Million Dollar Lunch
John:
Then I re-grab it and go thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump.
John:
Anyway, max speed should be higher.
Casey:
All right, as usual, we should start with follow-up.
Casey:
And as usual, we have APFS-related follow-up.
Casey:
How do we have this every week?
John:
I swear to you, I'm not, like, intentionally trying to make this a streak.
John:
It's just happening naturally.
Marco:
Is this, like, the bell lobby, like, influencing us?
Marco:
Like, what is going on here?
Casey:
Who knows?
Casey:
LibertyRPF from Twitter writes, APFS doesn't support compression yet.
Casey:
What if on macOS you've run something like clusters to compress everything at the file system level?
Casey:
What do we make of that, John?
John:
I hadn't thought of this before.
John:
So there are a couple of things about this.
John:
This was a tweet, right?
John:
I'm, I also most agree.
John:
My recollection is that ABFS does not support compression, but I would not like, am I sure about that?
John:
Maybe not.
John:
Maybe like it actually does have built in support for the HFS plus compression and they just never say anything.
John:
I don't know.
John:
But anyway, assuming it doesn't support compression, which is my, my recollection at this point.
John:
uh it is true that on max um even if you never run any third-party utility a whole bunch of the files that like come with the operating system and stuff are compressed on disk right and then hrs plus is this native compression feature and they added many releases ago and just when it gets read from the file system it gets reinflated to its normal size and it's all transparent to you know the rest of the operating system it's just it just takes up less room on disk right and
John:
So the APFS conversion thing, iOS anyway, is like leave all the data exactly where it is and just make new pointers to it and blah, blah, blah.
John:
Don't like move anything around.
John:
I have no idea if iOS uses the HFS plus compression feature, but I know Macs do.
John:
And also on Mac, there are third party utilities that can wander over the rest of your file system and compress stuff or tell HFS plus basically, oh, this file right here, make it be compressed on disk.
John:
And, you know, you could write your own little programs to do this, right?
John:
So
John:
on a mac it is very likely uh in fact almost certain that you know one or more files are compressed now if a mac is going to have the same sort of in-place conversion to apfs that ios devices have you have kind of a weird situation where it can't just leave all the data exactly where it is because if apfs can't decompress stuff it can't just leave that data as compressed because it'll be scrambled garbage and
John:
uh after you know avfs points to and said here's the file data and you go to read it and it's compressed garbage avs has to either know how to decompress that on the fly just like hfs plus which seems to me to be the easiest solution because then you don't have to worry about all these issues that i'm about to explain or you have to expand those files to their uncompressed version
John:
which means you need to find space for them, which means you actually have to copy the data someplace else and shuffle things around, and now it becomes suddenly a way more dangerous operation than it was before.
John:
And in the worst-case scenario, someone's got tons of stuff compressed with HFS Plus compression, and their disk is almost full, and there's literally no room on the disk to expand everything, because if you were to expand everything, it would exceed the capacity of the disk.
John:
So I'm hoping that I'm either just misremembering or APFS has support for HFS Plus compression just transparently included and it just hasn't been brought up or they told me I forgot or whatever, because that would certainly simplify things.
John:
But if that's not the case, it'll be very interesting to see what happens with the macro out of APFS.
John:
And I wish maybe someone in the chat room knows.
John:
I wish I knew if...
John:
ios also uses hfs plus compression i would imagine it would too because i don't see any reason it wouldn't do it or maybe battery life i don't know um chat room says it the ios does have support support sure but like do all the os files compressed like they are on not all of them but i don't know it's if you get a phone from a store and just take it out of the box are a bunch of the files on the formerly hfs plus disc uh compressed if you had done this like a year ago i don't know
John:
Anyway, it will be an adventure.
John:
I'm still waiting for the Mac rollout of APFS because converting on all our phones was boring except for the apps that broke.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
We got some very interesting feedback via David Carlton about WWDC lunches, which is the topic that keeps on giving.
Marco:
I love this so much.
Yeah.
Casey:
he linked us i actually love it as well he linked us to the gdc boss lady blog by megan scavino scavio excuse me so she writes with regard to the game developers conference the other recognizable change this year is lunch we reduce the price of conference passes by the cost of lunch that box lunch that you all know and love and wish you could consume five days a week all year round is forty dollars a day she writes i'll give you a minute to stop choking on your doritos ready
Casey:
Yes, $40 a day for sandwich, chips, apple cookie, and water soda.
Casey:
I could not make this stuff up even if I wanted to.
Casey:
We decided to give the attendees a choice this year.
Casey:
Spend as much as you'd like by buying from one of the many on-site concessions or nearby food repositories or pre-order and pay for the $40 a day meal.
Casey:
It is now your decision.
Casey:
I trust you will make the right one.
Casey:
And the catch here, which I didn't explain, is that GDC apparently at the time of this writing was happening at Moscone.
Casey:
So holy smokes, $40 a day for that disaster.
Marco:
The story with conferences and things like this is any kind of exhibitor of conferences or if you're going to set up a booth at a conference, you've probably gone through a lot of this crap.
Marco:
Basically, doing anything inside of a big conference hall usually involves dealing with
Marco:
ridiculous exclusive contractors and exclusive vendors and possible union politics and what you think these things should cost they cost way way way more than that so this is like you know food service exclusive provider for Moscone provides these lunches and Apple pretty much has to pay whatever their price is because they aren't allowed to bring in food from anybody else into Moscone it's that kind of arrangement usually
Marco:
uh it's like you know if you're setting up a booth for like a small trade show and you need like a surg strip you can't bring your own surg strip you have to use their surg strip installed by one of their licensed people to install it and it's going to cost you four hundred dollars like it's it's that kind of thing usually at these at these uh large venues so i'm not really surprised to hear this it's it's sad and if you ever book one of these things it probably makes you angry uh but it's not surprising
John:
Even when you're not in a conference center, like, at work, we have, you know, food they bring in.
John:
They try to bring, like, healthy food.
John:
So you have, like, apples and bananas and stuff.
John:
And when they first started doing this, I heard someone throwing around the idea that each one of those apples was two bucks, which, you know, doesn't seem like too much.
John:
But on the other hand, you just look at the giant pile of apples, you're like, oh, that adds up.
John:
And this is in a non-conference center environment.
John:
So in general, but just getting...
John:
uh, large amounts of stuff in a place where it's normally wouldn't appear, whether it's apples and offices or box lunches in a convention that are across a lot.
John:
And then yeah, they, all the exclusive contracts and the unions makes it really expensive.
John:
And remember this, this $40 thing, this post was from many years ago, right?
John:
It was a seven years ago.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So it's probably like a hundred bucks now.
Casey:
So if you do this math, $40 a day times five days at WWDC.
Casey:
Actually, I guess it's four because they don't serve.
Casey:
Do they serve lunch on Fridays?
Casey:
Yes, they do.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Casey:
So five days times 5,000 attendees, which doesn't account for all the Apple people.
Casey:
That is a million dollars on these godforsaken lunches.
Casey:
Yeah, that's the thing.
Marco:
It's like when you have these kind of like, you know, special venues and special deals with everybody and restrictions on you doing anything else.
Marco:
I mean, they can charge kind of whatever they want.
Marco:
By the way, see also weddings and hospitals.
Casey:
Well, it's bad.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I think that's it for follow-up.
Casey:
Surprisingly, this is a miracle.
Casey:
I don't know what to make of this.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
I have some alternative topics we could put in follow-up, copyright 2011, John Syracuse.
Marco:
I think you actually did pretty well defending Plex on Connected.
Casey:
Well, yeah, that was intended for follow-up here, but I actually did a guest spot on Connected.
Casey:
earlier this week, and we'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
If you don't listen to Connected, our dear friend of the show, Federico Vatici, slandered the Plex name in not the latest episode, but the prior one.
Casey:
And this could not stand.
Casey:
And as such, I was planning on a
Casey:
Probably 15 or 20-minute follow-up section, or really a follow-out, copyright 2015 or 16, Jason Snell, built upon the work of copyright 2010, John Syracuse.
Casey:
That's a derivative work.
Casey:
Yeah, it was a derivative work.
Casey:
I had planned on doing some follow-out with regard to Connected.
Casey:
and their thoughts on Plex.
Casey:
But I was asked, probably out of desperation because Mike was not in town, I was asked to guest on the beginning of the latest episode, which I will put a link in the show notes, like I said.
Casey:
It's at the very beginning of the episode, and I kind of talk about what makes Plex awesome and why it's not nearly as hard to use as you would expect.
Casey:
So if you're at all interested in that, I do encourage you to check it out.
Casey:
But yeah, because of that, our follow-up in this show, including follow-out, is pretty much done.
Marco:
I will say, since we're talking about Plex anyway... Oh, here we go.
Casey:
This is how we always get there.
Marco:
One quick thing that I don't think you guys really covered enough that I wanted to point out, because I was also a Plex skeptic for years.
Marco:
Casey would always bug me about how great it was and why don't I do this.
Marco:
Tell me all the great things that, well, you know, if you had Plex, you wouldn't have this problem right now.
Marco:
And one of the great values to me of Plex in a world where we can stream pretty much everything we want all the time, and that is when you have children and the children really want to watch a specific thing at a certain time that they do that every day.
Marco:
And if this thing is not available for kids, it's going to cause problems for the parents.
Marco:
And there's lots of times in life to teach your kids they can't always get what they want.
Marco:
But a lot of times you don't want to have that discussion right now.
Marco:
You just want to give the kid the TV show they wanted to watch so you can go wash the dishes or something.
Marco:
Sometimes internet connections go down.
Marco:
Sometimes iTunes freaks out and won't authorize anything.
Marco:
Sometimes things break in the online world.
Marco:
And it is really, really nice when that happens, which is rare.
Marco:
But when that does happen, it's really nice to have Plex running in your home and everything you need to play the media you want to play is on your local network and DRM free.
Marco:
And that means there is no reliance on your Fios being out or not out.
Marco:
There's no reliance on the Apple DRM servers authorizing you to watch what you paid for or not.
Marco:
It's just playing a file off a network share and it just works.
Marco:
And that's really, really nice when you need it.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And if you have friends, which also have Plex servers and accounts and whatnot, you can stream from each other.
Casey:
So I have been amassing a collection of Daniel Tiger and Paw Patrol and things of that nature.
Casey:
And so these are probably beneath Adam at this point.
Casey:
But hypothetically, if Adam wanted Paw Patrol and it isn't on Netflix or iTunes is down or whatever the case may be,
Casey:
Marco can hop on Plex, tell Plex, don't look at my local server, look at Casey's server, and he can stream that directly from me to him, which is really awesome.
Casey:
And so once you've built up a kind of quote unquote network of, you know, a few friends that all have media, it's actually kind of your own personal Netflix.
Casey:
It's really phenomenal and really, really cool.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Fracture.
Marco:
Go to FractureMe.com slash podcast and select ATP there so they know you came from here.
Marco:
Fracture is a photo decor company.
Marco:
They are out to rescue your favorite images from the digital ether.
Marco:
And here's how they do that.
Marco:
They print beautiful photo prints in vivid color onto sheets of glass that hang on your wall or stand up on your desk.
Marco:
It is really just, they print your photos on these nice thin panes of glass and
Marco:
And you just hang that on your wall and the photos go edge to edge.
Marco:
There's no frame needed even.
Marco:
The photos are their own standalone objects that go edge to edge with the print.
Marco:
And it looks so clean and modern to just have the photo across the whole expanse.
Marco:
They make great gifts as well.
Marco:
Mother's Day is right around the corner.
Marco:
Suppose you have kids and you want to get pictures of your kids for your mother or for maybe their grandmother.
Marco:
It's a great gift idea for all sorts of occasions, friends, family.
Marco:
And these things just look great around the house.
Marco:
We have them all over our house.
Marco:
And we get compliments every time somebody comes over and say, hey, what's that?
Marco:
Is that a fracture if they've heard of it?
Marco:
They just look fantastic, these great photo prints.
Marco:
And they really want you to get those photos out of the social media feeds that they kind of get stuck in.
Marco:
Because if you post a great picture to Facebook or Instagram or whatever, and then in eight hours, it's gone.
Marco:
You'll never see it again because it's off the end of the timeline.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Get those best photos out.
Marco:
Get them printed by Fracture.
Marco:
It looks great.
Marco:
They look great either in your house or in somebody else's as a gift.
Marco:
Go to FractureMe.com slash podcast.
Marco:
And then there's a little picker to say what show you came from.
Marco:
Make sure you pick ATP on that list so that we get credit and they know that you came from here.
Marco:
And I highly recommend you check out Fracture.
Marco:
Great photo prints directly on glass.
Marco:
Great prices and great gifts too.
Marco:
FractureMe.com slash podcast.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Fracture for sponsoring our show.
Oh,
Marco:
We also have some show news.
Casey:
We do.
Casey:
We very much do.
Casey:
This is super exciting.
Casey:
I'm very pumped about this.
Casey:
Tell us what's going on, Marco.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So we are doing a live show at WWDC.
Marco:
So on Monday, June 5th in WWDC week, we are doing a live show at AltConf.
Marco:
AltConf is this community-run conference that happens across or down the street from WWDC.
Marco:
It's happened for three or four years now at least.
Marco:
It's been kind of a while.
Marco:
And the way AltConf works is the conference is totally community run.
Marco:
And it's free for the most part.
Marco:
You can pay optionally if you want to to get priority in line.
Marco:
But otherwise, it's free.
Marco:
And there's great diverse talks.
Marco:
And it's really a great event for the community.
Marco:
Anyway, we wanted to do a live show this year, and they had this great thing where they invite the community to come use their venue and bring talks and content to AltConf.
Marco:
We decided to take them up on that offer, and we contacted them this past week and arranged it pretty quickly, actually.
Marco:
And so we are doing a live show in AltConf, and it's going to be...
