Chili Cookoff
John:
chili kickoff is like one of those confusing titles where people will listen to the whole episode and then glance back at the title before like it itself at least i'm like what was that about anyway right it's a great title i didn't love this title when you first said it but you're you're the two of you are convincing me that there's this thing has got legs just like my icon there's depth to that title depth the flavor and spice it's just a good time
John:
But not a lot of levels of depth mapping.
John:
No, very few.
Casey:
Oh, John, you've redeemed yourself.
Casey:
So as always, we start with follow-up.
Casey:
And listener Richard Buxton wrote in to say that tradespeople generally like Face ID.
Casey:
And this was something I hadn't considered.
Casey:
And I really like this email.
Casey:
Richard wrote, I wanted to provide some feedback on the face ID concept and perhaps shed light on an entirely different group of phone users.
Casey:
I'm a tradesperson or more specifically an electrician and touch ID sucks.
Casey:
As a consequence of manual work with rough materials all day long, my fingertips constantly get scratched and worn.
Casey:
The result is that touch ID on either a six or seven plus constantly fails.
Casey:
I have perhaps a 10% success rate and I am therefore forced to type my password in a lot.
Casey:
and thus uh richard you know had written that he was he is really really really excited about face id and that makes perfect sense but it was something i hadn't really considered you know the obvious thought of like oh people who don't have i don't know hands or perhaps you know don't have uh fingers that are dexterous enough to to be placed on a little fingerprint sensor that all you know is semi-obvious but i didn't even think of somebody who has potentially 10 working digits but
Casey:
but they're hacked to smithereens because of the line of work that they're in.
Casey:
So I thought that was a really useful follow-up.
John:
You also didn't think about people who have weather, which is the first thing that comes to my mind when thinking about Face ID is the large portion of the year that many people don't want to take their hands out of their gloves or mittens or whatever to use their phone.
John:
That's why they have all those special gloves with the touch sensors on them, but then sometimes they only work for a short period of time or sometimes it can be too cold for them to even work.
John:
uh and to not have to deal with that to be able to basically say if i got gloves that are dexterous enough to handle my phone i don't have to worry that i that the phone can't touch my fingerprints in any way even if my fingerprints are pristine i can just point it at my face and it will unlock uh and then of course you still have the problem of how do you touch the screen but i think that's you know again that's where those gloves come in where at least you can
John:
Yeah, I mean, with any of these biological systems, you kind of have to think, like, you know, how many people does this exclude?
Marco:
And for the most part, our mainstream tech commentators and media reviewers and everything, we usually are not very aware of the kinds of people or groups or situations that anything could rule out in a lot of these edge cases.
Marco:
And Touch ID provides a fairly simple interaction, but if you for some reason can't do that...
Marco:
Very often, that's going to be a major problem.
Marco:
There's no real out for you.
Marco:
Face ID, I think, is a little bit more flexible.
Marco:
Like they had the thing, you know, first of all, I think more people can probably show their face, but not everybody, of course.
Marco:
But, you know, but more people can, I think, then can take out their finger all the time.
Marco:
And there's the wonderful accessibility option where you can turn off the looking at it attention detection.
Marco:
So in case people can't use their eyes that way, then they don't have to be directly looking at the screen for it to unlock.
Marco:
So there's that kind of accommodation.
Marco:
And you're never going to find a system like this that accommodates everybody.
Marco:
But it does seem like Face ID probably accommodates more situations than Touch ID did.
Casey:
Would one of you like to tell me about why the multitasking gesture feels different on springboard?
John:
This is me.
John:
I'm the one who last week described how I, I couldn't bring up the multitasking switcher reliably from springboard versus doing it from within an application so much so that I initially thought it wasn't even possible to bring up the multitasking switcher from springboard.
John:
And I pretty quickly figured out why after the show, I went back and looked at it more closely.
John:
And it has to do with something that we talked about, which is animations.
John:
Um,
John:
on when you do the multitasking gesture on a screen that contains an application as you start to do the swipe up thing whether you're gonna like take a hard ride and go multitasking or go up on an angle and go to multitasking or go straighter up and go to the home screen
John:
No matter what one of those things you're doing, as you're doing the gesture, the application that was in the foreground starts to shrink and move upward.
John:
It doesn't follow your finger exactly, but it reacts to what your finger is doing in a reasonably linear way.
John:
I'm swiping up.
John:
The farther up I go, the more shrinky the front thing gets.
John:
and you know if i flick to the right i see the little multitasking thing or whatever um if you do it on springboard the screen reacts to your scrolling upward from the bottom like it doesn't just sit there and not move at all it does sort of start to shrink and move a little bit but then it stops shrinking and moving and
John:
and is kind of inert for a period of time.
John:
If you successfully complete the gesture, the multitasking switcher appears.
John:
If you don't successfully complete it, it snaps back to where it was.
John:
And that discontinuity, like the fact that there was a different relationship between what my finger was doing and what was on the screen was apparently enough to make me think it wasn't possible initially and then fail at it a way higher percentage of the time than on other screens.
John:
So what I've been trying to do is...
John:
break that connection which is hard for me because i'm a visual person and i you know like that when things are connected that way it makes sense to me when they're not connected it feels like things are broken but to say look the screen is not going to react the same way in springboard just do the gesture right just do your little j turn do your little angled swipe do whatever it is you have to do to make and and have faith that even though the screen stops reaction to your sliding finger just keep sliding it just just keep sliding swipe because keep swiping and have some confidence now
John:
I still am less successful, and it could be that I need some kind of feedback to match up with my, like, yeah, you know, yeah, your thumb's making a right turn.
John:
Yeah, it's going to happen for you.
John:
See how the little thing is moving to the right a little bit?
John:
Like, I don't know, you know, what the disconnect is there.
John:
um but i did find out that i'm not the only one a lot of people did uh tweet at me and tell me they some people also thought it wasn't possible from springboard until they heard the program some people knew it was possible but have much more difficulty doing it and then of course there are all the people who are the equivalent of tap the click wizards like i have no problem i've never failed it a single time i just i just make it an exact 45 degree line with my thumb and it happens every single time um so whatever uh everyone has difficult you know it's an accessibility issue everyone has different difficult uh
John:
different abilities to swipe but i think the difficulty on springboard actually is explicable by the by the difference in animation because that is the only difference as far as i can tell like it's still like the same gesture works in both places the only difference is what happens on your screen and if you have an expectation of something that's going to happen on your screen and it doesn't it can cause you to to pause to rethink to move your finger differently to stop moving and all those things will mess up your
John:
I'll keep practicing on my wife's phone.
John:
In the meantime, Apple should consider doing something about that, Jeff, because I don't see any reason why Springboard can't have the same animation when going through the multitasking.
John:
Obviously, you're never going to go from Springboard to Springboard.
John:
So the only animation that has to initiate is the one that brings the multitasking switcher.
John:
And if you bail on the gesture, yeah, it'll snap back to where it was.
John:
But I don't see why it doesn't follow your thumb the full way through the gesture to give you the confidence to know that it's going to happen for you.
John:
The multitasking screen is going to come up.
Casey:
Yeah, it is weird.
Casey:
I've noticed that as well, that it's super peculiar.
Casey:
Speaking of things that I think you said, John, last episode, I got this phone for $50 and it's fine.
Casey:
Tell me more about that.
Casey:
That's still funny.
John:
That was just me describing my sister getting her phone and how I wasn't able to consider getting an iPhone.
John:
And, you know, it occurred to me that would be a good slogan for Android.
John:
And some people took that and ran with it.
John:
But I did want to offer some clarification because some people thought it was like,
John:
They were putting down Android that is, you know, pejorative, like, oh, this $50 phone, what a piece of crap, right?
John:
My main point was the opposite, that the Android phone you can get for $50 is fine, right?
John:
And if you're not, as I said, a phone enthusiast or, like, an Apple enthusiast or a gadget head or someone who appreciates the ways in which iOS differs from Android...
John:
The supposed superiority of iOS or Apple hardware or anything like that does not even come close to overcoming the price difference.
John:
Right.
John:
So I got this $50 and it's fine.
John:
Sounds like, oh, you know, like Apple people yucking it up.
John:
But really, it's Apple's problem in that if the $50 phone is fine, Apple has a problem there.
John:
And the second aspect is people say, well, I do appreciate those differences.
John:
I do like high-tech gadgets.
John:
I just don't like iOS or I like Android phones better or whatever.
John:
And those are the people who are shopping for the...
John:
high-end fancy android phones and those people were insulted we thought they said if you're a gadget nerd obviously you're going to like ios and if you're a non-gadget nerd then android is fine for you and that wasn't my intention i can understand where you got that impression but yeah of course um if you don't like ios at all but also like high-tech fancy phones
John:
yeah you're also going to shop for an android but you're not going to pay fifty dollars for it is what i'm getting out there like you're going to actually pay the big money for the fanciest highest end uh android phone and that phone is not going to cost you fifty dollars so you are excluded from this guy i got this phone fifty dollars and it's fine the only thing i can say for those people is you do have to make do with the slower cpu sorry about that but other than that um if you like android and the control it offers and all the various features that android has that
John:
that ios doesn't um like a configurable set of widgets on your lock screen and all that good stuff uh then yeah go for it but uh yeah my main point is i got this one for fifty dollars and it's fine sounds insulting if you're an apple snob but really it constitutes a semi-real problem for apple because if a fifty dollar phone is fine why the hell are we all paying twelve hundred dollars for an iphone 10
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Duncan Stevenson Price writes in, regarding AppleCare+, did you guys know that you can get a pro rata refund on the plan if you change your iPhone after one year?
Casey:
This changes the math.
Casey:
This individual wrote math, so that's incorrect.
Casey:
This changes the math a little, though admittedly not the overall thrust of your argument against buying it.
Casey:
I had no idea that that was possible, and I don't recall how they said that you go about doing that, because I think they did include it in their email, but...
John:
apparently there's a way to get a bit of a refund on your apple care plus i don't get a phone every year so i didn't know about this at all but to you two who do get a phone every you should try that well if you know casey you bought the apple care this time next time you go to get a phone say duncan told you you're supposed to get uh some of the money back for apple care and see what they do well i did not get apple care this time but oh no you didn't no no no i got a well i did get apple care it's a 50 leather case remind me of this when i still shatter my phone
Casey:
But that's all right.
Casey:
Stephen Harrison writes, you mentioned that it is not possible to remove individual keys on the new keyboards.
Casey:
Well, I just had a faulty B key on my MacBook Pro.
Casey:
And the first thing they did at the Genius Bar was take it out back.
Casey:
That sounds awkward.
Casey:
And removed the offending geek app to check for dust, etc.
Casey:
underneath.
Casey:
From what I could gather, they have a special device or machine for removing keys, so it's not something one could do at home, but it's possible.
Casey:
In the end, I still had a new top case with the accompanying trackpad, touch bar, and battery, etc.
Casey:
There's been a lot of talk about whether or not you can remove individual keys in a non-destructive way, and Stephen certainly thinks that it's possible, although they ended up going the destructive route on his behalf anyway.
John:
So what we heard from geniuses in past feedback is, yeah, of course, you can get the keycaps off, right?
John:
But that the process of removing them has such a high chance of bending or breaking one of the very, very tiny, very delicate plastic pins that holds these things together.
John:
that the geniuses who wrote to us said basically i've never seen anyone pull it off successfully or the success rate is so low that it's not even worth trying so i don't doubt that they still try to do it but i wonder like why did this person get a new keyboard possibly because they got the keycap off and they thought they had done it successfully and they tried to put it back on and realized they'd accidentally bent one of the little tiny pins and it's like well that's it game over because there's no repairing a bent pin there's no repairing a broke pin
John:
uh if you don't get it off cleanly and get it back on cleanly then it's whole new top case which is one of the many reasons that this keyboard is not friendly to repair yeah it seems like the the rate at which they're able to properly rescue it with some kind of replacement in store or some kind of like you know not replacing the entire top case
Marco:
the number of problems that are solved that way seems significantly smaller than the number that require a whole top case replacement anyway.
Marco:
So however the multiple parts inside the keys work out, however the serviceability works out, the reality is this is an incredibly service-unfriendly problem.
Marco:
On this topic, there's been a number of good discussions about this on Connected with Stephen Hackett.
Marco:
He was a genius back in the day.
Marco:
He mentioned that the idea of one bad key requiring the replacement of the entire top case of the computer...
Marco:
and the entire top case being a very expensive repair because the entire computer is basically built under it so you have to like basically take the entire computer apart in order to replace that and put it back together he mentioned that this is actually not new to this current generation of macbook pros this started with the unibody back um what was that 2011 that the unibody started 2010 something like that um
Marco:
And ever since the unibody MacBook Pros, you've had to replace the entire top case, and it's been a lot of work, if the keyboard breaks in certain ways.
