it would be on by default and that I would somehow have to install with the Ethernet cable unplugged to make sure that it doesn't even attempt to do anything and then just stop it.
John:
But apparently it's not on by default.
John:
And I just got to be really careful not to be fooled by the wording into activating this feature.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, this kind of thing worries me because, you know, not only the reliability issues and, you know, perception and reputation of, you know, of your customers and potential customer data loss, you know, if this goes wrong or thinking it went wrong.
Marco:
But overall, like, and I've used this rant before, so I'll be brief.
Marco:
It worries me how little the Mac is getting attention these days.
Marco:
Not because it really needs a ton of changes.
Marco:
I mean, it is a mature platform.
Marco:
And I wouldn't say macOS is done and needs nothing else.
Marco:
And I wouldn't even say that it doesn't need anything big because it could use big improvements.
Marco:
Things like modernizing the AppKit framework to be more like UIKit or allowing more code sharing there.
Marco:
Cellular data monitoring and being able to have cellular Macs and have that like which the fundamentals of that are all there.
Marco:
But bringing it up through all the apps require a little more, you know, a little more work, you know, stuff like that.
Marco:
That stuff exists.
Marco:
That can be done.
Marco:
That can be improved.
Marco:
I'm not sure it ever will be anymore because when you look at where Apple prioritizes resources, it seems like, especially in the most recent years, they are prioritizing resources in basically where the money comes from.
Marco:
And iOS gets the most resources.
Marco:
And that's probably a smart move.
Marco:
If you look at it objectively, that's probably smart.
Marco:
It does kind of suck for those of us on the Mac side who we care a lot about this platform, though,
Marco:
and the Mac doesn't get a lot of attention anymore.
Marco:
What I worry about is not that the Mac will just kind of stagnate forever, but that it will get updates with new features like this weird iCloud desktop document sync thing.
Marco:
that are actually bad, like that it will get this kind of like drive-by updates that, you know, it isn't a high enough priority to really do this well and knock out of the park and give it the resources it needs to be good.
Marco:
But they basically use the Mac as kind of like, you know, it's something to support the marketing messages and everything else of their other services.
Marco:
Or they kind of like...
Marco:
...give it lip service updates... ...where they assign a small amount of resources to it... ...occasionally to update something or add a new feature... ...but they're not giving it enough to really do it well.
Marco:
So it isn't just the Mac OS will stagnate... ...it's that if Apple starts being a little bit careless and cavalier... ...with some of these new features... ...it'll actually get worse...
Marco:
That is what I'm worried about.
Marco:
You know, if they just ignore it forever, that's also really unfortunate.
Marco:
And I would not be happy about that either.
Marco:
But if they actually start being less careful with updating it, that is actually worse than not updating it.
Marco:
That's a little concern here.
John:
I don't think they're making it worse.
John:
This is like an unforced error.
John:
There's no reason that they had to add this feature and they added it and it's not good and using it makes the experience work.
John:
But overall, the OS is still better.
John:
If you just pretend this feature doesn't exist, everything that you were using before...
John:
is at least the same or presumably more efficient and faster or whatever, and they fix a whole bunch of bugs and stuff like that.
John:
And they have added useful things, like the picture-in-picture type of thing that's not technically that impressive, but it makes a big quality of life difference for people who want to just watch a video.
John:
I mean, this is exactly what they should be doing, like identifying...
John:
what is the thing that people do all the time that we can make it easier at the os level thing that people do all the time is they have video playing in some window uh usually a web browser window but web browsers are usually uh i don't know how people do them but mine are basically like sheets of paper right that proportion but that's not the right proportion for video so they take one of the web browser windows and either they resize it or if they can't tolerate doing that because they're like me and don't want the default window size to change they're like
John:
scroll it you know drag it half off the screen so just the video is showing but then there's like the ad banner on the top and they try to you know you're trying to get it so you can just see the video part and not all the stupid ads around it in the browser chrome and have it off to the side but still do the other stuff you're doing in your work or if you're full screen you can't even do that you have to put the video on a second monitor or something picture in picture totally solves that something they can do really easily something they can build into one of their bundled applications that really makes quality of life different same thing with the tab windows which is
John:
uh a lot of people want tabs we can build it into our default controls a bunch of applications get it for free if you don't want you don't have to have it if you're a developer and you don't like it you can opt out of it uh but it's the same tab control we've been using in safari it's debugged code for the most part um and people like tabs like those are the things they can do on top of make it faster now
John:
What I'm looking for at this point is, like, fix the tech underpinnings, you know, improve that stuff, make it faster, make it more efficient with memory, new file system, which they did, and, you know, it's just a developer building this one.
John:
But, like, all that stuff they're doing, that stuff excites me and I think makes the product better.
John:
Adding features, adding big features like desktop and document sync that don't work...
John:
Again, I don't think it makes the operating system worse if you don't use them, but it's an unforced error.
John:
No one asked you to do that, and now you messed it up.
John:
And if people do look in that part, they feel bad about you and they feel worse about your operating system.
