The Technical Burden of Users
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let's start with the Mac Pro hole design because we can't get away from the trypophobia or whatever it's called.
Casey:
I don't even remember anymore.
Casey:
But a friend of the show, Stephen Hackett, has collected a bunch of links and information that he conveniently put on one post, I think expressly for us.
Casey:
So, John, tell us what's going on here.
John:
Yeah, a few tidbits.
John:
First, in one of the popular feedback items we got last week, people were pointing us to the design page on Apple's website for the Mac Pro.
John:
They actually have a little movie animation thing showing how the holes are created.
John:
They show a side view, sort of a side view cutaway of the thing, and they show...
John:
So hemispherical divots appearing first on one side and then on the other offset.
John:
So that's what we theorized.
John:
And we should have just gone to Apple's website because they confirmed that is indeed how those things are shaped, how they're made.
John:
You know, we don't know, but that's how they're shaped.
John:
And then the speculation about.
John:
where the the design came from and about you know that the poorly heard conversation between johnny i've and tim cook about it coming from the g4 cube uh stephen hager took out his g4 cube and looked at the bottom of it and you can see it's the bottom of the top anyway one side of the the naked robotic core thing has
John:
a bunch of big holes and then behind that another piece of metal with a bunch of small holes and they are offset in the same sort of arrangement where through each big hole you can see uh a bit of three other holes right um but it's not the 3d thing so it's unclear based on the overheard conversation whether johnny was referring to this like oh the mac pro it looks kind of like the uh uh the g4 cube or uh as i originally thought
John:
that they actually did think about this machined pattern with the hemispheres, but then just didn't actually put it on the G4 Cube and just did something that was much, much cheaper and simpler to manufacture, but also not as cool and not as prominent.
John:
Like, these are much smaller scale holes.
John:
And then finally, somebody... Who sent this?
John:
Ivar Magus sent us an article by Ian Parker in The New Yorker that is an old article from 2015.
John:
talking about johnny ive and in it they talk about a particular person in the design studio who used to come in early in the morning and make a bunch of geometrically complex objects then they would have the machinist mill which doesn't seem cost effective like i know people are coming in just wasting the time of your machinist on staff and you know spending material and electricity and wear and tear on the tools just to make cool designs anyway
John:
Sometimes when they're having a meeting about a speaker hole pattern or something, Johnny will ask the guy, can you get your box of patterns?
John:
There's just this ready-made box of weird patterns that they can try out, which is fun.
John:
That's kind of like brainstorming and just coming up with ideas and socking them away and then saying, we have a need for this.
John:
Instead of having to come up with something on the fly, that you have just sort of a parts bin of interesting design ideas that you may or may not be able to apply.
John:
So that may have happened in this case as well.
John:
So I think we have thoroughly, thoroughly exhausted the origins and design merits and aspects of the whole pattern in the front of our Mac Pros.
John:
I think we can put this one to bed, please.
Casey:
No argument here.
Casey:
I had seen some information about this flyby, but I didn't get a chance to read it.
Casey:
What we had put in the show notes is Apple reverses course on MDM, which is mobile device management and parental control apps.
Casey:
Can someone pinch hit as the chief summarizer in chief and let me know what this is about?
John:
It's you basically summarized it.
John:
Remember before we talked about.
John:
Yeah, you did it accidentally.
John:
When we talked about before that this parental control applications that were using mobile device management features that are normally used to control a fleet of company owned or company controlled devices.
John:
And there was they're using for parental control.
John:
And Apple told them they couldn't do that anymore.
John:
Apparently, Apple has reversed that decision.
John:
And it now says that you're allowed to do it for parental control applications as long as you don't sell, use or disclose any data to third parties for any purpose.
John:
How Apple is going to enforce that, I have no idea.
John:
But bottom line is that apparently there are enough companies making and selling parental control applications using this technology and their cries were heard by Apple and they have relented.
John:
and they are allowed to continue to have businesses using this technology.
John:
Honestly, Apple really needs to create purpose-built APIs just for this.
John:
Apparently, they do want this sort of market, this third-party market for parental control stuff that have these powers.
John:
They want that to exist, because if they didn't want it to exist, they could have just held fast and said, sorry, your business is over.
John:
It's screen time or nothing now.
John:
Obviously, they want it to exist.
John:
They should do better than MDM, because MDM really is...
John:
not the best tool for that job and not really intended for that purpose and having these multiple sets of rules about if you're a parental control app you have this but if you're an enterprise app enterprise you know actual mobile device management app you have that set of rules is just weird but anyway i'm so i'm sure they'll resolve it in a few more years
Casey:
Kind of tangentially related, around the same time that this parental control brouhaha happened, there was the like illicit app store thing where people or companies were using enterprise certificates in order to distribute apps to people that were not part of their company.
Casey:
So to recap…
Casey:
If you're a big company, say like Northrop Grumman, you might have a bunch of internal tools that you want to distribute only to your own employees.
Casey:
And you can get a enterprise certificate from Apple if you jump through the appropriate hoops and pay the appropriate money, which will allow you to distribute apps outside of the app store sort of constantly.
Casey:
Kind of sideloading them just for your own employees.
Casey:
And what some not very nice people were doing was letting anyone be their quote-unquote employee.
Casey:
And so apparently Apple has tightened up their rules with regard to enterprise app certificates.
Casey:
And one of you was kind enough to put in the show notes the following quote.
Casey:
You understand and agree that Apple reserves the right to review and approve or reject any internal use application that you would like to deploy at any time during the term of this agreement.
Casey:
If requested by Apple, you agree to fully cooperate with Apple and promptly provide such internal use application to Apple for such review.
Casey:
So I read that as you have to do what we say when we say it.
Casey:
And if you think you have something private, well, it's not private when it comes to us because we are the gatekeepers.
John:
again enforcement is weird like how would they know what to request from who for what reasons like it's just kind of like they have to hear through the grapevine that somebody's using a certificate to distribute an application that they shouldn't or that apple is you know an apple can ask and say show us what you're distributing or show us this application but if they don't know you know anyway and this seems mostly tangential to the thing was that's even worse and i was amazed that people found like
John:
Just random people on the web who want to distribute an application outside the app store.
John:
They're not a big company.
John:
They don't have any employees.
John:
They just somehow got an enterprise certificate and they're using it to distribute like some weird jailbreak application or a game emulator or some...
John:
other weird tracking spyware stuff that wouldn't go through the app store and they just have a website and have instructions on how you can download stuff from the website and install their enterprise certificate on your phone and install this weird software that gets you pirated stuff or who you know is porn or gambling or whatever uh and that has just been sitting there existing on the web uh outside of of apple's view apparently and so
John:
This doesn't change any of that because those people just get shut down no matter what.
John:
This is more like for companies like Google or whatever that are do legitimately have enterprise certificates.
John:
It's just that Apple now says at any time we want it, we can ask you, hey, what are you distributing?
John:
Show us this.
John:
Show us that.
John:
And then we can give a thumbs up or thumbs down to it, which I'm sure the big companies love.
Casey:
Marco, you've been tweeting recently about Bluetooth and a new, I guess, like prompt that's in iOS 13.
Casey:
I am not yet running iOS 13 on any of my devices.
Casey:
I will probably put it on my iPad when the next seed comes out.
Casey:
But can you tell me a little bit about what's going on here?
Casey:
Because I find it very interesting.
Casey:
And I thought we could talk about it a little bit before I go to sleep during the Mac Pro section.
Sure.
Sure.
Marco:
And I should begin this with a massive disclaimer that I'm still learning about this, and I currently don't know that much about it.
Marco:
I don't know that much about the Bluetooth API usage and everything.
Marco:
But basically, the world of ad tracking and analytics tracking is always looking for a way around Apple's protections and rules.
Marco:
So they don't want people...
Marco:
So lots of apps basically want people's location data and other things that they can sell to make money.
Marco:
You'd be shocked how many apps sell your location data behind the scenes for money, especially apps that actually get permission to use your location for some part of the app.
Marco:
Like this is very common among scammy weather apps.
Marco:
and even some ostensibly non-scammy ones, like some of the really big weather apps, end up being caught tracking your location all the time and then selling it to people for money.
Marco:
Tracking location is a very valuable privacy thing to be sold, and so lots of apps try to do it, and Apple tries to lock it down.
Marco:
If you deny the location access to the actual GPS chip of the phone,
Marco:
There are still ways to infer your location much of the time.
Marco:
One of those ways is to scan for Wi-Fi networks around you and match it against databases of known Wi-Fi networks and where they are.
Marco:
And you can oftentimes get tracked that way.
Marco:
Another way is via Bluetooth beacons and other Bluetooth devices that can be scanned with core Bluetooth.
Marco:
What Apple has done in iOS 13 is lock down core Bluetooth in the same way that GPS accesses lockdown by requiring user permission.
Marco:
So it pops up a box saying, hey, you know, so-and-so app wants to use Bluetooth.
Marco:
Do you want to allow this?
Marco:
And what's interesting is that in...
Marco:
In iOS 13, I've had the beta installed on all my main devices for about two days now.
Marco:
By the way, don't do this.
Marco:
It's really bad.
Marco:
Beta 2 is really bad.
Marco:
Especially around audio and volume and audio routing to multiple audio devices.
Marco:
It's really bad.
Marco:
Uh, so don't do this.
Marco:
But anyway, um, the, uh, the Bluetooth dialogue boxes just keep popping up for me from apps that I haven't even launched that are just doing background refreshes or responding to silent push notifications or something like, and, and so I tweeted earlier today, I think, or yesterday, uh, I tweeted like, Hey, here's the apps that I've, that so far in like one day of running this, I already have like six or seven apps that, that,
Marco:
most of which I haven't even launched, that are trying to use Bluetooth.
Marco:
And I've gotten a ton of responses since then from people either saying, wow, my list is even longer, or from people saying, here's all the ways and all the reasons why some of these are legitimate.
Marco:
And I think it's interesting.
Marco:
One of the things people pointed out is that the location-based apps like Google Maps and Waze
Marco:
They apparently will use Bluetooth beacons if you're in certain tunnels that have these beacons installed to provide GPS in tunnels or to provide GPS indoors in various places indoors.
Marco:
I don't know how...
Marco:
useful and accurate that is i mean if you're driving down a tunnel at like 60 miles an hour can you even make a bluetooth connection to something you're passing by i don't think i think it connects i think it's just like a pinging type thing it's not making a it's not pairing with it or anything
Marco:
Yeah, so anyway, so walking around indoors is probably a more common thing.
Marco:
Or maybe even using mass transit, like subways, it might be a more common thing.
Marco:
Anyway, so there are some legitimate reasons why apps that use your location as part of the functionality, like a mapping app, might want Bluetooth access.
Marco:
I do find it creepy that it's Google that's doing this.
Marco:
Another problem is YouTube.
Marco:
And apparently...
Marco:
Every app that includes Google Chromecast support.
Marco:
Whoops.
Marco:
So one of the things that Bluetooth is often used for is for proximity device communication.
Marco:
And so one of my things that had it was the Nokia Health Mate app because I have a WiThings, or I guess Nokia now, Wi-Fi scale app.
Marco:
And during setup, it uses Bluetooth for setup and pairing of the scale initially.
Marco:
Now, this just came up in a background refresh.
Marco:
I haven't launched the app in months.
Marco:
And I think what we're seeing is the app just instantiates the core Bluetooth device manager singleton.
Marco:
And it just instantiates that and just has it ready to go all the time.
Marco:
Even though I'm not currently pairing a new scale, so I don't need this.
Marco:
Every day when I step on the scale, it communicates over Wi-Fi.
Marco:
And I get my results in the app over Wi-Fi.
Marco:
So Bluetooth isn't necessary anymore, but...
Marco:
You know, the app just starts the, you know, Bluetooth manager API probably in like the application did finish launching, you know, startup method and just, you know, calls it a day.
Marco:
Similarly, the Tesla app.
Marco:
So like there's a couple of features that Tesla offers that I have never set up and don't use.
Marco:
And some of them my car isn't even capable of.
Marco:
uh but apparently it also just instantiates a bluetooth connection in the background all the time like whenever a background refreshes so what we're seeing is there are legitimate uses for a lot of apps to have this but there's also a lot of apps that really don't need this permission by the way i've said no to all of them and everything still works
Marco:
so and there were a few responses from on twitter from people who were upset that i was calling them out like these are legitimate this is going to cause problems but i think what what we're seeing here is like apps often just request access to things by default because it's easy because it's part of some like global setup method like your app to finish launching method and you you just instantiate the bluetooth just in case you need it like for example
Marco:
There's an API on UI device, which is kind of like your API gateway as an app developer to the phone and its properties.
