John Is My Default
Speaking of your tiny beings in your house, I saw in one of your Instagram stories you had a bowl of food for hops.
I think, what was it?
You were like, oh, I've got to give hops his breakfast first.
Do you remember that one?
And this was before you said you were out of dog food.
So I wasn't aware that you had run out of dog food.
But the bowl that you put down to hops, like it's on camera for two seconds, and it looked to me like oversized chocolate chips, coconut shavings, and carrots.
Yeah.
tell me that's not what was actually in the bowl uh coconut shavings no oversized chocolate chips coconut shavings and carrots obviously it's not chocolate because that's poison for dogs but it looked like i'm just saying as it goes by the camera real fast it looked like big chocolate chips those were chunks of dry dog food oh wow they look really big they look like they were the size of like nickels um no they're coconut shavings no no
oh i know what you okay are you talking about the omelet breakfast or whatever you made him yes there was there was one segment of that you can see i i saved it as a highlight of my story you can go see um so what i feed hops what i've been feeding him most mornings is some you know dog kibble from a reputable brand i have been chopping up some carrots in there like just like like i take like four baby carrots and chop them up and put them in because he likes carrots and you know keeps his uh stuff working regularly and
And then the other little bit you saw was a torn up slice of deli turkey.
Like, you know, boar's head oven roast turkey.
I know there's too much salt in it, and that's why I don't give them a lot.
It looked like kind of a lot.
It wasn't even a full slice.
It also looked like a big bowl of food for a small dog.
It was very close to the camera.
It's actually like a cat food bowl.
Yeah.
hops is not a big dog put that food and mold it into the shape of a dog it would be about the same size as him no it not only is he not a big dog but i don't even it doesn't even fill the bowl and it's a cat bowl like the bowl is it wouldn't even hold the amount of water he would need to be a water bowl that's how small it is all right anyway you got uh bad planning on the the dog foods now you're making people food for the dog
yeah well because like i i bought like you know so the the brand i get is like it's one of like the fancier brands that is not available in like your typical grocery store you have to go to like you know a nice pet food store to get it and and so like there are grocery stores here they do sell a very small selection of dog food uh and i looked at it all today and i was like it was all like total garbage like you know the ingredients are like you know
water sawdust compressed meat byproducts like it's like it's all like the worst garbage you can possibly imagine i'm like i don't i don't feel right feeding that to him because you know i know he wouldn't care but i care you know like it's it's it's about standards and i don't want to you know put a bunch of crap in my dog so i'd rather just you give him cold cuts that's not really
very small amount and the reason why the human that's the human equivalent of that dog food you rejected agreed but it's yeah but it's like it's that's in very small quantity and it's mostly because i i wrap up the pill after he takes thyroid pills because he's old and so i wrap up the thyroid pills in the in like a little bit of deli turkey because it makes it easy to give it to him and it's relatively low bulk so it's not like i'm not adding that much you know stuff to him
um and then i just put like i tear up a few little extra strips of the turkey and put it in there so that he inhales his dog pellets but it turns out when you make food they actually like you don't need to taint it with deli turkey i did however i must say whenever i've had to make him like chicken for like if he if he like gets sick and i have to make him chicken because like he won't eat anything else like i've had to do it a couple times here and there throughout this dog and uh throughout this whenever i do it i i always feel bad for him i'm like
you know the vets tell you like just boiled chicken i've done it for my dog multiple times as well boiled chicken is terrible like it's so flavorless and you can't give them onion or anything else that could flavor it and so i always do a little tiny pinch of salt in the chicken water they don't need salt and i always do i always do a little dash of rosemary
he doesn't care probably but I care I don't want to give him such incredibly bland chicken so today I did the same thing and I was like baking I baked a couple of chicken breasts and three chicken thighs to make this big dog food mixture tonight and I put a little dash of rosemary on top because it just felt so bland without it
His sense of smell is 10,000 times more powerful than yours.
It's probably overwhelming him with rosemary, which dogs do not seek out or like in any way.
It's not food for you.
It's food for the dog.
You need empathy for the dog.
Believe me, all the work I put into this food.
It's like 10,000 rosemaries in his face.
Well, it's pretty good.
It allowed me to feel good about feeding him the meal that he seemed to really love.
You're supposed to be empathizing with the dog, not you.
We know you...
The only downside is I have no idea how much of this mixture I've made to feed him.
And he certainly won't tell me because he'll just inhale as much as I give him because it's really good.
So I don't know if I'm feeding him enough or too much.
I guess I'll find out.
You can do it by volume.
You have like a scoop that's like this is the scoop for hops.
Like whatever fits in the scoop is a meal, assuming it's reasonably packed.
i would give him like a third of a cup each meal of like the dry kibble but you know it's this is totally different this is like you know freshly made like you know baked things with actual meat and actual vegetables and a little bit of rice so it's like i don't even like i'm sure the volumes are not comparable because the the kibble is probably so much more calorie dense you can just tell when it comes at the other end when it becomes a uniform density you can say how much poop is there and how often
I guess.
You know, you're putting in the right amount when the normal amount comes out the back.
All right.
We should start with follow up as always.
Andrew Bimmons writes a way in which you can disable auto boot.
So I was lamenting that, you know, I like to take a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser to my computers when they're powered off in order to get the finger grease and other bits off of them.
And if I were to do that with the newer Macs, from what I'm told, they will turn themselves on as soon as you press any button on the keyboard.
And some people wrote in with some software tools to do this when the computer's on, which I'm not entirely keen on.
But Andrew wrote in and said, the command you need, and we will put this in the show notes, is sudo nvram autoboot equals percent zero zero.
And autoboot is Pascal case.
Do I have that right?
Capital A, capital B.
Like I said, you'll see it in the show notes.
Continuing our segment of reading out command line things and source code.
We put them in the show notes too.
It's a useful thing.
Although I think I missed the last time you mentioned this, that you're using magic erasers on your computer.
I don't really recommend that.
Because don't they have like a mild amount of bleach in them?
And I know they're kind of abrasive.
So both of those things combined to make me think.
Those are both kind of incomplete.
So what magic erasers are is melamine foam.
And it's actually a really interesting material.
It's basically a super fine abrasive formed into a sponge.
And there's no other – at least in the regular kind, there's probably like different flavors now.
But like in the regular kind, it's just a block of foam.
And you make it a little bit wet to make it effective.
But then you're basically – it's basically a super fine abrasive.
So they actually are really useful things to clean off a lot of different kinds of things.
The problem with cleaning computers with them, they work fantastically automatically.
on cleaning keys on keyboards, like on laptop keyboards.
The downside is that because you have to put a little bit of water in them to activate them and kind of make them work, if you're scrubbing on a keyboard, there's a very good chance you're going to leak a drop or two of water into it.
And...
I've actually seen this happen and I've seen this cause problems.
So that is the biggest reason not to use them.
It's not about the block of melamine foam itself.
It's about the water that you need to use with it causing problems for the device that you're cleaning.
I still don't like the idea of using abrasive and I think some of them do have a mild bleach in them.
And the other thing is if you're doing it on the keys, especially with these current ones, even if you get it wet, little bits can shed from the magic eraser.
That's true.
And I don't want the other thing that our keyboards are vulnerable to is any little speck of anything.
I don't want a tiny little speck of abrasive working its way into there.
So all I'm saying is, Casey, follow the instructions on Apple's website.
75 degrees for the air.
And they always say a clean, damp cloth with just water.
Say you have finger grease on there, right?
Water, it's not as good as a degreaser to get off finger grease, but it will eventually get off the grease.
It is universal solvent.
It will eventually get rid of the grease unless you have some...
serious like motor oil situations going on there but don't endorse the magic eraser uh that is noted and i will promptly ignore you henceforth uh tell me about your apple card uh i hear there's some trouble in paradise there
I applied for the Apple Card because now it's open to everybody, and I did the little thingy on the phone where you apply and you enter some small amount of information.
It was very painless.
My first sad realization was that my limit on the card was going to be $10,000.
Which is very low and not enough probably for the Mac Pro system I plan to buy.
It's probably not that big of a deal practically speaking because my wife got a card too and so I could buy like the monitor and her card and the computer on mine or something like that.
So you think.
I was going to say, you think the computer would fit on one?
Yeah, I better.
But like $10,000 is not a high limit for a credit card in general.
It's lower than any of the limits on any of my actual credit cards.
And what I've heard since then of people complaining about the limits is that
uh they're being conservative because it's like the first consumer credit card golden sax is done yada yada yada excuses excuses anyway i immediately went to customer service and in addition to uh going to the the text chat to say get me out of arbitration i also said and by the way can you increase my limit because my experience has been if you ask a credit card company to increase your limit they will if you have good credit and all this other stuff and like i have good credit i have lots of credit cards with high limits i figured they would do it but
Their response was, at this time, we are not evaluating credit limit increase requests from customers who have had an account open for less than six months.
So basically, no one's getting an increase for six months, which is kind of cruddy.
By then, it will be too late.
So anyway, that's my card situation.
The other thing is I did get...
the physical card because everybody should just even if you're never going to use it because it's cool um and i i was impressed about a couple things one the apple card which is a normal size credit card actually comes in packaging i i just assumed it would just be like i don't know like stuck to a piece of paper like other credit cards but no of course apple has to have packaging for its card and as you would expect the packaging is
you know interesting in the details it just looks like a folding piece of paper with a card inside it but if you look at it closely it's actually very clever and interesting and and cool and the second thing is you open it up and there's your little apple card uh and it's in this little slot and mine at the bottom of the little slot mine says activate your card what is the text here wake iphone and hold here
That's it.
You know when you get a credit card and it says to activate your card, call this number, and you've got to go through some phone tree, and you press a bunch of buttons, and you enter a bunch of things to identify yourself, and you activate your card, and blah, blah, blah.
It used to be more painful when you had to speak to a human, but even the phone tree stuff is annoying.
To activate this card, it says wake phone and hold here.
It doesn't say activate Apple Pay.
It doesn't say launch the wallet app and all that stuff.
It just says wake phone and hold here.
And that baffled me for a second because I'm like...
just wake the phone do they mean like do i have to unlock it or can i just tap the screen to turn it on anyway i held my phone close the thing and went i thought for a little bit and went bloop and it said you want to activate your card i said yes and it activated so it was the best credit card activation experience i've ever had that said my wife got her card and i was waiting for her to do the same thing i'm like you know i wanted to her to experience the joy of activating a card without having to call somebody on the phone
But hers didn't say wake phone and hold here.
Hers said, like, launch the wallet app and do something or other.
Like, it had her doing a bunch of other stuff.
It had different text instructions printed on the bottom of the thing.
And just holding her phone next to it didn't activate it.
She had to actually follow those instructions.