John:
So, you know, on the bright side, the new desktop background looks really good.
John:
So there's a silver lining.
John:
oh my god i feel like that's the most that's the most compelling new feature of because what do people see like when my wife comes home the only reason she will know that i upgraded is there'll be a different picture of mountains in the back she really liked the the lcap uh background picture like the default one she just kept that that was a really nice background right and you know to apple's credit i like how many do this you know when we upgraded didn't change it it kept the old one but i like the sierra one so i changed the sierra and i think it's the only thing she'll notice and like what is that funny colored icon up on the right i still have not spoken to the computer oh yeah neither have i
John:
not use Siri at all, but I suppose I might at some point in the future, maybe.
Casey:
I completely agree with you.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I feel, I don't mean to come across, I don't think any of us mean to come across a negative about any of this.
Casey:
It's, I don't know.
Casey:
I don't,
Casey:
want to speak for you guys necessarily but I'm not negative about it it's just the headlining features are features that fix problems that I don't have I don't feel like I've ever really wanted to speak to my computer to use Siri in that way I don't think I've ever really wanted my stuff mirrored in the cloud transparently
Casey:
Picture-in-picture does sound very appealing to me.
Casey:
To be honest, I just keep forgetting that's a thing in Sierra now.
Casey:
And the iMessage stuff is great.
Casey:
The watch unlock, it is very good.
Casey:
I wish it was a bit faster, but it's very good.
Casey:
It's very freaking cool.
Casey:
And maybe in a month or a week or two or something like that, maybe I'll find that feature that I say, oh my gosh, I can't live without it.
Casey:
But just only a week or two in so far, I haven't found that feature yet.
John:
Speaking of things that...
John:
people predict will not work and actually don't work because the predictions are right things i mean this is having to do with watch unlock as well but things that are related to airdrop handoff or related synchronization without wires technologies between ios devices and the mac have always been a
John:
and have not really gotten less weird and the one that i think of in sierra is the the clipboard sync between ios devices and max which totally sounds like an awesome feature but you just know you just know based on past experience like you're excited for the feature then you're like oh but that's not actually going to work reliably
John:
you just know it's not going to work reliably and everyone who tests it says it works most of the time but sometimes it doesn't and you don't know why and like yep that's exactly how all these features work handoff airdrop universal clipboard sync all of them i totally expect to work most of the time but sometimes not work for inexplicable reasons that you can't do anything about and that never change year after year after year and
John:
that is the word like jason snell has great three paragraphs which is like a three paragraph concise jason snell style version of the seven pages i would have written with exactly this sentiment i tried to tweet a quote from it i'll try to read it here it's like he's frustrated with the cloud sync feature or whatever of the documents he says what's going on i don't know this is a feature without an interface so there's really no way to debug it sometimes it worked and that's pretty cool and then sometimes it just doesn't work that's frustrating
John:
Like that's exactly so many Apple features recently specifically related to this technology.
John:
We just know they've been out for years.
John:
It's just it's going to be like that.
John:
And it's not the end of the world.
John:
Like if it doesn't work, it's not like you're losing data.
John:
It's not, you know, it's not the same as the documents thing.
John:
But, you know, you're also what your clipboard didn't sink or whatever.
John:
But it's like, why?
John:
What is stopping this from working reliably almost 100 percent of the time?
John:
The first one, fine.
John:
The first few years, you're working out the kinks or whatever.
John:
But are we just now resigned to the fact that anything that has to do with... Like, thinking of the clipboard, I think, is... Especially for small clipboard items, even if you have, like, a size limit.
John:
That's as basic as you can get.
John:
And, like, look, there's a wireless feature that we have that uses Bluetooth or Wi-Fi or whatever the hell magic we're using to hand off data from a Mac to an iOS device that's sitting on your desk...
John:
Is there some technical reason why that can't eventually, after several years, become reliable enough that we don't talk about, you know, that it almost never fails?
John:
Apparently, the answer is no.
John:
And I'm like, just don't make any more of those features.
John:
If you can't make the ones you have work, if you can't make clipboard sync work, forget about any of the fancy ones, right?
John:
And the thing is, like, handoff, when I was testing that in my review, it worked pretty reliably.
John:
But because it's a beta, the one time out of 100 that doesn't work, I'm like, oh, it's a beta.
John:
But three years later, you're like, is this a beta?
John:
Like, I don't know why it's not working again.
John:
As Jason said, there's no interface.
John:
There's nothing for you to look at, nothing for you to debug.
John:
There's no way you can make it work, aside from like, oh, let me just reboot and cross my fingers or something.
John:
incredibly frustrating and i feel like that's you know whatever that problem is that is bad for apple's image it's bad because we won't use the new features uh if they don't work and people will abandon them um and it's bad that apple needs to figure out like why can we not make this work if there's some technical reason don't make any more features like this but if there's not figure out what it is that's causing this to continue to be a problem especially it gets worse for things like universal clipboard because like i would totally use that feature i want
John:
that feature that would be a feature i'd be excited about but it's you know everyone has used and tried it said i was really excited about this feature too but sometimes it doesn't work and i just eventually come to not rely on it and frustrates me when i need it and it doesn't work
Marco:
See, this is the one time where I will say, I am an airdrop unicorn.
