Mutually Assured Destruction
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
I mean, on the one side, a little sliver of me does feel ever so slightly bad, but 99% of me is like, you f***ers deserve this.
Marco:
Yeah, we'll get to it.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Just such, such obnoxious bastards.
Marco:
Save it.
Marco:
Save it.
Marco:
Save it.
Marco:
Save it for the show.
Marco:
This is a show we're about to do, including this topic.
Casey:
Well, because the problem is I need to get the obnoxious bits out of my system so I don't say obnoxious s*** on the show.
Yeah.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Casey:
It gets me so fired up.
Marco:
Wait, all this time, am I supposed to have been doing that instead of saying all my obnoxious stuff on the show?
Marco:
You say it, then you just edited it out.
John:
You just edited out the things that you said that you didn't want to be in there.
John:
Well, most of them.
Casey:
We should dive right in, and I need to apologize for all three of us, but particularly me.
Casey:
Last episode, we were talking about how the kids these days, the youths, have ways to accomplish what basically Instagram Close Friends does.
Casey:
And I was real smug last week because I knew about this, and I knew the name of this.
Casey:
And I forget exactly what I said, but spoiler alert, it was wrong.
Casey:
So anyway, so I forget what I called it.
Casey:
Maybe I called it...
Casey:
fake Instagram or something.
Casey:
But what I was thinking of and couldn't actually emit from my body was Finsta, F-I-N-S-T-A, which does stand for fake Instagram.
Casey:
I can't remember what I called it last week.
Casey:
It doesn't really matter.
Casey:
But yeah, it's Finsta.
Casey:
That is the kind of like casual Instagram that all the youths are doing.
Casey:
And I don't know why I didn't remember that.
Casey:
I was so smug about it because I was like, oh, I know this.
Casey:
Oh, Friendstagram.
Casey:
Thank you, Brian Mitchell.
Casey:
It was Friendstagram that I said, God, is that right?
John:
Well, Friendstagram actually makes sense as a name.
John:
Finsta and spam account, both are the opposite of what they mean because like a spam account, it's like where – well, I guess it depends on what you mean by spam.
John:
But I feel like it's – your fake Instagram is the most real because it's the one where you are the least fake.
John:
The actual fake one is the one where you present your beautiful life.
John:
And spam like –
Casey:
implies bad yeah i mean maybe you're saying if i have a garbage picture i put it on my spam account yeah i think that's some sense and quantity there's just a lot of it because you don't care as much to your point but yeah i'm with you yeah for instagram does make more sense once you try to you can try to make that happen in case you know it's it's that's gonna happen right after fetch anyway i apologize that we're all old men and we really screwed that up and this will teach me never to be smug about thinking that i'm not old because i am indeed old i do not apologize for being old
Marco:
No, I'm a little confused.
Marco:
So is the Finsta the one that you show everyone or the one that you show only your friends?
Marco:
No, it's the one you show only your friends.
Marco:
So it doesn't make any sense.
Marco:
But it stands for fake?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Correct.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm too old to understand this.
John:
Kids are dumb.
Casey:
We got to move on.
Casey:
We're too old.
Casey:
I just wanted to apologize for being old.
John:
John does not, though.
John:
Stop including me.
John:
It's just Marco and Casey are self-hating old people.
John:
I am not.
No.
Casey:
I think it's just that I don't want to speak for Marco, but I'm still clinging to the thought that I have some amount of awareness of what the kids are doing these days.
Casey:
And no, I don't.
Casey:
I really don't.
Casey:
I just need to embrace it.
Casey:
So anyway, moving on.
Casey:
We talked last week about this quote unquote stage light effect on MacBooks and MacBook Pros where there's like a series of spotlights.
Casey:
It almost looks like coming from the bottom of the display.
Casey:
An anonymous person wrote in and said, I work as a genius at a very busy Apple store, and my colleagues and I triage and repair literally hundreds of Macs a week.
Casey:
When there's a genuine manufacturing or design fault that affects a significant portion of devices for a particular model, it is very quickly and unambiguously obvious.
Casey:
what it is and the exact symptoms and so on and so forth.
Casey:
I'm paraphrasing here.
Casey:
For instance, the keyboard issues in the post-2016 MacBook Pros were definitely a real problem and the eventual, what is it, repair extension program?
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
Everyone kind of thought that was coming, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
Anyway, so this anonymous genius says, you know, all of us were really honestly baffled about the brouhaha about the stage lighting thing because they apparently have seen no pattern or increased symptoms from their customers and they see a lot of customers.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
This individual is actually asked around, and apparently nobody really knows what we were talking about last week.
Casey:
Now, granted, we were just going off of the news reports that we had read, so maybe we got hoodwinked by some fake news.
Casey:
I don't know.
John:
We usually don't have access to this type of information because it's not as if Apple has some sort of giant dashboard showing the prevalence of repairs.
John:
This is not public information, right?
John:
So when we see a story that says, there's a problem with Apple product or whatever –
John:
The only things we have to judge it by are like, how many people do we personally know who that happened to?
John:
And we know a lot of people who know a lot of people who use Apple products.
John:
So that's something.
John:
And also the reputation of whatever website is that is publishing the information.
John:
In this case, I forget where this was.
John:
Maybe it was Apple Insider or something.
John:
It's very easy for just one person who has a problem to be angry about it and get it.
John:
put it online and make it seem like it's an epidemic but the obviously apple knows for sure uh but they're not talking so having sort of leaks like this from anonymous geniuses i think they carry a lot of weight assuming they're actually true um because you know i said to this person's point a single store does see hundreds and hundreds of macs a week and so that's a pretty good sample size and then they may not know other people who work in other apple stores and kind of the word kind of gets around like that it's not if there actually is a widespread problem
John:
they are in the best position to know outside of the people who keep the spreadsheets back at Apple.
John:
So we'll see if we hear about this problem anymore or if it was just a thing that a few people got and were mad about, but it is not an actual epidemic like the keyboard issues.
Casey:
John, you want to tell me about the silence of Siri and other Internet of Things information?
John:
Yeah, we got a lot of feedback about my little smart outlet and my experiences with Siri.
John:
One thing I was speculating about was I was asking if HomeKit knew what room it was in and if it was using that information to determine whether it talked back to me.
John:
Pretty much everybody said, yeah, it should know what room it's in.
John:
My HomePod actually is in the same room as the outlets.
John:
And in theory, if it's in the same room as the outlets and I ask the HomePod to turn the lights on or off,
John:
It shouldn't talk back to me at all.
John:
Some people had interesting theories about when HomePod decides to talk back to you.
John:
I didn't really test any of these, and I'm not sure if they're based on documentation or just like a notion.
John:
One person, I think my favorite one said, if you're far away or if you yell...
John:
It will talk back to you to confirm, which I don't know if that's true.
John:
Like far away, my voice would be faint, but yelling, it would be loud.
John:
Very confusing.
John:
Most people agree, though, if you were in a different room.
John:
So if you ask it to turn off or on something that's not in the same room as the HomePod, it will talk back.
John:
all that said my home pod has always been in the same room as these outlets and it has talked back to me occasionally why i don't know so there's this mystery still abound but they're in theory it should be able to do this and so same thing with the other devices the amazon echo devices like they they have room awareness you can place things in a room and in general they try to be silent or less verbose if you're doing something in the same room if the thing you're talking is in the same room as the devices so that's good to know uh in practice
John:
It hasn't talked back to me for a while now, so maybe, I don't know, maybe it's just holding a grudge or it's giving me the silent treatment, but either way, I'm liking it.
Casey:
Moving on, but in the same vein, wrote that he was involved in creating a technology known as wireless accessory config or WAC.
Casey:
This is a Apple technology that allows an app developer to basically load the current Wi-Fi information onto an external device.
Casey:
And this was in the context of John saying that, oh, my smart outlet, you know, just kind of by magic figured out what my Wi-Fi information was, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
He wrote this mechanism or was involved in this mechanism that does this.
Casey:
And he said, you know, Apple was sick of the Wi-Fi network dance that we had to go through for these accessories and decided it was a problem worth solving on the platform level.
Casey:
It's available to any MFI partner for both AirPlay and HomeKit accessories.
Casey:
And you can turn on the entitlement for your app in Xcode to allow it to find and configure these accessories as well, which I thought was pretty cool.
Casey:
And apparently it does automate the whole drop off your Wi-Fi thing.
Casey:
connect to the device's Wi-Fi, upload the information, then get back on your regular Wi-Fi dance, which is what I had said that I had to do by hand with a lot of this stuff.
Casey:
I didn't realize, because I'd seen this happen before where it just works by magic and you don't have to go to settings and change Wi-Fi access points, whatever.
Casey:
Well, apparently this is just automating that whole thing.
Casey:
And that was surprising to me.
Casey:
I guess I should have guessed, but I didn't realize it was just automating that whole dance.
John:
He also provided links to some patents that are related to this type of technology.
John:
It's got a name, it's got an acronym, but as is the case with a lot of stuff in HomeKit, this is one thing Apple's been smart about with HomeKit, but it's also historically been a weakness of HomeKit.
John:
As far as you're concerned, it's just this one thing called HomeKit.
John:
And it has been difficult for devices to get qualified with HomeKit either because you have to go through this testing and you have to buy a bunch of stuff from Apple and it could be expensive.
John:
And like they had all these problems in the beginning.
John:
There was if if you got a HomeKit device, it had a good user experience.
John:
But there are far more devices from other manufacturers just because what they had was simpler or cheaper or less of a hassle to get done or, you know, all sorts of things.
John:
And Apple's been changing that slowly, but still, the idea that there's one thing you look for, this works with HomeKit.
John:
And under that umbrella, you get a bunch of stuff like this, a technology whose name nobody probably even knows or cares about, that basically just makes the experience better, is one thing that's attracting me to the HomeKit ecosystem.
John:
Despite the fact that the other Internet of Things ecosystems seem much larger and more diverse, I'm impressed with...
John:
how much the core experience of HomeKit is polished.
John:
I know people say, well, you can't do as much with HomeKit as you can do with other things, and that's undoubtedly true, but I do like the fact that the main gameplay loop, God, I don't know why I've been playing too much Destiny, the main gameplay loop in HomeKit seems to work well.
Wow.
John:
Had a rough day in Destiny today.
Casey:
Do you want to talk about it?
John:
Oh, man.
John:
We have so much stuff.
John:
Don't worry about it.
John:
Thank God.
Casey:
Oh, thank God.
Casey:
I mean, I'm sorry for your bad day, John.
John:
I can put it in that.
John:
It wasn't as bad as when I lost all my legendary charts, but don't worry about it.
Casey:
Well, I am sending good destiny thoughts your way or something.
Marco:
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Casey:
There has been some interesting things going on in the Apple ecosystem over the last, I don't know, 48 hours.
Casey:
This began, I don't know, like six months ago, a year ago, something like that, with this thing that Facebook created, which was called Onavo, and I'm probably pronouncing that wrong, but Onavo Protect.
Casey:
And my recollection of this was that it was pitched as one of those VPNs, like the ones that have sponsored this show, I believe, in the past, but sleazy instead of the ones that have sponsored, which are not sleazy.
Casey:
And really the point of this VPN, if you peel back all the layers of the onion, was to be able to sniff all of these people's network data to see where they're going, what they're doing, who they're interacting with, etc.,
Casey:
And this was called Facebook's Onavo Protect app.
Casey:
And once Apple got wind of what was really going on here, which again was like six months or a year ago or something like that, they forced Facebook to remove it from the app store.
Casey:
And that did happen.
Casey:
Fast forward a few months, and it seems that Facebook kind of white-labeled and to some degree rebranded the exact same app.
Casey:
and started distributing it via enterprise deployment.
Casey:
Generally speaking, when you deploy to the App Store, you give your binary to Apple, and you've signed it with your developer certificate, and then Apple signs it again with their certificate and puts it on the App Store, and then in theory, anyone can download it.
Casey:
With enterprise deployment, it's kind of sort of a deliberate backdoor to that.
Casey:
It's a deliberate and blessed backdoor to that where you can ask Apple, hey, we would like to distribute some things internally.
Casey:
And internally is the key there.
Casey:
Let's say you work for Acme Widgets Incorporated and you have a company directory.
Casey:
Well, you don't want your company directory on the App Store, and it's probably useless even to put it behind a login on the App Store.
Casey:
The writer answer, arguably, is to distribute it internally only to your own people.
Casey:
And so somewhere within your company's intranet, you would have a link to where you could install the Acme widget company directory.