I think maybe it's because she didn't actually do any transactions with the card before she got the physical one because I had already, like...
paid for iCloud storage or whatever the heck you know had it set for does she happen to have an old a super old phone that doesn't have nfc iphone 10 okay so that isn't it then yeah it's it's very confusing but anyway uh just to let people know what kind of activation experience they might get they might get the really cool activation experience or the slightly less cool one but both of them are better than using the phone
i wonder why it's different like why i have two different ones going i don't know i i looked it up before i was i know like maybe you know maybe there's some like additional feature of nfc that allows it to be more passively like but i google all this stuff it's like no this has been a feature of iphones forever um so you'd have to really have an old phone it would know what phone she was using because she had put it in her wallet on her phone that's how you have to do that to even order the physical card so that was all set up so they know what kind of phone she has right
Anyway, that was weird.
And the card itself, which we'll get to in the next item.
It's cool.
It's white.
I'm not going to actually use the physical card at all.
I've held one briefly when I was in San Francisco.
I met up with a friend of mine who had one, and they are very fancy.
They're very fancy.
I kind of want one, but I don't know.
I just don't feel like going through the whole rigmarole of unfreezing my credit and applying and getting it and freezing my credit again and blah, blah, blah.
And
I don't buy Apple stuff enough that I really think that 3% is going to make that much of an empirical difference in my world.
Plus, I don't plan on buying a Mac Pro because I'm not a maniac.
So I don't need to worry about these things.
See how stress-free your life can be if you don't need to worry about the Mac Pro.
I also just like, just as a credit card user, I hate this new trend of nice credit cards being like heavy, thick metal.
why do you want your wallet to be unnecessarily heavier like plastic was fine for decades of using credit cards why are we changing this this makes no sense like i want the benefits that the high-end cards give you but i don't get like can i opt for a plastic one come on marco treat yourself
Someone was saying that they were doing market research on credit cards, or some company was doing market research on various premium credit card designs, and the number one factor by far in all focus groups was the thing that everybody liked about cards was the heavier equals better.
Everything else varied, color, shape, texture, designs on it, but heavier equals better was number one with a bullet.
Yeah.
You might not like it, but apparently in the market of credit cards, heavier is more impressive is better.
I feel the same way.
The market is wrong.
I'm not going to carry it around because I already have a MasterCard, so I don't need to have a second one, and I'm certainly not going to put a heavier one in there.
And then the next thing we're going to get to is another reason I'm not going to include in there.
By the way...
eh in the chat room says the iphone 10 doesn't have background nfc scanning only the 10s and the 10r have it so i have have a 10s and maybe that was that was my guess but i kept trying i didn't know what i was googling for i was googling for like transit pass or some other nfc stuff but everything i saw was supported everywhere but maybe background nfc scanning background meaning i guess if you're not in an app like you know because i wasn't that it can scan without being activated maybe that's really interesting that makes sense so there you go you only get the cool the super cool experience if you have a 10s or a 10r
That's also true of the shortcut stuff, right?
Come to think of it, didn't they say that if you have a lowly iPhone X like I do, that I wouldn't be able to use the tap to activate shortcut thing?
Do you know what I'm talking about?
That's what I was trying to remember, but I apparently didn't know the right words to Google, that there was some new feature in the XS that had to do with snaking your phone against something without launching an app, and this was it.
I should have been looking for, I guess, background NFC.
Interesting.
All right.
Question answered.
All right, John, tell me about how you keep your Apple card feeling healthy, wealthy, and strong.
Yeah, this is one of those micro controversies, which I don't think there's anything particularly controversial about it, but it's an opportunity to talk about Apple's design decisions again.
So Apple has a tech note or support article or whatever that is entitled, How to Clean Your Apple Card.
See how to protect and maintain the condition of your titanium Apple card.
So it is, you know, a very nice object.
If you want to keep it looking nice, they have all these instructions about what to do, about gently wiping it, you know, damp cloth, lint-free microfiber, all the things they tell you about everything.
Although they do mention isopropyl alcohol, which they usually don't mention for anything else.
Don't use household cleaners.
Don't use compressed air.
That's just for our laptops.
Don't use any aerosol sprays, solvents, ammonia, blah, blah, blah.
So that's all fine.
It's like they have those instructions for basically any Apple product.
Like how do I clean my whatever?
You can probably find an Apple support article, which is good.
You should look at because I'll tell you what not to use.
But the part that got everyone up in arms was how to safely store and carry your titanium Apple card.
In particular, the passage that says, where is it?
If the credit cards are placed in the same slot, your card could become scratched.
So don't put it next to another credit card.
The Apple card needs to be by itself.
And then the next bit, some fabrics like leather and denim might cause permanent discoloration that will not wash off.
So don't put it near other credit cards.
Don't put it in denim and don't put it in leather because you might permanently discolor your card.
I think that's probably true of every credit card in our wallet.
If you put it in denim or leather, they could be permanently discolored.
Nobody cares because who cares with your plastic credit cards, whether they get discolored.
But Apple made this beautiful thing that they have instructions on how to keep beautiful.
And part of the instructions are try not to use it like a regular credit card by putting it in your leather wallet or in a wallet like on those iPhone cases where it's exposed.
And then you put it in your back pocket of your jeans.
It's not, I mean, it's not ridiculous.
Who cares?
Like if you care about it, then care for it this way.
If you don't care about it, just use it like a regular card.
It'll be fine.
It's not like it stops operating.
This is all about how to keep it pristine.
But this gets back to the discussion that I think we had maybe on this program or maybe on, maybe it was hypercritical days.
There was a big thing going around, I guess it goes around every few years, let's send it around again, about products that look, if not better, at least look good, wear their age well, like they wear well.
The example of people always putting in there is like a cast iron pan or like
leather goods very often wear in a way that makes them attractive as they get used.
It doesn't look the same as when they're brand new, and maybe they might look worse than when they're brand new, but they still look nice.
They get a patina versus getting gross-looking, right?
For a credit card, honestly, who really cares?
It's not actually a big deal.
But if you were tasked with designing an Apple credit card and you had to go on the whiteboard and let's list the attributes, the favorable attributes that a credit card could have and the use cases, right?
The use cases would have to include being put into a leather wallet and being subjected to denim.
Those would have to be on the list.
And the attributes would be, maybe you could say looks good as an attribute.
I think you'd have to put, for this product and every product, either stays looking good or wears its age well.
And those items are very often not on the list of things for Apple products.
I think they are sometimes, like the unibody aluminum and glass laptops, for example.
I think they wear pretty well.
Part of the criteria is they look good when they come out of the box.
And I think they wear well.
They don't stain easily.
They don't chip.
They don't scratch as easily as many of the alternatives did.
They don't discolor like the plastic ones did or whatever.
But it's hit or miss.
Some products age well and some products don't.
A lot of the iPods did not age well and they just look beat up and gross and not in a good way.
But some of them did age well.
Some of the iPhones aged well.
Some of them didn't.
This card...
seems like it's not going to age well because the design is this beautiful white sleek thing and if it gets like streaked with blue not really a great look so I don't think this is a big deal but it does scratch that itch in my head of like you know Apple your things don't just have to look good in the product shots and when you take it out of the box especially if you're going to use and handle it every day for years on end it would be good if they aged gracefully they can't be impervious they can't be magic and not get damaged but
Like try to make them age in a way, age evenly or get a patina on them.
Don't say, oh, well, here's your brand new card.
Don't stick it in your leather wallet because that's silly.
And it makes it sound like what's going to happen if you don't do that is going to be an aesthetically unpleasing experience.
I understand why they had to publish this support document, even though it is ridiculous.
Everyone's always looking for ways to call fail on Apple.
They're in a very high-profile position, and if there's any flaw with any new product they launch, the press will jump all over them for it.
I understand.
That's the reality that they're in.
And so if they didn't post this document, there would be people whose Apple cards would get beaten up, as all credit cards do, after, what, a few weeks of being in a wallet at most.
And they would take pictures and they would start a Reddit thread saying, look, my Apple card is defective.
And it would be a big story.
And Apple would have to deal with...
a pr crap storm that day um you know about why the apple card is badly designed because it was defective because it got banged up in a wallet because all credit cards always do that instead they designed it to be so sensitive to to damage uh that they moved up the pr you know crap storm of dealing with this they they just call themselves in advance by publishing this support document saying all right look here's you know if you keep your apple card and
In pretty much any way that anybody ever keeps credit cards, it's going to probably get banged up.
You know, I kind of see why they had to do that because of the scrutiny they're under with anything new they launched.
But it's still kind of sad that they had to do that.
It is ridiculous.
It is a hilarious document to read, even though, yes, they probably had to do it.
But it is still funny.
It does indeed happen to every credit card.
And also, as John said, they also did design this one in a way that seems even more completely distanced from reality than it was necessary.
Nobody was forcing them to create a white credit card for one.
It just happened to them.
Yeah.
yes it happened to be white oh nice yeah so the thing is i can't tell though like you mentioned that like they made a card that is more susceptible to damage at this point nobody knows whether this card is any more susceptible to damage than any other credit card maybe it's less susceptible to damage we just don't know because we all just got them and they're all brand new right but the article doesn't say and by the way unlike your other credit cards this one will be discolored like
It could be worse.
It could be better.
It's hard to tell because the article is very sort of matter of fact and gives, you know, the most cautious advice.
Like if you read the instruction manual for anything you own in your life, it's hilarious how they tell you like not to use it in the way.
It's like Q-tips instructions telling you not to put them in your ears.
Like there's the instructions that come with the product and then there's how everybody uses them.
And with the Apple Card, people are going to put it in their wallets.
And I think we still will see here's what my titanium Apple Card looks like after six months in my wallet.
Will it be better than if you had stuck a plastic card in there?
Worse or the same?
This article gives us no clue.
But yes, the choice to make it white.
To give an example, I have other metal-ish cards or cards that don't feel like plastic to me.
And a lot of them are either like black or very dark blue.
And those might be getting all scuffed up from my leather wallet, but I would never see it because it's harder to see on a dark material.
And it's not like that color scheme...
is foreign to Apple.
Like, they make, you know, space gray and, you know, dark-colored computer stuff, like the Apple TV, for example.
And also, dark colors and black cards have been, like, a premium thing.
So they could have actually gone in that direction.
Maybe they would have made the card feel too out of reach for regular people, and they're going for the mass market to make it white.
But they could make a black version of it.
Maybe they still will make a black version of it, or a gold one for the Apple card edition.
But...
Actually, DLC would prevent a lot of the problems that they're guarding against here.
Yeah, that's true.
That's true.
Like, it's kind of like, you know, if you make something beautiful and like it really is more delicate than other cards, you ruin the beauty of it by having to stick it in some kind of protective sleeve or something.
