The Failure Mode of a Train
John:
We didn't get to talk about this in the show, but the most important revelation of Casey's video of him sending me the dollar is just how terrible his handwriting is.
John:
Like, my handwriting is bad, but wow.
John:
So here's why it's extra awful.
John:
Like, my handwriting is like chicken scratch.
John:
I have terrible handwriting, right?
John:
But yours is terrible, but then it has this extra flavor, and the extra flavor is it's terrible, and you do unconventional things.
John:
You connect letters in ways that other people don't.
John:
So it's not just like you're sloppily drawing the letter shapes.
John:
You decide that two letters should be connected in ways that are not normal.
John:
So it's just hard to parse.
John:
You're like, is this even English letters?
John:
I don't even know what you're... Boy, bad handwriting.
Casey:
Marco was saying before the show that he was having a little bit of troubles with the live stream.
Casey:
And I didn't understand why for a moment until you started explaining to me what's going on.
Casey:
And then I realized, oh, yes, I'm having similar problems, but manifesting themselves in different ways.
Casey:
So why don't you tell the listeners what's going on?
Marco:
Okay, so as you might have noticed, the tweet that announced that we were going to be live, the time duration that was in that tweet, normally it's like, we'll be live in 45 minutes.
Marco:
You know, usually I try to start the live stream about a half hour or a little more before recording.
Marco:
And today, the time interval was seven minutes or eight minutes.
Marco:
I forget which one.
Marco:
And the reason why that took so long to set up, I was here at 8.30.
Marco:
I was here at the 30-minute mark trying to get it going, and I realized...
Marco:
All afternoon and evening, Hover has been going through this massive DDoS attack that has taken down, among other things, their DNS servers.
Marco:
Marker.org is hosted by Hover or registered with Hover, and I use their DNS.
Marco:
Marker.org's VPS is what hosts the IceCast server that powers this live stream.
Marco:
I basically spent the last half hour trying to first seeing if I could get it working just by IP address.
Marco:
But that was going to be tricky because of various virtual hosting things.
Marco:
And then eventually I just created a whole new host name.
Marco:
Hover didn't register .fms for a while.
Marco:
I actually don't know if they do yet.
Marco:
I think they might now.
Marco:
But for a long time, they didn't register .fms.
Marco:
So ATP.fm is registered at Gandhi.net.
Marco:
So I quickly ran over there, created a new domain name, live.atp.fm, hoped that that propagated in time to be requested by anybody, and fortunately it did.
Marco:
I created that name at like 840 and basically moved the whole thing over to that, and it's pointing to the same IP, pointing to the same server, and basically required only a very quick creation of a new virtual host on the Mark.org server to just recognize that host name and give it the little tiny little HTML page that basically embeds the audio player.
Marco:
And that all worked, and it was great, and there we go.
Marco:
So now we are streaming from live.atp.fm instead of market.org colon 80808080 or whatever it was.
Marco:
And it actually appears the DNS outage might actually have just ended, but oh well.
Yeah.
Casey:
People are starting to tweet at me saying, oh, your site's down, your site's down, your site's down.
Casey:
And for a fleeting moment, I was like, oh, did I get fireballed?
Casey:
That's exciting.
Casey:
Or something like that.
Casey:
And then I thought, no, this was just a link post.
Casey:
I wouldn't be fireballed for that.
Casey:
And then it occurred to me, oh, no, this is a much greater issue entirely.
Marco:
I think it really says a lot about how little I blog anymore, that my site has basically been up and down for the last five or six hours, whenever this started.
Marco:
And I got, in total, one tweet about it.
Yeah.
Marco:
Oh, I'm so glad that I have not had to deal with stuff like that in my various server administration stuff.
Marco:
That's got to be hell to deal with, deal with DDoSs.
Casey:
Yeah, I can't imagine.
Casey:
Especially, I mean, imagine if you're Hover where you're hosting DNS for so many people.
Casey:
That's your business to some degree.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
No, thank you.
Casey:
I'm glad that's not my problem.
Marco:
I'm curious for the people in the chat who are recommending different DNS providers.
Marco:
I guess I don't know this.
Marco:
I probably should know this.
Marco:
Isn't your registrar like the top authority?
Marco:
So like if somebody had a totally empty cache, suppose my registrar is still hover, but suppose I host the DNS somewhere else like Cloudflare or whatever.
Marco:
If a new request goes to fetch my DNS that has no cache information at any stage of the way, is it first going to go to my registrar to see who the NS is and then go to the NS?
Marco:
So basically, would I have to change my registrar in order to prevent this from ever hitting me again?
Marco:
How would it know to go to your registrar?
Marco:
Well, how does it... I don't know.
John:
How does DNS actually work at the very low level?
John:
I have no idea.
John:
You should read one of the O'Reilly books on DNS and Bind or something.
John:
My vague recollection, and the only way that occurs to me now as I think about it, would just probably be informed by my vague recollection, is if you've got no information...
John:
you can't start by going to the name server for that domain because you don't know what the name server for that domain is.
John:
So there's a set of root name servers that handle requests, you know, that you, that shouldn't handle requests at all because there's so many layers of caching in between.
John:
But if you really started from nothing, there's a set of root name servers for.com and.net and.whatever.
John:
And, um,
John:
I don't know who those root name servers are, and I don't know if there is a more complicated system in place that makes this old information obsolete because I read this book in the 90s, but that is my recollection.
Marco:
Yeah, and all the people in the chat seem to be supporting the fact that basically, like, if you don't use your registrar's name servers, that your registrar is not involved in looking you up for DNS in any way.
Marco:
That it goes up through the ICANN and ARIN-maintained master servers and stuff like that, as you were saying.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It sounds like I can stick with hover for the registration and just move the DNS somewhere else.
Marco:
So that's good.
Marco:
I think I might do that just to move it somewhere smaller, basically.
John:
It's time for you to run your own DNS server.
John:
Hey, why don't you write your own DNS server?
John:
It's a thing that people have done before.
John:
Just ask those people.
John:
They love it.
Casey:
Well, actually, it's funny you bring this up, and I'm not trying to be funny.
Casey:
One thing that I've wondered, and I keep meaning to ask you, Marco, but I keep forgetting about it, and this is a perfect opportunity.
Casey:
When you were building Tumblr and you were giving people subdomains, weren't you?
Casey:
Well, maybe not you personally, but I'm saying Tumblr was giving people subdomains.
Casey:
How did that work exactly?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Excellent question.
Marco:
So the problem, as you know, but our listeners might not, you know, basically the idea is if you have some giant web service and you try to have people like hosted remains there, so basically pointing their DNS to you, if they're hosting a subdomain like www.caseylist.com, they can point that to a CNAME.
Marco:
And a CNAME can just be like, you know, hosts.squarespace.net or whatever, and...
Marco:
And then that host.squarespace.net can lead anywhere that Squarespace wants it to.
Marco:
It could lead to a whole bunch of load balancers.
Marco:
It can be geographically distributed.
Marco:
It can be moved around between hosts or servers if it needs to.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
The problem is that the very root entry, so like inside of www.caseylist.com, if it's just caseylist.com with no www, that can't point to a CNAME.
Marco:
That has to be an A record for it to work.
Marco:
And an A record needs to be an IP address.
Marco:
So you basically have to have a special kind of IP address that you can route to different servers as needed.
Marco:
Or if you just have that as a load balancer.
Marco:
So there are very advanced routing things you can do to make that not crazy.
Marco:
But they're not easy.
Marco:
And they are limited when you only have the IP instead of like a CNAME.
Marco:
What we did for the first couple of years, Tumblr started out at Rackspace.
Marco:
It started out with one server at Rackspace.
Marco:
And then eventually it grew to three servers at Rackspace.
Marco:
And then it was like, oh, Rackspace is ridiculously expensive.
Marco:
We will never be able to afford to scale here.
Marco:
So we very quickly moved over to what was then called the Planet, which is now today SoftLayer.
Marco:
we had already started telling people to point their names at this one IP that we had at Rackspace.
Marco:
It was just our master server with the load balancer on it.
Marco:
When we moved to the planet, we kept one server at Rackspace for a long time.
Marco:
It had to be at least two years into Tumblr's insane growth, where if you had looked at our DNS help page before six months into the service...
Marco:
your domain would have been pointed there which is many of our very large users being proxied through um i forget whether it was squid or uh oh crap what's that uh ha proxy yeah so it was either squid or ha proxy running on this one rackspace server for years proxying all this old traffic and eventually they shut that down i think but it was years and years into the service
Marco:
And then when we were at the planet, we basically had like some kind of floating IP that their routers could assign to anything within the data center.
Marco:
And that made that a little bit easier.
Marco:
And I'm sure with like GeoDNS, you might have more options.
Marco:
I don't know enough about it to say.
Marco:
Fortunately, by the time Tumblr needed to care about stuff like that, I was gone and it wasn't my job anymore.
Casey:
But that was all for like me redirecting my own domain to Tumblr, right?
Casey:
So how does like something.tumblr.com work though?
Marco:
Well, that's just a wildcard virtual host.
Marco:
That's like the web servers just literally just had wildcard virtual hosts.
Marco:
And so like the PHP app that would get the inbound request would just look at what the host name was and then dispatch it from there.
Marco:
That's cheating.
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
I don't know.
Casey:
I'm just kidding.
Casey:
I was expecting this super long and involved answer, and that was super simple and boring.
Casey:
I'm disappointed.
Casey:
Sorry.
Casey:
That's all right.
Casey:
I'll forgive you this once.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We should probably get into follow-up proper.
Casey:
I think I have all of the follow-up this week, which is making me very uncomfortable, to be honest, but we're going to roll with it.
John:
If I'm here, Casey, and you're here, doesn't it make it our follow-up?
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
But I am the one who put all of the three bullets into the show notes, which is, I think, a first.
Casey:
And I'm not feeling too comfortable with this.
Marco:
I mean, in reality, isn't it always basically John's follow-up?
Marco:
Basically.
Yeah.
Casey:
But here we are.
Casey:
So anyway, a friend of the show, Steve Troughton-Smith, put up a Twitter poll, I don't know, a week ago, maybe a little over a week ago.
Casey:
It says, listening to the latest ATPFM, I'm curious, did you turn on desktop and documents iCloud Sync and macOS Sierra?
Casey:
I did, and I'm happy with it.
Casey:
Now, Steve is a very prolific iOS developer and hacker, so you have to consider that when you consider the sort of person that is likely to follow him.
Casey:
And the poll results as we record, 30% yes and I'm happy with it, 4% yes and I regretted it.
Casey:
29% no, and the winner, 37% hell no, which I just thought was kind of interesting.
Casey:
So yeah, so thanks to Steve for putting that up.
Casey:
I don't believe in the official Twitter client, thus I cannot create polls.
John:
I love seeing the empty space where a poll should be as I browse Twitter.
John:
Yep.
John:
Sometimes it's not obvious.
John:
Sometimes you can sense, like, this must be a poll, but this tweet doesn't make sense.
John:
Oh, well, I'll never see it, and I continue on my way.
John:
Yep.
John:
So obviously this is not a scientific poll or whatever.
John:
It's just Twitter stuff.
John:
The fact that most people have been scared away from this feature, like I said, if it's a bunch of nerds following a nerdy Twitter account, it makes sense that they would be the people who are reading reviews and listening to our podcast and being scared away from the feature.
John:
So that's why the vast majority are like, no, I did not enable this feature.
John:
And that's why Hell No wins, because these people are afraid of the feature because they've read scary things about it.
John:
The other possibility is...
John:
Even if the things they read about aren't that scary, they may be in a situation like me where they know they're an outlier, that they have a lot of files or they have some very large files.
John:
And I think even if it works for most people, I know I'm at the edge of the envelope here and I probably shouldn't enable it.
John:
But if you just look at the people who did enable it.
John:
most of them are happy with it.
John:
So 4%, yes, and I regret it, isn't that big a number.
John:
And of course, the people who are happy with it, maybe they're happy with it now.
John:
You can wait a year to see how happy they are because all it takes is one thing that goes awry that you become upset about.
John:
But anyway...
John:
Yeah, it's really difficult to get a read on these things without an actual study controlling for all the variables, especially when nerdy people like us ask about it because it's a self-selecting group.
Casey:
I wanted to also briefly touch on my headphones.
Casey:
Last week, we had talked about how my beloved but ancient and adorably crappy headphones had kicked the bucket.
Casey:
Well, sort of.
Casey:
They weren't cooperating well with my work laptop with Sierra, which is the laptop that they're pretty much always connected to.
Casey:
And I had solicited suggestions for alternatives and promptly ignored every single one of them because guess what headphones spontaneously started working again?
Casey:
The old, crappy, adorable headphones.
Casey:
Yeah, I was very excited about this.
Casey:
I did do a PRAM reset, which I didn't have a chance to do before the show.
Casey:
Of course, I was shotgunning and just trying everything under the sun to try to figure out how to make them work again, and I'm not entirely clear what it was that did it for sure.
Casey:
I think I had rebooted it at least once.
Casey:
Is that what shotgunning means?
Casey:
It's like trying two headphones at once.
Casey:
Yeah, something like that.
Casey:
No, it's just the old shotguns.
Casey:
They spray a bunch of little pellets everywhere.
Casey:
At least that's my understanding.
Casey:
Don't email me.
Marco:
Now we're going to hear from gun people.
Marco:
Yeah, I know.
Casey:
Please don't email me.
Casey:
I'm so sorry.
Casey:
God.
Casey:
I'm so sorry.
Casey:
Anyway.
Casey:
So I wanted to quickly cover a handful of options, if you're in a similar scenario, that I heard a lot of responses from.
Casey:
The first one, the Motorola S305.
Casey:
These links will all be in the show notes.
Casey:
Those are the ones I used prior to the ones that I am currently using.
Casey:
And I loved them, except that the battery went to crap pretty darn quickly.
Casey:
And I used to be able to make it through an entire day very fast.
Casey:
And by, I don't know, maybe six months or a year after getting them, I could no longer make an entire day with the S05s.
Casey:
There were a lot of suggestions for the Plantronics Backbeat Fit, which have the behind-the-neck brace, if you will, that I had been requesting because I'm too prissy to have my hair squashed.
Casey:
But those were also kind of sort of earbuds.
Casey:
And to me, if I'm going to go earbuds, I might as well just go AirPods, battery, potential battery issues be damned.
Casey:
But those were very, very popular, very, very popular response.
Casey:
I was almost going to buy our next set, which is the Kinevo, Kinevo, Kinevo, I don't know, Kinoa, BTH 260 V2.
Casey:
It's pronounced acai.
Yeah.
Casey:
Quino.
Casey:
What was that commercial?
Casey:
It was some football, but food commercial.
Casey:
Anyway, point being the Kinevo BTH260.
Casey:
There's an older version, I don't recall the model name, number, whatever, that did not support aptX, but this pair apparently does.
Casey:
And this is what I was about to buy when my old Bluetooth headphones came back to life.
Casey:
Then there are a lot of people suggested various kinds of earbuds, but with shoulder neck harness things.
Marco:
Those things always look horrible to me.
Marco:
Like those always look like the worst of all of all worlds.
Marco:
Basically, it's like you have this like you have the discomfort of earbuds and all the crappy sound that usually goes along with them.
Marco:
And but you don't have like the tiny, like, you know, tiny little size or wrap around the phone kind of cable.
Marco:
Like you still have this big block of battery and crap that you have to deal with.
Marco:
And it's just like I don't I don't get why anybody likes those.
Marco:
Please don't write in.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I completely agree with everything you just said.
Casey:
There are very, very many different flavors of this particular example I'm putting in the show notes is the LG Tone Pro HBS 750.
Casey:
And again, these will be in the show notes.
Casey:
I completely agree with you.