Casey:
And in order to do that, like I said, you have to go to Apple and say, hey, we would like to distribute stuff internally.
Casey:
And they say, okay, sure, here's a certificate with which you can use to do that.
Casey:
And then through some magic, if you give the person a link to the app, to the bundle, the IPA that is the app, they can install it and run it.
Casey:
Well, Facebook leveraged this in order to basically redistribute this Onavo Protect app outside of their internal people.
Casey:
So what they did was they signed basically the exact same app, but with their internal enterprise distribution certificate such that they can get around the App Store.
Casey:
Well, Apple found out about it.
Casey:
And they got angry.
Casey:
But before we talk about that, does my quasi summary of enterprise distribution, does that ring basically true to you guys?
Casey:
Or would you like to refine anything I just said?
John:
I think I'd add is that they, uh,
John:
as you said, they reskinned the app or redistributed.
John:
A couple people did class dumps on it, and so they didn't even rename all the ONV prefixed classes and functions.
John:
It was sort of the... I mean, what could they have really done?
John:
The bottom line is the functionality of the app was going to get them in trouble no matter what, but they didn't even make the most trivial effort to hide themselves.
John:
All they did was basically change the name of the app and maybe reskin it, but it was literally all the same source code underneath.
John:
And
John:
It's sort of an amazing pattern of behavior where you get banned with cause.
John:
You're doing a thing you're not supposed to do.
John:
You get booted out of the app store and you immediately say, we need to find a way to distribute this outside the app store.
John:
How can we do that?
John:
You're not chastened.
John:
You don't think we have to find a new way to get the information we need or whatever.
John:
You just immediately switch gears and say, how can we work around this ban?
John:
Which is...
John:
I feel like that's the instinct.
John:
You see this sometimes.
John:
I can't recall any specific stories, but when it's a young, usually lone, inexperienced developer who gets a ban or some other ruling from the app store that they think is unfair, and their immediate reaction is to find a way to fight back, to try to get around the ban, to try to circumvent it, to try to find some way that they can find a loophole, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And it ends up in this back and forth.
John:
And each time they go back and forth, Apple gets angrier and angrier and gets bigger and bigger bands until they are no longer a developer on the App Store at all.
John:
And then they get a fake credit card.
John:
It escalates in a way that you usually only see when it's just a petulant 20-something versus Apple.
John:
This is not a petulant 20-something.
John:
It is a very large, very important corporation acting like a petulant 20-year-old.
Casey:
Which is of no great surprise.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
So Apple catches wind of this, and this happened late Tuesday.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
We're recording this late Wednesday.
Casey:
And Apple caught wind of this, and nobody really knew what they were going to do because Facebook has done a lot of really sheisty and shady stuff in the past.
Casey:
And it seems from an outsider's perspective that they've gotten some slaps on the wrist.
Casey:
Some may be harder than others, but mostly has been able to do whatever the crap they want because, hey, they're Facebook.
Yeah.
Casey:
So this morning, Wednesday morning, Apple decided to pull, if we understand things correctly, there was a little bit of debate about this, but it sounds like Apple decided to pull their enterprise distribution certificate, which means that this rebadged Facebook or Navajo Protect app did, in fact, go away.
Casey:
Because when all of these iPhones went to run it, presumably at some point or another, they would phone home and verify that the certificate is still valid, and Apple would tell them, oh, no, it's not.
Casey:
And they wouldn't run this app.
Casey:
That in and of itself, okay, good.
Casey:
What I find fascinating about this, though, is it seems like they pulled the entire enterprise distribution certificate, which is, I know what I just said, but what that means is all of Facebook's internal apps, like their Acme widget company directory, in this case, the Facebook company directory, that stopped working.
Casey:
Apparently, these poor, poor souls couldn't use their app in which they order food.
Casey:
They would have to actually get up and walk to the free restaurant and talk to someone to order their food.
Casey:
See, I'm getting angry again.
Casey:
Cruel and unusual.
Casey:
I'm getting angry again.
Marco:
And all their internal beta testing of all their apps.
Marco:
This is usually how big companies do internal beta testing.
Marco:
It's a lot easier than the other methods.
Marco:
It's a big deal.
Marco:
They lost all of their internal apps that they were assigning with their enterprise certificate, which on a number of levels is the result of incredible brazenness and also stupidity.
Marco:
This is not a decision by Apple to...
Marco:
interpret a rule differently or to punish facebook for you know because they don't like them apple is very clear with enterprise distribution certificates and like the agreement that you agree to when you get one it's very very clear that it is for internal use by your own employees only it is not for any kind of public distribution they couldn't possibly be more clear about that but
Marco:
And so Facebook literally sending this out to people in the public brazenly because they knew they're Facebook, they're invincible.
Marco:
They deserve every single bit of this.
Marco:
Every drop of the inconvenience this causes their employees, every single minute of the wasted time that they're going to have to spend working with this problem and then hopefully routing around it in some way for themselves.
Marco:
They deserve every single bit of this because they were literally...
Marco:
blatantly flagrantly violating the very clear rules of this like it's not even close it isn't up for interpretation it isn't apple you know overreaching like it's a very clear cut and dry like facebook knew exactly what they were doing they knew exactly that they were violating this agreement completely both in spirit and in letter of the law and they violated anyway and they got hit for it and i don't know how anybody at facebook can possibly complain as a result of this
John:
It's a double whammy, too, because remember, the reason this was banned from the app store is because the app itself violates Apple's rules for data selection and everything.
John:
So this is already like the got banned from the app store, not because Apple was a media, but because the app was just collecting too much data or violating Apple's rules on how much data you're allowed to harvest from your users.
John:
Right.
John:
So this is an app that wasn't allowed on the App Store.
John:
The app itself, by itself, does sneaky, gross things, which is why Facebook is paying people to install it because who else has any motivation to install a thing that's going to monitor every single thing you do and report it back to Facebook, right?
John:
And then on top of that, the whole thing is we have this app and we're told that it violates rules for privacy or whatever.
John:
They don't come back and say, is there a way that we can learn what we want to learn about our customers without...
John:
You know, without basically watching everything that they do thing that they do and violating their privacy.
John:
No, they say, let's take the application as it exists and find a way to distribute it.
John:
So it's a double double violation.
John:
Right.
John:
So it's yeah, it's doing a bad thing, getting caught and then doing a bad thing by violating a different rule.
Marco:
yeah it on so many levels this is like it is inexcusable it is horrendous behavior by facebook they are they continue to be a completely appalling company like everything they do is appalling and this is just this is no exception to that so i do have some sympathy for the employees who can't order their lunch though because in a large company yeah because in a large company
John:
those people who just want to order their lunch probably didn't even know this thing existed.
John:
Now, at this point, you could say, well, they didn't know this specific thing existed, but they knew the kind of company they worked for, which is true, which is why I'm not saying I have tons of sympathy for them, but I have a small amount of sympathy.
Marco:
Maybe not for the lunch ordering thing or whatever, but... No, look, I will be very upfront with how I feel about this.
Marco:
I know people who work at Facebook.
Marco:
I know good people who work at Facebook.
Marco:
I think if you work at Facebook in 2019...
Marco:
You have decided to work for a company that is morally bankrupt, and you've decided that's going to be okay with you.
Marco:
Now, my hands are not totally clean here.
Marco:
I use Instagram.
Marco:
I like Instagram.
Marco:
Facebook owns Instagram.
Marco:
I don't feel good about this right now.
Marco:
There's never been a day where I've reconsidered it more than today.
Marco:
I don't feel good about this, but I think the company is abhorrent.
Marco:
I object to so much of what they do and have done.
Marco:
but I continue to use one of their products.
Marco:
So I recognize my hands are not clean here.
Marco:
But if you work at Facebook, you have decided this company is horrible, but I'm going to work there anyway.
Marco:
And I think if you make that decision, you have to accept the consequences that come with that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So speaking of, I mean, this is not the first and only bad thing that Facebook has done, to say the least, right?
John:
And in and of itself, it might not be like disqualifying or might not make someone decide not to work there.
John:
But there's definitely a pattern of behavior.
John:
But speaking of pattern of behavior, another company that has some similar business models, Google, where they make a lot of their money by knowing information about people who use their products.
John:
Google, in fact, had a very similar application.
Yeah.
John:
That would monitor what you did and report back to Google so they could learn more about their customers.
John:
And I believe – I don't know if they were paying people to install it, but it was a similar type of thing.
John:
They wanted people to install this and were trying to motivate them somehow.
John:
And they distributed this application under the Apple Developer Enterprise Program.
John:
And they issued a speedy statement after Facebook got hit with the certificate revocation.
John:
This is what Google says.
John:
their application was called screenwise meter the screenwise meter ios app should not have operated under apple's developer enterprise program this was a mistake and we apologize we have disabled this app on ios devices very straightforward it's like we're sorry we're doing it too we're sorry we told it we stopped we're not doing it anymore don't look at us don't get us not because i bet google has a lot of internal applications signed by their enterprise certificate they probably don't want to stop working because they have a lot of employees and they probably have a lot of apps
John:
um the other angle on this uh by the way uh is setting aside these these companies weird business models and their you know their questionable practices and so on and so forth um and this came up in a couple of slacks we're in this reinforces the idea that you know apple controls what gets installed on apple devices uh and i'm sure we're going to talk about this in a second about uh the the appropriateness of of apple's punishment of facebook if it was you know too severe not severe enough um
John:
But there is a power dynamic between all these companies here.
John:
One thing this can make companies think is, well, maybe we should stop making all of our internal applications iOS applications.
John:
Or maybe we should stop making iOS versions of our internal applications because it's a corporate risk.
John:
If the proper functioning of our company relies on these applications continuing to work and some other company that's not us and maybe isn't even friendly to us can at any time
John:
cripple our entire enterprise by turning off all of our internal applications maybe we shouldn't make them on ios anymore maybe we should make them on android so we are masters of our own destiny like imagine if microsoft could turn off all your copies of office remotely for all i know they can these days because everything's subscription but um
John:
That's one power dynamic at play here.
John:
Who is in the driver's seat?
John:
Can Facebook actually, quote unquote, afford to not have iOS versions over the applications?
John:
Or would that make its employees revolt and say, I don't want to use an Android phone?
John:
Like, what is the power balance?
John:
And I think in a lot of these situations, I don't think either party really knows.
John:
who has the power i mean i guess we'll slide into the the obvious question here is like could apple have uh kicked facebook off of the app store like who has the power in that situation on the one hand apple certainly can they control what goes in the app store they can say guess what facebook i'm treating you like a petulant 20 year old you no longer have a developer account
John:
Which is certainly what they would have done to a petulant 20-year-old, had the petulant 20-year-old been banned from the App Store and then used an enterprise certificate or whatever.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Let's be clear.
Marco:
If anyone else did this, if it was anyone other than a giant, very influential company, the entire developer account would have been banned.
Marco:
Like, Facebook got off relatively easily by only losing enterprise distribution rights.
Marco:
And even then, we don't know that this could only be temporary.
John:
And they'll probably get them back eventually through some negotiation because these are giants talking.
John:
The same way that Netflix gets the better subscription rate.
John:
Like, I mean, there is a...
John:
it makes everyone feel good to think that apple is treating everyone the same but realistically speaking that's not how the world works and it's probably not even how the app store should work and it never has worked that way like it's an illusion kind of so it makes some kind of sense yeah because like ultimately like you know facebook has so much power here because like if apple actually removed the facebook app from the iphone who do you think is gonna get hurt more by that oh
John:
Well, that's the question.
John:
So both of these parties probably have a notion of who they think is in the driver's seat.
John:
But I think the accepted wisdom has been Apple can't afford to not have the Facebook app on its phone.
John:
That Facebook was in the power position because Apple can huff and puff, but they need Facebook more than Facebook needs them.
John:
I think that's what we've thought for a long time.
John:
But at a certain point, the iPhone installed base and sort of the entrenched love for the iPhone,
John:
maybe starts to tip that the other way if you ask the world of iphone users that you have a choice you can either keep your iphone but not have the facebook app or keep the facebook app but you got to get an android phone how would that how would that turn out and i don't think either party wants to find out like it's like who would win world war three what do you think it's like let's not let's not find out i don't really want to because no one's going to come out 100 there's no scenario in which 100 of iphone users would stick with their iphone right
John:
So like there's never – it's like World War III.
John:
There's not going to be like a victor who is unscathed.
John:
So no one wants to even try that.
John:
But the more I think about it, the more I'm thinking that –
John:
I no longer accept that it's a slam dunk that the iPhone can't survive without the Facebook app.