Marco:
The main difference with the new ones is that not only are the keys more likely to break in a way that requires top case replacement, in the older keys, you had a better chance of servicing individual keycaps.
Marco:
But also...
Marco:
As we know, the new ones have such an incredibly high key failure rate with whatever it is, specks of dust, things bending, whatever the problem ends up being with these.
Marco:
We know that they are failing way more often than they used to.
Marco:
So the whole top case being acquired thing is not new, but the rate of failure and how severe the failures are now does seem very new.
John:
And even the old keyboards with the scissor switches, I've manually tried to repair many of those, and they have a lesser version of the same problem.
John:
Removing the keycaps from an older scissor switch keyboard is possible, but there is some fairly high chance that you will bend or break one of the little pennies.
John:
I think mostly I bent them.
John:
I don't know if I ever really broke one off, but I've definitely bent them in my attempts to repair things, both on the laptop keyboards and on the same scissor switches that are in the extended aluminum keyboard and stuff.
John:
it's pretty easy to mangle the tiny semi-clear pieces of plastic in there because it's basically like a bunch of little plastic hinge mechanisms with these little little feet little legs little cylindrical uh sticks that snap into these little c-shaped clamps on the key cap or at least with the scissors it was i imagine it's similar with the uh
John:
with the new butterfly ones and that's just that's just a really difficult thing to to work with you kind of have to do a lot of them blind where you just have to get the pieces aligned correctly put the cap on and then just press down and hope everything snaps in all at once uh it's not not particularly friendly to repair it never has been it just seems like these new ones are even smaller and the little leggy things are even finer you can find some good like sort of macro photography of it online if you search
John:
But it's not something that I would want to repair.
John:
And I'm sure there are lots of sort of gung-ho geniuses who are like, I'm going to do it.
John:
This is going to be the time.
John:
I'm going to get the keycap off.
John:
I'm going to get it back on.
John:
And everything's going to work until the next speck of dust.
John:
But, you know, they know that if they blow it, $475 or whatever it is.
Casey:
Yeah, that's rough.
Casey:
I see the notes here about the OLED display, but I have a feeling that somebody's trying to tell a story with them.
Casey:
So rather than flub my way through it, whoever, I'm assuming this is John.
Casey:
Do you want to talk about this?
John:
I think we touched on this in many past shows in terms of burn-in on the OLEDs and everything, and things Apple might be doing that acknowledge the fact that it has burn-in, whether it be the 30-second timeout on the thing, which, by the way, some people say is not new and just a bug or happened with non-iPhone X, so who knows?
John:
That's still mysterious.
John:
But the burn-in of the OLEDs is communicated in various Apple tech notes.
John:
It's also communicated in iOS itself.
John:
If you look at the auto-brightness setting on a non-iPhone X,
John:
it says auto brightness on and off and there's a little descriptive text underneath it it says turning off auto brightness way affect battery life right so that was the old message like hey if you don't let the phone sense how much light there is in the room and dim itself if you just set up keep a brightness and set it that way all the time even in a pitch dark room it may affect battery life which is saying it may lessen your battery life right
John:
The new thing, if you have an iPhone 10, on that very same switch says, turning off auto brightness may affect battery life and long-term display performance.
John:
So they added some words to that.
John:
And what they mean by long-term display performance is that if you...
John:
turn off auto brightness, crank it to max brightness, and don't let it dim itself even in a dark room, you're probably going to get burned in sooner than if you didn't do that.
John:
Because one of the tools, like, you know, if you read the Apple docs, they in typical sort of marketing PR speak, they say,
John:
The Apple display and iPhone 10 and whatever, blah, blah, blah, have been engineered to reduce burn in.
John:
And there are many aspects to being engineered to reduce burn in.
John:
One of those aspects is our software will try to prevent burn in by trying to be nice to your screen.
John:
We'll adjust the brightness down so it's not at max brightness in a dark room.
John:
We'll dim as soon as we possibly can.
John:
We'll try to pay attention to whether you're looking at the screen so we know when we can dim, and also the way the screen is built to be resistant to burn and whatever that involves.
John:
So it's the whole package.
John:
It's not just hardware.
John:
It's not just software.
John:
It's everything.
John:
And part of that is you taking some responsibility in your own hands if you tweak the settings.
John:
If you put the brightness to max, turn off auto brightness, and probably also turn off True Tone, and put your display sleep timer on five minutes,
John:
you are probably going to get burn-in sooner and more severely than someone who leaves it in the default setting.
John:
So welcome to my world of plasma television ownership.
Marco:
Yeah, this is probably my only long-term concern about the iPhone X and using OLED screens in general on the iPhone, which, you know, this is not going to be the first phone to do this.
Marco:
I mean, sorry, the only phone to do this.
Marco:
Because we really don't know what they mean by critical word here, long-term.
Marco:
If you actually use your phone with the screen on a lot, because if you're using it, the screen is going to be on a lot.
Marco:
And many parts of iOS are always in the same place, like status bar items and the home indicator and stuff.
Marco:
When they say long-term, to refer to OLED problems...
Marco:
Well, how long?
Marco:
What are we talking here?
Marco:
Are we talking a few months?
Marco:
Are we talking a year?
Marco:
A few years?
Marco:
I feel like whatever the number actually is there makes a great deal of difference onto what we should do and how big those problems are.
Marco:
If it turns out that OLED-screened iPhones are going to have really annoying screen flaws eight months into ownership...
Marco:
that's going to be a really big problem.
Marco:
Even if they're going to have really annoying flaws after two years of ownership, that's going to really impact the used market.
Marco:
So either way, if this is at all likely to have serious display flaws during the useful lifetime of the product, that's going to be a big problem down the road.
Marco:
And I really hope it's not that bad.
John:
I think it will probably be okay just because Apple seems so aware of this issue and Apple held off on OLEDs for such a long time.
John:
And also the whole rest of the industry, meaning Android, has had OLED screens for so long that I feel like it shouldn't be a mystery.
John:
Apple's not the first company to put an OLED in its phone.
John:
So we should have data from all the many, many years of OLED Android phones.
John:
of what their performance characteristics are like and how bad burn-in is.
John:
And then Apple, of course, waiting until it gets just the right display, hopefully has one that is better in all ways that they can make it better, including burn-in.
John:
So my advice to people is to not be as obsessed about this as I am with my plastic television.
John:
uh and just you know use sensible settings maybe just take the defaults if you don't know what sensible settings are uh leave auto brightness on don't crank your brightness to max if you can help it um let your display go to sleep but in general just use your phone because i my prediction is that
John:
image retention will not be a problem in the average lifetime of a newly bought iphone 10 because i would imagine the average lifetime a newly bought iphone 10 is probably like two point something years right because if you buy the fancy iphone 10 probably you're going to want to buy a new one within at least two years and maybe there's some long tail people who try to keep them for much longer right because it's an expensive phone um it may be more of a problem when oled travels down the line to the cheaper phones that tend to be kept longer and marco's right about the used market but
John:
you know i don't know how much people buy their phones uh contingent on the idea of being able to sell them for you having them having high resale value i'm not sure how common that is versus trade-ins which that's the good thing about trade-ins is you're not getting a big great deal on trade-ins anyway but i don't think apple's going to give you guff about trading in your phone for their like update program if you've got image retention because like look it's your damn phone apple it's not my fault it is an intention take my phone and give me my pittance for it um so i'm i'm not that concerned also
John:
When I look at my plasma television, that is, I don't know how old it is, but it's longer than, it's older than two years old and plasmas are just notorious for image retention.
John:
I don't know what the OLED characteristics of image retention are, but I'm pretty convinced that the characteristics of plasma are that if you are patient enough,
John:
Your destiny HUD will go away in a year.
John:
I don't know if that helps the resale market or makes people feel better.
John:
But I'm actually kind of optimistic about this, having been in the burn-in wars for many, many years.
John:
And finally...
John:
Having seen so many people in real life use absolutely shattered cell phones, like smartphones, just completely destroyed, like not just a little spider web or a crack here or there, but like whole giant glass chips missing, circuit boards exposed, like one step short of sparks flying from the phone as they use it.
John:
I have a hard time believing that the average person will be thwarted from using their phone because it has image retention on it.
John:
Because that's not even a physical defect, like a tactile defect that they can feel.
John:
That's just like, eh, the home indicator always looks like it's on the screen, but whatever.
John:
So I think it'll be okay.
John:
But if you're a super paranoid nerd about it, you know,
John:
Take a look at your phone in a year or two.
John:
And I don't know.
John:
Marco will put a free app in the App Store that puts a checkerboard pattern on your screen and then turns it gray.
Marco:
Yeah, I really hope that this is a non-issue.
Marco:
But my concern is... So they set it at the 30-second by default screen sleep, which I hate.
Marco:
And thank God I turned it off.
Marco:
My concern is...
Marco:
Since I raised that to five minutes, if I get bad image retention on my screen in six months, are they slash you slash all the crazy Apple defenders on Twitter going to say, well, I was doing it wrong.
Marco:
I was using this option that I shouldn't have been using.
Marco:
Is that going to be my fault because I changed this annoying setting back to where it was on all LCD phones before that?
John:
it said may affect battery life and long-term display performance marco can't you read it's like i you know it does say that and yeah that will contribute to it but like that i don't think there's any consequences like they're not gonna say uh you know you like if you bring it in with image retention i'm not sure what their their deal will be but same thing with the iMac like if you just let your iMac screen dim more often or move your windows around more often maybe you'd have less image retention but they still just replace the screen for you right
Marco:
i wonder if it's kind of like if you use launch control on us on a sports car there's there's there's always like there's always like conventional wisdom that like there's a counter for that right and like if you burn out the engine like they'll check that counter and if you're doing too many launch controls like they won't service your car like is there like a counter on the iphone of like how many times that i've let it uh you know reach that's like five minutes max brightness for five minutes without you looking at it
Marco:
sorry sir we can't replace this panel you changed this one setting too much it's been in the bathroom red tag red flag john red flag it was actually a tag though wasn't it wasn't the proper tag
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I've gotten my app icons printed on little square ones and hung like a little trophy app icon wall up above in my office here.
Marco:
We've given lots of them as gifts to family members and friends.
Marco:
Things like if you have a cute picture of your kid or pet, you can give them to other people who might appreciate that in your family and friends.
Marco:
They make wonderful, wonderful decorations for your home or gifts.
Marco:
And the photos really look great.
Marco:
The colors really pop.
Marco:
The contrast is really perfect.
Marco:
And it really just goes edge to edge with the photo print.
Marco:
It looks clean and sleek and modern without really needing any other ornamentation.
Marco:
You don't need like a big frame around it or anything else like that.
Marco:
So it's incredibly practical.
Marco:
It's also incredibly economical.
Marco:
You don't have to buy a frame or get it framed.
Marco:
Fractures are just great.
Marco:
ordering a simple and fracture prints come ready to display right out of the box they even include the wall hanger if you need it and they are green company operating a carbon neutral factory right here in gainesville florida from u.s source materials so you can feel good about it but fracture
Marco:
want you to know that around the holiday season they really get booked up quickly and in the holiday season they get tons and tons of orders because they make such great gifts so if you're going to put if you're going to order fracture prints for the holiday season get your orders in now today not next week get them in today just so you can make sure you get it on time so check it out today at fracture.me and get 15 off your first order with code atp17 thank you so much to fracture for sponsoring our show uh
Casey:
Anyway, at least a couple people wrote in and were confused slash perturbed that we didn't really talk about the iPhone X camera last week when we were going over our impressions.
Casey:
That's a fair criticism.
Casey:
And I don't have all that much to say, surprisingly.
Casey:
I do really, really like portrait mode until Joe Steele corrects me and shows me all the ways in which portrait mode is terrible.
Casey:
But my eyes are not discerning enough to be able to see, in a lot of cases, all the places that portrait mode is just falling on its face.
Casey:
And portrait mode is where they get the fake bokeh, whatever, however you pronounce it, the background blur and the depth of field tricks.
Marco:
It's one of those words like niche or niche where no matter how you pronounce it, everyone's going to tell you what you're wrong.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So if I remember, I'll see if I can dig up some links for the show notes.
Casey:
But follow Joe Steele on Twitter.
Casey:
He's funny and he's good.
Casey:
But anyways, he has gone through some of the pictures I've taken and noted all the places that portrait mode...
Casey:
Has been not as good.
Casey:
And it's funny because some of the things that he's noted are extremely obvious in retrospect, but in the heat of the moment, I just don't notice them.