Casey:
The thought of having this thing resting on my shoulders, yet also having earbuds seems like the worst of all worlds.
Casey:
Not for me, but definitely on paper, it sounds like it would be good because presumably it has forever long battery life.
Casey:
This particular set is also AptX compatible, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
The final recommendation, which I'm actually looking into because they just seem very interesting to me, is bone conduction.
Casey:
Is that what it's called?
Casey:
Yes, bone conduction headphones.
Casey:
And the way these works are you have these things that sit pressing against your cheekbones, and they vibrate your cheekbones, which vibrates your head and the things inside your head, hopefully kind of in a not dangerous way.
Casey:
And a lot of people wrote in to talk about that, and I'm actually looking into that as well.
Casey:
So the Aftershocks, Trex is an example of that.
Casey:
That'll be in the show notes too.
Casey:
So if you're in a similar situation, you can look at all those or just try to find an ancient pair like I have and do whatever magical incantations slash sacrifices I did in order to get them to work.
Marco:
So I'm curious, because of my whole inability to comfortably wear anything in-ear, I don't really know the answer to this.
Marco:
I'm curious, for all these really tiny in-ear Bluetooth things, what do they do for remote control commands, things like volume and play-pause and skip-back, skip-forward?
Marco:
Do they have buttons somehow for that?
Marco:
How do they do that?
Casey:
Well, and that's why the Plantronics Backbeat Fit are a popular choice, I think, because they have those bars that rest on your shoulders or those those orbs that rest on your shoulders that that I presume have.
Casey:
Oh, excuse me.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
I'm getting myself backwards.
Casey:
Let me try that all over again.
Casey:
So that's why the Plantronics Backbeat Fit is popular is because they're earbuds, but with like panels on the outside of the earbud, if that makes any sense at all.
Casey:
And so the buttons are on there.
Casey:
And additionally, on those shoulder harness-y things, the LGs, and I think a few people had recommended Sony's that were a similar design.
Casey:
Those, I think, have the buttons on those little like shoulder pad things or whatever they are that rest on your shoulder.
Casey:
So I guess that works for those.
Casey:
But I can't speak for any like true to form earbuds.
Casey:
And I did get a lot of recommendations actually.
Casey:
And I can't recall which one was the most popular, but a lot of recommendations for just straight up earbuds that have the cord behind you.
Casey:
But if I'm going to go that route, I'd rather have like the ones I have today that just kind of rest on my ears.
Casey:
I'm not a...
Casey:
Big earbud fan.
Casey:
Although that being said, the more I hear about the AirPods, the more I think they're going on my holiday list because it sounds like they're the best possible solution in that they have almost enough battery life if I listen all day long.
Casey:
Oh, Jaybird X2 has all said in the chat.
Casey:
I believe those are the ones that everyone and their mother had recommended.
Casey:
Anyway, so I think the AirPods are probably the best bet because if I ever get up from my desk for like any reason, I can pop them back in the little Tic Tac holder and that'll probably give me enough juice to get through the rest of the day.
Casey:
So hopefully Santa or the equivalent, I guess Hanukkah Harry, if you will, will be good to me this year and maybe I'll come up with a set of those.
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
Last piece of follow-up, and this I think will be a little bit more shared.
Casey:
A friend of the show, Greg Koenig, had written a post earlier today about why your next iPhone won't be ceramic.
Casey:
And if nothing else, it's a great post because it includes a screenshot of one of my favorite movies of all time, The Hunt for Red October.
Casey:
But what Greg goes through in this post is why he thinks that this is probably not going to be a thing.
Casey:
And if you don't know, Greg, he is, I think, a co-founder or one of just a handful of employees of Luma Labs, and they make the Luma Loop, which is the camera strap I have on my big camera as we speak.
Casey:
And that was not comped.
Casey:
Well, it was a gift, but it was from family.
Casey:
So somebody paid actual money for it.
Casey:
It's really great.
Casey:
I love that thing.
Casey:
And so Greg manufactures stuff for a living.
Casey:
That's what he does.
Casey:
And his point, which he had a very long essay and it's worth reading every bit of it.
Casey:
But if I were to quickly distill it down, he said, Apple is a hardware company and machined aluminum is their primary platform.
Casey:
At peak production, Apple's manufacturing roughly a million iPhones a day.
Casey:
So for Apple to bring a whole new long cycle time process online, the sort of thing that ceramic would require, they would need warehouses with tens of thousands, or excuse me, thousands of machines already squared away and ready to rock with thousands more machines being built.
Casey:
The machines that are building the iPhones, there would need to be thousands of those, and there would probably need to be
Casey:
But those machines would be needing to be built to add to the collection that's already ready to rock.
Casey:
So in his perspective, there's no freaking way this is going to happen anytime soon.
Casey:
And it's really worth reading all of it because I am way oversimplifying it.
Casey:
But you should check it out.
Casey:
We'll put it in the show notes.
Marco:
Well, and just also, it's like in order to get the machines and tooling and everything set up to produce ceramic iPhone cases at the scale needed to produce enough iPhones to meet demand,
Marco:
they could theoretically do it but not only would it be like way way way more machines and space and money and people than what they have now but the gist of it was like if they were even preparing for that you couldn't hide that that amount of investment and effort like that would take years to build up if they were going to do it and it would you know you you would see that you would see people talking about it noticing it in expenditures you'd see sources in the supply chain talking about it and
Marco:
leaking information or an apple acquiring companies or staffing up you know in certain ways basically it's like it would be such a massive undertaking and just like stuff money and people that they really couldn't hide it although disguising it as a car development program you know all those billions of dollars to go make it a car who would believe that anyway um so for the past i think for the past
John:
for a long time now, I think, Apple has to have been internally looking for their next material after machined aluminum.
John:
Because the machined aluminum age began with the MacBook Air.
John:
The aluminum age began slightly before that.
John:
But once they settled in the machined aluminum...
John:
They had a nice situation where so many things they made started as a block of aluminum and these computer-controlled milling machines would carve out what they wanted.
John:
And they do that for so many products.
John:
And that's good because then you've got sort of a solid thing to invest in, a thing to become good at.
John:
They buy all these machines, the machines get faster, so on and so forth.
John:
Part of the thing that Greg was talking about in the post is exactly how long does it take to go from raw material to a part material.
John:
And ceramic takes longer than machining aluminum because you got to do the whole baking process or molding and all sorts of other stuff.
John:
And anyway, looking for the next material, there's a lot of research in that.
John:
Like, oh, I mentioned less carbon fiber, some kind of ceramic, different things with plastics.
John:
I don't think they've found what their next thing is going to be, but surely they are looking for it because they're looking for something that is like a net win over aluminum.
John:
Aluminum is pretty great.
John:
It has some good things going for it.
John:
It removes away heat.
John:
It's easy to machine to high tolerances.
John:
It's sort of a known quantity.
John:
They can mess with the formulation of the aluminum.
John:
as greg points out and not have to replace the machines right because they can all still mill they've only changed from 6 000 to 6 000 to 7 000 series aluminum they could still use all the same machines um but it's got downsides too it's not radio transparent it bends um scratchability if you're going to have a high gloss finish they haven't sorted that out or whatever so anyway
John:
I feel like during all this time when we're in this aluminum and glass age, Apple has to be looking for what the next thing is.
John:
Eventually, presumably, they'll find it.
John:
And when they do find it, there is going to be, you know, a long ramp up into switching over.
John:
I don't think, you know, as this thing points out, if what he's saying about the time required to manufacture it, I don't think they can use ceramic unless they solve that problem.
John:
Because time is one of the problems they can't really fix, right?
John:
So...
John:
If they decided some kind of ceramic combined with some other material, like ceramic, like he says, the end ceramic at the outside or something else on the inside, if they decided this was a thing because it has more desirable qualities, they have to get it down to the point where they can manufacture it as quickly and easily as aluminum or within that ballpark.
John:
Because they're not going to go backwards by like a 2x or 10x manufacturing time.
John:
They just can't sustain that.
John:
And I think he's right that if they have made that decision, there's going to be such a long lead time that we'll all know about it.
John:
But as discussed last week, the next one's going to be glass.
John:
Glass is a thing they already know about.
John:
They already did with the 4 and the 4S.
John:
There's glass in the current phones.
John:
Whatever.
John:
That's the rumor.
John:
It's not a big change.
John:
They've done it before.
John:
It's an existing material.
John:
if they were going to do anything with ceramic and the watch was a trial run don't even think about it until like after you have two rounds of this glass phone the the whatever and the whatever s or you know actually i'm we're totally off the rhythm now because they kept the phone the same and realize this is not uh an s generation it's actually the seven even though it looks the same as a success anyway we're all confused now um
John:
but yeah i still think that somewhere out there in our future is apple's next material uh remember the liquid metal rumors he mentions them as well they bought that liquid metal company and they had you know they made the sim i think they made the uh the sim extractor tool i have liquid metal not really a big uh return on investment for that company but that was another possibility can we can we make can we like injection mold metal and come out with a part that has all the fine details already on it because it's liquid metal and it flows in it's like plastic but you get you know anyway
John:
none of those things have won yet.
John:
I think the ceramic watch tells us that of all the possible future materials, maybe ceramic had enough promise to say, well, even if we've eliminated it as a possibility for our phone, we can make a cool watch out of it because as Marco pointed out, it's not an unknown material in the watch world and they can give it a try.
John:
But the requirements for a successor to aluminum on the phone
John:
are pretty stringent uh and it could be that we have to we have to go through a whole series of generations of this glass phone before we even look at you know carbon fiber or plastic that doesn't look like plastic or whatever else they're going to do
John:
so speaking of phones have you made it to the apple store i don't recall i still have not i'm i'm a solo parenting again so like i just haven't had time to be running around and going to stores i still have not actually made to the apple store i think i'm going to eventually because my wife is finally starting to look at like watches and bands and stuff and complaining about the combinations that she would like to exist that don't and complaining about the sport band colors that seem not to exist anymore
John:
and so on anyway that probably means i'm going to end up in an apple store at some point with her looking at watches and that's that's probably what will get me there to mess with the phone fair enough i'm curious to hear what you think um after you go and do it so uh my co-worker jamie has a jet black i have a matte black
Casey:
every time i look at my matte black i am convinced that it is i think in my personal estimation my favorite iphone ever i just think it looks amazing and i love it to death and then for some reason or another i'll i'll grab jamie's phone and then i'll wish so badly that it was even a half as tacky as sticky as jamie's phone is
Casey:
Because, man, that Jet Black is so nice to hold.
Casey:
I still prefer the aesthetics of the matte, but gosh, that Jet Black is so nice to hold.
Casey:
Have you considered pine tar?
Casey:
Yeah, that might be the fix, right?
Marco:
I'll tell you what, too.
Marco:
Now that we're a few weeks in, my Jet Black one...
Marco:
you know how many times i've looked at the back zero i looked this morning just like it was like it was upside down on on the bed i was doing i was getting dressed and i noticed i'm like you know how does how does the back look now after a few weeks of use and i look and it's like there's like three fingerprints on it but it's not that bad and like i hadn't i hadn't just wrapped it off or anything this was like like organic discovery of the back of this phone and in the wild and
Marco:
And like there was, there were a few fingerprints on it and it's fine.
Marco:
And there's a few small scratches that you can see in certain light and they're fine too.
Marco:
And it doesn't matter at all.
Marco:
But every single time I pick it up and hold it, which is constantly during the day, I am so glad it feels as good as it does.
Casey:
Yeah, I can understand that.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It's a tough call.
Casey:
I think, to be honest, Jet Black or Matt Black, it's kind of a win-win.
Casey:
I mean, because I think the Jet Black absolutely wins on comfort.
Casey:
I think the Matt Black wins on aesthetics, personally, although it's a close call.
Casey:
So it's a win-win no matter how you slice it.
John:
Yeah, I'd agree with that.
John:
Before we move on from the materials that your phone has made out of, assuming the glass rumors are true and they do the glass thing, what do you guys think is the most likely successor material to aluminum and glass?
Casey:
Oh, golly.
John:
Like after that?
John:
Yeah, like after whatever this next one is, however long the glass era lasts, assuming the rumors are true.
John:
Because I have to think that Apple continues to look for the next material and they will find it eventually.
John:
It's not going to be aluminum and glass forever and ever.
Marco:
I don't think we can say for sure, I mean, on an infinite timescale, but I don't think we can say for sure that they necessarily have to replace aluminum.
Marco:
I mean, there are certain things in the world that just end up being made of certain materials for a very, very long time just because that makes sense for physical characteristics or for manufacturing ease or for cost or availability or scale or whatever else.
Marco:
Like, there are certain things that always end up being made of that material.
Marco:
Like, airplanes are made out of aluminum because there's lots of reasons for that and, like, that's
Marco:
There's nothing saying that's going to replace aluminum for airplanes unless there is.
Marco:
Please, airplane nerds, don't tell me.
John:
Let me believe one thing.
John:
I mean, there is.
John:
Your airplane example is a good one because for a long time, airplanes were made of metal until people started working carbon fiber into airplanes, into actual airplanes.
John:
It's not like they're all made of carbon fiber now, but that became a viable material for important parts of airplanes.
John:
Whereas, you know, in the beginning of our parents' lives, that material didn't even exist and wasn't used in airplanes at all.
John:
And aviation is really slow to adopt new materials.
John:
But slowly but surely, basically over the course of our entire life, suddenly carbon fiber is part of the formula of making up a plane.
John:
Um, I think phones are less conservative than airplanes.
John:
Um, and especially since, uh, you know, airplanes have the constraint that they have to like transport something, otherwise why they even exist, whether it's people or cargo.
John:
Right.
John:
But phones, the form factor of a phone, I mean, in some respects until it is sending images, you know, into directly into our brain, it has to have something that we can look at.
John:
you know assuming we don't go to glasses or something but everything else about it is kind of up for grabs like aluminum you know if if the electronics for a phone fit into something uh the thickness of a credit card aluminum is not the material for you because once you get to the thickness of a credit card you can't make that out of aluminum anymore because it will bend and stay bent and so it's a non-starter period you cannot do it out of aluminum right so
John:
If we get to that in our lifetime, which I think is reasonable, we'll be old men, but you can keep making these things thinner and smaller and lighter weight and new screen technology and so on and so forth.
John:
We can get them pretty thin.
John:
And once they get to a certain thinness, you can't use aluminum anymore.
John:
And then you probably don't want to use glass because it's just too fragile.
John:
So you have to go to a material that's bendy and bounces back.
John:
um and you'd probably want to also go to something that's lighter so i i don't you know it's reasonable to say though you could say in the next 20 years it's aluminum glass that's it or just glass and whatever they sandwich between it is that what you're saying you can't envision anything in the next like 20 years or so that's not aluminum glass or some combination
Marco:
I don't really know enough about materials and the science behind them and the status of current technologies.
Marco:
Carbon fiber is a great example.
Marco:
That might be it.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I know carbon fiber is, right now, it's not used in mass quantities in a lot of places because of various newness and cost issues and things like that.
Marco:
But I don't know enough about it to know whether that's likely to be overcome in the next few years.
Marco:
I really don't know.
Marco:
Carbon fiber, I think, would have many of the same advantages of ceramic in that I assume it's radio transparent.
Marco:
I assume it can be very thin and light and strong based on the little I know about it.
Marco:
So it seems like it could be really cool, but I don't know if they can make enough of it.
Marco:
I mean, if you think about where you might see it first, certainly the iPhone is a very high-profit, very high-profile, prestigious device.
Marco:
But it wouldn't surprise me if you saw carbon fiber first appear in something lower volume that could maybe sell for even more.
Marco:
Maybe a MacBook Pro.
Marco:
Maybe you see a MacBook Pro lid casing or bottom casing or maybe even the entire case made of carbon fiber.