Marco:
And there's an API to check the battery level of the phone, which, by the way, people have used to be creepy.
Marco:
One of the ways people would try to fingerprint unique people and devices between different apps without using the ID for advertising that Apple provides would be to match the exact battery level, which would be like 94.37% with time of day and with other things trying to fingerprint you.
Marco:
And so years ago, Apple made the battery API only go in 5% increments.
Marco:
So you'll never get 94.35% reported to you as the app.
Marco:
You'll get 95%, and then a little while later, you'll get 90%.
Marco:
And so Apple's always in these battles with creepy analytics packages to try to lock down things so that you can't be uniquely identified without your knowledge.
Marco:
And so Overcast enables battery monitoring.
Marco:
You have to actually tell the API, turn on battery monitoring, and then you can start getting values from it.
Marco:
And I do that right from the start.
Marco:
As soon as my sync engine starts, I'm enabling battery monitoring because I check the battery level to determine how frequently to sync.
Marco:
because syncing involves a network request, and that could use power, and so when your battery level is not great, or when you are in low power mode, I throttle back the sync engine so it doesn't make as many requests.
Marco:
There's lots of things like that, that people might be starting up the Bluetooth API just automatically, all the time, for every background refresh, for some feature like that that they think is minor or might occasionally be helpful to you, and they just do it out of just, it's, why not do it, right?
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So what's nice about this is that now it gives people the knowledge of what they're doing on this thing that could be used for creepy purposes, even if it isn't always.
Marco:
But it could be used for creepy purposes.
Marco:
So Apple's giving people the knowledge like, hey, you know what?
Marco:
By the way, this app here, they're wanting to access your Bluetooth hardware.
Marco:
And you get a chance to say no.
Marco:
And for most apps, you can say no and nothing bad happens.
Marco:
I should also clarify before I just remember now, before I forget, before we get a lot of confused emails and tweets, the Bluetooth access that this is prompting about and potentially denying has nothing to do with Bluetooth audio output.
Marco:
Like, Overcast does not use this.
Marco:
Even though you can play to a Bluetooth headset, it's only about scanning for Bluetooth devices and communicating with Bluetooth devices in ways that are not about playing audio.
Marco:
That's all this is.
Marco:
So you shouldn't see this prompt from, like, podcast apps and stuff unless they integrate the Google Chromecast SDK, which apparently starts this up for whatever reason.
Marco:
So anyway, most of the warnings you see are going to be legitimate and most of them don't reflect the apps being creepy as hell.
Marco:
But there are a whole lot of apps out there that are creepy as hell and use this in some way.
Marco:
And so I would say, you know, similar to if an app asks for your location, say no unless you have a really obvious, clear reason to say yes.
John:
I wonder if Apple's going to eventually come out with their version of cross-origin request, whatever stuff.
John:
I know they have the thing where they require all your network connections to be secure and everything, but we're not at the point where the iPhone has a little snitch installed and tells you everything you're connecting to.
John:
Do they have a thing where you have to list all the domains your app communicates with?
John:
Is that a requirement?
John:
No, and that's how Overcast can download podcasts, because otherwise that would be a big problem.
John:
Yeah, I can imagine that coming on eventually, because that's like the next frontier of creepy things.
John:
So the Bluetooth is one, and the other thing, I forget if you already talked about this or tweeted about it, but like...
John:
analytics packages like not just chromecast sdk but like if you if you have any sort of thing like we'll send your crash reports and we're accompanying the ball and by the way we'll also track the location of all your users and convey that information as well like using bluetooth to again to find location like without gps like you can do wi-fi network uh mapping and there's the bluetooth stuff so that's another reason i think a lot of apps use it not because the app maker is trying to creepily do something but because they merely embedded a third-party sdk that they had no idea was doing this i bet half the people who embedded the chromecast sdk don't know
John:
But anyway, the next frontier is, where is this application sending your data?
John:
And if the application vendors had to just whitelist and say, this application is going to communicate with these domains, right?
John:
And then at least there would be some way for both Apple to know what it's supposed to do with and disallow connections to anything else and maybe some place for users to understand what it's connecting to.
John:
Obviously, for things like podcast applications, they'd have to have the I'm going to communicate with everything.
John:
Right.
John:
Which would definitely be a thing that you should be able to ask for and Apple should give it to you and then.
John:
Apple would know what's up with that application and people who are interested in what things your app are communicating with could see the list and it says this app has the permission to communicate with any website or any, you know, any server.
John:
And here are the last 100 servers that it communicated with.
John:
And you could look at that list and maybe I'm going a little bit overboard, but it seems like that's the direction Apple is going in it.
John:
Every way that app makers can find to funnel data into or out of the phone for purposes that the user of the application might not guess, Apple is adding controls to, adding visibility to, you know.
John:
Not that they're stopping them from doing that, but just that, like...
John:
if it's a legit thing you have to do you should have no problem saying that saying this is what my app is going to do and you shouldn't be ashamed to explain that to your users and it should you should be able to explain it users if you could explain it somewhere to either apple or users they should be like yeah okay that all makes sense fine right if that's not the case and you're like why is this application you know again like in the old days reading all my contacts and sending them up to the server this application has nothing to do with my contacts why is it even doing that why is it tracking my location like
John:
if you can't explain that to your user you shouldn't be allowed to use it so i'm i like this type of change even though it is producing yet more dialogue boxes that that was the other complaint that i saw on twitter that people like well people you're just training people to to click through all these dialogues dialogue boxes and click okay maybe but it's better than no dialogue box in which case you know it has 100 of people essentially allowing it to happen because they're never even prompted so
John:
It's better than no dialogue box at all.
John:
How much better and how much dialogue fatigue are we getting?
John:
I'm not sure, but...
John:
Hopefully, after the initial release, when everyone has to deal with all these dialogues, it will just fade into the background and not be such a common thing.
John:
And by the way, real-time follow-up so we don't get this next week.
John:
The Withings co-founder bought the company back from Nokia in 2018.
John:
That's fun.
John:
You sell your company to Nokia, some big company.
John:
Yeah.
John:
You sell your company to Nokia and presumably get a nice payday.
John:
And then, you know, the big company, like...
Casey:
squanders everything your company had and they sell it back to you for a song so you're back in control of your company and you made a nice windfall in the meantime that's kind of great i just i think this is fascinating and i do love that apple as you guys have said is calling more and more attention to this behavior that could isn't always but could be nefarious and i think oftentimes it is either nefarious or laziness and
Casey:
I've been guilty of this.
Casey:
I can't think of specific examples, certainly not with regard to Bluetooth, but I've been guilty of this.
Casey:
I can see myself, and I don't use any third-party analytics in Vignette, but I could totally see myself just throwing some analytics package in there and not realizing that I need to tweak this setting here or turn off this feature there in order to prevent this sort of dialogue from popping up.
Casey:
So I don't entirely blame, you know, your average app developer, but I definitely am creeped out by how many apps seem to be doing this.
Casey:
And it was, I think Benjamin Heron had tweeted and you had retweeted a list of what looked to be like 50 plus apps that he had discovered on his phone that were trying to get Bluetooth access, which is just bananas.
Casey:
And yeah,
Casey:
It's so hard because, as you guys had said, how do you know where this data is going?
Casey:
How do you know if it's using it to find your location in a tunnel or if it's using it to try to figure out your specific point on the earth for an app that adds images to your contacts?
Casey:
It's so hard to say, but I do like that Apple's surfacing this.
Casey:
I do like this effort to give more control to users, and I hope that this sort of thing continues.
Casey:
Another thing like this is...
Casey:
I don't have anything to put in the show notes handy, but maybe we'll be able to dig something up.
Casey:
But apparently when you delete an app that has an associated subscription, it actually says to you, hey, you still have a subscription for this thing, and it's going to re-up on such and such a date or something like that, which I think is another great idea.
Marco:
Yeah, that's awesome.
Casey:
It stinks for Marco in the sense that he might not collect money from people who didn't even realize they were sending him money, but I know I speak for Marco in saying, that's for the best.
Casey:
That's okay.
Marco:
Yeah, that doesn't suck.
Marco:
I actually really don't want people's money if they are tricked into giving it to me.
Marco:
I really don't want that at all.
Casey:
So I really like that as well.
Casey:
I just really like this direction.
Casey:
Yeah, I think, John, you had said that there's fatigue about dialogues, there's fatigue about subscriptions.
Casey:
We're getting fatigued about everything, our current administration.
Casey:
Anyway, but it's worth it, I think.
Casey:
It's worth it to see this and to think about this at least for a second.
John:
Yeah, I think that this behavior will change because the reason all these, you know, things are using Bluetooth is because you didn't have to prompt before, right?
John:
Once you have to prompt, it changes the equation entirely.
John:
You'll have to find some new nefarious way to figure out where you are for the purposes of analytics, right?
John:
I mean, it's kind of the same reason that, you know, I installed an analytics package that tells me what all my users are doing with the applications and sends me crash reports.
John:
And to each crash report, it attaches the last 30 seconds of audio heard by the phone so I can hear the user cursing.
John:
That doesn't happen because you need permission to get access to the microphone.
John:
And no one wants to prompt for that if their application doesn't actually need it.
John:
So same thing with this new rule on Bluetooth.
John:
All these weird SDKs that don't actually need Bluetooth and just using it as a backdoor to get your location are going to find some other way.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Molecule, reimagining the future of clean air, starting with the air purifier.
Marco:
Molecule replaces 70-year-old air purifier technology.
Marco:
Imagine if your phone hadn't changed in 70 years.
Marco:
This is what air purifiers have been like before Molecule came around.
Marco:
Molecule's breakthrough PECO technology is a nanotechnology.
Marco:
It goes beyond HEPA filtration to not just capture but completely destroy at a molecular level the full spectrum of indoor air pollutants, including those a thousand times smaller than what a HEPA filter can trap.
Marco:
And this really is dramatically significant.
Marco:
It makes a meaningful impact, especially for allergy and asthma sufferers.
Marco:
They even did a study of 49 allergy sufferers presented at the American College of Asthma, Allergy and Immunology.
Marco:
And Molecule Technology provided dramatic, statistically significant, sustained symptom reduction within just a week of use.
Marco:
These results have transformed lifelong allergy and asthma sufferers' lives.
Marco:
and it's also a nice clean design the molecule air purifier is just really nice it's a nice like metal cylinder it's almost like a mac pro it's like a nice metal cylinder uh with a vent on top intake on the bottom has an app to control it or button or a little tuck screen on top it's really nice it's sleek and it looks nice pretty much anywhere you put it this can really help you sleep especially if you're asthmatic or have allergies and this technology was backed by the epa and partially funded by a grant from the epa
Marco:
And so, again, it's been extensively tested by third parties and verified.
Marco:
You've got to check out Molecule.
Marco:
See for yourself, M-O-L-E-K-U-L-E.com.
Marco:
Molecule with a K. And enter code ATP at checkout to get $75 off your first order.
Marco:
Once again, Molecule.com, M-O-L-E-K-U-L-E.com.
Marco:
Enter code ATP at checkout for $75 off your first order.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Molecule for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I'm going to go to sleep now.
Casey:
What's going on with Mac Pro?
John:
I think this is the bottom of the barrel of Mac Pro topics.
Casey:
Oh, sure it is.
Casey:
Uh-huh.
John:
Sure it is.
John:
How many times have we said this?
John:
Things that were put into the document at WWDC.
John:
I think this is probably the last of them.
John:
This is about, briefly, one small item about the Afterburner card, which we have touched on before.
John:
It's the card that lets the Mac Pro deal with three simultaneous streams of 8K video or an even larger number of streams of 4K video.
John:
And it does all of the work of decoding and video on this card.
John:
And it uses an FPGA, which is a field programmable gate array, which is basically like imagine a chip with a bunch of gates on it instead of someone deciding ahead of time how they should be connected to each other and what they should do.
John:
you can program it to arrange itself however you want.
John:
It's field programmable.
John:
So you can, you know, take this Lego set of gates and make essentially, you know, the chip that you want it to be.
John:
And then it runs software after it has become that chip.
John:
Obviously, it is...