Marco:
It's separately ticketed, mostly for the purposes of just capacity management.
Marco:
But the tickets are just $5.
Marco:
It's basically just to make sure that people actually are serious when they book them, so we know how many people are coming, so we know how big to make the room.
Marco:
And then we're working on maybe we can donate that money to something useful.
Marco:
And then the show is going to be Monday from 5 to 7 p.m.
Marco:
So the idea here is to be after the WBDC State of the Union address, which usually runs until 4 or 4.30.
Marco:
But before anybody's dinner plans or Jim Dalrymple's beard bash or other things that might be happening on Monday night.
Marco:
So 5 to 7 p.m.
Marco:
live show, WBDC Monday, June 5th at AltConf.
Marco:
Go to, is it altconf.com?
Marco:
It is altconf.com.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Just checking.
Marco:
And yeah, so we look forward to it.
Marco:
It's going to be, you know, it's not going to be like any kind of outrageous thing where we have like Tim Cook on or anything.
Marco:
I don't... I mean, we could try, but I don't think we'll get him.
Marco:
Just a hunch.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
But I'm looking forward to it.
Marco:
We're going to basically just do this in front of a live audience of between 100 and 1,000 people, depending on how many people respond to the room.
Marco:
I do expect to stream it live.
Casey:
When you say that, you mean audio only is your expectation?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
audio i don't think we have any kind of video uh setup i do have the audio setup uh to stream it live if internet connectivity holds out and that's a huge if at conferences so i don't want to guarantee it because basically i will be trying to get uh some kind of connection out of a very very full room in a venue i've never been in in a city i've never been in uh so it's hard to predict whether or not i will be able to maintain an audio live stream but i'll do my best
Marco:
Otherwise, we look forward to it.
Marco:
So yeah, if you want to come, go book a ticket now.
Marco:
We will put the link in the show notes.
Marco:
And so yeah, thanks to Alt Conf for working with us on this because what we wanted to really was just like we wanted to do a live show, but we didn't
Marco:
want to go through like the massive ordeal and and hassle and risk of booking a whole venue ourselves it's a ton of work to do that and i highly respect the podcast that do that we did not have that in us and we could barely get t-shirts for sale so uh so we we found a great arrangement with altconf that worked out well for all of us and we hope to see you there
Casey:
Yep, it's super exciting.
Casey:
Most of the three of us are very excited about it.
Casey:
So please, if you are interested at all in doing this and you think you will be there, please go ahead and get yourself a ticket, buy a ticket, and do it now just like the T-shirts.
John:
To be clear, the live show that we're doing, like it's a live show.
John:
You can come see us live.
John:
We're going to try to stream it.
John:
And the main thing that will probably prevent streaming is the fact that if the stream craps out, Marco can't fix it because he's on stage.
John:
So, oh, well.
John:
But we're also releasing it as a regular episode.
John:
This will be our regular WWDC episode.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
John:
Good point.
John:
In most years, like we just record this in Marco's hotel room or whatever.
John:
You know, we're releasing this episode.
John:
So just don't feel like, oh, I'm not going to WWDC.
John:
I'll miss this one.
John:
You won't miss it.
John:
It will be that week's episode.
John:
You just won't get to see it or hear it live.
John:
That's it.
Casey:
Excellent point.
Casey:
So the news this week, it's been a little while since we've spoken to each other.
Casey:
I've missed you too deeply.
Casey:
But one thing I might be missing soon is Touch ID in the front of my phone because there have been some very interesting hardware specs and photographs that have leaked that indicate the Touch ID sensor in the supposed iPhone 8 may be on the back of the phone already.
Casey:
under the Apple logo.
Casey:
And the internet is not happy about this from what I can tell.
Casey:
I don't really know what I make of it yet.
Casey:
I've never really used a phone with the fingerprint sensor on the back.
Casey:
However, pretty much anyone that I know that has used an Android phone with any regularity has said that it's fine.
Casey:
In fact, some of them have even said they prefer it, even having had used both.
Casey:
So, um, I'm kind of whatever about this.
Casey:
It's not something I feel like I want, but I think I can roll with it just fine.
Casey:
I, you know, I feel the same way about this as I did about the lock button moving from the top to the right hand side of the phone.
Casey:
Not really something I want.
Casey:
I'm sure I'll get over it.
Casey:
And that's exactly how it turned out.
Casey:
Not really something I wanted.
Casey:
I got over it pretty quick.
Casey:
So Marco, how do you feel about this?
Marco:
I'm kind of the same way.
Marco:
I've never used a phone with it on the back.
Marco:
And I think I'd get used to it.
Marco:
It would be fine.
Marco:
But I think on the front would be better.
Marco:
And I think it's more interesting that we don't seem to have a clear picture yet and that maybe Apple doesn't seem to have a clear picture yet.
Marco:
That is more interesting because it's getting pretty late in the year for these kind of decisions to not be made yet.
John:
I got a point of clarification that we needed on this, because in the beginning, Casey said the touch ID sensor is on the back under the Apple logo.
John:
And that actually can be interpreted in multiple ways, which is a way that has been suggested.
John:
So what he was referring to is that you'll look at the link we'll put in the show notes, nine to five Mac or whatever that shows a picture of the supposed park leak.
John:
so if you look at the back of an iphone there's an apple logo on the back but the apple logo is towards the top of the phone right when he says under the apple logo he means go down about an inch from that and pretty much dead center in the back of the phone below the apple logo like lower down on the phone than the apple logo there's a circular opening and that's where touch id would be a lot of people suggested hey if you're going to put something on the back of the phone why don't you make the apple logo also the touch id sensor
John:
obviously the the problems there are that it's not really shaped like a circle and you know it might be hard to get a sensor that kind of fills that area and still looks nice and blah blah blah um and maybe it's position wrong maybe you actually do want it more towards the center instead of high up and so there's all sorts of aesthetic and functional decisions that may make them not want to put the touch id sensor literally in the apple logo but the parts leaks show there's a cutout for the apple logo and then an inch lower there's a circular cutout for the touch id sensor so what are your thoughts on this john
John:
well i mean these these parts leaks we're getting into parts leak season um and i have a hard time dismissing these as complete fakes or ridiculous things because they're starting to look starting to look pretty real to me at the very least a real thing that was made by somebody for some purpose probably apple um
John:
some people in the chat room are saying there's no way apple will do this they'll never do this because it's not an apple thing to do i totally disagree with that apple would 100 do this whether they are going to do it or not i guess you know as every week advances these things these rumors be the cement or they will just go away and we won't see it anymore um but remember this is the phone we're talking about that's supposed to get rid of the chin and forehead more or less and make the screen go from top to bottom edge to edge and
John:
much more so than it does now leaving no room for even the completely immobile touch id button on the iphone 7 there won't even be room for a non-moving button it'll just be screen everywhere and so you know the early rumors were like oh it'll be screen everywhere and in fact the home button and touch id will also be in the screen
John:
you can kind of see how they could put the home button in the screen because we already have a home button that doesn't move right and there's a little indentation for it which is better than being no indentation and that's another sort of ergonomic issue of like how do i find the home button if there's no little indentation for my thumb to go in i just feel for the middle of the phone or maybe the whole bottom of the phone is like a home button and i just force press somewhere near the bottom and it takes me home whatever but the touch id sensor
John:
um the the the rumors were supposedly like oh it turned out to be harder than they thought to get a touch id sensor inside a screen because the screen has lights that come out of it and the touch id sensor you know it's like sensor and screen are not the same things how do they combine them in a way that the touch id sensor works and
John:
all these recent part leaks are part of the narrative.
John:
They're like, Oh, they couldn't get that to work this year.
John:
So instead they're putting it on the back.
John:
Um, and you know, people have Android phones with touch ID sensors on the back and they're saying like, it's fine.
John:
It's whatever.
John:
Like, obviously if you put your phone down on the table, now you can't unlock it.
John:
Um, unless you put it face down, but then when you unlock it, it's no good cause you can't see the screen anyway.
John:
Right.
John:
You know, so that's the one disadvantage that people talk about with it being on the back, but otherwise like ergonomically speaking, um,
John:
It's probably better, easier to hit the Touch ID on the back than it is to hit Touch ID at the very, very edge of your phone.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
If you had to pick where is the best place to put a fingerprint sensor on a featureless rectangle, you wouldn't say, let me put it on the very, very bottom edge because...
John:
You kind of got to shimmy your hand down and you kind of pinch in it from the edge.
John:
You could certainly get a more secure grip if the touch of the sensor were somewhere in the middle, right?
John:
My main reservation about the thing being in the middle is since I'm someone who's had a case on all of my iOS devices,
John:
So putting something that you can't put a case over on the back is somewhat of a problem slash disappointment for me.
John:
I'm not one of those people that has ever had a case that has like a circle cut out so you can see the Apple logo.
John:
I found those cases absurd and just comical and sad.
John:
I don't need a cutout to show the world my Apple logo.
John:
And in fact, if you get an Apple case, they have their own Apple logo on the case as a little indentation.
John:
People will still know it's an iPhone.
John:
It'll be fine, I swear.
John:
But not just for those sort of aesthetic and image reasons, I don't like the cutout.
John:
But mainly I don't like the cutout because the cutout that will inevitably have to be there on any case for an Apple iPhone with the Touch ID sensor on the back...
John:
is that that basically becomes a lint collecting belly button for your phone like it's another place for grime grime and crap to get inside there because you're going to be sticking your grimy fingers in there constantly to unlock your phone and any grime that's on there is just going to get wedged into this little scene it will literally be a grimy linty belly button for your phone
John:
That's not good.
John:
It doesn't look good.
John:
It doesn't feel good.
John:
It makes the Touch ID sensor farther away from you because now you've got to dig your finger into the little belly button to find the Touch ID sensor.
John:
The thicker your case is, the worse that's going to be.
John:
Think of battery cases.
John:
How the hell are you going to get a battery case?
John:
It's going to be a super-duper any belly button where you've got to poke your finger up there and...
John:
It would be a mess.
John:
If you don't use cases on your phone, whatever, then it's no big deal, right?
John:
These are all nine issues.
John:
But I do use cases and I don't want to stick my finger into a little hole in the case and fiddle around on a linty belly button.
John:
So that's mostly making me
John:
Either A, hope this is not true, or B, hope that by the time... Because I have a 7, I'm not going to get this phone.
John:
I'm going to wait another year and get the one after that.
John:
Hopefully, by the next phone, they will have started out whatever issues with Touch ID on the front and I don't want to worry about this.
Marco:
I think having it on the back is worse enough than having it on the front that if we were forced to... If there was no way to keep it on the front while having the screen go edge to edge, if there was no way to put it under the screen...
Marco:
I would rather just still have the chin.
Marco:
Make the bezel smaller.
Marco:
You don't need to make the screen 2 to 1.
Marco:
You can keep it being 16 by 9 and not do the Samsung 18 by 9 or 2 to 1 thing because no one really needs it to be taller necessarily.
Marco:
Just keep the chin.
Marco:
I don't think we need... No one's really asking to have that go away if the cost is going to be losing Touch ID to the back.
John:
well johnny i like symmetry i mean i know you've got a chin on the imac and no forehead right but on the phone though i feel like that silhouette is so iconic you know of the like even like apple's little outline graphics that they give you for iphone that you're like you're not allowed to use in your app or they won't let in the app store that it's basically a rounded rectangle with a little rectangle exactly dead center in the middle and that's basically uh you know hieroglyphics for iphone or for smartphone at this point and
John:
for apple to come out with uh an iphone with asymmetrical margins like a chin but very little forehead because they're trying to pull on the edges like you can pull on the sides a little bit and shave a few millimeters right oh edge to edge screen especially if they do like a rounded screen on the edges like so many of the
Marco:
uh you know past uh android phones oh it's a lot like it when you see them side by side in people's review videos like the the iphone design the side bezels really stick out compared to these newer like you know bezel-less ones like the s8 like yeah but it's only a few millimeters here it's not like you're getting back like a full inch if you took off the chin and forehead
Marco:
but that matters like i'm saying like if you just if you keep most of the chin you don't even need to keep the whole chin just keep enough of it for a touch id sensor to be there there's like two millimeters on top and bottom of the touch id sensor go look at your phone right now there's not a lot of room above and below i'm holding it right now you there is some room about as much room as the side bezels and also uh does it need to be that big we don't know maybe they can go with a smaller one i think it needs to be that big
Marco:
Well, but regardless, I'm saying... This is all about trade-offs, right?
Marco:
This has been a theme of our show.
Marco:
Is Apple making the right trade-offs in its physical designs of things?
Marco:
And I think the trade-off here is... Texture ID on the back is not that great.
Marco:
And if you keep it on the front, basically, it solves a lot of problems.
Marco:
If you can't get it under the screen, which...
Marco:
I mean, I don't know a lot about screen technology, but getting it under the screen without having it be like a visible different spot on the screen when the screen showing an image sounds impossible.
Marco:
That sounds really, really hard.
John:
That's not impossible.
John:
I feel like, you know, I feel like the rumor wouldn't have been around so long if it was literally impossible.
John:
I think.
John:
The tech is sort of kind of there to sort of kind of pull this off to some degree.
John:
Otherwise, it would never be discussed.
Marco:
But you think that there's a way to put some kind of optical readings or scanning sensor in a screen that also is showing pixels such that if you showed a solid color rectangle on the screen that you wouldn't see the outline of that?
John:
Touch ID isn't optical, is it?