Marco:
It always works for me.
Marco:
And I feel like what makes it always work for me is kind of a few luxuries I have of being a work-at-home person.
Marco:
First of all, I have my one Mac and my one phone and occasionally Tiff's phone that are involved.
Marco:
So it's like a small number of devices.
Marco:
I set them all to accept from every one.
Marco:
That is very, very important.
Marco:
If you don't set, at least the receiving one, if you don't set the receiving one, which is almost always my iMac, to accept from everyone, I found that it works way less often.
Marco:
And obviously there are certain situations where you probably shouldn't have it set that way.
Marco:
For me, AirDrop works great and I use it all the time.
Marco:
Almost always I will use it to send a photo I just took.
Marco:
From my phone to my iMac, because it's faster than iCloud Photo Sync, and maybe it's from a phone that maybe doesn't have iCloud Photo Library set up, like a developer phone sending a screenshot or something like that.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
I use it all the time.
Casey:
Yeah, I wouldn't say I'm a unicorn, but I'm a horse who is stuck like a little unicorn thing to his head, you know?
Marco:
Like wearing a horn hat?
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, pretty much.
Casey:
I say that, what I mean is it doesn't work all the time for me.
Casey:
And gosh, when it doesn't work, it is so frustrating.
Casey:
But it does work pretty darn often for me.
Casey:
So I am pretty satisfied with Airdrop.
Casey:
I agree with you that I see things appearing and disappearing from my dock all the time from handoff.
Casey:
I almost never use it, but it seems to be working well enough that things are appearing constantly.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So I don't really have any complaints about those features.
Casey:
I've yet to try the clipboard sync, but I've heard a lot of mixed reviews about it.
Casey:
But I hope it works because that'd be another one that would compel me to upgrade, say, my WorkMac.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
I mean, I would also, like, that would be a major feature for me, too.
Marco:
And when they announced it, I thought, oh, finally, this is great.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
But the reports that I'm hearing so far, not only that it doesn't always work, but also that it's a little bit slow.
Marco:
And that's the kind of feature where if you're going to have that feature, it has to be fast and reliable.
Marco:
If it's only one or neither of those things, that's going to make it hard to really get into your workflow.
John:
Didn't somebody say also that it doesn't work with at least whatever clipboard history thing they were using, like that it wouldn't, it wouldn't add to the history.
John:
Like I, I use clipboard history all the time.
John:
And if this feature kills my clipboard history, that would be a reason for me not to upgrade because I'm the most exciting new thing I got on my Mac recently is the pay spot beta for the Mac.
John:
i've already had it you know i've been using various clipboard uh history things in the mac the one i that i had settled on before is jump cut this open source thing which is really ugly and silly but it's very reliable and small and i've been using it i switched to pay spot which is much fancier i'm like oh this is probably too fancy but i really like it i like that it feels like it's going to be a more supported product than the open source jump cut and it certainly looks nicer and has some interface niceties but
John:
I, I need that feature.
John:
Like my use of a Mac, it's kind of like window shade used to be or all these other things.
John:
Like you come to rely on them at this point, a Mac without clipboard history would feel broken to me.
John:
So if Sierra breaks my clipboard history, like I'm going to be really sad and just be looking for ways to find the secret P list thing that I can set to make it not do clipboard universal clipboard stuff.
Marco:
Well, as far as I know, I don't think it actually breaks clipboard history locally.
Marco:
I think the things that are remotely brought in from the other devices, they don't actually hit your clipboard.
John:
Yeah, they don't get pulled until you paste, I think.
John:
It doesn't actually transfer it when you copy or paste.
John:
It's when you paste on the foreign machine that it says, oh, actually, I want to pull it.
John:
And maybe that's why it's unreliable, because it's not doing it at the time you initiate.
John:
It has to then...
John:
go back to the phone and say oh give me that thing that you said you had for me and the phone's like what i'm totally doing something different now hang on i don't know i don't know what the problem is and here's the thing about these type of features like like airdrop or whatever
John:
even if you're dutiful and you're like i'm gonna file bugs in this it's impossible to file a bug you're like this one time it didn't work and i go you know you could send all the system reports you want and give them all the information and try to give them like logs and like it's just like i don't know why it didn't work like i don't know like it's not it's not reproducible because you try it again and it works fine and you're like what were you doing differently that time like i don't know so it's it's the worst kind of bug to report it's incredibly frustrating as a developer you're like
John:
I can't fix your thing.
John:
If the people who are developing universal clipboard or handover, like they can't fix my thing.
John:
If I can't explain to how to make it, how, how to make it fail.
John:
And if it always a hundred percent succeeds for them and all their automated tests and everything, like, I don't know what to tell them, but it's, you know, people out in the world are having it fail.
John:
And, and,
John:
There's nothing they can do about it.
John:
And the people who write the software, I'm not sure there's anything they can do about it.