John:
less efficient and bigger and hotter and all that than an actual custom designed integrated circuit that just does one thing uh but it's very flexible and there's a couple questions about that at wwc like why did they use an fpga what's the deal with that i thought my first guess was like maybe it's time to market like they were they were kind of in a rush for this mac pro and they wanted to have this afterburner card and maybe making a custom chip
John:
in that time frame wasn't feasible and it turns out an fpga could do the job just as well and obviously it would be more expensive and take more power but money and power are two things the mac pros got plenty of so that's not a big deal but uh when craig fitterie was on the talk show wwdc he said that the reason they use an fpga is because it's reprogrammable like that it's field programmable uh implying or outright saying i forget that essentially
John:
they'll be able to change the card to reconfigure it maybe to do different things maybe to just do the same thing but better uh but like that's an actual goal that they you know it will be reprogrammable to change its behavior in one way or another which is really cool uh again i'm not sure how often apple exercise this or whether it's open to third parties but
John:
uh that's that makes that piece of hardware even a little bit more exciting and then doug brooks on mac power users podcast also at mac world mentioned the afterburner card as a way for customers to spec fewer cpu cores it's a money saving thing like if you get the afterburner card then you don't have to get the mac pro with a bazillion cores because you're offloading a big part of the hard work that the cpu would be doing to the second card so apple's always looking out for your wallet with that mac pro
John:
how much does that we don't even know i was gonna say how much does the afterburner card cost like that money saving thing only makes sense if the afterburner card itself is not like 10 grand or something i have no idea obviously it's probably not 10 grand but we don't have the prices on anything so right now it makes sense as a money saving story after we see although it probably makes sense no matter what because probably the most expensive thing aside from ram that you can add to your mac pro is to max out the cpu because intel's prices are pretty nuts when you get that high
Marco:
Oh yeah, Intel is going to have quite a good time with these CPU prices on this.
Marco:
The Afterburner, I would say, is unlikely to be under $1,000.
Marco:
The wheels are going to be under $1,000.
Marco:
The stand is $1,000.
John:
Of course it's going to be over $1,000.
Marco:
I'm guessing that's like a $1,500 option maybe, but I don't know anything about FPGA pricing.
Marco:
It's interesting that also they called it Afterburner.
Marco:
They didn't call it ProRes Accelerator.
Marco:
I think that also opens them up to future expansion of this into other types of roles.
Marco:
There's all sorts of pro hardware that is basically some kind of accelerator card for some kind of specialized task that goes into a PCI Express slot.
Marco:
Apple themselves were bragging about things like Avid has some kind of accelerator card.
Marco:
somebody has whatever there's some kind of dsp accelerator for i think pro tools or something i don't know see i don't know this market at all but like many pro fields have these kind of like accelerator cards that are usually like you know basically like you know programmable thing or not programmable like specialized hardware to super accelerate some tasks similar to how a gpu accelerates graphics calculations i think there is a future here for other applications and they're probably they probably will never be
John:
a large number of other applications but i bet there's going to be at least like one to three more yeah i think the main interesting prospect is that they the card continues to do essentially the same job but that gets better at it and supports more different codecs and formats or whatever as time goes on like that they protect your investment that way not that suddenly the fbga is reprogrammed as like you know a bitcoin miner or something although that is certainly possible but seems like not something that apple would be into
John:
Alright, tell me about the Pro Display XDR.
John:
One more leftover item from our discussion of that.
John:
Longevity.
John:
We talked so much about the price and the stand and all the other stuff.
John:
And we talked about the longevity of the Mac Pro itself.
John:
But the final thing to consider for this horrendously expensive but cheap if you want a reference monitor display...
John:
is how long do you think it will last?
John:
As I sit here in front of a 10-year-old monitor that is, as far as I can tell, as perfect as the day I bought it, does not have any dead pixels, doesn't have any image retention, isn't any dimmer.
John:
It just...
John:
you know monitors in theory if they don't have anything weird and complicated inside them can last a very long time the the best the biggest thing in favor of the longevity of display is the number of pixels on it and that 10 years from now you're not going to be like well i don't know it depends on how well apple does with the glasses thing but presumably if current trends continue 10 years from now you will not look at this 30 whatever inch monitor and be like i really need a bigger monitor or i need i need more pixels um
John:
I certainly won't because my vision was just getting worse, not better.
John:
So features-wise, that monitor is not going to look old or small or dim anytime soon.
John:
But there are many things on the other side of the longevity equation aside from assuming it continues to work perfectly.
John:
Will you be disappointed with this?
John:
No.
John:
The assuming it continues to work perfectly thing is very fraught because this is not...
John:
a sort of reliable implementation of a proven technology for monitors as far as i'm aware there is no monitor and apple was trying to emphasize emphasize this it has the same features and is built the same way as this monitor there are televisions that are built the same way as this monitor but they're very different they have far fewer pixels they are much larger they have you know have much more headroom for cooling because they're not shoved into a smaller space
John:
Uh, and so that's the only real analog we have and televisions getting around 10 years, no matter what technology they're built on, you start to ask questions, right?
John:
About, about reliability, about just the circuitry in there and everything.
John:
This display, I guess if all goes well, maybe you get 10 years out of it, but it's got moving parts.
John:
It's got two fans.
John:
I mean, the fans of my Mac pro are okay, but that's tends to be the type of thing that dies.
John:
Like I've gone through many GPU coolers in my, uh, Mac pro and,
John:
which are obviously of lower quality than the fans that apple puts in the entire thing so maybe maybe the fans will last 10 years will the cooling be sufficient will some part of that thing be baking will it have image retention problems you know the whole hdr thing like that the back of it being a heat sink makes you think it's going to be generating considerable amount of heat so my confidence in this monitor actually physically lasting 10 years and continuing to function is
John:
is not that great so if you're thinking of buying this and you think it's gonna i think it's gonna uh you know yes it's horrendously expensive but i'm sure i'll use it for 10 years i wouldn't i wouldn't bet on that and the other thing to keep in mind is this technology you know uh dynamic backlit uh lcd with a bunch of leds that turn on and off
John:
There's a reason it is not the top tier technology in televisions anymore, because it is more complicated and not as good quality as OLED, which is a much simpler technology that gives you essentially the same results.
John:
Will there be an OLED screen that surpasses this?
John:
Certainly there could be an OLED screen that is much simpler than this.
John:
OLEDs have a problem with brightness.
John:
It's harder to get.
John:
On OLED televisions, you can get a very bright little square in the middle of the TV, but if you fill the entire screen with white,
John:
They don't have enough power to drive that at the brightness levels that an LED backlit thing does.
John:
So there's that disadvantage.
John:
But other than that, OLEDs are so much simpler, thinner, don't require as many fans, don't have multiple layers of filters and circuitry to control which parts of the backlight are on.
John:
There is no backlight.
John:
It is self-emissive.
John:
Each pixel gives off its own light.
John:
So I would imagine in 10 years...
John:
This display, it won't seem old because it's too small or has too few pixels or doesn't look as good, but it will seem, I don't know, kind of like my Mac Pro does now with a bunch of spinning disks and nine fans in it and all that other stuff.
John:
It's a lot of bulk and a lot of machinery and a lot of heat and a lot of power to get a result that you can get from a much thinner, completely silent, fanless, much cooler OLED.
John:
That's my hope anyway, that in 10 years there is
John:
uh replacement that had those attributes because certainly that's that's true of televisions now like i mean my plasma tv with all its fans and its giant power draw and its huge hot stuff you replace that with an oled no fans much quieter much less power uh i expect that to happen in the modern world as well so
John:
i guess i'm mostly telling this to myself like if i what how am i justifying this uh this horrendous display it's not because i'm gonna keep it for 10 years i'm gonna buy it with the expectation that it might not even outlast the mac pro i might still have that mac pro 10 years from now you know with all the the internals upgraded 10 times over but the display might have died by then and i'm mostly okay with that but
John:
Keep that in mind if you were thinking of plugging down the price of a car for this system.
Casey:
I cannot wait until we get to the point that you can spec this out.
Casey:
Both of you can spec this out and see exactly what you're in for because, oh boy, this is going to be something else.
Marco:
I already know that what I want is probably going to be $18,000.
Marco:
It's probably going to be some obscene amount of money.
Marco:
But I also...
Marco:
I really don't think I'm going to get one.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Okay.
John:
You can get one briefly.
John:
The resale value should be pretty good on these, especially if you decide after six months that you don't want it anymore.
John:
I mean, you found that out with the trash can that, you know, it wasn't the computer for you and you sold it and the resale price was reasonable.
John:
Like you didn't take too much of a bath.
John:
It's not like, you know, rolling your Ferrari off the lot and you lose, you know, 150K.
Marco:
No, I mean, the reason I sold the trash can after a short time was that the 5K iMac came out, and I wanted desktop retina so badly, and there was no good way to do it on the trash can for a while, if ever, after that.
Marco:
But otherwise, I really enjoyed it.
Marco:
I liked it at the time I bought it.
Marco:
It was fine for me.
Marco:
It wasn't as ideal as an expandable tower, but it was actually great, and actually, it would be more ideal for me now than I think the new Mac Pro, which is unfortunate, but that's not to say they should go back to it.
Marco:
But no, I think, you know, the more I think about it, the more I think the iMac Pro really is probably the best computer for me.
John:
You have to buy it at least briefly because I need someone to buy it and tell me about if it's finicky and weird.
John:
So you have that duty to fulfill.
Marco:
You have to be that person, John.
Marco:
After 10 years, you have to finally be that person.
Oh.
Marco:
No, I don't.
Marco:
I want someone else to tell me if it's a lemon.
Marco:
We'll see.
Marco:
And if they do resolve the monitor situation by offering some kind of 5K monitor that's compelling and well-priced, that might change my calculus.
Marco:
But for now, with the only good monitor being...
Marco:
the 6k monster uh that that while i would love a 6k display i don't need any of the you know fancy you know backlighting and hdr like i don't need any of that uh i really just want like a larger version of what i already have in the imac because the imac pro monitor is already dramatically over specced for what i actually use it for but it's like but it's not dramatically overpriced for what i use it for um whereas like you know
Marco:
I currently don't use a $40,000 reference monitor because I don't need one.
Marco:
And so for Apple to make a really nice $6,000 one, that's great, but I still don't need it.
Marco:
So I'm really leaning towards iMac Pro still because I have it already, first of all.
Marco:
So it's kind of free.
Marco:
So I have it already, and it's just really good.
Marco:
And there's nothing wrong with my iMac Pro.
Marco:
And so, you know, maybe like if things start going bad in a few years or like maybe like if I have problems with the screen of the iMac Pro, that might push me in the direction of a Mac Pro to separate those concerns.
Marco:
But right now, I'm not motivated to make a change.
Casey:
Okay.
John:
This is what happens when Apple doesn't put up the configurator, because once that configurator goes up, suddenly Marco's trigger finger gets a little itchy.
Casey:
You know, I give you a hard time, Marco, but in a lot of ways, I feel like...
Casey:
The both of you, I think John more than Marco, but the both of you have been longing for this computer since probably before the trash can came out.
Casey:
And I don't know you, Marco, to be one to shy away from trying something new.
Casey:
And I will be flabbergasted if you don't at least...
Casey:
pull a i don't know if it's a pulling a steven or pulling a marco at this point because you two are competing over who buys and resells or returns computers more often but anyways you'll pull a something and buy one of these and then i suspect you'll end up keeping it but i am not nearly as confident as i was before we started really thinking about what this pricing is going to be
Casey:
But I will be utterly flabbergasted if you don't at least briefly have one that you own in your house, even if it leaves within the two-week return window or perhaps like the two to six months Marco quote-unquote return window wherein you will sell it to somebody else.
John:
Possibly John.
Casey:
Possibly John.
John:
Yes.
John:
By the way, I can get one at a discount.
Marco:
I would never sell a computer to John.
Marco:
Are you kidding?
Marco:
Sure you would.
Marco:
Imagine.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
No way.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
I agree with Marco on this 100%.
Casey:
Sure you would.
Marco:
It would still be under warranty.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
If something goes wrong with it, it's my fault.
Marco:
I'm not going to blame you.
John:
It's under warranty.
John:
You would totally blame him.
John:
You would totally blame him.
John:
I wouldn't blame you.
John:
I mean, I might drive there to pick it up.
John:
I probably wouldn't let you ship it.