Casey:
Like, I think I had tweeted a picture of a cup of Diet Coke at McDonald's to a friend of the show, Alex Cox.
Casey:
And half of the straw was missing and I didn't even notice it until Joe pointed it out.
Casey:
Like, again, it's super obvious that I should have noticed.
Casey:
I just didn't.
Casey:
And maybe it's because I'm just predisposed to like this because this is the first time I've had this in a human sized phone.
Casey:
But but I really do like portrait mode and I think it's pretty cool.
Casey:
It just has a lot of room to improve.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
Marco, what do you think about the camera?
Marco:
So I had a hard time evaluating the camera in any kind of useful way to anybody else because I didn't have the dual lens camera from the 7 Plus because I didn't do Plus phones before.
Marco:
My impressions of it with that giant disclaimer aside, I love the regular...
Marco:
cameras on this the regular wide and the regular you know quote telephoto which is not a telephoto but I'll take it because it's it's like a 45 millimeter ish equivalent something like that so I very much enjoy that focal length and and so I've really enjoyed the camera using its regular modes
Marco:
I have played a little bit with portrait mode and portrait lighting and have managed so far to take zero acceptable pictures with it.
Marco:
In addition, when I've seen other people's pictures using these modes, I have seen, I'm pretty sure, zero of them that I considered good without obvious weirdness or flaws.
Marco:
Maybe it's because I have a lot of experience shooting pictures with big cameras and big glass with proper background blur with shallow depth of field.
Marco:
But the pictures from portrait mode, and not even getting into portrait lighting, which I think portrait lighting is basically the same thing, but with some weird effects applied to the same data that sometimes work, but usually don't.
Marco:
Portrait mode itself, it just always looks really bizarre to me.
Marco:
It never fools me into thinking that this was taken with a shallow depth of field and a lot of glass.
Marco:
Ideally, it shouldn't be perfect every time, but it should be able to provide that illusion much of the time.
Marco:
And to me, it just doesn't.
Marco:
And maybe I'm just being too picky or too observant or nitpicking on the details.
Marco:
But the problem with me, I basically have two critical problems with it.
Marco:
Number one is obviously the depth map that it captures just simply is not granular enough.
Marco:
It is not high resolution enough.
Marco:
And you can see there's actually been a couple of apps.
Marco:
One of them is called Focus, F-O-C-O-S.
Marco:
has this really cool 3D... It kind of shows you the picture in a 3D rendering as the depth map, and you can kind of turn it, and you can see the different layers that it captured in the depth map.
Marco:
It's really cool to see.
Marco:
But you can see from these depth map viewing apps that the...
Marco:
resolution of the depth data is not very high it's not very granular it's it's pretty coarse there's not that many levels and there's and it's not doing per pixel depth mapping so that's why you could have like if somebody has like a hair sticking out of their head that hair will be blurred away in this effect whereas on a real camera that hair if the rest of their hair was in focus that hair would be in focus too
John:
and also in infinity starts like at the back of the people's head like not only does it not have a lot of levels but it uses up all the levels on the stuff that's close to you so it's like nose cheek ear back of the head and then everything else is one depth which is behind like the the farthest depth so when you do the 3d 3d thing and you rotate it looks like everyone's head is embedded in a wall and that wall is
John:
like here are the levels close closer closer and then everything else is basically either infinity or whatever and so when they blur the background they're blurring everything that's beyond their last level of depth resolution as if it's equidistant and and it's not like the tree that's 10 feet from you is different than the tree that's 40 feet from you but as far as the blurring is concerned it has no more depth information so it treats them all the same which contributes to the
Marco:
what marco was talking about if you know what it's supposed to look like and you see these pictures it's so obvious to you that something is off right so like so you know problem number one is that the depth information is not high resolution enough to even do the effect consistently around things like object edges and that's that's where usually the the obvious problems appear um is you know around edges you know edges of people's heads edges of objects um you know because
Marco:
they're just applying this very coarse map, and they're trying to be smart about it, and they succeed sometimes.
Marco:
But even Apple's example photos, I remember when the iPhone 8 and 10, when their event happened, and they put up their big press pages on the site, even some of their example photos, I thought, had obvious flaws in them from the algorithm.
Marco:
So again, maybe I'm just seeing this too much, but
Marco:
They're not capturing enough resolution of depth data to be able to do the edges correctly.
Marco:
That's why edges always look weird and fuzzy and they blur things that shouldn't be blurred and vice versa sometimes.
Marco:
And the other problem is what John said.
Marco:
The blur doesn't look right.
Marco:
If you have seen actual blur photos from real optics more than a few times, you will probably recognize that the type and look of the blur in these portrait mode photos isn't right.
Marco:
And it's hard to put into words why, but
Marco:
it's just not the right kind of blur.
Marco:
It doesn't look the way it would look from a lens.
Marco:
Even if the depth map was perfect and they were able to do it pixel by pixel, the blur is still wrong.
Marco:
And it just looks like a filter.
Marco:
It looks like a cheap image editing filter that's trying to cover up bad optics, which it is.
Marco:
Well, not bad optics, small optics that are not designed for this.
Marco:
Now, so all that being said,
Marco:
i am very very happy with the camera without any of these tricks it's a fantastic camera and you don't need the portrait crazy effects that all look weird and blur the edges of your dog off you don't need those to make this camera look amazing they're a fun trick they're a fun demo i'm sure and i'm sure people have fun with them and i'm sure everyone's going to write into me saying how much fun they have with them if you like them great but
Marco:
But I really, really don't.
Marco:
And the cameras are so good without them that I almost find them like an odd detraction from this otherwise awesome camera.
Marco:
But fortunately, it doesn't get in my way.
Marco:
I just don't use those modes.
Marco:
And I get to take awesome pictures.
Marco:
Well, you know, technically awesome.
Marco:
My composition is terrible, but...
Marco:
But I get to take technically awesome pictures with this camera and with both of these cameras and finally have the flexibility of having that zoomed in lens.
Marco:
And I love all that.
Marco:
I just have no use for the trickery modes.
Casey:
Having a telephoto lens is really, really nice.
Casey:
And I forget that it's a thing at first because I'm so used to just never, ever, ever zooming my camera ever.
Casey:
Or at least my iPhone, I should say.
Casey:
In the same way that I never really use the flash ever because I've just trained myself to never use the flash, which actually...
Casey:
From everything I've gathered and seen, the flash on the iPhone, both front-facing and rear, is actually not bad.
Casey:
I mean, it doesn't mean that it's perfect, but as a flash goes, particularly on a phone, it's pretty decent.
Casey:
And so because I've trained myself to never zoom, I forget that the telephoto lens is a thing.
Casey:
But as it turns out, it's awesome, just like you were saying, Marco, just to have the option to zoom at all.
Casey:
is really, really nice.
Casey:
And as a quick aside, at work today, we had a chili cook-off, and I'm going somewhere with this.
Casey:
The way it worked was we had something like 12 different employees cook chilies, and then they gave us a little shooter, like a shot cup, or it would be a glass, if you will, but like a little paper cup.
Casey:
It was like the size of a shot that you could take a little sample of each of the chilies and vote on whichever one was your favorite, right?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So I had taken a picture to send to Aaron earlier today, and I used portrait mode.
Casey:
Now, in the defense of Apple, portrait mode was only really officially marketed as being for people.
Casey:
But what I did was I took a shot of my stack of shot cups, if you will.
Casey:
And and I sent it to her and I just looked back at it a few minutes ago and realized that if you look at it at a glance, it looks really, really good, or at least it does to me.
Casey:
But if you look at it for even a second more than a glance and I've put a link in the show notes, I'll put a link in the chat room.
Casey:
Look at the right side all the way at the top.
Casey:
Like, part of the cup is just gone, which is kind of preposterous.
Marco:
The algorithm kind of helpfully found the edge of that design on the cup and expected that that was an edge of a person and just blurted it out for you.
Casey:
Which, I mean, again, to be fair to Apple, like, this is a really crummy situation to put this software through, right?
Casey:
To put this edge detection through.
Casey:
Like, this is ripe for failure.
Casey:
But at the same time, like...
Casey:
it is clear that I'm not going to be giving up on my Micro Four Thirds camera anytime soon.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
John:
So I think the blur effect that Marco thought looked bad, I think that blur effect would be fine if there was depth information back there.
John:
Because the reason I think it looks terrible is because it is basically blurring a flat photo.
John:
Whereas if you have an actual optically, you know, blurred stuff, depending on the distance, the closer things are blurred less than things are farther away.
John:
Like depending on how close they are to like the, you know, the focal point, right?
John:
but if you only have depth information for the first like two feet in front of you everything behind that is is like a blurred poster and it looks like a blurred poster um but all that said i agree with marco like you don't need this the cameras are great without it they're the you know that's why probably why we didn't talk about it's like these are the best iphone cameras ever everything apple says it's true they are better than the previous cameras
John:
and the previous cameras are already pretty good, and they're great, and you'll take good pictures with them.
John:
Two things to say about this.
John:
The portrait lighting modes, I think, fulfill their purpose better than the portrait blurring mode because they're so focused on...
John:
Like selfies and, you know, dramatic pictures of people.
John:
They're more like Instagram filters.
John:
We're like, yeah, we're going to mangle your picture for an artistic effect.
John:
No one is going to think like this is an untouched photo.
John:
And that's the point.
John:
The crazy studio lighting where it blacks out the background for extra drama and stuff.
John:
You can get some hilarious weird effects out of that.
John:
But it's kind of, you know, that's it.
John:
The people who want to use it and try it are getting exactly what they want out of it.
John:
Ridiculous, overblown, dramatic effects that are going to screw up a lot of the time.
John:
But hey, you take 900 selfies before you pick the one you like anyway, right?
John:
So no problem there.
John:
As for the portrait mode blurring thing, which has been around for a while now, and I see all over the place in real life and on Instagram.
John:
i think the main feature of that is if you don't have a big expensive camera and most people don't just look at the numbers like they don't sell a lot of big expensive cameras as compared to the number of cell phones this is the first time many people have ever been able to take a picture that
John:
has this look that you know oh the thing i wanted to take a picture of now look sharper because the rest of the thing is blurred and so i'm not distracted by the background and it looks like a better picture it looks more professional it doesn't matter whether they can tell whether it looks right or not all that matters is that they had never previously had the ability to take pictures that were anything like this that had any kind of depth of field right and
John:
It was always like everything was, you know, there's some tiny pinhole camera and everything was in focus because all the light beams were getting phone through this tiny, tiny aperture on their, you know, cheap camera on their phone.
John:
Right.
John:
And so.
John:
For them, it's a huge upgrade of never having this effect and subjectively looking at a picture of your kid with the background pleasantly blurred out makes your kid look better.
John:
right it's not that they're comparing that to how it would look with a you know an actual wide aperture big glass expensive camera because they don't have one of those and they probably never will they're comparing it to how it would look with that with that effect turned off and as far as they're concerned this looks better because it just looks closer to like a quote-unquote professional picture or a magazine type picture and i can see that i can see when i see people use it like they just say i just like it better it looks better so in the end the blurring portrait fixture
John:
is giving people a better experience with this phone at least in the moment where they're like this phone takes pictures that i'm just blown away they maybe don't even know what it is about them like that they just look better right and even if you point out oh you just erased your kid's ear they're like oh i hadn't noticed that but i still like it the only my only concern with the blurring which so many people love is that i worry that years down the line
John:
they will feel bad that all their pictures are blurred.
John:
Now, Apple also saves the unmodified picture.
John:
So that shouldn't be a problem.
John:
But I still worry that somehow that information will get lost or the blurred one will be burned out to a flat JPEG and moved around to a different service.
John:
And just, you know, I don't know.
John:
I've already heard from some people who kind of regret they took a lot of pictures of their kids with that.
John:
Maybe they don't know they can recover the original or maybe they can't anymore because they've exported it in some way.
John:
But in general, I think despite what Marco and I and many other big camera owning people think about it, a lot of people like this feature.
John:
I think it helps sell iPhones.
John:
I think it makes people happier with their phone and happier with the pictures they take with it.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree.
Casey:
And again, if you don't take a critical eye to it, which for the three of us is, or certainly the two of you, probably the three of us is hilarious.
Casey:
But if I don't really and truly look at these pictures, even those cups, which as soon as you take a true look at it, it's so obvious how broken it is.
Casey:
But at a glance, I didn't even notice.
Casey:
So, yeah, if you're not discerning, then this is more than enough.
Casey:
And it saves you the thousand plus dollars of getting another camera that has big glass, etc.
John:
Yeah, you wouldn't want to spend a thousand dollars on a camera, right?
John:
Yeah, why would you do that?
