Outlets That Suck
Still haven't bothered picking up a watch.
And at this point, I'm like, I don't know if I should even bother.
Why?
Are we too close to the next one?
No, I just I feel like I've missed like all the excitement at this point.
Obviously, he doesn't need it if he's getting by without it so long.
Yeah, exactly.
So two things.
Number one, it really is the big deal.
And if you care this much, you probably should buy it.
But number two, if the only reason you wanted to buy it was to participate in the wave of like newness, then you shouldn't.
I didn't think so.
But now I'm wondering.
Now I'm wondering if maybe that was it.
That's a very bad reason to buy it because that's very short-lived.
But if you wear the Apple Watch every day and you really are into the Apple Watch, you should buy it.
Yeah, and that's what it boils down to is I think both of those... I don't know if I'm really into the Apple Watch.
What does really even mean in this context?
But I take your point and I think that...
In spirit, what you mean is spot on.
And I probably should go find one.
I haven't looked at iStock now in a while, and I haven't just ordered online because... No, literally, just like walk into a store in the morning.
Now that you don't have a job, you can do this.
Your local store will probably... Excuse me, I'm doing my job right now.
It probably opens at like 10 in the morning.
Just go there at 10 in the morning one day and say, hey, do you have any?
And they'll say yes or no.
And if they say no, say, hey, what time do they usually come in?
And they'll tell you like 1 p.m.
And then so next time, show up at 1 p.m.
and say, hey, do you have any?
Right.
I bet if you actually do that, I bet you can get one within two days.
You're probably right.
I have been making a habit of looking at iStock now like a fool.
Although, oh, actually, we'll turn this into follow-up now.
I went to my friend's house.
We didn't talk about this on the show, did we?
Because I think it was after we recorded.
The husband has a 44.
The wife has a 40.
I think I got to go 40.
I think I do.
The 40 lifestyle is awesome.
I really enjoy the 40.
It's a really good size.
It really...
is much better proportioned for me you know so i'm curious your reason you know but my reason stands that like i care about how a watch looks on my wrist i care about the proportions of it and i get a lot of value out of a small watch being sufficient on me because that's graceful that's pleasing it's lighter it's smaller like it's that actually is more valuable to me like the smaller i can go and have it still look reasonable on me
And so I'm curious your reasoning because you're more into it than me as a computing platform.
So why do you say 40?
Just from looks, I think that the 42 looked on the upper edge of okay on my wrist.
As I look down at my wrist now, I think I'm right on the ragged edge of it being okay.
And even though the 44 is only two millimeters and maybe it's all in my head, who knows?
But at the end of the day, even if it's in my head, it's not like let's suppose it is.
I still got to look at my own darn wrist every day, you know, and it's if I look at it and go, oh, then that's not a good thing.
And so even though I really don't want to get rid of my bands, which is funny because I only have like three or four, only one of one or two of which are actually decent.
It makes me kind of, not sick, but it bums me out to, you know, not being able to use the stuff I already have on what appears to be the same device.
Like, I totally understand it.
I'm not saying Apple did anything wrong here.
But that being said, you know, when I tried on, this is my friend Steve and Kristen, when I tried on Steve's watch, it didn't look...
It wasn't out of bounds unacceptable, if that means anything, if that makes sense.
It's just it didn't quite look right on my wrist.
And I thought it looked fine on his wrist.
His wrists are bigger than mine.
And so I think that makes sense.
But on my wrist, I just didn't think it looked quite right.
And I thought that the 40 did look a hint smaller than I would have liked.
But all told, I think it looked better than the 44.
And I think part of this is just some, I don't know, maybe latent or subconscious angst about me not having the risks for like a Panerai.
Because one of the first times I looked at a watch and thought...
damn, that's a good looking watch, was a friend of mine who was a watch nerd, not Marco, surprisingly, because this was years ago.
And he had a Panerai, I forget the model, but it's one of the ones with like the weird clasp on the right hand side around the crown, which a lot of people hate.
And I think you're in that camp, Marco, but I love, I just think it looks really cool.
I prefer the ones without it, but yeah.
It's a cool look overall.
All of their stuff looks pretty much the same, and it's all a pretty cool look.
Although, to be fair, the Panerai look is a statement of bigness.
They are big intentionally.
That is the look.
That is the style they're going for.
I'm glad you said that.
That is a perfect way to describe it.
And I always thought that, yeah, they're huge and were just comical on my wrist.
Like, I tried my friends on once and it was hilariously oversized.
But I always thought to myself, like...
And this was even years ago when I was just wearing either no watch or like a crummy Timex wristwatch, you know, that was like 25 bucks at Target, which I loved.
And it's actually a very good looking Timex.
You're probably thinking of the exact one I'm thinking of, both Marco and listeners.
But anyways, I always thought to myself, you know, if I ever fall upon just an absurd amount of money, I'm going to get myself a Panerai and just not care about the fact that it looks ridiculously stupid.
Yeah.
And and so I wish I just I wish I had bigger wrists.
Maybe I just got to take the Dr. Nick approach.
That's reference, John, and get myself a little bit bigger so I can sport one of these watches.
But realistically, I think it's just the 40 looks better than the 44.
And there is something to be said for being able to share watch bands with Aaron, which I can't imagine that would happen often, but it would be kind of nice to be able to share them occasionally.
So I think whenever it is I get around to pulling the trigger on a watch, I think I'm going to do a 40.
And part of the reason I want to do it in the store is because I'm pretty sure I just want to trade in or whatever the term is in this context, get rid of my 44 that I'm wearing now.
And get a credit against the 40 that I would be buying.
You can do that in store?
I thought that was the case.
And what I had read after having looked only briefly into this was that it's actually much better to do it in store because I guess they do some amount of the assessment in store.
Whereas if you send it in, whatever third party vendor is handling that.
My understanding is they're way more aggressive about taking credit away.
So let's say for the sake of discussion, I think my current watch is worth like $225.
And let's just say that's true even if it isn't.
My understanding is if you go in store, you're likely to get $200, $225 for it, whatever the case may be.
But if you send it in, you're getting like $150 at the best.
You know what I mean?
Because they just, oh, well, this has a tiny hairline scratch you can only see under a microscope that we have at our little facility.
Right.
Or whatever the case may be.
So I want to do it in store.
And that's why I haven't just ordered it.
And so one of these days, I just need to walk in, like you said, and just give it a shot.
Well, for whatever it's worth on that topic, since this year, I learned of...
of this system of trading things in i'd sent in a bunch of stuff um over the last couple of weeks i have sent in two iphone 6s uh an 8 plus my iphone 10 which is still processing because it took a while to get there um and my series 3 apple watch all of them so far i don't know about 10 yet but all the other ones have given me the exact quoted price online
oh really okay yeah and so is this apple give back is that what i'm thinking of is that the term for yes and it's it's it's run by i think it's run by two different companies bright star or phobio all the all the other ones except for the 10 went to bright star the 10 went to phobio and it's like it went fedex and the other ones others went ups like i don't know i don't know if this is actually two different companies or just two different like receiving centers for different age devices uh but so far it's been totally fine i've gotten the full value of everything i sent in
And I know I can get more if I go to eBay or something, but I don't want to deal with that.
That's the reason why I try to sell things on Twitter so often, because dealing with eBay is tricky and very risky.
Even as a seller, it's very risky.
There's a lot of scam buyers out there.
It is worth it to me to give up some of the value for an easy sale, and that's what these things have given me.
And so, yeah, for whatever it's worth, I've been totally fine with my experience with this company so far, but your mileage may vary.
Yeah, I hear you.
Also, we should tell everyone that we fired John from the show, so it's just us now.
John never gets rid of anything.
I'm looking at these ugly Panerai watches.
It occurs to me, I mean, this is something that I think about, and I'm sure some other people do, but do you guys ever worry about
wearing things that can either injure you or increase the increase the severity of injuries to you about the like the little the this ridiculous uh like guard thing they have over the uh yes it's called a crown guard whatever right so looking where that is depending on what wrist you wear it on like if you fall and catch yourself with your hand and your the palm of your hand goes to the ground and so it's like at a 90 degree angle with your forearm
That thing's going to, like, dig into and cut into the top of your hand.
Like, it just is.
It's a sharp piece of metal, and it's a big, chunky watch.
It doesn't stick out that far.
It's basically the same thing as, like, you know, wearing earrings.
Like, you're probably fine, but if you wear big, dangly earrings, they could get caught in something and yank through your earlobe, and in a situation where your earlobe would otherwise be fine, right?
So there are things that you can wear that can injure you or increase the severity of an injury that you'd be injured anyway, but wearing the thing increases the injury or makes it much more severe.
And these giant watches definitely look like they would increase the severity of an injury or possibly injure you in a case where you wouldn't have an injury in that area.
And they can also protect you, I suppose, if you block bullets with them like Wonder Woman.
No, it doesn't stick out that far.
No, this is a non-issue.
It does not stick out that far.
You're not going to injure yourself with your Panerai.
Even just a regular watch with nothing sticking out on it can increase the severity of your injury if it snags on something or presses against some part of your skin because it's just a foreign object attached to you.
I don't know.
Obviously, I don't even wear my wedding ring anymore.
I don't wear earrings.
I don't wear a watch.
Wait, did you wear earrings at some point?
No, I just said I don't.
I didn't use a tense that should lead you to believe that I did.
I do not have any additional holes in my ears.
I would love to see this if we can somehow arrange this.
I can get a clip-on earring.
I'll put it on for you right now.
I suppose that could increase the chance of injury as well.
Even just a simple earring because the post goes through.
If your ear gets pressed against your neck, the post can go into your neck.
I think if you're to that point where that's a risk, I think you have bigger problems.
That's why you can't wear earrings in gym class.
They don't want you to poke a hole in your neck.
Or get your earring ripped out.
Well, but the good news is if you fall into the water, the Panerai, isn't the history of Panerai that it was like a diving watch or something like that?
And so you would at least know what time it is as you're drowning.
So that's good.
The loom is so strong that as you go into the depths of drowning, you will see that time for quite a while as you go down.
Precisely.
And it's so big that it'll weigh you down.
So it'll hurry it all up for you.
It'll go down faster.
All right, we should probably get some started with some follow-up.
Greg Parker writes in that ARMv8.3 adds a new float-to-int instruction with errors and out-of-range values handled the way that JavaScript wants.
The previous instructions to get JavaScript semantics were much slower, so JavaScript's numbers are double by default, so it needs this conversion a lot.
So this is with regard to the dramatically increased or improved benchmarks on the new A12 processor, is that correct?
Yeah, it did really well in the JavaScript benchmark.
And this is just depressing.
It's worse, I think, than the quote-unquote string instructions in x86.
Because JavaScript, as we all know, is a dumb language.
No one making a language today would decide...
you know what semantics for like edge cases and booleans and type conversion and how numbers are stored like no one would choose this it's it's not good no one is like i love how javascript handles numbers it's so obvious and does what i want all the time it doesn't have any weird edge cases it's just the best no it's stupid but we're stuck with it it's like the way php named functions or orders arguments to things
Yeah, like, I mean, JavaScript is a victim of its own success.
It's everywhere now.
And they keep changing, you know, JavaScript.
But there's a lot of things like that that you can't, you would think, oh, why don't they just change it?
Why don't they change it so they're just native in storage behind the scenes and not have everything be doubles.
But that would change programs out.
They would break programs, right?
And the web.
They keep adding stuff to JavaScript and adding new features, but the fundamentals like that are changing slowly, put it that way.
I don't know if they've changed at all, but they're changing very slowly.
So, adding an instruction that lets you quickly convert from JavaScript's stupid everything is a double, even though you store it as the number one, it's like, I know, I'll store that as a double.
Please don't.
And the whole 53 bits of precision for integers, even though they're 64 bits long.