Marco:
No, you would totally do your little grumble like, well, you know, the GPU just died.
Marco:
Probably wouldn't happen if... That happens.
John:
Marco must have dropped it.
John:
This computer has been through a lot of GPUs.
John:
It happens.
John:
It'll be fine.
John:
I would take the discount.
John:
There's no way I would ever sell you any hardware.
Casey:
Marco, I cannot possibly agree with you more on this issue.
Casey:
There is not a chance that I would sell John.
Casey:
And now giving it to him, which of course you wouldn't do with a computer this expensive.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Giving it to him, that's a different story.
Marco:
Right.
Casey:
But selling it?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
Like I normally don't sell things to people I know.
Marco:
Like if I'm going to give it to somebody, I'll just give it to them.
Marco:
And if it's something that's too expensive for that, I'll sell it to a stranger on the internet because I don't want there to be that awkwardness of like, if something goes wrong with it down the road, that's really weird.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So like, so I really don't like selling things to people I know, but among the list of people I know, John would be like the last person I
John:
would sell it to it's better it's better to sell to somebody you know because i know that you don't mistreat your hardware so i wouldn't it wouldn't be a suspicion in my mind that you would like you were you had stored it in a you know a room with 700 cats and been chain smoking in front of it for a year and then you know dropped it off your desk like i know that's not how you treat your hardware and so i would be assured that it hadn't been mishandled by you
John:
Could have been mishandled by UPS or anything else, which is why I might drive to go get it or whatever.
John:
But that's true of anything that gets shipped to myself, too.
John:
Like, you can't control that.
John:
No, still not worth it.
Casey:
I still agree with Marco on this one.
Casey:
I would not wish that upon my biggest enemy.
John:
Just trying to deny me the Marco discount, which I need.
John:
I may need, desperately.
John:
You want to start making YouTube videos?
John:
I got some video gear.
John:
Pass.
John:
I've got all the video gear I need on my PlayStation.
John:
Yikes.
Marco:
We were sponsored this week by Squarespace.
Marco:
Start building your website today at squarespace.com slash ATP and enter offer code ATP at checkout to get 10% off.
Marco:
Make your next move with a beautiful website from Squarespace.
Marco:
Now, websites today are expected to be pretty rich.
Marco:
They're expected to be really nice looking, have beautiful designs, beautiful themes, beautiful typography and logos, and have images integrated in these moving carousels and everything, and dynamic elements like built-in calendars and blogs and podcasts and storefronts and all these things that...
Marco:
If you're coding a website by hand, that stuff can actually be quite a lot of work to get right, and not everyone has the expertise to do that.
Marco:
Squarespace lets you do all of that with drag-and-drop simplicity.
Marco:
It is super easy to use Squarespace.
Marco:
It's all live previewing.
Marco:
What you see is what you get.
Marco:
You can theme it to your heart's content, or you can just stick with one of the built-in themes and do a few little customizations if you want your certain colors or fonts.
Marco:
And you can move around the blocks, you can have different blocks, no matter what your skill level is.
Marco:
Squarespace makes it super easy to make a site that not only is awesome, but looks modern.
Marco:
It looks like it is of this era, which is something that honestly, when I'm left to my own devices, I can't do that.
Marco:
Squarespace gives me that.
Marco:
It's amazing what you can get done on Squarespace, and it's so easy no matter what your skill level is.
Marco:
There's no coding required.
Marco:
All their tools are easy to use for anybody.
Marco:
They have great support if you need it, although you probably won't, and you can get a free domain if you sign up for a year.
Marco:
So see for yourself what Squarespace can do for you with surprisingly little effort by starting a free trial site at squarespace.com slash ATP.
Marco:
When you decide to sign up, make sure to head back there, squarespace.com slash ATP, and use offer code ATP to get 10% off your first purchase.
Marco:
Once again, squarespace.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Code ATP for 10% off your first purchase.
Marco:
Make your next move with a beautiful website from Squarespace.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So one other thing we've wanted to talk about over the last couple of weeks is this whole sign in with Apple thing.
Casey:
So I think it was during the keynote or maybe the State of the Union, but it was something on Monday that Apple announced that instead of doing or, you know, it's kind of like a peer sort of to log in with Facebook or log in with Google, you will be able to sign in with Apple and use your iCloud account and
Casey:
in order to sign into other services.
Casey:
So presumably there will be some API that Apple is vending that will let, say, Overcast, for example, use some sort of token or credentials from Apple in order to give you an Overcast account.
Casey:
And this all sounded well and good and people were excited about this, including me.
Casey:
But what was interesting was something that somebody spotted.
Casey:
I forget where this was, but this is a screenshot that we got from somewhere.
Casey:
Sign-in with Apple will be available for beta testing this summer.
Casey:
It will be required as an option for users and apps that support third-party sign-in when it is commercially available later this year.
Casey:
Well, shots fired.
Casey:
So this is extremely cool in general.
Casey:
I'm not sure what I think about forcing it upon people, well, companies really, but it's really a great idea.
Casey:
And one of the things I talked about during the keynote or State of the Union or whatever it was was that they'll actually –
Casey:
give a vendor so say overcast like this completely cryptic uh not fake but unique email address that will proxy emails from say overcast to you so that overcast i'm picking on overcast not you know just because marco's here but um that will proxy emails from overcast to you so so the evil people at overcast can never see your actual email address
Casey:
It just it seems like it's really, really well done.
Casey:
I don't know how I feel about this forcing people to use it, though.
Casey:
So before we talk about forcing people to use it, any other notes about kind of what this is?
Marco:
It's important to clarify what like in what conditions they are forcing people to use it.
Casey:
OK, tell me more.
Marco:
It's easy if you just kind of glance at this and the rule to think that they are going to require any app with user accounts to use this.
Marco:
And a lot of the reactions I've seen have seemed to be based on that assumption.
Marco:
But that's not what they're saying.
Marco:
You can use it for user accounts, but you aren't required to.
Marco:
When you are required to offer it is if you offer...
Marco:
login or registration you know if you offer user account login via third party things like social networks interesting i have my own account system in overcast so i don't need to offer this because i don't have an overcast login screen that says sign in with google sign with facebook so therefore i'm not required to do this the the only people as the rule is written the only people who are required to do this right now or who will be required this fall are
Marco:
apps that offer sign-in with third-party thing as their account system.
Marco:
Or in addition to their account system.
John:
They always call it in websites, they call it sign-in with email, which is basically make an account on my system or don't bother making an account and we'll just authenticate you using whatever your social network or thingamabobber is.
John:
So I think a lot of apps do that.
John:
They have their own account system, but they have those other convenient ones.
John:
And then the private email thing is kind of like, you know, this the thing that tech nerds have done forever, where they give a unique email address to each service is just appending a plus and a service name or something like that.
John:
So that when they get spam, they can have the satisfaction of knowing, aha, I only gave this specific email address to this company.
John:
And so I know that this company sold my name.
John:
What they do with that information, other than being satisfied briefly, I don't know because every company sells your email address.
John:
Like they all do that.
John:
And what are you going to do?
John:
Now I'm never going to buy anything from insert store name soon.
John:
You can't buy anything anywhere ever again because they all sell your information.
John:
They all do.
John:
But this privacy thing is like, you know, it does this for you.
John:
It doesn't do like your name plus in some tag.
John:
It's just entirely, you know, random cryptic type thing.
John:
and then you can sort of turn it off you can say well i'm done with that one i don't i don't want that email address to connect to my actual email address anymore and so you won't hear from them anymore like it just disconnects it which is probably not what you want to do you do want them to stop spamming you but you also still want to get the email that confirms your order at the whatever online store that you bought but anyway that option is there um i think the most interesting thing about that option though is
John:
Apple has said they won't retain any of your messages, but it's like, good, we didn't expect you to.
John:
Apple doesn't want our email.
John:
But, but, but, but, the way this system works is big, long, cryptic, weird-looking hex string at something.something.apple.com.
John:
It's like private.apple.com.
John:
I don't know, whatever it is.
John:
The email goes to an Apple server.
John:
The Apple server, using the email system as we know it, then stores and forwards that email to your actual address.
John:
So the email passes through Apple.
John:
So we are essentially trusting Apple to not look at these emails, the vast, vast, vast majority, which are not encrypted in any way.
John:
Email is a plain text format.
John:
Most people don't have, you know, signing keys and all sorts of other stuff, even though you can.
John:
Um...
John:
So there is an inherent part of this feature that relies on people having trust in Apple, which I think is entirely well founded because Apple doesn't make money by scanning your email and selling advertising based on what the content of it and so on and so forth.
John:
But that is an aspect of the system.
John:
Apple has the best reputation for privacy among these big companies, actually is the best on privacy for the economic reasons.
John:
And so I think this won't be much of a barrier because people honestly don't even understand what all the other big companies are doing with email.
John:
But for tech people, it's a good thing to understand if you decide to use that.
John:
Because if you give the company, if you give this online store your actual email, the email will not...
John:
necessarily pass through apple it's on its way back to you because again email is stored and forward and you have no idea how many places your email is being stored and forwarded to and who gets access to it and you know if you have a gmail address google can see it and if you have whatever address then maybe your email vendor can see it and best not to think about email it's not particularly secure not particularly secure but that's one thing to keep in mind um
John:
And the final thing I think is interesting about this and the reason I've wanted a feature like this for such a long time and the reason people offer sign in with Facebook, sign in with Google.
John:
Is there a sign in with Twitter?
John:
I don't even know.
John:
I think some things have that.
John:
I think so.
John:
The reason they do this is because no one wants to set up a new account.
John:
It's friction in the process.
John:
It's like a barrier to entry.
John:
It makes lots of people say, oh, I don't want to have to set up a thing.
John:
And it used to be back in the even worse old days.
John:
I'm not going to call the bad old days.
John:
We're still in the bad old days.
John:
the even worse old days they would make you pick a username do you remember that where you had to pick a username and like the username you wanted would be taken and so you wouldn't even be able to remember what the heck you put because like your first and last name are taken your first name is taken your last name is taken your first and last initial are taken and so you can never remember what you put thankfully uh from the even worse old days till today most sites have switched to doing an email address which hopefully you have some stable version of which is
John:
Again, not a great system, especially when you use third-party email vendors on a domain that you don't own.
John:
But no one wants to set up an account.
John:
I don't want to put it in my first name and last name.
John:
I don't want to put it in my address.
John:
I don't want to have to uncheck all the checkboxes about the spam.
John:
It takes a long time, and it's annoying.
John:
I don't want to do that.
John:
I'm in the middle of trying to buy something or do a thing.
John:
Just let me do the thing.
John:
So sign in with Facebook is like, oh, I'm already signed into Facebook in all my web browsers and in the application and on this phone.
John:
So I'll just tap the sign in with Facebook, and it will bounce me through the little...
John:
you know single sign on thing and i won't even have to enter anything because i'm already signed in and the embedded web view already has my cookies and it'll just sail right through i don't have to think about it i have to make a new account i already have a facebook account let me just reduce the friction that's why people use that feature i use that feature sometimes every time i use it i regret it because you know i don't i use to sign with google not sign with facebook obviously
John:
But I don't like the idea of Google being that much of a linchpin, even though my email address is at Google anyway.
John:
And so anyway.
John:
it's it's convenient in the moment long term perhaps it's not that great but the advantage that apple has is they have even less friction than sign in with google and sign in with facebook because while you're using your phone you are signed in to your apple id if you have any iCloud i don't even know can you even get onto your phone without any kind of iCloud sign in i suppose you probably can yeah yes you can but they really fight you on it
John:
But nobody does that because if you want to do anything useful on your phone in any way like buy apps, which is a thing I feel like you might want to do on your phone, you're going to have an Apple ID and you're going to be signed into it.
John:
And that sign-in process has access to Touch ID and Face ID and your keychain with all your passwords on it that sync across all your other Apple devices, even if you don't use a third-party piece of software and the new strong password generation.
John:
It is even lower friction.
John:
i don't even want to have to bounce through another site i just want it to be like when i make a purchase in the app store or something or apple pay on the web where it just like i'm staring at the screen and it looks at my face and it approves it and it goes through i barely even need to hit anything except for the double tap on the side thing for apple pay
John:
But for login, you won't have to do anything except for it, sign in with Apple, continue to stare at your screen and get signed in using an account that you probably already have from a company that has the best reputation and privacy in the entire industry that you already trust with a certain amount of information because you're using an iPhone and you're presumably buying apps from the app store.