John:
You might spend twelve hundred dollars on a phone.
John:
It's fine, though.
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:
That's J-A-M-F dot com slash ATP.
Marco:
Manage your Apple devices from anywhere.
Casey:
All right, moving on to Ask ATP.
Casey:
Kim Allberg writes in, would John consider gaming on the GeForce Now service instead of getting a tricked out new Mac Pro?
Casey:
And Kim included a YouTube link, which we will put in the show notes.
Casey:
So what is GeForce Now and what is this all about?
John:
So the short answer is no, I wouldn't consider that.
John:
But the longer answer is what GeForce Now is.
John:
GeForce Now is another sad slash, I don't know, it's sad to me, attempt to bring gaming to Mac users.
John:
You've got a Mac, you want to play games.
John:
boot camp is there for you if you want it but even if you go in boot camp uh you probably don't have the best gpu because apple doesn't sell macs with it and so you're like what if you want to play the most demanding modern pc games but you don't want to own a pc you just have a mac you're kind of stuck these days and geforce now is a service a lot like some services in the past including the one i'm most familiar with on live for many years ago
John:
um where it will run the game for you in a data center far away on a tricked out pc with all the fancy hardware presumably using nvidia gpus right and then it will let you remotely control that pc sending the picture of it to your screen and letting your keyboard and mouse act as input for it so that's what the geforce now service is and it lets you run on like your dinky like
John:
you know macbook escape with a wimpy gpu you can run the most modern game at a really high frame rate at a really high resolution because you're not running it it's running on a fancy computer far away from you you're just displaying the results as kind of a dumb terminal
John:
Um, but of course there's no, you know, no free lunch.
John:
You've got latency because you're communicating over the internet.
John:
The image quality that you're getting is not going to be the same as if it was running locally because they have to compress that video and send it to you.
John:
You need to have a fast internet connection.
John:
You need to have not many hitches in your internet connection.
John:
You need to have a surprising amount of bandwidth because there are a lot of frames in that video.
John:
And that's generally why I wouldn't want it instead of a local computer, because the compromises are not great, and they are especially bad for some of the types of games that I like, like a game like Destiny.
John:
I would love to play Destiny 2 on the PC because I get a higher frame rate and it's higher res, but Destiny is the type of game that is very sensitive to lag.
John:
it would really affect gameplay if you wanted to play something like civilization or some other game that is also very demanding but maybe not as sensitive to like i don't know someone who plays civilization could tell me if it's if it's a game where you need to have twitch reflexes but surely there are games out there that you don't care about the extra latency and it's more about you know the rest of the gameplay experience this would be something you might be interested in
John:
It's going to be a pay service, and then you have to pay for the games on top of that.
John:
So it's cheaper than buying a gaming PC, but it's an additional cost.
John:
So I wish them luck with this service, and it seems like a good idea.
John:
I just wish that gaming would actually get better on Macs.
John:
But if that's never, ever going to happen, I'm kind of glad that someone still feels like there's money to be squeezed from Mac users who want to play games.
John:
As long as they make that amount of money smaller than the price and hassle and desk space of buying a gaming PC, I guess maybe there's a market for it.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So Mark MV writes in, do you use a VPN?
Casey:
If so, which one would you recommend?
Casey:
So the motivation here, I think, is that there are many VPN services that allow for different things.
Casey:
One example is if you live outside the United States but want to have an Internet connection that appears to be within the United States so you can use – well, I guess Netflix used to be a good example.
Casey:
Now I don't think it's quite as important –
Casey:
or any number of other services that are forced to be US only.
Casey:
But another option is if you're just in a public Wi-Fi hotspot and you want your communications to be encrypted, then you could use a VPN for that.
Casey:
I do use a VPN when I am out of the house on a Wi-Fi network that I do not trust, or if for some reason I want to get on my in-home network.
Casey:
And the answer that I have for what VPN do I recommend is
Casey:
Well, I recommend the VPN that you run on your Synology that's sitting in your house, which is not a terribly useful recommendation, I'll be the first to admit.
Casey:
But you could install a macOS server if you have a Mac at home that's on all the time.
Casey:
If you have any sort of cheap computer that can run Linux, you can run various different servers that do it that way.
Casey:
Or if you have a Synology, I strongly recommend setting up a VPN server on there.
Casey:
If, like me, you connect your Synology to the Internet, which I know John's is not.
Casey:
But that's what I do.
Casey:
I can't speak for either of you guys.
Casey:
So, Marco, what do you do for this, if anything?
Marco:
I mostly don't use them because, first of all, I'm hardly ever out of my house.
Marco:
And when I am, I'm usually on the cell network.
Marco:
And I know the cell network is not perfectly secure, but I'm hardly ever connecting to somebody else's Wi-Fi, is what I'm saying.
Marco:
So where I think is probably the most common need for a VPN is to protect yourself in that kind of situation.
Marco:
There are lots of other reasons to use one, as you said.
Marco:
I'm not that up on what's the best solution if security and privacy are the main reasons you're using them.
Marco:
You can use a big service like... So the one I use occasionally when I need it is Encrypt.me, which is formerly known as Cloak.
Marco:
I signed up for that a little while back.
Marco:
But it's mostly for...
Marco:
practicality, not sheer amount of security.
Marco:
For instance, at my in-law's place, their crappy rural ISP blocks outbound SSH connections.
Marco:
Seriously?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
I can't log into any of my servers when I'm there.
Marco:
I don't know.
Casey:
That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
Marco:
I'm sure it's like some Windows worm probably started attacking SSA servers.
Marco:
They just figured they'd block.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I'm sure there was a reason like that.
Marco:
Whatever it is, it's not a good reason.
Marco:
But the fact is I have to occasionally log into servers when I'm away.
Marco:
So I basically bought it just to do that.
Marco:
But I use it also when traveling – when I have to be on hotel Wi-Fi for reasonable connectivity, I'll use it then.
Marco:
But I usually don't use one because, again, I'm almost never connected to anybody else's Wi-Fi networks.
Marco:
I think the whole idea of connecting to a random Wi-Fi network in public –
Marco:
And letting all your traffic flow over that without always being encrypted, like without everything running over HTTPS, which, you know, let's face it, you're going to have something that probably doesn't.
Marco:
The idea of that sounds crazy to me.
Marco:
And I think we're going to look back on this era of using public Wi-Fi networks unencrypted.
Marco:
Like, I think we're going to look back on this and think that was crazy in not even that long, maybe in five or ten years.
Marco:
The whole idea of...
Marco:
connecting to random public Wi-Fi and everyone not having every device have a cellular connection that is theirs and private, that's going to seem barbaric.
Marco:
But anyway, yeah, I use Cloak, which is now known as EncryptMe, but I hardly ever actually need to use it.
Marco:
If you are doing it more for privacy...
Marco:
I don't know a lot about this, but I do know there is always discussion about which of the various VPN services keep logs or will be beholden to government requests or things like that.
Marco:
There's all sorts of levels of paranoia slash security, depending on your point of view, that you can go into with this.
Marco:
And I'm not familiar with that.
Marco:
So I will say if you lean that direction or if you have more advanced needs like that, you're probably better off doing something more like Casey just suggested, which is like kind of running your own on some kind of server that you can trust somewhere.
John:
um rather than doing somebody's big service but that's i don't know anything about that i'm always worried about uh you know kind of like the stories about antivirus software being a vector for malware right the vpns vpns that are secretly run by like some hostile foreign government unbeknownst to you they're just man in the middling all of your traffic even the secure stuff and
John:
feeding you fake certificates for ssl and all sorts of other stuff and like i'm using it on my synology it's local it's fine it's like you don't know that you don't know like synology could be unknowingly shipping some you know thing that is infected with some malware that is sending all your traffic to who knows where um but yeah i in general i use vpn at work for work because i have to i have no idea if the vpn i'm using for work is actually making things more secure or not but i have to use it so i do when i'm out and about
John:
I'm never connecting back to anything in my home because I have no way to do so just because that makes me feel more comfortable.
John:
And I tend not to – I think I have Cloak and a couple other VPN software that I think I've used on occasion when I've been feeling particularly paranoid and have no choice but to connect to some potentially sketchy Wi-Fi network.
John:
But in general –
John:
i i will connect to the wi-fi at the hotel i'm staying at and i'll just use it and just try not to worry about it i'm basically going for the big sky theory which is a lot of people out in the world and unless someone is specifically targeting me i'm probably going to be fine and i'm on sell most of the time that i'm away anyway but i have to think back a few times i was at hotels i use the hotel wi-fi
John:
i rely on the fact that the things i care about should all be over a cell and i just hope that i'm not being man in the middle with some fake certificate uh authority crap and i just keep my fingers crossed because what else can you do and there's also other practical reasons you might want to use one like there's a lot of vpn services that provide built-in ad blocking for like just all of your stuff through the vpn um there's some that that um
Marco:
As Casey said, to enable you to change your regions for video services, which can be nice.
Marco:
And that could be not only just internationally, but even that could be for things like sports blackout things, which I won't even pretend to know anything more than just that's a term that exists.
Marco:
Sorry.
Marco:
There's also things like...
Marco:
like on airplanes, where a lot of times the airplane Wi-Fi providers will throttle or block certain things, or they'll do creepy things like recompress images down to lower sizes.
Marco:
And if you're trying to do something that requires you to not have your images recompressed, like if you're doing web development or something, that might get in your way.
Marco:
So oftentimes, they will allow you to get around those restrictions.
Marco:
Even when you're at a hotel or something,
Marco:
or on some kind of large public Wi-Fi network like an airport or something like that, a lot of times they will use different traffic prioritization schemes to deprioritize or limit certain types of traffic that might get in your way.
Marco:
So if you're trying to download something off of a CDN or if you're trying to watch a YouTube video or something, that might get throttled or blocked by a hotel or airport.
Marco:
if you download it directly, but if you go through a VPN, it might not be.
Marco:
So it kind of gives you more flexibility and more options to have this tool at your disposal if you're out and about a lot.
John:
Yeah, some people use it just to get a different route.
John:
Like if you're having trouble reaching a server and people say, oh, connect your VPN because then your traffic will go through the VPN, which may be geographically located in a way that totally changes your route to that host.
John:
And suddenly you can get through to it.
John:
Some people have tried this, like getting through to the store when ordering, putting their thing on Wi-Fi through a VPN to have a different route on one device to see if maybe their CDN comes up sooner.
John:
Lots of interesting things you can do to sort of using VPN, not for its primary purpose, but merely to just take a different path to the same destination.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Elliot George would like to know, do you think Apple will eventually bring air power to its magic mouse and keyboard?
Casey:
So to recap, the new iPhones all support Qi, Qi, Qi, Qi, wireless charging.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
And Bizzell, they pronounce they support that wireless charging.
Casey:
And so Apple has announced but not released a special mat that will allow you to charge.
Casey:
Your phone, your watch, and your AirPods, given you spend money on a special case or get a brand new set of AirPods, all on the same mat.
Casey:
Because currently you can only, for most of these pads, you can only charge one device at a time.
Casey:
And so AirPower will allow you to do, if you're a super nerd like me that has a watch and AirPods and a phone, it will let you do all three on one pad.
Casey:
So Elliot's asking, do we think that Apple will eventually bring air power to the Magic Mouse and keyboard?
Casey:
I don't think so, but I can't figure out why.
Casey:
It just doesn't feel to me like something Apple would do.
Casey:
I think they're perfectly satisfied with having you periodically charge via the lightning cable, even the harpooned turtle that is the Magic Mouse.
Casey:
And I don't think they feel like there's really any need to change or improve that.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
That's my thoughts.
Casey:
John?
John:
they changed their apple input devices so infrequently the keyboards change infrequently the mice change even more infrequently but all that said i think the mouse is they should do it and i think there's a reasonable chance that they will just because the harpoon turtle is ridiculous and the reason they did the harpoon turtle is no other good place to plug the thing in
John:
And the mouse is small and easy to pick up and put on a mat.
John:
So once a month when you have to recharge it, it's easier to just say like the thing pops up to just plop it down on the thing.
John:
Keyboard would be too awkward.
John:
Like how do you pick up your keyboard and like balance it?
John:
It's bigger than the AirPower mat.
John:
You're not going to have a mat that's the size of your keyboard and the keyboard would take up the whole thing.
John:
And which part of the keyboard needs to be over the thing?
John:
It just seems like not a good fit.
John:
The mouse is...
John:
more or less the size of a phone and i think it would fit perfectly well and i think it will solve their harpoon turtle problem solve their like where do we put the charging port problem um and if you do have one of those mats there's a reasonable chance that it will be on the desk where your computer is because that's where you plop your phone when you're using the computer so you plop your mouse there so i'm i'm semi-optimistic that five years from now when they finally revise their mouse again that it will have whatever the current standard of wireless charging is
John:
because it makes sense to me as a product to be a thing that you put on a mat to charge every once in a while.