Marco:
I have no idea.
Marco:
But that would be a place where you could actually really use more of a weight savings and you could charge more and have more of a profit margin to kind of cover the cost of it.
Marco:
And you wouldn't need to make as many of them as you would make with the iPhone.
Marco:
So I think if they're going to use something like carbon fiber, we're probably going to see it first somewhere else, not in the phone.
Marco:
But I really have no idea.
Casey:
Yeah, I was going to say carbon fiber as well.
Casey:
But I am not confident in that idea because I thought that carbon fiber is just a nightmare to work with.
Casey:
And doesn't it like splinter really badly?
Casey:
Or maybe I guess that's fiberglass, which I am not recommending.
Casey:
I'm just saying.
Casey:
I just thought it was a nightmare to work with.
Marco:
I think carbon fiber does shatter, though.
Marco:
Isn't that one of the problems?
Casey:
Maybe that's it.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I mean, it's an interesting thought exercise for sure.
Casey:
But I think this is three blind men leading themselves around in a circle.
Casey:
You know, I don't like Marco said, I don't know anything about materials, really.
Casey:
So I'm not sure what's even reasonable.
Casey:
What would you say, John?
John:
I basically agree with all the things that you touched on.
John:
Like, I was thinking the exact same thing as Marco in terms of, like, that's why I was getting at with the credit card type thing.
John:
Aluminum is great right up to the point where you start reaching a certain minimum thinness, and then you have the bending problem, right?
John:
Because aluminum is not all about springing back.
John:
And we have a good analogy in the car industry where
John:
uh for many many years cars were made of steel and then more exotic cars incorporated aluminum parts which were weird and harder to manufacture don't you remember like when we were kids like audi had aluminum cars and it was like oh but those are a nightmare to do body work on because everyone knows how to do steel and aluminum is harder to work with and all the sorts of reasons that like
John:
you know mechanics and body repair people would tell you that aluminum cars are pain in the butt uh fast forward to today aluminum is everywhere it is trickling down the car line uh it's not just on exotic supercars anymore what's on exotic supercars these days exotic supercars are essentially entirely made out of carbon fiber like the the konaseg one has carbon fiber wheels for crying out loud like um and you say okay that's fine for carbon fiber for exotic cars but carbon fiber just like aluminum before i feel like will be
John:
trickling down and like you said on cars very often especially on very expensive fancy cars it'll be aluminum and steel but on the lightweight model they will replace certain parts with carbon fiber very often the roof the hood things that are thin not really load bearing but very large like marco was saying with the back of a macro pro
John:
um and i mean cars you're not supposed to touch them to anything so they shouldn't be bending but macbooks if they make them really thin like think of the current macbook that's starting to push the limits of bendiness if you want to go much thinner and you probably will be able to considering like that the iphone is probably faster than the current macbook and the iphone is a really small that a10 is really small um if you want to go much thinner um
John:
And you want to make a more lightweight version of that that's more resilient, making the top case of a MacBook Pro out of carbon fiber starts to make sense.
John:
And because carbon fiber, I think, is inevitably going to trickle down the automotive ladder in our lifetime.
John:
It's just the way the industry goes.
John:
There will be an ever increasing expertise in dealing with and manufacturing carbon fiber.
John:
So that's, that's my number one pick for the successor because the things will get thinner.
John:
It has the advantage of radio transparency.
John:
It's really light.
John:
It's really strong.
John:
The difficulty is you can't like machine fine details into it.
John:
It's more of a pain to deal with, but like,
John:
hoping that the rest of the manufacturing industry starting with aviation and supercars and coming down to regular cars or whatever will will start to work out the details of a carbon fiber manufacturing process that makes it viable in a way that it is not now that makes it viable for uh manufacturing phones well the chat room says carbon fiber is not radio transparent so i don't know that's that may be another thing that they can uh tackle um they could always just have antenna lines smoothly etched into the carbon fiber like they do with the aluminum today um
John:
but anyway there we go ceramic antenna lines inside a carbon fiber pleat yeah yeah ceramic ceramic the reason we were even talking about that is because apple introduced this really shiny phone that scratches really easily and we're like oh well it would be nice if it could be smooth but also not scratchy and then that's how we get into the whole carbon fiber thing oh carbon fiber shatters and chips and so on and so forth um all of these all these different properties i feel like within the realm of
John:
metals and ceramic and even plastics that's my second pick by the way carbon fiber is my exciting pick my boring pick is as you get really really thin you know what for something the size of a phone not necessarily the size of a laptop or something the size of a phone maybe not the big phone plastic has a lot has a lot of desirable qualities plastic we know all about plastic it scratches more easily than than the hard metals it will shatter eventually but it bends and springs back and can and can take a beating
John:
and you still got the problem of the screen floating out there we haven't even been talking about mostly just talking about the back of the thing i don't see any anything other than glass for the front of the thing until the whole thing is a bendy piece of plastic and then you can't have it be glass at all because the whole thing is like you could roll it up or whatever and you can't make that out of glass and then we just have to accept that it's plastic and they're so cheap that if you get it scratched up you just go to the uh apple store and they give you a new one for 50 bucks or something but we'll be dead then so don't worry about it
Marco:
We respond to this week by Betterment, investing made better.
Marco:
Go to betterment.com slash ATP to learn more.
Marco:
Betterment has changed the investing industry by making investing easier and at a lower cost than traditional financial services.
Marco:
Betterment manages your investments with the same strategies that financial advisors use with clients who have millions of dollars, and now they're bringing that to you.
Marco:
You might be hearing about Betterment in the press, such as the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and TechCrunch that have covered them recently.
Marco:
Betterment is the largest independent automated investing service out there, managing more than $5.5 billion for over 180,000 customers.
Marco:
Now, the financial services industry has embraced technology and innovation through the creation of these automated investing platforms, meaning that you keep more of your money with fees that are a fraction of what you pay for traditional financial services.
Marco:
Any excess cash your investment generates is automatically reinvested.
Marco:
So every dollar you invest is put to work and your portfolio is automatically rebalanced as needed.
Marco:
Investing involves risk.
Marco:
Right now you can get up to six months of no fees.
Marco:
To learn more, visit Betterment.com slash ATP.
Marco:
That's Betterment.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Betterment investing made better.
Casey:
There's been a brouhaha.
Casey:
There's been a kerfuffle.
Casey:
There's been—I'm out of adjectives.
Casey:
So there's been a thing.
Casey:
And Apple and an independent developer are kind of sort of duking it out.
Casey:
And that's not usually happy for anyone involved, and particularly for those watching from the sidelines.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
because oftentimes this has pretty big implications on your own business.
Casey:
So I'm trying to think that there's so many angles to this story, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to summarize.
Casey:
And we'll put links in the show notes to MJ Sy's summary post.
Casey:
There's two of them, and they're really good, Michael Sy's.
Casey:
But the super, super quick version, and then we'll add details in a moment, is that this gentleman, Bogdan, and I don't have his last name in front of me, but anyway.
Casey:
Popescu.
Casey:
He had released many apps, maybe, but certainly, indisputedly, was the author of an app called Dash, which I actually haven't used, which is probably criminal, because from everything I've ever heard, it is phenomenal.
Casey:
And I don't say that sarcastically.
Casey:
What do you use, the built-in Xcode documentation like an animal?
Casey:
No, Safari, usually, because I don't trust the built-in stuff search abilities.
Casey:
But anyway, again... Because it sucks.
Casey:
Well, yeah.
Casey:
So I will be the first to admit I'm missing out on this.
Casey:
And again, I'm not trying to be sarcastic.
Casey:
Genuinely, from everything I've ever heard from anyone who has ever touched Dash, it is phenomenal.
Casey:
Well, all of a sudden, his developer account got shut down.
Casey:
Maybe.
Casey:
That's a little bit up for debate.
Casey:
But all of a sudden, it gets shut down.
Casey:
He...
Casey:
kind of tries to talk to Apple, doesn't really get a lot of information out of them, eventually starts posting about it.
Casey:
So now people, other independent developers like Marco, for example, are starting to say, hey, this doesn't feel right.
Casey:
What's going on here?
Casey:
Eventually, he gets in contact with Apple.
Casey:
Things seem to be making forward progress.
Casey:
Then Apple goes to the press and says, well, he's getting booted from the App Store because he's done some really nefarious stuff.
Casey:
Meanwhile, Bogdan is thinking, well, I thought we were still in the midst of a dialogue.
Casey:
What's going on here?
Casey:
So then he escalates and writes his own post.
Casey:
Again, links will be in the show notes.
Casey:
Writes his own post that includes, among other things, a roughly 10-minute phone call, recording of a 10-minute phone call between him and an Apple representative, which...
Casey:
i'm not sure that was the most morally sound choice but i can understand why he did it um and then since all this has happened the armchair archaeologists have been digging into what's going on and whether or not things are awry because it seems to be that the disconnect is that
Casey:
There were two accounts that were linked in some way, shape, or form.
Casey:
The method of that link and how tenuous that link was is up for debate, but it seems clear that there's absolutely a link between two different developer accounts.
Casey:
And
Casey:
One of the accounts, it seems like everyone involved isn't debating that it was involved in some kind of shady practices, trying to buy good reviews for their own apps, trying to put bad reviews for competitors' apps, and just generally being shady.
Casey:
Now, Bogdan's perspective is, hey, I opened that account for a relative of mine.
Casey:
I did it using my credit card because in other countries, having a credit card isn't necessarily a given like it sort of is in America.
Casey:
And after that, I walked away.
Casey:
They're the ones that are doing all this nefarious, terrible things.
Casey:
I'm just collateral damage here, and that's not fair.
Casey:
So there was some back and forth, like I said, between Apple and he.
Casey:
Apple apparently wanted him to write a blog post saying, basically, hey, Apple...
Casey:
He just got confused, but we've straightened it out.
Casey:
It's all good now.
Casey:
And then he allegedly would have been allowed to get back in the app store.
Casey:
This is before he escalated with the phone call.
Casey:
And I believe before Apple escalated by going to the press.
Casey:
So there's a lot of other avenues here.
Casey:
The armchair archaeologists seem to have found a lot of different ways that point to all the shady apps actually having been him as well and not some other relative, and we can go into that if need be.
Casey:
But this is one of those situations where everyone seems wrong, everyone seems right, and nobody's clear what the real story is, which makes it very interesting.
Casey:
And many people have joked that maybe Serial Season 3 will be about this, but...
Casey:
But but it's hard to make heads or tails of it.
Casey:
And and I'm not sure if I had to choose sides who I side with.
Casey:
And I think the reality of the situation is I kind of side with both and side with neither all at once, which I know is kind of a cop out.
Casey:
But that's really how I feel.
Casey:
So let's start by asking before we get into our opinions about this.
Casey:
Is that a relatively OK summary?
Casey:
Did I miss any really important points?
Marco:
I think you got it.
Marco:
I mean, I think your characterization of what Apple wanted him to do in that blog post is not quite there, but close enough.
Casey:
All right, John, any other thoughts?
John:
I was going to say, some of the... It's not clear.
John:
We have the rough timeline of events from the outside, but because Apple is so tight-lipped about everything...
John:
i i still feel like we don't really have their side of the story and they're never going to give it to us right so we it's kind of like we have the black hole that is apple and then we have a leak of their private communications with this recording and then we have the discussion for the developer but apple's never apple's not going to for instance like you characterize where like oh then apple went to the press with this thing that said this thing like
John:
We have no idea if that statement was written and distributed through the bureaucracy before that call even took place.
John:
And Apple's not going to clarify.
John:
They're not going to go, oh, by the way, you may think you've heard this, but really, actually, they're not going to tell us.
John:
It's like none of our business, what goes on inside their company.
John:
And also, I feel like the communication, their public communication to all the different sites, if you look at it, my recollection is that it basically...
John:
It doesn't tell you the details to let you know all the nuances that the developer's blog post went into.
John:
But it also doesn't say anything that is false from the perspective of Apple with their terminology, which I'm sure we'll get into later.
John:
Like, from Apple's perspective, this is their rule system.
John:
These are the set of rules.
John:
They matched on this particular set of behavior.
John:
They took this action.
John:
and that's what they're distributing and apple was basically putting that out in response to the original kerfuffle about uh oh no a developer is getting squished again and so i would say that like it's difficult to know it's difficult to know apple side of the story like we can get the developer side because the developer not only is free to say uh whatever he wants to the public but seems very willing to
Marco:
to say and do whatever he feels like the public which fine but apple is totally unwilling to do that so i still feel like we are all at a disadvantage on the outside in terms of knowing what the real deal is yeah i mean i i think trying to figure out all the details of what happened is not productive for any of us possibly even them um because you know we weren't there these are private communications for the most part we have seen very little of them we don't really know
Marco:
This developer, well, we use his app, but none of us know him to know for sure how complete he's probably being.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
And we also don't know if Apple's being complete and truthful in their statements.
Marco:
We have no way to evaluate these really.
Marco:
So all we can really do is try to judge this.
Marco:
Or first, we can just ignore it, which is one valid option.
Marco:
um i i think our the the community's initial reaction of hey this looks like a mistake because this app you know before we knew about the second account with all the other crazy apps like this app is really good and has lots of legitimate five-star reviews what need would this person have to buy fake reviews or to get suspended like it seemed ridiculous and so we were all yelling last week on twitter and
Marco:
hey, this doesn't look right.
Marco:
Can somebody at Apple look into this again or explain this?
Marco:
That was the main gist of everyone's demands last week when this blew up.
John:
Well, the reason anyone was talking about it all is because he made an initial blog post.
John:
He said, you might be wondering what happened to the Dash.
John:
Here's the deal.
John:
I'm not sure what's going on.
John:
But they said, my account is pulled and I can't appeal the process.
John:
So that's why we knew about it at all.
John:
Because he went to the public and said to explain why his apps are suddenly not available.
John:
Because people use his app and it's popular.
John:
And that's the main thing I think we can take away from this entire thing is how the Apple developer community reacts to it.
John:
Because this reaction doesn't happen in a vacuum.
John:
It's got the context of all the past history.
John:
So when we all collectively saw this story from a developer, and the reason we saw it is because we all travel in developer circles online and read developer blogs.
John:
Anyway, when we saw that, because of the past history of...
John:
App Store rule enforcement and policies that, you know, that don't seem right to developers or, you know, the history of conflict, the history of arbitrary decisions that don't make any sense or that are punitive to developers in ways they shouldn't be or...
John:
you know honest mistakes or whatever that context is why we had this reaction because it's not this this event is not a thing this event just highlights hey how does the apple developer community feel about apple and the app store at this moment in time are they inherently suspicious do they give apple the benefit of the doubt do they give developers and like it so clearly showed that the current context despite positive changes is that
John:
we will all readily believe that the giant faceless bureaucracy that is the apple app store uh can and does do things that are you know best case mistakes or worst case like just wrong-headed decisions right so that's that i feel like was it you know part of it marco you're right is that like this is a good app and we kind of like
John:
you know do virtue transfer like application good therefore developer good which is not a valid transfer but you're like it just didn't seem like if you've got a quality app that people like uh that you're known for what reason do you have to like cheat on reviews or anything even before we knew that but like it just seemed like all right and and but i really think the most important thing is that the apple should take away from this is that
John:
developers still don't trust that we are going to do the right thing and that when they see anything that even looks like one of those past situations where we've been in the wrong or done something that was not productive they will immediately believe it so
John:
They'll know they have made progress when a similar event happens and the reaction from the developer community is not immediate suspicion that Apple has screwed a small developer again.
Marco:
To Apple's credit, though,
Marco:
This ability to totally terminate somebody's developer account is probably used every day for lots of different fraudulent accounts that are conducting fraud or spam or scams or something like that.
Marco:
They probably terminate developer accounts every day.