John:
Partially because, yes, people can still go to Facebook on the web, but partially because of just the year of bad news of Facebook.
John:
I don't know what Facebook's numbers are like or whatever.
John:
All I know is that it has been a relentlessly bad, deserved relentlessly bad news about Facebook.
John:
And I feel like that has to be having some kind of effect.
Marco:
I think your World War III comparison is apt.
Marco:
I feel like this is kind of a mutually assured destruction scenario here that neither company can really afford to totally blow off the other one on their platform.
Marco:
That would be very bad for either company if Apple kicked Facebook's app off the platform.
Marco:
And by the way,
Marco:
Again, Facebook owns multiple things.
Marco:
If Apple actually revoked Facebook's entire developer ability, that would also include WhatsApp and Instagram.
Marco:
That would have a massive effect.
Marco:
Think about every single news report that would happen from this.
Marco:
Every single comment
Marco:
non-nerd out there would have the exact same opinion.
Marco:
Apple took away Facebook from my phone.
Marco:
Apple took away Instagram from my phone.
Marco:
Apple took away WhatsApp from my phone.
Marco:
They would 100% blame Apple for that, and not in a good light.
Marco:
Apple can't afford that.
Marco:
They can't do that.
Marco:
So I think ultimately Facebook holds the power in this relationship because if Apple were to ever remove Facebook's ability to ship their apps, all of the blowback would fall on Apple, not Facebook, from their actual customers.
John:
But I feel like at a certain point, because we all accept that as probably the way things are and I think Apple accepts it, at a certain point Apple could find itself in a position where that is way less true than it used to be and they just don't realize it.
John:
It's happened with web browsers a couple times too where
John:
the power shifts but nobody noticed because like the conventional wisdom is just so strong like the conventional wisdom that ie is dominant and then like eventually you wake up one day and it's like what the hell happened to ie right you you don't adjust your thinking uh and on the flip side of that if if the conventional wisdom still is true which it probably is uh if facebook wants its enterprise certificates back it's just just like world war three they can say uh
John:
Apple, you should probably give us an enterprise certificates back or we're going to pull the Instagram and Facebook and WhatsApp apps from the iOS App Store because Facebook can unilaterally pull its own apps from the iOS App Store.
John:
They can use some or all of the power they have or hold it as a threat to try to get what they want back, which is why in any kind of...
John:
This kind of flare-up of PR and yanking a certificate or whatever, these two behemoths will probably talk to each other over the phone or in person and work something out billionaire to billionaire and come to an understanding.
John:
Again, in the same way as the Cold War did it.
John:
No one wants to launch any of the nukes.
John:
Everyone's got enough nukes to destroy each other ten times over.
John:
I don't know offhand.
Casey:
how granular a big red button Apple has.
Casey:
So said differently, could Apple have turned off just this one app?
Casey:
Yeah, they can.
Casey:
Yeah, that's what I was going to say.
Casey:
I suspect so, but I don't know.
Casey:
And on the one side, I feel like
Casey:
Isn't that the rightest, most mature answer is to turn off this one app and leave everything else alone?
Marco:
Well, no, because they violated the terms of enterprise distribution.
Marco:
Yeah, the terms are for the certificate.
Marco:
And they were stupid enough to use their main enterprise distribution certificate for this app.
Casey:
But either way, it seems to me like I don't think that Apple turning off this app, whatever it's called now, it doesn't matter.
Casey:
Turning off this sleazy VPN app.
Marco:
It's Onavo.
Marco:
It's not Onavo, we swear.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly right.
Casey:
Phonavo.
Casey:
Instagram.
Casey:
Anyway, turning off the Phonavo app won't...
Casey:
do anything.
Casey:
It won't accomplish anything.
Casey:
Facebook's just going to go trudging along.
Casey:
Because from an outsider's point of view, if there is anyone that has even more hubris than Apple, it's Facebook.
Casey:
Facebook seems to be pretty self-obsessed.
Casey:
And it seems to an outsider's perspective that Facebook thinks that Facebook can do no wrong.
Casey:
And so I think that...
Casey:
I'm okay with Apple just completely turning off the enterprise certificate because it seems like, to me, it seems like that punishment is commensurate with the crime committed.
Casey:
Well, crime isn't the right word, but you know what I mean.
Casey:
It just seems really freaking gross.
Yeah.
Casey:
The offense.
Casey:
Yeah, thank you.
Casey:
That's a very good word for it.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I think I'm okay with this.
Casey:
And like one of you said earlier, I think it was John, some of the slacks that we're in were going back and forth about whether or not this was fair and whether or not this is the right answer and whether or not Apple should have that kind of control.
Casey:
And I see the argument there that maybe Apple shouldn't be able to turn off...
Casey:
to some degree, the livelihood of another corporation.
Casey:
But I don't know, man.
Casey:
It's their swimming pool.
Casey:
And if you're choosing to swim in that pool, shouldn't you have to abide by the rules?
Casey:
I mean, if it's adult swim, shouldn't the kids have to get out of the pool?
John:
Yeah, I don't think anyone's arguing that.
John:
They're just getting back to the root thing that's been with the App Store the entire time, that we don't like these rules.
John:
We got to choke them down because being in the App Store is better than not being in the App Store.
John:
But
John:
The idea that there's a platform that's so tightly locked down with no sideloading at all, and even the sideloading that is allowed through enterprise certificates is still locked down.
John:
I remember before TestFlight and everything, people were just so angry about the fact that they couldn't even just make betas and give it to people.
John:
That is a developer experience question that has been with the App Store since its introduction and probably will never leave.
John:
It just comes up again in this context because this is...
John:
a fairly high profile example of apple flexing those muscles like they have the ability to do this everyone knows they always have it but it's mostly academic until you see you know the uh god i can't i'm getting so old people are getting sold and i'm just thinking about my bad day in destiny uh now witness the power of this fully operational app store close oh wow wow i'm surprised that didn't roll right off your tongue
Marco:
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Casey:
Last night, I tested this thing that let me spy on Erin.
Casey:
Now, granted, she was sitting three feet away from me, and I told her exactly what I was doing.
Casey:
But, ooh, this FaceTime thing, not good.
Casey:
Not good at all.
Casey:
So, if you start a FaceTime video call with another person...
Casey:
And then you do the little swipe up thing in order to add a person to that call.
Casey:
So say I was starting to call Marco and then I wanted to add John to the call.
Casey:
Well, instead, what I do is I call Marco, I swipe up, and instead of adding John, I add myself.
Casey:
If you do that, suddenly Marco's phone, with no intervention on Marco's part, starts broadcasting Marco's microphone to me without Marco's permission.
Casey:
Then, if Marco thinks to himself, hmm, I know how to make this stop, I will hit the side button, whatever they call that, the lock button, the power button, I don't care.
Casey:
I'll hit the side button to silence this ring.
Marco:
I think it actually is called the side button now.
Casey:
Oh, is it?
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So I'll silence this ring and make it go away.
Casey:
Well, guess what?
Casey:
Now I'm looking at Marco's front-facing camera without Marco's permission.
Casey:
And I tried both of these with Aaron.
Casey:
And honest to God, both of these worked.
Casey:
Well, they don't work, if you know what I mean.
Casey:
But these exploits accomplished what they set out to accomplish.
Casey:
And ooh, that did not make me happy.
Casey:
And it went around the internet thoroughly.
Casey:
And it makes sense because people were turning off FaceTime left and right until Apple distressingly slowly eventually turned off group FaceTime at the server level, which is the right thing to do.
Casey:
But it took, from what I could tell, several hours for that to happen, which I'm not keen on.
Casey:
So that bug is bad in and of itself.
Casey:
And I'll leave a chance to talk about that.
Casey:
But what's worse is apparently Apple has known about this for at least a week, which is really gross.
Casey:
But we'll talk about that in a minute.
Casey:
Gentlemen, thoughts about this bug and what it means?
Marco:
I mean, look, everybody ships bugs.
Marco:
Like I said, I'll say it here again.
Marco:
I don't blame Apple for this bug existing.
Marco:
Everyone ships bugs.
Marco:
What's important is how you respond when you have accidentally shipped a bug.
Marco:
And it's when you have something that is a very severe security bug like this.
Marco:
one of the key elements is speed of your response.
Marco:
And on one level, they did a really good job, actually.
Marco:
Like, the bug hit the press, you know, and then, like, within a couple hours of it hitting the press, all group FaceTime was disabled server-side, which effectively neutralizes the bug and makes it impossible to exploit again.
Marco:
So that...
Marco:
alone like that in itself was an adequate response like that was fine yeah sure i would have liked if it was less than a few hours but it was hell it was later that night like it was fine like that's fine i i give them full marks for that um but there is this other problem which is a pretty big problem which is that this was this was reported to them like a week earlier through the official channel through like security at apple.com or whatever it is product security like they have an official channel to report security flaws in their products and
Marco:
and it was reported almost a week earlier.
Marco:
And it was fully documented, and apparently the woman who reported it was told to file a radar.
Marco:
So she did, even though this was a security thing.
John:
This reminds me of the movie Die Hard, which got... Marco, have you seen Die Hard, please?
John:
Yes.
John:
It was my number one Christmas movie.
John:
Yay, we did it!
John:
We did it, everybody!
John:
I just showed it to my son recently, and there's a scene in Die Hard where
John:
I think it's Bruce Willis.
John:
He finally manages to call emergency services or whatever, and he gets on the line.
John:
He's telling them the building is under attack or whatever.
John:
You've got to come send the police or whatever.
John:
And the person on the other end of the line is like, this is a restricted channel.
John:
If you have an emergency, please call 911.
John:
Essentially saying, this is not the right way for you to report an incredibly severe security bug.
John:
File a radar.
John:
So it's like, and Bruce Willis was having none of that.
John:
He's yelling and screaming, but this, this person, this poor person was like, I have to get a, I have to file it with a bug report.
John:
Like I'm talking to you now you're Apple, right?
John:
Like, look, this is severe.
John:
I'm like, Nope, sorry.
John:
Wrong channel.
John:
Like, this is not how you report bugs to us.
John:
Please do it through the proper channels.
John:
So the person did do it through the proper channels, but I was thinking the same way of like, if someone comes to you and it's telling you there's an emergency and your only reaction is to say, Oh,
John:
I'm not the person you're supposed to tell about emergencies.
John:
I'm not going to take any action on this.
John:
I'm just going to redirect you to the right channel.
John:
And then you go to the right channel, which is, you know, signing up for an account and going through and filing a rate or whatever, and still it doesn't get to the right people.
John:
This is sort of the faceless cooperation that we always complain about, that they're...
John:
We think of a company as this giant entity, but it's really this big group of people with very different incentives and motivations.
John:
There is no one consciousness that is Apple that you can talk to.
John:
So trying to get the corporation writ large to be aware of a thing in the world is very difficult when you are interacting with even the correct people.
John:
one or two people who are touching the outside world which is why when things go to the press the giant entity that is apple becomes all of a sudden very conscious like and how does it work i mean maybe like the press is seen by people at the top and the people at the top make everyone below them aware of it but like if you start it through the right channel it's it's dysfunctional and baffling but not actually uh
John:
very rare occurrence that you can present what you would imagine is like incredibly important critical information and because it is presented alongside tons and tons of other information that's just garbage and
John:
That it gets lost in the shuffle.
John:
You can't distinguish it from the 800 other cranks who emailed you that day and said, I have a way to secretly destroy every iPhone by pressing a big red button.
John:
Tons of garbage comes into that same channel, and here is this tiny little gem that is like a legit super serious security bug.
John:
In hindsight, we all say, why didn't they jump into action on this one big thing?
John:
And it's like, well, you didn't see the 8,000 other radars that were filed that day, and you didn't have the millions of other things that got into that.
John:
So it's frustrating from the outside.
John:
It's explicable on the inside, but it is a dysfunction.
John:
You want to design an organization such that if some well-meaning person is nice enough to tell you about a super-duper important problem...
John:
That that finds its way in less than a week to the collective consciousness of the company and that they take action on it.
John:
And you don't have to wait for it to go all over the press and come sort of top down through the executive suit, just make all their underlings have a giant fire drill about it.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And this and this is not like I mean, so first of all, like I was about to insult the whole like bug reporter radar system.
Marco:
But the funny thing is like that wasn't the right channel for this.
Marco:
The right channel for this was product security.
Marco:
She went there first and they told her, you know, buzz off basically.
Marco:
It sounds like some weird bug.
Marco:
You probably don't know how to use computers.
Marco:
File a radar.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
So, like, she went to the proper channel first, and they told her to go to the incorrect channel.