John:
I can't wait to use this feature in the same way that I enjoy using Apple pay, which means I don't have to remember or enter my credit card information or whatever.
John:
And that the site doesn't have to, doesn't get in, retain my credit card information.
John:
I would love to sign in to everything with sign in with Apple.
John:
I already have an Apple identity and,
John:
I'm probably always going to have an Apple identity for as long as the company exists.
John:
I'm already signed into it everywhere.
John:
It's the ultimate friction reduction in sign-in that is possible on the devices that I use.
John:
So I'm looking forward to this feature.
John:
I probably won't use the private email thing because, honestly, everybody has my email.
John:
The entire universe has my email.
John:
There is no way it could get more spam.
John:
It's not like...
John:
Like, I'll keep my email private.
John:
That way I'll get less spam.
John:
No, you won't.
John:
You won't get less spam.
John:
Anyway, I'm probably not going to use that feature, but they're nice for including it, and it will make paranoid people happy and give them something to do as they deny people access to the email by turning it off and then don't understand why they didn't get a confirmation of their order.
John:
But I'm really looking forward to signing in as easily as I pay for stuff with Apple Pay.
John:
Probably even easier.
Casey:
So Marco, do you plan to offer this then?
Marco:
So the short answer is I don't know yet.
Marco:
If I were starting brand new today, if I didn't have an existing app to have legacy about, I wouldn't have an account system at all.
Marco:
I would store everything in CloudKit and try not to even run servers and just get myself out of that business.
Marco:
There's reasons why now I'm regretting where I currently stand.
Marco:
First of all, I'm going through a whole bunch of server upgrades and database upgrades and everything, and it's really quite a lot of work, and it's very frustrating.
Marco:
So that's part of it.
Marco:
It's like, oh man, I wish I could just get rid of all this user data.
Marco:
And I'm trying to.
Marco:
But another part is that the future world of where Apple is pushing us as soon as this fall is multiple devices.
Marco:
And Overcast has a sync backend and a web player and has had an iPhone and iPad app for years.
Marco:
So I'm already in the multi-device world, but where they're really pushing us is for...
Marco:
a lot more people to have multiple instances of overcast and and one of the most common ones is probably going to end up being the watch app in fact i think already the the watch app not the standalone playback but i think the watch app in general has significantly more users than my ipad app so that's why i kind of have to you know care about it
Marco:
As I'm facing the prospect of rebuilding my watch app again to be an independent app, as well as looking at the Catalyst version to have the Mac app also exist, I'm looking at a whole bunch of places where people are going to have to log into Overcast.
Marco:
And every time somebody has to log into their existing account, that introduces the potential for them to abandon the effort and just say forget it and delete the app.
Marco:
Or it introduces the potential for them to inadvertently create a new account and they have two different accounts and they have a problem and they lose their data or they email me or they get all confused.
Marco:
So having all this account stuff is a pain and it's a pain for everybody, for the users, for me to have to manage it and own it and everything.
Marco:
I don't want accounts anymore.
Marco:
The reality is, I have accounts, and I have a large number of users who have accounts.
Marco:
I would love to migrate to an entirely cloud-kit-based system, but I don't think I have time this summer to do that.
Marco:
That would be a massive undertaking.
Marco:
That would probably take six months.
Marco:
First, a few months to implement it, and then a few months to fix all the bugs that would result.
Marco:
So at least six months, possibly up to a year, I think, to do something like that.
Marco:
So I would love to be in a place where I was starting fresh and had no accounts at all.
Marco:
I'm not in that place, though.
Marco:
I have this technical burden of users.
Marco:
Sorry, I love you all.
Marco:
I have this existing software and user base to move forward.
Marco:
I can't just start clean and throw everything away.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
From that point of view, I am probably stuck with my account system for a while.
Marco:
So that being said, I should probably offer this to make it even easier.
Marco:
But then I worry like, is everyone just going to tap this?
Marco:
And now they have a third account?
John:
You'd have to like port them, like have a migration process where if they tapped it.
John:
Apple offers APIs for you to be able to do this, like to, you know...
John:
If they use the same email address to sign up for their account, or you could say, are you sure you have another account?
John:
Or you might have a record of their other account on the other devices like you do now for the sign-in across iPad and iPhone.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Right now, I do iCloud syncing of the login token.
Marco:
So that way, when you set up the app on a new iCloud-connected device, it prompts you to say, hey, do you want to use the account from Marco's iPhone?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And you can say yes, and it just logs you in.
Marco:
Which is how I can have email and password-less accounts that still have multi-device sync.
Marco:
Although it doesn't work on the website.
John:
So you could use that to convert.
John:
But you mentioned CloudKit and everything.
John:
That was originally one of the big selling points of CloudKit.
John:
CloudKit was essentially signing with Apple because it's like,
John:
oh each user can have a certain amount of data and it was like sign in list sign in it's like well what do you mean each user can have a certain amount of data how do you know what user the data belongs to ah well they're signed into their apple id on their phone and when you use cloud kit it just implicitly uses that and you know problem solved right and there was there was like no login no it was it was basically your accountless account this is just one step farther like this this seems like an ideal fit for the way you want to deal with accounts by not dealing with them
John:
this would give you that solution but you do have this legacy problem and you'd have to somehow figure out how to convert and it'll be a big pain in the butt if you could magically convert all of your accounts to sign in with apple accounts i'm sure you would but that's not the type of thing you can do behind the scenes for people so you just have to i mean you depending on what you think your growth curve is like you could offer it as a conversion and push it on on first launch and make all new users like be faced with a giant default button of sign in with apple and just sort of slowly drain the swamp and
John:
phase out that phrase had meanings in the software context before it was destroyed just like red baseball hats you could slowly convert all your other things to sign in with Apple I still miss red hats being wearable Marco I miss a lot from the before times yes
Marco:
I will say, though, so one thing I've been doing as part of my big database migration is, you know, I've been running Overcast since 2014.
Marco:
So I have like five years almost.
Marco:
Next month makes five years of user data.
Marco:
And GDPR happened.
Marco:
And so all of a sudden I had to start making sure I was really adhering to these rules, which I mostly already was anyway.
Marco:
But also get express consent and everything.
Marco:
And my pre-GDPR privacy update was...
Marco:
I added a splash screen at first launch to existing users saying, basically prompting them to remove the email address from their account, to convert email accounts into anonymous accounts.
Marco:
And I added all this stuff to be able to go back and forth whenever you wanted to, change your password, change your email, whatever you want.
Marco:
But I really encourage people on first launch to lose their email address, basically, in Overcast, which, by the way, created a ton of support problems.
Marco:
Let me tell you, I'm still paying for that with people who basically lost track of their accounts because they then signed out or they deleted it unexpectedly.
Marco:
Anyway, so I prompted everyone then, and I also made it such that on the new user screen,
Marco:
I don't even give you a chance to create a new email account.
Marco:
First, you have to create an anonymous account, and then if you want to add an email to it later in the account settings screen, you can.
Marco:
The result of this is that my rate of acquiring new email addresses went down substantially, but I still had all of these user accounts from the last four years before that, most of which had email addresses on them.
Marco:
So over the last few days, I have deleted over a million accounts.
Marco:
Holy smokes.
Marco:
Because it's been – so I basically – I was smart enough to, for a long time now, to record on the user account the timestamp that they last either logged in or synced anything.
Marco:
So basically the timestamp of their last activity.
Marco:
It turns out – and I know how many active users I have.
Marco:
And my number of total user accounts was many times that, you know, defined as, like, monthly active users, right?
Marco:
So, like, I have many times the amount of monthly active users in, like, just user accounts.
Marco:
This happens to pretty much every web service.
Marco:
That's why VCs want to know your active user account, not your user account account.
Marco:
Because the number of user accounts you have is fairly meaningless because tons of people create an account, try it for an hour, delete it, move on, right?
Marco:
Or people accidentally create multiple accounts and they only end up using one of them or whatever.
Marco:
So I had all these user accounts.
Marco:
So before I did this bulk delete, oh, and my heuristic was accounts that were not currently subscribers or
Marco:
had never bought an ad because I offer ad buyers a dashboard where they can log in and see the stats of the ads they bought and had not had any activity in at least a year and had not been created in the last few days.
Marco:
Making sure to check for that in case somebody creates an account and then it gets deleted immediately because there was no activity on it.
Marco:
That would be terrible.
Marco:
I ran this and it deleted over a million accounts and now
Marco:
the vast majority of my accounts that are left don't have email addresses on them.
Marco:
So I feel like I'm making great progress here.
Marco:
I'm getting rid of as much user data as I can, but I still need to get to that holy grail of like, I just want none of this user data, or I want 100% of it to be anonymous.
Marco:
And there's some friction involved in getting there.
Marco:
And one step might be, I keep all the user data, but I lose all the email addresses.
Marco:
And I've experimented with various ways of doing this over the last few years, but I haven't come up with anything that actually is a good idea yet.
Marco:
One idea I had was to hash them all the same way you hash passwords and just store the hashes of email addresses.
Marco:
This creates a number of technical issues if you do this.
Marco:
Believe me, I've looked into this.
Marco:
It's surprisingly tricky to attempt that, so I mostly haven't yet.
Marco:
But in a world where I have a Mac app,
Marco:
the ability to log in to the website and use a web player becomes way less important.
Marco:
And already that's incredibly unpopular because it's terrible.
Marco:
And most people don't even know you can.
Marco:
Already my web player is a waste.
Marco:
But if I have a Mac app,
Marco:
that you can log into and sync everything.
Marco:
In my scenario in my head here, I would still have web addresses that you could go to for each podcast.
Marco:
Share links could still work.
Marco:
You could still share a link and it would have a player.
Marco:
It just wouldn't be tied to anybody's user account, so you couldn't log into the website in this world.
Marco:
and like and have playback synced and everything so the only people this would really hurt if i got rid of that after i have a mac app would be people who use the web player when logged into their account on like a windows pc at work and that is a really small number of people
Marco:
this is where i want to move to and none of this has anything to do with signing with apple honestly i'm sorry for this massive tangent uh signing with apple uh is if i were trying to get more accounts with email addresses whether they were you know valid or proxy or i don't care uh if i was trying to get more email based accounts logging with apple would be great i would use it immediately no question
Marco:
But I'm trying to get less of that.
Marco:
I'm trying to get rid of the email addresses I have.
Marco:
Trying to have as little personal information from anybody as possible.
Marco:
And so it's not going to do anything for me.
Marco:
If they force me to use it, I will.
Marco:
But I currently don't plan to because all it would be doing would be adding more robust support for something I don't even want.
John:
Do you have to get their email address if you sign up with Apple?
John:
I think you have to explicitly ask for it.
Marco:
Yeah, so maybe they just give me an ID, basically, like some kind of unique identifier?
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
They basically, the equivalent of an access token or some unique identifier, but in the API, you have to say, the examples they always give, like if you want to ask them for their email address and their first and last name, and I didn't dig into it deep enough to know, are they just saying that to say, oh, if you want their name, you have to ask for that extra?
John:
But I think the idea is,
John:
If you don't want any of that, don't ask for it and your app won't ever have it.
John:
It really is completely opaque as far as you're thinking.
John:
You should check out the API to see what the limits are.
Marco:
That would be interesting.
Marco:
Then I could prompt everyone to sign in with Apple on first launch of the new version, associate that ID with their accounts, and just have that be the anonymous account.
John:
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like CloudKit.
John:
You don't get their email address when you use CloudKit.
John:
Well, how do you know who they are?
John:
Well, it's just what they're signed into and the API uses it.
Marco:
That's not a bad idea because that also works on the website.
Marco:
They said they're going to have some kind of web gateway.
Marco:
Yeah, sign-in with Apple works on the web too.
Marco:
It's just like sign-in with Facebook.
John:
That is an interesting option.
John:
Edit to your short list of things you might need to do to overcast.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
I really want to have an independent watch app for this fall.
Marco:
Honestly, people out there...
Marco:
You all love the apps you use.
Marco:
You all know the developers of the apps you use.
Marco:
And you all are asking the developers of the apps you use.
Marco:
So are you going to be there on day one?
Marco:
Let me tell you, as one of these developers, this summer, the answer for many of us is going to be no.
Marco:
Everything that we have access to now from WBDC, all these new tools and APIs and platforms and everything, this is a lot of work.