Marco:
Yeah, that sounds about right.
Marco:
The only thing is that the Lightning method of charging them also provides a secondary function, which is it pairs them to the computer.
Marco:
You never have to go through Bluetooth pairing and everything.
Marco:
All you have to do is plug them into the Lightning cable that's connected to a computer, and it just automatically pairs to that computer, which is really nice.
Marco:
It's also frequently used for me when my trackpad...
Marco:
disconnects itself for no reason.
Marco:
Thanks, Sierra.
Marco:
And then I have to plug it back in about every two days so that it reconnects itself.
Marco:
So there's reasons why the cable is nice to have besides just charging.
Marco:
I agree with John that it doesn't make as much sense on the trackpad and keyboard where it's not only do they need to be plugged in generally less often, but also you can still use them when they're plugged in.
Marco:
So if you forget to charge a keyboard or trackpad,
Marco:
Not that big of a deal.
Marco:
Just plug the cable in and keep working.
Marco:
Whereas if you forget to charge the mouse, you have to literally just stop using it for a while as it sits there sideways.
Marco:
And then you go back to your trackpad that has disconnected for no reason.
Marco:
So... Not that I'm bitter.
Marco:
This, to me, it's...
Marco:
It's an interesting problem to solve on the mouse, but if they just move the port to the front of the mouse and give us a little indentation there, that would also solve the problem with the Lightning port.
Marco:
I think the Qi charging is less necessary and is less compelling for a device that you only have to charge once a month for a little while.
Marco:
It makes a lot more sense on devices like phones where you are using them constantly and they're draining their batteries constantly.
Marco:
And then every night or even throughout the day, they need to be topped off.
Marco:
They need to be recharged.
Marco:
That's not really the case with these peripherals.
Marco:
So I can't really see them doing that necessarily.
John:
What I really need to add is to solve your disconnecting problems, like the equivalent or maybe the identical, like the W1 chip.
John:
The fact that you can plug it in to pair it is great because it gets you out of the whole Bluetooth device pairing game.
John:
They've circumvented it with a hardwired connection.
John:
But also on AirPods, they have their own pairing mechanism.
John:
Yes, AirPods are Bluetooth, but the whole W1 thing and the experience of opening a little container and switching easily from device to device and all that stuff.
John:
that experience would help you presumably, uh, work around OS bugs when your trackpad disconnects without having to actually plug in a cable.
John:
Uh, and so, you know, the wireless, everything for devices that are small and handheld, uh, I think is a reasonable future.
John:
And like I said, they revised their mice so infrequently that by the time they do, all this stuff should be more reliable, lower power, cheaper, and just sort of be table stakes for any portable thing that has batteries that, uh,
John:
presumably will become less common to have to keep plugging these things in and have to have ports on them and have to deal with connectors it'll just be like put it down on the pad and let it go
Casey:
So why don't you like the next Ask ATP, which I know we've already hit three, but I'm bothered by you not liking this question.
Casey:
And I'm willing to give Marco the editing work to clean this up.
Casey:
Thanks.
Casey:
So in the show notes, it reads, how would you define, quote, close to the metal quote to non-nerds?
Casey:
And do you have a favorite non-computer analogical use for the saying?
Casey:
analogical is that a word i don't think so um it looks terrible and and and it's prefixed in italics i don't like this question so i asked in slack earlier john why don't you like this question the response i got was as follows many reasons i was busy i don't have time to type a big thing i was on my ipad i gotta type a big answer to you on my ipad
Casey:
So what the hell's wrong with this?
Casey:
I thought this was a perfectly reasonable question.
Marco:
Wait, you don't have a smart keyboard on that iPad?
Marco:
Yeah, that too.
Marco:
No, I don't.
Marco:
Oh, you're missing out.
Marco:
The only way to use an iPad Pro is with a smart keyboard.
Marco:
It's so good.
John:
But I don't type on it.
John:
I'm just reading the web and browsing Twitter and watching YouTube.
John:
I'm not typing things.
John:
Yeah, because it sucks to type on the screen.
John:
But if you have a keyboard, you'd start typing on it.
John:
No, I wouldn't.
John:
I'm using my iPad.
John:
If I want a laptop, I would get a laptop, but I don't like laptops, so I don't have a laptop.
Casey:
Except your work laptop.
John:
Well, I got no choice.
Casey:
No choice.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
I don't like that one either.
Casey:
Anyway, what the hell is wrong with this question?
John:
My assumption is that they're asking this because of the...
John:
merlin many years old troll gag of trying to say uh you know is that close to the metal i think he was like riffing on something that we said in an early tech podcast that he reframed and and uh you know i don't know if close to the metal was something we said or it was close to something we said but he catched he latched onto it as like a catchphrase and a sort of a nonsense uh
John:
uh thing that i don't know like it's a it's a multi-layered multi-year-old gag that has lost all meaning and never really did have a meaning it's like his returning null thing right that's it's it's not it doesn't seem like an honest question because what how would you define why would you find yourself needing to define close to the metal unless they also listen to a bunch of podcasts with me and merlin for years and years to understand what this gag is about in which case you would never need to define it like there's context that's missing here what is the
John:
why does this come up uh why are you saying close to the metal to anyone why do you feel like you have to explain it why is it an important thing for them to understand do you understand it are you asking me to explain it to you or do you just want you think you understand it but you want me to tell you how to explain to someone else who doesn't care about it it's a bad question
John:
That's why we're not answering it.
Casey:
Are you serious right now?
Casey:
This is the most insane thing I've ever heard.
John:
I mean, maybe you guys don't have that same context and maybe I'm wrong and this person also has no idea what I'm talking about.
John:
And they're just like, I've just heard close to the middle.
John:
I don't want to know what it means or I know what it means, but I need to explain to other people.
John:
Maybe it's perfectly honest, but I didn't interpret it that way.
Casey:
How would you define, quote, close to the metal, quote, to non-nerds?
Casey:
Okay, that was literally verbatim the question.
Casey:
How in the name of Zeus's butthole did you get that much context from that little text?
John:
Maybe you don't have that context, but if you had listened to tons of podcasts with me and Marlon and remembered the origins of this whole gag, you would have the same context as I do.
John:
That's why I don't like the question.
John:
i'm i'm stupefied right now i i understand the words coming out of your mouth but how you concluded from how would you define close to the metal to non-nerds how how did you come to that conclusion because the only reason they're they're saying close to the metal is because like i mean again i'm assuming you're right but but like it's too much of a coincidence marco who actually listens to podcasts that merlin is on and i am on and probably remembers this more better than most of us you know what i'm talking about right
John:
I don't think so.
John:
Well, forget a side of whether you like the question or not.
John:
You know the origins of the close to the metal thing, right?
Marco:
In computer terms, I know what it means.
Marco:
I'm not sure.
John:
You don't know the John Merlin podcast axis of this?
John:
Maybe I've forgotten it.
John:
I mean, all right.
John:
Well, then maybe it's just me.
John:
But anyway, that was my interpretation.
John:
And my guess is that the person asking this question also knows what I'm talking about, even if nobody else does.
Casey:
I bet you that you are 100% wrong on this.
John:
Anyway, you can see why I didn't want to try to type that.
Casey:
So can we answer this without all of that completely bananas backstory?
John:
If you two want to answer... Let's put it this way.
John:
You're abstaining from this?
John:
No, no, no.
John:
Listen, listen.
John:
If you...
John:
why what is the non john merlin related context for asking this question do you think close to the metal is a phrase that needs to be explained to other people does it come up in conversation why would anyone why would anyone say this and be disappointed that someone didn't understand it to them and yet not know how to explain it to them like what why is this a legit question in any way independent of any other stuff
Casey:
Who knows?
Casey:
Why are you judging whether or not Jonathan Bowling has used the phrase close to the metal in conversation?
Casey:
That's not up to you.
Casey:
You're not the boss of him.
John:
It's not like you could say, how would you define, you know, like a slippery is a banana peel to non nerds.
John:
Do you have a favorite analogy used to explain?
John:
It's like that's not even a comma phrase.
John:
You know, yes, the banana peels are slippery, but a slippery is a banana peel is not a thing that people say.
John:
So why would I have to explain to you how I explain to other people?
John:
It just doesn't come up.
John:
Like, it's arbitrary.
John:
It's too arbitrary.
John:
Have you ever had to explain Close to the Medal to non-nerds?
John:
Yes!
John:
Have you ever said that to anyone?
Casey:
When?
Casey:
I'm sure I have.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
I'm sure I have at some point, because there's a big difference to answer the question.
Casey:
See, I'm going to sneak the answer in here.
Casey:
There's no way this is making it to the show.
Casey:
Oh, come on.
John:
This is preposterous.
John:
This is all of the chat room.
John:
This is the quality you get for being in this chat room.
John:
There is no way this makes the edit.
John:
You get fish, and you get this.
Time for the meeting.
Casey:
The answer to the question, which Jonathan will never hear, is that some things... He already knows what it means.
Casey:
No, he does.
Casey:
Or maybe he does, but he doesn't know how to describe it in a simple way.
John:
All right.
John:
Well, go ahead.
Casey:
You help him out.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
I'm so angry at you right now because you are putting this poor man in a context that I don't think... You're putting him in a box, John.
Casey:
You're putting him in a box.
Casey:
Anyway, the answer to the question is, my answer to the question, which John will then refute and be angry with, is that there are many different kinds of computer languages, programming languages, and some of them are literal direct translations to ones and zeros that are run on the CPU in question.
Casey:
And most of them are not.
Casey:
And as you get more and more current, most of these languages have many more abstractions that they're built upon that get you further and further and further away from ones and zeros that are run on the CPU.
Casey:
And so when you're close to the metal, you're doing something that is either directly translatable to ones and zeros or is very, very, very close to directly translatable, as opposed to something like, say, Swift or PHP,
Casey:
or certainly Pearl, which is built on so many abstractions, it's almost hilarious that any of this actually works.
Casey:
And so, you know, the stuff that the three of us work in day to day is nowhere close to the metal.
Casey:
There are abstractions upon abstractions upon abstractions upon abstractions, and so many, it's a layer cake, just layers all the way down.
Casey:
And
Casey:
Thus, that's what, when somebody says close to the metal, it means you're working in a situation where you are probably using a tool chain that is very difficult to work in because you're talking, it's more about talking the computer's language than it is talking about human language.
John:
You know, when you said, I bet John's going to have complaints about my description, I'm thinking to myself, oh, I'm sure it'll be fine.
John:
But then as you got further into the explanation, I was like, you know what?
John:
I would explain that differently.
Casey:
So here we go.
John:
So you were right.
John:
You were right.
John:
I couldn't take it.
Marco:
Of course.
Marco:
Why would you even think that that wouldn't happen?
John:
Because I was like, you know, I'm not going to have any objections to your explanation.
John:
But then there's like, no, no, I wouldn't say it that way.
John:
No, no.
John:
Anyway.
John:
Do you know you?
John:
Exactly.
Casey:
Exactly.
They're fine.
Casey:
So how would you explain it then, King?
John:
No, you did fine.
John:
You just told me I didn't do fine.
John:
Jonathan Bowling already knows what it means.
Casey:
No, he doesn't.
John:
And if he has a need to explain it to non-nerds, that's not him.
Casey:
I'm tweeting right now.
Casey:
I'm tweeting at Jonathan Bowling, and we're going to find this out right this second.
John:
He's asleep.
Casey:
He probably is, but...
John:
Tell you what, if Jonathan Balling legit needs an explanation, he can email me and I will email him.
Casey:
If he can give me a convincing... So after, you're going to complain about my explanation and you're not even going to actually give your own explanation?
John:
It's hard to explain, but I don't think there's... It's pronounced Syracusa.
John:
I don't think there's any... Marco, you're like one of the only few people in the world who can actually pronounce my last name correctly and I enjoy that.
John:
All right!
John:
Don't encourage him.
John:
It's not hard.
Casey:
So really, you're not going to answer the question?
John:
No, it's fine.
John:
It's nitpicking.
John:
What you said is perfectly adequate.
John:
I would have to know why it is... I would never say close to the metal to non-nerds and expect them to understand what I was saying.
John:
Why use tech nerd jargon with someone who you know is not going to understand it?
John:
You think I'm throwing out destiny jargon in regular conversations with people and expect them to follow along?
John:
No.
John:
Would we even know?