Anyway, there's lots of
stupid things about it uh but given that javascript does this and you have to follow these semantics having a cpu instruction that does this conversion and handles it the way javascript wants you to handle it in terms of what if i converted and it's too big or too small underflow and overflow and all this stuff makes a javascript benchmark faster because the javascript benchmark maybe you know a couple of them are doing lots of stuff with numerics where otherwise they'd be spending so much of their time doing conversions from into float to float in and back and forth
uh if you can do that 10 times faster you get a higher score on the benchmark so that is that's gross and depressing and i don't want my cpus perverted by a stupid language but regular people just want web pages to be faster and this gets the job done so i suppose uh you know yet more explanation of why uh the a12 does so well on this javascript benchmark even if it's a depressing explanation
Do you know that Minecraft is really popular?
I did know that.
Although I did not know it was on the Apple TV.
There was a story about it.
And I think it was even an Apple presentation at some point.
Anyway, Minecraft was a wildly popular game.
It's been popular for years and years.
And the straightforward hot take on this is, as everyone has said who's responding to these tweets about this, is that if you have a gaming platform...
where minecraft feels like there aren't enough users where you can't support minecraft you have a crap gaming platform because it's not like this is some obscure game if minecraft can't get enough people to play it to justify porting it like it's incredibly popular and the people who play it don't demand super high performance or need to have a mouse and keyboard or uh it's not a platform exclusive like
Apple TV, but they say, you know what?
It's not even worth it.
It's not even worth it to like the most popular game in the world, like before Fortnite, probably one of the most popular games in the world, one of the most popular games ever made.
It's not worth their time to be.
And this is after a fairly high profile, even though none of you remember it.
uh coming out saying and minecraft will be on apple tv yay see it's a good gaming platform and notice by the way that they're not pulling off of like ios like i think they still have a phone version and an ipad version it's apple tv in particular that they can't be bothered with because not enough people play minecraft on apple tv and this uh that's depressing we've talked about apple tv and uh and games in general and apple um and
You know, I think Apple probably should care about this because it's a big external validation of the idea that Apple TV is not a good gaming platform.
Like, not that you need much validation.
It's more like a...
dumping ground for people who have an ios game and think yeah you'll probably make an apple tv or maybe it'll be okay but nobody is uh getting an apple tv to play games on it it's just not really a thing um i'm sure people who have apple tvs might enjoy the fact that they can play games on it that's different than having a gaming platform as i think we've discussed in the past if you really want to break into the gaming business you can do what apple did and
And fall ass backwards into it and say, oh, wow, games, they make a lot of money.
Or you can set out to have a gaming platform, which is what Microsoft did.
And that involves a lot of giving people a lot of money and losing money over a long period of time and courting game developers and
generally doing what apple is doing with television now which is like find talent get them to make things for your platform market it and it remains to be seen if apple will be successful but that's what it takes because gaming is an entertainment industry and you can't just say we have a platform now come make great things for it because that's not
how the creative and gaming industry works because all the other players are out there courting developers and trying to get the best content and getting platform exclusives and paying for marketing and paying for people to bring ports to things you know like it's it's difficult to build critical mass so apple is back to its normal position which is
People just seem to love to make games for our phone platform because we have a bunch of users who are willing to spend money on software and you can build your casino, human nature, exploiting free to play, you know, casinos for children.
And we make tons of money off that and we somehow we manage to sleep at night.
Uh, but it doesn't really require us to do anything other than sell lots of iPhones every year, which is itself a difficult task, but still it's not.
The iPhone is not a gaming platform first and, uh, everything else second, despite games being by far the best seller in the app store.
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Screen time is here, and I have barely looked at it, but I presume one of you has a little more thoughts on this than I do.
I put this in here back when screen time was actually here, back with iOS 12 introduction.
It's been sitting there and we've had other things to talk about, whatever.
I put it in for a couple of reasons.
One, I figure it's a good time for us to check in with our own screen time to see if there's any surprises.
You know, I'm assuming we all have it turned on and occasionally we look at it.
So what do we think about the information we found out there?
But the second reason is because I also...
turned it on for my kids and i wanted to talk about that oh this sounds fun but let's do let's do us first i thought i was using screen time but until last night when i was trying to figure out why my settings has the one indicator on it uh i didn't actually have it turned on so i just turned it on last night so i don't really have useful data yet
Most use for me, the Plex beta, because that's how I've been watching a couple of things here and there, like before I go to sleep.
Tweetbot, messages, Instagram, Safari, Facebook, surprisingly.
Wow, I didn't really think I looked at Facebook that much, huh?
And mail.
90 pickups a day, 1,005 notifications.
This is last seven days, 500, maybe more or more than 500.
I don't know.
It just says 500 messages, notifications.
That's my most.
182 mail notifications which have been on my to-do list to turn that crank that down even more than i already have uh my garage door opener getting pissed off about everything like hey the light turned on the light turned off the garage is open the garage is closed i gotta turn that down uh instagram our baby she pooped she peed she ate etc thing espn and slack so no surprises for you except for facebook which you didn't think you were using that much but showed up in the top five or whatever
one two three four five the top six but yes that is an accurate description uh time per day it's hard for me to tell i don't i don't know well tuesday apparently was six hours which seems pretty aggressive but um i don't know yeah i the only thing i'd say i can definitely glean from this is that i spend a lot of time on twitter and messages which i knew a fair bit of time on instagram and safari which i knew more than i thought on facebook and i get a lot of text messages
What's interesting to me is that even though I have a very small number of values here, but it's breaking down individual websites in Safari.
And they look like apps.
Yeah, if they get up to, like it'll do, if a particular website...
you're on for a significant period of time it ranks that website right alongside everything else it still shows you your safari total though which is handy for the kids stuff to find out which websites there so i can't say other than the i mean facebook was what 58 minutes in the last seven days which is not egregious but more than i thought to be fair but anyways other than that i wouldn't say there was that much that was really too terribly interesting
Uh, well, I've been watching, uh, I use my iPad a lot and I've been watching TV shows on it.
So like Hulu is by far my number one, but they're just like binged an entire season or something.
And Netflix says like in third place and Twitter, Twitter is usually, is the top non I'm watching video app.
YouTube surprisingly is.
I guess not that much one hour over the past seven days of YouTube.
But it's video, you know, so I do watch.
I'm not I don't know how to split stuff by device, but this is all devices.
And I can tell you that all the videos on my on my iPad.
Other than me watching TV shows on my stuff, I think I'm using my devices less than you.
My average pickups per day is 17.
oh my god you basically never touch your phone you gotta get out of the whole pouch and everything it's a big it's a big ordeal that's true this is the phone and the ipad remember it's not just the phone what do you do all you really do love the mac don't you uh and then my notifications per day is 29 and almost all those are from nest again security camera stuff and
noticing the light moving across the room or oh god it's the does do the nest engineers who design these like you know sensing notification movement kind of things do they not ever test it in a room that has a window most of the time i get it is not the sun by itself but like a branch with leaves on it swaying in the wind in front of the sun making it like flicker and move but but i think most of these notifications are uh your nest cam thinks it hears a dog barking and it's right it does my dog is barking sorry neighbors
Um, second place is messages, uh, but it's a very low number.
Uh, and then in third place is my dog's GPS thing for notifications.
Um, so yeah, uh, what this is telling me is that basically I'm watching a lot of video and Netflix, Hulu and YouTube and TiVo even one hour on TiVo.
I think I watched, yeah.
Occasionally if I'm in bed already and want to watch TV show, I don't bother going downstairs to watch it.
If I'm going to like, if it's the last thing I'm going to watch before I go to bed or whatever, I'll watch it there.
So.
Not a lot.
And then Twitter is Twitter is by far my number one actual iOS app that doesn't involve watching videos.
So no surprises for me.
I do.
I'm such an anti notification person.
Just seeing obviously when you rank stuff, you're going to rank like what is the thing that sends me the most notifications?
There will always be a number one unless you have zero notifications on.
There will always be a number one.
But my instinct is to look at that number one and say, I can knock you down.
I got I got to take whatever that number one is.
Let me see if I can cut that number of notifications in half.
But there will always be a number one.
It's not like I can eliminate it.
It's like if I follow this instinct, eventually everything will have notifications turned off.
So, I mean, maybe I'll make I don't know.
I like I'd like to ask notifications and I'd like to be able to see if my dog is getting into something in the house or I like knowing like when the kids come home, they usually get an S notification for them walking in the door.
But on the kids' devices, I mean, transitioning into the kids' stuff, it doesn't sound like we have any dramatic news for our stuff.
Well, hold on.
Before you do that, are you, either of you, I'm assuming not Marco, leveraging any of the downtime or anything like that?
Because I really should explore that.
Maybe I'll set homework for myself that I need to play with that.
Because as an example, we tend to eat dinner at around the same time every night.
And sometimes I'll get a buzz or notification or something.
Or maybe just not have the self-control to not pick up my phone.
And and I'll be using my phone over dinner, which obviously any family time I shouldn't be doing it, period.
But particularly over dinner is kind of obnoxious of me.
So maybe I'll try that and set that up to give myself a little downtime during dinner and see how that works out.
But, John, have you played with it?
Well, let me start with Marco.
I assume you haven't.
No, I haven't.
I mean, I do schedule Do Not Disturb at night, like when I'm expected to be in bed, but otherwise, no.
All right, well, I'm going to try some downtime and see how that works over dinner.
John, what about you?
Any downtime or app limits or anything?
No, I don't see why I would use downtime because that's the thing that stops you from using your device, right?
Or does it just lock out certain apps?
Yeah, but I don't want to be locked out of anything.
I mean, for me, just for me to try to add some kind of value to this discussion, not having any data on myself yet, I have spent periods in the past using things like RescueTime that can track what I'm doing on the Mac.
Yeah.
This kind of stuff was never possible to do on iOS in some kind of automated system-wide way before, which is why screen time is noteworthy and useful now.
But on the Mac, it's been possible for a long time.
So I have done that before for long spans.
And just to do things kind of like what our friends talk about on Cortex and what you, Casey, have so far done very poorly on analog about time tracking.
This is a true story.
You know, what you're basically doing here is like time tracking for the stuff you're doing on your phone.
And so the value there is in... Not necessarily in like shaming you or in controlling you.
The value is giving you information...
about something that your brain is pretty hard it's pretty bad at estimating on its own like if you just ask most people like how many times you pick up your phone in a day and you know they'll give some estimate it's actually like you know 10 times higher because like you just your brain is not good at that or a more useful example of like how long do you spend browsing twitter every day and or every week like if you look at like oh like if i want to get 40 hours of work in in any given week how many of those hours am i wasting on twitter
And you can get that information now.
You have that information.
And when I've had that information in the past, like on my Mac, that number has been scary.
That's why I have that's why I made quitter.
Like it's that's why because like I would see like, oh, I've used Twitter for something like, you know, six hours this week out of like the 40 or 50 or 60 that I was at my computer.
Like that's not good.
That's that's not worth it to me.
And so the main value in this is giving you the tools to do whatever you feel is necessary.
And that might be nothing.
You might decide when you see your data, like, you know what?
Okay, I already have a pretty good balance.
I don't need to do anything right now.
But it's useful to check in there every so often just so you can see, like...
oh, I'm spending X hours a day or a week on this thing.
Is that really worth it to me?
Is that worth those X hours a week?
Or should I use these tools to help me reduce that?
That's really valuable.
I would have guessed way more than 70 pickups per day.
I don't know if this thing is broken or what.
I mean, every other number looked accurate, but I don't know if it's counting my pickups quite right.
I feel like I'd, well, I don't know.
Maybe if I added them up, I'd take out my phone more than 17 times today.
I don't know.
But anyway, downtime.
Yes, I use downtime on the kids.
How'd that go?