Yeah.
And I think also like the timing of this was pretty poor optics of like, you know, right now, like after in right before what is hopefully the end of the butterfly keyboard era, right as, you know, Johnny Ive has exited.
And I think we've had kind of like the peak of the worst of Johnny Ive style designs in a
I feel like Apple commentators and press are very hypersensitive to anything where Apple is designing something for purely visual appeal in a way that will make it less practical or less reliable in the real world.
And so to have this come out now when everyone's very sensitive to that kind of thing, and it seems to be exactly that.
It seems to be something that Apple designed in a vacuum that designed it to look good, but to be fairly incompatible with the real world.
And whether it ends up that way or not, that is what this document makes it sound like.
This document makes it sound like this thing is not at all designed to be used the way anybody ever uses credit cards.
And so that I think it kind of like it hit a nerve in the Apple community and press of like, yet again, they're doing something that is form over function.
And hopefully we're at the end of that, but we'll see how that turns out.
So you're going to have a special sleeve for your Apple card that matches your special sleeve for your iPhone, John?
So interestingly, when my bank sends me my debit card, they always send it in a sleeve.
So I just always put it in my wallet in the sleeve.
So like all my credit cards are just in these little pockets, but my debit card is in the sleeve that it came in.
Oh my God, John.
have you ever seen those little you've seen the size of your wallet little like tear resistant material sleeves yeah like i mean you've seen my wallet it's not it's basically it ends up being like a pocket liner because it doesn't it's not as tall as the the card and when i pull the card out the the pouch stays in the wallet kind of but yeah it's one of those little sleeves some of your cards might come in them people just throw them away you already have protective sleeves for a credit card in your wallet oh my god
Just for my debit card, not for any of my credit cards.
But it is nice.
It does actually keep the cards nicer, because if you compare it to the cards that are just in the leather slots, it's a little bit nicer.
Anyway, I'm not going to... I'm not going to... I do have sleeves.
I do have sleeves for this card.
But I'm not actually going to put it in my wallet, so...
Oh my God, John.
So you're talking about like the thing that your global entry card comes in or comes with?
I don't have a global entry card, so I couldn't tell you.
But yeah, it's a little sleeve, exactly the same size as the credit card.
Often credit cards come in them.
Oh God.
You know, everyone's going to be so excited.
I don't know why you're so oh God about that.
It's exactly like having a pocket.
The sleeve doesn't come like the phone where the phone comes out with the sleeve on it and it has to be removed.
It's just like putting it in a pocket except for my pocket is lined with mylar.
I think that's what they're made out of.
It's no wonder.
I cannot believe you don't have severe back problems worse than Mike, given that you sit on a four-foot-tall wallet every single day.
I've been thinning it out lately.
Okay, three-foot-tall wallet every day because of all your stupid sleeves.
Why would I be sitting on it?
Oh, my God.
It's in your back pocket.
No, it's not.
We've gone through this multiple times.
I forgot.
I forgot how much of a monster you are.
Anyway, can we move on?
I'm getting so stressed out just thinking about your wallet.
We were written by a lot of the Internet, a sizable portion of the Internet, to tell us that most modern cars actually have USB-C and typically USB-A ports as well.
Yeah.
No, most, but certainly a lot of them.
We never got percentages, but people would say, my car is X, and it has some USB-C, whereas my car is Y. And so we saw lots of car models, but we didn't see enough of them to say that most new cars have it.
But it seems like it's much more prevalent than we thought it was.
Indeed.
And the other thing is that they didn't get rid of the A's.
Almost all the cars, I think every single car that someone told us about, had USB-C, but also still had A. Sometimes the C was only in the back seat, but it only had A in the front seat.
So we're in some weird transitional period.
And tell me about your new or your forthcoming camera.
Since you're not spending enough money on your Mac Pro, you're going to buy a new camera as well?
Well, whether I buy it or not, Sony did release the new cameras that we were talking about, new APS-C cameras.
The numbers, I guessed wrong on the numbers.
They had now, in addition to the 6,000, 6,300, 6,465, now they have the 61 and 66.
Of course.
And I think they revised the 64.
But the good thing is the 66 actually is the best one in almost all ways.
The 66 is basically like the 64.
It's got the advanced motion tracking and the new color chip and all the other stuff or whatever.
And it has in-body stabilization, but the 6400 doesn't have.
And it has the gigantic battery from the A7 series.
So the battery was fine in those things to begin with.
But now the battery is like twice as big.
It's rated for like 800 shots or something.
And that's a conservative estimate.
So...
No problem with battery.
And they made the handle bigger, which both to accommodate the larger battery, but also because people have been complaining that the handle is small.
I thought the old one was fine.
But anyway, a bigger handle is not whatever you call it.
Bigger grip is not a bad idea.
So it's about what everyone expected it to be.
The only surprises slash downsides, as far as I can tell, are that it still isn't USB-C.
Like, it's just like all the other of the Alpha 6 whatever series.
It's that stupid mini USB, which is terrible.
Like,
they didn't it's this this feels like the uh the final best revision of this generation of camera and i hope like the next one will be like a different number and i'll have usb c on or something anyway no usb c also no usb 3 so it's still usb 2 with remaining usb which is not great that's weird for something released now
yeah that's what i'm saying like i mean it makes sense if you look at the line they're all exactly like that but they revised all this other stuff and they're like yeah usb2 is fine and honestly it is fine like they're small it's only a 24 megapixel sensor and if you're not shooting raws it's not a big deal and you can just take the sd card out and you know yeah yeah but but like the a7 line went usb3 like two years ago yeah i mean this is the cheap line you know what i mean um and the other weird thing about the 6600 is no flash
Which sounds like, well, who cares?
And most people probably don't even know these cameras have flash anyway, but it does.
It's very cleverly hidden.
It's a terrible little, very tiny pop-up flash.
Honestly, I'm pretty sure I've literally never used a flash on my camera, but all the other ones have it, and it doesn't take up any room, and it's very unobtrusive, and you feel like, yeah, you could have put the flash there, but maybe they make up for it with more weatherproofing, or maybe they need more room inside for the chips or whatever, so it's not a big deal, so...
Anyway, 6600 looks like a really nice camera.
The more exciting news for me, I think, because I'm still not sure about if I'm going to step up to the 6600, is they introduced a couple new lenses, and the one I'm interested in is a new 70-350 zoom lens, which is better quality than my zoom and has a longer reach.
And, yes, it's twice as heavy and slightly larger.
But I think, depending on what the reviews say about it, it seems like it is the...
best option if i want a zoom lens that is not tremendously bigger and has better image quality and has a longer reach it's not a you know f4 through the whole range it's the same whatever 4.5 to 6 point whatever but it does have a longer reach and presumably has better optical quality so i'm going to take a look at that and it's not super expensive
So mostly good news on the camera front.
I'm still debating, waiting, you know, anyway, I'm not going to be looking at cameras for a while, but come summer next year, uh, I might just get the new lens and use it on my existing camera, or I might be looking to step up to full frame depending on what they come out with there, but it's still good news.
i mean i would say given given your proclivity towards like super zoom style lenses you probably don't want to go full frame because you get so many more like better zoom lens options like super zoom lens options with the crop sensor like because because making it full frame would be like prohibitively you know massive and expensive and everything
Yeah, but I still have... I can't make an acronym of this, but I have full-frame FOMO.
I want more light in the camera.
I want more pixels on the picture.
I want the ability to crop things out.
I want all of that, and I haven't had that.
Mostly the light thing, because I hate when I'm... Like I said, I do never use the flash, and in certain environments, it's so dark that even with my quote-unquote good camera, I'm not going to get usable pictures without a flash, and I'm not going to use a flash, so I basically get...
grainy bad pictures especially if people are in a dimly lit indoor room and they're moving like people like weddings like if someone's like on the dance floor in a wedding at night it's i'm not getting good pictures with my fancy camera and i'm like i need to if i had a full frame i'd have a better fighting chance there'd be less noise that have more of a chance of capturing the motion without ever being a blurry streak right so i i feel like you know maybe i'll regret it maybe i'll get full frame and say it's way too big and i don't care and everything you said about the zoom is true but i
I feel like I at least want to entertain the options.
Like we said a couple of shows ago, the A7 just with no letter 4, if something like that comes out, I might look at it.
Anyway, I don't know.
Mac Pro is before that.
Lots of money to be spent.
Lots of years to wait.
Plus the TV is in the mix somewhere there.
So it's a long road to all these fancy things.
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Oh, yeah, yeah.
All right.
I think it was the episode before last we were talking about whether or not Tesla was a joke.
And one of the things I conceded was that Tesla's supercharger network seems to be beyond compare.
And a friend of the show, Sam Welsumit, of the Wheelbearings podcast, which is neutral but with people who actually know what they're talking about, he wrote me to point out that according to energy.gov in the United States, I am not making any claims about anywhere else in the world, just the United States,
Uh, he sent me a couple of screenshots that he took and I will try to remember to put them in the show notes, but suffice to say, according to the U S government, Tesla has 737 stations in the U S and Canada, actually for a total of just shy of 7,000 outlets.
Meanwhile, if you combine all the other kinds of electric charging together, uh,
The number jumps from 737 stations to 2,407 stations and actually a little bit fewer actual outlets.
So there's more stations with fewer outlets, 4,191 outlets as opposed to Tesla's almost 7,000.
But the point is, there's actually a pretty good parody from the looks of it, with the exception of like the area of the country that's, I don't know, like the Northwest and Midwest.
I don't even know what states these are.
I'm so terrible.
Like Iowa and thereabouts.
Yeah.
Not so great coverage there, but just about everywhere else, it looks almost, you know, toe to toe with what Tesla has.
And that was news to me.
I assumed that if you were to buy anything but a Tesla, the charging story is basically good luck.
As it turns out, I think my dad might be within 24 hours of buying himself a Chevy Bolt.
So we'll see how that whole experience goes if he actually pulls the trigger.
But as it turns out, there are more options for non-Teslas than I had expected.
Shouldn't be news to you because I brought up this exact same point the last time we were arguing about Tesla like six months to a year ago.
I think I went to the exact same website and looked up this info.
A couple of key things about the screenshots you sent on this website.
He actually sent screenshots of U.S.
and Canada.
If you've limited to U.S., it changes slightly, but the main story is about the same.
Also, he applied the filter that only looks at, you know, DC fast charging, like the highest level of charge rate.
There's a bunch of filters that you can apply that's like you just want
Any kind of electric car charger?
Or do you want the fastest, fastest one?
Because the super chargers are all, I think, the fastest, fastest ones.
So to be a fair comparison, you have to limit the non-Tesla ones to also be the super fast, fast chargers.