John:
yeah you would know because it would sound like nonsense oh my gosh i i cannot believe you're you're going to complain and moan about my about my description and then not complain i said you were right i said you were right that uh that i thought i would wouldn't have any objections to it but in the end i did this is preposterous i'm so angry at you right now anyway the main reason why this shouldn't go in the show is because you only get three questions
Casey:
Who defined that as the rule?
Casey:
All of us, by consensus.
John:
No, it was not by consensus.
John:
It was, too.
John:
We said, how many questions?
John:
Go find that recording of, like, how many questions do you think we should have?
John:
One, two, three.
John:
And we're like, oh, three questions sounds good.
John:
And that's what we've been doing ever since.
Casey:
We'll make it a topic.
Casey:
Yeah, that's the first topic.
John:
It just happened.
John:
The close to the metal topic.
Marco:
Technically, it's follow-up because it was discussed on another podcast before, right?
John:
i think that's follow out they have to ask the follow-up people about that i think well that's follow out right who invented follow that i mean it couldn't have possibly been the same people who invented ask podcast right uh was that i don't i it was track of all the my curly yes it was upgrade how do you do so many of them and they change names so much not upgrade which has never changed names yeah it's only ever been up no but yeah but the the dugga dugga was from like three of my curly shows ago right
Casey:
No.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
I don't think so.
Casey:
Wasn't that... No, that's from Dubai Friday.
John:
Yeah.
John:
No.
John:
The Dugga Dugga is... Yes, they do it in Dubai Friday, but why are they doing it in Dubai Friday?
John:
Because an earlier show... They're imitating an earlier show.
John:
Which one was it?
Casey:
I feel like I'm watching... This is the verbal version of looking in your brain and seeing the world's most intricate conspiracy theory with yarn between all these different... It's not conspiracy.
John:
This is where it comes from.
John:
Look, someone in the chat room tell me where the Dugga Dugga is from.
Marco:
This is the verbal version of that t-shirt that says Helvetica printed in Comic Sans.
John:
Someone says the prompt.
John:
Is that ringing a bell to you guys?
John:
The prompt?
John:
Remember the Dugga Dugga on the prompt?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
I don't remember the Dugga Dugga on that.
John:
They had the recording of the word follow-up with a weird voice.
John:
Yes.
John:
And it had the little musical trill in front of it.
John:
Follow-up.
Marco:
No, it's like a space laser sound effect.
Marco:
It sounds awful, actually.
John:
I think that's what they're imitating on Dubai Friday.
John:
No, not even close.
Marco:
They're imitating like TV news.
John:
Breaking news.
John:
I thought what they were doing was imitating the prompt.
John:
Certainly, the weirdly voiced word follow-up is from the prompt, right?
Casey:
Yes, that is from the prompt.
John:
And so I was tying those two together.
John:
If the Dugga Dugga is not from that, my bad.
John:
I recalled that little musical laser trill and I thought that's what they were imitating and it slowly warped until it was Dig Dugg.
John:
Wow.
Casey:
I don't even know where to go from here.
Casey:
We have just created a verbal, an oral train wreck.
Casey:
What just happened?
John:
It's references all the way down and anything that gets filtered through Merlin slowly mutates until it's unrecognizable.
John:
So what can you do?
Marco:
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Casey:
I don't have a Qi charger, but I hear rumors that one or two of us do.
Casey:
So can one of you with a Qi charger tell me if they're any good and worth buying?
Marco:
So I got my first Qi chargers this past week.
Marco:
And so I have the Mophie one that the Apple store sells, which is one of the only ones that Apple has ever officially acknowledged its existence of.
Marco:
And I have the, what is this?
Marco:
Let me see.
Marco:
The RavPower stand-up one.
Marco:
It looks like it props it up so it can stand up on your desk.
Marco:
It's like this black thing that says fast charge in the middle of it for some reason.
Marco:
RAV Power seems to be a reasonable brand.
Marco:
They seem like they're pretty much on the level of anchor in terms of power and charging and battery gear that is inexpensive and seems to be reasonably made.
Marco:
Anyway, and Mophie is very well regarded too.
Marco:
I usually find their stuff a little bit pricey for what it is, but it's well-made stuff, so I can't complain too much.
Marco:
Anyway, so this is my first experience with any kind of wireless charging for phones.
Marco:
I know with previous phones, you could get cases that were basically Qi receivers, and Mophie even sells those, actually, and a few other people do, too.
Marco:
But I have no experiences with those.
Marco:
All the reviews that said wireless charging is not very good.
Marco:
I think the only reason they were saying that is because it seems like Apple gave the Belkin charger to reviewers, not the Mophie charger.
Marco:
And the Belkin charger seems like it has... I haven't tried it because everyone said it sucked, but it seems like it has pretty significant problems with the phone vibrating off of it and also the correct target spot of where you have to put the phone being pretty small.
Marco:
um and it and it being very easy to put it on there thinking that you're charging it but it's actually slightly misaligned and so it doesn't charge i have not found this to be the case at all with either my rav power stand up one or the uh mophie circle pad thing and so let's i don't know what these are called the mophie disc yeah who knows uh so you know
Marco:
Let's get that right out of the way.
Marco:
And I don't know if the Mophie one has multiple coils.
Marco:
I know like one of the ways that the stand-up ones try to fix this problem is they'll have multiple coils in there.
Marco:
And so if the phone is aligned with any of like three different coils, it'll charge properly.
Marco:
So that way you can maybe have it in different orientation.
Marco:
Like some of the desk ones...
Marco:
They support the phone being in landscape if you're like standing up to watch a movie or something, which is a nice little touch.
Marco:
You have to have like a coil kind of down low for that.
Marco:
And they also have one kind of up high in the middle so the phone can be standing up in different heights.
Marco:
Anyway, so the experience of using these things, I got to say, these are amazing.
Marco:
These are awesome.
Marco:
And for a number of reasons.
Marco:
Now, they're not perfect.
Marco:
There are a couple of downsides.
Marco:
As mentioned, you do have to actually land it somewhere near the charging spot.
Marco:
In practice, I have found this to not be a problem at all with these two chargers.
Marco:
Maybe there's other ones that are terrible.
Marco:
Sounds like there are.
Marco:
But with these two chargers, the only ones I've experienced with so far, they seem great.
Marco:
There's other slight problems like the flat ones.
Marco:
Obviously, it's like having the phone flat on the desk for Face ID purposes.
Marco:
So you're probably not going to have Face ID work with it lying on the desk flat.
Marco:
The Stand-Up RavPower one that I have on my desk, though, does actually work and will unlock Face ID with it in the stand.
Marco:
So this probably has to do with angle and distance and everything else.
Marco:
But just so you know, that's a thing that can work.
Marco:
So I'm very happy with that.
Marco:
And the other main downside to be aware of with these things is that they charge fairly slowly compared to high wattage power bricks.
Marco:
It seems like most of them charge at 5 watts.
Marco:
Some of them will charge at 7.5 watts on the 11.2 beta.
Marco:
I don't know how many of them will do that, but at least the Mophie one will.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
That's roughly two-thirds of the speed that you'd get if you use an iPad power brick or any kind of 2.4-amp charger.
Marco:
So it's not quite as fast.
Marco:
It's closer to the speed of the little crappy power brick that comes with the iPhone, which for many purposes is totally fine.
Marco:
So if you're charging overnight, like next on a bedside table, it's totally fine.
Marco:
And let me tell you, being able – like every night for the last, I don't know, decade, I have –
Marco:
Upon going to bed, placed my phone in some kind of dock or charger on my nightstand to charge overnight.
Marco:
I have a feeling this is a pretty common use case.
Marco:
I think pretty much everyone does something like this.
Marco:
And I've gone through so many different docks and good and bad, lots of different ones.
Marco:
There used to be zero good docks.
Marco:
Now there's lots of good docks.
Marco:
Our friends at Studio Neat make one, the material dock.
Marco:
That's wonderful.
Marco:
It even has an Apple Watch option.
Marco:
I have one of those on my desk.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
That's how I keep my watch charged.
Casey:
My bedside table is one of their material docks with my phone and my watch.
Casey:
And were it not for this Qi stuff, I would probably use that freaking forever.
Casey:
But now that Qi is a thing, it's got my eye wandering.
Marco:
Yeah, and there's been all sorts of efforts over the years to make docks that were easy to lift the phone out of one-handed.
Marco:
I believe Elevation Dock kind of made this famous.
Marco:
Then right after Elevation Dock launched, the 30-pin connector was replaced by lightning, and it really screwed them over for a while.
Marco:
And they had various attempts to fix that for a while.
Marco:
The way most docks seem to fix this...
Marco:
is to just have one of those micro suction pads on the bottom that just sticks it really hard to the surface it's on.
Marco:
So that way you can just pull the phone out and have the dock stay where it is.
Marco:
And I have the new Elevation dock too.
Marco:
It's also really nice.
Marco:
What's especially nice about it is that you can adjust the alignment and thickness of its charging things
Marco:
Really quickly and easily with little knobs on it.
Marco:
So if you frequently change whether your phone has a case or not or you change between two different thicknesses of cases or something like that, the Elevation dock is great for that.
Marco:
But once you get to Qi charging, once you try a wireless charging pad, I have a feeling you're going to not want to ever use a dock again.
Marco:
Because it is so different.
Marco:
It is so much better.
Marco:
Rather than having to align your phone into a dock, no matter how good that dock is, no matter how nicely it's designed, and then having to pull your phone out of that dock in the morning, rather than doing that, to just lay it on a pad,
Marco:
And it lights up to confirm that it's charging.
Marco:
That's awesome.
Marco:
And then when you want to pick up the phone again, you just reach over and pick it up.
Marco:
It's incredibly... It's so much lower friction.
Marco:
It's so much... Both physically and metaphorically.
Marco:
It's so much nicer that it really is like a behavior changer.
Marco:
Right?
Marco:
um similarly the one on my desk um this is nice i was reminded by by somebody on twitter the other day i'm sorry i forget who right now i don't i can't find it quickly but uh i didn't realize that wi-fi ios app debugging had shipped and is a thing we can now do in xcode 9 i still haven't tried it i knew i did know it was a thing but i still have not tried it myself
Marco:
So the great thing is, so all you do is you go, so basically the reason why I always have lightning cables on my desk is that as an iOS developer, you frequently need to, from Xcode, do a build and run where you are building your code that you just wrote and you deploy it onto your iPhone or iPad and you get to test it right on the device.
Marco:
To do this before this fall, you had to use a cable.
Marco:
You had to be plugged in via USB and a lightning cable and it helpfully also charged the phone, which was nice during this time.
Marco:
But you had to do that.
Marco:
With Xcode 9, this came out this fall,
Marco:
you can now do Wi-Fi build and run and Wi-Fi debugging.
Marco:
And all you do is you go into the organizer pane and you go to that device and there's a little checkbox at the top that says something like access via network.
Marco:
And then it's just always available.
Marco:
It doesn't have to be connected via USB anymore.
Marco:
And so this is a perfect combination with a Qi charging device because you can have your phone sitting there charging when you're not running.
Marco:
And then when you build and run, you can just pick it up and hold it in your hand and you're running and debugging your code.
Marco:
It's glorious.
Marco:
It is so, so nice.
Marco:
And it works as far as I can tell.
Marco:
There doesn't seem to be any difference in performance.
Marco:
Everything seems to work just fine.
Marco:
It isn't like horribly slow or anything in my initial testing and use so far.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
So anyway, so now on my desk, I lose a big reason to plug my phone in or a big reason why I would need to plug my phone in.
Marco:
So that's why this RAM power thing is great to have on my desk because here's the phone standing up.
Marco:
It's charging much of the time.
Marco:
And when I want to build and run, I can just pick it up and it's glorious.
Marco:
And another great thing about these Qi chargers is that there are tons of them in all different shapes and sizes and looks.
Marco:
And while many of them, most of them, I would say are these hideous plastic things with fast charge written in capital letters on them somewhere for no reason.
Marco:
Some of them are decent looking and they're all really inexpensive.
Marco:
Like you can get tons of them because Apple didn't invent Qi charging.
Marco:
It's been around for some time and Android phones have supported it for some time.
Marco:
And so there's a whole ecosystem out there of existing Qi products that
Marco:
that are all pretty functional you know they're pretty ugly most of them but they're pretty functional and they're so cheap and even ikea makes a lot of pretty decent looking ones um and and because they're so plentiful and expensive you can afford to put these pretty much all over the place like i already have the one next to my bed which is amazing i have the one on my desk which is incredibly useful and amazing um
Marco:
I've ordered a few more to have on the kitchen counter, on the end table next to the couch.
Marco:
Because when we watch TV, I often will put my phone on that table.
Marco:
Might as well have a pad there, right?