Things that stops you from using your thing and you can make exceptions for applications and stuff like that.
But no, I don't use that.
I do not disturb is, you know, the feature that I love because.
although i have to sometimes remember that it's on ios 12 is kind of obnoxious with this banner every time you do not disturb on this giant banner is on your phone every time you look at it just so you know like it's on right now so let me see what it looks like it's like i find that great honestly because it prevents you from uh from leaving it on without realizing it's on and missing everything for like a day well but that's the thing like time i don't know why everybody doesn't do this time to do not disturb this is my recommendation for everybody who's listening right now
Set schedule, do not disturb.
Pick hours.
Be conservative if you want.
Say, I don't want to be disturbed from 2 a.m.
to 5 a.m.
Maybe start with that if you're afraid I need to be reached all times.
Just pick some times of like, after this hour, I don't want to be disturbed and before this hour, I don't want to be disturbed.
And just set time, do not disturb for that time.
It's such a simple thing that I'm shocked that everybody doesn't do it, but I always see people like, oh, I don't want to do Do Not Disturb, or I forget when it's on, or I just set a schedule.
Then some people are like, oh, but what if someone wants to reach me at 10.01 p.m.?
It's like your favorites can get through, repeated calls can get through, like they'll reach you if they need to get through, right?
So my time Do Not Disturb is like 9 p.m.
to like 6 a.m.
or something like that.
Uh, and that does for me what I think a lot of people looking for for downtime.
Well, maybe it's not the same thing.
Like I'm not preventing myself from using my phone.
Phone works fine as far as I'm concerned.
But the point is if my phone is sitting next to me while I'm watching TV, it never disturbs my television because nothing will make it vibrate or make a noise.
which is kind of annoying to other people who live with me because occasionally my wife or my kids will text me from upstairs.
My kids will text me.
Not text me.
I'll get the notification for them that they want to buy an app or download an app or extend their downtime, which we'll get to in a second.
And I won't see the notification or my wife will text me.
And I won't see the notification.
I mean, we're in the same house.
They could just come and get me if they really cared.
But they'd be like, why didn't you answer my text?
I didn't see your text.
My phone becomes dead to the world as far as notifying me about anything.
But if I need to pick up my phone and look up where an actor is from or something, it works fine.
I'm not locking myself out of anything.
So I don't see that I would ever use downtime.
But that's the exact feature I want for my kids because...
It's just a sort of it's computer enforced way of thing.
We always had downtime in the house.
No electronics after whatever time.
Right.
That's been a rule forever.
But the problem is if you're not on top of them, they're always trying to eke out that extra two or three minutes or they're like, oh, just let me finish this thing that I'm doing or whatever.
And it's just it's a constant battle.
And you can shortcut that battle and not fight over those extra two minutes or whatever by just having the computer do it.
And there is a handy feature, which they all quickly discovered, which you can ask for an extension.
So if you're in the middle of watching something and the big scary downtime banner comes over to precisely...
you know 9 p.m or whatever they can press a button on the screen that says ask for more time and we'll get a notification that says uh you know so and so would like to have 15 more minutes of youtube or whatever app they're using like it's specific to that app and you could say yes or no um unless your phone isn't doing how to start in which case you don't see the notification you have to wait for them to come whine in person which is fine with me like good take the stairs it's good exercise um
um so we did that like a couple aspects of me when i did that i also wanted to see what they were doing like to see their graph like how much time they're spending in each app not that it was surprising guess what youtube is really popular with both of them uh websites they're on which was interesting and led to some interesting conversations but you know it's not it's not uh i'm not like pouring over their entire uh history or whatever uh the screen time stuff or the downtime stuff was
Very upsetting initially, because they didn't like the hard line nature of it, especially before they discovered the extension.
They didn't like the idea that it precisely, you know, when the hour ticks over or whatever, the precise time, there's no ifs, ands, or buts.
Doesn't care if you're in the middle of something.
Doesn't care if there's only one minute left on the show that you're watching.
It just doesn't care.
So now, did you tell them beforehand that this was going to be a thing, or did you just turn it on and let them...
i told them about the feature of ios 12 when it was announced and have talked to them about it previously gleefully saying it's coming it's coming but i didn't like tell them the day they knew i was upgrading all their devices i didn't tell i i think i anyway i probably caught a couple of my surprises by the fact that i've been talking about but they didn't know exactly when it would come um a couple of them how many more are there uh you know what my son got annoyed by it my daughter quickly adapted and shifted into just asking for extensions and
I mean, they'll live with it.
It's fine.
The tricky thing is before they had the extension thing, my son was like, I need to do my homework.
I'm like, fine, I'll disable it for you.
So I disabled it, but I didn't realize that I had permanently disabled.
I thought I was basically just using it.
And so the next day, he's using his device past the deadline, and we're like, did you turn it off for his thing?
So I turned it back on.
But I think now we're just settling in.
You can adjust the time and there are negotiations.
It's not like a... Again, it's a thing that we were doing anyway.
It's just an additional tool to make that interaction easier because for whatever reason...
the kids are more accepting that the computer is doing it to them.
Then if I came and hard line set up, it's 9 PM like this, I would do that.
And then it's an immediate negotiation and whining and annoyance or whatever, where if there's a screen just blanks over, then they have, it's on them to say, do I care enough about watching the last two minutes of this thing to go down and whine and beg or ask for an extension?
Right.
Yeah.
Uh, or, or do I not care enough?
Like they have to come to me and say, I want, you know, it, it, it puts the burden on them to do it.
And it's just the path.
At least this is like, Oh, I wasn't doing anything anyway.
I was just, you know, farting around on YouTube and they'll pick up the video right where I left off tomorrow morning or whatever, when I look at it.
So,
I think that's mostly settled in fine.
I do like seeing what they're doing.
Again, screen time isn't the first time I'm seeing what they're doing.
I always look at what they're doing on their devices, which they hate, but it's part of being a kid is your parents get to know what the heck you're doing on the computer all the time.
What video are you watching?
What websites are you going to do?
What is this about?
I'm always watching in real life.
And I think they prefer this because at least then I'm not over their shoulders.
Hey, what's that video about?
They hate when I do that.
But that's parenting for you.
You have to actually be aware of what they're doing.
You know, Little Birdie is telling me that you're downplaying how perturbed your son was when this all landed.
Yeah, I mean, I know, but like, it's, I don't want to throw any kids under the bus.
Like, it's tough being a kid.
Right.
We all we all make adjustments like I ended up adjusting my son's time to be a little bit different than my daughter's because he's older and to recognize the fact that he has less time for leisure because he does like sports after school.
Right.
And then he's got to do homework.
Right.
And so the adjustments have been made to make it reasonably equitable.
so they can get in their minimum amount of youtube time although they really don't have a case when i look at like the youtube totals for the week and he's like complaining like on a weekend when downtime kicks in i'm like oh you only watch six hours of youtube today which watching youtube is like a thing a thing that your parents would say that you would like playing nintendo or whatever like what you watching youtube is not a thing he's watching video right if he's watching a television show and he's watching a season of a television show because there's a season of a television show on youtube which is a thing it's like oh you're watching quote unquote youtube it's
just like watching tv or movies only or like what i did binge watching like a you know a sci-fi series on hulu or something the fact that it's youtube doesn't change the fact that he's essentially watching a tv show right so it's not you know it's not that ridiculous although a lot of it is of course watching fortnite videos but i watch a lot of destiny videos too so i can understand anyway uh it's mostly working itself out um
but the big thing like this this topic changed like yeah so that's screen time for the kids i'm finding it a valuable tool uh there's you know it can't be the only tool and it should be you should be doing this anyway it can be helpful i'm glad this feature exists in ios 12 but now this topic suddenly changes unfortunately for people who don't like hearing us talk about bugs to a story about how screen time has decided that it's no longer interested in performing one of its major functions so if you have a family
in iCloud uh which i suggest you do because there's lots of cool features to come with it and you make a family you put the members of the family and you put the kids in and you know you have the you know the adults and i think only one person could be like the family manager which just lets you add them anyway um when i go to screen time on my any of my ios devices i see all my info and then if i scroll down there's a section called family
And it shows my two kids, not my wife.
She's also a member of the family, but it doesn't show her.
So I see my two kids and they're in a little section on their own.
They have a little, you know, rightward facing arrow.
And it used to be when I would tap on one of them, you see a screen that looks just like your screen where it says downtime, app limits, allowed apps, content and privacy restrictions, include website data, you know, all the same things that you see on your own.
And that's where you can set what the downtime is for that kid, what the app limits are, which is nice.
I excluded apps like
You know, by default, like maps and messages are excluded.
I excluded like FaceTime and I excluded a whole bunch of things that are reasonable.
Basically, if I could blacklist it, all it has to do is blacklist YouTube and I basically destroy their devices as far as they're concerned.
Right.
Yeah.
And the content and privacy restrictions, you can not let them, you know,
Rent, you know, rated R movies, although for the longest time when you have a family, if a kid wants to buy something, they can't buy anything.
They can't even download free stuff without it sending a notification to one or both of the parents' accounts and saying, you know...
you know, Kate wants to watch the movie, whatever.
And you can see information about the movie.
You can approve or deny that feature has been there for a while.
It's not a screen time thing, but that's, that's definitely a cool thing.
If parents don't know about it, you should definitely, there's another reason to put people into a family.
You definitely enable that.
You basically know that there's no way your kids can download anything onto their devices without you approving it.
Again, even if it's a free app, especially if it's a free app, because like these free to play games.
Um, anyway, at the top, it says screen time and it's got an all devices thing because they both have like phones and iPads at this point.
And in theory, if you tap on all devices, you see it today and last seven days, there should be a bunch of graphs there just like there are for us.
But instead, what I see is underneath all devices, it says as this device is used, screen time will be reported here.
And if you tap into all devices, today says nothing and last seven days says nothing.
This worked fine for like the first two weeks of iOS 12 and then for the past two weeks or so.
There's just no data.
As this device is used, screen time will report it to you.
I assure you this device is being used.
No, they have not disabled screen time on their devices.
Their devices are all set up fine.
You can look on their devices and see the info.
They're all set up to share with iCloud.
Like everything, all the settings are correct.
Nothing is disabled.
They haven't somehow circumvented it or whatever.
Just both of them one day.
just disappeared so now this feature that used to work is now entirely non-functional i can't see any screen time information for any of my kids anymore despite it working for like multiple weeks so that kind of annoys me because it's one of those things like well what do you do i pulled the refresh i tap i turn screen time on and turn screen time off like i don't i don't even know what to do i tried all the things like i'm not going to delete the family and then recreate it because i'll destroy a million things uh so i'm hoping the dot update will fix this
This is pretty frustrating that a headlining feature that I was actually enjoying decided to just stop working and not entirely because, again, I can go to their devices and look it up on each one of their devices.
But the whole point of this is as the, you know, family adult or whatever, I should be able to look at it on my devices.
And they're all listed here.
I just can't see any information about it.
So I find it's very frustrating.
But.
aside from the bugs uh i suggest all parents a look into making a family uh with your kids that you know this i forget what the process is it used to be worse than it is now but um kids can't have their own apple ids which is why i suggest don't try to share one amongst the whole family everyone in the family should have their own apple there's kids apple id you can make a family you can say which are the kids and which are the adults and
And the kids, you can, you know, require your approval to make purchases.
And in theory, you could see the screen time information.
And these are all great tools for parents.
And I'm glad Apple's added them.
I just want them to go back to working.
I don't think you're alone in this either.
We heard from a lot of our friends who did this during the iOS 12 beta that apparently it seemed like screen time, like whether it tracked data for you or not, and especially whether it synced that data, was seemingly very rough and buggy during the beta.
And so it's possible they just haven't ironed that out yet.
So I would keep an eye on it, and hopefully they will get it all worked out in the next couple of point releases.