John:
i don't know oh i don't know if i knew how touch id worked i could have a more informed opinion about this but uh but i don't but anyway like i would the room the rumor has been around so long and i haven't seen a single story that say you dummy that's impossible stop talking about this which leads me to believe that it is possible it's just a question of how much worse is the sensor you know how how how less clear an image uh or you know a sense of your fingerprints does it get um
John:
so i i i feel like it's it's it's possible if not now then eventually but you know if not this year then whatever but but getting back to the idea of leaving the chin and getting rid of the forehead like you know you can pull in the margins all you want bottom line is if the margin above is not the width of the margin below you've got an asymmetrical phone that's weird to me now they did make the fat nano so never say never right apple has been known to make some pretty
John:
awkward looking ios that was an ios device awkward looking handheld battery powered devices so who knows what they'll do um but i first i personally think that would be an ugly iphone it would be the equivalent of the fat nano even more so than the thing on the back and so i'm i think it is more likely that the front will be nice and symmetrical and the touch ed sensor will be on the back if they really couldn't get it any other way or like the final thing is
John:
it's got top and bottom margins that are both equal they're both slightly smaller than they were before they pulled in the sides a little bit and you know there's your phone people would still like that it would be a new form factor it's not like the iphone 7 form factor again it is a new phone especially if it has you know steel you know that steel shiny chrome edge thing sort of reminiscent of the first iphone and the stainless steel back and you know all the other things it would be a new form factor people would accept it as a new phone
John:
It just wouldn't be like, oh, I thought this one was only going to have screen on the front, but instead it's still got a tune in a forehead, but oh well.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree.
Casey:
I certainly would not complain if Touch ID was pretty much exactly the way it was.
Casey:
It's just the only difference is that the bezels were slightly smaller.
Casey:
But we'll see.
Casey:
I'm pretty much nonplussed by this regardless.
Casey:
Whatever ends up happening happens, and that's fine.
John:
By the way, I think this is a good time to revisit while we're on the topic of the buttons on our phones and everything to take another pass at each of us saying how we feel about the non-moving iPhone 7 home button after using it for a year now or whatever it's been.
John:
because i had occasion to use my wife's phone recently and she's got a 6s and that button moves uh and i start off as like oh the buttons it's weird you get used to it it's not quite the same or whatever and now i'm at the point where when i use a an ios device where the button actually moves it feels like junk and i can't handle it and i am like fully converted yep
John:
I am fully converted to the non-moving button, which does not feel like the old button.
John:
Like, it's not like, oh, now it has fooled me.
John:
It doesn't.
John:
But all I'm saying is the way it feels now is the way I expect my phone to feel.
John:
The little wiggly shake, even how it works when my phone is sitting on a tabletop, like, all those little haptic movements and whatever...
John:
my hands have just accepted that that's how your phone feels and when i use phones that don't feel that way and when a thing like presses in on them it feels junky and crappy to me so i am a total convert to this which makes me gives me some hope that i will eventually be a convert to and you know an in-screen completely smooth no border thing i could be wrong it could be that i need the little circle to feel with my thumb right no matter where it is which is another question by the way they put touch ID in the back is it a little crater on the back or is it totally featureless
John:
and if it is a crater that's kind of weird because you'd have the apple logo and then a little then a little zit crater belly button blow it anyway um i i'm here to say that i feel like i have unbeknownst to me completely converted to not just tolerating the non-moving home button but to saying i like the non-moving home button better than all the moving home buttons i've ever used
Casey:
I could not possibly agree with you more.
Casey:
The only time I dislike the non-moving home button, the static home button, is when I try to unlock my phone when it's resting on a table because whatever magic the haptic, taptic, whatever feedback does in order to make you feel like you've clicked a button, it's either completely muted to the point of, figuratively speaking, silence or just very, very, very soft and almost muted.
Casey:
And that annoys me.
Casey:
But in hand, I have no problem with it.
Casey:
And I believe I'm on the softest setting.
Casey:
I'm going to have to come back to it because I don't remember offhand.
Casey:
But I think I'm on the softest feedback setting, too.
John:
Yeah, like I mentioned, the table thing, it may be because I have a case.
John:
Like, it does feel different when it's on the table.
John:
But I have now come to like that feeling.
John:
also better than pressing like the home button on my wife's success that's also sitting on the table it is totally weird and it is different than when it's in your hand but i like it better because it's just what i'm used to right and when i push it and it moves in it feels like i'm breaking the phone and opening up this weird gap and like it feels so clunky or whatever and i i have been in the situation and maybe it is the case that it makes a difference that like gives it that extra cushion or margin for the haptics to do something like where you press it and and like
John:
imagine if you pressed in the haptics didn't go off at all right that would feel broken on on the seven right and so sometimes i feel like if you're if you're on a very flat table a very hard flat table with no case and you try to do it maybe somehow the haptics have no had nothing to move or vibrate and that feels a little bit more broken than it does with the case so it could be the case is helping me like my home button uh more but either way um i'm willing to uh you know i i like it i like it better even in that scenario
Casey:
So what setting are you on in terms of the feedback?
John:
I'm just going to go look that up.
John:
Where is that?
Casey:
It's in general.
Casey:
It's home button.
Marco:
Everything's in general.
Marco:
That's why it's aptly named.
Marco:
It should just be called settings.
Marco:
You go to settings and you go to settings.
Marco:
No, I'm with you guys.
Marco:
I totally agree.
Marco:
The very first probably three or four days, I hated it.
Marco:
I thought this is a huge step backwards.
Marco:
I said as much here.
Marco:
And somehow between now and then, I've turned into not only liking it, but like John, liking it more than the old buttons.
Marco:
And the old buttons now feel weird to me.
Marco:
That has not happened with Force Touch trackpads or the new keyboards on the MacBooks, but that has definitely happened with the Force Touch home button on the phones.
Marco:
And I also would go a little bit further and say one of the great things about the iPhone 7 is
Marco:
is that new Taptic Engine second generation that has enabled because it's like a much more precise Taptic Engine that can do a lot more stuff and has like a whole sequencer for the things it does.
Marco:
And so that has enabled all the little tiny haptic feedback things throughout the interface.
Marco:
And now that I'm accustomed to that in so many system standard apps that use standard controls and standard haptics and everything, when I go back, when I use like an iPad that doesn't have the Taptic Engine and nothing gives me those little taps with everything, it feels like something's broken.
Marco:
It feels like, what's wrong?
Marco:
Is this some kind of primitive piece of glass?
Marco:
It makes a huge difference.
Marco:
So I also am a very big fan of haptics and especially the new Taptic Engine and
Marco:
I look forward to seeing them added to more apps, including probably my own, once I get around to it.
John:
Speaking of haptic feedback and things that feel broken, Marco, this is my brief complaint about Overcast things.
John:
I have really long lists, really long playlists, and when I try to drag something from way, way down at the bottom to way, way up at the top, the maximum scroll speed as the little haptics fire off is way too slow, and I just sit there holding it and going... And then, of course, Overcast refreshes the list, and it yanks the thing that I was holding...
John:
in my hand out of my hand and drops it into the list wherever it was then i regrab it and go thump thump thump thump thump thump anyway max speed should be higher all right this the second thing is my fault the first thing is uh the first like this is just the the standard behavior of ui table view and i know but i believe in you i believe you can you can change the default behavior and make it make it go faster
Marco:
Given what you've done... If I have to do anything else to UI TableView, I'm just going to move to UI CollectionView.
Marco:
Some people speculate that maybe CollectionViews will replace TableViews.
John:
Yeah, I saw that article about TableViews for suckers.
John:
It's all CollectionView now.
Marco:
Well, there's a bunch of things that TableViews still do that CollectionViews don't or that you'd have to write it yourself.
Marco:
But I think I've probably crossed the threshold after which...
John:
i've done so much work to hack table views that maybe doing it in a collection view would have been less work after all so probably next time i redesign this interface if that ever happens i'm not looking forward to that but if that ever happens uh i will probably do collection view instead go over a higher max scroll speed it can ratchet up it can be like slow in the beginning and then you're holding and then it goes faster in fact you know like the same way that flick scrolling kind of does where you you can you can get it up to speed because really long list like there's just no recourse it's just and well there there is a shortcut
Marco:
uh if you if you start playing an item near the top and on the items near the bottom that you're trying to move all the way up play next play next play next play next that'll move them all immediately yeah all right that was just an aside it's uh funny you bring up the the taptic haptic whatever feedback because uh as an aside the other day i had a few minutes to kill at work
Casey:
And the app that I work on, we have a scenario where there's like a bunch of cards across the bottom of the screen and you can slide the cards left and right and some will come from off screen onto screen and then go back off screen again.
Casey:
And this is like the perfect moment to use that feedback and that tap, tap, tap as you're scrolling through the cards and they're coming on and off screen.
Casey:
And I tried to get it to work just right.
Casey:
And I couldn't get the math right such that when the card was at the midway point off screen, it would fire at the exact right moment.
Casey:
It was very wonky.
Casey:
It was probably my fault.
Casey:
But I hope to at some point go back to finish that up because it really does work phenomenally well when you get it right.
Casey:
But getting it right is kind of tough.
Casey:
So, yeah, I am in full support of third-party app developers putting that everywhere they can in their apps because it's super cool.
Marco:
No, not at all.
Marco:
And so apps, in theory, could have much more creativity and options over the feeling and even possibly direction, if that's a thing, like side-by-side directions of the haptics.
Marco:
That's not yet exposed in the API, but maybe in iOS 11 or the future, maybe they will.
Marco:
Because I would love to do some custom stuff there that just isn't possible right now.
Casey:
Yeah, I completely agree with you.
Casey:
All right, anything else on these iPhone 8 rumors?
Marco:
I think at this point, there's so many crazy rumors.
Marco:
We know so little, it's hard to comment intelligently on much of it.
Casey:
Well, has that ever stopped us before?
John:
And by the way, the 9to5Mac article that we're going to link that has the parts leak thing, the parts leak was like a drawing, which is always the best part.
John:
It's like measurements on them and stuff like that.
John:
It's good.
John:
I actually took a screenshot of that thing because those are so easy to verify.
John:
They're down to the...
John:
you know thousands of a millimeter we can verify those when the real phone comes out if it's exactly those dimensions after the thousands of the millimeter that was probably a legit leak if they're not then that was just totally made up uh stuff but anyway the 95 mac article has a picture of like oh here's a part it looks just like that schematic it's just a rendering of the schematic like the schematic is the supposed leak not this thing that looks like metal and the thing so don't don't be fooled by thinking someone found a metal thing and took a fuzzy picture of it it's just a rendering
Casey:
Also, real-time follow-up, the Touch ID hardware as it exists today is capacitive, which I did not realize.
Casey:
I thought it was optical.
Marco:
Yeah, so I think it's just like a really, really high-density capacitive layer, like higher precision than the touch sensor on the whole multi-touch screen, I assume, right?
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, I mean, the whole thing of the capacitive layering, there's two aspects.
John:
One is the layering thing, where you can make screens out of a series of layers, and one layer is the part that does the capacitive sensing, and the other layer is the part that has the...
John:
the the color elements and the light up bits and you know especially if it's an oled screen but isn't this the the new iphone supposed to be all oled and everything so then you you reduce the number of layers because you don't have a light emitting layer and a filter layer you the little pixels themselves emit light but either way you have to have a bunch of things that emit light and then in between the light emitting things you need the sensing things and the light emitting things don't have to fill the whole area because there's you know light bloom and everything so the actual light emitting areas can actually be very small and have mostly empty space between them it's just a question of trying to like
John:
either weave that together or layer it over each other such that you know the the the capacitive thing is has this fine mesh that's put over the light up things but you don't notice the mesh because it's super fine or you put it below the light up things like again i'm just making up random words for tech here but like it seems to me that it should be possible to make a layer cake that works in some way
John:
the only question is how much worse does it work than the existing touch id which is which still has like whatever this is a layer of sapphire or glass over the capacitive sensor right so it's still there's still some distance there's just no light being emitted from it and especially if they just darken that area of the screen when you hold your finger on it when it's expecting touch id or whatever like there are ways around a lot of the limitations that make me think it is feasible if not this year then surely in a few years
Marco:
We were sponsored this week by Eero.
Marco:
Go to Eero.com.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
You buy a router with a whole bunch of giant antennas on it thinking you will finally cover your entire house and you'll finally have coverage in those two or three back rooms where you never had coverage before.
Marco:
And in practice, you get that big router home and every time it says it's going to have the best range and it doesn't cover those rooms.
Marco:
Wi-Fi has been broken for so long because we rely on single routers.
Marco:
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Marco:
Eero is a system where you plug in one of these routers as your main one, but then you buy more than one.
Marco:
You can buy a two pack, a three pack, whatever amount you need.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
And the app that it comes with helps you set them up in a really effective way, and it just blankets the entire house in fast, reliable Wi-Fi way better than a single router ever could.
Marco:
And again, as I mentioned, the app is super easy to use, tons of great features, and they're updating it all the time.
Marco:
And the performance you get is way better than you get out of a traditional like repeater or range extender setup because they actually create a backhaul mesh network separately from the main network to communicate with each other and to form that huge mesh of Wi-Fi coverage in your home.
Marco:
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Marco:
And don't just take my word for it.
Marco:
Do your own research.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
They know that that's what you're going to do anyway.
Marco:
So check it out today.
Marco:
Go to Eero.com.
Marco:
That's E-E-R-O.com to learn more.
Marco:
Highly recommended.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Eero for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
So there's been a lot of motion in this thing called Overcast.
Casey:
I don't know if any of you are familiar with this, but apparently the developer of Overcast has been very busy and getting work done and has tweeted, the Overcast account has tweeted, found a fix for M4A chapters.
Casey:
They'll return in the next version.
Casey:
MP3 chapters continue to work great.
Casey:
They'll be easier to create soon.
Casey:
So there's a fair bit to unpack here, but let's start with M4A.
Casey:
What'd you do, Marco?
Marco:
So last episode, I described the problem that I was facing where basically the Apple low-level parser would only recognize chapters in MP3 and M4A files if they were named with .mp3 and .m4a extensions.
Marco:
And whenever Cast downloads a file, it doesn't know the...