And by the way, there are some super fast, fast chargers in the non-Tesla world that are actually faster than Tesla's ones.
probably mostly in europe but like the the the new porsche taycan or whatever the hell it's called uh that actually has like some 800 volts or that's that's just the power inside anyway it has some even faster charging thing but this is trying to be apples to apples so you can play with this we'll put the link in the show notes to the website you can play with and look at it but if you if you say okay set aside the super fast chargers what about just chargers period the numbers go even tip even more in favor of the non-tesla things
There is still the option of, like, well, what kind of connector do you want?
Because there are a couple of different connectors, right?
So you can figure out, based on where you live and the car you're going to buy, like, look at what connector the Bolt has and how fast charging the Bolt can even accept.
This, I think, is a useful website for figuring out what your charging options are.
But Tesla has the advantage of, like...
all superchargers as far as i'm aware are more or less uniform pretty much i mean there there are there is variety between them but it's it's very it doesn't really matter like it's variety in ways that most people don't care about but are they all are they all fast they're all fast yeah like like i i forgive me i forget like exactly like the specs for like certain you know dc fast charging sae standards kind of thing but uh but all superchargers are considered like the fast kind
I think like level three, I think it is, whatever it is.
But I think one major advantage that the superchargers have is they appeal to you in the same way that that like fast food restaurants in highway rest stops appeal to you.
When you're on a road trip, you know exactly what you're going to get.
you know that if you are driving a Tesla, you know that you can drive pretty much anywhere, at least in the countries that they cover, and they cover the U.S.
very well, and they're getting pretty good in Europe and Canada too, but you know that if you drive somewhere...
you don't have to look up in advance like, wait, what is the supercharger?
Is it somewhere nice?
Is it going to actually be there?
Is it going to work?
Is it going to be enabled?
Am I going to be able to pay for it?
Is it going to have the right adapters or whatever for my car to plug into it?
There's a whole bunch of question marks around a lot of this stuff because the charging infrastructure in general is still in its early days in the whole world.
With the supercharger, you know, if you drive a Tesla, you know that you can go to
supercharger x y or z you can even tap on the map in your car and it will tell you whether they're full or not how many bays they have and how fast of a charging rate they support and they're all fast and you know exactly what you're going to get so there's a level of like predictability that for the same reason people choose to eat fast food on road trips because they know exactly what they're going to get they don't have to take any risks same reason and oftentimes in the same places you get tesla supercharging if you go outside of the tesla world and
you just have to do a bit more legwork.
You have to do a bit more research.
If you're going somewhere, you should probably look up ahead of time.
Not just looking at a point in the map of where a charger is, but look in more detail.
Has someone posted photos of this charger?
Where exactly is it?
Will it work?
All these little things you have to additionally check.
So by going Tesla, you actually do have this kind of peace of mind that you know exactly what to expect.
You know it'll be there.
You know it'll work.
And
And in most cases, you know it'll be free.
And so you don't have to worry about, like, how do I pay for this and everything.
So it's just kind of a nicer system.
And I'm not saying that we can't ever get there.
Like, you know, we got there with gas stations.
It probably took a while when gas stations first came out.
Like, gas stations probably had similar issues.
But now you know that you can drive anywhere in America and most of the world.
You can drive anywhere and you can stop...
almost anywhere you would possibly need a gas station and there will probably be one you can probably find one that is open at all times of the day and it will work with your car and it will take your payment and you kind of know the infrastructure is mature enough that you know that's there with electric we aren't quite there yet outside of the tesla world it's still very young and there's still a lot of questions that you need to answer but with tesla you can be sure and that's actually a really nice thing
I think there is a fast food aspect of the non Tesla things in that there's so many more of them and not all of them are like the full service, fancy McDonald's.
Some of them are just like the quick McDonald's.
Some of them are just drive throughs.
Like some of them, the equivalent is like some of them are not the super fast charging.
Some of them are slower charging, but there are so many more of them.
that the odds are if you throw a rock in some direction, like what is the closest charger, the supercharger, there's maybe one or two around you, but there's like 75 of these other dinky things, only one or two of which are the fast chargers, but the whole rest of them are, you know, all around.
So it's like the ubiquity is, I feel like starting to become a factor with these other charging things.
And there's more variety and they're not all fast and so on and so forth.
That's why the comparison here is fast to fast.
And I think fast to fast, there's more or less parody of,
Albeit with the variety that you mentioned of like, well, how are they?
And how are they?
And the second advantage is if and when Tesla goes out of business and or is acquired, these independent charging stations will still exist.
Because as far as I'm aware, they're not affiliated with any individual car manufacturers, but are just like we charge you money for electricity stations or like they're third party companies whose only job is selling electricity to people with electric cars or whatever.
Like, I don't think they're like there's a Volkswagen station and a Porsche station or whatever.
So
I'm not sure what will happen to all that supercharging infrastructure if Tesla decides to get out of that business or gets acquired or goes out of business or something.
But, well, you know, the the idea that you would have to go to a specific gas station for your specific brand of car is not tenable long term.
And I feel like is just an anomaly here at the beginning of the the electric car.
And, you know, Tesla's will be fine.
They can use the other chargers to write with adapters or whatever.
So it's not it's not a big deal for the cars, but it seems like something they can't hold forever.
You know, I have to ask, and I'm looking mostly at you, John, are Tesla fans today better or worse than the dark era of being an Apple fanboy?
What I mean by that is, if you say anything that's even mildly negative about Tesla anywhere on the internet, there are a lot of very, very
I think they're kind of right.
He's just proving my point.
Anyway, what I can't help but wonder is like, were our people, were like the Mac people and the Apple people just as bad in the heyday?
I surely hope not because the Tesla fans are just intolerable.
It's gotten to the point that like...
Even if I wanted a Tesla, I don't know if I want to be associated with Tesla.
Now, I got over that for the BMW for sure.
Yeah, you got a BMW.
No, exactly.
I will be the first to tell you.
I got right over it when push came to shove.
But oh my word, the fans are so obnoxious.
And Elon occasionally can do wrong, but Tesla as a corporation can do no wrong.
There's nothing wrong with anything Tesla does ever.
I think the Apple fans probably were just as bad, but they had the advantage of the Internet not existing in its current form.
They just had to be bad in isolation.
Like their badness was not allowed to like the way their badness filtered to people was like actual physical letters that they would write to like op-ed columnists who said bad things about Apple or Macs or something.
Right.
Um, uh, so it was, they may have been as bad, but it's not, the exposure wasn't as bad.
Like the experience of being around them wasn't as bad because they didn't, there wasn't a means for them all to communicate to you or anyone else.
And in fact, they wouldn't communicate to you a random person.
Like, you know, they would only communicate to you if you were a columnist and then by letters or whatever, which were much nicer than tweets and far less numerous.
Second thing is, uh, as obnoxious as Steve jobs was, uh,
And as clueless as the various Apple CEOs were who were there at Apple before he came back, Elon Musk is worse.
And he is allowed, his message and his self is allowed to transmit to many, many people.
So I think that adds an extra spice of awfulness to the situation.
It's hard to say, though, if Apple fans were in the current environment with Elon Musk as the CEO of Apple, I think it would be about the same.
Because, you know, Apple fans... Apple fans were probably, I'm going to say, more justifiably angry because...
You know, it wasn't like... I don't know.
I'm not going to say anything about... I feel like the Apple stuff and Macs were less justly maligned than the complaints people have against Tesla.
Let's put it that way.
Because Tesla does have...
Like Macs were not, you know, arriving missing screws or with paint sprayed onto the tires.
And, you know, like in general, even Apple's worst days, it was still, you know, a nice product.
Right.
Whereas some of the complaints about Tesla are not in keeping with the supposed stature of the company.
And then when people complain about them, they get defended.
And I feel like there was not much of not much defending shoddy workmanship on the part of Apple, mostly because there wasn't as much shoddy workmanship.
It's just it's frustrating to me when I try to take a reasonable you know I try to make a reasonable point and I had said on Twitter I forget how I phrased it but basically like I think it was actually Sam Ball-Smith as well that had pointed out that the Roadster is basically abandoned by Tesla 10 years on and and I said you know that just seems kind of
So is my Mac.
I know it's not the same thing.
Fair.
But actually somebody said to me, well, what about iPhones and Macs and so on?
And I think there's a big difference there because a car is sometimes the most or maybe the second most expensive thing that any regular person would buy.
Whereas a Mac, unless you're John Syracuse of buying a $100,000 Mac Pro, is not the second most expensive thing you'll buy in your life.
And I know you were saying that to be silly.
I don't even know if it has to do with the expense.
It's more like just tradition.
Like, traditionally, cars are supported for a long time.
Why?
Why?
They just are.
Right.
And in some ways, Tesla not doing that is treating its cars more like electronics, like phones, which it does in many aspects of his cars that are favorable.
And here's one unfavorable one.
I agree that it's bad because we're used to a world where that doesn't happen.
But it does kind of fit with the idea of Tesla being a different kind of car company.
Yeah, but I mean, look at all these roadsters.
You know, what happens to those batteries?
What happens to all the metal in those cars?
You know, nobody's recycling them, are they?
And a lot of these owners, they want to keep these cars longer than 10 years.
I mean, God knows how those batteries are working, if they're working anymore.
But, you know, they want to keep them longer and they're basically out of luck.
And so there's a video.
That Sam had tweeted and I had retweeted with comments saying, you know, there's a single guy, I think in Seattle or something like that, that has basically become the Tesla Roadster expert.
And he will service them to the best he can, sometimes to the point of like having new hoods machine printed, I don't know the terminology, but, you know, created.
And based on a mold from an existing hood that he had made himself because he can't get parts from Tesla.
And, you know, we have stories of like a friend of the show, Arik, who he waited, what, like four months for a windshield for his Model 3.
And so I pointed out, like, this just seems crappy to me.
And so many people came out of the woodwork.
Well, they're disruptive and, oh, they're pushing the car manufacturers in the right direction.
Yeah.
Yeah, but I don't want a car that I can't get a frigging windshield in four months.
And I would presume that that's gotten better since Eric had his problems.
I mean, honestly, it probably hasn't.
Well, and that's the thing.
I don't want any part of that.
And I don't think that's an unreasonable take to have.
But, oh, the Tesla fans were not happy with me.
Oh, no, they were not.
You're both correct.
One is not a counter-argument for the other.
You are correct that Tesla has had tons of problems.
I've seen problems with just operations, service, that kind of stuff.
They do have tons of problems with that.
Those other people are correct that Tesla is really disruptive and it's very helpful to all of humanity to push all this stuff forward as aggressively as they have.