Yeah, I heard that, too, during the betas, which I ran iOS 12 since, like, the second beta on my iPad.
And I heard people saying, oh, screen time is fine, except, like, they were just doing it for themselves.
Except, like, every once in a while with a new beta, it just totally wipes all my screen time data.
I'm like, well, fine.
It's a beta, like, they'll wipe the data every once in a while.
But surely once they release one comes.
They won't do that.
This seems like a different class of bug in that the data is all still being collected.
I just can't see it from my phone, despite there being sections for their stuff.
So yeah, I hope they work this out.
Because otherwise, it's a pretty nice feature.
The UI was pretty straightforward, which is actually a challenge, because...
it is a fairly complicated and setting filled thing to do.
And they've managed to organize it in a way that I didn't, you know, I didn't have to, it was pretty obvious to me what was going on despite all the screens kind of looking similar and everything like that.
So it, you know, it's, it's a lot of buttons and a lot of settings and a lot of semantics and a lot of information that they managed to organize in a nice way.
Just need to make it work.
One of these days, and I don't think we have time for today, I'd like you to sell me on doing this iCloud family thing.
I just did.
I just sold you on it.
Oh, geez.
Do it.
Well, I don't know, man.
Okay, fine.
I guess we're just going to pull on this thread right now.
Number one, you share purchases.
Number two, I think you share iCloud storage.
Yeah, you do as of a couple of years ago.
Consolidate to a single bill.
Yeah, single bill, shared iCloud storage, shared purchases, although not in-app purchases.
I believe those are still separate.
Depends on the app.
Right.
So certain types aren't.
But for the most part, you're sharing most purchases.
You're sharing media purchases.
And also, you have all these parental control things.
So you can do the thing where your kid can ask for a game and you can approve it and stuff like that.
It's really nice.
And as far as I can tell, we set it up for our family, I think about a year after it launched, like a few years back.
as far as i can tell there's no downsides like i don't i don't think anything has gone wrong or is worse off since we set it up it's it's wonderful you also get like automatic location sharing and you can prevent the kids from turning off location sharing like there's all sorts of controls that are inconveniences because uh like if you have a family oh we all share our location with each other in perpetuity but if you if you're all in the same family you don't even have to set that up just they show up and you find my friends because they're part of your family all the time
Interesting.
Yeah, the way we've had it and have run this way since both of us got iPhones.
And remember, Declan has an iPad that's kind of dedicated to him, but basically it's just a Daniel Tiger device.
He almost never uses it outside of long car trips, and basically the only thing he uses on it is Plex.
So this isn't really relevant.
He's your son, all right?
Yeah, right, exactly.
Of course he's in Plex.
Of course he is.
It'll be relevant faster than you think it will.
Yeah, yeah, I agree.
And so this is really today only about Aaron and me.
And the way we've run it is the trick that a lot of people discovered by accident, which was different iCloud accounts, but the same Apple Store account.
So we're using my Apple Store account, but different iCloud accounts.
And to be honest, that's generally worked pretty well for us.
But I know I'm going to have to pull this, you know, rip this bandaid off sooner rather than later, to your point, John.
So it's not ruinous to do the switch from...
Yeah, even just for you and Aaron, you don't lose anything by doing this, because if you're in the same family, she can still use all of your purchases.
Again, plus or minus the in-app purchases.
I don't know how many of those you have, and it might be annoying to have to repurchase them or whatever.
But the sooner you cleanly separate into your own Apple IDs, the simpler things become.
I feel like I was also worried about like, oh, am I going to have to rebuy anything?
But in practice, I don't think we had to had to rebuy anything.
Maybe it's because we don't do many in-app purchases.
But yeah, separating into separate IDs across everything.
But being in the same family gives you most of the benefits and it's just cleaner.
And that part, all that stuff, the purchase approval and everything, that's, again, it's not part of screen time.
That stuff isn't really buggy.
It was buggy in the beginning, but it's been around for years now.
So most of the kinks are worked out.
Or if they're not worked out, occasionally you get some weirdness on the Mac.
where you can see the same family stuff but occasionally it gets a little uh fidgety over there usually you can solve it just by like signing out and back into iCloud like i don't know yeah but that but that's true that's true of any stuff like my i didn't mention this uh i don't think i mentioned on the show but my contact stuff is back to not syncing it's really annoying oh no i
I went through, I was looking at, I was on the Mac for whatever reason.
I'm like, oh, I have all these.
It was, here's what it was.
It was like after Mike's wedding, I had all these pictures of people I knew, computer people, like you guys and Mike and all this.
I had recent photos of them.
um i love the word computer and so like i need to update the contact pictures because previously i had like for you know for mike i had like a i don't know where i got the picture from i just googled for his name and pulled the picture or maybe i used like his twitter avatar or something but they were old they're old pictures and here i had you know pictures that i'd taken that i liked of these people i'm going to replace their contact pictures so they show up nicely in my messages list or whatever um and so i go and i paste you know i figure out using the mac contacts app what it wants me to do get stupid image in there because you used to be able to just drag it but now you have to do some other dance and
Anyway, I get the image in there.
I crop it to the right size.
I, you know, blah, blah, blah.
And I do this for, like, four or five contacts.
I think I might have updated both of yours.
I forget.
Marco's got his ancient picture, but he basically looks the same.
No, I did update Marco.
He's got a beardy Marco now.
I look totally different.
Well, but here's the thing.
Like, the reason I don't remember this is because I did all this work on the Mac, and then I noticed the next day none of that stuff was on my phone.
Or my iPad.
Like, what the hell?
I spent all that time doing these pictures.
And so then I'm back to going back to the Mac and like turning off contact syncing and turning it back on and just trying to like do anything I can.
It's just I cannot get anything I do on my Mac to appear on any of my iOS devices or on any of my other Macs.
i haven't i haven't tried it in mojave yet but it's something used to frustrate me like there's like nothing i can do there's no like please sync it now like see this contact image i'm holding my phone next to the screen it's the same contact it has a different image it's the old one same thing with changing any other contact info like adding a new email address or phone number
It's very, very frustrating.
I felt like, aren't we past this now?
Can't we get contacts to sync successfully?
Everyone is a while.
My computer just says no.
Maybe it's because it's too old.
Yeah, she had a new one.
No, this is my wife's computer.
It's a 5K iMac running Mojave.
Everything is latest, latest, everything.
I felt like there's no excuse.
No, sync is hard.
That's a big excuse.
Sync is really hard.
I just want something to happen.
I want to do something on my Mac and see something happen elsewhere.
Put it in a duplicate contact.
I don't care.
I just want to see something happen to acknowledge.
I'm doing, especially I'd spent so long like carefully finding all the images and cropping them and being careful not that they're too big as it chokes if you just like take a giant, you know,
20-something megapixel image, chuck it on the thing and try to crop it to the head.
It freaks out, right?
So I'm making small versions of things.
In the end, because I had done it once and it annoyed me, the second time I did it, I made a little folder that I call contact photos, and I put the contact photos suitable for dragging into contacts in that folder, and then I put it in my Dropbox.
So the 900 other times I try to do this, I have a ready-made bin of all your heads that I can just throw on to stuff.
Let me look.
I haven't looked lately.
This was actually like, you know, it was actually pre-Mohave, but I haven't looked lately to see what my contact situation is like.
Let me see.
Is Marco beardy?
That is the question.
Hey, I got beardy Marco.
I think it's because I did it on my phone as one of my ninth or tenth times.
I think I used the one that you have for your Twitter avatar picture, maybe.
You took that picture.
I took all these pictures from my photo library.
But yeah, I was pulling pictures from my photo library.
I think I just happened to pick the same one that you picked from like WWC or whatever.
Yeah, it's frustrating.
And the main reason I'm doing that, though, is because you forget that thing where like, I don't know if you guys run messages on your Mac a lot, but I do because, you know, guy and the window just sits there.
It's sitting in the background and every once in a while you look at the window.
And along the left sidebar of the thing, you'll see the avatar image of all the people you're talking to.
Or, you know, the last, you know, five or ten, or depending on how the size of your window, the people you talk to.
And first of all, if one of them has no icon, they're just like the silhouette, that looks bad.
You're like, oh, that person needs an icon.
Like, why doesn't that person have an icon?
I've known that person for 20 years.
They have no icon.
That's bad.
Yeah.
And second of all, if you look at it and it's like a picture of somebody, it's like a bad blurry picture.
That's like, it's like 64 by 64 pixel image stretched out and looking all gross.
It's like their aim icon from 1993 or something.
You're like, I need to fix that.
Uh, and it uses the contact images.
So then you go to their contact and you had a picture and you, what you want is a messages list that you look at and you're like, yeah, I recognize all those people.
And those are the people I talked to.
Uh, and they look nice.
And you know, so that's, that's what motivates this.
My, my, uh,
you know retentiveness to have a to want to have a pleasing sidebar partially inspired probably by like all my screenshotting and os 10 reviews that you would never take a screenshot where the sidebar didn't have like beautiful professional photos of everything everyone you communicate with oh yeah there's no and there's no like embarrassing message that's the thing that always about messages next to the avatar it shows the name and the date and then it shows the last line of text and
That was in that conversation.
But the last line of text may not have been spoken by the person whose image is there.
It may have been the last line you sent to them.
Oh, yeah.
And so sometimes it makes it look like, you know, your wife is saying something that you said because it's her image next to the last sentence you wrote to her.
So it's still not a great interface.
Anyway, everyone's got pictures on my stuff.
Well, but no, but you can collapse that, though.
You can get rid of it.
Yeah, you can get rid of the whole sidebar.
But like.
No, no, no.
You can get to go to just icons.
So it's just heads.
Yeah.
What kind of monster leaves the like one line of most recently said?
No, no, no, no, no.
Sometimes that's all I can see in the window and I want to be able to see the last line is from them.
I think it's relevant information.
And I also want to see the date.
That's what I'm saying.
There's two modes of the sidebar.
There's show me the last line in addition to their avatar and just the avatars.
really i had no i i'm always in last line uh like a chump mode yeah no that is like a chump mode you just you in in the divider between the sidebar and the actual messages pane slide that bad boy to the left but i but i think it's rid of the dates too i want to see the last line when it's from them it reminds me of the context of the conversation oh that's weird no i don't like and then it has their name too yeah nah screw that no this is the way to go
How am I going to know what two-factor verification looks like?
This is another context tip while we're in the context tip section of the thing.
Every time you get a two-factor thing, which everyone's saying you shouldn't do over SMS anymore anyway.
But anyway, if you still have some services where you're getting two-factor SMS, every time you get one of those, add that phone number to a single contact that you call two-factor verification or something similar.
So then when it comes in, you don't see like, what is this random text from?
Oh, it's a two-factor thing.
It'll come in as two-factor verification.
And it's not a random number every time.
After you've added like the five or six common numbers that you get stuff from, that's it.
That's a really good idea.
it's just like sand i haven't given it gotten to the point where i've given it an icon but it's only like how many how many icons are are mr two-factor details one two three four five only five phone numbers covers everything granted i'm trying to move away from sms for uh two-factor but many services it's still the only thing they offer sony playstation so
Well, you know, Sony's really known for their incredible online security.
That's why I've been able to factor.
My PlayStation account is one of the accounts I care the most about because someone got into there and deleted all my Destiny characters or whatever.
That would be...
more disastrous than deleting all of my photos because i have backups of the photos you'd rather have somebody go and delete your family pictures than your destiny account because i have a hundred backups of those how many backups do i have of my you know playstation data none it's like that the thing i tweeted the picture before that nintendo finally has an online backup switch data and it's like finally because yeah like my data was tied to my specific switch and if i you know dropped it and cracked it in half
That's it.
Like I said, I'd send it away to Nintendo, like, oh, well, we'll just give you a new one.
What about my save data?