John:
Give me a failing test case.
John:
Give me a reproducible bug.
John:
Otherwise, it's just you saying this bad thing happened once and I have no idea why.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Since we've spoken last, the iOS 10.1 beta has been released, which includes the portrait feature for the 7 Plus.
Casey:
And this portrait feature basically is doing a faux bouquet.
Casey:
Gosh, I watched that video on how to pronounce it.
Casey:
I've already forgotten what it is.
Marco:
The answer is however we say it is wrong.
Marco:
So continue.
Casey:
Yeah, fair enough.
Casey:
So anyway, so it does the FOCA is what we'll call it.
Casey:
And so what it does is it does a background blur behind the person or in some instances object that you're taking a photograph of.
Casey:
And so there's a write-up on this from Matthew Panzarino, and then there's been plenty of stuff put out by Serendi Caldwell.
Casey:
Lex Friedman has been posting pictures to Instagram that I'm pretty sure are using this feature, although I have not confirmed that with him.
Casey:
And I got to tell you, at a glance, at a glance, they look pretty darn good.
Casey:
Under inspection, even for me, and I don't have the most discerning eye,
Casey:
Some of them still look good, and some of them just look like they're somehow wrong, even if I can't put my finger on them.
Casey:
I probably have the least discerning eye of the three of us, and Marco, as the person who I think is closest to a quote-unquote real photographer, how do you feel about this, and what are you thinking about this feature?
Marco:
My thinking has evolved as I've thought about it more and as I've seen a lot of the people's pictures.
Marco:
Before, we could really only see Apple's pictures.
Marco:
And now that they've released this beta, now anybody with a 7 Plus can make their own.
Marco:
And so lots of our friends have it.
Marco:
We're seeing these pictures all over the place.
Marco:
And ultimately, I think they look pretty decent for what they're doing.
Marco:
Now, what they're doing is not replicating an SLR.
Marco:
However, if you view these photos on a phone and you're doing a casual look, like reading through an Instagram feed or whatever the kid's using these days, then they look pretty good.
Marco:
And if you compare it to SLRs,
Marco:
And, you know, quote real cameras that are that are generating real background blur, you know, using the actual properties of the optics and the shape of the aperture blades and everything else like to really generate the nice, pleasing looking blur and the various shapes of the circles and everything.
Marco:
If you compare it to that, it's not even close.
Marco:
The real optic version of this looks way nicer, and it doesn't have a few of the artifacts that the fake one does that photographers will notice, things like the blurry edges around subjects that the focal mode has.
Marco:
But if you have your SLR, just use your SLR.
Marco:
For all the other times, for either you don't own an SLR or you do have one but it's not with you, it's kind of amazing that a phone can generate pictures that look this good.
Marco:
Now, that being said, the regular pictures from both the iPhone 7's cameras already look fantastic.
Marco:
And the fake blur effect is literally just like... It's kind of like an Instagram filter.
Marco:
It's like...
Marco:
You can take very good pictures without it.
Marco:
But if you want this kind of look, you can fake it with this kind of software effect.
Marco:
It's a really good-looking approximation if you don't look too closely or if you're skimming by.
Marco:
It's really nice that it's there because it's better than it not being available at all.
Marco:
However, if you really want something to look really good with that look, you know, a real camera doing it optically will look way, way better.
Marco:
But in practice, in the modern world, that doesn't really matter.
John:
I think I've gone the other direction from Marco, because he's coming around to like, oh, you know, it's not as good as it could be, but it's better.
John:
Like, the more of these pictures I see, the more I'm convinced that certainly I would never willingly do this, and the more I'm convinced that nobody else should do this either, because they look really bad to me.
John:
Like, the only time I feel I can get any value out of them is if there's a picture where
John:
the background is really busy and would detract from the intended subject matter and in this case the terrible blur they apply helps emphasize the part of the picture that i'm supposed to be looking at but it always looks terrible to me like i'm i'm not an expert in photography i don't even know what it is that i'm seeing that's different but it looks wrong and bad and like someone messed up my picture but you know
John:
And one of the questions a lot of people had about this was maybe it's using the other camera to take an out-of-focus picture and using that for the background.
John:
According to Panzerino's article, or maybe it was a tweet or something, that's not the case.
John:
It's computed blur.
Marco:
And that would have been awesome because if you think about it, and somebody could theoretically make a third-party app that tries to do that, although I think... I don't think the cropping will work out.
Marco:
Well, the depth mapping information is not exposed in the API at the moment.
Marco:
I don't know if it ever will be.
Marco:
So, you know, you'd have to kind of do that yourself, which is not an easy task.
Marco:
But you could theoretically, like, you know, have the wide lens focus basically right in front of itself so it has the maximum background blur and then have the telephoto lens focus correctly on the subject and kind of combine the optically blurred picture from the wide lens with the telephoto lens's regular picture somehow detecting where the edges are.
Marco:
you could theoretically do that.
John:
I don't think they would match with the distortion, right?
John:
All the lines, you wouldn't be able to combine them with each other unless you somehow distorted the pictures from the cameras.