Marco:
Now, the incorrect channel she was directed to, which is the bug reporter slash radar system, is horrible.
Marco:
The pipeline, whatever the process is that Apple uses to filter and respond to and close those bugs that get reported is horrible.
Marco:
Any developer who's ever filed bugs will tell you that most of the time it's a waste of your time to even bother with it.
Marco:
Most of the time you don't get a response at all.
Marco:
If you do get a response, it's basically them asking you to provide a sample project and sysdiagnose files, both of which take a lot of time to gather and prepare, both of which are usually not necessary for lots of the bugs that you report, and it seems like they request those things before they've actually really read what you wrote.
Marco:
It seems like Apple has, oh, and then every time there's a new beta released of anything, they will seemingly go through in bulk,
Marco:
and to all the open bugs that haven't been responded to yet and say let us know if this is still a problem or we'll automatically close it in like a day and what this leads to is a whole bunch of legitimate bugs either going back to the filer and asking for them to spend way more time on it when that wasn't necessarily like when when apple didn't really pay enough attention to it to see whether it needed that or not um
Marco:
or a whole bunch of valid bugs being closed that are still bugs, but that the person didn't get to in time to say, yes, it's still a problem.
Marco:
And so you have Apple over filtering the inputs on that system dramatically.
Marco:
It seems, I mean, I don't know how this works internally.
Marco:
But it sure seems like there are people whose job it is to just close as many bugs as possible as a performance metric and not anything about the actual outcomes of those things.
Marco:
So they seem to find ways to just close them en masse
Marco:
if you're lucky that they even close them at all.
Marco:
Most of the bugs that I report are just left open forever.
Marco:
They never get a single response.
Marco:
But some of them do get these wonderful mass closures that happen to them that the bugs are still there and nothing ever happened.
Marco:
And this is why when Apple employees tell us on Twitter, file a radar, it really helps, it really matters, I don't appreciate that very much because filing a radar from the outside, from our point of view,
Marco:
is a massive waste of our time, 99% of the time.
Marco:
The vast majority of bugs you file are a total waste of your time.
Marco:
And the way Apple deals with them and the people who file them, the message it sends us from the parts of it that we see, which apparently is very little of it, the parts of it that we see tell us we are wasting our time.
Marco:
Whether that's true or not internally, we can't see.
Marco:
But the part we see is you don't care about us.
Marco:
You are dismissive if you respond at all.
Marco:
And we are wasting our time doing this.
Marco:
So that's just a little rant about radar.
Marco:
But the fact is, for this story, the woman who was reporting this bug shouldn't have even been sent to radar in the first place because this wasn't that kind of bug.
Marco:
It was a product security thing.
Marco:
And she emailed product security.
Casey:
This makes me so angry that she was told, oh, just go file radar.
Marco:
That is such a... It's dismissive, and it shows that they weren't really reading things very closely.
Marco:
Exactly the same problem that happens with the radar bug screeners.
Marco:
It's exactly the same.
Marco:
It's like, you ask us to file bugs, you ask people to report security problems, you ask us to do this, and those of us who take our time, and this doesn't take a small amount of time to do this kind of stuff, those of us who take our time to do it, more often than not, get dismissed in a way that suggests they didn't even read it.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
This is such a big f*** you to this poor lady who took the time to actually do this the right way.
Casey:
My understanding is there's a series of tweets from a person with the Twitter handle Beast Mode, which I am quite impressed by.
Casey:
Anyway, John H. Meyer, who I guess got in touch with the woman whose child initially discovered the problem.
Casey:
And, you know, she apparently made a video of it.
Casey:
She sent like a whole write up to Apple about it.
Casey:
And the response from them was, oh, go file radar.
Casey:
How off putting is that?
Casey:
How obnoxious and off putting is that?
Casey:
It makes it makes my blood boil.
Casey:
It's so ridiculous.
Casey:
It's just so obnoxious.
Casey:
And it makes me so angry.
John:
So the more charitable interpretation is not that there's any malice or dismissiveness there, but just that the volume of stuff comes in as such that they are overwhelmed with information and their sort of first pass filtering algorithm identifies this as probably just some person who has some kind of bug they want to report.
John:
And that's that's the this person is the mom who reported this as a lawyer.
John:
And if you look at the letter, it's not lawyer ease.
John:
But like, I mean, maybe if you saw something that was from a lawyer or look like it was written by a lawyer, like maybe that doesn't like when you get a lot of input, you get a lot of Apple sure gets lots of people telling them all sorts of things.
John:
You have to have some sort of way of filtering it.
John:
And in the letter, I think the person asked about like bug bounties, like a lot of companies pay people to find bugs.
John:
And I think one of the benefits of bug bounties, which Apple has, by the way, I think they just recently started a bunch of them.
John:
I think we probably talked about an ATP a while back.
John:
is that if you have a program where you're going to pay people for finding bugs, I think the people at the other end of that firehose of incoming information probably have slightly different incentives.
John:
Because the whole point of that program is to find the super valuable stuff, whereas the product security one...
John:
probably gets way more like just random people with opinions about apple stuff or like people who think that their phone is spying on them at night because it wakes up on a notification come like who knows what kind of stuff they get but the bug bounty ones the only people who even know that that channel exists are people who are out there looking for bugs or think they found some super big security bugs everything that comes in there in theory is like the sender thinks it's super important security thing whereas product security probably gets just
John:
you know who knows what kind of random stuff so it's hard to tell from the outside whether it actually is sort of jaded dismissiveness or if it's uh we are not good at dealing with the volume and type of information that we have or understaffed we don't have good heuristics for figuring out we have tier one two and three i would get this impression like there's tier one two and three radar stuff before it ever even gets to a developer it has to go through this sort of kind of like the app store used to be and probably still is to some degree like a
John:
implemented by people who don't have any awareness and don't need to by design don't need to have any awareness of security or app store rules or anything like that and just doing sort of a first pass following whatever rules they've been told and eventually you get down to a human who understands this is an application this is for the app store this is what security is like whatever but you know as with so many things from the outside we can't tell which one of those things it is so it's just a black box that does the wrong thing
Casey:
It's funny to me, too, because, you know, all of us have friends within Apple and I'll talk to them about radar and and they'll try to say, well, you know, oh, you don't understand the volume, which I think you're right, John.
Casey:
Like, that's true.
Casey:
And oh, you know, there's this and there's that and there's this and there's that.
Casey:
And it just makes us sad that you guys always assume the worst of us.
Casey:
And that also kind of grinds my I don't know why I'm so angry tonight, but that kind of grinds grinds my gears, too, because if you don't want us to think the worst of you, then talk to us to
Casey:
Tell us what's going on.
Casey:
Like, this is your fault.
Casey:
Not my fault.
Casey:
It's not my fault, I'm assuming, the worst.
Casey:
This is your fault for being so secretive.
Casey:
You can't have it both ways.
Casey:
You can't be so secretive about what's going on inside.
Casey:
And you can't be so just a black box.
Casey:
You can't be such a black box and expect us to just assume it's roses and pansies and daffodils inside.
Casey:
Like, this is a self-created problem.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
It's like Apple is saying, like, you keep mispronouncing my name.
Marco:
And we're like, all right, how do you pronounce it?
Marco:
And they're like, I told you before.
Marco:
That's not what it's like at all.
John:
They don't tell us.
John:
They would never have told us.
John:
I mean, here's the thing.
John:
We want more transparency.
John:
And Apple, I think, has been more transparent than it has been in the past.
John:
But for a large company like this, you don't want...
John:
Yeah.
John:
uh does probably the smart thing from a pr perspective but that nevertheless leaves us in the dark which is we're not here to explain to you exactly exactly what happened here like in this whole thing they said that you just you know we had their statement you read part of it like google uh facebook did this thing with their certificates against the rules so we revoke their certificate blah blah blah that's what they said they didn't go into this whole sort of like post-mortem of like oh how do we miss this they didn't mention this
John:
person and her son and finding the security thing a week ago they didn't even they didn't acknowledge that even exists as far as i know like why would they there is no like that's not as far as like we're going forward like it's the smart pr thing to do to say here's the situation here's what we did boom not to say oh how do we miss this and have some sort of back and forth with the press about uh you know scolding apple about how they should have found this and soul searching about how they like they'll do that internally but they will never do that externally and so
John:
Because of that, which I think is probably mostly the right thing to do, we are left with just, you know, an unknown.
John:
And then we are free to map all of our past experiences and prejudices onto it and think that the best of the worst are about what's happening.
John:
But I mean, honestly, it doesn't really matter.
John:
Whether it was malice or, you know, understaffing or whatever, the end result is the same as far as the company is concerned.
John:
They were not appropriately reactive to a very serious, very cleanly, well-presented situation.
John:
helpful thing from the outside.
John:
So it's not like an edge case.
John:
They really need to make systems that in the best case scenario where a conscientious, motivated person who's found a legit bug does everything you tell them to do, does all the right things and still can't get you to pay attention for a week.
Marco:
Kind of makes you wonder what else they're missing.
John:
Yeah, well, that's the best case.
John:
The worst case scenario is people find tons of bugs and never tell Apple about them because why the hell would you tell Apple?
John:
They'd either use them themselves or sell them on the black market.
John:
That's why bug bounties exist where you try to pay more money than the bad people are going to pay to find out your bugs.
Casey:
So maybe we can talk about something a little happier.
Casey:
Just a couple hours before we recorded, Mark Gurman had a scoop at Bloomberg where he had a bunch of information about the next iPhone, about iPads, and about iOS 13.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
And it's hard for me to really get too anxious about this because – or maybe anxious isn't the right word – excited, I guess, about this.
Casey:
Because it seems like Bloomberg can get some details right and a lot of things wrong.
Casey:
And I think Marco had summarized this best in saying he'll get the little specific things right, but then he'll try to put it in a narrative and it all falls apart at that point.
Casey:
But –
Casey:
There's an article on Bloomberg, we'll link it in the show notes, where Gurman talks about all of this stuff.
Casey:
And one of the big features, apparently, of the iPhone vNext, I don't know if it's XT or whatever, is very much camera-related.
Casey:
And there was no information about any sort of knockoff of Google's seemingly very impressive night shift.
Casey:
But apparently Apple is starting to really angle toward augmented reality.
Casey:
And so what's being said in this article is that there's going to be a more powerful, longer-range 3D camera, which is, quote, designed to scan the environment to create three-dimensional reconstructions of the real world.
Casey:
Supposedly, it's going to work up to about 15 feet away from the phone.
Casey:
It uses a laser scanner instead of dot projection because the dot projection goes to crap over long distances.
Casey:
And it got really... I don't think Garmin's a very good writer.
Casey:
It was very unclear to me...
Casey:
What is or is not getting the third camera?
Casey:
Because early in the article, he says there's a third, more advanced camera.
Casey:
Then later on, he says the third camera is only in the Max.
Casey:
And then immediately after says, and other handsets could eventually come with the upgraded system.
Casey:
So...
Marco:
Well, I don't think that's a mistake.
Marco:
I think that's hedging.
Marco:
Anytime you see a rumor article like this, especially one from a publication that's edited like Bloomberg, not fact-checked like Bloomberg, but edited, it's generally a result of they don't actually know for sure.
Marco:
And so they're offering, it's like, this could come out this year or in the future.
Marco:
Whenever they write stuff like that, it's rumor articles that have, that they literally heard a rumor.
Marco:
It's not really firm knowledge or they don't want to commit.
Marco:
So they use flexible language to give themselves an out.
Marco:
So that basically anything that is not very clearly stated and unambiguously and unequivocally stated in an article like this, you can assume they're just guessing.
John:
And on the night sight thing, you said night shift before, but you meant night sight.
John:
Oh, yes, thank you.
John:
There is a thing about that with the multiple cameras in terms of catching a wider field of view and more pixels or whatever.
John:
But for something like a night sight type feature, that is probably, I mean, there is a component of that that deals with the cameras, but it's very much a software thing.
John:
And the software is not going to leak from these same channels.
John:
Like that's the thing that you have the most difficulty finding out because that is just kept in Apple devices.
John:
In Apple proper, there's no manufacturing or parts or any other places where that can leak.
John:
So we tend not to know as much about the software, and what we do know comes much later.
John:
So it doesn't surprise me there's no mention of a predominantly software-only feature.
John:
All they have to go on is probably a bunch of parts leaks or drawings or whatever of phones with a bunch of different cameras on the back and information about them.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I am still optimistic that Apple will copy that feature to some degree, and they'll do it in software, and we'll find out about it the day before the keynote or the keynote.