Marco:
I mean, I might confuse it for a coaster sometimes, but if it's only $18, that's not that bad.
Marco:
So it's really...
Marco:
It is a pretty big game changer.
Marco:
It also brings another big advantage that you can charge the phone while you have something plugged into the lightning port, like maybe headphones, which is a very, very common need.
Marco:
Now that I see how Qi charging actually works, and I'm sorry, Android people.
Marco:
This is like the Opera did it first, people.
Marco:
The Android people are just screaming right now, like, we know!
Marco:
We've had this forever!
Marco:
You guys are living in the past, whatever.
Marco:
I know how frustrating this must be for you, Android people.
Marco:
I'm sorry.
Marco:
But this is new to us.
Marco:
So whatever you were talking about six years ago when you and Opera did it together, we are now enjoying this now.
Marco:
So let us have this moment.
Marco:
But it's so clear to me now that the iPhone 7 should never have been the phone to remove the headphone jack.
Marco:
The X and the 8s should have been.
Marco:
Because... Oh, that's interesting.
Marco:
Once you have wireless charging abilities...
Marco:
One of the biggest annoyances about the removal of the headphone jack is you can't charge the phone at the same time you have headphones plugged in.
Marco:
There are other annoyances, like having that dongle for other headphones, but the fact is most people use the earbuds that come with it, or they use Bluetooth headphones, honestly.
Marco:
So it's less intrusive as long as you can use that lightning port.
Marco:
But so many people listen to their phone all day at work because their work computer doesn't have any... They can't install apps on it or something, so they use their phone to play Spotify or whatever.
Marco:
It's so common for people to want to listen and charge all day long.
Marco:
And with the iPhone 7, they couldn't do that without buying some kind of expensive dongle or adapter or series of adapters and dongles, and it was horrible.
Marco:
Whereas...
Marco:
I think it's a much more defensible position to remove the headphone jack when introducing Qi charging.
Marco:
Because you can just get a $15 disc and put it on your desk and that problem goes away.
Marco:
So, a little side note there.
Marco:
But, overall, this is really great.
Marco:
And the charging speed thing, that is indeed a problem.
Marco:
You know, it is...
Marco:
It's noticeably slower than an iPad brick through a wire or a USB-C power brick through a wire.
Marco:
But when you can afford and when you can practically and when it's low friction enough to put these little charging pads all over the place...
Marco:
The charging speed becomes less important because the battery is probably more charged most of the time.
Marco:
You don't have to go from 15% to 80% in a half hour because you're probably not dropping the battery down that low most of the time.
Marco:
And for the very few occasions that you actually need very fast charging, you can plug it in somewhere for that.
Marco:
You can cable it for that.
Marco:
The other benefits of this is that all these times every single night and throughout the day that I'm not plugging in a lightning cable over and over again, plugging it in, unplugging it, putting it in and out of a dock, I'm saving tons of wear and tear on the lightning connector and on the outside edge of the bottom of the phone.
Marco:
My iPhone 7, I had to get my iPhone 7 replaced after about six months because the lightning connector broke.
Marco:
Through regular use, it just started frying cables and then eventually just wouldn't charge because it had probably some kind of damaged pins or something in there.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
And from what I learned at the time, that was not that uncommon of a problem to have.
Marco:
And so with this, I'm turning the lightning port from something that I plugged something into two to eight times a day probably on average into something that on some days I'll never use at all.
Marco:
And so that's probably going to be great for long-term reliability of the port and of the phone.
Marco:
So to me, this is pretty much all wins.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
What do you guys think?
John:
So what room do you think there is for Apple's air power, Matt, to come into this market and give you something that you feel like you're not getting?
John:
Like what like is there a place for Apple innovation here or is like no matter what Apple comes out with, you're just going to keep surveying the field of cheap Android focus chargers and just buy like 50 of them and spread them around your house?
Marco:
I feel like if you have the full Apple combo of AirPods, Apple Watch, and phone, that becomes more compelling for the AirPower mat because right now, the AirPods and the watch are not Qi compatible.
Marco:
You can't just put them on a Qi disc and have them charged.
Marco:
They seem to be their own little thing that only the AirPower mat will support.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
If you have all the current Apple stuff, you get the new AirPods or the new case for your old AirPods, you get the Apple Watch Series 3, so it has whatever this thing is in it, and you have the iPhone 8 or 10, then you can go buy the AirPower mat whenever it comes out.
Marco:
Honestly, I'm kind of wondering where it is.
Marco:
It seems kind of weird for them not to release it when they release their Qi charging phones, but oh well.
Marco:
um that i can see being popular for the people who are all in on new apple gear and want to charge it all at once if it isn't too big or heavy that could also be really nice to bring when you're traveling if you if you travel with all those apple products that could be nice to then not have to travel with as many chargers or cables um but ultimately i have a feeling it's going to be very expensive and
Marco:
Who knows where it is?
Marco:
It isn't out yet.
Marco:
And, you know, I think it's going to be a totally good product, probably.
Marco:
It's very likely to be a good product.
Marco:
But I think it's going to be unlikely to be very compelling unless you are one of those Apple superpower users with all the new hardware.
Marco:
You know, see also HomePod, by the way.
Marco:
Like, I think HomePod's going to have the exact same problem.
Marco:
And where is that?
Marco:
Another good question.
John:
So you've got all that hardware, but I'm thinking that you're not going to get it because you want your phone to charge while you're wirelessly debugging it while FaceTime can see you.
John:
And the air power mat makes everything lay flat on the table.
John:
So even though you have...
John:
you know you could get that you have airpods and you could get the new case for it for 60 whatever bucks if you wanted and you have an apple watch even though you hardly ever wear it uh and you have a phone but i don't think you want all three of those things on the same mat even on your nightstand i would imagine that you don't have your airpods your watch and your phone all charging on your nightstand because that's getting pretty crowded right
Marco:
yeah my stand isn't big enough for all those things um and you know for me like my personal use here is weird i don't use the airpods tiff uses the airpods i had to give her mine because they don't they make my ears hurt that's right you got the weird ears i know i really i wish i could wear them because they're so good but i can't um so i i don't have airpods that's one thing out and then the apple watch i do wear it frequently just not
Marco:
for long durations i wear it almost every day for dog walks and for most for much of the morning um but then i take it off when i when i like you know shower and get dressed for the day after like dog walk and school drop off and everything else anyway so the apple watch lives on my desk not upstairs but this is this is like this is i i get this is the very unusual setup that i have here i think most people who own the apple watch probably wear it every day or most days um so they might have different needs than me um but
Marco:
I'm guessing the AirPower mat is probably going to cost like $100 to $200.
John:
Oh, I hope not.
John:
Although on a recent episode, I think it was Cortex, Mike and Gray brought up the problem of if you have like one of those bands that doesn't let your watch lay flat, like a link bracelet or something, then I guess you also can't use the AirPower mat because you can't get your watch, the charging part of your watch on the bottom to contact with the pad.
John:
Yep.
John:
and that you know what what mostly what i'm getting at with the air power mat which seems like a good solution for like you know the fat part of the curve of like hey you're all in like you said you buy you got a lot of apple stuff and this will charge it all at once and isn't that convenient um but i don't envision apple selling 17 different charging mats like they've just got the one that they announced and maybe there'll be a little bit of variety on the line
John:
But nothing will ever compare to the ecosystem of Qi charging stuff that's out there.
John:
And this is the type of thing, charging devices...
John:
Even though there is a fat part of the curve where most people charge things like this, there are long tails on both sides of all sorts of different scenarios.
John:
Developers who want the thing upright.
John:
What I'm thinking of is like, for me, families with lots of devices.
John:
We've had lots of problems figuring out where to charge all our devices.
John:
And as our kids got older and have more and more devices that they actually care about, we have a problem of where you charge all these things.
John:
And the current solution we're using...
John:
it was really the only one that physically fits in the space we have allotted for it.
John:
We have like a sideboard table and we have, let's see, we all have iPads and we all have something that's phone shaped.
John:
And some of us have watches, right?
John:
There is no room for,
John:
for all those things to be laying on pads the pad would have to be like three feet by five feet to fit all those ios devices and the crazy jigsaw puzzle on it right so even if apple made like a family pad where you can put all your stuff good luck finding a place to put four ipads four iphones and two watches down on a pad like are you going to dedicate an entire piece of furniture to this it's just not efficient so we have one of those things that like lets you uh
John:
put them like books in a shelf, like vertically, you know, so they're all sort of like lined up with each other.
John:
And, you know, you plug in lightning cables in the back of them.
John:
So it's like this big, this big, it's not even that big.
John:
It's like nine inch by nine inch square with slots.
John:
And you just put the iPads or the phones in the slots and you connect the lightning cables from the side.
John:
And we can actually fit like three iPads and four phones and no watches, unfortunately, because it doesn't do watches into a fairly small amount of space.
John:
So these extremes, like I always want to have my phone upright and facing me so I can take it on and off when I'm doing iOS development, or I have a family of, you know, many people with many devices and I need a place where they can charge all of them every day and not, you know, cover the surface of some desk with either a giant pad or a rat mask of wires or both.
John:
Apple's never going to address those needs.
John:
They're going to make one or two pads, just like they make one or two docks.
John:
And that'll be that.
John:
So despite whatever advantages Apple may have are, you know, the Apple pad charges faster, the Apple pad can charge your watch, the Apple pad is less finicky about finding all your devices.
John:
It's never going to be the go-to recommendation, I think, because the first question will be, how many devices do you want to charge, and where do you want them to charge, and what orientation do you want them to charge?
John:
And pads, in general, will never be the solution to lots of devices if they require any device that charges on them to lay flat.
John:
I mean, imagine if you had a family of four people all with 12.9-inch iPads.
John:
Like, now you're getting into, like, a coffee table, just...
John:
it's inefficient you want them the apple surface yeah god you but you you want them to be vertical and for vertical stuff you need you know something like the uh i always forgot the name of that the other company started by the guy who did on live steve perlman or whatever the wireless power delivery for that wi-fi beam forming no uh artemis yeah artemis p cell yeah something like that where you could actually have them filed like books in a shelf and have them all wirelessly charged but we're not there yet so
John:
Anyway, I'm, I'm intrigued by what you described, Marco, like the, you know, the, the sort of, I would describe it as crossing a threshold where like, yeah, it's only slightly less annoying to plug in, but you cross over some threshold and it like, you're freed up like from, it just feels so different.
John:
You never want to like line up a little thing with the hole in it again.
John:
Um, and so I'm, I'm actually kind of interested in that and I'm assuming my next phone will have wireless charging and I'll think about, you know, what, do I want a pad for my nightstand?
John:
Do I want a little upright thing for my desk?
Um,
John:
Go on both because they're only $20 each.
Marco:
Get both.
Marco:
I feel like that's the power of this ecosystem is that because there are so many options and most of them cost pretty little, you can just get a lot of them.
Marco:
And they're probably going to last a while because you're not having some connector that's getting plugged and unplugged all the time.
Marco:
So the wear and tear on these is probably going to be fairly minimal.
Marco:
I'm guessing this is going to last multiple phones, and maybe down the road it won't be the fastest charging method.
Marco:
I mean, it isn't today even.
Marco:
So maybe down the road they'll develop higher wattage ones, and maybe you'll want those in certain places.
Marco:
But I bet having these around everywhere is still going to be useful.
Casey:
So I have a question for you, Marco.
Casey:
I know you've only tried a couple of these so far, but I'm looking at Ikea, and they have something that's spelled R-A-U-M-L-E-N, and it's an integrated wireless charger, comma, black.
Casey:
That's $12.
Casey:
And it looks to me—
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
It looks to me to be quite a bit taller than the... What was the good one that you said?
Casey:
The Mophie one.
Casey:
Okay, thank you.
Casey:
It looks to me to be quite a bit taller than the Mophie, but the Mophie is listed on Apple's website as $60, and this is $12.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Having never held the IKEA one from the best that you can, do you feel like the Mophie one is five times better than this is?
Marco:
Probably not.
Marco:
I mean, you're paying the Mophie tax.
Marco:
You're also paying the Apple certification tax.
Marco:
You're paying a lot of taxes on that for what it is.
Marco:
But this RavPower one, I think, was like $20, something like that, somewhere around $20.
Marco:
And it's totally fine, too.
Marco:
It seems to charge at the same speed for now.
Marco:
I mean, I don't think it's going to get the 7.5-watt upgrade, but I don't honestly really care that much because I don't need that much charging speed on my desk right at this moment.
Marco:
But, you know, I feel like this is the kind of thing where, like, first of all, because everything is so inexpensive, you can afford to try a few of them and see what works best for you.
Marco:
But, you know, ultimately...