Marco:
and i can't think i mean maybe i'm wrong please let me know if i'm wrong i can't remember a single previous instance in the eight years of the app store where it seemed like someone's developer account was terminated wrongly has that ever happened that we that we learned about well i mean the equivalent is like uh we're rejecting your update even though you've got to crash it for some annoying reason yeah they didn't terminate your developer account but but but effectively effectively it's the same thing and no i mean this is more severe this is what this is much more severe
John:
It is, but, like, see, the reason I think you don't see people complaining about termination is because I think you're right.
John:
Termination happens all the time, but it happens to known bad actors, and it's part of the cost of doing business to known bad actors.
John:
Bad actors get their accounts terminated all the time.
John:
They just open a new one.
John:
Like, that's their business is open up a new account, do something against the rules for as long as you can.
John:
When your account gets closed, open up another one.
John:
Like, that's their entire MO.
John:
Like, that's the life cycle of the fraudster on the App Store is...
John:
Right.
John:
And so, of course, they're not going to complain about it.
John:
Why would they?
John:
That's just like how the system works from their perspective.
John:
So I think this is just, you know, the legitimate developers have the review problems or whatever, and they'll get shut down.
John:
This looks like a crossover of those two worlds.
John:
The world over there where no one ever complains, but everyone knows, yeah, you're going to get shut down in like a week or two, but sometimes they're slow about it.
John:
You can make a lot of money in the meantime.
John:
And then this world over here where it's like, historically, sometimes Apple reject your legitimate application and be frustrating or whatever.
John:
But eventually you'll get through it, except for the people who are like, you know, apps of this type are no longer allowed, period.
John:
And they just have to stop development.
John:
That's also very similar in terms of like, oh, we don't want you to make launcher apps for a couple of years.
John:
But I don't know.
John:
That's a good example.
John:
But.
John:
that where apple categorically decides that this type of application isn't allowed anymore even though we had previously allowed it um but this is like crossing over of and because and it's not that much of a crossover because there is like you said everyone agrees there's some kind of fraudulent activity on an account somewhere the argument is whether that fraudulent activity should mean that this other account gets closed right so this is the meeting of those worlds the only question is
John:
is that meeting uh you know is it legitimate to do collective punishment because the accounts use the same test devices and the same credit card number which from apple's perspective is the only way they have to tell they can't see who's on the other side of the computer right so you know all they have is data and their data says same test devices same credit card number same legal entity um and you know from a legal perspective like
John:
Not from a practical human perspective, but from a legal perspective, like that's how the Apple ID system works.
John:
That's how developer thing works there.
John:
They want information about you to connect to essentially to connect to an entity that they can sue or that is legally representing.
John:
Right.
John:
And so if you if you.
John:
use all the same information that they use to establish what the entity is for multiple accounts it's all the same entity like that's the whole point of you doing this like if marco has multiple don't you have multiple things for your various yep like right and but that's like if they were all you know separate or combined like that's how things work in the business world we don't care what physical person is sitting for another thing they just care what the legal entity is and where the liability lies right
John:
now the more human side of it is what if you do live in a country where it's not easy at credit cards and you do a favor for somebody and you you're not a lawyer and not thinking about the fact that now you essentially are legally vouching for the activities of this other account right i think apple would be entirely in the right and probably totally in their legalese somewhere that says hey if you use all the same legal and contact information for multiple accounts
John:
you are legally responsible like you know that's you've essentially absorbed the liability for this other person it's as if you started a company and then you know your friend came in and wrote all the code but then you published it as the legal entity you're legally responsible not your friend it's like oh i didn't write all the code he did it's like doesn't matter that's not how the law works right for the most part i'm not a lawyer um
John:
And so in this situation, Apple probably could have just said, these are the rules.
John:
This is the data is irrefutable.
John:
You don't argue it.
John:
You know, we all agree on the facts here.
John:
And so therefore, your account is closed.
John:
But that's not what Apple did.
John:
What Apple did instead is tried to communicate with this developer to work things out because they're and here's the next question.
John:
All right.
John:
So Apple works with the developer to try to work things out.
John:
does do all of us here in the peanut gallery and the apple developer community
John:
Do we immediately suspect that the only reason they were working it out is because this person made a blog post?
John:
Well, this happened beforehand.
Marco:
So here's what happened.
Marco:
And this is... I think if I can look at this whole situation, if I can point to two things that I would say were like bad moves.
Marco:
I think one was Apple's bad move and one was the developer's bad move.
Marco:
Apple's bad move was when they first started detecting all of this fraud on the other account.
Marco:
they did consider the fraud account and the Dash account to be logically linked because they both were made by the same credit card and they both used some of the same test devices.
Marco:
So they considered that enough of a correlation to consider them logically linked.
Marco:
And I think that alone right there, considering an account logically linked for the purpose of fraud detection based on the same credit card being used and the same devices being used, I think that's a reasonable assumption.
Marco:
And I think Apple was totally fine to do that.
Marco:
The error that Apple made that I would say was probably the one big mistake that is Apple's fault in the way this was handled is that when Apple detected the fraud on the other account, they only contacted that account's email address to talk about and try to fix the fraud issue.
Marco:
So when they were issuing the warnings, basically, they only contacted the fraud one, not the other one that was logically linked to it.
John:
But why do you think that's a mistake?
John:
Like you think it's a mistake because it seems like unfair or whatever.
John:
But I think like from, you know, policy wise, I think it is a reasonable policy to have that.
John:
You know, the like who's responsible for the actions on the account?
John:
Well, the responsibility of the actions of the account ties back to whatever legal entity, you know, as we define it as the information you enter when you make your Apple ID.
John:
Right.
John:
If that's their policy.
John:
And then they see fraudulent activity, and then they also have a policy that says if this fraudulent activity, all of the accounts that are tied to that same legal entity get shut down, I don't see anywhere where there's any specific need to carefully communicate with each one of them to give each one of the connected legal entities a chance to explain or something.
John:
That is a nice thing to do, and we all think they should do it in this case, but policy-wise, like...
John:
As many people pointed out, if you get shut down by PayPal or eBay or anything like that, no one's going to give you a nice phone call and ask you to explain yourself to them or whatever to make sure everyone gets a separate communication in case they're separate people.
John:
It's asking Apple to foresee the situation as described by the developer that actually it was two different people and we were just sharing a credit card and I had no idea what was going on in this account for years and so on and so forth.
John:
I think it is a reasonable policy for...
John:
for a business to say, this is just how the rules work.
John:
If you don't like it, you developer have made a mistake by legally vouching for someone and you have no idea what they're doing.
John:
They're committing fraud over years.
John:
You have no idea about it.
John:
That's your bad.
John:
That's not our bad.
John:
We can just shut them all down, right?
John:
Now, I was getting back to what we thought about this when we heard about it is like, why is someone on the phone, because we heard the phone call that he put up on his phone, why is someone on the phone trying to work it out with this person?
John:
It's mostly because...
John:
you know like do we think it's because this is a popular developer and it's a developer who's popular with other developers because they make a developer tool right is that why someone from apple is bending over backwards because you know what makes this one different versus if this had just been uh one of those you know fraud developers who got their account closed or whatever you think apple in all those cases for fraud is on the phone with each one of them saying oh let me hear what you say about it oh we'll try to get your account back i don't think that's happening
John:
And the reason we think that is part of the anger of the old AppReview guidelines that were like, never run to the press, that doesn't help.
John:
Remember that old one that I think they've removed?
John:
Yeah, it's gone.
John:
The guidelines.
John:
That was Steve Jobs-style snarky, we don't like it when you badmouth us in public type of thing.
John:
That's where the root of all of this is coming from.
John:
When we see this, at least for me specifically, when I see this, I think...
John:
Apple is bending over backwards a because they're trying to be nice but be a little bit because this person made a blog post and presented their side of the story and Apple feels like this is you know they don't like looking bad they don't like looking like they don't want to be the bad guy but in cases where they do something like close an account and they just never hear anything about and nobody blogs.
John:
apple you know feels okay about i was like i guess we weren't the bad guy so like the removing of don't run to the press is removed partly because it recognizes that like that's the only way apple has to tell whether something they've done might have been inadvertently meaner than they would want to be right the only way they can tell is if there's public outcry you know because they're they don't know every single developer or whatever like
John:
You can't ask the entire infrastructure at Apple to know every single app and to know what Dash is and how popular it is and that this is a good person.
John:
I can't do that for everybody.
John:
It's too much, right?
John:
And so I think this signal, the public outcry and complaining on Twitter and other developers looking at it askance and thinking maybe it's something weird here, is actually an important feature of the system as it currently exists, quote unquote, working.
John:
And I'm glad that guideline was removed by saying don't run to the press because I think it's an essential part of the process at this point.
Marco:
Yeah, unfortunately it is.
Marco:
But anyway, so back to what happened here.
Marco:
I honestly don't want to spend a whole lot of time on this because I think it's not that very productive.
Marco:
So I think if we can summarize, basically, you know, I think Apple... I disagree with you on them notifying multiple accounts.
Marco:
I think if they're going to shut down an account, which is a severe action, they should notify it beforehand.
Marco:
And so after...
Marco:
the termination and the first round of blog posts, somebody from Apple called the developer and the developer recorded this, which in California is illegal.
Marco:
The developers in Romania where it's legal.
Marco:
The gist of it was that the Apple guy was trying very hard to work this out.
Marco:
You can tell that they wanted to work this out.
Marco:
You know, Apple wanted to make sure that the correct story in their opinion was told.
Marco:
So they suggested maybe he could write a blog post.
Marco:
And they...
Marco:
they basically wanted two key facts to be in the blog post.
Marco:
These accounts were linked, so Apple was not mistaken to suspend it.
Marco:
There was fraud in the linked account, and he was working with Apple to unlink the accounts and get back on the App Store.
Marco:
And they went over this back and forth a few times, and it sounded like the developer was not very happy about the phrasing of this, about the part that Apple didn't make a mistake.
Marco:
And then he says he submitted this draft post, which he later posted on his website.
Marco:
He said he submitted that to them,
Marco:
You could tell on the call, though, that, again, there was definitely friction.
Marco:
He definitely did not seem happy about what he was being asked to agree to.
Marco:
And then a few days later, Apple tells the press, this was indeed justified.
Marco:
There was lots of fraud on this account.
Marco:
We tried to work it out with the developer but couldn't reach a resolution.
Marco:
And that's it.
Marco:
And so I think if you kind of try to connect the dots between those two things, it seems like he and Apple couldn't agree on how he was going to present these facts of the case or how he was going to word things.
Marco:
It seems like Apple most likely...
Marco:
Got whatever he submitted to them, decided this was not going to be resolvable or was not basically decided negotiations were over and this was not going to work out.
Marco:
And then the statement of the press is basically them shutting the door.
Marco:
You know, we're only hearing part of a phone call.
Marco:
We're not hearing what was before or after this part of the call.
Marco:
We're not part of we don't know any of the communication that happened separately from this call.
Marco:
So things could have been more tense and hostile than what's shown here.
Marco:
And what's shown there is slightly tense and hostile from the developer.
Marco:
So I don't know if Apple was in the right or wrong to close the door on this when they did.
Marco:
But that certainly seemed like that is what happened.
Marco:
And based on the two conflicting attitudes in the phone call, I think that's very likely the case, that they just decided this was not going to be resolved, that they were not going to reach agreement, and they were going to...
Marco:
From Apple's point of view, they want to make sure that they control the narrative here.
Marco:
And it was very clear from that recorded call, from the Apple rep on that call, Apple wanted to make very sure that everyone knew that they didn't just slip up and suspend an innocent account, that there was fraud that was linked to this account.
Marco:
and so they they wanted to make very clear that that was the story that got out that the facts were very clear apple did not just mess up because that would be really bad if they just messed up and suspended an account that had no connection to any problems whatsoever and like because that is a very severe action and
Marco:
Clearly, running the App Store in eight years, and this is the first time we're hearing of a bad developer account suspension, clearly they do a pretty good job and they're pretty careful most of the time when taking that action.
Marco:
So they clearly wanted to make sure that fact was out there, that there was indeed real fraud, it was indeed linked to this account, and that basically they were going to unlink the accounts and let this developer move forward.
Marco:
So I think they were actually being very reasonable there.
Marco:
And through whatever reason, whether it was communication or attitudes or whatever it was, they couldn't work it out.
Marco:
And that sucks.
Marco:
And there was a good post today that Rene Ritchie wrote, I think, on iMore, that was basically like, how do we move forward from here?
Marco:
And the gist of it was basically like, look, we all know the facts now.
Marco:
Apple should just reactivate the good account.
Marco:
Just reactivate that account.
Marco:
That's how we move forward.
Marco:
Everyone basically suck it up, stop talking about it, and just reactivate the account because that's best for everybody.
Marco:
Because the other side of this is like...
Marco:
This is a great app, and it's out of the store for this reason that probably shouldn't have happened, or at least this app and this account probably didn't deserve it, assuming the developer's telling the truth and this was some relative and not just him with a different account.
Marco:
And secondly, this really sucks for the customers of this app, because if you bought this app like I did in the Mac App Store, you can't even re-download it.
Marco:
When the developer account is suspended,
Marco:
The app is gone.
Marco:
It doesn't show up in your purchases tab.
Marco:
It doesn't show up in searches.
Marco:
It is gone.
Marco:
You can't redownload it.
Marco:
And that sucks if you bought it.
Marco:
So it does kind of suck the way things are left now, even though I can look back at what Apple did.
Marco:
And I think Apple was in the right based on just the little bit that we can know and the little bits and pieces that you can pick up.
Marco:
I think Apple did pretty much the right thing the whole way through here, with the exception of not notifying all the accounts before termination.
Marco:
But besides that, I think Apple was in the right, and they seemed to handle it very well, and they seemed to put in way more effort.
Marco:
I mean, the guy on the phone was saying that Phil Schiller was personally involved in trying to get this solved, and I believe that.
Marco:
Knowing the way these things work, I believe that.
Marco:
And so the fact that you could have somebody like Phil Schiller trying to get this fixed, and Apple devising this way that they can resolve this and get back in the store, and presenting it to the developer, that sounded very reasonable.
Marco:
It really did seem like Apple was going above and beyond to try to fix this, and they really didn't need to.
Marco:
This, like...
Marco:
It's nice that they did, and I hope that if I ever am on the wrong end of this, I hope they do the same thing for me.
Marco:
But it's really, really above and beyond.
Marco:
They didn't have to do this.
Marco:
They didn't have to give this guy away back in.
Marco:
They didn't have to call him and offer this kind of olive branch and say, all right, look, if you can just agree to these few statements, then you can get back in.
Marco:
They didn't need to do any of that, and they did it all.
Marco:
They really obviously wanted to solve this in a decent way.
Marco:
And again, through whatever reason, they could not reach agreement with the developer on something that I think... Honestly, I think the developer made a huge mistake in the way that he handled that, and I think he should have just said what they wanted him to say because it wasn't bad or incorrect.
John:
So from outside of this, again, looking at like, oh, when we all heard the story, what do we all think?
John:
And what does that say about how we view Apple?
John:
Now, sort of at the conclusion of this, I think...
John:
Apple kind of got a positive result here.
John:
Because in the beginning, we're all like, oh, Apple's doing something bad in the App Store again, and we've seen that story so many times, and we're immediately suspicious, right?
John:
By the end of it, especially for any developer who is paying enough attention to read all the details that we just discussed and read the blog post, by the end of it, I think most legitimate developers come away thinking, if this happens to me, it seems like Apple will give me...
John:
a legitimate chance.