John:
Because the lenses are making straight lines in a fence and curved.
John:
You can do it.
John:
It's math, right?
John:
But it's difficult to get them... Anyway, they're not doing that.
John:
They're doing the depth map.
John:
They have nine layers of depth information and they blur it.
John:
I don't know why it looks bad to me.
John:
But what it looks to me...
John:
Like, it looks like they blurred stuff in the picture.
John:
And sometimes it's easy to know why it looks bad.
John:
Like, we saw a couple pictures uploaded by friends where their head happened to be next to something that was a similar color to their hair and the blur, like, crept into their head.
John:
And it's like, that's just, you know, like, obviously it's not going to be perfect.
John:
You can't expect to be perfect in all conditions.
John:
But even the ones where I was like, oh, that looks pretty good.
John:
Something about it looks wrong to me.
John:
And I would say that if you took a picture with an optical camera of the same thing with the same focus settings, I would also say it looks wrong.
John:
I'm not even saying it looks wrong because it doesn't look like it would be.
John:
Maybe I'm not even detecting things like, oh, if that was with the real lens, it would look different.
John:
Maybe it would look the same with the real lens, but that you wouldn't set it up that way.
John:
I don't know.
John:
What I know is I've had a camera that can reliably do this for a short period of time.
John:
I've taken plenty of pictures of blurred backgrounds, and I love all of them better than every one of these pictures I've seen.
John:
Now, it's not to say, like Marco said, if you like it, use it, whatever.
John:
And I've seen a few of them on Instagram, and sometimes I think this does help isolate a subject in a way that I find more pleasing, because very often, if you take a picture with one of these things that everything is in focus, it makes your pictures look bad, because the background that you don't want people to see is just as prominent as the thing you want them to see, and this helps with that.
John:
I am not a fan of this at all.
John:
Now, this is their first try.
John:
There's no reason they can't get better.
John:
And I don't think they should remove this feature.
John:
And if people like it, more power to them.
John:
But I personally don't like it.
Marco:
Well, and it's never going to look right to people who notice the flaws.
Marco:
And I mean, I think you're right in noticing it doesn't look right.
Marco:
There's lots of reasons why it doesn't look right.
Marco:
The biggest by far is the edges of the in-focus subject where they meet the background blur.
Marco:
In a real optical version of this, the entire subject is sharp right up to that edge.
Marco:
And in this one, it looks kind of like...
Marco:
Hey, I'll make a reference for you, John.
Marco:
You know how in the original Star Wars where they had the Vaseline under the speeder?
Marco:
I do know that part.
Marco:
The photos look like somebody put Vaseline around the edge where the subject meets the blurred area.
Marco:
It looks like a badly, messily blurred thing.
Marco:
And the reason why is because the depth map information is just not incredibly granular.
Marco:
It's not very precise.
Marco:
I think they said something like six slices of depth that they can identify.
John:
identify and there's nine but it's not it's not just the slices like i'm looking in pans greener's article he's got a picture of a little girl and she's got like wispy hairs coming out it's not that the depth map doesn't have enough layers it's just that it does the depth doesn't detect those hairs like light from a camera will do the correct bouncing off those things and the hairs will be pin sharp if they're in the plane that's focused
John:
But the blur doesn't know the hairs are even there because the blur has to say, well, the head is close to us and the fence behind it is far away.
John:
So keep the head in focus and blur the fence.
John:
But it thinks the boundaries of the head end way before those wispy hairs.
John:
So the wispy hairs melt out into a big smear of someone who would like to use the finger smudge tool in Photoshop.
John:
And like it's as clear as day that like it shouldn't it shouldn't be like that.
Yeah.
John:
but i don't even know if that's i mean i can see that when people say oh you know if i had to pick it out like you know in in a multiple choice and find them that's how i would find them but i don't even think that's the thing that looks wrong to me i think the completely clear totally not near the info subject like in the clear can be safely blurred doesn't look blurred to me in a way that seems right like it just it just feels like
John:
Like, they're standing in front of a blurry picture of the place where they were.
John:
And so it was like a composite.
John:
Like, they took a picture without the person there.
John:
They applied a blur to it.
John:
They took a picture of a person against the green screen, and they composited them onto it.
John:
Or they printed out the background picture and put it on a big mural, and they're standing in front of it.
John:
I don't know.
John:
It's just, you know, it's got...
John:
Maybe it's uncanny valley, whatever it is.
John:
It bugs me.
Marco:
Well, and part of the reason why, I mean, you're right.
Marco:
I mean, first of all, that whatever custom blur optimization or whatever blur algorithm they're using, it doesn't, like the blurred areas of the photo, all the edge detection aside, the blurred areas of the photo do not look
Marco:
like the actual optical blur from a camera lens would look of that if you did the same picture side by side so that that's obviously a big part of what you're seeing johnny and that's that is a very real problem that i'm not sure they really easily can solve or at least if they did it might be not able to be done in real time on current hardware whatever it is they that is not being solved well
Marco:
But also, I think we're kind of being sold this bill of goods like, oh, you're going to have this awesome background blur with this nice portrait and everything.