Casey:
Yeah, we'll see.
Casey:
I sure hope so.
Casey:
But it was interesting.
Casey:
They also had a couple other tidbits.
Casey:
The third camera, which may or may not only be on the Max, has a larger field of view and a wider range of zoom.
Casey:
It will also, and this is now a direct quote, it will also capture more pixels.
Casey:
So Apple software could, for example, automatically repair a photo or video to fit in a subject that may have been accidentally cut from the initial shot.
Casey:
uh finally enhanced live photos which they say is basically just doubling the time from three seconds to six seconds there will be updates for the 10s 10s max and 10r uh the and then this is another thing that seemed contradictory to me but maybe my reading comprehension is bad they said that the laser-powered 3d thing could debut in an upgrade to the ipad pro in spring 2020 even though they started talking about it in the iphone
Casey:
whatever uh they also apparently are testing apple is testing an iphone with usbc which i think i'm pretty excited by i think i would like to go all usbc now let's see again that's not information they are testing it well of course they're testing it like that doesn't mean anything
Marco:
Chances are, by now, I would assume based on, like, the iPhone production scale and everything, they have probably already decided whether the 2019 iPhones will be USB-C or Lightning.
Marco:
And so by Gurman saying that they're still testing it, like, that just means he doesn't know yet.
John:
And that's true.
John:
The iPad thing actually makes some amount of sense to me because this is kind of a coincidence that yesterday in a different cycle, I forget about the context that we're talking about earlier,
John:
I forgot they were talking about it.
John:
I made some joke about, uh, just wait until you get your Apple AR glasses.
John:
You'll just walk around the house and look at all the rooms and it'll make a 3d map of your house.
John:
I think it was you Casey asking about like cat applicant or talk about linear, um, making floor plans and stuff.
John:
Right.
John:
And so here we are with this rumor a day later about, you know, basically a way to get a 3d image of the stuff around you at a longer distance that basically room distance, like 15 feet ish or whatever, rather than face, uh, face ID distance, which is, you know, a foot or two.
John:
Um,
John:
On an iPad, you're like, well, iPads, like people don't carry around iPads as cameras for the most part.
John:
They usually have their phones with them, despite the fact that we see people taking pictures with iPads.
John:
But if you wanted to do some kind of AR thing and scan your whole room and then manipulate it, an iPad's a perfect device that you're in your house already.
John:
You've got your iPad, hold it up, show it all the walls of your house, and then you have a nice big screen on which you can move your furniture around in AR or whatever.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
It makes sense as an iPad thing.
John:
Not that it gives me any more stake in any of these rumors because they take every side of everything, even on the USB-C thing.
John:
They're testing a phone with the USB-C, but they might not include it in this phone.
John:
So you've offered no information.
John:
USB-C could be there, but it might not.
John:
Great, thanks.
John:
I mean, VGA could be there.
John:
It might not.
John:
Right.
John:
Well, it's not that bad.
John:
But anyway, the iPad Pro thing, I would actually...
John:
be excited about an iPad pro that had the laser camera thing on it because the iPad in many contexts is a better device for AR, uh, because it has a bigger screen for you to, you know, a bigger window into the world to see through than the tiny little, uh, porthole that is your phone, even if you have one of the really big phones.
John:
So I think that would be neat.
John:
Although it, it coming out ahead of the phone is a little bit weird.
John:
Like that's what they were saying, like that they would ship new iPad pros with this new camera and
John:
It seemed like it would steal a little bit of the iPhone's thunder because they would demo this camera.
John:
Look, it's got lasers and it does all these things.
John:
Isn't it amazing?
John:
And then when the new phones came out, they're like, yeah, it's got that camera too.
John:
It's kind of underwhelming.
John:
So I don't know how they would deal with timing of that.
John:
But I fully endorse an iPad with this 3D scanning laser thing on the back of it.
Casey:
yeah me too i was just confused because it seemed like early early in the article they were saying it's coming to the phone next and oh wait it's coming to the ipad next all right weird whatever look look they just got a bucket of parts casey just like take a bucket of parts you dump it on the table like can you make an article out of this like yeah i can give it a shot
Casey:
Why not?
Casey:
They also had some other interesting news.
Casey:
Apparently, there's going to be an updated lower-cost iPad with a 10-inch screen and lightning.
Casey:
And what would have been of interest to me, although now I think I've converted myself to the large-ish iPad world, a new cheaper iPad mini.
Casey:
And I was a devout mini fan up until I got this brand new iPad a couple of months back.
Casey:
And now I really love this iPad.
Casey:
But a new iPad mini sounds very cool.
Casey:
I would love to see that come back.
Casey:
And then finally, iOS 13 apparently will have dark mode.
Casey:
It will have improvements to CarPlay.
Casey:
I actually am a fan of CarPlay.
Casey:
I think CarPlay is pretty good.
Casey:
It's not fantastic, but it's pretty good.
Casey:
And I'm curious to see what improvements means.
Casey:
Uh, apparently there's going to be a new iPad specific home screen.
Casey:
So I don't know if that means, I think Steve Trouton Smith kind of implied this.
Casey:
I'm not sure if that means that instead of springboard, there would be some equivalent to springboard that is not the exact same, you know, some different home screen app, if you will.
Casey:
I think that could be very cool because certainly the home screen, the iPad seems like a place that it could be treated very differently and a lot more done with it.
Casey:
And then a couple of direct quotes.
Casey:
Ability to tab through multiple versions of a single app like Pages in a web browser.
Casey:
That's not something I feel like I need right now, but I bet you once I have it, I'll say, oh, this is amazing.
Casey:
I can't believe I didn't have it before.
John:
What do you think that means before we move on from that?
John:
Like, again, with the vague writing.
John:
Ability to tab through multiple versions of a single app like Pages in a web browser.
John:
There's a lot going on in that sentence, right?
John:
So some people may read that and think...
John:
Do they mean like command tab?
John:
Because you don't use command tab on a Mac to go through multiple versions of a single app, like pages in a web browser.
John:
You do command tilde for multiple windows, and it's a different keystroke, usually command shift square bracket or whatever, to go through multiple tabs.
John:
Or do they mean tab through multiple versions of a single app, as in tabbed windows?
John:
Remember, we heard where if you wanted to have multiple versions of
John:
an application running like the tabbing would be the sort of the windowing interface kind of like safari tabs having like it's so confusing it's basically it's a sentence that says almost nothing other than the fact that there will be some new way to handle multiple versions of something that there are not currently multiple versions of so i don't know how do you guys interpret tab is it do they mean the tab key as an analogy to what you do on a mac or do they mean tabs as in safari tabs
Casey:
I think tabs is in Safari tabs.
Casey:
I think the idea here is if you wanted to have multiple copies of Google Docs running at the same time, you could do that.
Casey:
I'm not sure the exact mechanism, but something like a tabbed Safari experience, you know, where, or, you know, actually in Safari on the, on the iPad, you can create two side by side Safari quote unquote windows, if you will.
Casey:
And they're each their own tab and you're looking at two tabs or two windows simultaneously.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I think something like that.
Casey:
God, the terminology is terrible.
Casey:
But it's something like that.
John:
The vocabulary reflects the mess that is the actual UI.
Casey:
Well put.
Casey:
But I think it's something where basically you could have two copies of the same app open at the same time.
John:
Just like Windows.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I don't know, Marco, any thoughts on that?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then finally, improvements to file management, which would be great.
John:
Which is as vague as you can get without saying nothing.
John:
Literally nothing.
Yeah.
Casey:
But everyone wants it.
Casey:
I was just thinking today about how I feel like if I had file system access in a couple of places, my iPad could really potentially replace my computer for anything.
John:
Would you like that file system access to be improved, Casey?
Casey:
It would be great.
Casey:
I would love that.
John:
The most exciting thing I think here, like buried at the bottom of this article, I read this whole article and I'm like –
John:
The very end has something I think is the most significant.
John:
I've told this story before.
John:
I'll keep telling it again for the people who didn't listen to every single episode of the show or weren't alive in 2010 or whatever the hell.
John:
When the iPad came out, before it came out, we all knew they were going to come out with a tablet and we were all talking about it.
John:
And a big topic of discussion was...
John:
what will this this apple tablet look like when you turn it on right like what because the phone we know what the phones look like the phones look like a bunch of icons and a grid they had springboard on them but when you have an ipad what will that look like and the leading contender was not it will look like a phone but the icons will be more spread out like that was there was i'm not going to say it wasn't in contention because it was brought up
John:
But it was so distant, everyone was thinking about, what could it look like?
John:
Like, it's not going to be the Finder, obviously.
John:
It's not running Mac OS.
John:
It's going to run iPhone OS or a variant of iPhone OS.
John:
But with all that screen space, what could you do?
John:
And when they came out and said, we're not doing anything.
John:
It's exactly like the phone but spread out.
John:
It's like, all right, well, it's the first version of this, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And in practice, it works fine.
John:
It's an interface everyone is familiar with.
John:
Right.
John:
And here we are.
John:
What is it?
John:
Eight years later, nine years later.
John:
And just now we're getting rumors, hopefully substantiated in some way.
John:
Now they're going to take a crack at doing something other than having just a big grid of icons spread out a little bit more.
John:
It's so far overdue, and I'm not even like a super iPad power user.
John:
Just every time I hear the umpteenth seven-hour dissertation of how people are arranging their icons into folders with spacers and color-coding them and stuff, I'm like, oh, this is...
John:
There's so little flexibility in such an important interface.
John:
I mean, it's nice that, you know, folders were an addition, so that's good, right?
John:
But it's nice that people can find ways to make these two Lego pieces fit together in different patterns because you've got the icons and you've got the folders and we can do creative things with them.
John:
But that's a pretty big screen, especially on the really big iPads.
John:
There's so much more you could do.
John:
uh to let people build a more efficient place to go back to when they're not in an application uh i don't know how far apple will go with this but i'm i will be very happy when they do something i mean they maybe unlike my mac pro they're going to get it in under the decade line and say see we eventually addressed the what was a burning question about an apple tablet in less than a decade
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Aftershocks bone conduction headphones.
Marco:
If you haven't tried bone conduction headphones, I urge you to give them a shot because they work differently from any other kind of headphone and it really can be game changing.
Marco:
The main difference is that there's not anything sticking on or in or around your ears or blocking up your ears.
Marco:
They have these little transducers that rest next to your ears that send micro vibrations that you don't feel through your cheekbones and your eardrum picks them up to make sound.
Marco:
But all that doesn't matter.
Marco:
What matters is there's nothing covering up your ear or sticking in your ear or anything like that.
Marco:
So comfort on these for me is way better than things like earbuds because there's nothing in my ear to make my ears hurt.
Marco:
And the main thing is you hear ambient sound.
Marco:
in addition to the podcast you're listening to or the phone call you're taking on these.
Marco:
And so what that means is you can be walking or jogging outside and you can hear if a car's coming.
Marco:
You can be using these around the house and you can hear if someone's calling your name or if someone knocks on the door or if the phone rings.
Marco:
It's amazing the freedom this opens up for both convenience and for safety and just niceness.
Marco:
Like when I'm walking around outside, I don't want to be blocked out from the rest of the world.
Marco:
I want to hear the rest of the world, but I also want to hear a podcast.
Marco:
And these are just great for that.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
hassle-free two-year warranty if you need it.
Marco:
So they're really nice headphones to use.
Marco:
I highly recommend Aftershocks bone conduction headphones.
Marco:
So the flagship model is the Trex Air.
Marco:
This has an MSRP of $179, but listeners can snag a pair for $50 off by visiting atp.aftershocks.com and using promo code ATPBUNDLE.
Marco:
That's atp.aftershocks.com code ATPBUNDLE for $50 off the weightless wireless Trex Air bundle.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Aftershocks for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Oliver Dijon writes,
Casey:
So until now, I haven't removed the lowercase on this machine.
Casey:
After four and a half years of usage, I'm wondering if it would still make sense to open the lowercase and remove some dust.
Casey:
What do you think?
Casey:
I don't think I've removed any part of any of my MacBooks for years.
Casey:
At most, I would just blow some compressed air in the vents and call it a day.
Casey:
But Marco, what would you do?
Marco:
I would say if you're not having actual problems with the fans and cooling, if it's not broken, don't fix it.
Marco:
Because you run two big risks here if you do this.
Marco:
I mean, number one, even if you just blast compressed air into the vents, you run the risk of shoving some dust where it wasn't before that could possibly cause problems.
Marco:
And if you take the bottom case off...