And they really have
made the industry move in a pretty big way uh so that is all correct however that doesn't excuse all their problems and and i think people on the internet are just bad at arguing and they see any attack on tesla as an attack on all that good stuff when in fact you know there's these can be separately discussed issues and you can both be correct that tesla is doing amazing things and also they have tons of operational problems
Yeah, I think it is an interesting experiment, though, to see if one of the the, you know, traditions of the audio industry that Tesla can break is the idea that you can continue to get parts for your car a decade later, which is absolutely standard.
Like for any, quote unquote, a real car company, if you have a 10 year old car.
you know, Chevy, a Ford, a Honda, whatever, of course you can get parts for it.
Like, especially if it's like, you know, a common car.
I mean, Tesla only makes a few models anyway, but it's not like, if it's not like a rare exotic one-off thing that they made, but even then, like, I don't know like what the standards are for how long parts are in inventory.
I'm sure someone in the auto industry can tell us, but it's a really long time.
And the only real reason for it is like tradition, essentially.
Like, I mean, I'm sure there are reasons way back when, but like, it does make you, it is a way these car companies, uh,
earn trust and last a long time because once one car company does that, it's like, well, I have my Model T and 30 years later I can still get parts for the Model T because Ford still makes them.
It makes you have a certain level of
There's affection and trust in Ford that they stand behind their product or yada yada.
Again, assuming the car company doesn't go out of business or whatever.
And now they all do it because once one does it, it's like, well, we want that trust from our customers too.
And it just becomes part of the industry.
It's like, yeah, we keep parts on hand for X number of years or we excess manufacture this many.
And we have this math that says this is how many parts we need to have an inventory to satisfy the need because cars do go away at a certain point and all that stuff.
But I've kept many of my cars long after they were 10 years old and it never occurred to me that I could bring it in and they would say, you know, oh, like I dented the oil pan on my Civic on this, you know, very steep apron because, you know, there's such low ground clearance on these exotic cars like the Civic.
Very steep apron on a gas station in Georgia.
And that car was more than 10 years old when I dented and I hadn't didn't enter my head that I would go there and they'd say, yeah, we can't get an oil pan for your car.
What do you mean you can't get a Honda Civic?
It's like, oh, it's more than 10 years old.
They don't make those parts anymore.
Maybe we can custom design you one if we can mold it from and stamp it from another thing that you can get from a junkyard.
We just assume the parts will be in inventory.
But there's no reason to assume that.
We don't assume that a 10-year-old Mac will be able to run the latest software or will be supported in any way.
Although, when I think of it...
Can I get parts for this?
I think not.
I think Apple won't sell new parts anymore for this.
I would have to buy used.
But different industries have different standards for that.
I think probably at this point, the auto industry, the consumers in the auto industry wouldn't accept the idea that this different kind of car company says, no, you can't get parts after 10 years.
But who knows?
Stranger things have happened.
I don't know.
I really want the traditional car manufacturers who understand how to do service and how to do parts and things like that to kind of get a grip and start going electric.
And they've all pledged it to some degree or another.
But I really want...
you know, of an e-golf to be more interesting than it currently is, even though it is very interesting.
I want, you know, the Polestar to come out, the Polestar sedan.
Now, granted, these are all probably way too expensive for me.
You know, it's still early, but I just, I can't imagine that Volkswagen or, you know, Polestar slash Volvo will have the kind of like rookie mistakes that Tesla has.
And yeah, I know I understand that electric cars have fewer moving parts, but
they still get bumped into from time to time.
You know, you still have rocks that hit windshields from time to time.
So I don't think that just saying, you know, a lot of times when I complain about this sort of thing, people, you're not going to need to get a service as much because there's just less stuff to go wrong.
Well, yeah, true, especially compared to my BMW, which tried to explode its engine on the hour, every hour on the hour.
But
Still, you need brakes from time to time.
No, you don't need brakes as often because of regenerative braking.
Okay, yes, but you still will eventually need brakes.
You will eventually need a windshield.
You will eventually bump something and need a fender.
These are all things that happen to cars.
It can just happen to you, John, I'm telling you.
I don't know.
I want everyone to be happy, and I want Tesla fans to be less obnoxious.
Take hands for everybody.
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Apple just today has come out with a statement about the Siri kerfuffle from a week or two ago entitled Improving Siri's Privacy Protections.
And there's a bunch of stuff in there where Apple talks about what does or does not happen with Siri, what does or does not leave your phone.
But I think most interesting to me are the passages with regard to what they call grading.
And they say,
Siri uses a random identifier, a long string of letters and numbers associated with a single device to keep track of data while it's being processed rather than tying it to your identity through your Apple ID or phone number.
And, you know, they pat themselves on the back for that being unique.
And so they move on and say, okay, so that's...
That's what was happening.
Those who choose to participate will be able to opt out at any time.
And third, when customers opt in, only Apple employees, as in not contractors, will be allowed to listen to audio samples of the Siri interactions.
Our team will work to delete any recording which is determined to be an inadvertent trigger of Siri.
I think there's some things to quibble about in here, but by and large, it was written for human beings, not for lawyers.
And I think it...
That solves most but not all of our problems.
So starting with Marco, how do you feel about this?
It's kind of nothing.
That's not really a meaningful change.
Apple always said they had the same standards for contractors that they would have for employees for privacy-sensitive things like this.
The fact that they're now going to be only employees and not contractors, I think, is a technicality.
That doesn't mean much in practice.
So let's focus on the other two.
The second one that...
Use of audio will now be opt-in is fantastic.
That's great.
I think that that is the way it should have been all this time.
I think maybe Apple now thinks that as well.
That's great news.
That is the right decision.
The only thing I really have to quibble about is point number one, where they basically say that the use of transcripts is not only...
Not only is it not opt-in, you can't opt-out.
The only way to not have transcripts used is to not use Siri at all.
And so all these employees now will still be able to review the text transcripts of what you told Siri.
And basically as long as they want and with and all of them that you can't you can't go in and like delete one that you act where you accidentally said something that was caught by Siri that might have been sensitive information.
You have no control over it like basically the text of the transcribed text of what you said has no privacy.
And I don't think that's good enough.
I think Apple can do better in that area.
And I understand they probably do want a lot of data to train models and to have human review for making stuff better and everything.
They do need a source of data.
if they were really only looking at 0.2%, clearly they have enough data.
They don't necessarily need all of it.
There might be other ways to get it.
So one example, like maybe they should make the opt-in apply to both things.
Make the opt-in apply to both the audio and the text.
That honestly sounds to me like the right move.
If people choose not to, like if they see the option somewhere, maybe it's during the setup wizard, and they choose not to opt in to the audio,
do you think they really are going to know that their text is going to be reviewed anyway?
Like that's, it's almost misleading.
I think it goes against people's expectations and it goes against common sense.
Like if you say no, you can't analyze what I told Siri in audio form.
I think I would assume that would apply to text form as well.
So now you're left with a situation where if you are concerned about humans seeing what you told Siri or hearing what you told Siri, still your option is don't use Siri, which is an increasingly obtuse answer to that concern.
So I think this does solve some of the problem, but it doesn't go far enough.
I would like to see them go further and make the opt-in also apply to text.
And if they really need more data, one thing I saw suggested by a few different people today was text.
Have some kind of report a problem button on the Siri screen when it gives you a response the same way you see it on the voicemail transcripts.
I don't see why they can't do that.
Maybe pride is one answer.
They don't want to.
appears though there might be a problem with siri but like look the jig is up everyone knows siri has problems all the time right like no one is fooled by by that but not being there no one is getting the impression oh this this thing is perfect it's wonderfully it works every time it never mishears me it never says something dumb in response like
That jig is up.
We all know Siri is kind of unreliable and not as smart as we always want it to be.
A little report a problem button on the Siri response UI would give them an easy way to get lots of data that is handpicked by the crowdsourced everything to be exactly the kind of things that cause problems that here is a specific example where Siri didn't do what I wanted.
Perfect.
That's exactly what you want.
You want people to be able to send that in, which is why they put it on the voicemail transcripts.
So this seems like an obvious solution that they probably should do instead of all this garbage or in addition to all this garbage.
But in the meantime, if they are not going to do that,
I don't see why audio recordings were deemed private enough to have this opt-out behavior now or this opt-in behavior now.
But the text transcriptions of those was deemed not important enough to have that privacy.
We have some explanations for some of this stuff.
So first of all, I think the reason that they didn't announce the thing that I originally suggested when we talked about this, like you just said as well, like the just in time reporting of a problem when people are the most primed to report it because they're angry that Siri did something dumb.
is simply because that requires implementation and time, and they're struggling to get iOS 13 out, and they just don't have it.
They're not going to announce them when they don't have it.
I wouldn't be surprised if that appears, but this announcement took long enough as it was.
They're not exactly nimble here.
they can announce, here's what we're going to do.
We're going to do this, we're going to do that, we're going to do that, because they can't do that yet.
They could put that in development and plan it for iOS 13.3 or something, or maybe it'll be pushed to iOS 14, but they have to make an announcement now.
So I think that explains why they don't have the UI solution that we all think is what they should obviously do, just because they're not ready with it.
So in the meantime, the second question, why is audio treated differently than transcripts?
There's a couple of angles on this.
The first is,
and this is silly but is actually true there is some protection uh for uh the the transcriptions based on how bad transcriptions are like if we all assume that the transcriptions were accurate it would be like well they can have the transcriptions but that's just garbage anyway it always gets it wrong what i'm saying and that sounds terrible but it's actually true because like i think in in our mind
No one assumes that the transcriptions are the same as the audio in terms of fidelity, because the audio a human can listen to and have a good chance of understanding.
But transcription may be just gibberish, like especially in cases where it gets it wrong because maybe there's noise in the room or whatever.
The second thing is in the Morgan Freeman problem, as I described when we first discussed this.
Part of the Morgan Freeman problem is solved by transcriptions, because if you hear Morgan Freeman's voice and you know who it is, suddenly you're much more interested in what they're saying.
But part of the problem isn't solved.
And if Morgan Freeman references the name of the new movie he's doing with Steven Spielberg, that would be in the transcription.
And now, you know, to be interested because you're looking for keywords, you know.
like whatever movie title is, or Disney, or whatever, even if you don't hear Morgan Freeman's voice.
And this gets, speaking of Morgan Freeman's voice, this gets back to something that I think was clarified in this, that Gruber wrote about in his post about it, in case you just read before.
The original stories were saying that the information was...
mapped to your Apple ID for like a really long period of time.
But what Apple says and what is apparently true about it is it's never mapped to your Apple ID.
When they get this information, it is associated with a random number that Apple cannot map back to you, your phone, your Apple ID, anything from the get-go.
Like as soon as Apple stores this, it is stored...
quote unquote anonymized.
Now, obviously, if they have your voice and you're Morgan Freeman, they can figure out who you are.