Sorry.
I gotta do that.
So now I have an online backup of that, too.
Just one, though.
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I have a hopefully quickie about a new Apple feature that mostly works well and I really love, even though I thought it was both hilarious and stupid when I saw it during the keynote, and that is Apple Watch walkie-talkie mode.
I did not understand the point to this up until a couple of days ago, and now it's like my new favorite thing.
And this is if you have two people with an Apple Watch on on watchOS five, there is a new app called walkie talkie.
And you can go into that app and you can invite people to join walkie talkie mode with you.
And then like the hellscape was that was the late 90s and Nextel push to talk phones, which were very popular in the Northeast.
I don't know if they were popular anywhere else.
But you can just drop in on somebody's world and talk to them, like you actually broadcast a verbal message from their wrist, which sounds freaking terrible.
But if you, say, have a partner that you live with, and if you, say, have one or more children—
that you live with it is amazing because in in the past i would grab my phone and type out a message to aaron like hey can you bring me a bottle or hey can you help me do this or hey declan is really hungry what did you give him for snack earlier so i don't give him the same thing again or whatever the case may be and now i can just bloop on my watch and we can get through this conversation so much quicker no typing involved
I'm so glad I don't have this because all I would hear is, Dad, answer the request on your phone!
Which is what I hear now, but at least it's yelled from upstairs instead of actually coming out of my wrist.
Approve my request!
You don't have to add your children as people.
It would come out of your drawer, let's be honest.
Yeah, that's true too.
It would absolutely come out of your drawer.
I think that for most use cases, like, you know, when we all looked at the, what do they call it?
Digital touch.
Uh, when it first, when the watch first came out and everyone was like, dudes, people, Apple people, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
That's, that's not what we want.
And generally speaking, I think that's applicable for this walkie talkie mode, but Holy crap to get Aaron and I to have a quick two second conversation, you know, typically involving some child related issue.
It is great.
And I love it.
And I just wanted to put a little, uh,
Put a little word out for everyone because we tried it kind of on a whim when we were at the beach over the weekend, and it was great.
It worked really, really well, and I'm really, really happy about it.
So if you have a similar situation, you should give it a shot.
I should feel you're missing the simple joy of yelling across the house to each other.
And we do that from time to time.
But oftentimes if we're going to do this walkie talkie thing, it's because one of us is upstairs and the other downstairs.
Yeah, it's a big part.
It's a big part of being a family is yelling across floors of a house.
Yeah, exactly.
And I mean, our house is not particularly big.
It's an at best average size house, but it's big enough that, you know, yelling between floors is not particularly fun or conducive.
And we only have one echo in the house, so we can't do any sort of like, what is that drop in or whatever it's called?
So this is the best thing that we have available to us.
And it's funny because it's kind of like coming full circle.
I remember as a kid, we we my family built a house.
Gosh, how old was I?
Maybe 8 or 10 or something like that.
And it had one of those in-home intercom systems, which were super popular in the day.
Oh, those were so fancy.
They were so cool.
I was just about to mention this.
I was going to mention it in a very unflattering context, though.
Well...
It was so cool, but they were pieces of trash, but it was amazing because you could play FM radio throughout the house because that's what people wanted.
But anyway, I just thought we had made it as a family.
And again, our house was not particularly large.
It was an average sized home, but we built it and we had our little...
We had our little intercom system and I think we also had a urinal in the basement, which was amazing, but that's a story for another day.
Anyway.
First time anybody's ever said a urinal is amazing.
I'm telling you, put one in your house and see what you think.
They are amazing.
See what you think.
But yeah, so having that intercom we thought was the coolest thing in the world and it lasted like a month.
I love that you had the intercom.
That was the coolest thing in the world in 1992 or something.
It's exactly what I'm talking about.
It's not a 90s thing.
It's an 80s thing.
The thing that's relevant to my life that I was going to say about that before Casey even began that story was the house we run on Long Island was renovated in the 80s.
Long Island house renovated in the 80s by rich people, right?
So it has, of course, it has an in-home intercom.
It also has central vacuum, and it also has... Yes, I was going to mention central vacuuming.
That's another good one.
I was going to say, like, I had this one rich friend who had all this stuff, and the two things I was going to mention were the intercom and the central vacuuming.
Yeah, well, there's actually a third one, which I think might be part of the intercom system, but it's also...
I don't know if it was banging all of a sudden, but it was similar.
It was like built into the wall, a dual cassette stereo system.
Like it built into the wall, like flush with like a wood grain thing or whatever.
I think it might've been part of the intercom, but they have, have one of those too.
Um, but here's the thing about the intercom, the whole house intercom, the way it manifested itself throughout the house, uh, it was, you know, cause it was, it was like, you'd push a button and talk and you could hear this.
It was like terrible quality.
It was RF or whatever.
Um,
It's like, I kid you not, 16 inch by 16 inch square fake wood panels.
They're huge.
They're bigger than 12 by 12.
They're probably 16 by 16.
They're plastic slats like a...
You know, like like blinds or whatever, like I don't know what are the what are the horizontal blinds called made out of wood, but it's plastic with wood grain on it.
And it's a big square.
And then there's a circle inside the square that's gigantic.
It's like bigger than a subwoofer.
It's like the biggest supposed inside.
It's probably this tiny little four inch, you know.
speaker thing in it and then all these buttons lined up on it and you'd talk across the house now my family was a rich family in the 80s but not quite that rich so we bought from radio shack these little realistic home intercoms things this vaguely rings a bell they were beige uh they were like maybe like as big as an iphone uh 10s max
uh but of course like you know seven times as thick and they had a big button on them and you would press the button down and you would talk and it would broadcast into horrible fidelity throughout the house in theory um and there was the idea to stop us from yelling through the house but the sound quality was so bad and you'd end up yelling into the intercom and you could hear them like not on the intercom i don't know why we kept them for as long as we did but we did have them in the house and they're mostly useless we've never used the ones in the book in the vacation house but
they're there so i mean this is this is the you know the most pathetic uh contest ever but my rich friends intercoms were fancier than yours because it was just it was basically a phone system it was like an office phone system like they were each room had a wired like office phone in it basically even like the kids bedrooms had wired office phones and you could use those so because everything was wired over the phone system it was perfectly clear just like an office phone would be yeah the cheaper ones are rough yeah they were bad
A user in the chat says, I was born in 1991.
What the hell are they talking about?
So the intercom system, imagine there was this big control panel, typically in the kitchen, which was literally two or three feet wide and a foot or two tall, where you could...
And speak into it and little, well, not actually that little per John's conversation, but comparatively little boxes in every room would wake up and broadcast the message that you just said in the kitchen.
So a great example of this is mom or dad says, hey, dinner's ready.
Come downstairs.
So you walk up to the intercom box, which is massive, and you hit a button and you say, hey, dinner's ready.
And then all of the rooms in the house get that message.
Hey, dinner's ready.
And that was extremely cool in the apparently anywhere from as early as the 70s all the way through the like early to mid 90s.
They were typically pieces of garbage.
They typically toward the end of the era would allow you to do FM radio like I was talking about earlier.
So you could put on radio throughout the house.
And these were the crappiest speakers known to man.
So it sounded hilariously bad, probably no better than an iPhone, if not worse.
um and but they were a sign of someone they were of someone that was typically at least slightly well-to-do i've never seen the the kind of intercom system you're describing i've never seen it i've only seen the one at my friend's house that was basically an office phone system installed in their house i put a link in the in the uh chat room too it's not the exact one that we have but it's a similar oh i remember this yeah yeah yeah see how big that is like yep oh yeah yep i hear it and imagine a panel that size in like every room
So the central vacuum, what that is, is imagine you had like this big tall canister somewhere, typically a basement or a garage, and then you had hoses.
It's called a vacuum.
Yeah, it's called a vacuum.
Who knew?
But no, it's larger, or at least the one we had in the house that I kind of sort of grew up in because we had central vac in that.
We did not have an intercom.
You had a central vacuum.
We did.
We did.
But anyways, so there's hoses running throughout the home.
Like you don't see them.
They're in the walls, but all running back to the vacuum.
So you could plug in.
So you take a hose and you can bring it to any room and plug the hose into the wall.
And suddenly you have a vacuum in that room.
And it actually is very cool.
Yeah.
You basically have like outlets that suck.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
That's exactly right.
There's like outlets like near the floor level usually that are just like suction outlets and you plug a hose into it and you can have a vacuum anywhere.
But like vacuums aren't that hard to carry around or like it's not like this.
It solves a problem in a really crazy way that isn't that big of a problem to solve the regular way.
Yep.
I mean, it was it was a neat trick.
And actually, one of the extremely cool things about it is like, actually, I think my brother in law's house, which was built not that terribly long ago, has this.
He has a central vac, but in the kitchen, he has like a little door or something where you can like sweep crumbs into it.
You know what I mean?
So it's like right at floor level.
And I don't remember how you activate it to get the sucking to start title.
But you can like you can sweep dust into there, which is actually pretty cool.
It's like a built-in dustpan, basically.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
None of these things are worth their installation and maintenance over just having a vacuum.
That's true.
Here's the miraculous thing about them, though.
The fact that they continue to work at all, because all of the home automation crap that we're installing now or that people installed five or ten years ago is not going to work when they're 20 years old.
But here's this 1980s stuff that's 20 years old or more.
I mean, it's still just as bad as it ever was, but it continues to function.
You know, like RF continues to be just as bad as it always was.
And, you know, the size of it becomes more and more hilarious because now, again, we got into this because Casey is talking to his wrist at higher fidelity than these gigantic, you know, panels in every room of the house.
And I don't think it's like Bluetooth or anything like that.
This is getting carried over the internet, if I'm not mistaken.
So, yeah, it must be because I was walkie-talkie with Stephen Hackett very, very briefly when this all first came out.
So, yeah, this is going over the internet.
I could talk to Memphis from Richmond more clearly than I could talk from the downstairs to the upstairs in a prior home that my family owned.
Not if you yelled.
Yelling is quite clear.
Touche.
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All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Are we really not going to talk about the Bloomberg thing?
No, just listen to Upgrade.
It'll be fine.
Honestly, I fully support that.
Upgrade covered it really well.
It's still on the topic list.
It's probably not going away.
We'll have another shot at it next week.
Just quickly, do you think there's any chance that Bloomberg is correct?
It seems like there isn't.
It seems like they really have a lot of egg on their face.
No, they can't be 100% correct because the claims are so broad that it would be very easy to find evidence of them from all the players involved who are highly motivated to find evidence of them.
So it can't be 100% correct.
Could it be 1% correct?
Sure.
There could be a kernel of truth somewhere in here.
But their claims are just so massive that this is... Things happen and it happened to all these different companies and all these different people and confirmed by all these people and confirmed by this agency and that agency.
All these people can't be conspiring to pretend they know nothing about this.
And again, they're fairly highly motivated to...
To find out if this is true and to, or like, I don't think there can be coordination between all the tech companies and all the governing agencies all got together and decided we're all going to get together and agree on the same story and deny this Bloomberg thing.
So Bloomberg made a boo-boo somewhere.
It just depends.
Is it sinister?
Is it just incompetence?
We didn't even give any context for this.
I guess many people don't know.