Marco:
Not only do you run that same risk, but you also run the risk of damaging something in the process of taking it off or putting it back on.
Marco:
There's a lot of very, very small, very sensitive, very weak components that are in these, and
Marco:
for somebody who has not been formally trained on how to service each model, like, like, you know, some of the Apple, you know, geniuses and service places like, and for people who don't do this for a living and maybe this is your first time or 10th time or, you know, fifth time opening up a laptop ever.
Marco:
The risk I think is too high unless you're having a problem.
Marco:
And even if you are having a problem, I think my first step would be bring it to Apple, like have them do it.
Marco:
Um, if it's still under warranty, um,
Marco:
Just because the risks of slightly or less than slightly breaking something, I think, are too high.
John:
Yeah, I mostly agree.
John:
Especially with laptops and these tiny little devices, I never like the idea of them ever being opened by anyone, even a professional who's opened 100 of these this week.
John:
It's never the same.
John:
Yeah.
John:
No matter how good you are, it's just never the same.
John:
That said...
John:
We don't know all of his life.
John:
If you know that you live in a house with 75 cats and a smoker... I think you have other problems at this point.
John:
Right.
John:
If you know your devices are constantly filled with stuff, it really depends, right?
John:
I wouldn't say... If you know that's a problem, if you know all your devices eventually get choked with cat hair and dander...
John:
it's you should you know think about doing something right but if it's just like a sort of a hang-up like you lead an otherwise normal life and your your devices do not fail at an incredibly higher rate and they aren't all choked with dust or sawdust or whatever like who knows what's going on if you don't live in an exceptional scenario and you just feel like if you look at your macbook and you look at the events of like any other person's macbook they're more or less the same
John:
yeah don't don't open it don't mess with it don't blow things into it like hopefully you can assess this and understand and know whether you have a problem or not but i can tell you that i have never opened up any of my little devices to remove dust that said my power mac g5 and my power mac g3 and my mac pro all have a side that opens up really easily and occasionally you
John:
When I'm in there for other reasons, I will blow out dust.
John:
But they are cavernous, and they are meant to be opened by people.
John:
There are no screws.
John:
It's just a little handle, and that's a totally different ballgame.
John:
And speaking of the delicate parts in there, I was reminded of a sad thing I just heard today of someone who will remain anonymous to protect the innocent.
John:
who opened up his brand new mac mini to replace the ram and accidentally crack some tiny little connector that connects the wi-fi antenna because they're super delicate and you can put if you pull it off the wrong way it just goes chink and so now all the time and money this person was saving by doing the ram themselves has gone down the drain as they have to go crawling back to apple and say yeah i opened it up myself and i pulled a little bit too hard on this tiny delicate plastic thing and now please tell me how much money i'm gonna have to pay to get this fixed
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
Jeremy Kennenson writes, I'm planning to get an iMac, not an iMac Pro, for the family to use.
Casey:
No video editing, no coding, or high-intensity use.
Casey:
Honestly, the only hardcore thing would be playing Firewatch, which, by the way, if you haven't played it, you should.
Casey:
Is there any difference that I should care about between the 3.4 gigahertz, 3.5 gigahertz, or 3.8 gigahertz, if they're all core i5 or whatever, says Jeremy.
Casey:
I feel like storage and RAM are more important than the processor for a typical non-coding, non-developer user.
Casey:
In my mind, this is not something I should worry about or need to pay extra for.
Casey:
My personal opinion is when you're buying a new computer, it's exactly what Jeremy said.
Casey:
Start with RAM, get as much as you can afford.
Casey:
Then storage, get as much as you can afford.
Casey:
And then if you need to worry about the processor, so be it.
Casey:
Obviously, that's not true for everyone.
Casey:
You don't need to email us.
Casey:
But for an average rule of thumb, that's my two cents.
Casey:
We started with Marco last time.
Casey:
John, what are your thoughts on this?
John:
In rare circumstances, there can be differences between CPUs that are all out of proportion with a difference in price.
John:
If it's just the case where it's like, oh, slightly higher clock speed or whatever, and there's no real differences, then yeah, you should know what you want to do with your computer.
John:
And if you're...
John:
Yeah.
John:
i mean if you're not following the cpu world or whatever you can just look at benchmarks and say like look here's here's how much faster this one is and here has much more money it costs and if you know you're never going to see that see or feel that speed it can actually be better to get the slower one especially in a portable device because it could use less power so i think jeremy uh correctly assessed his uh his needs and should not be chasing uh the best cpu and to casey's point
John:
The thing that you will regret about your computer much more than if it feels a little bit slow after a year is when you run out of space or when you run out of RAM or it ends up swapping.
John:
Again, with SSCs, it's much better than it used to be.
John:
But yeah, RAM and storage over CPU if you're not doing anything where you need the absolute fastest CPU.
Marco:
Yeah, you pretty much covered it.
Marco:
The one thing to be aware of is that the CPU performance within a family does not scale linearly with the advertised clock speeds.
Marco:
There's lots of complexity these days in real-world performance.
Marco:
One of the biggest things is Turbo Boost, which is the CPUs are not always operating at the speed they advertise.
Marco:
They are often operating at higher speeds.
Marco:
And when you have three different clock speeds within one CPU family that's the same generation of processor, everything else is the same, they're all branded i7 or they're all branded i5 or it's a mix of i5s and i7s or whatever, the actual difference between different models is smaller than you might think because of all these complicating factors.
Marco:
One of the easiest things to do, as John said, is you can go do research.
Marco:
For me, my favorite place to do research is the Geekbench browser.
Marco:
If you go to browse.primatelabs.com or something like that, we'll put the link in the show notes, you can look up every Mac model with every processor
Marco:
going back a number of years.
Marco:
And so you can see right there, you can see, all right, you look at the single core and the multi-core, and you can see, all right, here is the 2018 MacBook Pro, whatever it is, right?
Marco:
And you can see, all right, here's the top CPU here, middle CPU here, bottom CPU here.
Marco:
And if you look at what the actual variance between these is, most of the time, with a few exceptions, like if the high-end model has more cores, like is the case with the Mac Mini and some of the MacBook Pros right now,
Marco:
If the high-end model has more cores than the low-end model, it will have a significant advantage in multi-core benchmarks on the order of 20% to 50% maybe.
Marco:
It depends on what the difference is.
Marco:
But usually within a family, usually you don't have that choice.
Marco:
Usually it's just like, here are three different clock speeds.
Marco:
And if you look at the actual differences on Geekbench, you'll see that usually the range between the low-end processor and the high-end processor is like 15% maybe.
Marco:
It's like in that ballpark.
Marco:
And so it's probably not worth you spending an extra $300 or $400 to get 15% more performance.
Marco:
Most people are not well-served to spend the amount of money it takes to get such a small percentage performance increase.
Marco:
Whereas, as John and Casey said, these days SSD size, storage size, is the premium.
Marco:
And so if you have a limited budget and you're looking for which aspect of this computer should I upgrade or focus on,
Marco:
I would focus on SSD size because even the lowest end CPU in almost every Mac family is totally fine and not that different from the highest end one.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And finally, Andrew writes, what tweet management approach do you have?
Casey:
I ask because Marco's tweet count seems to be decreasing since Andrew named Marco.
Casey:
Why don't we start with you?
Marco:
Well, I don't really have much of an approach necessarily.
Marco:
It's not like a methodology or a formal thing where I'm like, you know, having stand-ups every morning in the parking lot and whiteboarding my action items.
Marco:
But –
Marco:
So it's not really a formal thing.
Marco:
I've been tweeting less because Twitter sucks.
Marco:
That's about it.
Marco:
It's like, you know how if you eat a certain type of food and you vomit after eating it, you tend not to want to eat that type of food for a while, if ever?
Marco:
Imagine that feeling in a smaller way every time I go to Twitter.
Yeah.
Marco:
It's like, wow, every time I use Twitter, I feel a little bit worse about using Twitter more in the future.
Marco:
And so that feeling is accumulating over time.
John:
I wonder if your tweet count actually is decreasing, though.
John:
Like, I'd like to see some charts because my impression is you've been tweeting more than usual lately.
John:
Or maybe it's just they're more like bursts.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I would have to see some numbers on it.
John:
But I'm wondering how this person came to the conclusion that your tweet count, they said, seems to be decreasing.
Casey:
Well, did you delete a bunch of tweets when that was trendy like a month or two ago?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
So the actual tweet count probably does go up and down a lot because I have one of those things that just deletes tweets older than X days.
Marco:
But it didn't sound like this is what this person was talking about.
Casey:
Yeah, I read it the way you read it the first time, and then I came back to that a week, or not a week, I guess a few days later, and I thought what he meant was, did you delete a bunch of tweets?
Marco:
Oh, yes.
Casey:
But to kind of come back to your interpretation of this, Marco, I...
Casey:
I found that I am paying less and less attention to Twitter over time.
Casey:
I'm still addicted, but less so.
Casey:
So that's good if you can consider there a gray area in this conversation.
Casey:
I find that I'm tweeting less and less because more and more frequently, even when I tweet
Casey:
innocuous things i get angry tweets in return and uh i i don't typically pay attention to my timeline anymore i think i've said this either on here or on analog but i have a list of roughly 30 or 40 people it's a private list that i do pay attention to and i am a completionist on that list but my main timeline i only look at if i get really bored and so i just have been slowly backing away from twitter slowly
Marco:
I mean, the thing is, like, if you go to a place where you're hanging out with your friends, and suppose it's like a bar that you all go to with your friends, right?
Marco:
I love these kind of metaphors on Twitter, because they're almost as overused as car metaphors on computers.
Marco:
So it's like hanging out at a bar with your friends.
Marco:
And you keep going there, because all your friends are there, and it used to be a really good bar.
Marco:
And every time you go there, someone walks up to you and slaps you in the face and walks away.
Marco:
And you're like, well, that kind of sucks, but my friends do.
Marco:
And then a few minutes later, someone comes up and just farts and it just stinks up the whole place.
Marco:
And then they walk away like, oh God, this, okay, this is kind of unpleasant.
Marco:
And then a few minutes later, somebody else walks up and like, you know, just starts yelling at you like a crazy person.
Marco:
Like, why are you, what are you doing?
Marco:
You're doing everything wrong.
Marco:
It's like,
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
And eventually you're going to be like, hey guys, you want to go somewhere else?
Marco:
And that's kind of what I've been doing.
Casey:
John, any thoughts?
John:
Another vague question.
John:
Tweet management approach?
John:
Speaking of managing Twitter in general, Casey, I have a recommendation for you.
John:
Take that list of 40 people where you read the timeline and make that your new list of followers and unfollow everybody else.
Casey:
It's funny you said that.
Casey:
I really mean this.
Casey:
It's funny you said that.
Casey:
I have thought about doing exactly that a lot.
Yeah.
Casey:
The reason I haven't yet is because there are a lot of people who I really, really, really, really like in the real world that I don't want to upset by unfollowing them.
John:
You should change your mental model of Twitter.
John:
Come to my mental model of Twitter, which is me following you doesn't mean I like you.
John:
Me not following me doesn't mean I don't like you.
John:
i follow people whose tweets i want to see that's that is the sole criteria just because i don't want to see your tweets doesn't mean i don't like you maybe you're awesome maybe you tweet about a thing that i love but you tweet about it just slightly too much like i love dogs but maybe you tweet about dogs too much i won't follow you don't take it personally i just don't want to see all your dog tweets it's fine
John:
Anyway, everyone can decide how they want to follow up.
John:
But like tweet management approach.
John:
I mean, I guess we did this broad brush.
John:
Marco talked about his deleting tweets with some automated thing and why he's not liking Twitter too much.
John:
And you have your list and then your other timeline.
John:
I mean, everyone knows my approach.
John:
He's listened to the show for a long time.
John:
I'm a completionist.
John:
I trim my follow list so I can read everybody's tweets automatically.
John:
Pretty much nobody else in the world does that because it's not the way most people use Twitter, which makes me think, again, how could Andrew know what Marco's tweet count is?
John:
I get this a lot from other people who reply to me, and it's so clear from all the replies that I get.
John:
People don't have time to read everybody's tweets, so they'll ask about something that I tweeted about an hour ago.
John:
Why don't they know I tweeted about an hour ago?
John:
Why would they?
John:
It was an hour ago.
John:
They're not like their Twitter completionists.
John:
Anyway, I tweet when I feel like it.
John:
I read Twitter when I feel like it.