Obviously, if you say something that identifies yourself, you know, if you reference your home address or the first and last name of somebody in your family, like it's not unidentifiable, right?
But it is de-identified.
And we originally had thought when we were discussing this that not only was it like mapped through Apple ID, but it stayed that way for a really long time.
So I'm glad to hear that that's not actually true.
They do anonymize it to the extent possible in terms of the metadata, the data itself.
Yeah, that might be used to identify you because you may be saying things or whatever.
Again, the transcript, I feel like being slightly better than the voice because you do like voice print analysis or something to hunt somebody down or whatever.
So I feel like the situation was not quite as bad as we thought it was.
This is an announcement of saying, here's what we can do right now, essentially without changing our software in any radical way, which we hope they do do eventually.
Right.
But for now, they have to say, here's what we're doing.
I'm also baffled by the transcript thing, because like we were discussing this in a couple of slacks in the past few days.
Like, what can you what can you do with just the transcripts in terms of getting things better?
Maybe, you know, sometimes if you look at you do it when you talk to Siri and it makes a reminder and you're like, oh,
what did I say that produced this word?
And sometimes you can puzzle it out.
So maybe a human could puzzle that out, but it's really helpful to be able to hear the audio.
So with just the transcription, what's so important about just the transcription that it has to be for everybody?
As Marco pointed out, 0.02% doesn't sound like a lot, but when you have 500 million users, it's like a million people, right?
So if you just left it to the opt-inners, if everything was opt-in,
probably more than enough people would opt in.
You just need a tiny sliver of people to opt in.
I think a fraction of a single percent take rate for opting in is apparently adequate because that's what they're choosing to do now.
Right, exactly.
So it is kind of baffling why the transcripts are global.
And that's a thing they could have done now.
Just like they're going to make the thing opt-in, which I feel like is just one screen and a preference thing.
If they had made transcripts opt-in,
It would have been a cleaner win.
So I would love to know what the decision-making process was and why.
Maybe the calculus is that people actually won't care about the transcripts.
Again, I can understand the thing because the recording sounds more personal and people know that transcriptions are garbage anyway.
But it does seem weird and is like the tiny blemish on what would otherwise be
a fairly clean PR win, especially with the part about clarifying about the identification, because I feel like that was the worst part of it, that they would have...
Audio recordings of you that if you didn't read all the fine print, you didn't know were happening.
That's something that, by the way, that people have been pointing out since the story came out.
They're like, well, Apple told you this was happening.
Of course they did.
It's always in the fine print.
But the whole point was, it's not what we expected.
Like, no one reads that.
We all know nobody reads it.
Like, yes, it's always in the fine print, but nobody reads it.
And we're basically going by what we expect from Apple.
So this was...
And to Apple's credit, Apple didn't come back and say, well, just so you know, we told you about this two years ago and everyone was fine with it.
That's not a defense because Apple knows nobody reads that stuff, right?
Apple understood the actual problem was here, expectations versus reality, and they weren't matching up.
So they're trying to get them realigned.
But I am glad to hear that it was, you know, de-identified from the beginning.
And then they just have to address the identified stuff, which is the data, which should all be opt-in.
So in the last, what is it, 24 hours, 48 hours, we've gotten an iOS 13.1 beta, which is different since iOS 13.0 isn't out yet.
I haven't seen a lot about what the differences are, other than that some things that were taken out seem to be added back.
I know Federico was very excited about some shortcuts-related things that were added back in.
Uh, what's going on?
Trouble in paradise for Apple these days?
It sure seems like 13 has been way more of a cluster than anyone expected, especially since we all thought that they had so much time to work on a lot of these features last year in theory, although it's never quite that simple.
What's going on?
And lucky 13.
I think the situation is not particularly unexpected and also not that different.
So the unexpected part is like, well, you know, iOS 12, they pulled stuff out of it.
Shouldn't they have had more time to work on the 13 stuff?
Well, it's not like there's a relatively fixed number of people working.
So the whole point was...
bump those features and get all the people to continue to work on 12, which they did.
And I think 12 was a good release and it was very stable and it felt like it accomplished their goals and made your old devices faster.
The reason it did that is because all those people who would have been working on those features that got pushed to 13 weren't working on those features.
So it's not like those features got such a long time to be worked on.
Those features were put aside.
No one working on them.
like frozen in time and then more or less, you know, and all those people were working on 12.
And then when all the 12 work was done, they resumed work on the 13 stuff.
So it's not true that those 13 features got like twice the amount of time.
They got like 1.5 the amount of time.
And obviously they were challenging features because they're the ones that got bumped out of 12.
They didn't bump the easy stuff out of 12, right?
So it doesn't particularly surprise me that there might be problems.
What does surprise me is exactly how many they are and how severe they seem to be.
Sometimes that happens.
Right.
And we've heard stories about not just features, you know, they're having trouble with, but features that have been rolled back to say, like, we were working on a new version of this subsystem and it's not going to make it.
So bring back the old subsystem and remove all the features that relied on the new subsystem.
presumably so that those things can come back in 13 one and 13 two or whatever.
Right.
But that, if that happens, it's usually a big deal.
And that seemingly happening on multiple fronts in 13, uh, doesn't bode well.
Now as for the iOS 13.1 beta, uh,
This kind of overlap, where people are working on 13.1 and 13.0 at the same time, pretty much always happens.
What normally doesn't happen is the 13.1 beta is distributed to developers before the 13.0 happens.
Very often, 13.0 comes out on the same day the 13.1 beta comes out.
So it's not weird inside Apple for them to be overlapped.
It's weird for them to be overlapping externally.
And I think the explanation for that is rumors say that
13 was, you know, given some extra time to bake, but they have to commit to a shipping version of 13 to be on the iPhones that they're going to announce in a week or two.
So they basically had to say freeze a version of 13 for the new hardware.
set that aside, continue working on the quote unquote real 13 for everybody else, and also get going on what we know is going to be 13 one.
And they have to do all of that, you know, not at the same time, but overlapping in many ways, because as much as they can give 13 more time to bake and more time to develop or whatever, this is the question we were all asking ourselves back when they're doing this, would they bump the iPhone date?
The answer is no.
iPhone is coming out when it's coming out.
It has to have 13 on it.
So job one was get something that will work on the new iPhones and be relatively stable, ready in time for the iPhones, because that is not moving.
And if it means just abandoning everything and rolling back subsystems of previous versions, just get it done.
And then even the 13.0 is going to have stuff missing from it.
And then 13.1 hopefully looks more like what 13.0 was supposed to be.
So it seems like typical software project management.
And I think for the most part, despite it
you know, not going well over there at Apple.
These are the kind of decisions we want them to make.
If it's not working and it's crappy, delay or boot it out.
Don't ship it like that.
We're hoping that's what they're doing.
It's disappointing when a feature that was, you know, advertised and shown isn't in the .0.
But honestly, we'd all rather have the 0.0 with the old subsystem and working and wait for the 0.1 or 0.2 or 0.3 for the feature.
Like, these are all the correct decisions.
We're all software developers.
We know how it goes.
Especially, can you imagine if you had something like an iPhone launch that was, like, literally, apparently unmovable?
Like, these iPhones are being made.
They're going to ship.
We need to put software on them.
We need to start making them.
We need to literally start making them and putting them in boxes now.
So they need to have some software that we can put on them.
Because if we put them in a box without software, it's not good.
So, like...
a date like that that you have i don't i feel bad for the people at apple and that's just like throw everything overboard until the thing works enough to ship on a phone and that's not an ideal place to be but if they pull it off like that's that's how the sausage gets made i mean if you've ever worked on any big software project you would be lucky to have a project that is as successful as ios 13 most of them are way bigger disasters
So I'm kind of glad I'm not working at Apple right now.
I'm a little bit afraid of the software, but in general, from a distance, I think they're doing all the right things.
I say until they actually ship something, then we see what they actually ship.
But assuming what they ship works okay, thumbs up.
I don't have much to add to that.
Obviously, iOS 13 has been way rougher than previous versions have been.
And we got some rumblings that there might have been this Craig Federighi email, what, back in July, I think, that basically, like...
They were trying to find ways to buy time and move stuff around because quality wasn't good enough.
It wasn't where it had to be.
And so we're just seeing some tiny little part of that.
We're not really seeing all the details about what was done or why or what their intentions are.
But what we are seeing looks like a reasonable result of that leadership decision.
which was probably the right decision.
So it's weird.
As a developer, I really don't like it because now I have two beta trees to worry about, neither of which are stable yet.
As a user, I still don't think whatever was beta 8 of iOS 13.0, which is the last beta that was called iOS 13.0,
I was using that until this afternoon and day-to-day use, it's stable enough, but I'm still having annoying bugs like mail still isn't loading new messages in my all inboxes view until I go back to the home screen and back into all inboxes.
These have been problems since the very first beta that still aren't fixed.
I think 13.0 is still a disaster, but they seem to be doing what they have to do to let the iPhone ship on time.
I'm guessing if iPads wait, then maybe the 13.1 can be the first version that's on iPads, and 13.0 is only an iPhone release just to get to the new hardware.
Who knows?
They could do stuff like that.
And whatever that ends up being, it's probably the right move if it means getting a little bit more time for the quality to get worked out.
I'm going to guess that the build that is on the phones of their manufacturing right now is not a build that ever shipped to developers.
both because it's got all the special libraries that they presumably strip out for like the triple camera and whatever other weird new features you know what i mean like but also because it seems clear that they would have to have dedicated a team and a build in a target just for the hardware and it didn't have to have anything in common with the betas they're shipping to developers for 13.0 never mind how far behind the betas they ship to developers are it just seems like
that's a whole different branch.
So my hope is that when people open up their new iPhone, whatever pros, uh, that they have a build that no developer has ever been subjected to that.
It works.
Okay.
That mail isn't a disaster like you described.
And that basically the day they open it up or like a couple of days later, they'll be able to update to 13.1 because the thing is they need to get the software.
So it can be put onto the phone.
So can we put in boxes, but they don't need to send those boxes to customers.
Um,
you know the you know as early as possible they can't they could try to make it so that the the you know you can order your phones on launch day because that's what they care about is get your money and everything but they won't arrive until whatever weeks later and that's their target date for 13.1 so you take it out of the box and the first thing it does is check for updates it finds 13.1 and you get 13.1 and nobody ever has to use whatever shambling beast of 13.0 build they put on those things that's an optimistic scenario but i feel like it's plausible
How many times does that happen that you'd get a brand new iPhone and you would have at the very least a point release waiting for you?
All the time in the old days if you didn't buy on day one.
If you bought like a normal person, you'd get it and it would be some version that's like a point or two back.
I remember that for a lot of my iOS devices.
I think it's less so now maybe because there's a lot of turnover or maybe because they're better about inventory.