John:
First of all, I think most developers understand that
John:
the developer made a mistake here like not a mistake but like that essentially by by uh by tying himself legally to the other account he is he is essentially responsible for it right and i'm hoping that most developers would understand that like that if you use your credit card number and your test device maybe that's not obvious to anybody but after the story i guess it is so maybe before the story you could say no but now understanding like you know you see that they were tied to that and yet despite that
John:
Apple made an effort to try to make things right.
John:
And I think that whole thing is comforting to developers who feel like, you know, legitimate developers who would never do anything wrong like that.
John:
But they're like, if I find myself in this situation where I have, you know, unintentionally gotten myself entangled in the way that either I didn't understand or I trusted somebody that I shouldn't have trusted, which, you know, this happens to everybody, right?
Right.
John:
will i just be sol or will i be able to will apple be reasonable with me and the with the exception of the fact that it's not clear that apple would have been engaged at all if he hadn't quote unquote run to the press which really just means put a post on his own personal blog and have a popular app like with the exception of that what i still think is a concern like hey what about my obscure app nobody loves my app like they love dash when i post on my blog no one will even notice maybe i would still be sol right
John:
But with the exception of that caveat, I think Apple's actions are essentially reassuring legitimate developers that Apple will try to be reasonable.
John:
And what Marco said is like, if the goal of this developer was to be able to continue his business...
John:
his business of selling software and his popular application, he made bad choices.
John:
You can, I mean, you can decide, do you, do you want to be right and be like righteous and be like, I refuse to admit to even any kind of wrongdoing or being linked or, you know, Apple's being on four, or do you just want your account back?
John:
Because they weren't asking him to say anything that's not true.
John:
They weren't asking him to take blame for anything that he doesn't have blame for.
John:
They were a hundred percent believing his story, taking it at face value saying, okay, great.
John:
You gave an account to somebody else or whatever.
John:
We're going to get your account back.
John:
all you all we want you to do is to make it clear like marco said that the facts of the situation were what they were there was a reason for apple to do what it did and that everyone involves like not to make it seem like apple made a terrible mistake but we all worked it out and then have apple come out of it which i kind of think is totally reasonable and he just he made bad choices if his goal was to get his business back he he could have gotten it back
John:
doing things that are reasonable telling the truth they were allowing him to write whatever he wanted as long as he hit those two key points which everybody involved in the conversation agreed on and he didn't do it did he not do it because he was just too proud or stubborn or thought it was he would end up you know coming out of it looking bad or whatever who knows but like if his goal was to get his business back he blew it but i i still think like outside of this
John:
that most developers maybe you know marco can answer because he's obviously the only you know one with a application on the app store of any significance that's specifically tied to him and has long experience do you feel reassured by the outcome of this that apple would be reasonable if you found yourself in this situation or is it neutral or do you feel worse that like that you know that you didn't realize this could happen but now you think it could happen to you and you'd be screwed
Marco:
I think you nailed it.
Marco:
The reason Apple cared so much about this was because they know how bad it would be if it appeared that they were capriciously suspending developer accounts for no reason.
Marco:
That would be terrible.
Marco:
for their reputation among developers.
Marco:
They knew how important it was to make sure that the official story here, which was true, was that Apple did not make a mistake in detecting this fraud and suspending this account.
Marco:
That was not a mistake on their part.
Marco:
They did not mess up.
Marco:
They were not being capricious.
Marco:
They actually detected real fraud and on a linked account that was really linked in a way that is substantial.
Marco:
And so they wanted that story to be true, that this was not just them being wrong.
Marco:
And again, the way they handled it, as I said, I think they handled it very well, better than they had to.
Marco:
And so because of those two things, yes, I feel good about this.
Marco:
You can say, as a developer working on the App Store, there's always a certain kind of minimum level of App Store BS that everyone has to put up with, mostly around the reviews and the policies and everything else.
Marco:
But
Marco:
It really, in the grand scheme of things, that BS tends to be, most of the time, consistent and easy to work within for most developers.
Marco:
And it's a known quantity.
Marco:
It's not usually capricious or dangerous, about to kill your business at any moment, unless you're doing things really close to the edges of the rules, which most people aren't and don't need to.
Marco:
for the most part the the apple as a gatekeeper does pretty well as gatekeepers go the whole concept of a gatekeeper to begin with is problematic sorry merlin uh it is you know that it is challenging to get that right and there's always going to be dysfunction and problems by having any gatekeeper but if you're going to have a gatekeeper i think apple does a pretty good job of it um possibly even a very good job of it and i
Marco:
As a developer on these platforms, I am reassured by this story that Apple really does care to get things right and to make sure that they're doing right by the community as much as they can.
Marco:
So I consider this a positive thing as a developer.
Marco:
I consider it a bit of a pain in the butt as a customer of Dash.
Marco:
But otherwise, I consider it a positive thing as a developer.
John:
That's why you should never buy your Mac apps in the Mac app store.
John:
Once again, we learned that lesson.
John:
If it's available outside the Mac app store.
John:
buy it outside the mac app store you'll just be happier which which is a problem for apple it's like ironic that like this is exposing like you know that like this is something they can fix apple internally like oh when we suspend a developer account shouldn't we still allow the l apps to be downloaded they can fix that internally that seems like something they you know if they cared about the mac app store at all that they would fix uh but but yeah it's kind of sad that it's they're they're kind of highlighting the the problems with the mac app store by doing the right thing and detecting and uh fraud and canceling accounts
John:
We are also sponsored tonight by Pingdom.
Marco:
Go to pingdom.com slash ATP for a 14-day free trial with 20% off your first invoice with code ATP.
Marco:
Pingdom is a great website monitoring service.
Marco:
You can monitor your websites and servers.
Marco:
Pingdom makes it faster and more reliable for everyone to run web servers by offering powerful, easy-to-use monitoring tools and services for anybody with a website.
Marco:
pingdom can for example monitor availability and performance of your server or your database or your website from more than 70 global test servers they can emulate visits to your site to check its availability as often as every minute and you can do things like have query parameters have cookies you can have it check for certain strings on the site to make sure certain things are passing and are working properly it's incredibly flexible and incredibly powerful
Marco:
Now, developers know that websites are becoming more and more sophisticated and are often made up of several different components.
Marco:
And when any one of them encounters an outage, it can affect the whole site.
Marco:
So with Pingdom, you can monitor the availability and performance of key interactions.
Marco:
You can have it submit contact forms.
Marco:
You can have it check out of an e-commerce site.
Marco:
You can have it log in to perform searches and a whole lot more.
Marco:
And stuff breaks in the internet all the time.
Marco:
Every month,
Marco:
pingdom detects more than 13 million outages it's more than 400 000 outages a day so whether your web presence is a small website or a complete infrastructure you should really monitor its availability and performance i use pingdom i've used it since oh geez 2008 or something a very very long time ago 2007 something like that i used it back in the tumblr days now i use it for all my stuff now it is great i use pingdom all the time and i hope to never hear from them but what i do is when you hear from them something's down but
Marco:
When I do hear from them, I'm really glad that they're there.
Marco:
When I get the message saying, hey, this thing is down, go check it, it is very, very nice.
Marco:
It can alert you via text message, app push notification, email, any combination of those things.
Marco:
It is very customizable and just awesome.
Marco:
I've used them, again, for a very long time.
Marco:
All you do is give Pingdom a URL to monitor and optional conditions to check for, or you can just check to see if it's up.
Marco:
And when they detect an outage, they tell you immediately so you can fix the problem before it becomes a much bigger and more costly problem for you.
Marco:
You should not be learning that your site is down from people on Twitter.
Marco:
You should be the first to know.
Marco:
And you can be with Pingdom.
Marco:
And you can fix it before too many of your customers see it.
Marco:
Check it out today.
Marco:
Go to pingdom.com slash ATP for a 14-day free trial and get 20% off your first invoice with offer code ATP.
Marco:
Thanks to Pingdom for sponsoring.
Casey:
So, Marco, tell us about Dropbox.
Marco:
Here's the thing.
Marco:
Dropbox is making questionable choices in recent times.
Marco:
There was a thing a couple weeks back where Dropbox was basically discovered to be hacking the Mac Accessibility Apps database.
Marco:
This is actually, I believe it's fixed in Sierra.
Marco:
But basically...
Marco:
mac os 10 has a certain separate security level for accessibility related apps and this allows apps to to see way more system events things like capturing keyboard input and stuff like that like you basically if you are an accessibility app you can
Marco:
basically see and and intercept and track everything happening on the system uh things that are considered secure you can you can still um you know you have access to them whereas most apps would not be able to do things like log every keystroke in that's you know ever typed in or things like that right
Marco:
um and so dropbox in order to to achieve certain features or something dropbox was forcefully injecting itself into the list of of apps uh using a prompt to prompt you for your password that looked like the system password box and no it was the system password box that's why i put this thing it was it was yeah
John:
Oh, okay.
John:
So, like, this... I had this... Before Marco started getting cranky about Dropbox, I had an item in the notes that is actually still below there about Dropbox's accessibility quote-unquote hack.
John:
Because the first stories about this were, like, so this is the observed behavior, which everyone agrees is crappy.
John:
The observed behavior is...
John:
uh dropbox uh it wants you to turn on accessibility but if you say no uh it will you know and take and take it out the next time it comes up it will just try to put itself back like if you go to the system preferences and remove it right and then you just reboot like it'll be back again and so that is user hostile behavior because the user disabled it and then unbeknownst to them maybe you just launch it again and it puts itself back and so the question was among
John:
the people who first saw this behavior who were probably not programmers or particularly technical was like, it must be saving my admin password because I entered my admin password to allow it to do this stuff.
John:
But then when I went to system preferences and turned it off, the only way that it could be possibly turning it back on automatically, which is this user hostile behavior that they observed,
John:
is that it must have saved my admin password, which would indeed be horrible.
John:
But anybody who knows anything about, you know, Mac OS X or whatever the hell it's called now, and Unix or whatever knows, like, they would never save your password.
John:
That is the stupidest possible way to get the thing they want.
John:
Because once you've entered your admin password...
John:
They don't need your admin password anymore, right?
John:
And so, yeah, so they don't save your admin password, which would be... And you can't totally discount it, because we all hear about these websites saving people's passwords in plain text.
John:
So never overestimate the security intelligence of people writing code.
John:
But Dropbox is a big company, and it's really hard for me to believe that they do something that dumb.
John:
They don't.
Marco:
Honestly, I would have believed that.
Marco:
By the time I read the story, it was already discovered that they weren't actually saving their password.
Marco:
But I would not rule out that they would try.
John:
Well, but they wouldn't, though, because it's a matter of competence because Dropbox has a lot of money and they have smart developers.
John:
Right.
John:
And the reason I think it's not a matter of competence, it's a matter of respect.
John:
No, no, no, it's not.
John:
It's not.
John:
It's a matter of competence because to do the thing they want to do, which we all agree is user hostile.
John:
They don't need your password more than once.
John:
Once they enter it, like, what they actually did is they just make set UID executables.
John:
Like, everybody knows that.
John:
Anyone who's done any Unix hacking, like, as soon as you've got root access, the first thing you do is make set UID executables, set UID shells so you can get back.
John:
Like, it's just, like, you've given them your admin password.
John:
They're like, la-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
John:
Check the set UID bit on these CHO.
John:
Now I have set UID root executables done and done.
John:
They don't need your password anymore, right?
John:
And so that is what they use.
John:
And it doesn't matter.
John:
Every time you give an app an admin password, you are essentially saying, by giving you this admin password, you now have free reign of the whole system.
John:
Not just momentarily, but because once I give it to you, you can immediately make a set UID executable as whatever.
John:
It's all over.
John:
The system integrity protection protects against that because it's like, oh, even with root access, you can't modify these files or whatever.
John:
But anyway...
John:
there's that so there was competence like the best way to do this user hostile behavior is not to store their passwords you're like they're smart they're not going to do that and they're going to do it the smarter way to do this user hostile behavior right the second aspect of the part that's the hack part is like
John:
once you have that access it still doesn't mean you have to go directly to the sqlite database and start mucking with it because that's like using private apis it's like apple's like you don't know what the structure of our database is just because you look in there and see a bunch of tables and columns and think you know how to hack it that's not oh that's not a public api that's not guaranteed it's the same reason i don't want you using private apis you're not supposed to even be looking at stuff we reserve the right to change that at any time so that is the quote-unquote hack part of it is that
John:
don't directly access our databases behind the scenes we provide apis you have to use those you can't just go sneakily find what the underlying storage is and directly mess with it so that is i don't know why they were doing it that way maybe it's the easiest way to secretly do it behind the scenes but it's terrible and they were signing themselves up for a maintenance headache because it's like once you use a private api like that whether you know it or not you're now on the hook to track every little change apple does to their internals instead of just tracking their api diffs because at any moment in any point release
John:
They could totally change the structure of that database and your app will blow up and it's totally your fault because you've screwed things up.
John:
So that I would say is the best example of them doing something that's not a good developer practice.
John:
But the initial story about them changing your password was totally a misunderstanding of the fact that they don't need your password.
John:
They would never do that because it's dumb.
John:
They have everything they need and more.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So anyway, however they were doing it, Dropbox was really inappropriately hacking the TCC database, the accessibility database, to inject themselves forcefully, even if you remove them.
Marco:
So that, to me, is like offense number one for, you know, this is not good.
Marco:
And this is, they're eroding trust that I have in them and the ability and the willingness I have to run their software on my computer and give them access to literally everything on my computer.
John:
And then... Although, before we move on from that, their defense of this, as LinkedIn, I think, probably have the Hackers News link that the developer talks about, their defense is actually plausible as a... I mean, you can still say, like, this is not socially acceptable behavior, especially among tech-savvy users, but...
John:
I can see where a company like Dropbox can get into a situation where it thinks this is the right thing to do.
John:
And it's basically that when you install an application, if they have these one-time prompts that you answer, quote unquote, the wrong way, like you didn't understand what the hell it was, you just hit cancel or whatever, and now you don't have like some kind of finder integration that you expected from Dropbox, right?
John:
It can be a legitimate support issue that enough people...
John:
click the wrong box on that one-time setup thing and they're like dropbox doesn't work uh when i see it on my friend's computer there's these little badges or these little whatever like whatever features accessibility is providing it's not working dropbox is broken and i can imagine that being a popular support request and that they have to walk people through oh like go to the thing go to accessibility click the little lock icon and go to like to basically re-enable it and then the the sort of cutting the gordian knot solution uh becomes you know what
John:
users can't handle this it's too complicated they don't understand what we mean by accessibility they don't want to type in their min password they're scared by it why don't we just like if they ever enter their min password put a little insurance but just bury some set uid root executables in our bundle and as soon as they enter a min password put them there and you know what if it accidentally gets turned off by a point release or an os update or whatever so we won't hear from people saying hey dropbox is broken again why don't
John:
why don't we just turn it on?
John:
Like it's paternalistic.
John:
It's like, they won't even know we do it.
John:
We'll do it behind the scenes.
John:
They won't see any UI.
John:
It will cut down on our support requests.
John:
That I think is the headspace that they get into.
John:
It's not particularly nefarious.
John:
They're just trying to solve a support problem, but they eventually, they wrap themselves up in knots to where they think they're actually doing people a favor by doing this.
John:
Whereas we all realize you've gone too far in the hopes of like, let's make it a smooth experience for most users at the expense of,
John:
being sneaky and it's the wrong thing to do but i think it is not done because they are malicious or bad developers i think it's actually done because they're trying to make make the experience better for everybody like why don't we just solve this why are we bothering users with this crap why don't we just make drop people just want dropbox to work like dropbox we have the technology we can just make it work and that's i think where they went wrong in that in that feature
Marco:
I mean, the thing is, like, if you're going to, you know, basically it's the attitude that a lot of developers and platform owners have of, like, we know better than our users, so we're just going to do it for you.
Marco:
Or we're going to do things the way we think are right for you, and you just have to go along for the ride because that's going to be best for you.