Marco:
Summer is only a couple months long.
Marco:
This is going to be like, I have a feeling like this fall, we're going to be seeing a lot of really bad apps and a lot of apps that people are kind of apologizing for.
Marco:
Like, sorry, this is what I have ready now.
Marco:
It'll get better later.
Marco:
And a lot of developers who are just going to be like, sorry, my, you know, Catalyst slash independent watch app isn't going to be ready yet.
Marco:
And maybe next year, you know, or maybe later in the winter or something like that.
Marco:
It's going to be a long time for a lot of apps to update to all this stuff because there's just so much new stuff.
Marco:
I would love for the first time you install my new independent watch app for that login screen to pop up and for there to be a quick sign in with Apple button right there and then you're just done and you never have to deal with anything else again.
Marco:
Because there is kind of a massive question of like, how do you log in on the watch otherwise?
Marco:
And if iCloud works with my existing setup, great.
Marco:
What if it doesn't?
Marco:
What if you don't get the message from iCloud?
Marco:
Or what if you're not logged in?
Marco:
Or who knows?
Marco:
God knows what, right?
John:
Just tell them to sign in by writing their email address with the Apple TV remote pointed at their watch.
John:
Right, exactly.
John:
Combine all of Apple's worst input methods.
Marco:
Yeah, or I could have one of those terrible things where the watch displays a four-digit alphanumerate code, and you type it on your phone.
Marco:
There's ways I could do it.
Marco:
It just sucks.
Marco:
Have the watch display a barcode, and then have the phone camera recognize it, and then I need to prompt for camera access.
Marco:
There's just so many bad ways to do this, and only a couple of good ones.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I would love to have that experience be better for initial sign-in for both the Mac app and the Watch app once those exist.
Marco:
Right now, neither of them do, but I'm hoping they exist soon.
Marco:
Anyway, so sign-in with Apple might be the way to do that, but I'll see.
Marco:
Because that also...
Marco:
creates a problem.
Marco:
If I make that like the way to use my app, what about those people, many of whom still exist, who have multiple individuals who share the same Apple ID in order to share purchases from forever ago before family sharing existed?
Marco:
And what if they both use Overcast?
Marco:
But separately, because they're separate people.
Marco:
Gotta add profiles to Overcast.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
Right?
Marco:
So, like, right now, like, you know, when you have a separate account system, that's fine.
Marco:
You can have, it doesn't matter, you know, whose Apple ID is whose.
Marco:
You get occasional collisions on the login screen when, you know, one of them is offered the other one's login token on a new account.
Marco:
But, you know, otherwise, like, they can just say, no, use my other account.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
If signing with Apple becomes my account identifier system,
Marco:
two people who use the same Apple ID can no longer have two separate Overcast accounts.
John:
You can add profiles, just have the sign-in with Apple ID be a new ID that points to one or more of your existing email list IDs.
John:
You know what I mean?
Marco:
Oh, yeah, I could do that.
Marco:
Boy, that sucks.
John:
There's so many ways to make this suck.
John:
Well, you know...
John:
I mean, it would still be only one sign-in for everybody.
John:
You'd still be able to present a profile screen, but your back-end is exactly the same.
John:
Your sync engine deals with the secondary ID, not the primary one.
Marco:
Yeah, that's not a bad idea.
Marco:
Why are you so good at this?
John:
It's a database back-end web services.
John:
That's all I do.
Marco:
Yeah, that actually isn't a bad idea.
John:
Anyway, don't worry about it.
John:
Do the watch out first.
John:
To briefly bring it back to sign-in with Apple before we finally move on to Ask ADP...
John:
The other thing to note about sign in with Apple is the same feature that they call sign in with Apple.
John:
You can use this exact same feature to let people basically just look up their password in Apple's key chain.
John:
Right.
John:
So it's a totally an old school email address and password login system on your website, on your app or whatever.
John:
It's your own account system.
John:
But you just want to present a really nice UI to quickly look up their password in their key chain and fill it in.
John:
and do authentication to do that lookup by doing face ID or touch ID or something similar.
John:
Sign in with Apple also accelerates that, and it is entirely up to the person writing the application to decide, am I just going to look for if they have a sign in with Apple, Apple ID login thing?
John:
Or am I also going to look to see if they have an email address login based on their email address on their contact card or whatever they enter or whatever?
John:
Am I going to do both and prioritize one over the other?
John:
The app developer entirely has control over that.
John:
And the question I had at WWDC, which I never really got an official answer to, which is,
John:
That whole requirement that, hey, if you offer sign in with Facebook or sign in with Google, you have to offer sign in with Apple.
John:
Could you fulfill that requirement by saying, yeah, we offer sign in with Apple.
John:
It's just a really convenient way for us to get your password out of the key chain.
John:
And it's just our account system.
John:
hey voila we were shut because it's the same button it's like a ui they'll pull up for you sign in with apple so look it's signing with apple we've done it the best and the best unofficial answer i could get was that probably won't fly with the app store and they'll say when we say sign in with apple we mean the thing where you can use your apple id to sign in not the thing where we use space id to authenticate you to look up a password for some email address based account in your keychain
John:
I still don't know the answer to that question, but I think we'll find out rapidly because I bet a lot of people will try to skirt the requirement by doing that.
John:
And I think they're going to get slapped down.
John:
Oh, one more thing.
Marco:
When it comes to people, please don't beg your favorite app developers to have everything on day one.
Marco:
One thing that really is a large degree of friction to adopting the new things we got this year.
Marco:
Well, there's two big ones to know about.
Marco:
Number one is if you try to maintain support for older OSs, like if you don't just require iOS 13 immediately, which most apps don't.
Marco:
then it's hard to adopt a lot of this new stuff.
Marco:
Secondly, if you want to write a Catalyst app this summer, or if you want to write anything using SwiftUI that's any good, you have to do it on Catalina, which means you have to run a Mac OS beta on your development machine.
Marco:
And whether you do this the conservative way, like what I'm doing with a separate boot partition or an external SSD...
Marco:
or whether you do it by actually just upgrading your main install to the Mac beta, which I don't recommend.
Marco:
Either it's a separate installation, which has its own degree of friction because you aren't using your main installation for whatever reason.
Marco:
Even if you are using your main installation, you are dealing with beta bugs on your main development OS all summer.
Marco:
Like iOS developers have had it easy all these 10 years because we could run the beta on a hardware device, but the device we were actually developing it on, we were writing the code on our nice, most of the time stable Macs.
Marco:
And we didn't have to run the Mac betas ever.
Marco:
This is the first time I've ever run a Mac beta.
Marco:
And it turns out betas are terrible and you don't want to run a beta on your development machine.
Marco:
And so a totally reasonable path for developers to take this summer might be to defer their Catalyst apps and to defer much Swift UI work until Catalina is actually released and never actually run the Catalina beta on their Macs during the summer.
Marco:
In which case, their Catalyst Mac apps won't be ready on day one.
Marco:
Or they'll be terrible, but they probably won't be ready on day one.
Marco:
And so everyone out there, all of you wonderful users who would expect and beg for a Catalyst app on day one from all your favorite iOS developers, please give your developers some slack.
Marco:
And be patient, because there's lots of reasons...
Marco:
From the sheer complexity of it all to not wanting to run a beta macOS to develop on, which is a very different prospect than running beta iOSs.
Marco:
Lots of reasons like that why your favorite apps might not have their catalyst versions out on day one this fall.
Marco:
And it might be more like a next spring, next summer kind of thing.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
One small bit of real-time follow-up.
Casey:
I am one of those people that does the pre-family sharing approach for sharing apps.
Casey:
And Aaron and I do not share Apple IDs.
Casey:
We simply share store accounts, which my store account is my Apple ID, but I am not signed into her phone as an Apple ID.
Casey:
I'm only signed into her phone as an iTunes store account, if that makes any sense at all.
Casey:
It's a small difference.
Marco:
Yeah, and that is not as bad.
Marco:
It's not great, but that is not as bad as literally sharing the same Apple ID.
Casey:
Which I know my parents did for a while, and I finally convinced them not to do it anymore because they had constant problems.
Casey:
And I know there are still people that do it, to your point, but I think most of what you're thinking about, or the more common use is what Aaron and I are still doing because I'm too lazy to move to family sharing, which is same store account, different Apple IDs.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by ExpressVPN.
Marco:
Protect your online activity today and find out how you can get three months free at expressvpn.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Now listen, I would love to tell you that we live in a world where we never have to connect to some rando Wi-Fi.
Marco:
We never have to send our data over someone's Wi-Fi that might be a coffee shop or an airport or a hotel or something like that.
Marco:
I would love to tell you that that's the world we live in, that we can just use our own data that's secure from our devices to the cloud.
Marco:
But we don't live in that world.
Marco:
We don't live there yet.
Marco:
We might never get there.
Marco:
And what you need to protect you from the reality of today's world where you are connecting to random Wi-Fi networks and sending your data over them, you need a VPN to help keep that secure, especially if you travel a lot or if you frequently go to coffee shops to work or something like that.
Marco:
You need a VPN to protect your data from being easily snooped on by the owners of the Wi-Fi network or anybody in between.
Marco:
So ExpressVPN secures and anonymizes your internet browsing by encrypting your data and hiding your public IP address.
Marco:
They have easy to use apps that run seamlessly in the background of your computer, phone, and tablet.
Marco:
It takes only one click to turn on ExpressVPN's protection so you can safely surf on public Wi-Fi without being snooped on or being at risk of having your personal data stolen.
Marco:
All this is for less than $7 a month.
Marco:
ExpressVPN is also rated the number one VPN service by TechRadar and comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Marco:
So protect your online activity today and find out how you can get three months free at expressvpn.com slash ATP.
Marco:
That's expressvpn.com slash ATP to get three months free with a one-year package.
Marco:
Thank you so much to ExpressVPN for sponsoring our show and keeping our data secure.
Casey:
Let's move on to Ask ATP.
Casey:
I think these will be quick.
Casey:
Let's see what happens.
Casey:
Andy Beyer Bowden writes, Hey, what are your opinions on mousepads?
Casey:
Thrilling question, I know.
Casey:
I personally don't understand the appeal.
Casey:
Mousepads are all the rage in the gaming PC world, but I've never seen the need.
Casey:
Any mouse will function perfectly on any halfway decent desk surface.
Casey:
Well, for me, I use a glass-topped desk.
Casey:
In fact, the desk is glass.
Casey:
And so...
Casey:
I like it.
Casey:
I know most people find that to be insane.
Casey:
Hey, you know what?
Casey:
I like it.
Casey:
It works for me.
Casey:
But because of that, I definitely need a mouse pad.
Casey:
I have the most boring, basic black mouse pad that I think I got from Amazon like five years ago.
Casey:
And that's it for me.
Casey:
John, what do you use in terms of mouse pads?
John:
It's interesting that you mentioned a glass top desk because for whatever reason, back in 1984, when no one knew what the hell to do with the mouse and we got our first Macintosh, my grandfather and my uncle also got one at the same time.
John:
The received wisdom, presumably the only person who had any connection, I guess, was my grandfather.
John:
My grandfather went to Mac user group meetings, mug meetings.
John:
And the received wisdom was that the best surface for mousing on was glass.
John:
Remember, these are mice with mouse balls.
John:
It was like a weighted rubber coated ball inside a thing that had two little rollers that touched it.
John:
One for X axis, one for Y axis.
John:
And then it would, the ball would poke out of the thing.
John:
And the idea was the glass was the best surface.
John:
I'm not sure why that is.
John:
Like,
John:
i guess maybe a compromise between how smoothly you can slide the mouse over the surface versus how much grip the ball has because it was you know it was very sort of matte finish rubber and matte finish rubber does get a pretty good grip on glass right but then it's also smooth enough that there's not a lot of friction when you're moving the mouse and i feel like that uh is why mouse pads are still a thing because people have different tastes about
John:
What should the balance be between how hard it is to slide and the feel of it?
John:
Is it rough?
John:
Is it smooth?
John:
Is it grippy?
John:
Is it not?
John:
Those are kind of two independent things.
John:
These days, obviously, we don't have balls in the mice anymore.
John:
It's all optical magic.
John:
The only real consideration is you have to have a surface that works with an optical mouse.
John:
If you try to use your mouse on a mirror surface, you're not going to have a good time.
John:
There's lots of other surfaces that are better or worse for using an optical mouse on.