John:
uh the only thing that i've been doing more in the past few years than i have earlier is i am getting much quicker with the block button like i mean and much proactively blocking uh just uh blocking and muting are are the two biggest new tools say in the past three years that i've used um
John:
i don't need to use them that much but that's the only thing that i've added to my normal practice of keeping my follow lists small and i don't know uh you know i don't i don't no one slaps me in the face or farts when i go on twitter for the most part i i have the the discipline not to respond to most people which really helps but the people i do respond to are nice and i have fun and sometimes i do see pictures of dogs and they're cute
John:
Except for we rate dogs who rejected my dog picture a year ago and then post one that looks exactly the same.
John:
Not that we're bitter.
John:
So angry about that.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Aftershocks, Marine Layer, and Casper.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter...
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arman, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental, they didn't mean to.
Casey:
Accidental, tech podcast so long.
John:
WeRateDogs is all, oh, if you have a cute picture of your dog, just DM it to me.
John:
Maybe I'll include it on my thing.
John:
Great, I've got a cute dog.
John:
Check out this cute picture.
John:
Nothing.
John:
Silence.
John:
No response for a year.
John:
A year later, WeRateDogs is like, look at this dog that blends into the surface that it's on.
John:
Which, you know, there's been a million of those pictures from WeRateDogs.
John:
I'm like, I sent you a perfectly good dog blending into the surface that it's on picture a year ago and you never posted it.
John:
Are you trying to say my dog isn't cute or isn't blending with its surroundings?
Casey:
nothing nothing from we write dogs very very sad times i'm sorry john my dog is cute everyone should see my dog uh marco you shipped something this week you shipped uh instant search and i'm assuming that you used rx swift for that is that correct
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
I always use Prescription Swift for everything.
Marco:
You should have called it InstaSearch.
Casey:
That's true.
Marco:
I can't use Insta anymore because I came out with Instapaper and then a couple years later, Instagram came out.
Marco:
And now if I would use Insta something, everyone would think I was just aping Instagram.
Marco:
Just call it FinstaSearch.
Wow.
John:
Fake InstaSearch.
Casey:
Anyway, I haven't actually taken the time to play with this because I'm a terrible person.
Casey:
But you said in your blog post about it, which we'll link in the show notes, you said this was a lot of fun to build and I'm proud of it.
Casey:
Which means now I need you to tell me why was it fun to build and tell me, not that you shouldn't be, why you're proud of it.
Marco:
Well, all right, so what instant search is, for a long time, I've had this fantasy for Overcast of, wouldn't it be cool to move the most common search items, the most commonly searched podcasts, into a local cache that just is bundled with the app?
Marco:
And will therefore like be instantly searchable.
Marco:
So like when you're typing in the name of something that you want to add, like the name of a new podcast you just heard about, you want to go at it, it just shows up like immediately.
Marco:
And I've tried lots of different ways to do this.
Marco:
And the main problem I kept coming back to, you know, I basically tried this like every six months for like the last few years.
Marco:
And the main problem I kept coming back to was the index that it would create, the search index it would create would just be too big.
Marco:
And so I would shelf the idea, like, okay, it isn't worth the size.
Marco:
I'll shelf it for now and I'll come back later.
Marco:
What I started doing, oh, maybe about a year ago, I forget exactly, is I started recording with new subscriptions for new podcasts.
Marco:
What search queries led to that podcast being subscribed to?
Marco:
And so that gives me, when I combine that with popularity rankings on Overcast, just how many people subscribe to each one,
Marco:
that combination is able to give way more relevant results than straight up like title relevance matching with with no waiting you know like imagine like you know google without page rank like that's that's kind of crappy it's just a keyword search at that point like that's how most podcast apps are able to search is they just kind of do like a kind of like a dumb text relevance score like there's like algorithms like bm25 and stuff like that like there's algorithms where like if you search for you know
Marco:
accidental tech and our podcast shows up in the list because it includes those keywords and you might rank it because it was part of the title which is more important than the body and it was two-thirds of the title of this show and some other show it might only be like two of ten words in the title and the words are next to each other so you might rank it highly like there's all these different algorithms that search engines use to rank to see what's most important
Marco:
that you can use without any knowledge of the results set of how important they are.
Marco:
All you know is how well does it match the text of the query.
Marco:
So that's what I was doing for years, and it's been mediocre, it's been fine.
Marco:
Anyway, so I started in more recent times adding popularity rankings to that, and episode recency, so that way if you search for the talk show,
Marco:
you get John Gruber's more recent The Talk Show podcast, not the one that was on 5x5 like five years ago and hasn't been updated since.
Marco:
So there's all sorts of matching things you've got to do to kind of account for this.
Marco:
I factor in recency of episodes, I factor in popularity on Overcast, so that way if you launch a podcast called This American Lives...
Marco:
And you shouldn't get every search for this American life because you kind of didn't earn that.
Marco:
People who searched for that probably meant the big public radio show, not yours.
Marco:
So you got to account for stuff like that.
Marco:
And so the more factors you can put in that are based on popularity or the merits of this as verified by human beings, the more relevant your search can be.
Marco:
So I started building in this thing about whatever people typed
Marco:
And then whatever they actually subscribe to weight that more highly.
Marco:
So over time, if you figure like that will eventually make, like if you type in a search query and it brings up three results and the one that everybody really wants always shows up third, over time that will actually rise in the list up to first place.
Marco:
Because if everyone types in this American life and above it is this American lives and this American love and then this American life below that, like eventually people will type this American something
Marco:
subscribe to this american life and eventually that will rise up to the top until it is the first result in that list so because i had this increased relevance building algorithm i was able to then make a downloadable local search index using that combined with my other you know popularity and stuff like that that was way way way smaller but that actually had significant relevance to most searches that
Marco:
And the index of that takes about 3 megs.
Marco:
And I could make it smaller if I made it slower, but I include in that 3 meg index everything that is needed to show it in the search result list, like the artwork URL, the title, the description, the author.
Marco:
I include all that in the database, even though I could fetch it, just so it shows up faster.
Marco:
And so the result of this is I've been able to achieve my dream.
Marco:
You can go to the search box and you can type in a single letter.
Marco:
Effectively, immediately, you will get three results right there on top.
Marco:
You type in letter number two and you get a different three results or maybe one of the same ones.
Marco:
But like letter number two, you refine your search even further.
Marco:
And chances are by letter number two or three, if you're searching for a popular show, it's probably already on screen.
John:
You're bearing the lead here.
John:
The most important feature, which you demonstrated in your movie, is now, finally, you can go to Overcast.
John:
Go to the search feature and type the letters ATP.
John:
And the number one hit is this podcast, which does not contain any words with the sequence of letters ATP in them.
John:
Nevertheless, it will be the number one hit.
Marco:
You've been able to search for ATP by the phrase ATP in Overcast for about six months now because about six months ago, I started indexing keywords in domain names as part of search results.
Marco:
And our domain name, as you heard in the song, is ATP.fm.
Marco:
And so I tokenize based on the dot.
Marco:
I discard the TLD.
Marco:
And so our domain names keywords are ATP.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
And so it would show up in relevance for a long time if you type in ATP for about six months.
Marco:
And over time, that query leads to result algorithm made it slowly rise in that list.
Marco:
And now it's on top when you search for ATP.
John:
Was it number one before?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I don't remember.
John:
Well, anyway, it's the number one result now, as it should be.
John:
And honestly, Marco should have added special case code for this a long time ago.
Marco:
So Overcast... People always accuse me of this.
Marco:
Overcast has no special case code for ATP, with one very, very, very small exception.
Marco:
I do have a flag in the database.
Marco:
So normally, when a show...
Marco:
You have a show like This American Life where it only usually includes the one most recent episode in the feed, and then any old episodes you can't download fresh anymore.
Marco:
You have to go buy their app or whatever to get them.
Marco:
They remove it from the public feed.
Marco:
So Overcast has a feature that's been there for a while where it keeps track of what episodes it knows about from a feed that are no longer in the feed.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And for people who are newly arriving at that podcast, it doesn't show the ones that are no longer in the feed because the assumption is you probably can't download them anymore.
Marco:
ATP is hosted on Squarespace.
Marco:
Squarespace has a limit of 100 items in RSS feeds.
Marco:
So because Overcast has been running for long enough to catch ATP from episode one in that feed, Overcast knows about all the episodes because they were at one time in the feed that it saw.
Marco:
It just has many of them marked as no longer in the feed.
Marco:
Overcast
Marco:
I do have a special flag in the back end that I can set for a podcast that says, ignore what's no longer in the feed and just show everything I know about that has ever been in the feed.
Marco:
And so I have that set for ATP and a handful of other shows where I know this is a problem.
Marco:
And therefore, Overcast can see all the back catalog of ATP, even though the RSS feed only ever includes the last 100 episodes.
Marco:
But other than that, that is the only special case handling of ATP and Overcast, and that's not applied only to ATP.
Casey:
So what made this so fun to write, other than just accomplishing this thing that you've wanted to accomplish for so long?
Marco:
It was a fun technical challenge for me, because it involved a lot of low-level stuff.
Marco:
I love low-level optimization code.
Marco:
Take this enclosed problem that doesn't really involve anything...
Marco:
like frustrating.
Marco:
Like there's no weird concurrency stuff.
Marco:
There's no like weird, like UI conditions and testing and weird States.
Marco:
There's no time based anything.
Marco:
There's no network based anything.
Marco:
Like it's just a very like, here's a bunch of data that you need to operate on in low level ways and make it really fast and keep it really small.
Marco:
Like, and I love problems like that.
Marco:
So it was a very fun problem to work on of like, how do I make the index in the first place?
Marco:
How do I decide what goes into the index?
Marco:
How do I rank what's in the index?
Marco:
And then how do I make the index as small as possible?
Marco:
And then how do I make the app read and display contents from the index as quickly as possible?
Marco:
And all of that was, oh, and then how do I make the servers serve the index as quickly as possible through the CDN and everything so the servers don't all get hammered when all the apps come down with the update?
Marco:
There's all sorts of fun little challenges that were involved here that I just love that kind of work.
Marco:
I get a lot of joy out of it.
Marco:
That's why I've been doing this.
Marco:
And then the result of it is sheer delight.
Marco:
Like the result of seeing instant search, because most search boxes don't work this way.
Marco:
Like most search boxes in any other podcast app and even in many other kinds of apps in general, you're searching a catalog of things like the app store.
Marco:
You know, like you type in
Marco:
a letter, and you don't immediately get results.
Marco:
You might, after a few letters, get one of those suggested search things where it just shows the text below the box, and you can tap on it to actually run that search.
Marco:
You might get that, but I don't know of anyone else who does search like this where you're actually searching what is technically remote content, but it shows up instantly thanks to this local cache.
Marco:
I'm very proud of it.
Marco:
I think it's a very delightful feature, and as I wrote up in my blog post, it's an important feature.
Marco:
Because search is incredibly important to podcast apps.
Marco:
And I think overall, we as podcast app makers have not done a great job prioritizing search for the importance that it actually has.
Marco:
It is a really important feature.
Marco:
And I kind of learned this over winter break.
Marco:
I had some server issues.
Marco:
Mostly it wasn't a problem that people couldn't sync their playback.
Marco:
The biggest problem was you couldn't easily search to add new podcasts.
Marco:
And that made me realize quite how important search is because the first thing you do when you install a new podcast app is use the search box to add the shows you want to hear.
Marco:
And what people do frequently throughout their usage of the app is, oh, they hear about our new show.
Marco:
I want to go add it.
Marco:
Go type it into the search box.
John:
Speaking of that, by the way, that use case I run across all the time.
John:
Someone mentions a cool podcast and I want to go add it to Overcast.
Yeah.
John:
i wish search was more available in the ui like more prominent in the ui now that you've improved it so vastly i would love it if like everywhere i could get access to from wherever i am and it was context aware like if i'm on a playlist and i want to go find an episode and stick it in the playlist that i'm currently looking on i don't want to leave the playlist and go back to the home screen and do a search whatever i want to do it right there so i think now that you've improved search you should in your whatever your next ui redesign is think about how to
John:
feature it more prominently and make it more useful in more context.
John:
Because now, you know, even the old search I wanted to use frequently, and now that it's fast, I would love to just use it immediately.
Marco:
Yeah, thanks.
Marco:
That's a good idea.
Marco:
It's a little tricky in that the combination of the search box and the way iOS standard controllers display search results by overlaying the table view with a new table view that has just the search results in it, and it dims the background and moves the search box up.
Marco:
The way that's all done is through this thing called UI Search Controller.
Marco:
UI search controller has been notoriously buggy and hard to work with over time.
Marco:
The current version is no better.