Marco:
And, you know, there's a place for that, and there's lots of places where that is the most pragmatic or the correct solution or position to take.
Marco:
But as a user, I want to make sure that whatever software I am granting that level of control to, I want to make sure that I agree with their judgment in general and their technical abilities and their way of doing things.
Marco:
And if I start doubting somebody's judgment or integrity or skill, then I don't want them making decisions for me and doing things behind my back and having access that I don't believe that they need and things like that.
Marco:
That becomes a trust issue.
Marco:
It becomes a security issue and lots of other potential problems.
Marco:
So my problem with Dropbox here is...
Marco:
That accessibility hack, I think, shows poor judgment.
Marco:
I think that is irresponsible, the way they did that.
Marco:
So did Apple, which is why Apple made it impossible by putting the accessibility stuff into system integrity protection in Sierra.
Marco:
And Apple is one of these companies, too, where Apple...
Marco:
In many ways, Apple's implied position is basically, we know best, we're going to do this for you, and you're not going to have control.
Marco:
And if you're an Apple customer or a user, you have to basically decide, like, do I trust Apple with its control, and do I generally agree with their judgment on
Marco:
you know in order to to give them this control happily without problems right and and a lot of people who don't like apple products who don't use apple products the reason they don't use apple products is because they don't want to give apple that control they don't agree with apple decisions in those areas and they or they don't trust apple to have that that level of of ability and that's fine right and my issue here with dropbox is they make decisions like this um they also like they in their beta channel which is still in beta granted but in their beta channel
Marco:
They recently, quote, tested a toolbar that was, like, injected into Finder windows, which was, like, showed this giant, like, toolbar, which it looked like malware.
Marco:
Like, it was injected in the bottom of the window.
Marco:
And it's like, no, that's not okay.
Marco:
Like, why?
John:
Who thought that was a good idea?
John:
Well, but that's just a bad feature being rolled out to Beta.
John:
I mean, everyone, you know, you try it on a Beta user, and all your users go, oh, that's awful, right?
John:
But, like, the specifics of injecting, we'll eventually get to this, I think, later, but, like, the origin of Dropbox...
John:
Is that it was basically a haxy on the finder to do all the little badges and the icons like that is that is the product we all fell in love with is what was the one that didn't like literally inject itself into the finder process to do this like the worst kind of hack the worst kind of totally unsupportable unsupported hack.
John:
and i think a lot of the reason i mean that's the app we came to to to start using and we liked it and we like the badges we like you know they gave you some reassurance green check market sync little blue thing it's not like right that's that's dropbox if they didn't have that feature it would have been a lesser product and because the people who did it were clever enough to get it done in a way that didn't suddenly cause the finder to be crashing left and right and were able to
John:
chase apple as they updated the finder and keep it working and so on and so forth to the point where apple eventually said dropbox is so popular and badging things is the thing that people actually want to do we're going to add an official api office they finally did the haxies pass on the grass thing that i talked about all those years ago it's like look at what people are using
John:
if you don't want them to use a disgusting hack to use this feature make an officially supported api and i'm pretty sure i'm some i'm sure people will send us email from wrong with us but i'm pretty sure that dropbox did eventually adopt that official api rather than continuing their hack because dropbox doesn't want to do that hack they would love to have a supported api presumably if the supported api does everything that dropbox needed to do this of course they would adopt it and i think they have in the later versions
John:
That's not really the system working.
John:
But during all that time, we were all like, yay, badges and Dropbox icons is great.
John:
So it's not so much that they added a hack for this.
John:
It's that you could say the fact that someone thought this was an aesthetically pleasing and appropriate UI was...
John:
it shows poor judgment which i'm i'm on board with you there right um that it looks like like i think of like those internet explorer toolbars you know they're like again just like that shows poor judgment but the fact that it's not a uh the fact that it's injected it's like well you know origin dropbox was founded on on ill-advised code and dejection which is probably not on the wall in their headquarters but it might as well be yeah fair enough anyway
Marco:
So Dropbox, in my opinion, has shown poor judgment recently and questionable technical decisions.
Marco:
There's also some performance issues.
Marco:
Dropbox appears to monitor all file system activity in some way, not just in their folder, but in the whole system.
John:
So I have some things to say about that as well.
John:
I know you've complained about this.
John:
um they've been doing that for freaking ever from the very beginning dbfs eventy has been there slurping from the fs events fire hose and being justice and function has always been this is not a new thing like whether it's ill-advised or not it's like maybe not from the very very beginning but for many many years if you were to look at top and see dbfs events the grinding up your things especially if you had a slow spinning disc and especially if you have a small number of cores that is not a new development now you can say
John:
a preponderance of things have been bothering me about dropbox and all of a sudden i know i noticed that it's eating up my cpu cycles and they shouldn't be drinking from the fs events firehose and they should be using the officially supported fs events uh api and doing the diffs themselves and so on and so forth that is a legit complaint but it's not new so i think for you personally thinking about why you're at your end of your rope about dropbox
John:
That can be a contributing factor, but just because you may have become aware of it recently doesn't mean it's not something that has been a constant for many years.
John:
That's fair.
John:
Totally fair.
Marco:
But anyway, so with these problems that I'm finding with Dropbox, I started thinking...
Marco:
Could I remove Dropbox from my life?
Marco:
Could I switch to something else for the roles that I use Dropbox for?
Marco:
And how difficult would that make my life in working with other people, basically?
Marco:
And this is an interesting exercise.
Marco:
I started realizing that a lot of the way I work and the software I use
Marco:
is tied very closely to Dropbox right now.
Marco:
And I don't even use it as much as a lot of people I know.
Marco:
Like, a lot of geeks I know, they put, like, all their photos in Dropbox, all their, like, text everything.
Marco:
Like, I actually use Dropbox pretty lightly compared to many people I know.
Marco:
But even then, like...
Marco:
I started thinking, like, how would I move off of Dropbox if things finally pushed me over the edge and I decided... Because I'm not there yet.
Marco:
Like, I'm not saying right now I'm leaving Dropbox, period.
Marco:
I don't know that I'm going to be doing that yet.
Marco:
But I started thinking, like, what if Dropbox continues going down a path I disagree with and I decide that I want to leave?
Marco:
Like, what does that look like?
Marco:
What do I go to, first of all?
Casey:
All right, well, before you explain your conclusions, why don't we talk about something that's definitely unequivocally awesome?
Marco:
Final sponsor this week is Indochino.
Marco:
Your look, your way.
Marco:
Go to Indochino.com and use promo code ATP for any premium suit for just $3.99 with free shipping.
Marco:
Now, Indochino offers made-to-measure custom suits to the masses at a ridiculously affordable price point.
Marco:
A made-to-measure suit feels and fits so much better than a generic off-the-rack suit, even with tailoring.
Marco:
And it feels so good to have a suit that is one-of-a-kind and uniquely yours and made specifically to fit your body.
Marco:
When you look good, you feel confident.
Marco:
And a made-to-order suit makes you look good.
Marco:
Indochina was reinventing fashion, and made-to-measure suit is the best suit you will ever own.
Marco:
So, suit up.
Marco:
They offer one-of-a-kind made-to-measure suits.
Marco:
You can customize the deal you want.
Marco:
You can pick your own lining, your lapel designs, personal monograms, and more.
Marco:
I was very surprised how much was customizable here.
Marco:
They basically make you take 14 unique measurements.
Marco:
They even have these awesome tutorial videos on exactly how to measure yourself.
Marco:
They'll even send you a little cloth measuring tape if you need it.
Marco:
And then you went through these amazing measurements.
Marco:
You submit all your measurements.
Marco:
In some cases, they'll even ask you for pictures just to kind of verify certain things.
Marco:
And they use all this to make a suit that fits you perfectly.
Marco:
You cannot go wrong with a well-crafted 100% merino wool suit from Indochino.
Marco:
They also offer made-to-measure dress shirts and men's accessories.
Marco:
And all this comes with a money-back guarantee.
Marco:
So today, listeners, get any premium suit for Indochino for just $3.99.
Marco:
That's up to 50% off at Indochino.com using offer code ATP at checkout.
Marco:
Plus, shipping is free.
Marco:
There's no reason not to try your first custom-made suit with a deal this good.
Marco:
And a suit classic from their premium collection will look good, feel good, and last.
Marco:
Go to Indochino.com.
Marco:
Use promo code ATP for any premium suit for just $3.99 with free shipping.
Marco:
Indochino, your look, your way.
Marco:
So I've been trying to figure out if there's any alternatives to Dropbox that I could switch to and how that would look, how that would work, what I would have to move or change about my workflows or setups to really achieve that.
Marco:
I mean, I use so much for Dropbox.
Marco:
I have my 1Password sync is there.
Marco:
I have a couple of text apps that sync to it.
Marco:
My entire blog engine is based on Dropbox syncing and editing a bunch of text files that are in a Dropbox folder.
Marco:
And the way I edit my blog on my phone is by using Dropbox syncing text editors.
Marco:
So it would be non-trivial to switch off.
Marco:
But not to mention, one of the biggest things about Dropbox is shared folders.
Marco:
The three of us on the show, we have a shared folder.
Marco:
That's how John and Casey get their audio files to me after each show.
Marco:
That's where we put any kind of shared files, things like artwork and sound effects.
Marco:
There's so many...
Marco:
So many people, when you're working with small groups of other people, especially if they're nerds like us, you will almost always have Dropbox shared folders or Dropbox share links involved in that work group in some way.
Marco:
So it really is not trivial to switch away.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
There aren't a whole lot of solutions on how to switch away.
Marco:
Assuming you want the same kind of thing, there's five or six different things you could do.
Marco:
There's not a ton.
Marco:
The ones I got the most recommendations for are what used to be called BitTorrent Sync and is now called Resilio.
Marco:
And then there's also cfile.
Marco:
That's SEA file.
Marco:
There's not a lot about it out there, but people who use it tend to love it, apparently.
Marco:
There's not a lot in the way of apps for iOS and stuff or anything like that, but people seem to love cfile.
Marco:
So I might try that as well.
Marco:
I didn't really get a noticeable amount of recommendations for any other solution.
Marco:
I'm curious.
Marco:
Have you guys ever tried any of these other things that can do Dropbox-like functions?
Casey:
No, but what about the Synology Cloud Station or whatever they call it?
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
I did want to try that as well.
Marco:
I'm a little... I worry about, like, you know, because it is probably a fairly small audience thing, I worry... Again, with that, I worry about things like app support.
Marco:
That's why, like, if I'm going to try one...
Marco:
In a world without mobile devices where I'm just syncing between two computers, I would probably try cFile because that seems like it is the best regarded in that way.
Marco:
But because we're in this world of mobile and you need things like apps and stuff, I think Resilio is probably the one to use because that seems like the most popular alternative that is roughly what I'm looking for.
John:
i go with the bigger names like i've used like box yeah voluntarily and involuntary i use box at work did not like but it is very dropbox like just imagine dropbox but worse um great that's what i'm looking for yeah um uh google drive obviously uh widely supported it's available on mobile it works more or less like dropbox um i do use that voluntarily uh both at work and at home
John:
And I feel like if I was going off Dropbox for whatever reason, that's probably where I would go because it is very widely supported.
John:
I already, you know, I'm into the Google ecosystem pretty well.
John:
Yeah, so...
John:
I haven't had any problems with it.
John:
I can't say I've exercised it as much as Dropbox.
John:
Basically, I don't run Google Drive unless I need it.
John:
I launch it.
John:
I use the web UI a lot.
John:
And if I want it to be on my Mac, I launch it, do whatever I need to do, and then quit it.
John:
So obviously, I'm not giving it the same workout that Dropbox does.
John:
But that seems to me the most obvious.
John:
well-supported reasonable alternative i have no idea how it behaves in terms of niceness to your system i know lots of google stuff annoys me by when you give it your root password at some your admin password at some point and it gets admin privileges it installs all sorts of little watchers to make sure that all the google apps are kept up to date which is kind of nice but also kind of creepy when like this dialogue pops up asking you to update a google app that you haven't launched in like a year and a half and you're like
John:
What is that?
John:
Has that been running on my system trying to make sure Google Earth is up to date that I haven't launched in forever?
John:
Like, go away, whatever their keystone process.
John:
Like, I don't like that.
John:
But, you know, maybe that's what's keeping me away from those.
John:
And on Dropbox, which I feel like Dropbox is more understandable.
John:
I kind of know what it's doing.
John:
uh and you know in finer detail but anyway that seems like the most obvious alternative so you might want to give that a try it depends on what your main objection to dropbox is is it like ugly ui is it installing weird crap in your system is it performance like but i would say that you know that doesn't help you with the social aspects of it the sort of network effect of like hey we're all using dropbox and you're over there in google drive but google drive is pretty well supported on all mobile platforms has a really nice web ui and and does the job
Marco:
I mean, and there is one little saving grace with having to use Dropbox if you don't want it software running is that they do have a pretty robust web interface.
Marco:
So if you're forced to work with Dropbox people and you don't want to run Dropbox yourself, you can actually get a lot of it done with that web interface.
Marco:
Not all of it, but you can do a lot there.
John:
I think also with both Google Drive and Dropbox, which as compared to iCloud Drive, which is apparently not in the running here.
John:
Yeah, I was going to mention that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The glorious thing about this is that no matter what we think about Dropbox and Google Drive,
John:
this may be uh not true but i think we all still have the feeling that if i quit dropbox it's out of the picture until i relaunch it right but you can quit it it is a third-party application you can quit it on your mac and then like so if you were to quit you feel like all right well dropbox is not in the picture anymore right whatever evil it was doing before whatever annoyance i was having um and
John:
For the most part, both of them respect the thing of launch when I log in, yes, no.
John:
They don't automatically turn that one back on.
John:
And so you can turn off Dropbox and have some confidence that it's not messing with you anymore, as opposed to iCloud Drive, which there's always this suspicion that...
John:
you know some part of the system is doing stuff behind the scenes and you can't just quit it if you want it out of the picture like but you haven't brought this up before but like the idea of a expanding xcode with its thousands and thousands of files and you don't want a dbfs event grinding up one of your cores from dropbox observing every single file system event you can quit dropbox and then you're like that won't happen anymore if icloud drive was doing the same thing which hopefully it isn't
John:
You don't have that option except for maybe unchecking the checkbox and it's saying, you sure you want to remove all these, you know, having all your documents on desktop disappear or some other weird thing.
John:
When you quit Dropbox, A, you can quit it and B, nothing happens to your Dropbox folder.
John:
Like it stays however it was when you quit, which is, I think, reassuring.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, iCloud Drive is... A few people also recommended that.
Marco:
And it seems like while most people have issues with other iCloud things, especially things like the Sierra documents and desktop sync stuff, it seems like iCloud Drive is pretty good for most people.
Marco:
Most of the reports that we got from it were very positive.
Marco:
And a lot of people said...
Marco:
that they stopped using Dropbox and just use iCloud Drive now.
Marco:
So I might consider that.
Marco:
iCloud Drive still kind of bothers me, though, in the way that it's not just a folder.
Marco:
Like it looks like a folder in Finder, but isn't it kind of not?
John:
Isn't it kind of weirdly all over the place?
John:
It's in like a library, mobile documents.
John:
So I would just caution again, fine, but just don't use it with pages or any of the iWork applications because apparently it makes it so you can't open or save any of your files.
Marco:
What is great about Dropbox is that the way it's implemented is so conceptually simple.
Marco:
There's just a special folder on your hard drive.
Marco:
You can see where it is.
Marco:
It's a regular folder full of regular files.
Marco:
But there's this thing in the background that runs that keeps it in sync with that same folder on your other computers.
Marco:
That is great.
Marco:
And I've compared in the past.