Marco:
If you buy one and it's just kind of okay and you want to later down the road get a nicer one, you're totally fine.
Marco:
That's totally reasonable.
Marco:
Just move the one that you're not using anymore in one place.
Marco:
Move it somewhere else in the house and you'll figure out a way to use it.
Marco:
These things, I have a feeling, are going to be as useful and long-lasting as cables are.
Marco:
No one says, no, you shouldn't buy another lightning cable.
Marco:
You'll never use it.
Marco:
Sure, sure.
Marco:
Maybe if you buy so many cheat charges, you might not use it.
Casey:
I know what you mean.
Marco:
I know what you mean.
Marco:
But now, it's so useful that now I'm thinking, do I want to replace my little power bank battery?
Marco:
with one that includes a chi pad some of them do like some of them can some some of the batteries have chi charging pads on them so you could place your phone on the battery and not even use a cable to charge it like stuff like that like i'm now looking at looking at other things that like i just want like can i put one in my car can my can my car dock i have some kind of like you know little suction cup mount in the car so i can use ways which at some point we're going to talk about but
Marco:
i had one of those and it's like can i get one of those that uses cheese so i don't have to plug the cable into that over and over again like it's the kind of thing once you get one of these things you see how awesome it is you're like all right where else can i take advantage of this like can i put one on the couch end table can i put one on my nightstand can i put one on my spouse's side of the nightstand can i put one in the kitchen like you you kind of want them all over the place because it's so nice and
Marco:
And then you're walking around with a pretty much always fully charged phone so that when you do need to leave the house or go somewhere or do something crazy, you can do that and your phone's not going to totally burn through like the last 20% of battery it has because you haven't been charging it all day.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So a couple of notes about this IKEA one.
Casey:
First of all, this apparently tops out at 5 watts.
Casey:
Second of all, it may or may not include the wall brick and associated paraphernalia that you need to plug into the charger itself, whereas the Mophie one apparently does come with all that.
Casey:
Also, the Mophie one, as far as I can tell, Marco, does not have any illuminated lights or LEDs or anything when it's charging.
Casey:
Is that correct?
Marco:
No, it has a very small white LED in the base.
Marco:
It isn't like a ring-shaped one.
Marco:
The RavPower has a small ring around it that glows softly white when you first put the phone on.
Marco:
It does not stay lit.
Marco:
It just goes on for a minute when you first put it on.
Marco:
The Mophie pad, it has a single white LED...
Marco:
Shining from one dot on one side, I think, just one side.
Marco:
And I don't think that stays lit either.
Marco:
Either way, if you're charging an iPhone, you don't need any kind of lighting.
Marco:
And I'm very tempted to just cover these up or tape or paint over them or something because the iPhone, when you put it on the charger, it...
Marco:
The screen turns on for a minute and it goes blink.
Marco:
It makes the plugged in sound.
Marco:
And so it's very obvious without any kind of indication from the charger itself.
Marco:
The iPhone makes it obvious whether you are on it or not, which is one of the reasons why I have not yet had any issues with misalignment or misplacing it because it makes it very clear.
Casey:
Yeah, and I brought this up because a friend of the show, Jelly, in the chat room had said that he has the IKEA one, and it works fine, but it has a pretty bright white light while charging.
Casey:
And I think it was the Belkin one had a very bright blue light while charging, if I'm not mistaken.
Marco:
Yeah, there was an – the Anker makes one that has like this ring of blue LEDs around it.
Marco:
I don't know why.
Marco:
Yeah, it's the kind of thing like, unfortunately, with a lot of cheap commodity hardware, taste does not come frequently to these products.
Marco:
It's very hard to find nice ones.
Marco:
I'm sure now that the iPhone supports this and now that a lot more high-end buyers are looking for these things...
Marco:
there's going to be a lot more coming out like there's one this portland company called grove made um has has one that's coming soon that i've pre-ordered that is like a fancy like metal and cork one for like i think 80 bucks um i was gonna say your days of 20 dollar chi chargers are coming to an end as the artisanal handcrafted ones start appearing
Marco:
well yeah but it's like you start buying them like the one on my desk that can be the you know the the one that says fast charge and big letters and has an led in it but like the one i put in the living room on the couch end table that's probably gonna have to be something nicer your whole end table should be the t charger just like every car like the little like center center console things they all have two chargers yeah now where you just chuck the phone into this little bin and they all charge yeah no that's that i want that
Marco:
No, and it's funny.
Marco:
So Ikea actually sells, one of the Ikea things is just like a charger that's almost shaped like a cup holder insert.
Marco:
And the idea is you take a hole saw of like exactly that size and you can drill a hole into a desk or table or any desk or table you already have and just drop this in there.
Marco:
And then that becomes a cheat charger, which is kind of clever.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And actually, I'm glad you brought that up, John, because a friend of mine who has recently acquired an M2 has pointed out to me that between wireless CarPlay and the fact that the M2 actually does have Qi charging in it, he has like the perfect setup for his car.
Casey:
And I was curious, Marco, if you've looked at Tiff's car to see if she also has a charging pad within her car.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
i'm pretty sure that was available as an option and we didn't select it because lol iphones don't support wireless charging i will never need this yeah i'm just seeing a video review of a car maybe you saw it too casey of someone complaining that the little cubby where you chuck your phone it's like hard to get your phone in and out of there like they seem to do everything right hey you got wireless carplay you got a t-charging that when you get into your car
John:
wasn't that uh the verges uh iphone 10 review with neilay anyway anyway the point is that like leave it to car makers to find a way to screw it up right like oh finally the dream you just get into your car and chuck your phone into like that's what people do with their phones now anyway for the most part is either they clip them in a little clippy thing so they can see the navigation or they chuck it somewhere so they can be dangerous and see their text messages when they appear or stuff like that right um or plug it into a charger like my wife has a
John:
like a wire coming out of the little center console you know a lightning thing so you can plug it in and you know charge while you drive your phone wouldn't it be great if you didn't have to plug that in but then car makers make the cubby in a weird place or awkward to get to or fiddly to get your phone in and out of or to place in it so that it actually stays on the pad and isn't like up on an angle and not actually contacting the pad but you know give them a few decades they'll figure it out
Marco:
Oh, and one more thing to be careful of when you're looking at Qi chargers, some of them have fans.
Marco:
And this, depending on your point of view on fans, one of, so, and I'm not entirely clear yet from like Amazon reviews.
Marco:
So there's, you know, these things support like the regular five watt
Marco:
charging rate and then the reason why some of them yell fast charge on them is because they support like a higher wattage thing for certain android phones that that have these varying fast charge standards um as far as i know the iphone does not support those fast charge standards but maybe in the future who knows anyway so i i'm not clear whether the fans usually only kick on during fast charging or whether they are on all the time or what like i don't know like if you put an iphone on there will it engage the fan i don't know
Marco:
Some people light the fans because it keeps their phone cooler because when you fast charge lithium-ion batteries, they get hotter.
Marco:
So that's actually a thing that could be necessary.
Marco:
I don't think an iPhone is going to draw enough power for you to need that, especially if you're doing all-day trickle charging at 5 watts.
Marco:
So I have elected to buy zero models with fans, and I intend to never buy one with a fan because that sounds like a terrible idea to have...
Marco:
this already very inexpensive and tastelessly designed object.
Marco:
Let's throw a cheap fan in there and see how well that works out.
Marco:
No thanks.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Real-time follow-up, it was an M550i in the Verge's iPhone X review.
Casey:
Additional real-time follow-up from our conversation before, Jonathan Bolling has clarified, it was an honest question, but I was betting something pretty funny might happen in the answers.
Casey:
So, John, I am vindicated.
John:
I am vindicated, sir.
John:
If it's an honest question, but he's betting something funny would happen, doesn't that mean it's not an honest question?
John:
Oh, come on.
John:
Like that he knew the background, that it wasn't just like, oh.
John:
Come on.
John:
Don't even try to defend yourself.
John:
Don't even think about it.
John:
I just have an honest question.
John:
Can you tell me how you might explain to someone how to pronounce bezel?
John:
It's just an honest question.
John:
No connection to anything.
John:
I just want to know.
John:
It's a totally honest question.
Casey:
I will not allow this.
John:
But I have a feeling the answer might be kind of funny.
Casey:
No, I will not allow this.
Casey:
You are reading way too much into this, and it is entirely and utterly unfair.
John:
I thought they revealed too much by saying he had an idea the answer might be funny.
John:
He should have just stopped and said it was an honest question, because we have no way to verify what he's telling the truth.
John:
He went too far.
John:
oh come now you are being absolutely preposterous i cannot believe i cannot believe you're hanging your hat on this i really truly back to the back to the car on the verge review by the way the reason i remembered it is not you're right not x5 it was because it was i remember when they showed the badge and i said oh casey's gonna be angry about this because it's the m550i like what the hell is the m550i is it an m550i oh it's just the m sport package and they named the thing and that's why i had remembered it
John:
Because that's BS.
John:
At least we can all agree on that.
Casey:
I cannot believe you're hanging your head on this, John.
Casey:
I haven't had anything.
Casey:
I'm just explaining.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week.
Marco:
Betterment, Fracture, and Jamf Now.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Casey:
Because it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
Casey:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because 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.
Marco:
At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss.
Marco:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.
Marco:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
They did it in me.
Casey:
Are we still friends?
Marco:
No, we're still friends.
Marco:
I just hate John a little bit.
John:
You know, when I say I don't like a question, it's not an invitation to discuss it on the show.
John:
It's an invitation to not discuss it on the show.
Casey:
Hey, I tried to not discuss it on the show, but you didn't give me a satisfactory answer.
Casey:
You did give me a satisfactory answer, so then I needed to discuss another show.
John:
I explained, and you just didn't like the explanation.
Casey:
Many reasons.
Casey:
It's not a f***ing explanation.
John:
Oh, you mean I explained it?
John:
I told you.
John:
I was on my iPad.
John:
I didn't want to type.
Casey:
Well, now I know that.
Casey:
Now I know that.
Casey:
I didn't know that at the time.
John:
I was catching up on Twitter watching Destiny videos.
John:
This is important pre-show work.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
That's more important than talking to your good friend Casey.
John:
Oh, God.
John:
I knew I was going to talk to you on Skype in like 15 minutes.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
That's all right.
Casey:
If it makes you feel better.
John:
Plus, I was busy talking to Merlin, a.k.a.
John:
Mr. Close to the Metal, about other things.
Casey:
God.
Casey:
If it makes you feel better, I was fully prepared.
Casey:
And I was manning my battle stations to take Marco to task about his laptop article earlier today.
Casey:
It's still in there.
John:
It's not going anywhere.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
We just never got around to it.
Casey:
So really, that was frustration with Marco that somehow ended up on your lap.
Casey:
So my bad.
John:
You're welcome.
John:
Your time will come, Marco.
Casey:
Your time will come indeed.
Casey:
I do still love both of you, even though, John, you're killing me today.
John:
How am I killing you?
John:
You're the one who's busting my chops about the question of the metal thing.
John:
You're like, you don't like this question?
John:
Explain yourself.
John:
Why don't you like this question?
John:
Oh, you're ridiculous.
John:
like you just let it be i don't like the question you like the question you can leave it in but like i said i i don't i the reason i didn't delete the question is because like i just pushed it down because i felt like i had three more better one you know the three that that is fair all kidding aside that's fair that's fair so and like i'm like you know if we didn't if we needed this question for next week or you want to answer it you had an angle because it's very difficult to know what you know angle you might have on an answer like often i put things in there because i have a specific kind of answer about it even though this question looks you know particularly simple anyway
Casey:
No, no, no, that's fair.
Casey:
You did not delete it.
John:
Three questions.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
All right, what else we got going on?
John:
You can delete it now, though.
Casey:
Good God.
Casey:
Well, it's going to make it in the show, so of course I can delete it.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I feel like Marco should edit that out as too much inside baseball.
John:
Oh, come on.
John:
It was so funny.
John:
It was so funny.
John:
It's staying in.
Casey:
Oh, it's got to stay in.
Casey:
It's got to stay in.
Marco:
The problem is you guys made it too good.
Marco:
I was going to cut it out, and then you made it good.
Marco:
You're welcome.
John:
But it's going to be like nonsense.
John:
It's a lot of nonsense, a lot of inside baseball that people don't care about.
John:
Isn't that our whole show?
John:
No, not the whole show.
John:
It's the podcast equivalent of talking about Skype.
John:
Oh, we did that too.
John:
We already crossed that off the list.
John:
But he's going to cut out the Skype parts.
Marco:
Oh yeah, there's no way the Skype part's doing it.
Casey:
That's illegal.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
That is illegal.