Marco:
It is very buggy and hard to work with.
Marco:
It especially is buggy when dealing with navigation pushes and pops where you have multiple levels of navigation like Overcast has and where you might want a search controller in a deeper level of it than the root level or you might want one in both or one or the other.
Marco:
And Overcast also has a bug since 5.0 when I added search, which is search controllers just totally break when used in combination with pull to refresh.
Marco:
Apple has UI refresh control.
Marco:
It is a built-in pull to refresh thing.
Marco:
And if you use that with Apple's built-in search controller to display search boxes and navigation bars, they just conflict and you have animation bugs all over the place.
Marco:
I know this is a bug in Overcast.
Marco:
The reason why I haven't fixed it yet...
Marco:
is because it's merely a minor cosmetic bug if you pull to refresh and then you get the search box kind of stuck on screen for a second.
Marco:
It's a cosmetic bug and to fix it will involve me writing my own UI search controller and or UI refresh control.
Marco:
And that has not been a pressing enough need yet to justify the amount of work that it will be.
Casey:
Tell me about the video player for this thing that appears to be a GIF on your website, but actually has play pause controls, which are emoji, by the way, and I vastly approve of them.
Marco:
So that's, yeah.
Marco:
So when marketing this feature, it was important to me to show the video.
Marco:
So a couple of weeks ago, I did a tweet from the Overcast account saying like, coming soon, this like fast search thing.
Marco:
And the response to it was massive.
Marco:
So I knew people really liked this.
Marco:
This really resonated with people.
Marco:
And so I wanted to really market it right with the blog post.
Marco:
And so it had to be a video.
Marco:
As far as I could tell, I didn't look too much into it, honestly.
Marco:
But as far as I could tell, animated GIFs, there's no good way for browsers to pause their playback.
Marco:
Some of them will allow you to click them to stop them or hit the stop button to stop them.
Marco:
But I couldn't find a way to offer a play-pause button in the actual content of the page and give the users that control reliably.
Marco:
And so I didn't want this...
Marco:
big animated thing to be forcibly animating for everyone as they try to read the text below it, necessarily.
Marco:
Like, I wanted it to be animating upon loading the page, but to be stoppable.
Marco:
I also, like, the GIF quality was okay, but it was like two megs, and I thought, well, let me see if I can get better quality with, you know, H.264, H.265, WebM, whatever else I can get, right?
Marco:
So, I used this opportunity to revisit what can the HTML5 video tag do these days?
Marco:
And that is an HTML5 video.
Marco:
Literally, it has three versions of the file.
Marco:
It's H.265, which plays in most modern Safaris, and that is the smallest of the files.
Marco:
It also is H.264, which plays in almost everything else, and WebM, which plays in Google's whatever BS that plays WebM.
Marco:
That, I think, covers all modern browsers that have a chance to do this.
Marco:
At first, I thought like, oh, let me use just the built-in controls, make it super simple.
Marco:
But the built-in controls, at least in Safari, overlaid the search box in the video.
Marco:
And I thought, that's not great.
Marco:
That's kind of ruining the point here.
Marco:
So I did no controls, autoplay, play in line, and there's no sound, so I don't have to worry about that.
Marco:
And I thought, well...
Marco:
I'll make it so that if you click on it or tap on it, playback stops.
Marco:
And if you click on it again, it'll start again.
Marco:
People will figure that out.
Marco:
But then I thought, no, people won't figure that out.
Marco:
I can't depend on that.
Marco:
So it does that.
Marco:
If you click on it, it will stop playing.
Marco:
And if you click on it again, it'll resume.
Marco:
But I also wanted some kind of very, very small...
Marco:
play button and i tried different things i tried first like a link that just said play slash pause or pause or whatever and it didn't it was ugly and big and eventually i'm just like let me just make a little emoji thing i searched found the emoji play and pause buttons and i wrote the smallest video player that i that i possibly could it uses very you can view source it's right there it's like you know a couple lines of javascript and and uh and that's it and so
Marco:
it's very, very simple.
Marco:
And I'm actually kind of proud of like how easy and simple it ended up being.
Marco:
And it was kind of a fun little thing to just like play with HTML.
Marco:
I even did a, I thought like, what is the equivalent of an alt tag for video?
Marco:
So that people using screen readers can know what this is.
Marco:
I learned this thing called WebVTT, and it's basically a caption and transcription format, like a subtitle kind of format.
Marco:
And you can use WebVTT formatted caption files to use them either as subtitles for the video or as something called text descriptions.
Marco:
Now, semantically, subtitles are not for this purpose.
Marco:
Like the purpose of a subtitle is not for a visually impaired user to learn what's in a video.
Marco:
It's for a hearing impaired user to be able to read what is being spoken in a video.
Marco:
Now my video had no sound.
Marco:
All I wanted was the equivalent of a video alt tag of like to describe in text the image that is showing in the video.
Marco:
And so there's a thing for that called WebVTT, and you can use the track sub-element of HTML5 video, and you can give it the role, like the semantic role of text description or something like that.
Marco:
It's all in the spec somewhere.
Marco:
And so I did all that, and I transcribed the video, and it's great.
Marco:
Except no browser actually supports that yet, turns out.
Marco:
Nice.
Marco:
If I label it as subtitles, then the built-in controls, which I've disabled because they were covering up the search bar, the built-in controls would be able to display it as subtitles if you turn them on, but...
Marco:
They're not subtitles, and that kind of sucks.
Marco:
And as far as I can tell, the built-in screen reader on iOS and macOS, VoiceOver, just skips right over the video element no matter what I did.
Marco:
Whether it was subtitles or text descriptions or whatever, VoiceOver just skips right over the whole video.
Marco:
It pretends it isn't even there.
Marco:
So as far as I can tell, that was not a good use of time to do this.
Marco:
But hopefully in the future, that will be useful to somebody.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
And at least I learned how to do it.
Marco:
So if browsers ever do support that, then that'll be nice.
Marco:
But it was kind of like a fun little thing to make this little experiment of this totally self-contained little video player in this blog post and just see how easy can HTML5 make this for me and how minimal can I make it while still being functional.
Casey:
I dig it.
Casey:
It's cool.
Casey:
When do you fall back to doing a search across the internet against your servers?
Casey:
At what point do you say the local cache is not enough and you go and ask Overcast servers for help?
Marco:
I always will run a remote search once you've typed your third character.
Marco:
And one thing, too, the instant search cache results never move when...
Marco:
Once they're on screen, when the remote results from my servers come in, they will only ever go below them.
Marco:
Because what I didn't want is for you to type in something, see the instance search results, go to tap it, and then as you're going to tap it, it changes that from under you to something else, and you tap the wrong thing accidentally.
Marco:
That's exactly how the iOS app search works for me all the time.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
That's a terrible experience.
Marco:
So I didn't want to do that.
Marco:
So basically like the results are stable, whereas like the only way to make the contents of the list change is for you to enter more text or different text in the text box.
Marco:
So if you have typed a query and then you go to tap something without typing any more letters, whatever you go to tap on will still be there when you get there.
Casey:
I dig it.
Casey:
It's cool.
Marco:
So Casey, you published a video.
Casey:
I did.
Casey:
I win the competition between you and me.
Marco:
Hooray.
Marco:
Not to my surprise.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So I published the CRV video.
Casey:
What is that?
Casey:
Yesterday morning.
Casey:
And it has been up for a while.
Casey:
Unsurprisingly, it hasn't made a tremendous splash.
Casey:
I didn't promote it quite as aggressively as I have in the past.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I think the subject matter is slightly less interesting than some of the stuff I've had in the past.
Casey:
But the video is out.
Casey:
I'm mostly happy with how it's turned out.
Casey:
And we talked about this a lot last episode.
Casey:
So I don't really need to relive the motivations and trials and tribulations of the video.
Casey:
But all told, I am pleased that it's out the door.
Casey:
I am going to start on the next video probably tomorrow.
Casey:
And in general, I'm happy with it.
Casey:
There are definitely problems with it.
Casey:
The one thing that slipped through the cracks, and I'll beat probably John, if not both of you on this, is that at one point, hand to God, I don't know how this happened.
Casey:
I don't know if I did it and then never caught it.
Casey:
I did notice it at one point and then it slipped my mind after that.
Casey:
But at one point when I'm discussing how chatty the car is, I have the video flipped in such a way it looks like it's a right-hand drive car.
Casey:
I don't know how that slipped my mind to fix that.
Casey:
I don't even know how the video got that way.
Yeah.
Casey:
But somehow that happened, and somehow the one time I noticed it, I didn't fix it immediately and then forgot about it.
Casey:
And that really, really ticked me off.
Casey:
It was a self-created problem.
Casey:
There were a couple audio hiccups here and there, but mostly I don't think they're nearly as egregious as they had been in the past.
Casey:
And mostly I'm happy with it.
Casey:
Cool.
Marco:
That's easy.
Casey:
I mean, we don't need to belabor it any more than that.
Casey:
I'm assuming John is about to beat me up with a whole bunch of complaints and criticisms.
Casey:
But if we're done at this point, then I'd say go watch the video, mash that, subscribe, and hit the bell or whatever I'm supposed to say.
Casey:
And we're good.
John:
John?
John:
Oh, this is a video from the past.
John:
I want to talk about his future videos.
John:
When you release one that's newer than the one you released before, then we can talk about it.
John:
Yeah, it's fine.
John:
Although your opinion of the CR-V is warped by your contact with these luxury cars, of course.
John:
But it's a video.
John:
You can say what you want to say.
Casey:
It is.
Casey:
You're right.
Casey:
And I recorded, as I stated on the video, that wasn't a lie.
Casey:
I recorded...
Casey:
what i thought was going to be darn near all the footage for the car where i basically said it's a piece of trash and then it occurred to me it's really not it's actually a very nice car it's just that it's not it's not as nice as the car that costs twice as much which is weird right no no no you you make i mean i know you're actually 90 is nicer than this is it is it nicer it is nicer it only costs two times as much well there's that
John:
I hope it's nicer.
Casey:
You're absolutely right.
John:
How do you feel about two CRVs versus the X-Men?
Casey:
No, you're absolutely right.
Casey:
And that's why I ended up reshooting a lot of it.
Casey:
Not to say I did it perfectly, but
Casey:
My initial cuts at this were like, oh, this is a piece of crap and it doesn't do anything nice.
Casey:
And that's not true, actually.
Casey:
It's really genuinely not true.
Casey:
It's actually a very, very nice car.
John:
It is an SUV.
John:
I mean, you could slam it for that.
John:
But you have to compare it to the comparables, as they say in the real estate business.
John:
There are other SUVs that cost about the same amount of money.
John:
And how does this compare to them?
John:
When you're running one of the fancy cars like the –
John:
or whatever, you're comparing it to other cars of the same type in the same price class.
John:
And that's a valid comparison.
John:
But if you're going to constantly be comparing cars to cars that cost twice as much, you're always going to be disappointed.
Casey:
Yeah, and you're absolutely right.
Casey:
And I think I should have been...
Casey:
more cognizant of that when I was, when I was filming, but you know, you live, you learn.
Casey:
But yeah, so I'm going to hopefully be able to make heads or tails of this Tesla footage I shot in November.
Casey:
I think within the next couple of working days, I'm going to know whether or not I can do anything with it.
Casey:
I certainly hope to, I plan to, it's not going to be as long a video as this was.
Casey:
It's not going to be as involved a video as this was, but I hope to be able to put something short out based on it.
Casey:
Even if I end up,
Casey:
I'm really worried about the audio because I don't think I had my lavalier gain dialed in correctly.
Casey:
So even if I end up just doing a voiceover with a bit of B-roll, I might just try to do that.
Casey:
We'll see once I go digging through this footage.
Casey:
But I've set up a schedule for the next several months of what I want to review and when I want to do it.
Casey:
And so I think if I don't do the Tesla video for February...
Casey:
Then I'm going to do like a here's my Golf R after having lived with it for several months and what do I like and what do I not like.
Casey:
And so that's the plan for February and then I think the XC90 in March and then we'll see where it goes from there.
Casey:
So yeah, go check it out, youtube.caseylist.com.
Casey:
It's only 10 minutes.
John:
Could you not get – don't you have a vanity URL, youtube.com slash caseylist?
Casey:
I haven't done it yet.
Casey:
I need to do that, but I haven't done it yet.
John:
YouTube.com slash Syracusa.
John:
The name I never pronounce, Marco.
John:
Yep.
John:
Speaking of which, I should have recorded my day of woe and destiny because that would have made a great video.
John:
ABR.
John:
I always be recording.