I haven't been reading the news, but Bloomberg ran a story claiming that there are secret, very tiny chips embedded in boards used by a bunch of big tech companies that allow
uh you know hackers to get into their data centers or whatever and they named a bunch of different companies and all the companies are like we you know like the companies weren't just like immediate denial they checked they said they all of them probably turned to their security people and said do we have secret chips in our computer the things have we talked to the fbi about it like you know and the
the answer was they talked to all their people the security people their their company lawyers or whatever the answer is no none of this stuff is a thing so i'm not sure where you're getting and the fbi denied and like everybody so like you've had the level of denials from me like you really can't look at these denials and say oh they're they're leaving room to bs they're out of it like they're like categorical like very like very broad
they're not using weasel words they're not using carefully worded lawyer messages like and they're almost worded as if like we were willing to believe that we we double checked and triple checked just like to make sure like you know make really really sure because we're gonna like they issued a statement like we checked it like if you say we have these servers with these chips and you say that we discovered like in some cases like oh this company it was amazon or whatever discovered these chips and then cancel its order it's like we wouldn't know if we discovered the chips and canceled an order with like
it's a thing we would remember well and like and these are the kind of statements like if if these companies and their denials if they're lying about this executives would go to jail if they got caught like that's how severely these statements would be taken executives never go to jail so let's be real but you know they would get fined certainly i mean like these this would be like a severe like sec problem like they would they would almost certainly have major problems if they were if they lied about this kind of stuff
almost as bad as elon musk's tweeting that's yeah that's yeah we'll get to that some other time i hope 20 million dollar tweet good job oh i wish he would just stop being like that yeah just stop being like him just keep making the awesome cars please stop tweeting
So it's worth listening to the latest upgrade, which is upgrade number 214, which actually has a journalist as part of the panel.
And so Jason Snell and Mike Hurley did a really good job of kind of dissecting all this.
The only thing I think that may be interesting for the three of us to really pontificate on is
Maybe this was covered in the Bloomberg piece that I didn't read because it was almost immediately debunked by everyone.
But what do you think is the attack vector here?
How do you make heads or tails of data anywhere on a machine without any context?
If you intercept an Ethernet cable...
Can you really tell what's going on there?
Where do you attack in order to get all of the things that are happening on a computer without context?
That's what I can't just put my finger on.
But if you're on the board, though, I don't think that's the most obvious attack factor.
I suppose you could do that.
But first of all, many things travel across a computer board in unencrypted form that are otherwise encrypted.
Because if encrypted data comes in over a network connection,
It is decrypted by the, you know, whatever software on your computer.
And the decrypted information is put into memory and read by programs.
Like that's how you render a web page when it's SSL, you know, HTTPS connection, right?
At some point, that information is decrypted inside the computer.
So in theory, if you were in the right place, you can intercept decrypted information because your computer has to decrypt it to use it.
And there you are.
But I don't think that's the vector.
I think the vector is more like...
BIOS and bootloaders like compromising the security of the hardware to allow you to pull down a compromised OS image right with like a rootkit on it or something like that you can subvert the hardware at the lowest level and then
you know like the assumption is oh we're running a trusted version of the os that we validated a trusted version of the firmware like everything is all great and validated if you can sneak in there and subvert that and say we can load any arbitrary binary onto your system unbeknownst to you replacing a binary that you thought was your validated version but it's actually now we're going to replace it with our version and that piece of software
has a backdoor in it, logs everything that is typed on the keyboard, attached to the computer, watches all network traffic for certain information and relays it.
There's still difficulties, like Amazon was saying, these computers in question have no way to communicate on the network.
Every one of these companies watches egress from the network like a hawk and has it all locked down.
So it's not easy, but if you can get in at the hardware level, there's all sorts of very nefarious things you can do.
One of the most interesting stories I saw about this was a...
security researcher i forget who if we had been talking about this i would have collected more links but uh who had written up for like one of those security conferences i don't know if it was black hat but one of those similar things like let me show you all the cool exploits you could do if you could get onto the motherboards of this hardware
And he did a bunch of proof concepts and had ideas about it and suggested ways you could hide the hardware and, you know, all sorts of stuff.
And this Bloomberg story basically includes every single thing he talked about exactly the way he talked about it.
So as he said himself and the paraphrasing is basically either I'm incredibly good at predicting the future or
Or this story was massively influenced by, like, it doesn't mean that Bloomberg saw what he wrote and made up a story.
It just means, like, whoever the sources were perhaps saw his stuff and then fed Bloomberg information that exactly matched his ideas of how you could exploit this.
Like, literally every single thing, point by point.
You know, I said you could possibly do this.
And the Bloomberg story, they say somebody did do that.
And I said you could hide it here.
And the Bloomberg story says they hid it there.
And, like, it's weird.
Like, at this point, I think it's...
There's got to be something nefarious somewhere because all these supposedly validated sources have to have some motivation to be sources and to say, hey, Bloomberg, I've got information for you.
What their motivation is and why they're doing it and why they were able to seem credible to Bloomberg.
Eventually, we have to get to the real story, which is lots of theories about...
retaliation and trade wars with china to try to make it seem like china is exploiting stuff or trying to hurt tech companies or a stock of manipulation there's all sorts of motivations for this type of thing but hopefully in the end the real real story will come out and we'll know what the deal is but for now i'm content to believe that all the secret exploits inside the data centers of all the biggest tech companies remain totally hidden
Because that's all you can say.
You can't say, I'm sure everything's secure because this story is BS.
This story may very well be 100% BS.
You still just don't really know, do you?
You just don't really know.
Yeah, I just... When you look at all the... Everything's come out since then.
All these...
pretty, very, very firm, very high-risk denials from all the companies, the corroborating denials from the British and U.S.
intelligence agencies or whoever they are.
The chance that Bloomberg is right in the face of all that, and not to mention what you mentioned with the guy who gave them an interview, and then they basically said all of his theoreticals, they basically said that as fact.
It just seems very unlikely that any part of this is true.
I 100% blame Bloomberg for this.
Like, I don't think this was necessarily nefarious.
Like, I don't think we know enough yet to say whether it was, like, intentional, you know, stock manipulation or – but I do think it was –
motivation for this like there has to someone has to have bad motives because if it all isn't true someone is taking untrue information either just making it up themselves and printing it which is unlikely i think or being this being a source sources coming to bloomberg and saying here's this information which is not true but they are they're intentionally feeding false information so that's a nefarious motivation they must be feeding false information for a reason
It could be a misunderstanding somewhere along the way.
It could also just be confirmation bias.
I've had so many... I've seen so many instances, both stories I'm involved in and stories I'm not, where a journalist or their editor really wants to make a story true.
And so they will...
Basically, talk to sources until the source tells them what they want to hear or until they hear what they want to hear, even if the source never even said it.
And it's not necessarily malicious.
It's just like human nature.
You want so badly for this thing to be true that you think is true that you will find evidence of it, even if that evidence isn't real or doesn't actually support the conclusion you're trying to write about.
And so that's a natural thing that happens.
The real crazy part here is these are very, very serious allegations against very big companies and massive world governments.
And a major publication appears not to have done enough diligence on vetting this before making it a very high profile story.
That is the crazy thing to me, because I really don't believe a shred of this.
I don't think this story is true at all.
I think we have a lot of evidence on the other side, and we have nothing on the side of it being true, except Bloomberg saying, we say it's true, but it really appears like a massive case of negligence on Bloomberg's part.
But yeah, but it was like, it's so easy to validate if these things are out there, especially because the story specifically says that they were discovered by some companies.
Like, you should be able to verify all of that.
Like, everyone, if this is a widespread problem and some companies already discovered it, I mean, the only possible explanation would be, yeah, they discovered it, but they're just not saying anything about it because it's super secret.
Like...
The conspiracy theory you have to spin to make the Bloomberg story actually truthful gets bigger and bigger and more ridiculous by the day because it's the type of thing that it's not it's not just one tiny isolated thing.
It's so widespread and so large and such large numbers and like it's totally under their control to detect.
They can take the boards out.
They can put them on a microscope.
They can, you know, examine it like it's the type of thing that if you know it's supposedly there and you know where to look for it.
or how to look for it, you would find it if it was there.
Obviously, if you don't know to look for it or slipped under your radar, you might not see it.
But once the story is out, certainly you're going to look at the stuff and it's messed up.
That's why I think for this to be true, it requires such craziness to actually be true and so many people to be lying and outright.
But if instead you say it looks like Bloomberg was wrong and is...
either really afraid to admit it or really in denial that they're wrong or too proud to admit it.
Um, either like what they, what they have done here is so incredibly damaging and so incredibly irresponsible that they could really be sued big time for this.
Like Bloomberg, I'm saying like they could, they, they have a serious problem on their hands if this is wrong and it sure looks like it's wrong.
I don't think Apple would sue them.
Uh,
I think Apple has done enough, and I don't think they would want the bad PR of suing a journalistic entity.
That's pretty bad PR for a big company.
But what Bloomberg has done appears to be so neglectful and so potentially nefarious that it wouldn't surprise me if somebody sues them in a really big way.
Yeah.
Like I said, just listen to Upgrade.
There's a lot of good stuff there.
It's worth your time.
Moving on to Ask ATP, Bastian Anuk writes, storyboards for iOS development, yay or nay?
And if you're not familiar with iOS development, there's basically three mechanisms to generate a user interface that I can think of off the top of my head.
You can write a bunch of code.
You can handle each user interface, and I'm oversimplifying a little bit, as an individual item, and that's typically referred to as nibs, or you can use a relatively comparatively new technology called storyboards where you have many different screens all in one file.
And this is one of those things like Objective-C or Swift that everyone has an opinion about and nobody agrees on, and I expect that that's going to happen again momentarily.
I have used both professionally.
So I tend to come down in favor of storyboards because that's clearly where Apple wants you to be.
That used to provide things like you can do – I forget the term for it now off the top of my head.
But you can do table view cells and things like that in storyboards very easily.
There's ways to do it with nibs, but it's not quite so simple.
And there's a few other things like maybe safe area insets.
There's other things that were only in storyboards that never made it to nibs.
The problem with storyboards, though, is that they are just a wonderful place to have tremendous merge conflicts.
And if you have storyboards that are more than a screen or two and a team of more than one, it gets real ugly real quick.
So I'm in favor of storyboards.
And if you don't like storyboards, I'm still in favor of nibs.
I personally do not think the writing code for everything way is a smart call because all code is evil.
But Marco, tell me why I'm wrong.
I don't necessarily think you are wrong.
I don't use a lot of storyboards.
I do almost all of my interface work in code using auto layout and my compact constraint library, which is basically a fancy version of auto layout syntax that you can do really easily in code with a combination of that and the kind of ASCII based auto layout syntax.
I forget what it's called.
Visual format language.
That's it.
VFL.
Yeah, the visual format language.
You're right.
So I do all my interfaces like that, but that does bring issues.
You know, it makes it harder to accommodate for things like dynamic text or new screen sizes just because, like, there's more places to check.
There's more work to be done.
Certain areas of development you need to use a storyboard for, like the launch thing or, like, watch kit stuff is all storyboard-based.
So, like, there's certain areas where, like, you just kind of need that development.
And that is clearly where Apple is investing their time.
They're investing their time in the tooling and the capabilities and making things easy for you if you use storyboards.
So there's a huge argument to say just use storyboards because when you're fighting Apple on fewer fronts, things are easier for you.
However, with storyboards and with nibs before them, there are certain walls that you just hit.
And
They have done a really good job of reducing these walls over time so that storyboards are now more capable, more flexible than ever.
And there's fewer and fewer areas that you'll run into where like you just can't do this in a good way with a storyboard and you have to switch to code.
But there are still areas like that and there are still downsides to using it, using storyboards in certain ways.
There are things like using custom controls where you can do the IB designable stuff and make your custom control appear in Interface Builder in a useful way.
But that's really buggy and is difficult.
If you're a storyboard-heavy workflow, you end up doing a lot of supporting work
to enable the storyboard and that might for certain use cases that might be more work than it would have been to just write the thing in code in the first place so it's it's a it's a debate that is not it doesn't have an easy answer but i lean towards just use storyboards because that's what apple wants you to do and that's what they're going to make easy that being said i don't do that because that's me
Yeah, and just I would love for Apple to do something about making it easier for multiple people to work on storyboards at the same time.