Marco:
One of the things I like about that is that it kind of has the failure mode of a train rather than the failure mode of an airplane.
Marco:
Whereas like if an airplane fails, it crashes and you die.
Marco:
If a train fails, it just stops moving.
Marco:
Everything is still there.
Marco:
You just kind of stop moving.
Marco:
And like that's kind of how I feel with drop like the way Dropbox like if Dropbox a service has any kind of issue which it does.
Marco:
It is not perfect.
Marco:
I've seen its issues many times as somebody who uses a blogging engine based on Dropbox.
Marco:
You know if Dropbox fails all my files are just still sitting there on my drive.
Marco:
If Dropbox has some kind of catastrophic error and it like wipes out all my files like some kind of huge sync problem and it deletes all my files.
Marco:
those are just files in this directory.
Marco:
I can just go to time machine or my backups and I can just get the file off the backups.
Marco:
So like it, the, the ways in which it can fail are, are pretty like low key safe things that I can easily recover from as a responsible computer user who has backups.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
Whereas with a lot of these other solutions, they're like a little too smart or a little too abstracted, and I don't have that kind of luxury.
Marco:
Some of them do work that way, but many of them don't.
Marco:
And so that's why I was thinking of something like BitTorrent Sync, again, knowing very little about it, because it seems like that was probably going to be more like what I wanted.
Marco:
But in reality, I'm probably...
Marco:
probably just going to stick with dropbox for a while but kind of taking a few steps out the door like like keeping one foot out the door in a way like which is how i prefer to do most things with like services i commit myself to um so you know i i'm going to at some point start moving things off of dropbox like i'm going to move one password sync out of it
Marco:
I'm going to stop adding anything new to Dropbox that would require its integration.
Marco:
Start sending around links to people to just download files instead of having Dropbox shared folders necessarily.
Marco:
Don't invest into photos there.
Marco:
Things like that.
Marco:
Just kind of putting Dropbox at a bit of a distance and starting to move out of it slowly.
Marco:
Because I think...
Marco:
I think they're showing enough bad judgment over time here that I think the time will come that I will want to move off of it.
Marco:
And I kind of want to be ready for that.
Marco:
And that's easier said than done.
Casey:
I definitely take issue with some of the shady things that have been going on.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
I do think that, especially if you take the hacker news comments as actually coming from an engineer and an engineer that is to some degree, obviously unofficially speaking for the company, it doesn't seem like any of this was really malicious.
Casey:
It was just either ill-advised or perhaps they weren't as smart as we hope they were or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I feel like Dropbox is fairly essential to me getting my life done.
Casey:
I was going to say work, but just my life.
Casey:
So it would take quite a lot for me to want to walk away from it.
Casey:
And I am not at that point yet.
Casey:
And I think I'm further away from that point than you are.
Casey:
And that's not a bad thing.
Casey:
That's not a good thing.
Casey:
It's just a thing.
Casey:
But it's certainly worth keeping an eye on.
Casey:
And certainly, you know, we were talking earlier about, you know, what is everyone's perception of Apple after this whole kerfuffle with Dash thing.
Casey:
And what is everyone's perception of Dropbox after this came to light?
Casey:
And I feel like Dropbox, which used to be kind of like a panic level, can do no wrong, in my mind anyway, can do no wrong.
Casey:
Generally speaking, it's really good code that seems to always work, etc.
Casey:
It doesn't seem quite so cut and dry to me anymore.
Casey:
And that's too bad.
Casey:
But, you know, even the mighty can fall.
Marco:
All right, thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Betterment, Pingdom, and Indochino.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Casey:
Because it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Casey:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long
Casey:
What are we doing in the post-show?
Casey:
You want to talk about your cameras?
Casey:
Yeah, we got more Marco Waffling.
John:
This should be a new... We should put a capital W on that.
John:
Marco Waffling.
Casey:
Here we come, Waffling.
John:
It's the category of things where Marco decides...
John:
on a direction for his life like an example would be um i like bmw cars and then the the turn after that is i like electric cars right and then we assume there will be some point in the future perhaps distant future where marco starts waffling electric cars so this one is uh that that's how i would define this uh this category of thing i don't know marco waffling doesn't have a good ring to it we gotta we gotta workshop that name gotta come up but anyway the current round of marco waffling which by the way it sounds like it's a bad name but we're just joking really what it is is
John:
marco being willing to revisit decisions he's made in the past when the conditions change there we go thing which is an admirable thing but it's much more fun to make fun of him about it and use the word waffle because it's funny so anyway the current one is uh is cameras you know for years i used slr's
Marco:
They gradually fell out of favor as I just didn't want to carry them anywhere.
Marco:
And then I got this little tiny Sony RX1 because it could basically see in the dark.
Marco:
The sensor was so good and it had an amazing little prime lens on it.
Marco:
The limitations of that camera with both things like autofocus speed.
Marco:
This is the old RX1.
Marco:
There's a new one that's better, but this is the first one.
Marco:
Auto focus speed sucked, the battery life sucked, and I wanted a little more versatility in the lens selection and just a little bit better performance.
Marco:
And it wasn't small enough that I was actually carrying it many places because it was still a camera that couldn't fit in my pocket.
Marco:
So about a year ago, I switched to the new Sony a7R II because it was my first mirrorless, but it's still an interchangeable lens camera.
Marco:
It's an amazing camera in many, many ways.
Marco:
The a7R II is...
Marco:
in many ways, the best camera in the world right now.
Marco:
However, it is not perfect.
Marco:
And it's not perfect in some fairly large ways.
Marco:
And over the last year, I have thought I can get by this and I can get used to this and I'll get faster with it.
Marco:
So the main reasons the Sony a7R II is not perfect is
Marco:
are number one and this is a huge one which i'll describe why later battery life and ever since the beginning i mean i made fun of the fact that the camera the battery life is so bad that it ships with two batteries in the box it is the first time i've ever bought any electronic device that includes two of its own battery because everyone who uses it will need more than one
Marco:
I wish mine came with two batteries because they're like 50 bucks for that little turdy battery.
Marco:
I know, and I've lost two of them.
Marco:
Anyway, so the battery life is terrible.
Marco:
You're lucky to get through a day using it, and you can only get through a whole day.
Marco:
if you are very, very careful and you kind of baby the battery.
Marco:
The second problem with it is that it is pretty slow.
Marco:
Turning it on, it takes a few seconds to kind of boot up and get itself oriented.
Marco:
Shot to shot time, if you want to review the pictures that you're taking with it, it is very, very slow.
Marco:
It takes a few seconds after it has shot before you can really review them.
Marco:
If you want to
Marco:
Review a picture and zoom in to make sure that you focused correctly or that the right thing was in focus and you want to zoom in and check.
Marco:
That takes a long time, like a few seconds delay.
Marco:
Writing the pictures to the card takes a long time, which is partly because they're so large, but also probably because I think the image processes are just slow.
John:
Just to provide some context here, by the way.
John:
I'm sure you'll get to the context eventually, but...
John:
uh my sony which i'm sure is well i'm not sure actually is it is it actually slower and all those things that you described as yours because mine is actually newer yours is yours is almost a year newer and also shoots much smaller photos so it's i bet yours is probably a lot faster well anyway i was gonna say i totally believe that this is slower than the thing you're actually comparing it to which you'll get to in a moment but it's the fastest camera i've ever owned so like the
John:
world when you go up from the world of like three digit price cameras to the world of four digit price cameras i was amazed at how fast this thing turns on how fast it boots up how fast it does everything um so everything's relative but anyway continue the result so this camera it has the most amazing sensor i've ever seen i think it might even be one of the best testing full frame sensors in the world by by like testing metrics like dxo market everything
Marco:
It is an incredibly awesome sensor.
Marco:
It can basically see in the dark with very little noise.
Marco:
Dynamic range is ridiculous.
Marco:
It has an incredibly advanced autofocus system.
Marco:
The main problem is just that it's so slow and that the battery life is so bad.
Marco:
And the battery life manifests itself in interesting ways that I hadn't necessarily foresaw when I bought it in first... Even when I bought it, I knew the battery life wasn't going to be great.
Marco:
But there are certain ways this is a problem.
Marco:
So, for instance...
Marco:
it has wi-fi but i've never used it because in order in order for it to be convenient to use you have to leave the wi-fi enabled in some way and then you know eventually launch and have and everything and to get reasonable battery life out of this camera you have to do things like keep it in airplane mode so i've just never used the wi-fi because it's just like i have i have like all these settings to like maximize the power consumption also like as you're shooting throughout the day
Marco:
Because it's mirrorless, if the camera is on, if it's ready to go, one of the two screens is always on, either the one that's in the electronic viewfinder or the one in the back.
Marco:
A screen is always on if the camera is ready to shoot.
Marco:
Unlike SLRs.
Marco:
SLRs, if you have the back screen on, that's one thing.
Marco:
But in normal mode with SLRs, you're shooting through the optical viewfinder.
Marco:
There is no screen on in that process.
Marco:
There might be the metering sensor.
Marco:
It might be active depending on the mode it's in and whether it's certain things you're asleep or not.
Marco:
But basically, there's no screens that are on.
Marco:
So a DSLR that is just ready to shoot but not actually shooting a picture uses very little power.
Marco:
And that's one of the reasons why DSLRs get so much better battery life than these large full frame but still mirrorless cameras that have lots of processing demands but very small batteries.
Marco:
So for the Sony, in order to save battery life, I often need to flip it off when I'm using it.
Marco:
If I'm not going to be shooting for the next couple of minutes, I'll just flip it off.
Marco:
Because if you don't, as you move around and the camera bounces off your chest or off your side as you're walking around, it'll detect, it'll think your eyes up against it, so it'll turn on the EVF screen.
Marco:
Or then it'll think you're not against it, so it'll turn on the back screen.
Marco:
So there's basically, there's always...
Marco:
a screen being on and the sensor being you know capturing the data and showing it to the screen so the power draw of these things is incredibly high in just like walking around mixed shooting use and so you basically have to keep them switched off when you're not shooting to save the battery
Marco:
So that means that every time you want to take a shot, if it was off, you got to turn it on.
Marco:
You got to wait for it to boot up again.
Marco:
So that's like a few seconds lost there.
Marco:
And because of that, I have often missed shots.
Marco:
Because like, as my kid is getting older, he's getting faster.
Marco:
This is the thing that happens, I guess.
Marco:
I'm learning this.
Marco:
It's the most dangerous game.
Marco:
Toddlers.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
So basically, it is causing me to miss a lot of shots, and it's causing me to not use certain features very well.
Marco:
And these aren't the only examples, but basically, in short, I'm not able to use the camera to its full potential because I need to baby the battery so much.
Marco:
It is a lot more inconvenient than I expected to have a battery life that's this bad compared to SLRs, which I used for years beforehand.
Marco:
An SLR, you can leave it on all day, and it won't be a problem at all.
Marco:
It'll be in a certain low power mode, and if you lift it up and half press that shutter button, it is on in a half second and ready to go.
Marco:
It's so fast for an SLR to exit the on but idle state.
Marco:
Bam, it's right there.
Marco:
It's so fast.
Marco:
So, and you can, and when it's, when it's in that on idle state, it uses so little power.
Marco:
You can literally leave it there for like all day or even days and the battery won't die.
Marco:
It's incredible.
Marco:
Like how big SLR batteries are and how long they last relative to a mirrorless camera like this.
Marco:
So maybe a month after I got the Sony, I had picked up our old 5D Mark II because TIFF still uses the 5D Mark II most of the time.
Marco:
So about a month after I got the Sony, I was already getting used to it.
Marco:
And I picked up the 5D Mark II and I thought, this is the largest, heaviest dinosaur I've ever felt.
Marco:
This is crazy.
Marco:
I'm so glad I moved to mirrorless, etc.
Marco:
Now, a year and a couple of months in, now that I am more accustomed to the limitations and annoyingness of this particular mirrorless camera, and to some degree of mirrorless cameras in general...
Marco:
This past weekend, I picked up Tiff's camera to take a few shots because she had my favorite lens mount on it, the 135mm Canon F2.
Marco:
We wanted to take a quick shot outside.
Marco:
I picked up Tiff's camera and I took a few shots with the 135mm of my kid being cute in a pumpkin patch.
Marco:
I just flew on it.
Marco:
It was like night and day.
Marco:
And I thought having been out of practice with that camera's control scheme for a year and it being an eight-year-old camera compared to my awesome high-end new Sony, I thought this would be slower.
Marco:
I wouldn't be able to get things in focus because the focus system is so primitive in the old 5D Mark II compared to what we have today.
Marco:
I thought the pictures wouldn't look as good because they're so much lower resolution.
Marco:
The sensor is so old and crappy.
Marco:
And the reality is, not only did I fly on the controls, but I nailed tons of shots very quickly because just shooting with an SLR, especially a good SLR like the 5D series...
Marco:
is so much faster than a full-frame mirrorless.
Marco:
And I know there are smaller non-full-frame mirrorless cameras.
Marco:
There's lots that are in the APS-C sensor size range or the Micro Four Thirds size range.
Marco:
And because these process smaller sensors with a lot fewer pixels, they often are a lot faster.
Marco:
And it is also possible, I know, to make a full-frame camera that is very, very fast because at XOXO, I was able to briefly use a friend's Leica... Is it the Q?
Marco:
The one with the fixed 28mm lens?
Marco:
Whatever it is.
Marco:
It was one of the Leica $5,000 mirrorless things.
Marco:
And it was amazing how incredibly fast and responsive it was.
Marco:
That's what I noticed immediately about that camera.
Marco:
And honestly, I don't love the idea of a fixed 28mm lens being the only lens in a camera, even though that's technically what the iPhone is.
Marco:
But anyway, so the Leica Q is not probably for me, but wow, was it nice to use a fast camera again.
Marco:
So I used that at XOXO about a month ago.
Marco:
Over this weekend, I used TIFF's XLR, or TIFF's SLR, XLR.
Marco:
I'm in the audio world too much.
Marco:
I basically realized that, oh my god, I really love a fast pro handling camera.
Marco:
As I was talking a couple of weeks ago about the difference between pro hardware and non-pro hardware, one of the things I was describing about pro stuff in the concept of cameras is...
Marco:
pro stuff is not only like durable and and made to tolerate extreme conditions better and usually has better service but also pro stuff just handles faster and it has more controls and it doesn't always necessarily have to be the smallest it doesn't always necessarily have to be technically the best by certain measures but it has to be like reliable and fast and and have easily accessible controls that you can like use without looking and stuff like that that's what pro gear is
Marco:
And I just realized that I just love pro cameras and that the Sony in some ways isn't a pro camera in the ways that I am considering here.
Marco:
Not in all ways, of course.
Marco:
And certainly, technically, it is shockingly good in the picture quality that you get out of it.
Marco:
And the optical quality that you get from the amazing Sony FE lenses is also fantastic.
Marco:
But I think I might switch back to SLRs.
Marco:
Because here's what happened in the meantime.
Marco:
Canon released the 5D Mark IV.
Marco:
So the main problems I had with Canon before, one of the reasons that I wanted to jump to Sony in the first place, Canon was falling way behind on their sensor technology.
Marco:
Their sensors were really not competitive with the amount of noise at high ISO levels and low light.
Marco:
and they were really not competitive in dynamic range in like things like the amount of detail that you can recover in shadows of a picture basically what happened with the 5d mark 4 they didn't become class leading in those areas but they got very close sony and and therefore nikon cameras that also use sony sensors they are still ahead in high iso noise levels and in dynamic range and in resolution in some levels
Marco:
But the new Canon 5D Mark IV came very close to these levels.
Marco:
In my opinion, in most ways, probably close enough.
Marco:
It also has a fast autofocus system.
Marco:
It has insane battery life.
Marco:
It has pro controls, pro durability.
Marco:
It is giant and heavy, but I want one.