Marco:
the type yet until it starts downloading it at which point i already am saving it to a file and would rather not move it for streaming reasons and anyway uh and so the hack i was doing before was that upon playback i would temporarily create two sim links to the unextensioned file one of them with .mp3 one of them with .m4a have apple read those for the metadata parser and then take the metadata from there and
Marco:
I had mentioned that that was no longer working with stability on APFS in 10.3.
Marco:
Sometimes I would get crashes around those simlink creations or deletions.
Marco:
And so to avoid these crashes, I switched to my own metadata parser, which only supported MP3, and said, well, I'll figure out some other solution for M4A later.
Marco:
I have to fix these crashes now.
Marco:
And the solution I came to was just name all the files .m4a.
Marco:
Because I have my own parser now for MP3 chapters, and my parser is as smart as I want it to be.
Marco:
And I decided to build in the smarts that say, who cares what the file is named?
Marco:
Just parse and look at these first bytes, and you can tell what format it is anyway.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
So my parser is now responsible for MP3 streaming, and I use Apple's, again, for M4As on the files, all of which are now named .m4a.
Casey:
That's both extremely clever and completely bananas all at the same time.
John:
It's a perfect incarnation of file name extensions, highlighting the fact that the name of the file has no bearing whatsoever on the format of the data it contains, and it's an absurd system.
John:
And Marco, it's like a satire of file name extensions.
John:
Like, you know what?
John:
I'm just naming every file on M4A because that crap is meaningless, except to this stupid API that's too stupid to know what the hell kind of file is being fed and doesn't let me specify, and it just figures it out by parsing the file name.
Marco:
Especially, like, almost all formats, almost all modern file formats, even stuff as old as MP3,
Marco:
You can usually tell what format it is by looking at maybe the first 12 bytes of the file at most.
Marco:
Some files you can tell with even less.
Marco:
So the file command does.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
It's really easy to detect it.
Marco:
An M4A always looks the same, and it's super easy to see it.
Marco:
And MP3s can look two different ways up front, but they're both pretty easy to parse and detect.
Marco:
Like, I wrote code to do it, and I'm not a, you know, super crazy file engineer.
Marco:
Like, I just looked up the specs for these formats.
Marco:
Oh, well, this format has these bytes up front, and this one has these.
Marco:
Done.
Marco:
Like, it isn't hard.
Marco:
And, you know, JPEG and ping, those are like, you know, eight bytes at the beginning, too.
Marco:
It's super easy.
John:
Sometimes they begin with the letters JPEG or GIF, like literal ASCII text.
John:
JFIF, but anyway, yeah.
John:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.
Casey:
jfif yeah joint something international photo it's interchange format it doesn't really matter all right so it also in this uh tweet uh you you had said mp3 chapters will be easier to create soon tell me more
Marco:
Ask again later.
Marco:
Look, you all know I'm making forecasts.
Marco:
The only question is when it comes out.
Marco:
So when's it coming out?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Probably soon.
Marco:
Oh, yeah?
Marco:
I'm putting out some overcast fires first, but yeah, probably soon.
John:
It's been a long time coming.
John:
I think it's been more than a year since you were willing to talk about this program on the podcast in public, and who knows how long before that.
John:
This has been a heck of a gestation for this program.
John:
This program that...
John:
People have already been using to do it for its intended purpose for a long time.
John:
You just haven't gotten around to the point where you polished it up for release, right?
Marco:
There are a few little things I want to work out, but they're like minor UI issues.
Marco:
For the most part, it should be coming soon.
Casey:
And for those who don't know, Forecast is a thing that's been charitably in private alpha that Marco wrote in order to break a podcast into chapters and do so easily and quickly.
Marco:
And people in the chat are asking about pricing.
Marco:
The honest answer is that I still haven't quite decided for sure, but I'm leaning towards just making it free, but not open source.
Marco:
And there's lots of reasons for this.
Marco:
Maybe I'll talk about it once I release it, if I go this way.
Marco:
But the gist of it is basically, I don't think the market is going to be big enough
Marco:
to make it worth charging money for.
Marco:
Because when you charge money for things, you have to support it in a very different way.
Marco:
And there's overhead to that.
Marco:
And I just don't think it would be worth it because I think the market for it is going to be pretty small.
Marco:
So I don't think it's worth charging.
Marco:
uh and but at the same time open source is tricky when you're talking about entire apps like libraries and components sure that's easy when you're talking about entire apps though um you have a lot of problems with like people ripping it off and uploading it to the app store under their own name and like it's it's a big problem for open when you open an entire app doing stuff like that so
Marco:
I don't really want to deal with that.
Marco:
And I think the value of open source is much higher at the library level than at the entire app level.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So you've also been busy with your Apple Watch.
Casey:
And we kind of made a mention of this earlier.
Casey:
But it turns out your Apple Watch does have a purpose after all.
Marco:
Yes, for testing my Apple Watch.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
Yeah, I did a big watch update.
Marco:
We had kind of alluded to this months ago.
Marco:
And the truth is I've been working on offline watch playback for months now.
Marco:
It has taken a very long time.
Marco:
And there's lots of reasons for that.
Marco:
And it wasn't the only thing I was doing during that time.
Marco:
I did all of 3.0.
Marco:
It was originally slated to be a headlining feature of 3.0.
Marco:
There are lots of reasons why that didn't happen.
Marco:
The main reason is that the state that I had it in at the time 3.0 was going to ship...
Marco:
It just had too many weird limitations and bugs, and I decided it was not a good idea to make a big deal out of this feature, to have it be a headlining feature of this major update of my app, and to have it not work very well.
Marco:
That didn't seem wise to me.
Marco:
So instead, I push it off to later, figuring, you know, maybe something will change in watchOS in the next versions and I can, you know, do it then.
Marco:
And there were some other factors involved that influenced this as well.
Marco:
But suffice to say, it took a very long time to do because the way I did it.
Marco:
In order to get podcast playback on the Apple Watch, there's a bunch of major hoops you have to jump through.
Marco:
One of them is just the data transfer.
Marco:
The watch has very limited resources in all kinds.
Marco:
That includes bandwidth, that includes storage, and processing power.
Marco:
And the API for it is very limited.
Marco:
So there's certain things that you can't reliably do.
Marco:
One of the things is that you can't reliably just feed it any arbitrary podcast file off the internet and expect it to work.
Marco:
There are limitations in its API, certain things it just doesn't play or doesn't play very well, or certain formats and bit rates use way too much power.
Marco:
And it actually becomes like a noticeable load on the watch that you want to avoid.
Marco:
There's also issues like if you're transferring it from the phone, then you have a serious problem of bandwidth and transfer speeds.
Marco:
It could take an hour to transfer a podcast file to the watch.
Marco:
Oh, seriously?
Yeah.
Marco:
If you don't compress it, yeah.
Marco:
It could take a long time.
Marco:
Because, you know, a lot of times it's transferring over Bluetooth.
Marco:
Sometimes it'll use Wi-Fi if it can, but it's kind of vague as to when and whether it will do that.
Marco:
So you can't really count on that.
Marco:
So basically, it's a huge challenge to get the files to the watch.
Marco:
And then once they're on the watch, there were massive challenges around... There's only a few different ways to play audio on the watch.
Marco:
WatchOS 3.2 added a couple of big things.
Marco:
Before that, which is most of my development, the APIs that were there, there were three different ways to play audio files.
Marco:
And all of them had fatal, massive problems for playing podcasts.
Marco:
One of them, you couldn't set the start time of the file.
Marco:
So if you started it and then you closed it and you wanted to start it again, you'd have to start from the beginning or somehow have the watch splice the file.
Marco:
One of my prototypes, I actually had the watch splicing AAC files every 15 seconds so that it would be able to look and play this huge playlist.
Marco:
I tried a lot of things.
Marco:
And it was...
Marco:
It was a large period of trial and error.
Marco:
Let's say that.
Marco:
One of the APIs that you've probably seen before, you could present a sheet that has the file, but it only has the seek back and forward by five seconds at a time, and there's no way to change that UI.
Marco:
So that is pretty bad also.
Marco:
It does allow a start time, which is fine, but if you start to work out or background it, then it stops playing.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
And then there was a different one, the WK Audio File Player API, which is what the current store version, as we speak, uses.
Marco:
And that has tons of problems and shortcomings.
Marco:
And it's bizarre things.
Marco:
And by the way, I have filed bugs.
Marco:
I have been in contact with Apple about all these different shortcomings.
Marco:
So I've done my duty there.
Marco:
But I don't think they have a lot of resources to devote to audio playback on the watch, honestly.
Marco:
It seems like this is a pretty...
Marco:
rarely used thing and their resources are probably elsewhere like ios 11 you know so anyway um the uh the one of the issues with the with the wk audio file api is like things like if your app is in the background and you you initiate a player that player will just never play if if you go to note it has some integration with the now playing glance so if you go to the now playing glance and hit next track
Marco:
whatever was playing will never play again but there's no way to tell in the api so you go back to the app and the api says i'm still playing yes i'm playing at 1x but then you just notice if you pull the time you know actually you say you're playing and you say you're playing at 1x but the time stamp is not going up
Marco:
So in the version in the store right now, I have things like timers that pull every so often and check to see, is the timestamp going up as it should?
Marco:
If not, tear down and recreate the entire player.
Marco:
There are so many limitations and weird bugs with the current one.
Um...
Marco:
What happened in 3.2?
Marco:
Well, first of all, 3.2 made it possible at all to use this API because they added a set timestamp method on that so that you could start a file from the middle.
Marco:
And then they also very quietly with no comment, except in the release notes, they just they added the ability to use AV audio player.
Marco:
I'm like, oh, yeah.
Marco:
It's like, well, then why bother with all this crap?
Marco:
Yes, let me use that.
Marco:
And I should point out, too, as far as I know, I don't think I can actually move my entire core audio stack onto the watch yet.
Marco:
Some of core audio is there.
Marco:
I don't know if enough of it is there or if I'm maybe missing things like audio toolbox and some of the little accessory things.
Marco:
So I don't think I can actually move the entire thing over yet.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
AV Audio Player is good enough to do everything except smart speed and voice boost.
Marco:
And it has everything else I need.
Marco:
It has a pretty good speed engine.
Marco:
It is an in-process API.
Marco:
The only reason I wasn't using it before in the version that's in the store right now is that it wasn't backgrounding for me.
Marco:
reliably enough at least like it would background sometimes and other times and i realized um yesterday you had to set different background audio flags in different places for that one than you did for the original wk audio player once i set those it works perfectly uh well with some with a few bugs along the way but it's suffice to say those are all fixed now as of about two hours ago it works perfectly
Marco:
The version that is currently awaiting Apple's approval is this new version with AV Audio Player.
Marco:
It's going to be awesome.
Marco:
I should point out a few other things that I hit along the way.
Marco:
One of the things I did early on that took some time but was worth it, as I mentioned, none of these methods on the watch support smart speed or voice boost.
Marco:
And if you're accustomed to listening to overcatch with smart speed, listening to anything else seems kind of broken.
Marco:
It just sounds wrong.
Marco:
And you can do basic speed ups on the watch.
Marco:
But I don't have the low level access to the audio stream to be able to do smart speed.
Marco:
And so what I did instead was on the phone, I experimented and found something fast enough eventually.
Marco:
I'm actually transcoding the files on the phone.
Marco:
If you have smart speed enabled, it bakes in smart speed.
Casey:
That's kind of bananas.
Marco:
Whatever settings that you would play the track on on your phone, if you have it, say, play at smart speed at 1.25x, then it will play on the watch at 1.25x, and it'll have smart speed baked in.
Marco:
I'm not able to do voice boost yet, and this is due to some low-level implementation details.
Marco:
Basically, if I run this through an audio graph, it is 10 times slower, and it transcodes at about...
Marco:
12x real time.
Marco:
If I don't run it through an audiograph and just process the samples raw, it runs at about 110 or 112x on an iPhone 7.
Marco:
So I can transcode, you know, 100 times faster than real time by not using the graph.
Marco:
So doing it through the graph is just too slow to really ship that.
Marco:
And so there's no voice boost yet.
Marco:
I have not yet written my own voice boost that doesn't use a combination of audio units.
Marco:
I plan to, but I haven't yet.
Marco:
That's a low-level thing that will be a fun project someday, but it hasn't happened yet.
Marco:
So that's why there's no voice boost.
Marco:
But there is SmartSpeed, because SmartSpeed is a combination of C functions, not audio units.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Anyway, long story short, when you send a file to the watch, the phone transcodes it.
Marco:
It transcodes it also down to a lower bitrate.
Marco:
I did a whole bunch of testing to figure out what is the best low bitrate way for spoken audio to be heard on a watch.
Marco:
Obviously, there is some quality loss, so it's just a question of balance.
Marco:
How do I balance this?
Marco:
Because the bigger the files are...
Marco:
the much longer they take to transfer to the watch for me that a whole bunch of testing with heaac and aac and and even things like um some of the newer formats the aug um what is it opus i don't know if sorry if it's not officially aug but it's from those people the new opus format and there's a whole bunch of other stuff um and that would have been harder to decode uh because the watch doesn't support it anyway i did a whole bunch of crazy stuff
Marco:
I'm transcoding to that on the phone, on demand, baking in smart speed.
Marco:
It also has a few other cool optimizations.
Marco:
For example, if you are halfway through a podcast and you say send to the watch, it only sends the second half because there's no reason to send the part you already listened to.
Marco:
Anyway...
Marco:
Here's all my secrets.
Marco:
That's how you do it.
Marco:
And it's a whole lot of work.
Marco:
But now I finally have offline watch playback.
Marco:
And with the version that will hopefully be approved in the next day or two, it'll be way, way better because it'll move to this newer API that's way more stable and has speaker output and everything else.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
It's been quite a trip.
Marco:
Oh, not to mention the whole system of syncing between the watch and the phone.
Marco:
That's a thing.