But day one, I feel like you usually have to wait at least a couple of days for the point release.
I feel like that's happened to me in the past, for sure.
I just also feel like it's been a long time.
But maybe that coincides with me just starting to buy iPhones on day one because I'm an impatient jerk.
But I don't know.
It was not...
The idea of that does not sound delightful to me.
And I haven't had the experience of opening a console on Christmas morning only to have it go through 13 hours of updates, but that's just not fun.
I have had the experience of getting an iPhone and having several hours of trying to get it activated under AT&T.
That I do not miss at all.
But...
I haven't had a software update cycle that I can remember.
I'm sure it's happened, but not that I can remember in years.
And that just does not sound fun.
Hopefully that doesn't happen that much anymore, but I feel like the most significant experience that it may be in both of your futures is not so much when you get the new toy and you take it out of the box and it needs a software update, but the server's down or something.
But when you get a gift for your child and they want to use the thing,
And the server's down.
I very clearly remember when we got, I think it was the original PlayStation 4, and PSN was down for like two days.
And my son didn't and still doesn't understand how the internet works.
All he knew was, why is it that I cannot use this PlayStation?
PSN is down.
I was like, what is PSN?
And why is it down?
And why can't you fix it?
Please, Dad, please.
Yeah, Dad, fix it.
Why did you even get this thing?
It obviously doesn't work.
PSN.
Why PSN?
It will remember that Christmas for a long time.
I was sad too, to be clear.
But when it's your kid, it's a whole other level.
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All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
And let's start with James Gates, who writes, in this world with everyone taking pictures, when would you, as in you specifically, hire a professional photographer?
Full disclosure, I'm an amateur photographer thinking about going into the business full time, but I still think there's potential to make a living, even in this seemingly saturated industry.
So this is one of the...
uh ask atps which i think i lamented uh in a prior show that i answered via email only to find it to show up in the show notes but my answer to james was basically like a wedding of course but the only thing i could really think of is times that i felt it was really important to have all four of us in front of the camera you know if i'm at a birthday party for one of my kids i don't mind not only taking a bunch of pictures but also handing the camera off to like my dad or you know
Or Aaron on occasion or whomever to take a few as well.
I can't think of anything else offhand where I would really, really, really want pictures that are professionally done.
And...
I guess maybe, uh, pregnancy shots.
Like we had a friend of ours who is a professional photographer do them, you know, but we could have had my parents.
It wouldn't have come out as nice by any means, but it would have been okay.
I don't know, John, when would you as the fellow cheapskate pay someone to take pictures of you and your family?
We pay someone to take pictures of me and my family every year.
We take yearly family photos, yearly photos of all the kids or whatever.
Obviously, as you pointed out, the easy answer to this, and it's totally true, is if you want everyone to be in the picture and you don't want to do the tripod and run type thing, you have to hire somebody.
Otherwise, you're not in the picture or whoever the photographer is not in the picture.
And so that applies to family photos.
But also, in general, first of all, I'm not a professional photographer.
presumably, and this is absolutely true, professional photographers can and will take better pictures than I will.
So there's a reason you pay somebody.
Second thing is, presumably, and this is also actually true, they have better cameras than I do.
So there's that, right?
And they have places where you can go to pose your family in front of some kind of nice backdrop or whatever.
So anyway, we do that every single year.
It's just a place in the mall.
It's nice.
They give us all the digital files.
We used to have this actual one specific photographer that we went to, who we went to for...
I think our children's lives from infancy until they were like 10 or 11.
And then she like went off to either be freelance or work someplace else.
And we were all sad, but, uh, but yeah, uh, so that's the obvious one.
The less obvious one is every once in a while, mostly on my wife's whim, we had someone come and take pictures of us, like just, you know, outdoors in a park or like in some scenic thing or when the fall leaves, you know, whatever.
And those people will do more sort of artsy things and have us do stuff.
And, uh,
First of all, if you did it yourself, if someone in your family is doing it, that's just one person and then one person's taste in ideas.
Getting someone else in who has their own ideas and has way more experience than you ever will taking pictures of people and their families because that's what they do for their living, they'll have ideas about how you can pose and what might look good and what would be cute and what angles to take and what part of the park to take you to or whatever.
So we did that a couple of times, too.
And, you know, depends on the person and how good they came out.
But that's the answer to, you know, why might you think of doing it?
If you if you are or whoever the photographer is in your family, the only person who ever takes your pictures is the sameness to it.
And sometimes it's nice to get someone else's eye in the mix and someone who is, you know, one would hope going to be a much better photographer than you.
Marco, I think that that very last part is what's key to me.
We, you know, it used to be back like, you know, in the bad old days that to be a photographer, you needed to have a nice camera and access to, you know, printing resources and things like that.
And people would pay you because you had a nice camera and they didn't.
And so when some important event would happen, you would take your nice camera and you may or may not have artistic abilities or, you know, much training.
But if you had a nice camera, you could be a professional photographer.
And what has changed obviously is that, you know, in in recent decades and especially recent years, everybody has a nice camera now.
So that is no longer a differentiating factor.
Most people like your wedding photos from 20 years ago.
You could take photos that good almost on a smartphone today.
And at least if the light is good enough, you might not be able to even tell if you took it with a smartphone.
And if the light isn't good enough, even like, you know, a very, very like entry level mirrorless camera would be able to do that kind of quality today.
So the technology is now widely democratized, available to way more people.
Also, almost everything is digital now, so there's a lot more simplicity there than there used to be.
Printing is now available to almost everybody in great quality for very little money from various online services and photo books like what John got.
And so...
The stuff, the gear, the technology, that is now available to everyone.
You no longer need to hire a photographer to get somebody who has a good camera because chances are, if you care at all, you probably have a good camera already.
But what you can't replicate is not only having, you know, another set of hands and an eye to look through a viewfinder and click a button when everyone is actually in the frame that, you know, it's hard for you to take your own family photo because if you need to be in the family photo, yeah, you can do the whole like timer on a tripod thing, as John said, but that's, you know, that's limited in what it can do and not easy and everything else.
So there's the physical part, like you do need another person to operate a camera sometimes for practicality reasons.
But also a good photographer, which they aren't all, but a good photographer has a better eye than you at taking pictures.
So it isn't just about the tech.
It isn't just about having nice cameras.
A good photographer is able to capture pictures that you wouldn't have captured even if you had all the gear in the world.
That's what a good photographer can do.
They have the eye for composition and lighting and operating the technical details in ways you might not have thought of.
That's why like really good photographers can take amazing pictures that you and I could never take with like a three-year-old iPhone.
and meanwhile we have like all these fancy cameras and better phones and we don't take pictures that are that good they are like a good photographer not somebody who happens to own a good camera but a good photographer has a better eye than what most of us have and so you hire a good photographer and
When that's something that you value, whether it's for an important occasion like a wedding or family photos, new baby, whatever else, that is when you hire a professional.
And there is still plenty of value for that, even now that we're all carrying pretty good cameras all the time in our pockets.
And even now when you can get even better than that, you can get a really awesome camera for like 600 bucks.
That is like a really nice, you know, everything you can get all that, but you still need photographers because they know which photos to take and how to take them.
And that is something that no amount of technology will ever do for us.
I think the good camera thing is still an issue, though, because we all have phone cameras.
But in particular, as we've discussed when, you know, talking about the fake background blur or whatever, because nobody has standalone cameras unless you're into photography.
Nobody has a camera that can actually blur the background and have a shallow depth of field on it.
So if that's the only reason you're hiring somebody, obviously you want to also be a good photographer.
But the fact is.
Who has, you know, a camera anywhere in their life who's not into photography that can take a good shallow depth of field portrait of their kid?
Most people don't.
Most people have pictures of their kids and this pin sharp background with all their junkie toys laying on the ground.
And so, you know, even if you had someone who wasn't a good photographer, their pictures will at least look different than yours.
And you're like, ooh, well, maybe not because maybe people can't tell about the fake blur, but I can tell.
And so for me, that would be a reason to hire someone with a better camera than me.
because they can, you know, take pictures in more challenging conditions that will look good.
I mean, with my current camera, you're right.
The difference, especially if you're in a well-lit studio, isn't that big.
But I think fewer people now have good cameras than they used to.
But it used to be that, you know, smartphones didn't exist.
And I feel like more families would have like a random 35mm Pentax as the family camera, you know, even if they weren't into photography, just because what were the options?
And it was only, well, this is way before your time, but it was only kind of in the 80s when
you know, these Instamatic Kodak cameras with these tiny little negatives started becoming more popular.
But before that, you know, in the 60s and 70s, you'd have a family camera, and that camera was way better than, you know, the Kodak disk camera.
Like, there was a dark time for a long period.
And today, that camera is probably about as good, you're right, as an iPhone.
But depending on what kind of lens you had, you might have actually been able to get a shallow depth of field picture out of one of those family Pentaxes from 1975.
And today, you know, that's not true.
Nobody has those cameras anymore except for photography nerds.
All right.
Marco Silva writes, what do you think about message apps or services for communities?
Which do you use?
Which do you like using?
And which grind your gears?
I'm assuming this is like Discord and Slack.
Is that what we're talking about here?
No, this is not.
What Marco is referring to is things like Nextdoor.
oh messaging app services for communities that's code for next door and other similar services oh uh next door is a complete waste of time i'm on it it's stupid i didn't realize i wasn't aware of any others that are equivalent so that's all i got i am not on any of these things and i feel like i'm missing nothing of value that is correct
I wish I could name the competitors, but there are multiple services that are like this.
I'm not on them either.
Here's why I'm not.
Here's why.
It's not that they all grind.
They're all misguided in a particular way.
People don't know what this is.
Nextdoor is a place where you could exchange messages based on your geographic locality.
You're not interested in what somebody in two states over has to say.
You're only interested in what's happening in your neighborhood.
People can post things like
You know, lost dog, rabid raccoon on the loose, construction here, trees down on this road, whatever.
And it's all like local to you.
And, you know, honestly, you can say whatever you want.
Problem with these services is I think it silos a particular set of concerns.
Like, Nextdoor is not like Slack, where it's like, we're just a messaging thing.
You can talk about whatever the heck you want.
It's like, no, everyone should talk about stuff that has to do with our neighborhood.
It narrows the scope to things that are happening in our neighborhood, which seems like it would make sense.
Like, isn't that good to have a purpose-built channel for that?
But the problem is, if that's the only thing that is sort of expected to be discussed there...
it attracts the kind of people who are unhealthily obsessed with things happening in the neighborhood.
Now, this includes all the people who are racist and every time someone who walks by their house whose skin tone is two shades darker than theirs flips out about it.
So there's that whole venue.