Marco:
Well, this is only a 56mm perspective.
Marco:
You can get... I mean, sure, you can... On a full-frame camera, you can get...
Marco:
decent background blur with like an f1.4 55 ish millimeter lens but if you actually want to get like strong background blur for a portrait you actually need a longer lens to really do it well like you need like an 85 or my favorite a 135 it is incredibly impractical but the pictures you get from it when when you can actually like stand in the right distance from your subject to get them in the frame because
Marco:
A 135mm prime is incredibly hard to use with moving subjects, but the ones you get that work from it will be your favorite pictures you've ever taken.
Marco:
Anyway, you need actually a longer lens to get the amount of blur that makes portraits look good most of the time.
Casey:
I thought that there was a really good take on this, and it was Mike Hurley who had said it, and I believe it was on the last episode of Upgrade, so we'll link that in the show notes.
Casey:
And his point was, if I can paraphrase, I'm not going to get a DSLR or anything like it, and I'm certainly not going to carry one with me.
Casey:
And for me, this is really Mike, this is giving me a way to make these pictures that look so beautiful to my eye, but I don't have to carry that big, heavy, expensive camera.
Casey:
I can use the thing that's in my pocket always.
Casey:
And yes, it may not be perfect, but it's a crap load better than what I'm used to.
Casey:
And for that, I love it.
Casey:
And you know what?
Casey:
I think if I were in Mike's shoes, I would say the exact same thing.
Casey:
This is not enough for me to want...
Casey:
to give up my Micro Four Thirds camera and the couple of lenses I have for that.
Casey:
But I think for anyone who just wants to take a pretty shot with the camera that's in their pocket, whether or not they, like you said, Marco, whether or not they have a DSLR or something, you know, big,
Casey:
I think it's a really great feature.
Casey:
And yeah, there's a lot that we can nitpick about it and have nitpicked about it.
Casey:
But I still think this is a really great next step toward taking the iPhone cameras to the next level.
Casey:
And I really applaud Apple for it.
Casey:
And for a beta, it seems like it's working really darn well so far.
Marco:
Yeah, and again, I think the democratization argument here really can't be overstated.
Marco:
Yes, this is a very expensive phone for bought by privileged people, whatever.
Marco:
However, Apple is putting in the hands of all the people who buy this phone
Marco:
a photographic capability that while it is not as good as an slr and will never be as good as an slr it kind of gets in the ballpark and especially for you know most photos these days are being seen by people who are scrolling through social media feeds and you might be you might stop on that photo for two seconds like at most you know like so all the fine details that bother people like me and john and people who know how these photos are supposed to look are
Marco:
most people who are seeing these photos aren't noticing those details and they're just enjoying the photos so this is giving like millions literally millions of people the ability to post better looking photos to their friends and family on Facebook and stuff and
Marco:
And people who would never have otherwise bought and carried around an SLR with a really fast prime lens.
Marco:
So that is a pretty cool effect of this.
Marco:
Even though the pictures annoy people like me and John, that is an overall, I think overall this is benefiting the world for this to exist.
John:
yeah i agree and well i mean apple will find out because they'll have the usage data if this is a feature that people are using obviously they like it and it adds value to their phone right i personally think that the the dual cameras the ability to non you know to non-optically zoom when there's enough light for it to use the uh or to optically zoom non-digitally zoom when there's enough light to use the other camera i think that will have a larger effect on people's satisfaction with the camera than this but apple will know because this is an opt-in thing it doesn't do it to you automatically you have to use it um
John:
So if they see huge numbers of people using it, then using it is obviously successful whether I like it or not.
John:
But we'll see.
John:
There's another one of those things where we have to like...
John:
watch the non-tech people who we know to see casually see like are they using that feature or do they even know it exists a lot of it could be like they're not using it because it's not obvious in the ui or something i've met so many people who think they have to swipe the little line of words in the camera ui and show them that you can just swipe anywhere and it changes it changes their life uh that's just a non-obvious another mystery meat interface from
John:
the people who brought you iOS 7.
John:
But anyway, that's what will bear it out.
John:
And I think potentially it could be a big factor in making people more happy with their camera because now they can do a thing that they couldn't do before.
John:
But I'm not sure people will keep using it, mostly because you can't just leave it on all the time because it will ruin perfectly good pictures if you leave it on all the time.
John:
It can only be used in certain environments where you know you're actually going for it.
John:
If you leave it all the time, it's just going to mess up everything.
John:
So we'll see.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Tracker, Fracture, and Igloo.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Casey:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
All right, let's do some titles.
Marco:
You know, the Museum of Pristine Apple Hardware is not bad.
Casey:
Maybe the Museum of Pristine Apple Hardware?
John:
uh i guess that's my favorite of uh the ones you pick like how do you two not have that on like at front of mine of lists of weird things that i do that i collect all this apple hardware and try to keep it because it's a weird thing my books that are all on my shelf that like don't have the bindings broken that are all in beautiful condition that are displayed out like that like it's the same thing i mean just the list is so long i've lost track of some of the some of the smaller objects on it
John:
And when people were tweeting that stuff at me, I was tweeting back at them.