Marco:
You have to sync your progress and not lose stuff and not have stuff clobber itself during sync and everything else.
Marco:
It's been quite a lot of effort.
Marco:
And all of this is for a feature that relatively nobody will use.
Marco:
And it's hard to justify this, but there's a few reasons why I thought it was worth it.
Marco:
Right now, according to my analytics, something like half a percent of people are using it or something like that.
Marco:
And I haven't done a great job of promoting it, so a lot of people don't know it's there yet.
Marco:
But there's not a lot of people who are going to use this feature.
Marco:
But it was a very high-demanded feature.
Marco:
And it's the kind of thing where you might decide...
Marco:
What I've done is, while testing this, I have paired my favorite walking headphones to my watch.
Marco:
And so it kind of forces me to use my watch more as the podcast player because I don't want to unpair and repair my headphones back to my phone every time I leave to walk the dog.
Marco:
So I've kind of gotten into this habit over the last week or two and really gotten into this.
Marco:
And it is pretty cool.
Marco:
I've got to say, it is pretty nice.
Marco:
It's not as good as using a phone, but you have to carry a phone.
Marco:
And for a lot of people, people have been begging me since the watch came out.
Marco:
This has been one of the top feature requests for Overcast since the watch came out.
Marco:
Because a lot of people either...
Marco:
can't or don't want to bring their phone certain places where they can bring their watch it's a very common request for example in certain kinds of exercise like jogging where a lot of people don't want to carry their phone or it's too clunky or it's in some kind of inconvenient like you know arm thing or backpack or something else then you know they want it to be totally on their watch so I understand that I'm probably never going to run in my life but I understand the people who do that that's so like it matters a lot to a small number of people
Marco:
That's the kind of thing I enjoy doing.
Marco:
It's never going to be worth it by the numbers, but I do enjoy doing it just because of how much it matters to that small number of people.
Marco:
And the fact is, I think business-wise, it might also be a safe bet.
Marco:
It might also be a good thing to do because Apple likes it, for one thing.
Marco:
So it probably makes my app more likely to be featured by Apple in the future.
Marco:
Maybe it increases my chances of getting an ADA, one can hope.
Marco:
I never really think I have a chance at that, but I really want one.
Marco:
So one can hope, right?
Marco:
I also, I think that it's the kind of feature, kind of like when people buy SUVs and like, what if I need to haul something someday and they never haul anything, right?
Marco:
But like, I feel like if you're looking at podcast apps that are out there and you might think, oh, I want that.
Marco:
Even if you never end up using it or you hardly ever use it, that might've still helped me
Marco:
you know get that sale or get that person to use overcast instead of something else so i think in it for a lot of reasons i think it is probably worth having done it did take a lot longer than i thought it would and a lot more work than i thought it would and it's not done either like there's what i have now is a system where you still have to manually send episodes one by one to the watch and they still take forever to transfer
Marco:
And I'm not entirely sure I can ever really fix the taking forever transfer thing.
Marco:
I'm, you know, that might just have to like wait out the hardware advancements.
Marco:
Um, but like, you know, sending one by one to the watch is also not great.
Marco:
Uh, people have requested things like automatically send episodes of this podcast or this playlist to the watch.
Marco:
And that has its own challenges and limitations.
Marco:
Like for instance, I don't really know how much space I have to deal with.
Marco:
And if you, if you tell people, um,
Marco:
you can send this playlist to the watch.
Marco:
I'm going to design this feature for my playlist, which might have like 15 podcasts on it at most.
Marco:
And then somebody like John is going to use it and they're going to try to sync 400 audio books to it.
Marco:
And they're going to be mad when it doesn't work because there's not enough space in the watch, which I can't even tell as the programmer.
Marco:
So doing anything more...
Marco:
because of the constrained nature of the watch, is going to be harder than doing those same things on the iPhone.
Marco:
It's also going to be massive UI challenges.
Marco:
People are already asking for things like chapter navigation on the watch.
Marco:
It's really hard to fit a good UI that is both attractive and usable.
Marco:
on that watch screen uh and it's everything people want me to do with this feature uh is is going to be hard to do basically but i think i finally got the basics nailed down in this update that hopefully will be shipping around the time this podcast comes out uh the the 3.1.2 update um hopefully everybody will have that now and and it's going to be great and i'm kind of glad to have it finally be done and now i have a reason to use my watch again
Casey:
So have you been using the watch for anything other than podcasting?
Marco:
Well, you know, I use it on my dog walk.
Marco:
So, you know, I still prefer mechanical watches greatly for general use and general wearing.
Marco:
But the Apple Watch is, as the entire world plus Apple have figured out over the last year or two, whatever it's been, the Apple Watch is pretty good for fitness stuff.
Marco:
And so I am quite enjoying on my dog walks being able to track the time and distance that I have gone and get a nice cool GPS map of it if I ever want that.
Marco:
It will probably remain my like taking walks watch.
Marco:
But for other times in my day, I prefer mechanicals for other reasons.
John:
Did you get a Series 2?
John:
You mentioned the GPS.
John:
Are you saying because you have your phone with you, that's why you get the GPS trace?
Marco:
No, I actually did get a Series 2.
Marco:
I got a Series 2 this past spring or this past winter while testing this because the build, run, debug loop on the Apple Watch is so incredibly slow because the hardware is really basic.
Marco:
And when you're doing like build and run and build and run and debug, it's all going also through your phone.
Marco:
and then to the watch over bluetooth or whatever it's very very slow to the point where like changing something on the watch and building and building and running might be like a 45 second long cycle and when you're doing a lot of that that time really adds up and really gets annoying so as like after like a day of of like trying all these deployment methods in the watch i went to the apple store and got a series too i'm like because i asked underscore like is it faster and he actually of course he timed it of course he knew like exactly to the second of course
Marco:
And it was something like 20 seconds faster on the Series 2.
Marco:
I'm like, done.
Marco:
Sold.
Marco:
Because if you can save me 20 seconds every single time I'm building and running on the watch, that is going to add up.
Marco:
And it did.
Marco:
So I do have a Series 2.
Marco:
I'm very, very glad I got the Series 2 because the difference for development was immediately and incredibly apparent.
John:
so what series two did you get i know you're just getting it oh i just want something that's faster for me to do my builds on right but then did you go okay well since i'm buying one which one do i want what color do i want what bands like what did you get you know i did go through a lot of that that that debate because i'm like i'm like i'm just getting it for development i should just get the aluminum basic cheapo the cheapest one i can get like you know just get that one
Marco:
Not every fiber of your being screams out, no!
Marco:
In theory, I don't even need the Series 2.
Marco:
I could have gotten the Series 1.
Marco:
Same processor, same speed, just no GPS.
John:
No GPS, yes.
Marco:
And not super waterproof.
Marco:
So I could have gotten that.
John:
But once again, your inner Marco says no.
Marco:
Well, here's the thing.
Marco:
Oh, here we go.
Marco:
So I'm accustomed to now wearing nice watches.
Marco:
The reason I got into nice... You need to have a watch that lets you live in the style to which you have become accustomed.
Marco:
The reason I got into nice watches is because I fell in love with how the Apple Watch made me feel when I looked at it on my wrist.
Marco:
That is why.
Marco:
When the Apple Watch first came out, I obsessed crazily over which bands to get, which color combinations worked.
Marco:
I went over this for weeks.
Marco:
I was agonizing.
Marco:
Like, oh, will this band be more convenient to latch or this one or whatever else?
Marco:
And so it mattered a lot to me.
Marco:
And I really enjoy the way the steel watch looks.
Marco:
And I really, unfortunately, don't enjoy the way the aluminum ones look.
Marco:
The aluminum ones, to me, look a lot like a phone on your wrist.
Marco:
The steel ones don't look like an analog device by any means, but I think the steel ones are very attractive.
Marco:
I decided, after much agonizing, that I wanted a steel one again.
Marco:
The only way to get a steel one was to get the Series 2.
Marco:
You can get the Series 1 in steel.
Marco:
So I got the Series 2, and I got the steel.
Marco:
And I have it on... I think I came with a Milanese.
Marco:
That was the only one I could get in stock, which I immediately sold.
Marco:
And I'm just using my old sport band with it.
Casey:
It makes me a little sad that you haven't decided to come crawling back to the Apple Watch, but to each their own.
Casey:
Like what you like.
Marco:
No question it has a lot of utility, but it also has a lot of things it's not so great about.
Marco:
When I'm wearing it now for these testing periods...
Marco:
every time i turn my wrist to look at the time it doesn't show like every time just like just oh let me exaggerate this motion again or let me tap it and just like oh come on so yeah like when you're accustomed to regular watches the apple watch has a few things about it that are very annoying mostly the delay when looking at the time and
Marco:
So it's fine.
Marco:
All the utilities of it, things like notifications all day and stuff, I don't really care.
Marco:
I turn off most notifications.
Marco:
I don't like having a lot of them.
Marco:
So most of that stuff is not of much use to me.
Marco:
And the fitness stuff, I don't usually have much of a fitness regimen.
Marco:
When I do, it's extensive dog walking.
Marco:
So I'm using it now for that.
Marco:
For most things in my life, I don't have the kind of lifestyle that benefits heavily from the Apple Watch's good things, and the Apple Watch's bad things irritate me.
John:
Did you get the Earth Day badge?
Marco:
I did not.
Marco:
I did get reminded about the Earth Day badge on Earth Day, but I hit dismiss and did not get it.
Casey:
I didn't get it because it was disgusting weather over here.
Casey:
I didn't get that one.
Casey:
I did get the Turkey Day one, but I did not get the Earth Day one.
Casey:
Did you, John?
John:
No.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
And you haven't put your watch on in months, I assume?
John:
I wore it on vacation.
John:
I wore it the whole week.
John:
Why did you wear it on vacation?
John:
That's what I do.
Marco:
I do it when I travel.
Marco:
Well, and I will say it is a really nice travel watch because it sets its own time zone and you can have your boarding passes showing on it and everything else.
Marco:
So it is kind of nice for that.
John:
And walking directions in the city to be able to like tap on your wrist, tell you which street to turn down instead of how to constantly take out your phone.
John:
Yeah, that's true.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
The main downside for me is then you have to bring its separate charger and I'm trying to minimize the chargers that I bring on trips and that's usually a really easy one to let go of.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Anything else on anything watch-related?
Marco:
Hopefully not.
Marco:
It's been a lot.
Marco:
A lot of Apple Watch stuff the last couple of weeks.
Casey:
You've been working a lot.
Marco:
Yeah, I know.
Marco:
I'm proud of you.
Marco:
And the whole transcoding engine and baking in smart speed, that work was all done months ago.
Marco:
And I've just been sitting on it waiting for a chance to use it.
Marco:
And basically waiting for the watch APIs to both get better and for me to figure them out.
Marco:
Which both had to happen for this to finally be released.
Marco:
But here it is.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
it's a lot of work, it's a lot of time, and it's a lot of ongoing maintenance and support that, frankly, you probably shouldn't be spending your time doing.
Marco:
Because for like 90% of what people need out of websites, Squarespace does it all.
Marco:
Squarespace has built-in blogs,
Marco:
portfolios, even stores, all sorts of content sites that you can make, and even dynamic store sites with Squarespace.
Marco:
It is really incredible what you can do with Squarespace.
Marco:
And no matter what your skill level is, if you're a novice all the way up to if you're a web programmer, Squarespace can work for you.
Marco:
It's easy to use, but there's advanced options if you want them.
Marco:
Everything can be visual and drag and drop, or you can get in there and actually edit code.
Marco:
It spans the gamut.
Marco:
And best of all, once you get your site set up with Squarespace, you don't really need to touch it.
Marco:
If you're making a site for yourself or somebody else, Squarespace supports it.
Marco:
And their platform handles it.
Marco:
And they give you upgrades.
Marco:
And if you have these great, beautiful designs that you don't have to worry about, you don't have to do things like test them on new devices as they come out to make sure they look right on the new screen size of whatever.
Marco:
No, they do that for you.
Marco:
And if you want to change your whole design, you can do it in like two clicks.
Marco:
It's amazing what you can do with Squarespace with very, very little work.
Marco:
So start your free trial today.
Marco:
I highly suggest that you try it because it is not worth spending your time mucking around with some manual installation of some CMS on some server.
Marco:
Just use Squarespace and be done with it and move on to the thing you actually need the website for, whether it's a project or a new business or whatever else.
Marco:
Make your next move with Squarespace.
Marco:
Start a free trial set today at squarespace.com.
Marco:
And when you decide to sign up, make sure to use the offer code ATP to get 10% off your first purchase.
Marco:
Make your next move with Squarespace.
Casey:
Yet another tick in the Uber is gross box.
Casey:
It seems like Uber has been using private APIs to read iPhone serial numbers, or they were doing this anyway a couple of years ago.
Casey:
They were reading iPhone serial numbers, reporting them up to their own servers, and thus this allowed them to track...
Casey:
installations between deletes so you could install uber it would look at your phone serial number let's call it one two three four five it's the same combination i have in my luggage and then uh it you would delete the app it would you could then reinstall it later it will see that the serial number is still one two three four five and it would say haha this is user abcdefg and so allegedly they were using this for fraud prevention uh
Casey:
Which is a legitimate explanation, I think, but it just feels super gross.
Casey:
And so the story goes that Tim Cook called in Travis Kalanick, whatever his name is, the really skeezy head of Uber, and basically said, if you don't get rid of this post haste, we're going to pull you from the app store.
Casey:
And guess what happened?
Casey:
They got rid of it.
Casey:
I don't think there's that many interesting things to discuss here, but perhaps one of you has some thoughts that I haven't thought of yet.
Marco:
I mean, to me, the main interesting part here, I mean, you know, we know this has been talked to death on other shows, so we're not going to spend a lot of time on it.
Marco:
The interesting part to me here is not necessarily the horrible things that Uber did, because Uber is always doing horrible things.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
urge anybody out there to stop using it.