But also the people who think the police are watching them or, you know, like they're
They're constantly worried that someone's trying to rob their house or just general gossip.
Because the only thing that you can discuss there is stuff going on in communities.
Again, not technically.
You can probably type anything you want.
But socially, that's what the thing is supposed to be used for.
It ends up...
You know, the people who are the most active are the people who are the most likely to be overly concerned, let's say, with things that are happening in the neighborhood.
So it just becomes a cesspool of all the worst instincts surrounding this, as opposed to, and I'm going to
And we'll say something nice about Facebook here, as opposed to something like Facebook, which is like people can write about whatever they want.
They can talk about the TV show they just saw.
They can talk about the vacation they're just on.
They can argue with each other about politics.
But there's there's no specific topic that is expected to be discussed on Facebook or on Slack or on Twitter, for that matter, like these sort of more open messaging platforms.
Those don't necessarily devolve into only the people who are paranoid about, you know, the raccoons coming in and stealing their medicine.
Right.
That's the only thing you can talk about in Nextdoor.
So if you participate in Nextdoor, either you become one of those people or you realize you are surrounded by those people, neither of them is a good scenario.
It's fine to be engaged with your community, but engaging with your community is a full bandwidth type of thing.
It is not a narrow bandwidth, let's talk about the dark-skinned people who are walking by my house and how they're trying to steal my packages.
It's not healthy for anybody.
I wish those services would just go away.
I think they're doing more harm than good.
Fair enough.
Finally, Mike Taffet writes, what are your preferred themes or color schemes for Terminal?
And I got to look this up because I don't remember.
Pro, of course it is, because it's the most professional.
That is my preferred scheme.
When I get a new Mac, if I don't migrate, which I don't think I ever have actually migrated from an old Mac...
I will open Terminal for the first time.
It'll be blindingly white.
I will go to Preferences, click on Pro, and then I won't look at it again for years, which is exactly what you said.
Can you describe Pro?
I don't know what that looks like.
It's black background white text.
I don't know.
It's one of the defaults that come with Terminal.
What color is the cursor?
uh gray i the fact that i don't even pay enough attention to know so i can tell as per usual i am not hypercritical oh and there's transparency in the background too hmm yeah i just opened a pro window it's like mild it's mostly black but it's mildly transparent yikes
Alright, so what is the correct answer, gentlemen?
Well, in a shocking twist, I feel like you and I, Casey, should have the reversed options here.
Mine is basic.
I am really... Mine is just the... which I think is the default.
It is the white background with black text and no transparency or anything.
I like regular white terminal windows.
I know this is very unusual for nerds.
Usually nerds want everything black, you know, black everywhere.
I like white.
I used to use black like back in the day, like when I worked on like, you know, Linux servers and stuff.
But now I just use white everywhere and it's fine.
Most of my windows are light color backgrounds.
You know, I'm in like, I don't use dark mode in the OS.
I'm in, you know,
mail and messages and safari all the time xcode all these other apps textmate i also use light background dark text uh so i'm just i i don't get the like blindingly white thing that you said that is i don't see it that way and uh it's fine and i will say on the font side um i was a monaco holdout for a very long time
I would even do the little tricks, whatever was required to make it so that even when there was anti-aliasing in the rest of the system, that my terminal windows and Xcode and TextMate would never use anti-aliasing.
It would use Monaco, like pixel font.
What eventually killed that for me was Retina.
When everything started going Retina,
There was no good way to have Monaco on a retina screen.
It just, you know, having like the fixed pixel bitmap font just never looked good on retina.
Even if you like doubled it, it just, it still didn't look good.
So I am now reluctantly a Menlo regular 11 point person in my terminal and Xcode and everything.
Before we move on to John, so forgive me if you said this and I just totally missed it, but is Xcode white background as well?
Because curiously, my Xcode is whatever the default background is.
I do use Fira code, I think is the name of the font, which I quite like.
Um, that's like a programming specific font, FIRA code, F I R A code.
Uh, but my Xcode windows are white and I'm totally fine with that, but something about terminal windows, I need to have black.
I think because of all the time I spent on DOS where it was, you know, a black screen with white text and so on and so forth.
Well, sometimes green, but anyway, uh, and sometimes orange if memory serves.
But having a dark background for something that vaguely resembles DOS to my lizard brain is, I think, a requirement, which is funny because I agree with you.
It seems like you and I would be the reverse here.
But, you know, we're both we're both conundrums.
John, my Xcode is also white.
The only thing is I don't use Menlo in Xcode when Xcode introduced San Francisco Mono.
I just went with that, and so I just checked, and I'm using sf-mono-regular-12 in Xcode.
So I use menlo-regular-11 in Terminal and sf-mono-12 in Xcode.
John, what is the actual correct answer?
So I customize my color schemes.
Of course you do.
My color scheme is creatively named John, and I've ported that from all... I have a bunch of schemes, actually, but John is my default one.
I've ported that probably from, you know,
uh developer preview to whatever the first time you're allowed to make settings it is white background i think i talked about this uh at length on several podcasts but most recently on the episode the talk show i was on uh my whole thing with the mac is uh white background black text because that's what printed the printed word looks like and that's what i always want in all my windows including my terminal windows
uh monaco 9 because i am not retina i'm still rocking the non-nd alias monaco 9 or trying to i think i'm actually yeah i'm still it's still working i just sent a screenshot of it um obviously when i go retina i just like marco i will have to bail because there it doesn't you know the time is over but hey i'm staring at a non-retina screen it still works for me
The only twist I have, and it's all opaque, right?
The only twist I have in this in terms of the color scheme is 100% red cursor.
Just 25500.
Why?
That's interesting.
100% red block cursor.
I put a screenshot of my terminal in the... Okay, he's got his screenshot.
Yeah.
Uh, I, I don't know why I did that.
I think when I was coming up with my color scheme, I just couldn't decide.
And I made it a hundred percent red.
And like, why is it a block instead of the, like the eye beam?
That's like my equivalent of Casey's DOS thing.
I think it's because the block cursors in the VT two twenties in like the, uh,
in college were block cursors.
And so I associate Terminal with Unix.
And so I'm imitating the VT cursor.
I would never make it a block cursor in like BBEdit or something.
But in Terminal, I use the block cursor and I make it bright red.
And I think it looks nice.
So I do use a block cursor because I believe it's the default.
Until this moment, I never even thought you could change it.
And I don't think I will change it.
But I got to say, I actually kind of understand the red.
Because it does make it highly visible.
So you can always spot where it is very easily on screen.
So that actually isn't that crazy of an idea.
And, I mean, why is it 100% red?
Probably because I just put, you know, the R slider all the way to the right at one point, and that's just what I stick with.
And the nice thing is if I ever need to, like, recreate it on a new system, it's easy to get that color again.
It's not some weird, like...
shade of taupe or something.
Anyway, that's what I do.
I'm kind of in a bind when I go full retina of what font I'm going to pick.
Menlo is a contender.
There's a bunch of, you know, SF Mono and Consolata, Consolos.
There's a million monospace fonts that I'll have to sort of have a bake-off and see what I pick.
But on the retina computers, a monospace bake-off.
Yeah, I don't even know.
Is memory the default in terminal?
Yeah, I think so.
Like on my wife's computer that's red and on my laptop at work, I don't even care.
The other important thing is I do tweak the terminal in lots of other ways.
I turn off those stupid marks in the marking thing.
No.
I don't know if you know about that.
Let me look at Casey's screenshot to see if you have a turn on.
You probably do.
They have a thing that's on by default, believe it or not, in Terminal, if you don't have any custom settings, that every time you type a command, it puts a mark in the scroll back so you can jump back by command at a time, which is a cool feature, but it puts these little turds in the window.
That's what all those things are.
Oh, I know what you're thinking of.
I don't think I have that on.
Those little brackets?
Yeah.
Yeah, you've got to turn those off.
That's an option.
And a bunch of other stuff.
I have infinite scroll back.
I have the preferences changed a lot, but in terms of the appearance, those little turds are another thing that I was sure to turn off the second they arrived.
They came a couple years ago.
Where is that setting?
I hate the settings in terminal.
If anyone who works in terminal, I know it's like half of one person works in terminal, but if you're listening to this program, please rethink the model of
How the properties of terminal windows are determined when a window was created and how the properties of a window are modified once the window exists as contrasted with how the settings that could be used to spawn future windows are modified.
It is such a muddled mess in terminals.
Yeah, it is.
If I just see a single window and I want to change just the attributes of that window, but not the attributes of the preset that we use to create that window, it drives me mad.
Plus, there's a bunch of other options that are in the menu.
Someone just needs to rethink that UI, but that's never going to happen because Terminal is low priority.
So I'm just glad all these features exist.
Do we want Apple to rethink Terminal?
Really?
Just the UI of, like, decide if it's going to be, like, have a set of presets and have them totally divorced from the settings window to window, but have the UI be the same for both, but make it clear when you're editing just the attributes of one window versus when you're editing a preset.
Like, I feel like we have the technology to do this, but anyway.
The marking thing, I have no idea where it is.
I would have to dig it out.
It took me a while to figure out what it was when it first came out, and then once I turned it off, I forgot where the heck it was.
But it's in either the menus or the settings somewhere.
Well, thanks to our sponsors this week, Linode, DoorDash, and TechMeme Ride Home.
And we will see you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Because it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U
You can make your cursor an underline.
Ugh.
Why would you do that?
Monstrous.
And you can make it blink, of course.
None of your cursors are blinking, right?
No.
No.
All right.
Just making sure.
You can't see it in a screenshot, so you never know.
I have to have, like, for most of the time I am working at my computer, including right now, even when I'm not actually coding, the vast majority of the time, there's a terminal window, at least one terminal window, visible on my screen.
So it can't look too crazy.
And if it was, like, a blinking cursor, like, all the time on my screen, like, off in the corner or off to the side...
I don't know if it blinks in the background.
I might just blink in the foreground.
I've never turned it on, so I don't know.
I don't even want to try it.
Casey's Mac is predictably called Casey's Mac, and he has that name without the apostrophe, but with a hyphen shoved into his prompt.
Bah.
again be civilized and give a short name for your computer to appear in the prompt or omit it entirely because honestly do you need to know that i mean maybe you do need to know what machine you're on but i feel like you could just call it imac or give it a some other name that is an identifier but casey's imac without the apostrophe and with a hyphen it's not good and with capital letters it's just it's throwing everything off like a monster like an animal even that is really bad whatever his hard drive is called macintosh hd
I don't know.
Is that true?
That's probably true.
Let me add volume.
Yep, that's correct.
Mine is also called Macintosh HD.
I think we went over this.
We had an Ask ADB question of what we name our hard drives.
You two are not long-time Mac users.
Don't know that you have to rename your hard drive.