And I don't know how to do that because it's just like, you know, the XeProj files.
Or if you're a Windows person, like the Visual Studio solution and project files, it's just hard to have a scenario where multiple people can modify them and things don't just go straight to hell.
So I still encourage storyboards, but be careful.
Working with people is overrated.
Does that mean I'm fired?
Spencer Wollers writes, what's the worst compromise, a fusion drive or a hybrid car?
Assume modern implementations of both.
I thought this was really clever.
I think I would rather have a fusion drive and avoid the hybrid car.
But it's a tough call.
And I say that because having never actually used a fusion drive, to be fair, it seems like
there are not many compromises outside of them still not working with APFS.
Is that right, John?
No, they do.
Okay, there you go.
So there's few compromises in theory, and it would solve a lot of computing problems in theory.
And when everything works great, it's fairly transparent.
Whereas I would say that your typical hybrid car, and I'm thinking more of an economy hybrid car, John's about to swoop in with some sort of like NSX something or other.
um but it's pronounced ns10 well done sir uh anyways uh i think that i would you know unless you go into the hypercar territory i would be more displeased by a hybrid car than a than a fusion drive that wasn't the question he was gonna make it about you what's the worst compromise not which would you rather have all right fine the worst compromise is still the fusion drive don't at me marco what do you think marco
A fusion drive is a pretty poor compromise because you do start hitting weird speed issues pretty often.
It's hard to predict and inconsistent, and those are not good qualities for a performance-critical part of anything to have, especially your computer.
And ignoring John's complaint for a second, if I were choosing for myself...
I would choose the hybrid car because I don't like either of these things, but I spend a lot more time using my computer than using my car.
That's interesting.
I think I would... The problems of a hybrid car, which are many, I think the biggest problem to me of a hybrid car, besides the massive weight that they would tend to have because they have all of everything, is just the massive complexity they tend to have.
Hybrid cars, you have an entire electric drivetrain and an entire gas drivetrain and all the parts that both of those things need.
So it's a...
I recognize their importance for environmentalism to kind of bridge the gap until we get all electric.
But just as a concept, on principle, they're incredibly complicated.
And I don't like the idea of requiring all of those parts for all of those systems in this car as opposed to just picking one and sticking with that one and making that one really efficient and whatever else.
So the Fusion Drive, though, Fusion Drive is, again, it's a bridge technology.
It's a hack.
It's a way to get...
near where we want to be which is all SSD but without having to pay the costs and so it's you know it's actually a very good parallel but the downsides of a fusion drive are constant in use in the sense that like if that's all you have if that's all you can afford fine it's fine it's better than a pure hard drive but it's not nearly as good as a pure SSD I would pick the hybrid car and I think the hybrid car might even be the better compromise because
A fusion drive is unpredictable in how it will perform in a very critical way to the computer.
Whereas a hybrid car, much of the time that you're driving it, you could totally forget that it's a hybrid car.
Now, what if you didn't live on your computer like you do?
Same thing.
I think the, I mean, it depends on how, you know, if I use my computer an hour a week, then maybe I might make a different decision.
But I still stand by my last sentence there, which is like a hybrid car, like you don't notice its downsides most of the time while driving it.
You know, you notice when something breaks or needs to be serviced or wears out, but like for the most part, you don't notice its downsides most of the time.
Whereas a Fusion Drive makes itself apparent more often in use.
John?
I just want to correct one of the things that Marco said.
I don't think hybrid cars weigh more on average than an electric car with the same range.
They weigh less.
So, yes, they do have all of everything, and the complexity is for sure there compared to an electric car.
But they weigh less because they have very dinky gas motors, and you get huge range from a very small gas tank, and they have very small batteries as opposed to one giant hunk of batteries.
So that's not a reason to dislike hybrid cars.
What's the worst compromise?
I'm going to agree with both of you and say Fusion Drive, but for a slightly different reason.
So judging what's a good compromise, what's not, in the moment, both a hybrid car and a Fusion Drive are similar.
In the beginning, I was having trouble picking which one is the worst compromise because they're very similar compromises.
It's like...
You can't go all the way for, you know, basically for cost reasons.
So how can you get the reasonable compromise that gives you the speed of an SSD without the cost?
How can you get, you know, something that gives you a gas mileage, better gas mileage, but you can't afford to use a full battery pack, right?
Because it just costs too much money.
But the Fusion Drive is worse because in its relevant realm, storage for computers, the rate of advancement is such that that compromise quickly becomes...
you know moot like flash storage is so cheap now that it's very hard to recommend a fusion drive as a reasonable compromise more in the beginning it was reasonable but very quickly it became unreasonable whereas hybrid cars have been a very reasonable compromise for a long time they were they existed way before the fusion drive and they will exist way after the fusion drive and
mostly because the full solution that you know complete electric is still very very expensive um if you want to get the same range if you want to get you know a car with a 300 mile range that's all electric it's just much more expensive than a car with 300 mile range that's a hybrid a car with 300 mile range is a hybrid you can get for like 20k like if you buy you know a dinky econo box right um but fusion drives are
Like now, you know, flash storage is so much cheaper than it used to be.
Like, you know, the SSD that's sitting on my computer now, you know, I only bought it a few years ago.
Already I can get over a half or a quarter of the price depending on how much I want the performance to go down.
So Fusion Drives are worse compromised because they had a shorter lifetime, whereas the lifetime of the hybrid drivetrain has been much longer already and will continue to live on because despite all the complexity, taking a very well-known technology...
you know, the internal combustion engine and making a small, very efficient, you know, Atkinson cycle version of that and supplementing it with a fairly small battery, perhaps even using cheaper battery technology like nickel metal hydride instead of lithium ion and combining them and what is a fairly complex system, but it's cheap enough to put in, you know, a Toyota Prius, you end up with...
something that gets better mileage than a gas vehicle that isn't as expensive as a full electric and that's what you've ended up with for a long time and it'll you know continue to live on so that that's how i came to my answer
Marc-Andre Wybazon writes, Since you are all car fans and each one of you owns at least one console, I wonder, do you enjoy racing games?
If so, which one is your favorite?
Let's go the reverse order.
John?
This is about being a car fan, so I bet they mean like, you know, Gran Turismo and Forza and stuff like that.
But I think the only racing games I've ever really enjoyed are...
you know the arcade kart racing game so mario kart obviously diddy kong racing was a favorite back in the day um i did play some of the wipeout series which marco will talk about in a second yep they never really grabbed me that much uh the the racing game i have been most into was mario kart double dash uh but in general the whole mario kart series i liked um
So I guess the answer to this question is in terms of racing games with realistic cars, I've never been into one.
I've never gone down that rabbit hole.
Marco?
Yeah, I'm with you on pretty much all that.
I know the kind of racing games that are like the super realistic racing simulators like Forza or Turismo or whatever.
I know what those are.
I've played them before.
I have never found them to be fun.
I think there's a it's really hard to make this kind of game realistic and fun to a general audience.
You know, like if you're like if you're super into racing realistically, then it might be fun to you.
But like I think to a general audience, that's not fun.
and so i prefer the games that are optimized for fun and don't go for realism basically at all and so uh you know mario kart is fantastic i think mario kart is probably the the best example series and i'm talking about basically the entire series of mario kart like it's basically the best example series of like fun raising also because like
for me a major part of racing fun is battle racing i love racing with weapons and that's always been a very fun category and so like mario kart is a very good example of that very accessible to lots of people you know multiplayer is also very important to the fun of racing games for me so multiplayer battle racing is my ideal that's the most fun to have with a racing game for me i find mario kart very very fun wipe out i found more fun as a single player thing because i just never could find anybody to play with me
um so i played a lot of single player wipe out uh and that was fun too that's it's also wipe out i had fun doing things like time trials like trying to get your time better and i recognize people are going to say immediately like that's what's fun about other racing games but yeah i know i know but i don't i don't find the driving mechanics of realistic racing games uh fun
but I do like things that are futuristic or cool or just comically ridiculous.
I really enjoyed, back on the original Xbox, I really enjoyed the early Burnout games because those were just completely ridiculous arcade racers where you drive your car and those are the ones that had the ridiculous crash sequences.
You'd crash your car into as many other cars as possible to get points and they would do slow-mo bullet time of the car crashes and you see everything breaking apart and that was really cool for 2005.
five or whatever yeah that so like I like fun racing games like that I don't like realistic racing games and I especially like battle racing multiplayer games and for me Mario Kart is the best example of that
I completely, wholly, and entirely agree with Mario Kart.
I have played Gran Turismo on and off in the past, and it's fun, I guess.
I don't know.
It seemed like a lot of work, like upgrading your car and earning new cars and stuff like that.
I'm going to give you two really bad answers, and then I'm going to redeem myself.
first of all, I played a crapload of Carmageddon, which was 1997.
I loved that game, which by probably any metric, it was not a very good game, but I loved it.
Oh, no, it was terrible.
But like, there's a whole category of games that are like, not good, but very fun.
And so Carmageddon was a great example of that.
I believe this was DOS, if I'm not mistaken, it was so old.
um i also really really really loved and played probably more of than almost any other human uh wave race for the nintendo 64 oh yeah i forgot about that that's not the other racing series that i really like but uh both the original and blue storm i think blue storm was head and shoulders the better game but i did actually get pretty heavily into blue storm until i started getting frustrated by the the rng of the waves killing my lap times yeah
you like things to be predictable in a racing game and waves are just not and i get that's the fun of the game but eventually i got like margo saying i do time trials in mario kart i was i would do time trials in uh in wave race uh and play against the computer players it just always annoyed me when a perfect run was ruined by like a rogue wave that hit at the wrong time
Yeah.
And so I loved Wave Race 64.
I didn't even realize that there was a Game Boy version until just a minute ago, getting the link for the show notes.
But I loved Wave Race 64.
I played the snot out of that game.
And at the time, seeing what appeared to be pretty realistic wave physics in a video game was mind-blowing.
Like you kids these days, born in 1991, you don't understand how amazing this was.
Because previously, when you played a racing or any game that involved water, the water was flat.
always no matter what and this thing it seemed to actually have water a lot more realistic water than anything else we had um and coincidentally my final answer which is the one that i think you guys would have approved of if you didn't approve of the other two and it it reads in the wave race 64 wikipedia entry it it reads the following i know what this is i
Originally referred to as F-Zero on water, and that is my final answer, F-Zero, which I played the ever-living crap out of.
I adored that game for the Super Nintendo, and I would play that forever if I could.
And what was really interesting about F-Zero is, and I'm sure there's a term for this, and I don't know what it is offhand, but the...
The vehicle was always in the exact same position on screen.
It was the track that was rotating.
Your view of the track was rotating around the vehicle.
It was super, super weird, but I loved that game, and I played the snot out of it on the Super Nintendo when I was a kid.
God, did I love that game.
Yeah, I played F-Zero too.
I would lump that in with Wipeout and the similar kind of futuristic racing thing.
The only interesting thing I remember about F-Zero, I mean, obviously they have the F-Zero themed cars in Mario Kart, so they kind of live on and there's the F-Zero courses in Mario Kart.
But the F-Zero Nintendo 64 game was, if my memory serves, 60 frames per second.
It was.
Which was unheard of on Nintendo 64 because it struggled to do like...
15 or 20 frames per second uh in in most normal games so they they sacrificed graphical fidelity for frame weight which i always respected them for yeah and like i remember when that came out and that like everyone knew that that was one of the things that made it special and and yeah i mean it was you know the tracks were really basic like geometric they're basically you know driving on a tube hey it's a tube like it was super simple but to see that smooth motion for like this very high speed racing game that was pretty fun i give them a lot of credit for that
I've never gotten too into F-Zero.
It's always been a fun thing.
I play for a few minutes, and then I don't care anymore because it hasn't captured my other desires for a racing game with the battle or stuff like that.