Marco:
I've been using Lyft since one of their other recent scandals, and it's great.
Marco:
It's totally fine.
Marco:
It's like the same or better.
Marco:
So just use Lyft or something else.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
Stop using Uber.
Marco:
Anyway, one of the cool things about this that I thought was worth mentioning is...
Marco:
First of all, all these holes that we know of are now patched.
Marco:
Iokit is a weird framework.
Marco:
There's all sorts of stuff on your phone that apps should not have access to.
Marco:
Things like the phone part of it.
Marco:
There's a reason why apps can't dial your phone for you without interaction or read your phone calls or anything.
Marco:
All the stuff that iOS must wall off from apps is a private framework.
Marco:
And the way iOS is structured, apps, with the exception of jailbreaking, which ruins everything, but regularly in your phone, apps can't call into private frameworks.
Marco:
They just technically can't.
Marco:
There's no way to do it.
Marco:
They're walled off from apps.
Marco:
Iokit is...
Marco:
technically not one of these.
Marco:
The role of Iokit in iOS is mostly to read data about the hardware.
Marco:
And a lot of things that are in the UI device API are just thin wrappers around UIKit calls.
Marco:
Things like reading the screen brightness level.
Casey:
Thin wrappers around I.O.
Casey:
kit calls.
Marco:
Sorry, yeah.
Marco:
Or the system battery level or things like that.
Marco:
Just information about the hardware.
Marco:
This is where things like the UDID used to be, although now that's no longer available.
Marco:
And Apple is pretty good about any way that you have to uniquely identify phones, Apple has been slowly getting rid of.
Marco:
Iokit, for whatever reason, as I said, it's not in that walled-off area where the rest of the private frameworks are.
Marco:
So it actually is callable.
Marco:
But you aren't allowed to.
Marco:
It's undocumented, at least in iOS, and it's officially forbidden.
Marco:
And Uber is doing all sorts of tricks to avoid being detected.
Marco:
So I think there are two angles of this that are worth talking about.
Marco:
One is...
Marco:
Is it possible for Apple to prevent the use of private APIs on a large scale?
Marco:
The way that they usually prevent it is during app review, they have some kind of special testing environment where if an app calls a private API during app review...
Marco:
Or if it has a private API's symbols, like literally in the app, so if it has like the name of a private function in the code, Apple can flag that and they will reject it automatically for that.
Marco:
But there are ways to get around this.
Marco:
One of them is if you can load the module dynamically, or you can not have the name of the function in the code, you can have a scrambled string that
Marco:
that in code you unscramble at runtime and then call that.
Marco:
That's usually how these things are done.
Marco:
And again, this doesn't work for calling super private framework stuff, but it does work for calling private methods on public things or for the framework of IOCate, which is this weird kind of middle ground where it is kind of technically public.
Marco:
Anyway, do you think there is a way for Apple to ever fix that?
Yeah.
John:
Well, it's kind of the halting problem thing where can you tell me here is this program?
John:
Can you tell me how this program behaves?
John:
You know?
John:
in the general case, no, not really.
John:
But all these things you're talking about, all you need to do, I think, is do enough so that if something gets through your system, it was clearly done intentionally.
John:
And in the Uber case, one of the other stories about this is that
John:
The way they were getting around is, you know, have all these secret ways of dynamically loading the code and all that other stuff.
John:
But just to be safe, don't do that when the GPS detects that you're somewhere within Apple's campus.
John:
Right.
John:
So they geofence like the Apple campus and say, you know, when you're inside this perimeter.
John:
don't ever try to do the sneaky thing only when you're outside this perimeter somewhere else on earth then do the sneaky thing to call a private avi so in that case like again you know trying to detect hey is the program doing that like in general no there's no general purpose computable reasonable time way to figure that out or at all actually you know um
John:
because it literally isn't calling the bad API.
John:
And then you have to detect, how can I tell if it is doing something that lets it know when it shouldn't do the naughty thing that it's doing?
John:
But again, you just make the test hard enough so that if it is doing that, someone can't say, oh, we just did that by accident.
John:
That was just a bug, right?
John:
No, I didn't mean to do that at all.
John:
It's so clearly intentional, like at the point where you're putting scrambled strings or assembling symbol names out of a bunch of scrambled data spread all over your program, right?
John:
Like, there's no way you can explain that away.
John:
Versus say, oh, I just called an Apple API, and the Apple API called a private thing that accessed some file outside the sandbox, and it's totally not my fault, and that happens all the time.
John:
And Apple will be like, oh, yeah, I can see.
John:
Eventually, you can convince Apple, I was not doing anything intentionally bad.
John:
This is just something that you didn't realize was actually happening in your code, and I'm doing the right thing, and let's just all get through it.
John:
So I think that's all they need to do.
John:
That's probably what they're currently doing.
John:
And I think that's probably sufficient.
Marco:
I was thinking, too, like the environment that they have in AppReview that automatically detects whenever this boundary is crossed that your app is calling something private that it shouldn't be, what if they could deploy that to iPhones?
Marco:
And maybe not to all iPhones, because I assume there's some degree of overhead involved here that maybe would make it too power inefficient or too slow.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But what if they deployed it to, say, a large group of Apple employees' phones?
Marco:
That would probably catch a lot of things in popular apps.
Marco:
So whatever environment they have to detect these things in AppReview, spread that out wider.
Marco:
Maybe they have a whole bunch of virtual iPhones in the cloud that simulate using apps and they track them on those.
Marco:
They could do all sorts of fun stuff.
John:
They could just override GPS to get rid of the geofensive.
John:
Sure.
John:
Once you're running this faked environment, you just hard-code the GPS to be Antarctica or something, and you're all set.
Marco:
Right, exactly, and change the IP and everything else.
Marco:
So anyway, I think expanding that virtual environment would be one way to do this, that tripwire environment, whether it's just Apple employees or whether it's simulated things in the cloud or whether it's both or who knows.
Marco:
I think they could do a lot there.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
The second thing I wanted to talk about about the Uber thing, though, which I think is probably more interesting, is the dynamic here of this large app violates a rule in a pretty big way.
Marco:
Obviously, willfully violating it, blocking out Apple's campus area so they wouldn't see it, evading detection.
Marco:
Obviously, this was not like, ooh, I accidentally called the serial number function.
Marco:
No, this was like...
Marco:
willful violation and malicious intent to evade these rules that are there for very good reasons in order to invade people's privacy.
Marco:
It's really bad.
Marco:
And if I did that in Overcast, I would be kicked out of the App Store immediately.
Marco:
And there would be no recourse.
Marco:
I would be lucky if I was even told the reason.
Marco:
And that would be it.
Marco:
I'd be gone.
Marco:
But if Facebook does things like this in their app, which they do, and they get caught sometimes and they say it's a bug.
Marco:
Oh, sorry, we left the audio session running.
Marco:
It's a bug that we are running constantly in the background when we are in use.
Marco:
uh you know they facebook does all the time um twitter has twitter has all sorts of awful things with you know tracking apps that are installed and everything apple's locked on most of them but um and then you know you then you have uber doing crazy crap like this and again and and their crazy location stuff oh we need your location all the time now and all sorts of crazy stuff if a big company breaks a rule even in the
Marco:
They get a meeting with Tim Cook, where Tim Cook calmly expresses his disappointment in them.
Casey:
Like any good dad would.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
Oh, man, I would not want to be in there.
Marco:
And sternly tells them, like, you're going to stop doing this now.
Marco:
Like, that's certainly a stern warning, but, like, that's awfully special treatment.
Marco:
That is being incredibly generous towards this company that is literally defrauding you.
Marco:
Like, it's like they're doing really...
Marco:
there's no way to read this charitably right why wasn't uber just kicked out of the app store and i think the answer to that is interesting so like i have some theories you know obviously there's a question of like who needs who more right and i think
Marco:
The answer is, yeah, okay, I think Apple could afford to do that.
Marco:
I think Uber needs Apple more than Apple needs Uber.
Marco:
But you do have to think about it just for a second.
Marco:
How many customers would Apple lose by doing that?
Marco:
It's probably not zero.
Marco:
So that's something you have to think about, right?
Marco:
It would be even worse if that was Facebook.
Marco:
So there are these big companies that...
Marco:
Apple actually doesn't wield complete power over, that there is some power in the other direction as well.
Marco:
And Uber is big enough that I think it's one of those.
Marco:
Facebook is certainly one of those.
Marco:
Facebook is probably the biggest one, actually, when you talk about iOS apps, except maybe YouTube or Google Maps would also be pretty high up there.
Marco:
But Facebook, I think, is probably the biggest.
Marco:
So there's that angle of Apple maybe can't kick out.
Marco:
They're too big to fail.
Marco:
They're too big to kick out.
Marco:
Also,
Marco:
if somebody like Facebook or Uber got kicked out of the App Store, they'd probably sue Apple.
Marco:
And what would be the result of that lawsuit?
Marco:
would they bring up any trust would apple be at risk of maybe having to give up some of their control over the app store for any trust concerns or for other legal concerns like would they be at risk of giving up app approval i don't think uber would sue apple i don't see anyone suing apple for this like i yeah i hear you hear people talk about it sometimes but they're
John:
There are big problems with that.
John:
First of all, Apple has more money than you.
John:
Like, whoever you is.
John:
Apple has more money than you, right?
John:
So, in general, it's good when people have a lot of money, you want to sue them and get some of that money, but it's bad if you're going into a lawsuit that may turn out to be like this long-running thing, because you will run out of money before Apple does.
John:
And second...
John:
The case for antitrust on Apple grows weaker by the day as Android is like 80% smartphone market share and growing worldwide.
John:
It's really tough to make that sell.
John:
And third, the whole App Store agreement, everything is, I feel like, pretty ironclad and doesn't leave any room.
John:
And your only hope would be to say...
John:
yeah but it's a special situation because apple has a monopoly on x y and z like it is it's so difficult i feel like there's almost no legal recourse the only the best way you could go is maybe defamation because apple had to say uber was doing a naughty thing and they could say no we weren't apple is you know uh whatever whatever the equivalent of defamation for companies is probably maybe it's the same thing um
John:
But I don't see the antitrust as being concerned.
John:
I see this like the first thing you said, the similar situation that I think we've all experienced in some way, directly or indirectly, in the U.S.
John:
anyway, has been fights between cable companies and channels, right?
John:
Where there's some disagreement about how much it's going to cost to get HBO or ESPN on the cable package.
John:
This is going back in time a little bit back when people still had cable.
John:
And...
John:
There would be this standoff in the same way there's a standoff between Tim Cook and Uber or whatever.
John:
Like, again, Facebook is totally the biggest one.
John:
Say Facebook does nasty things.
John:
Why does Facebook not get kicked out?
John:
Why do they get like a stern talking to?
John:
Because it's a game of chicken.
John:
It's like, you know that we can kick you out of the store.
John:
And we know that you know that if we kicked you out of the store...
John:
it would be disastrous for us and our platform, but we might just do it anyway to teach you a lesson like temporarily.
John:
And so they're just staring at each other, you know, waiting to see who, who twitches first.
John:
Um, and with the cable companies in the channels, very often it gets to the point where it's like, sorry, you know, Comcast is no longer going to have ESPN.
John:
Right.
John:
There's no longer going to carry Yankees games on this channel or whatever.
John:
And then it's a PR war between the cable company and the channel to say, call the cable company and tell them you demand to get the channel back.
John:
and the cable company says call whatever and tell them that you demand to be more reasonable because we can't pay you know what I mean and that game of checking usually doesn't last that long and what always ends up happening is the channel comes back to the cable carrier in most cases if it's an important enough channel because in the end
John:
an iphone without facebook is a bigger problem than an iphone with a facebook that violates the rules every once in a while and has to you know and then like you yell at them and you catch them and they fix it right uh and so like and and the people don't know who to blame why can't i get me espn anymore i turn on tv i can't get the channel anymore i'm gonna change cable providers if i can at all if i can't change cable providers i'm just inarticulately angry
John:
but if i can change providers you know if that's the one channel that was the most important challenge i mean i'm going to change providers people would change phones if they couldn't get facebook it's like you can get an iphone but oh i heard the iphone doesn't have facebook anymore they will get a different phone that's the kind of power facebook has uber have that power probably not as much it's much smaller there are alternatives yada yada yada but that's that's the whole that's the whole relationship here so i don't think you know i don't think you need to bring in threats of lawsuits or other things into it i think you just need to look at the the power dynamic of customers want the app and
John:
The app makes your phone more valuable.
John:
If your phone doesn't have the app, it's totally a PR war.
John:
Can you imagine like Uber no longer on Apple phones?
John:
And, you know, maybe that's not a big deal because people would have all the entertainment.
John:
But if even for like a week, they said, guess what?
John:
Facebook no longer on Apple phones.
John:
That story would last like three years of people saying I was going to get an iPhone, but I heard they don't have Facebook.
John:
Three years ago, I heard they don't have Facebook.
John:
I was like, that was just for two weeks.
John:
It's like, well, no, too late.
John:
It's already out there.
John:
I got an Android phone again.
John:
So...
John:
Yeah, Apple does not want that to happen.
John:
And speaking of relationship between Apple and important software companies, software companies at various times when Apple has been not as rich and powerful as it is now have been even more have had even more influence over what Apple does.
John:
The best most recent example is.
John:
Apple's entire modern operating system plan to get away from classic Mac OS to do something to replace it with something else was essentially squashed by Microsoft and Adobe, two companies saying, yeah, we're not going to make apps for that.
John:
And Apple said, well, there's no whatever plan we thought we had that we thought was all awesome.
John:
And we had a cool code name for it.
John:
But it's, you know, forget it.
John:
Because if Apple and Adobe aren't on board and we can't convince them, there is no point in us even doing this because a Mac that can't run Microsoft or Adobe software is pointless.