John:
I'm like, you tell me.
John:
If you listen to the show, it's not a secret that I do this.
John:
That's why I left it unsaid.
John:
Why do I care that it's pristine if it's in a case?
John:
Because it's not going to be in that case forever.
John:
It's going to come out.
John:
It's going to join the collection.
John:
Like, people are like, oh, how much money do you think you're going to get for your iPhone 6?
John:
Like, what do you mean for my iPhone 6?
John:
It's not leaving the house.
John:
It's going... And this one is also pristine on the back, too.
John:
This case is probably going to the garbage because the leather thing is totally destroyed now.
John:
But the phone inside there is beautiful.
Marco:
And actually, I will say, part of the reason I convinced myself to get Jet Black...
Marco:
is that I thought, what is the canonical color of this generation?
Marco:
And I thought, when I look back in my closet at my row of old iPhones that I keep there, all lined up as if they're on a bookshelf, I thought, what do I want to see there once this phone goes there?
Marco:
Next year, whenever I retire this phone, which is probably next fall,
Marco:
What color would look best to represent this generation of phone in my little tiny museum of well-worn Apple hardware?
Marco:
And I thought Jet Black is the only choice.
Marco:
That is the phone that will define this generation of phones in my future phone archive.
John:
it makes sense yeah i feel like it's the same thing like that you know in all apples advertising like this is the thing this is the even though that i i really doubt this will be the most popular model because of all the scratching and and people don't like you know other colors that are more exciting than stupid black one again um this is the one they're pushing is like this is it this is the iphone the iphone 7 equals jet black
John:
i don't know i mean i'm i'm guessing you know i mean because there are two new black colors then it's you know it's probably going to be split between them but people really like the color that's new that year yeah only only apple knows these uh the breakdown of these numbers but we'll see like i in my experience i think most people find black boring like i'm amazed that i don't see more black phones in all generations of iphone and ios devices
John:
we're all buying the black ones for whatever weird tech dude reason compels us to buy the black ones regular people are not so excited about black well and honestly if they only released the other black i wouldn't be that excited about it either like if they only released the map because i'm kind of tired of just like black geek hardware i'm not that tired says the guy with the closet full of black shirts
Marco:
Actually, I just ordered more black shirts today.
John:
If you're tired of it, you're not expressing it outwardly in your clothing.
Marco:
Clothing's different.
Marco:
I think the new matte black one, as I said, I think it looks a little bit dated, honestly, and it looks a little bit too much like...
Marco:
new geek black gadget that looks like every other geek black gadget but the jet black looks so different because you know that that new finish that like nothing else has in in the gadget world um and and that i think really elevates it except for every shiny piece of black plastic ever made including the iphone 3gs yeah but it doesn't it doesn't look like plastic though it looks it looks more like plastic than metal looks like scratched plastic well maybe a little
Marco:
I don't know.
John:
I'll get there and see this.
Marco:
I do have a lot of scratches.
Marco:
What's interesting, almost all of the scratches on mine are in the lower third of the case.
Marco:
I wonder why that is.
John:
You're going to learn where you rub your phone against things.
John:
You're like Merlin where his phone pokes through his pants pocket.
Marco:
makes the little hole is the the most uh friction intensive area yeah maybe i mean the i mean the pants i'm wearing they still have the the wear line in the pocket of the 5s shape which should give you some idea of the age of these pants like i can date my pants by the by like which phone shape it has worn into the pocket
John:
I never I still don't.
John:
I mean, obviously, my first film is six, and it's big.
John:
And I'm not that I'm afraid of it bending, although I kind of am, but I feel a little bit of pressure in my pocket when I put it in any of my pockets.
John:
And so it just doesn't go in my pants pockets only goes my jacket pockets ever.
John:
I mean, I'll put it in my back pocket when I'm walking around the house knowing that I'm not going to sit down.
John:
But it's like that's in short term memory.
John:
That's in like the little M1 in the calculator.
John:
You have a phone in your back pocket.
John:
Don't sit down like that is top of mind as soon as the phone goes in my back pocket and it comes right out of my back pocket.
John:
I never sit down with it in any of my pockets.
John:
It just feels uncomfortable.
John:
Even if it wasn't going to bend, I wouldn't want to do that because it would feel uncomfortable to me to do that.
John:
What else is in this short-term memory?
John:
This is loud.
John:
It's high enough in there that I've never actually done it.
John:
I've never accidentally sat down with my phone in my pants pocket.
John:
As soon as I put it in there, whatever the highest priority, the register is in my mind, that's not an L1 cache.
John:
It's in a register.
John:
You have a phone in your pocket.
John:
Don't sit down.
Right.