John:
But in general, it's all about feel.
John:
I personally do use a mouse pad because I don't like the feel of an optical mouse on a bare desk surface.
John:
It just feels weird to me.
John:
I used my mouse on my first series of Macintoshes on glass and that felt fine.
John:
But at some point I transitioned.
John:
Still in the ball era.
John:
I think I transitioned maybe around...
John:
the SE 30 to being on sort of a fabric covered mouse pad.
John:
My current preference is one of those rubber backed fabric covered mouse pads.
John:
That's very, very thin just because like they used to be really thick for who knows what reason, I guess they were squishy or whatever, but a very thin, very large mouse pad.
John:
Amazon sells one.
John:
I recently bought a new one because the kids destroyed the ones on the 5K AMAC.
John:
Very large Amazon Basics, black, fabric-covered, rubber-backed, very thin mouse pad.
John:
That is my preference.
John:
That's what I use at home, at work, everywhere I possibly can because I just like the balance of friction and the feel of it versus doing it on metal or wood or glass or anything else.
Casey:
Marco?
Marco:
So I agree with much of what you both have said.
Marco:
What John said, for optical mice, which is all mice these days, to work, they need to see some kind of texture.
Marco:
So a glass desk, it doesn't work because there is basically not enough visible texture at the scale they're working at to see it.
Marco:
And so any good mousing service has to just have some kind of texture to it.
Marco:
And it can be very fine, but it can't be glass.
Marco:
So that's why some services, you just need that.
Marco:
And a lot of times, you can't change your desk that easily, but you can easily put a piece of paper under your mouse or something.
Marco:
So I'm a fan of mouse pads, also for the feel, but for a few other reasons.
Marco:
So the one I have used for a long time, I used to use gamer mouse pads.
Marco:
I
Marco:
Oh man, I forget what it was called.
Marco:
There was some kind of like big hard plastic black mouse pad.
Marco:
Glide?
Marco:
Something Glide?
Marco:
No, it was done I think by like the hard OCP people back in the early 2000s.
Marco:
And it was this giant, like, it was this dense piece of plastic with a curved front.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Whatever it was called, I forget.
Marco:
I also have used the Funk surfaces, F-U-N-C surfaces.
Marco:
Those are fine, too.
Marco:
But the one I've used for probably about 10 years now...
Marco:
is the CS Hyde company makes one called C4 Engine.
Marco:
And I use the medium size with the rubber backing on it.
Marco:
And what they make is a series of Teflon mouse pads.
Marco:
These are like, you know, real actual Teflon.
Marco:
They also sell like Teflon tape and Teflon feet that you can stick on the bottom of your mouse.
Marco:
And so the idea here is to have as little friction as possible when moving the mouse.
Marco:
So it moves really easily.
Marco:
And in practice, this doesn't actually last as smoothly as you want for very long because it wears down and certain spots get a little bit less smooth.
Marco:
But this brings me to my next point about what makes mousepads great, which is that from the days of the rubber ball to the present and to the foreseeable future,
Marco:
Crap gets under your mouse because we are humans and we live in worlds and crap gets under your mouse.
Marco:
So you have like, like the rubber ball, you'd have like those big long strips that you could pull off of like all the crap that it picked up on each wheel, right?
Marco:
You try to like pull it all off in one big strip.
Marco:
Um, so there, there was, there was that era and you know, now like crap just gunks up the bottom feet of, of your mouse.
Marco:
And so it is nice to, after a few years, uh,
Marco:
be able to just replace that surface with something brand new.
Marco:
If you are just mousing directly on your desk, depending on the texture of the desk and the material, it may get permanently gunked up in the spot that you put your mouse.
Marco:
And so you don't really have that option.
Marco:
Whereas a mouse pad, you can always just replace it.
Marco:
So in that way, it's also really nice.
Marco:
And then finally...
Marco:
the reason I like mouse pads is because they reserve the space on your desk where the mouse goes.
Marco:
Like if you have a cluttered desk, like the mouse pad is like staking a claim on this square over here.
Marco:
clutter should not intrude and granted if you're really messy clutter can go on top of the mouse pad but like i feel like that that becomes it at least like is taking a claim it's making a point like you shouldn't put anything else in this square right here this is where i go this is mousing area if you don't have anything to define that area it is so easy for stuff to invade it and then as you're mousing around you crash into it and that's i never want that that's always a terrible feeling
John:
I always associate that with PC users who first got their mice.
John:
First of all, your mouse shouldn't be on your desk and neither should your keyboard because that's too high unless you have your chair cranked up super high, but it should be on a tray.
John:
But anyway.
John:
Nope, you should put your entire desk that low and get a monitor stand.
John:
Either one, you know what I mean.
John:
Most people don't have an adjustable desk in that way and desks are too high for normal chair heights.
John:
But they would get like the Microsoft white PS2 mouse, like their first mouse for their PC, right?
John:
And
John:
they they would have no place for it because they would have the keyboard the big you know horizontal desktop computer and the crt on top of it and it's like what where do i put this mouse and so they would just like put it down next to their keyboard but there was no place for it like their junk was all over there like just and they would have the mouse and there would be like a centimeter of space to move it on three sides
John:
or maybe a centimeter on two sides, and they would just... And it wouldn't even be straight.
John:
It would be at a weird angle, and the cord would be all tangled up, and they would mouse by banging the mouse within that one or two centimeters of play and picking it up and moving it.
Marco:
Yeah, you have to do multiple passes to go across the screen.
John:
Yeah, just to go across the screen.
John:
Constant banging, and it would slowly skew, and they'd shove their drink in front of it, and then they'd reach around their drink to try to get it Casey-style.
John:
Oh, come on, man.
John:
They just never understood that...
John:
That's not how it's supposed to work.
John:
It's supposed to be this big area where you can make these movements with your hand and it corresponds to the screen.
John:
They would just treat it as like a weird mutant joystick where you're driving the cursor around by increments by moving it in its little cage.
John:
It was like a veal that, you know, don't have enough space to like turn around.
John:
It was terrible.
John:
Wow.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Those PC users, they don't know what to do with mice.
Marco:
Those people, they would also, usually they would have added the PC to a desk that was just like a regular paper desk before that, and so there wouldn't really be a spot for it, and so they would have their 14-inch CRT monitor off to the side.
Marco:
Mm-hmm.
Marco:
And so the way they would use their computer all day long, somehow their necks didn't fall apart.
Marco:
Well, maybe they did.
Marco:
They would be turned at a 45 degree angle.
Marco:
The keyboard would be in front of them, sort of, maybe.
Marco:
And then the CRT would be off diagonally to the side because there was nowhere else to put it on their desk.
John:
You know where you still see this today is in point of sale things.
John:
If there is an old PC in point of sale, there's never room for the mouse in point of sale.
John:
If you've ever watched someone use the mouse on their point of sale computer, it's like wedged under the monitor and they reach around the back of the monitor and do that same sort of one centimeter little shuffle.
John:
It's ergonomic nightmare and it's very sad and evil.
John:
yeah those systems have the most apt accidental acronym ever yeah do you do you guys have uh currently or can you recall in the past a mouse pad with something on it a picture a design a brand like like like marco's thing right now is just the one you sent us links to in the website it was just like brown or beige but solid color
John:
None of you have anything on your mouse pads right now?
Casey:
Oh, no, I'm sure I did.
Casey:
I can't recall any specifics.
Casey:
And obviously, I have no shame.
Casey:
And I'd be happy to admit to some of these specifics.
Casey:
But I genuinely can't recall any.
Casey:
But I am confident that in the past, I definitely did that.
John:
But you don't now?
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
It's just a black, basic mouse pad that probably cost me five bucks on Amazon.
John:
So I like something to be on my mouse pad, but I don't want something dumb on my mouse pad.
John:
Like, I'm kind of annoyed that I think the Amazon Basics one has, like, an Amazon thing or something on it.
John:
You know, it's black otherwise, but there's, like, a little logo or whatever.
John:
But I want there to be something interesting on it.
John:
Back when I was going to the MIT swap regularly, which is a...
John:
an open air thing that MIT has on like the something Sunday of every month during the summer ish time where people sell old computer stuff is someone was selling like a stack, like a, like a inch and a half high stack of mouse pads.
John:
And they were sun mouse pads and they were exactly the kind that I want.
John:
The really thin fabric covered kind that were just like two tone, like blue and silver with this big sun logo sideways on them.
John:
I don't know if you remember what the sun logo looks like.
John:
And I thought that was super cool because I loved Sun computers when I was at school, and it was obscure and Unix-y, and the pattern was nice.
John:
And I've been working my way through that stack.
John:
I'm using one of them right now.
John:
Oh, my gosh.
John:
My kids destroyed one of those.
John:
I replaced it with an Amazon Basics because I don't want to use any more of the good Sun mouse pads.
John:
But they're great.
John:
At work, I use a mouse pad that my wife got from her office, which has the name of her work on it.
John:
And, you know, it's just –
John:
I don't have much personalized on my desk, but I do have a picture of my family and I do have a mouse pad for my wife's work.
John:
But failing that, I would go with solid color.
John:
But I do like a mouse pad with a little pizzazz.
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
John Schwann writes, my wife's early 2014 MacBook Air is not long for this world.
Casey:
Retina and 16 gigs of RAM would be nice, but the loss of MagSafe, not so much.
Casey:
I see that you can still buy the old model, quote unquote, brand new.
Casey:
The last one was perfect for five plus years.
Casey:
Is it dumb to buy a new old one?
Casey:
To my eyes, I do miss MagSafe, but I don't miss it enough to buy a new old MacBook Air.
Casey:
I cannot recommend that, and I think that would be a really preposterous idea.
Casey:
Marco, disagree with me.
Marco:
I don't know that I can disagree with you.
Marco:
I mean, they do still sell it, but the new ones are only like $200 more.
Marco:
I mean, you know I love the old style of laptops, and you know I don't love the new style of laptops.
Marco:
but i have to admit like the old style is getting pretty old now and so i and also like a non-retina screen that's really bad i mean maybe if you don't care if that's what you're used to that's one thing lots of lots of people don't care
Marco:
Yeah, but I really do care about Retina.
Marco:
So I couldn't abide it on that alone.
Marco:
But even the idea of buying the 2015 era MacBook Pros, which you know I love, even buying those now in 2016, that was a good idea.
Marco:
In 2017, that was still pretty much a good idea.
Marco:
In 2018, it starts getting... It's awfully old.
Marco:
You're putting a lot of money into something that is four years old.
Marco:
In 2019, it's starting to get highly questionable to invest new money into one of these such old machines.
Marco:
Because as you go forward, it's not likely to have as long of a service life as one of the newer models, or at least have as long of a relevance life.
Marco:
Because these things are pretty far behind the current tech in certain ways.
Marco:
Certain critical performance ways, support of certain new port types and new speeds of things and everything.
Marco:
Support for certain external monitor sizes and everything.
Marco:
So you're going to be...
Marco:
fighting an uphill battle the the longer you hold on to something that's one of these older generations and if you already have it that's one thing but if you're gonna if you're buying new if you're like spending money on something new i feel like these are getting just too old to have that be a good option
John:
I think the only variable here is price.
John:
Like, it's not a smart thing to buy now.
John:
It is old.
John:
Its days are mostly past.
John:
But if you can get one really cheap, they were great computers.
John:
And if you get it cheap, you don't have the expectation that you're going to be using this for five years.
John:
So it's all about the price.
John:
The prices that they're being sold new for, you shouldn't pay that much.
John:
But if you see a refurbished one or a used one in good condition that you can get for a really good price, I still think they're good laptops.
John:
Just expect to use it for like a year and a half until...
John:
You know, what you're waiting for is the new Apple laptops with the non crappy keyboard.
John:
Right.
John:
And so if you can't actually hold out for that, buying a very inexpensive, you know, previous gen MacBook Air to hold you over as long as you get a good deal, I think that's viable.
John:
But don't pay like close to new computer prices for it because it's just too old and slow at this point.
Casey:
We owe our listeners a tremendous apology because we did not do our jobs.
Casey:
This is what the second or third episode post WWDC where we have not talked about the lunches.
Casey:
And we actually for the first time for the first time in years we actually the three of us shared a WWDC lunch this year.
Casey:
And all three of us had lunch together inside the venue.
Casey:
And Tim Schmitz was the one I happened to see who asked this question.