John:
And so they didn't.
John:
And they scrapped that plan, the Rhapsody plan, and said they did Mac OS X with Carbon.
John:
And that got those guys on board.
John:
um and that's like one of the biggest most important decisions apple ever made the life of the company at stake and who essentially ended up being you know having veto power of what apple does two third-party software companies with really important application and these days i feel like facebook and to facebook and you know google slash youtube and then a few other uh people to a lesser degree have veto power over a huge number of platforms and there is you know
John:
So Android, I feel like, has more power because if you can't put your application on Android and that's 80% of the world's smartphones, that's a big problem.
John:
And then on Apple, Apple needs these applications because they're a smaller percentage.
John:
And the whole point of their phone is you get the best stuff and you get it the soonest.
John:
And if they take that away, that's a problem.
John:
I'm not surprised at these sort of two people yelling at each other and, you know, being naughty and getting caught and going around in circles.
John:
I don't see any way that's going to change unless the power dynamic changes.
John:
And in the meantime, if the power dynamic is not like that and you are just Marco with one application...
John:
you apple doesn't have to play those games with you they can just shut you down and that's that's the way it is and makes perfect sense and uh there's no sense getting upset about the double standard just uh learn to be smart and uh hide in the rocks if you're a little mouse
John:
All right.
John:
When the asteroid comes, you'll be the one to survive.
John:
It turns out okay.
John:
Well, not you specifically.
John:
Probably you specifically, Mouse, will be dead, but there will be other mice that live.
John:
It'll be fine.
Marco:
Well, this took a turn.
Marco:
Thanks to our three sponsors this week, Squarespace, Eero, and Fracture.
Marco:
And we'll see you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
John:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
John:
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.
Casey:
It's accidental, they didn't mean it.
Casey:
John, you have made a long trip.
Casey:
You have gone on a grand adventure.
Casey:
Would you call it a tour?
Casey:
You could call it a grand tour, actually.
Casey:
I would love to know, John, what did you think of Britain?
John:
So, unfortunately for you, I came back from the UK and did another podcast where we talked about all this stuff, and that was last night.
Casey:
Oh, who got to you first?
John:
You got scooped.
John:
You got scooped by Merlin.
Casey:
Merlin did.
John:
Right, we did rec tips.
John:
We talked about travel stuff.
John:
Well, fortunately, we can probably release faster than they can.
Casey:
Yeah, there you go.
Casey:
See, that's the spirit, Marco.
John:
Anyway, what do you want to know?
John:
I can cover different stuff, I suppose.
Casey:
Okay, so how was the plane travel?
Casey:
You went direct from Boston to Heathrow?
John:
Yep, it was fine.
John:
I got very lucky.
John:
I've been lucky on my flights recently.
John:
Not really bumpy at all, straightforward.
John:
We went to British Airways, and we didn't go like the fancy class, but we didn't go like the cheapest one.
John:
It's like whatever one is in...
John:
the middle as far as i can tell it is exactly the same as the cheapest seats except for you have slightly more leg room which i appreciated because i got long legs um uh but yeah it was nice there was there was usb ports in the back of the seats which i hadn't seen before which is you know convenient um on the way back i think it's the first time i've ever flown a 747 did you stare out the window for six hours whatever it took you to get there and back
John:
that's what i do oh my god so so your poor wife is just sitting there basically doing your own thing she's not suffering she she uh playing sudoku and watching movies the whole time time flew by from the way there she's like oh i didn't even notice that six hours just flew by she's obsessed with sudoku lately so she just like if you if you were to take movies ever it's like this person's just staring at these numbers and she would just do that for occasionally she would move or twitch in some way but mostly stare at the numbers indeed indeed
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So you traveled to Heathrow.
Casey:
What were some of the highlights?
Casey:
How about this?
Casey:
What were your favorite things that you participated in?
John:
Even before we got there, the food I had on British Airways going to London was the best airplane food I've ever had.
John:
With the possible exception of Midwest Express's, uh, fresh baked chocolate chip cookies, which anyone who even remembers what Midwest Express was knows that that was a good deal.
John:
Um, and they had metal silverware for crying out loud.
John:
Midwest Express RIP.
John:
Uh, unless they're still alive, in which case, sorry, but I haven't flown them in years.
John:
Um,
John:
But yeah, you know, everything's relative.
John:
It's airplane food, right?
John:
But the airplane food on the way out was like, you know, full English breakfast thing.
John:
But imagine like the airplane version of that.
John:
And it was passably edible.
John:
which is which is a hell of a thing glowing review especially the eggs you know what eggs are like on planes like why even bother like i expected them to just be like a complete write-off but but i ate them um and on the way back it was uh bangers and mash type thing so first of all they're doing like stereotypical british type food and like i'm gonna say both of them are better than wwdc launch easily well they also cost you more than 40 dollars
John:
oh god they i don't know how you want to factor out how much it cost in these plane tickets how much of that was paying for that meal but anyway there was a lot of food there was variety and every part of it was way better than i thought it would be for airline for modern airline food like i don't know what like old style like in the 60s airline food was like real food but like for all my life with the exception of midwest express airline food has just been grim and so this was you know better than grim so i was uh happy about that
John:
okay so you stare out the window for six hours you don't play any zelda or anything like that you're just staring out the window i can't i can't look at the screens i can't watch a movie all i can do is listen to podcasts which is exactly what i did i forgot to bring as i as i tweeted i forgot to oh yeah my lightning to a headphone adapter which i only realized literally as i'm going to well let me get all my stuff plugged in
John:
so what did you end up doing you used something bluetooth so uh well so i figured out why i did it first of all like this is not the first time i've flown with my iphone 7 i've had it since like launch or whatever whenever i got like it's not the first time i've done i've flown with my iphone 7 before and i've remembered to bring the adapter i think the problem is i flew with it i brought the adapter uh because you're worried like when you first get the thing oh i've got i've got a phone with no headphone jack i gotta remember i gotta think about this it's a front of mind you know i gotta i gotta worry about it right
John:
and then you do it and you remember it and you bring it and you're like your brain's like well you've solved that problem now you never need to worry about your phone again uh but you do because every time you fly you have to make sure the adapter's in there so anyway now i have two adapters one of which is permanently in the case with the bose headphones with my bose noise canceling headphones so problem solved there um on the way out what i did was i took my earbuds which i had with me because i know i'm an overpacker
John:
like my lightning earbuds that came with the phone, I put them on my ears and I put the noise-canceling headphones over the earbuds so I could have noise-canceling and also podcasts.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
I'd forgotten about that.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
That is absolutely preposterous.
Casey:
But that actually ended up working?
John:
yeah totally worked that's awesome what did you guys do the first day so you arrived what time of day did you arrive uh we had like a morning flight so uh we got up an ungodly hour we got up like 4 a.m to get our flight out and but anyway by the time we get there it was by the time i think we got to the hotel it was like dinner time i think i don't know the exact like you're so scrambled up from the flying but anyway the whole day was shot whole day because you're going you're going east
John:
What did we do for the various days?
John:
We did like all the touristy stuff you can do in London.
John:
You name some touristy thing you can do in London, chances are we did it.
John:
Tower of London.
John:
Yes.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Churchill's Wall Rooms.
John:
Yes.
Casey:
Did you like that?
Casey:
It was fine.
Casey:
Oh, John.
Casey:
Poor Tina.
John:
The British Museum.
John:
We saw Big Ben, Parliament, Westminster Abbey, Windsor Castle.
John:
We did all the things.
John:
We had fish and chips.
Casey:
Tell me how amazing the fish and chips were.
John:
Oh, I don't like fish and chips, but Tina would like it.
Casey:
Oh!
Casey:
God bless America.
Casey:
God save the queen.
Casey:
Whatever.
John:
I don't like fish.
Casey:
I don't like fish either, but I like fish and chips.
John:
I got a pretty good pub sandwich made with sausage.
John:
A lot of things in England have sausage in them, and I like sausage, and so I had them, and they were good.
John:
We ate at a lot of different restaurants.
John:
Had all sorts of different kinds of food.
John:
Got to see some people that we both know in London.
John:
Yeah, it was fine.
John:
It was nice.
John:
The kids weren't with us.
John:
I guess this isn't clear to everybody.
John:
We sent the kids away to their grandparents.
John:
The Marco move.
John:
It's a good move.
John:
Yep.
John:
And this is the first time we'd taken a vacation without our children since they were born.
John:
So it's the first vacation without children.
John:
Wow.
John:
That's been the period that wasn't visiting family since our honeymoon, because it's like we had our honeymoon, which is just like a vacation that not to visit family with just two of us.
John:
And after that, pretty much every vacation we took was somewhere to go, you know, visit one of our families and go somewhere with the family.
John:
And then the kids were born and every vacation at the very least is with them.
John:
So.
John:
So you haven't had a vacation.
John:
yeah well well this this is kind of this thing is supposed to be our 20th wedding anniversary thing our 20th wedding anniversary is this summer but we like you know fitting it into the schedule and when the kids off of school and camp and all the other vacations this is the time when it fit in basically so um so yeah it was nice uh it was it was uh
John:
I was going to say it was mostly relaxing, but we did so much walking.
John:
It's like the most exercise and walking I've done in a long time.
John:
Like I posted the pedometer plus plus graphs of what we did.
John:
But like on the second day, we did like over 30,000 steps and over 15 miles.
John:
And the average was over 10,000 steps for each day.
John:
Not 10,000, sorry.
John:
Over 10 miles for each day.
John:
um and my i had my watch and i was counting my steps that way but i had my phone in airplane airplane mode so i didn't have gps but my wife had her series 2 watch and her phone with an actual data plan on it so hers is more accurate and her numbers are even bigger than mine and we were all going to the same places so we did a lot of walking and i'm an old man in the bottom my feet hurt
Marco:
You poor baby.
Marco:
Sounds like a great vacation.
Marco:
First of all, it's kind of mind-blowing to me that you've taken zero real vacations ever.
Marco:
I'm trying to picture, are you able to suspend, and I say this in the most loving way possible as a friend...
John:
are you able to suspend being you enough to enjoy a vacation i am awesome at vacations i am better than most people at vacations i have no problem relaxing i'm better here's what i'm better at my idea of a vacation is relaxing and doing nothing people who want to have a vacation where it's like we got to go we have a plan we got to see this we got to see that i'm the opposite of that i feel like those people are not good at vacations where they're like we have to do and see every possible thing there is to do and see and we have a schedule we got to wake up early and like wake up early
John:
that's not a vacation like my vacation is where you do nothing in a beautiful place that's my ideal vacation um so this is a compromise vacation where we're going we're traveling somewhere i don't like to travel but it's not that big of a deal it's not that long of a trip and we're doing touristy things but we're trying to do them at a relaxed pace and i don't have to worry about kids complaining the whole time so we can kind of do whatever the hell we want to do and be like
John:
you know a lot of it was like we did all this walking because we'd like go do this thing and then we just said like well what else is near here and we'd you know find some place to eat near here and then go do that thing and we just like it's like a random walk through london it's just all different places and all big circles we went to went to the regent street apple store uh we went to like every park in london we walked through at some point or another uh
John:
And it's just nice being able to just say, what do you want to do next?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I like not having a plan and just saying, like, vaguely speaking, there's lots of interesting things you might want to go see, but let's just go wander to them.
John:
My ideal vacation, so the vacations we take actually with our kids and my side of the family on Long Island where you just sit on a beach all day for a week.
John:
That's my ideal vacation, but other people don't like that, right?
John:
Although Marco is coming around to it.
John:
I have indeed come around to it.
Casey:
I think both of us have, because Marco and I, during the run of this show, I think we're going tit for tat on who hated the beach more.
Casey:
And I think that the both of us have since been converted.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
John:
It basically happened over the last year and a half or so.
John:
I've always loved the beach, and a lot of people hate it, not just because they might hate the beach, but it's just like, what are we even doing here?
John:
Who wants to sit in the sand?
John:
What are we doing?
John:
I don't understand what we're doing.
John:
It's just like...
John:
you're just relaxing in a beautiful place even with the kids and with the family the kids just go off and run and do the thing they do it's a little bit more stress of me like making sure my children don't drown you know when we go to the ocean but yeah but but other than that uh that's that's my ideal being in a familiar place with good pizza and bagels and just having no plan except to go to the beach every day and then come home and have a delicious dinner then eat primary pies and just yeah um
John:
But we, we've done that every year for many, many years.
John:
So I'm not deprived of that.
John:
I get that all the time.
John:
Right.
John:
And so this was more of a vacation of like a more, in a more traditional sense.
John:
And then we went to, you know, Disney with the kids, which was the, let's do a big family vacation with the kids and, you know, just sacrifice whatever our happiness may be.
John:
Oh, you know, we both love Disney too.
John:
Right.
John:
So it wasn't that big a deal, but anyway, you gotta have the two kids.
John:
You gotta make sure they're happy with this vacation.
John:
It's mostly for them.
John:
This one was for us, but mostly for my wife.
John:
Um,
John:
so yeah we're not we're not big vacationers but every once in a while we we try to do it and i'm i'm sure this will be the thin end of the wedge of like let's go on different vacations like this is building up to like when we're both retired and our kids are gone and she's dragging me all over the globe so you know i'm preparing for that was this your first international travel
John:
i've been to canada does that count no not really no i've been to not just not just like canada like just over the border but i've been to newfoundland uh i've been to the easternmost point in uh north america still doesn't count i've been out on a boat past the easternmost point in north america next to an iceberg so that's pretty exotic
Marco:
I do like in the chat room listener Seagrin made an interesting distinction.
Marco:
He said doing all kinds of stuff is traveling.
Marco:
Doing nothing is vacationing.
Marco:
I think that's a very, very good distinction.
Marco:
What you do and what we like to do now on the beach is vacation, where we just do nothing in a beautiful place, as you said.