Marco:
so uh tiff's getting one it arrived about a half hour before the show started i i haven't had a chance to unbox it yet and try it yet ask me again next week but basically tiff is getting one and i'm going to play with it and if i end up liking it i might get one as well and then sell the sony gear but we will see
Casey:
I did not see this coming.
Marco:
Neither did I. It really required me to have the Sony for long enough to get to know its flaws and then to have the Canon again in my hands and to see just how incredibly awesome a pro-grade SLR is when you haven't used one for a while.
Marco:
And in the ways that the Sony annoys me.
Marco:
And it is giant.
Marco:
I mean, it is still huge and it is heavy and the lenses are bigger and heavier, but it is really compelling.
Marco:
To answer expressly in the chat, basically asking, what about Nikon SLRs?
Marco:
And I rented a D750 about a year and a half ago before I decided to get the Sony.
Marco:
I was kind of figuring out which of the various Sony-censored cameras do I want.
Marco:
And of course, the D750 and D810 were on that list to try.
Marco:
And the main reason that I chose against the Nikon, one was that the Canon controls just kind of get along with me a little bit better.
Marco:
And Tiff has said the same thing.
Marco:
She also prefers the Canon control standards and layout.
Marco:
And maybe that's just what we're used to.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
Probably, right?
Marco:
But there's something there.
Marco:
and secondarily that that nikon had some some holes in the lens lineup that we liked and and canon is doing really well with their lens lineup recently like they they for a while they their lenses were you know they've always been great and great to pretty good right um
Marco:
But they were getting a little bit long in the tooth in certain ones.
Marco:
And in the last couple of years, they have released a handful of incredible new lenses, one of which I ordered with this 5D Mark IV to try, the new 35mm F2 IS.
Marco:
And, I mean, if I ever want to go with the zoom again, the new 24-70 2.8 is shockingly good.
Marco:
If I want to go faster on the 35 eventually, even though it's giant and heavy,
Marco:
The 35 1.4 is shockingly good.
Marco:
There's a whole bunch of basically modern Canon lenses that are amazing.
Marco:
The Canon 40 millimeter pancake is incredibly small and light and short and incredibly good and costs almost nothing.
Marco:
I mean, there's a lot here.
Marco:
So Nikon definitely has the best sensors that are available in SLRs because they are Sony sensors.
Marco:
But I think Canon wins me over for lenses and control layout.
Marco:
And because the Canon sensor is now close in the qualities that matter to me, that's kind of what's keeping me here.
Casey:
So tell me again why you're not really considering Micro Four Thirds.
Casey:
And I'm not saying that it's the best option, but it seems to me as a novice photographer that only kind of understands, it's smaller than a full-on SLR.
Casey:
My battery life
Casey:
I have the problem of, oh crap, I haven't charged this thing in forever and now I really need it and it's nearly dead because I've used my camera a ton and the battery lasts forever and I just don't think about it, right?
Casey:
You know, it's like your cell phone back when you would go a week between charging it.
Casey:
It would be that day that you'd be like, oh crap, I completely forgot to do this last night.
Casey:
Anyways, battery life lasts a long time.
Casey:
It starts up pretty darn quickly.
Casey:
It does have the problem of one of the two screens always being on, if not both, which is a
Casey:
Again, the battery life is great.
Casey:
The Wi-Fi is super easy to turn on and off.
Casey:
The app that Olympus has for your phone does a perfectly sufficient job of tracking your whereabouts.
Casey:
If you tell it to, it doesn't do it automatically, but you go into the app, you tell it, hey, start tracking where I am.
Casey:
And then when you're done, you get on the Wi-Fi, which again is very easy, and you have the app send that geodata to the camera, and it'll geotag all your photos.
Casey:
I mean, in many ways, it seems like it would be a good fit.
Casey:
So what gives you pause?
Casey:
Just that you haven't tried it and you're familiar with the Canon?
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, and so first of all, the 5D Mark IV also has a GPS built in.
Marco:
Oh, that's super nice.
Marco:
Some of the reviews were saying like you can leave it.
Marco:
There's like two modes.
Marco:
One of them is like kind of a more continuous one and one of them is kind of like a lighter or lower power one that's kind of less periodically updates the GPS.
Marco:
And that is apparently pretty nice in the battery.
Marco:
um and so not only can it geotag your stuff built in but it also automatically sets its clock which is awesome because one of the one of the long-standing annoyances with anybody who tries to use a separate camera that's not their phone and then mix those photos into their libraries is that if your if your camera's clock is off by a little bit or by a few hours if you travel uh that sucks and it messes up all your stuff right so anyway uh so built-in gps and wi-fi and in a battery that can probably handle it right because it's it's a large camera with a
Marco:
So that can probably handle it.
Marco:
There is perfectly valid reasons to go with smaller cameras.
Marco:
There are great reasons why most people should go with smaller cameras.
Marco:
Most people also shouldn't roast their own coffee.
Marco:
Most people shouldn't be waiting for Mac Pros.
Marco:
And most people should not have the 15-inch MacBook Pro.
Marco:
Most people should get a smaller MacBook Pro than 15 inches.
Marco:
I, however, am a picky apple.
Marco:
I have learned this about myself, as everyone else did long before I did.
Marco:
But basically, because I am a picky apple, I know myself now well enough to know that if I get anything that is not the biggest, best, most pro option for something, I am likely to be frustrated by its limitations.
Casey:
But that's not always true.
Casey:
You don't have a P85D or P90D.
Casey:
You have a 90D.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So there are cases – and by the way, I still stand by that decision.
Marco:
I love my car.
Marco:
It is plenty fast enough, and I love the amount of range it has.
Marco:
And I love I didn't spend $20,000 more for it.
Marco:
So all those things are great.
Marco:
So this isn't true in everything that I buy or use.
Marco:
But in certain areas that I care strongly about, things like the computer I use, the camera I use –
Marco:
I have learned basically that for cameras, there is the iPhone, which handles a lot of my photography needs because it's always in my pocket.
Marco:
So there's the iPhone.
Marco:
It's amazing for a lot of things.
Marco:
Its camera is very good considering it's a phone camera.
Marco:
That being said, it is not as good as a regular camera.
Marco:
My thinking is, if I'm going to carry a regular camera at all, and this is part of the reason that led me to the Sony in the first place, being the largest mirrorless camera that's out there, if I'm going to carry a camera at all, I don't worry about carrying a camera that can fit in my pocket anymore.
Marco:
Because cameras that can fit in my pocket are usually not any better than the iPhone.
Marco:
And so the iPhone solves that role for me.
Marco:
What I want is either the iPhone or...
Marco:
A camera that I will carry separately, in which case I want it to be the best camera that it can possibly be.
Marco:
A long time ago, when we first bought our 5D Mark II in 2008, I first tried a full-frame camera.
Marco:
And that ruined me forever.
Marco:
And now, if I'm going to carry a camera that is not my iPhone, I want it to be full-frame.
Marco:
And while the smaller sensors have made tremendous progress in recent years, and there are lots of amazing cameras that have micro four thirds or APS-C sized sensors, full frame is still a step above in areas I care about.
Marco:
in noise in quality in optics uh full frame cameras have a lot of advantages because that much larger sensor size that these smaller cameras just won't match and there are downsides to it there are major downsides obviously cost is a big one size is a big one and as mentioned earlier speed is a big one because now you have like these giant sensors that take more battery life to power and
Marco:
And then they have to have more electronics behind them to like, you know, convert all the pixel data.
Marco:
And they have the image processor dealing with way more image data because it's way more megapixels and stuff like that.
Marco:
So there are downsides to full frame.
Marco:
But generally, if I'm going to be shooting with anything that is not my iPhone, I want it to be the opposite extreme.
Marco:
I want it to be the best it can possibly be.
Marco:
And for me, that's a full frame SLR.
Casey:
Yeah, that makes sense.
Casey:
And I mean, to kind of come to your defense for a moment and argue with myself, the Micro Four Thirds that I have, I don't have any pancake lenses for it.
Casey:
I have a, I think it's a 25 millimeter, if I remember right, that I use most often.
Casey:
But we just picked up, as we've talked about on and off, this 35 to 100 millimeter zoom, which I know zooms is not for everyone, as you were talking about earlier.
Casey:
But
Casey:
I happen to like having the option.
Casey:
And I tell you what, with that zoom lens on, this camera is not small.
Casey:
I mean, it's already not small with the prime, but it is really not small with the zoom.
Casey:
And so I'm not sure that I'm really saving that much over a full on DSLR.
Casey:
I mean, it's certainly smaller, but it's not night and day by any stretch of the imagination.
Marco:
And the Sony has the same issue where there are a few... There's a small number of small prime lenses for the Sony FE mount that are great.
Marco:
And the one I keep on the camera the vast majority of the time is the 35mm f2.8 Sony Prime.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
If you want more light intake or if you want a zoom that is not horrible, it does get very big and heavy very quickly because that's just what it takes.
Marco:
If you have a full-frame sensor and you need a lot of...
Marco:
a lot of light to hit that in a way that doesn't suck.
Marco:
And if you want to have a zoom lens to have like the versatility of that, you're going to have this giant heavy piece of glass on there.
Marco:
Uh, so the size benefit for, for, uh, mirrorless cameras, I think mostly only holds if either you're willing to give up a lot of quality and have a really crappy zoom, in which case you can make them smaller or if you're using primes and not even very fast primes.
Marco:
Uh, so yeah,
Marco:
That does represent a lot of my usage, certainly.
Marco:
I mean, the 35 prime is what I have on there, as I said, most of the time.
Marco:
And so that combo is quite small.
Marco:
And I was thinking, I thought actually, like, if I'm going to switch back to SLRs, I still might keep the Sony and just keep that 35 millimeter prime and have that be like my small setup if I ever need that.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Like, really, once you have large glass on there, the size of the body matters less and actually becomes sometimes harder to use.
Marco:
Like, if you have a big imbalance between, like, a giant heavy lens on this tiny little mirrorless body, it actually can be harder to handle.
Marco:
So, anyway, I'm ruined forever.
Casey:
I don't even know what you're talking about at this point.
Casey:
I mean, you are probably one nice set of in-ear monitors away from just going completely off the deep end.
Marco:
I mean, the good thing is my audio deep end, I already did that years ago.
Marco:
I got my crazy headphones.
Marco:
I'm set there.
Marco:
My crazy headphones are not even as crazy as they could be or they were.
Marco:
The headphones I ended up with were not the biggest, heaviest, most expensive pair that I ever owned or tried.
Marco:
And the headphones I have, they have since been succeeded by multiple new models that replaced them.
Marco:
And I have not even had the desire to try them because I like these headphones so much.
Marco:
I haven't even tried the replacements.
Marco:
So this is how I am with things.
Marco:
I'll go crazy with something for a while, but then I kind of get settled for a long time once I find something really nice that I like.
Casey:
John, are you still liking your camera?
John:
Yeah, I'm watching the upgraded model that has been announced.
John:
Yeah, that sucks.
John:
I don't know if it sucks because I also found out that it's actually bigger.
John:
I'm like, all right, well, how much bigger?
John:
Is it two millimeters bigger or is it bigger in a way that I'll notice?
John:
So that's the only wild card there.
John:
But if it is not that much bigger and if the reviews say that it's basically my camera but better in these such and such ways, I'll probably sell this one and get that one.
Marco:
Yeah, because it got bigger because it added in-body image stabilization.
Marco:
So it was a similar size increase as when the A7 series went from the regular A7 to the A7 II line.
Marco:
So I expect the size difference to be substantial, and I expect you're not going to like it.
Marco:
However, you might want it anyway because of the stabilization being pretty cool.
Marco:
Now, that being said, sensor stabilization is not as good as having it in the lenses, but when you have a lens that doesn't have it, it's nice to have.
John:
i was thinking of stuff like oh first of all i think all my lenses have it at this point or i'll do all of them let's see i just got the i know my portrait one does does this one uh maybe it doesn't maybe my pancake one doesn't um
John:
But the other thing is it has a touchscreen.
John:
And so that could be good.
John:
Uh, and they're like, it's kind of weird that this camera doesn't have one or it could be bad.
John:
And the touchscreen UI could be even worse than using the little hat thingy.
John:
So I'm going to have to like the iPhone.
John:
I think I'm going to have to see this in person and hold it and see what it's like.
John:
And the only reason I'm considering trading up is like, uh,
John:
i can reuse my lenses i'm gonna i'm gonna buy that lens that my wife took on vacation so i will have three lenses and then just swapping out the body suddenly the body is the least expensive part of my camera setup uh shockingly for someone who this is my first camera that even has lenses now i'm now i'm in the lens ecosystem and so i can swap out the bodies and hopefully someone will be willing to buy my 6300 if that if the time comes but yeah i'll check it out
Marco:
I mean, in all fairness, like having more money being spent on the glass than the body is generally the right thing to do.
Marco:
Like if you have to allocate funds somewhere between those two, usually the lenses are the better use of the money because not only can they last between multiple bodies, but they like I'd rather have a great lens on a crappy camera than the opposite.
John:
yeah yeah like if i look at the performance difference this is not i don't expect that any other aspects of it are going to be phenomenally better i think the price actually is has gone up a surprising amount so it's not a slam dunk that i'm going to end up thinking that this is better enough to justify that i think it went up like 500 bucks or something so i don't know i i might still whip out and just keep this camera but we'll see
Marco:
I do want to quickly talk about video.
Marco:
There's a couple people in the chat talking about video.
Marco:
The Sony is way better at video, no question.
Marco:
And this is kind of like ever since the 5D Mark II that kind of introduced high-end video capabilities to what were previously photo-only SLR categories, cameras have basically been focusing a lot on video features because that's what the market is demanding.
Marco:
And so you basically have video abilities creeping into and in some ways dominating the development of cameras, the features that go into them, the reviews, what the reviews say about them, how they sell, things like that.
Marco:
If I mainly shot video on my camera, I would stick with the Sony line because I think those have proven themselves to be the best regular cameras that also shoot video for video purpose.
Marco:
Uh, however, I, I learned in the, in the course of owning this camera that I hardly ever shoot video on my camera because my iPhone does a better job of it.
Marco:
Uh, I know this is not, this is not true for pros.
Marco:
If you're like actually doing like a professional video shoot, uh, fine, use a good camera, use a good everything.
Marco:
That's, that's not what we're doing here.
Marco:
What I'm doing is shooting video of my kid running around.
Marco:
And for that purpose, the iPhone is better, not only because it's always in my pocket, but also the iPhone is way better at auto exposure, autofocus.
Marco:
The built-in microphone is way better at cutting out noise and crap.
Marco:
So the video I get out of my iPhone is substantially nicer in general to watch, even though it is less technically good as the video I get out of my fancy cameras.
Marco:
So therefore, my camera use is only for photos and videos are shot on the phone.
Casey:
I'm the same way.
Casey:
I know it's not exactly the same thing because my camera only shoots 1080 and the iPhone will shoot 4K.
Casey:
But especially with the 7...
Casey:
And the optical image stabilization that's in there, I was stupefied at how good the OIS is.
Casey:
We went pumpkin picking this past weekend.
Casey:
And at the particular place we do that, you get on a trailer that's towed behind like a John Deere tractor and they towed, you know, that you ride out to where the pumpkins are and then you eventually get a ride back.
Casey:
And as you can imagine, in a dirt field, you know, it's bumpy as crap.
Casey:
And I took a couple of short videos on this trailer, on the back of this tractor, in a field in Virginia.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
It certainly looks like things are bumpy, but I can assure you that it looks way, way less bumpy on this video than the reality of the situation was as I'm like boinging all over the trailer behind this tractor.
Casey:
I mean, I could not believe my eyes at how good this image stabilization was.
Casey:
It was truly tremendous.