But it is a very well-done game.
I've got to give credit for that.
I wish they would bring back Wave Race because Blue Storm was...
A pretty amazing game.
The original one was a little clunky and it has a 164, but blue storm, because if you're into racing games and you think like, Oh, I play, I play realistic racing games.
I play the arcade racing games.
I kind of like racing games.
It is a different experience than I've ever had in any video game because the waves are such a factor.
Like, you can't just ignore them and they're not just scenery.
They are what you're doing.
You have to anticipate, look at, and play the waves.
And it's not true of most other racing games.
Even things with tracks that change or whatever, they're fairly predictable and not, like...
the moment-to-moment thing that you're doing, kind of like a skiing game or a snowboarding game or anything like that.
Again, similar racing games where you have to play the hill, but at least the hill, the hill is the hill.
It doesn't change shape that much.
The waves are ever-changing, and that's what you're playing when you play the racing game.
Yeah, there's the course, and there's the buoys or whatever you have to go between, but you're playing the water, and that is...
so different and so some people i think find disconcerting because they think they're good at racing games and then they play wave race and they just they stink and they're like well this game sucks how can you do anything the waves knock you all over the place uh you know if you have a gamecube line around check it out and i hope they bring that game back i don't remember they ever brought back a port for another one of the platforms but they should
I should, in top four style, I should give honorable mention to Cruisin' USA, which is probably the best arcade racing game that's ever been.
Don't at me.
Oh, come on.
I thought you were going to say Hydro Thunder before.
That was my next one.
I loved Hydro Thunder, which was just Cruisin' USA on water.
And Hydra Thunder was, both of them are really terrible by any true metric, but I loved both of them.
Oh, and speaking of, you know, so many racing games.
Super Sprint, do you remember that?
No.
You don't remember that.
That's before your time.
Am I getting the title right?
Anyone in the chat remember Super Sprint?
So it was a four-person arcade cabinet, kind of like Gauntlet, where all four people would stay around the same screen.
And there were four steering wheels.
uh and it was a top view of a track like a static top view of the track so you were looking down on the track oh this does look familiar with these little with these little tiny cars on it and you drive the cars around the course and like it was a dirt track and you're in like you know basically they look like remote control cars because they're remote control buggy cars like that's these are the big cars they're modeled on i forget what the you know dirt track cars are called and you of course you would skid around turns because dirt is loose and
and to go around each turn you would like spin the wheel and they were on like bearings like the wheel would spin so you go around a 90 degree turn and you'd spin the wheel and it would be spinning like like 17 rotations as you go it was totally unrealistic but it was so fun to spin the wheels and just like massively oversteer and then correct and counter steer as your little buggies and you could see everyone else on the course it was it was like it was like doing slot cars on dirt on a static thing all right anyway i i had a lot of fun with the game from spinning the wheel and
And the unique, very low-tech, here's the whole course, and you can see every single car on it.
Just drive your little car now.
Oh, wow.
That was a fun trip down memory lane.
Actually, a lot of this episode was a fun trip down memory lane.
Also, you're totally wrong.
The best arcade racer like that is Daytona USA.
No, no.
It was mostly after my time in the arcades.
Was that multiplayer, two-player?
Yeah, it was the time of the Sega Saturn.
So it was like the mid-90s to late-90s.
1993 limited release, full release of 1994.
Yeah.
Was that set alongside somebody at a second cabinet?
Yeah.
So you could link up up to either four or maybe even eight of them.
And it would cost a dollar per play.
Like it was like the expensive game in the arcade because there are these, you know, these big new machines.
But multiplayer to Tony USA was a lot of fun.
If you convince anybody else to spend a dollar on it, it was a lot of fun.
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Betterment, Molecule, and Mack Weldon.
And we'll talk to you next week.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
It's accidental.
Accidental.
They did enough.
The new BMW 3 Series has no stick shift in the United States, and apparently it's only going to have it on the small motors overseas.
The M3 still has it, though, right?
uh they haven't said one way the other yeah i'm pretty sure the m3 still does that was i think that might have been the backslide that i mentioned like there was a bunch it was going to be no sticks anywhere and then there was a couple of strategic backslides and i think a stick on the m3 was one of them it seems like the m3 would be the last bmw to offer a stick in the u.s outside of the u.s i don't know because that's it's people buy sticks outside the u.s for different reasons but in the u.s i would bet the m3 is the very last bmw car to have it
that i would probably agree with or maybe the m2 now that i think about it like i forgot they have like a they have like a billion different cars now so maybe now that they have like smaller m car maybe the m2 would be the last one to have it yeah i'm not sure i mean i don't think they've said anything about the m3 that i have seen but uh i mean it says here bmw announced tuesday that it will drop the manual transmission from its gas-powered platforms in the newest three series lineup
Makes me so sad.
They were supposed to hold out.
They were supposed to be the ones that held out longer than anyone else, and they failed us.
As soon as you stop buying them, they're like, well, we don't need them anymore.
Casey stopped buying BMWs.
It's true.
I'm sorry, everyone.
It's all my fault.
It is.
They would have only made it in white.
What are you going to do, John, when the Accord is next?
The cheap cars are going to hold on way longer than the fancy cars.
Like I said, Honda moves slowly.
So just sheer inertia and the fact that it takes them a really long time to do anything.
I feel like it'll hang on for a surprising amount of time.
Maybe not in the Accord, but like...
you know, the Civic and the Type R, like, just because it takes them a long time to change anything.
So, you know, I think I'll be able to buy at least one more Accord at some point.
Speaking of which, I got my new tires, remember, did I mention?
Yeah, yeah.
And they're working great, except for I have my alignment thing that I have to deal with, which drives me insane.
I honestly envy people who can't tell when their car is out of alignment.
but I can tell and it really bothers me.
So I got to get that done.
But now my wife messed up one of her tires.
So we're spending a lot of time at the tire store.
Oh God.
Oh yeah.
Those, those Boston winters, man.
Yeah.
Living in the Northeast, the best.
It's not winter.
I know it's not winter there yet, but it's the winters that destroy your roads, isn't it?
And the plows that are removing your 18 tons of snow.
Yeah, you should see the roads in front of my house.
It's ridiculous.
They're repaving a lot of stuff, just obviously not like the residential street in front of my house.
But the major roads, a lot of them are getting repaved.
And when they're in the process of repaving them, that's how you destroy your rims as you bang over helpfully spray-painted manhole protrusions at 50 miles an hour on a major highway.
It's like, oh, thanks.
You spray painted it pink.
Now, how am I supposed to navigate these five manhole covers that are all in a pattern that it's impossible for me to avoid if I'm in this lane?
Yeah.
It just makes me sad that the manual is leaving.
I mean, I know that it's coming.
I know it's a thing, but...
I enjoy it.
And everyone is quick to tell me how they're oftentimes less efficient, how they're oftentimes slower than a modern automatic, that the modern automatic's very good.
I know the ZF8 speed is very good, but it's more fun for me to drive with three pedals.
That's what I like.
And you should let people enjoy things.
I think you're still going to have that option in a lot of cars, but they're going to become increasingly fewer choices, and they're going to become increasingly higher-end sports cars.
Porsche is probably not going to stop offering them for a while in some of its cars.
Maybe not all of its cars, but maybe the smaller ones, like the Cayman or something.
Who knows?
I'm guessing there's going to be...
options like that or maybe like a miata like there's going to be options where you will still be able to get sticks but you know 20 years ago you could get a stick on lots of different cars and just you know now you can get them on very few we're still going to have options for a while i think but it's it's not going to necessarily be cars that you want or that you want to spend the money for
Yeah, like the BRZ, like those throwback type cars where it's like a small traditional sports car.
Speaking of the BRZ, by the way, the 2018 Accord beat the BRZ around the track in the lighting lap.
Really?
So that thing needs a bigger motor badly.
Oh, I could have told you that.
I've driven one.
They're hilariously underpowered.
But still, that's kind of embarrassing for a sporty looking car.
That was pretty funny, though.
also you know you know i mean this is kind of against the way we tend to do things but there's also like the the old car option like you could keep like a car in your garage that is you know your old nissan 350 you know white thing with the wheels wheels falling off like you could totally you've conflated like three different cars two of which i owned and one of which i did not i am very impressed 350 is the modern numbering it was 300 yeah
I had a 300ZX, but it was my Saturn that the wheel fell off, and then there exists a 350Z, which I have never owned.
My mistake.
Anyway, but I'm sure all three of them were white.
That's what matters.
You could always just buy a stick car for fun driving on the side or on the weekends, or just make it your regular car and just tolerate the maintenance.
A lot of people do that.
That's totally an option.
If I really wanted to buy a stick car today,
I could go, you know, try to find one today or I could, you know, go buy my MR2 and drive it slowly around town as its death trap.
Like that's I can do that.
I have that option.
I wouldn't recommend it necessarily, but that option exists.
You know, it doesn't you don't have to be driving a stick all the time or as your everyday car.
And it doesn't have to be a new car for you to still have this as a thing you can do when you want to have some fun.
That reminds me, I have not caught up with any of my YouTube subscriptions, of which I do not have many.
But one of the regular car reviews that that I've seen has been posted in the last month or two is a 300 wheel horsepower MR2, which I'm sure is right up your alley.
And how do they do this?
I'm going to guess the answer is turbochargers.
Yeah, I think that is exactly the right answer.
Now, if you are listening to this, listener, and you have never seen... They installed some large pipes in the back.
That's a turbocharger.
If you've never seen regular car reviews, it is pretty deeply offensive.
And that's kind of the shtick.
So understand what you're getting into.
And I find it interesting and actually fairly well written if you can get past...
all the misogyny which may or may not be for show i can't tell if it's legitimate and real or if it doesn't really matter for a certain point it does not matter but yeah fair point for sure so anyway so the dude that does it is it has it has a appearance of being extremely misogynistic so be forewarned but i do think the reviews the reviews are interesting and he i think it was like an english major in college or something like that so he makes these really interesting often literary uh comparisons to these cars that i never would have expected but
I have not watched this particular video, but it is apparently a 300 horsepower MR2.
I think this is the era that you cared for, right, Marco?
Yes, it is.
See, there you go.
So I'll have to watch that later.
I have so much homework this episode.
What the hell's going on?
Sorry.
God.
Boy, that is a nice looking car.
The problem is like it's a nice looking car like from some angles, not from all angles.
Like that's kind of the problem like all like, you know, 80s and 90s cars have like looking back on old cars.
Some of them have timeless designs.
Some of them have sort of time full designs.
Some of them have like, you know, more time sensitive angles than others.
I don't know.
But I still would love to drive one of these sometime.
I've still never driven one.
It's going to drive like a noisy, low Honda Civic.
I know.
Yeah, I know.
Maybe it's probably better that I haven't ever driven one.
I think maybe that would ruin the appeal for me because I would realize... Because it was never actually a really good car and it's old.
Right, right.
But it has T-tops, man.
Does anybody even make T-tops anymore?
They do.
Nope.
Porsche makes them.
Porsche makes a Targa, which is basically a T-top.
Targa, it's not the same.
It's close enough.
Is it just like the Boxster with a T-top, basically?
No, it's not the same.
The removable hard roof thing.
Right, but there's no T to it.
You know, the entire roof comes out.
Arga?
Targa, T-A-R-G-A.
With no T, you missed the joke.
No.
Got it.
All right.
I thought Fit and Porsche make one that actually had a T in it at one point years and years ago.
Maybe.
Maybe.
I just now realized that YouTube honors the backward, forward, and play, pause keystrokes from Final Cut Pro.
So J, K, and L. J to go back, K to play, pause, and L to go forward.
Do you think those are from Final Cut Pro?
Well, what are they from, Mr. Fancy?
V.I.
Oh, God, you would.
Sorry, that's what that... You monster.