Marco:
And doing all kinds of stuff in a different place, that's traveling, right?
Marco:
Traveling is like you want to see as much as you can see.
Marco:
And so you are waking up early and going and doing this and that all day.
John:
So I kind of like that distinction.
John:
Well, you'd call Disneyland a vacation, though.
John:
People say, I'm going on a Disney vacation, and Disney is one of the main places where people are like, oh, got to wake up, got to get in this line, got to do this, got to see all these things.
John:
But they still call it a vacation, not traveling, because where are you going?
John:
You're just in Orlando the whole time.
Marco:
Yeah, so I will say this, I have never been to Disney.
Marco:
It is not the kind of thing that I think I would enjoy.
Marco:
However, just from the way other people describe it,
John:
I would never describe that as a vacation.
John:
It's more fun than you think it is.
John:
I mean, you should go at some point when Adam is like the right age of like he's not going to be melting down constantly, but he's also not going to be too old for it.
John:
Like find that age that is the right age for that and just take one family trip there.
John:
It is more interesting and more fun than you think it's going to be.
John:
I'm not going to say that you're going to think it's the most awesome place and you love it and you would do it all the time, but it's not as bad as you think.
Marco:
It sounds like more of an event.
Marco:
It's like we just finished, our kid's birthday was this past weekend, and so we just finished having a large party and arranging all the logistics and everything else.
Marco:
From the way that I've heard friends, including both of you, talk about Disney vacations, it sounds like it's like hosting a party times a thousand.
Marco:
All the stuff you have to do and plan.
John:
No, it's the opposite.
John:
opposite it's the opposite of that you don't have to worry about all that crap disney yep takes care of like it's it's it's like like you're like adam's party was for adam that's what disney is trying to be for you you're adam in this scenario and disney is you and tiff they are taking care of all the crap and making sure your needs are met and just like you just show up and be like ah where's my cake where's my presents like that's disney that's that's what they're trying to do
Casey:
Yeah, let me build on this.
Casey:
So I have been begging to talk about – well, that's not fair.
Casey:
I have wanted to talk about Disney on this show for a long time.
Casey:
So Disney is so intent on you having a good time and not having to worry about anything that if you stay on campus or in the parks – I forget the technical term that Disney uses for it.
Casey:
But if you stay at a hotel that Disney owns, that's on the Disney property.
Casey:
On property?
Casey:
I guess, yeah.
Casey:
I think it is on property.
Casey:
But anyway, so if you stay on property, if you –
Casey:
Book, you know, with any amount of advance notice and you are flying into the Orlando airport, you can do this thing called Magical Express.
Casey:
And what happens is when you go to JFK or wherever you would go, Marco, you deposit your checked bags.
Casey:
They have a special Disney tag on them.
Casey:
When you arrive at the Orlando airport, you go to where the Magical Express buses are.
Casey:
You tell them what hotel you're staying at.
Casey:
You board a bus.
Casey:
You do not go to baggage claim.
Casey:
You go to your hotel.
Casey:
You check in.
Casey:
You presumably get your room, unless it's silly early in the morning.
Casey:
You get your park tickets.
Casey:
And then you freshen up and go to the park.
Casey:
Your bags are still nowhere to be found.
Casey:
You go to the park, you do amazing things, have a tremendous time, have a lot of fun, especially you, Marco, because you would go at the bananas time of year when nobody else is there.
Casey:
Well, maybe not once he gets in school, but in terms of like jobby jobs, it's not a problem.
Marco:
He's in school.
Casey:
Yeah, I forgot about that.
Casey:
But anyway.
Casey:
But the point being, you go and you have fun.
Casey:
And then when you return to your room, poof, like magic, there's your bags.
Casey:
All collected all the way from the Orlando airport and placed conveniently in your room just for you.
Casey:
That's how serious they are about you not having to worry about stuff.
Marco:
Now, with that said, I would be worried the entire time whether my bag was actually going to be there when I got there.
John:
That doesn't work for control freaks, but there's something for everybody.
John:
And that, like, if that's not the experience you want to have, you don't have to.
John:
Like, just in general, like everything about the park is set up to make your life easier.
John:
And they understand by now what is annoying about being in a hot place with a kid who might be cranky.
John:
Yeah.
John:
you know what what makes rides like everything about it is nice looking and fun and clean and cheery and you know it's it's all artificial and it's all park like i'm not saying it's you know the beach is better so i'm getting at but uh you know going into this is what they're going to be trying to be doing you think it's not going to work on me and it's just going to be miserable and it still just kind of works on you
Marco:
So the impression that I have gotten from listening to you guys and Merlin talk about Disney vacations, the degree of planning and required expertise about the way that these things should be done, is that mostly just you guys being you guys and not the way it actually is?
Marco:
Ugh.
John:
it's half and half yeah it's kind of like there's a certain personality type who says that like you're the type of person who doesn't want to be worrying about where your bag is if you're also the type of person who wants to go to Disney and be like I don't want to go to Disney and not get to do all the super duper special things that I want to do
John:
like then yeah you got to plan ahead for it and do all this stuff but if you just go to disney you're like whatever i'll just do what let's just walk around and see something that's interesting that has a short line and especially if your kid doesn't know enough to know like i want to go on x and you know if they just like wandering around starry i just like you it'll work out fine uh you are enough of a planner that i think you would do it a little bit ahead of time luckily there is an entire industry of people whose only job is to plan your disney vacation for you that sounds awful oh god that would be so much fun are you kidding
John:
It's another situation where you can throw throw a little bit of money at a person and they will just do everything for you and tell you where to go and what to do.
John:
And it's not that much money, especially once you see how much the bill for everything at Disney is in the grand scheme of things.
John:
It's not that much money.
John:
And it's another example of like you being the Adam and just having these other people take care of everything for you.
John:
Everything in Disney.
John:
It's basically like being rich for poor people.
John:
that's disney for you right because like for the rich people like everything take everyone takes care of your every need and you just wake up and people have your clothes ready for you and cars whisk you from place to place and private jets and helicopters and your food is served to you and just everything is you know you know what i mean no one's going to get that experience unless you have a tremendous amount of money like billions billions of dollars right and also uh you know are the type of person who can tolerate a living like that um disney is like you don't have that much money but if you have
John:
A little bit more money to, you know, if you have enough money to throw what seems like a lot towards us, we will try to give you the, you know, three degrees of magnitude less severe incarnation of that.
John:
Like if you're never going to go to a hotel where they treat you, where they're like, oh, you know, they're at your beck and call.
John:
If you're never going to be able to afford that hotel, you can still go to Disney where reasonably nice people will try to be nice to you.
John:
and like that's it's like well this is closest i'm gonna get uh and and it's nice and everything here is nice and everyone here is trying to be nice to me i mean i think this is an unreconcilable difference i had an episode about the sustainability of disneyland it was a long time ago i did some podcast like
John:
That is the thing where you say, like, can can people keep us up?
John:
How can employees actually be nice for that long a period of time?
John:
Can you actually get that many people to be nice to obnoxious American tourists for that long?
John:
Like, is it even is it sustainable?
John:
Like, surely the cracks will show.
John:
And I'm sure it is not now like it was in its heyday, but it is still nicer than you will be treated at most places that are not Disneyland for the same amount of money.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And the thing that is, with regard to planning, I think John hit the nail on the head that it's kind of it depends on what kind of person you are.
Casey:
So I am super type A and I want to plan everything down to the second.
Casey:
And if I want to, I can do it.
Casey:
And then so I can get fast passes way in advance so I can figure out what rides I'm going to ride, which day at what time, which if you're not a planner to book your restaurant six months in advance.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And I can book my restaurant six months in advance, literally six months in advance.
Casey:
And if you're not a planner, that sounds like work and it sounds miserable.
Casey:
It sounds terrible.
Casey:
And the fact of the matter is you don't have to do those things.
Casey:
If you're a AAA member, which we have been for forever, and it's like 100 bucks a year or something like that, they have travel agents.
Casey:
That's the only travel agent I've ever used.
Marco:
Wait, first of all, they're still AAA?
Marco:
Second of all, they're still travel agents?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, absolutely.
Casey:
And you can go to a AAA travel agent and say to them, look, I've never been to Disney.
Marco:
Where do you find them?
Marco:
Like behind like the record player?
Marco:
I guess maybe you.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I've never had a problem finding a travel agent.
Casey:
But anyway.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
So I'm really being serious, though.
Casey:
And you can go to a AAA agent and say, look, I've never been.
Casey:
We've never been to Disney.
Casey:
This is these are the two things we want to do.
Casey:
We generally like to take it easy and not have like that many booked activities.
Casey:
Can you just figure out a vague arrangement of things to do for us?
Casey:
And they will make that happen.
Casey:
I mean, hell, I would do it for you just because I think this stuff is fun.
Casey:
But the point is, so far from fun.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
I mean, whatever it is that you like about Vegas, if you and Tiff were to go to Vegas by yourselves, so you don't have the social aspect of your friends being there, whatever it is you like about that, accepting the gambling and maybe the booze, because booze is less of a priority.
John:
It's like that, but not as nice and without the sleaze and the smoke.
Casey:
It's certainly without the sleaze, certainly without the smoke.
Casey:
I would debate whether or not it says nice, but you're probably having... Much more humidity.
Casey:
No, that's true.
Casey:
Less heat, more humidity.
Casey:
You, Marco, are probably doing a different kind of Vegas than I would do, and so Disney probably would be less nice.
Casey:
As compared to the Vegas I've done, it's considerably more nice, but...
Casey:
In any case, it's a similar thing.
Casey:
And if you are willing to pony up the money for a Disney meal plan up front, you can eat two or three meals a day and not have to worry about what they cost.
Casey:
You don't have to worry about where you go because they all take the meal plan, basically.
Casey:
It is a phenomenally fun time, and I genuinely cannot wait to take Declan there because seeing it through his eyes I think would be worth the price of admission, which is tremendous.
John:
Yeah, that's the big thing about it.
John:
You would go there, and no matter how much you like it, it would be a vacation for Adam, which is why you're playing it based around what age you think he's most able to enjoy it to its fullest.
John:
Kids love it.
John:
Kids love Disneyland, right?
John:
Even if your kid is not indoctrinated in Disney World and doesn't know all the characters, just everything there is fun.
John:
for kids of the right age and so you will enjoy the vacation because you will see how much he is enjoying himself even if you and they will make you enjoy it more like i think one of the most fun things we did on our vacation if you'd asked me before to predict what that might be i would not have called it the way i did um was we had dinner in the big disney castle you know the big one you see in the you know the big disney castle you know whatever it's called big like gray one that's in like the intro to the movies cinderella's castle
John:
yeah yeah yeah it's a little you know but it's the real life one and it's a restaurant in there where you can have dinner and i don't remember if i i talked about this on rectifs or here uh did i have a giant thing where i complain about the food at disney at some point no but now i want to know yeah there's a lot to go to that
John:
What I'm getting at is I didn't enjoy it because of the food.
John:
I enjoyed it because, you know, first of all, eating inside the actual real Disney castle is cool.
John:
I grew up my whole life seeing the Disney castle and pictures of it and, you know, the logo of the beginning of movies and all that stuff and Walt Disney and the whole thing.
John:
So the Disney castle has some meaning for me.
John:
Maybe it doesn't for you, but for me it does, right?
John:
um and i'm eating inside it and that's cool and second that like many of the places where you can uh book dinners there they have like people playing the disney characters coming around from table to table to you know say hi to your kids and stuff and my son was a little old for it and a little shy my daughter was super into it she likes seeing you know jasmine and bell and snow she knew who these characters she'd seen the movies there are people dressed as them
John:
and she had a blast she got to have a meal and got to pick off or pick the different foods that she wanted to have that sounded fancy to her and the people come around to the table and you know luckily i have one at least one of my kids is not terrified and shy of like characters that come around the table and she had a blast and i had fun because she had fun and we were in a disney castle and that was that was a good memory that i would not have uh predicted um
John:
Would it have been as much fun if we went there with no kids?
John:
Probably not.
John:
But we, after, put it this way, after we came back from a Disney vacation, my wife and I were talking about maybe we would go on a vacation without the kids there.
John:
Because in some respects you have fun with the kids, but in other respects you realize you're limited in what you can do because the kids have, you know, they run down and eventually, you know...
John:
that adults are able to do things that may bore the kids or sustain like you know every every night we were there we were like in bed by the time fireworks went off which by the way we saw fireworks outside our balcony literally every single night and it never got old
John:
um they weren't our fireworks they were actually distant fireworks or whatever but uh but anyway if you're there and as adult you can go out at night and see the fireworks you stole someone else's fireworks is that like pirating the fireworks wow there's plenty of it's it's just it's just infringement because the fireworks still exist over there even though we see them right we're not actually taking them um anyway we had a good time and we were thinking about like we should come back ourselves because we could have we could have even more fun with just us
John:
without having to worry about keeping the kids happy.
John:
And they're making Star Wars land, so maybe we will go back for that.
Casey:
So wait, tell me about what made the food so crappy.
John:
We don't have time for that.
John:
We don't have time.
John:
You can leave it on the list if you want to see it.
Casey:
Oh, I want to hear about this.
Casey:
The Accidental Food Podcast returns.
Marco:
Yeah, not tonight.
Marco:
It should be every after show.
Casey:
I'm ready.
Casey:
My body is ready.
Casey:
So we'll just ditch ATP entirely and turn it into AFP, which is both the Apple or the Accidental File System Podcast.
John:
Like picky food podcast, PF, picky eaters podcast.
Casey:
But if it's AFP, it's the Apple File System Podcast and Accidental Food Podcast.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
Although Pep Talk is a good name for the podcast if it's a picky eater podcast.
John:
We get Pepto-Bismol to sponsor.
John:
The Pep Boys.
John:
It'll all work out.
Casey:
It's perfect.
Casey:
Ship it.