John:
oh my god you are such a nerd wow and what do you when you bring your phone out in the summer what do you do like when you're not wearing a jacket where do you put it if i'm going somewhere in i'm trying to think about it so i will put it in my shorts pockets i wear shorts in the summer because the shorts aren't jeans they're not jean shorts right they're just yeah they're looser right and so that and they have big they have bigger pockets and i will do that
John:
so we'll go to the store or whatever with it in my and i will sit down with it because they're only front pockets on my shorts i will sit down within my shorts pockets just not in jeans so i guess it hasn't come up um if it did come up i probably what i would do is put it in my back pocket and just be walking around and as soon as i sat down take it out of my back pocket and just hold i don't know how's it come up i don't my clothes are very utilitarian i don't wear anything
John:
uh nice enough that i've had to worry about this it's just scrubby shorts in the summertime and all the rest of the time jeans and then i have some kind of jacket because i'm always freezing in the air conditioning wow my phone goes in my right front pocket even even with the six size you're able to pull that off you must have looser jeans than i do probably
John:
well i i've been doing it just fine but i i do the front left pocket which is the standard pocket for people who are over about the age of 30 all right are your phones bent no not at all nope i've never had that with any with any of my six series someone at work i know has noticed their iphone and i'm like do you know your phone's but i feel bad telling people this like first i was more like you tell people their phone is your phone bent like i thought like i thought i had seen it but maybe it was people bended it i think it was a six it's like
John:
Not bent a lot, not a big deal, but enough that I can spot it.
John:
Mine, I'm pretty sure is not bent.
John:
I was thinking also about the caseless thing.
John:
I've dropped this phone plenty of times, like onto carpet or onto a wooden floor or whatever, from a reasonable height, from nightstand height or whatever.
John:
That's why the corners of my case are nicked up, and I'm like, does that affect my caseless decision?
John:
Would it have broken my screen on any of those falls if it didn't have the leather case?
John:
Would it have dented the side of it like Christina Warren or whatever the hell she did with it?
John:
Would it have a huge dent in it?
John:
Because, I don't know.
John:
I'm so paranoid, but, like, someone was asking about, like, oh, the self-polishing thing, and I tweeted a picture of my little... I think you guys have seen it.
John:
My little...
John:
It's not microfiber, but it's like a velvety kind of synthetic cloth pouch.
John:
So I've got it in a leather case, and then I always put it in that pouch when I'm traveling.
John:
And even though it's in a leather case and in the pouch, it still never goes in the same pocket as my keys.
Marco:
Oh, no.
Marco:
I mean, that should be illegal to put it in the same pocket as keys.
Marco:
No, this is the whole reason why the correct pocket, if you're over about the age of 30, is the left front pocket.
Marco:
What?
Marco:
you know like when we were like in high school and college and stuff like like we we developed the habits of having your keys and wallet and since most people are right-handed the most sensible place to put those is your front right pocket and then when phones came out the only sensible place for them to go was still in the front pocket for easy reach if you're a front pocket person at all but your front right pocket was already taken with your wallet and keys you didn't want to scratch up your phone so you put your phone in your front left pocket
Casey:
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Casey:
You do not put your wallet in your front pocket.
Casey:
That is barbaric.
Marco:
If your wallet is too big to fit in your front pocket, your wallet is too big.
John:
You're a country boy.
John:
If you put your wallet in your back pocket, that's easier to steal.
Casey:
Yeah, that's why on the rare occasions I'm in a place where I fear for these things.
Casey:
Apollo Robins could be around every corner.
Casey:
I did just listen to that reconcilable differences.
Casey:
Anyway, you are right, Marco, for those who use keys.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
We are in this new amazing world of keyless entry automobiles.
Casey:
And so when I got my BMW, I flip-flopped.
Casey:
And the phone went from left pocket to right pocket.
Casey:
Keys went from right pocket to left pocket.
Casey:
And that is far and away the better way to do it if you have a car that has keyless entry and keyless start.
John:
Yeah, I kicked my keys out of the right side, too, once the iOS devices started coming in, mostly because I didn't trust my mal-coordinated left hand to successfully extract my phone without dropping it onto a hard surface.
John:
So totally the keys, but I don't, you know, drop the keys, whatever.
John:
Keys went to the left, and I'm talking about jacket pockets for the most part because I don't put either one in my pants pockets.
John:
Keys went to the left, phone on the right, wallet on the right.
Marco:
see i just developed a very you know agile left hand because that's just where like you know first when i was really young it was like a palm pilot uh and then eventually it became a phone that was what was in the left pocket and so i've i've always been a like if i'm using my phone one-handed it's my left hand even though i'm right-handed and this this like people who don't do this this drives like this blows their mind that anybody would do this with their non-dominant hand if you're not dropping it it must work i don't drop it that's just the habit i've developed and i hear like
Marco:
We will definitely hear from other people who grew up the same way of like everything was in the right pocket.
Marco:
Then my phones came around.
Marco:
They just kind of went in the left pocket because that was available.
Marco:
And yeah, we're going to hear from these people.
Marco:
There are dozens of us.
Marco:
Dozens.
Marco:
What is that?
Marco:
What about lefties?
Marco:
What about those people?
Marco:
We'll just flip everything.