Casey:
There were many others that came before him, but this was the one I happened to notice when I was sitting down to get Ask ATP squared away for this week.
Casey:
I actually don't think I have any.
Casey:
On Monday, I ran over and met Aaron for lunch at a sofa market, which is this new to me, and I think it's only a year or two old, really cool food court that's just a few blocks away from the convention center.
Casey:
I also went with my friend Jelly, who does the wonderful app Gift Wrapped.
Casey:
to, shoot, I can't remember the name of it now.
Casey:
Oh, San Pedro Square, I think is it.
Casey:
I think that was the name of it, which was another food court that was kind of nearby.
Casey:
And so I wasn't, I genuinely wasn't actively avoiding the lunches because I think they're fine.
Casey:
But I only had one or maybe two of them.
Casey:
So I don't really have that much to say.
Casey:
Marco, this was your first, this was your triumphant return to the WWDC lunch.
Casey:
Any notes or thoughts on yours?
Marco:
I thought they were fine.
Marco:
Not great, which is understandable.
Marco:
They're never great.
Marco:
You don't need them to be great.
Marco:
You need them to be fine.
Marco:
And I think they were.
Marco:
They totally satisfied that.
Marco:
They are exactly what they've always been in a way.
Marco:
There's nitpicks you can pick with everything.
Marco:
Every single aspect of every single meal.
Marco:
There's something about it that's a little bit off.
Marco:
But
John:
you know it was fine there were none that i took a bite i'm like oh i can't even eat this like no they were fine i ate them they served their purpose they were they were quick and easy and i can move on you know casey you could have had a second lunch with all three of us but you ditched us for whoever it was that you were going to see marco and i had a second lunch together anyway um so i had lunch uh every day of wwc as i usually do um
John:
it was similar to last year but i feel like there i think i said the same thing last year i feel like this whatever this catering company isn't really even trying it's hard like welcome to san jose yeah pretty pretty much every lunch or at least a lot of them didn't even fill all the little cubbies like you got usually like three or four three or four cubbies you got the big cubby where whatever the main thing is you got you know two or three small cubbies one usually has like the side dish and one the little deserty thing and maybe there's a third that's nothing in that one you
Marco:
Actually, that is true, and there's something I noticed, too.
Marco:
There were pretty much no side dishes.
Marco:
They had the dessert, and they had the main pile of whatever.
John:
And that's it.
John:
They didn't even try to do anything else.
John:
They didn't try to make some unidentifiable weird rice concoction or vegetable medley thing or whatever, which, you know...
John:
shows a lack of effort but on the other hand that is always the most challenging thing we've talked about that before like even figure what it is and it also has the highest uh you know chance of spoiling the other stuff because it could be like a wet thing that flops over into the main bin and makes the the bread on the sandwich wet or whatever
John:
And also by not trying, they didn't try to do anything exotic for the main dishes, right?
John:
So they basically did more or less what I had suggested a couple of years ago.
John:
Like the very first lunch on the very first day was a sandwich and a chocolate chip cookie, which is hard to screw up if you don't do anything weird.
John:
They wisely didn't put any, you know, lots of wet condiments on the sandwich.
John:
They were like, you get them on the side in little packets.
John:
And so I think the best lunch I had at WWC was the first one, which was
John:
a boring sandwich, which was mediocre or whatever, and an industrial chocolate chip cookie.
John:
And that was perfectly fine.
John:
The lunches all went downhill from there.
John:
Every subsequent day was slightly worse, but they never reached the really low levels.
John:
I only had one little bit of soggy bread, and all of them were like, okay.
John:
So I was disappointed by the lack of ambition, but I was happy about the sort of going for the...
John:
You know, the crowd-pleasing fat part of the curve.
John:
Don't try to do anything fancy.
John:
Just do a sandwich and a cookie in a reasonable way.
John:
So I think it was a pretty good year for lunches, even if it was not particularly spectacular.
John:
Low degree of difficulty, mediocre execution.
Casey:
You know, I had forgotten, and CMF reminded me in the chat, what was the mango tango situation this year?
Casey:
They were there.
Casey:
It wasn't one of the dark years, of which there were two or three, I think, where they switched to some other, like, silly drink.
Casey:
But I think I only had like one bottle, which I believe I had in line with John waiting to go see the Mac Pro, actually.
Casey:
But yeah, Mango Tango is some sort of weird drink that I just think is delicious.
Casey:
And it's like three or four dollars a bottle, generally speaking.
Casey:
It's hilariously expensive, but you get it, quote unquote, for free with your sixteen hundred dollar ticket from time to time.
Casey:
And so I love to have them even though they're like 300 calories per bottle.
Casey:
And I think I only had one, maybe two, which was really, really sad.
Casey:
But that is a highlight of my WWDC trip every year.
Marco:
It's kind of sad.
Casey:
Hey, man, I love Eastern Mango Tango.
Casey:
Leave me alone.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week.
Marco:
Molecule, Squarespace, ExpressVPN, and Mango Tango.
Marco:
We'll see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
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 Armin S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Tech Podcast So long
Casey:
We should get on the horn with Odwalla.
John:
I got a picture of you holding up your mango tango.
John:
Was that really the only one you had?
Casey:
It might be, yeah.
John:
Isn't that sad?
John:
I thought it was more plentiful this year.
John:
I saw it around a lot.
Casey:
I mean, and I was actually in the conference more this year than I had been for a while, because a lot of times I had every intention of going in and then...
Casey:
I would need to meet up with, let's say, Jelly.
Casey:
But, you know, I would need to meet up with somebody or want to meet up with somebody, whatever.
Casey:
And then I would end up missing out on stuff.
Casey:
But I was inside the conference much more frequently than the last couple of years.
Casey:
And I still only got a couple of them at most.
John:
Oh, I forgot to mention the other thing that they had more of.
John:
So we mentioned that they just had a lunch and a little dessert.
John:
But they had side dish thingies separate from the boxes.
John:
They would just have big bowls filled with chips and nuts and stuff like that.
John:
Right.
John:
They always have like the bowls of bananas and snacks, but like with the meal, like they never used to do this in San Francisco, like with the actual box lunch right next to it, you were expected to furnish your own side dish and you had choices.
John:
It wasn't just one thing.
John:
You had like three kinds of chips or, you know, a bag of nuts or something else along with the lunch, not just as the snack before and after it.
John:
So that was convenient.
John:
And I snagged a couple of bags.
John:
And in fact, I found a new planters mix thing that I liked.
John:
I think I took a picture of it.
John:
It's like they're
John:
tropical nut mix or something it's got like yogurt covered raisins and like one half of a macadamia and a bunch of peanuts and like some dried fruit uh like little dried pineapple bits and i thought it was a uh a nice you know two ounce size little bag of nut and dried fruit like a pleasing combination that i didn't feel like there was lots of some nut that i didn't like and
John:
You know, I tend to like things with dried fruit in it.
John:
So I'm excited about that discovery.
John:
I look for them online and I could find them at Amazon, but only if I bought 72 of them for a dollar each.
John:
So $72, I felt like that would probably be too much of those two ounce nut bags for me.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
I should also point out that they at one point had full on like Kit Kat bars and other things sitting outside in that like front courtyard area.
John:
I miss that entire sitting out in the courtyard.
John:
They're probably all melted.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
That was the thing was I was like running out the door, so to speak, although at this point I had already left the doors.
Casey:
But anyways, I was running out to go meet up with somebody and I saw this like pile of Kit Kats and I saw it sitting directly in the sunlight and I thought, yeah, I'll pass on that one.
John:
It's going to become one big Kit Kat.
Casey:
It actually doesn't sound terrible.
Casey:
I do love me a Kit Kat, but that's right.
Casey:
Do we need an after show?
Casey:
Are we good?
Casey:
What do we think?
Marco:
I'm telling you, this development is killing me.
Marco:
Which one?
Marco:
All of it.
Casey:
What are you actively working on right now?
Casey:
The watch app?
Marco:
Uh, no, I haven't even gotten there yet.
Marco:
Like I, I've been doing server stuff to prepare for some other stuff and fix some other stuff.
Marco:
And then I have to, I mean, part of it honestly is it's kind of nice that I'm, I'm avoiding beta one mostly.
Marco:
Uh, but beta two is, is terrible.
Marco:
And I'm just, I'm faced with this massive amount of stuff to do for the summer.
Marco:
So, and I still haven't really done it yet.
Marco:
Like I'm, I'm diving in a little bit here and there, but yeah,
Marco:
One of the things I have to do, by the way, I have to rewrite my audio engine partly because they have officially deprecated the AU Graph API that I've been using to render audio.
Marco:
They kind of said that unofficially like two years ago, so I knew this was going to happen.
Marco:
I really have to move to AV Audio Engine for lots of reasons because the audio graph stuff is...
Marco:
Officially it still works, but it's not working very well anymore on the newest betas.
Marco:
And I don't know if they're going to fix that because it's officially deprecated.
Marco:
And I need to rewrite an audio engine that will work on the watch anyway.
Marco:
And AV audio engine allegedly will.
Marco:
So I have to rewrite the audio engine for that.
Marco:
I'm also working on a multi-column view because using my two-column view on a Mac feels even worse than it feels on an iPad.
Marco:
And that's surprisingly non-trivial because of the navigation structure.
Marco:
You have to be able to have the two columns that go there with the root level nav and then the second level being either the podcast or playlist you've selected.
Marco:
You also have to figure out what to do with those two navigation bars.
Marco:
Do you display them side by side?
Marco:
That kind of looks weird.
Marco:
They also both have search bars which search different things.
Marco:
What do you do with those?
Marco:
There's all sorts of UI challenges there.
Marco:
Then you have to have the logic in the app to be able to
Marco:
like if you resize the app down so it fits one or zero columns, you have to then like tear those view controllers out of those navigation book controllers and stick them in either one navigation controller with them stacked or stick them all with one with the now playing screen.
Marco:
It's like, it's this whole thing
Marco:
that is surprisingly complex and just requires a lot of moving code around, refactoring code to work in this new structure of how it needs it and everything.
Marco:
And not to mention the cosmetic issues of how do you lay this out in a way that doesn't look ridiculous when you have all these common elements between them.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Just having a three-column view, that's going to be two weeks of work right there, probably, out of the 10 weeks I have in the summer, basically.
Marco:
There's so much stuff that just accumulates like that.
Marco:
Fun.
Marco:
Yeah, so first I need a multi-column view.
Marco:
That way, my Mac app, which I think is... I think if I can rank the importance of what I have to do for this fall...
Marco:
Number one is the Mac app, because that is the thing that will get me the most new ground covered, and it's the thing that people want the most.
Marco:
Actually, no, sorry.
Marco:
Priority number one is update for iOS 13.
Marco:
So anything that is broken on iOS 13, I have to fix.
Marco:
Anything that is...
Marco:
weird or deprecated that if i don't do it right in ios 13 like you know using old 3d touch apis not using the new menu system having any problems with the new uh card based um presentation controller style you know i have to fix ios 13 stuff first which i haven't done so i should i should really be doing that now then after that's fixed then i have to
Marco:
I think, do the Mac app.
Marco:
But that requires this three-column thing first, and probably the new audio engine, because I'm having a lot of bugs with the old one running on the Mac.
Marco:
So, then after that, I think the next step after that is tackle the independent watch app.
Marco:
The only reason that's not higher on the list is that I already have an independent-ish watch app, and it kind of works.
Marco:
So, like, it's less important.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I have like those three major projects to do this summer.
Marco:
Not to mention, by the way, I also need to do some significant server migrations, which I'm also doing this week.
Marco:
So I have those three things to do.
Marco:
And I'm like a quarter of the way through the first thing.
Marco:
And it's already been like two weeks.
Marco:
I'm just like, oh, this is stressful.
Marco:
This is not good.
Marco:
And all these things are going to take longer than I think they will, I'm sure.
Casey:
I don't mean this in a mean way, but I do find there to be a little bit of humor in the thought that I just had, which is that you might need to do a graycation this summer by staying at home while your family is at the beach.
Marco:
Nope.
Casey:
That's not going to happen.
Casey:
Yeah, I know, which would be terrible for you, but I do think it would be funny.
Casey:
I would send them home and I would stay...
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Casey:
I see how it is.
Casey:
The king needs his space.
Casey:
Be gone, child and wife.
Casey:
You must be gone.
Casey:
Let me know how that works out.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm sure that would go over well.