Not Enough Carrot to Take the Stick
Marco:
So what computer are you on right now?
Casey:
The fact that you even have to ask that question is really depressing.
Casey:
Really, really depressing.
Casey:
I'm on my iMac.
Casey:
I think last we spoke, nothing has changed with regards to the iMac.
Marco:
So you still only had it repaired once and then you did a software restore basically?
Casey:
Well, so I had it repaired once.
Casey:
I restored from Time Machine.
Casey:
Things got wonky.
Casey:
And then last Monday, so not October, what is today?
Casey:
It's the 9th.
Casey:
So not October 7th, but September 30th, I believe it was.
Casey:
I decided I'm just going to nuke everything from orbit.
Casey:
And what is the genesis of that reference, John?
John:
you don't know you're making me so disappointed i i use it you use it i'm like yeah we're all on the same page we all get this reference but now you're admitting that you don't and of course marco doesn't no of course not what is genesis of that aliens the one with the s the plural one the second one the james cameron one i've never seen it you've never seen aliens wait hold on there are two different movies one called alien and one called aliens there sure is that's terrible are they related
John:
They sure are.
John:
Because the first one had one alien, and the second one had more than one.
Casey:
Spoiler alert!
John:
That's right there in the title, Casey.
John:
Alien?
John:
That's not terrible.
John:
That is classy.
John:
That is... Before, it was like... Aliens 2.
John:
More aliens.
John:
Furious 5, and The Fate of the Furious, and Fast 5, and all this ridiculous.
John:
We had Alien, and then it was followed up by Aliens, which is a perfect way to amp up the sequel while not being too...
John:
Loud about it.
John:
It's like, you get where I'm coming from.
John:
You had Alien and it was a great movie and you all loved it.
John:
Guess what?
John:
Aliens.
John:
Also James Cameron.
John:
And it's another rare sequel that is, let's say, almost as good as the original.
John:
Some would say better.
John:
Some would say, oh, it'll never match the original because it's a different kind of movie.
John:
But I think we can all agree it's a very good sequel.
Oh, God.
Casey:
Totally, totally.
Casey:
Marco, you and I are going to get right on that, right?
Casey:
That's our homework you and me?
John:
I'm assuming neither of you has seen the original Alien, the singular one, right?
John:
I don't think so.
John:
Because that's like a 70s movie and that's before your time.
John:
But Aliens, I think Casey at least would enjoy if he's not too scared.
Marco:
If anything, I think Casey and I have proven to you, John, over the years that whether or not a movie was in our time has nothing to do with whether we've seen it.
John:
The answer is we've never seen it.
John:
You've seen a lot of garbage 90s movies.
John:
There's a higher chance of you seeing it if it's in your time, whereas the classic 70s movies you haven't seen, but you've seen no garbage 70s movies, right?
John:
And you've seen few classic 70s movies, but 90s movies, you've seen all sorts of trash.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So when Erin and I were engaged, she was living in Richmond and I was still in Charlottesville.
Casey:
And that meant I had lots of time on my hands with nothing to do.
Casey:
And this was back when Netflix still sent DVDs.
Casey:
And I went on a binge of watching the original versions of then modern films that I really loved.
Casey:
So I watched the original Italian Job.
Casey:
I watched the original Ocean's Eleven.
John:
The original Dodgeball.
Yeah.
Casey:
I hope you're kidding, because if that's a remake, I've got to watch the original right away, but I'm pretty sure you're full of it.
Casey:
Anyway, I watched the original Gone in 60 Seconds, and I don't know if it's my, as we've long established, terrible sensibilities, but not a one of those was any good at all.
Casey:
And even, what was it, Italian Job had Michael Caine, who I love, my cocaine, and I absolutely love Michael Caine, and that movie was also terrible.
Casey:
So I have seen some things from the 60s and 70s, and I did not enjoy them.
Casey:
But that's okay.
Casey:
So to come back around to my computers, a week ago Monday, I had nuked the iMac from Orbit, as we discussed.
Casey:
That's from the movie Aliens.
Casey:
That's right, right?
Casey:
Aliens, not alien.
Casey:
That doesn't matter.
Casey:
Anyway, it's from some movie I haven't seen.
Casey:
And so since then, knock on my glass desk, it seems to be behaving considerably better than a few days ago.
Casey:
I was attempting to use my MacBook, and I would start it up either from sleep or rebooting it, and it would work for a little bit, and then it would refuse all input from the mouse and the keyboard.
Casey:
Now, the mouse was clicking because, mind you, this is one of the, what's the term for the fancy trackpads where it's all haptic, right?
Marco:
Oh, it's a 3D force.
Marco:
Whatever.
Casey:
Yeah, sure.
Casey:
But anyway, the point is, it's a mini haptic engine that's causing the clicking.
Casey:
It's not an actual physical motion that's causing the clicking.
Casey:
And it was clicking, which typically indicates that somewhere deep in the software, something is working.
Casey:
But I couldn't change focus to a different window.
Casey:
I couldn't do anything with the keyboard.
Casey:
It was just a disaster.
Casey:
And this happened reliably several times in a row.
Casey:
And I thought, well...
Casey:
Guess it's time to nuke this bad boy from Orbit 2.
Casey:
So that's what I did.
Casey:
I did an internet recovery, which actually, a quick aside, works stunningly well, at least for me on my very fast internet connection.
Casey:
So if you hit, I'm going to get this wrong, but it's like command option R, maybe it's command R, I forget what it is.
John:
Command R is regular recovery, command option R is the one where it gets the latest version of the internet.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
And then there's like command option something else R that gives you the version that came with the computer again off the internet.
John:
No, no.
John:
Command R does that because it's just booting from your recovery partition, which probably has not been updated since you installed the original operating system or since it came with the computer.
John:
Command R boots off the recovery partition, I'm pretty sure.
John:
And the command option R is internet.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And I thought, maybe I'm wrong, it doesn't really matter, but I thought there was another key modifier that you could do an internet recovery against the version of the OS that your computer came with.
John:
Oh, yeah, that probably is.
John:
I don't know if we presented with you a menu or something.
John:
Once you're going to the internet, you have the option to pull different versions, I'm sure.
Casey:
So anyway, so I did an internet recovery.
Casey:
And this was, I think, the day that Catalina came out.
Casey:
It was this past Monday or something like that.
Casey:
It was shortly after Catalina came out.
Casey:
And sure enough, it gave me Catalina.
Casey:
And so far, it actually seems to be working better, I would say.
Casey:
The iMac in particular had a fair bit of cruft within it.
Casey:
But the MacBook, I don't think it had very much cruft from years and years and years of the same load being brought forward with each new computer.
Casey:
But even still, a couple of years on, I feel like the MacBook, and maybe it's a placebo, but I feel like the MacBook is operating considerably better now.
Casey:
So my MacBook, and we'll talk about this more later, my MacBook is on Catalina.
Casey:
I have not yet touched Catalina on the iMac.
Casey:
I'm not really sure why, except that everyone seems to be up in arms about the thought of upgrading.
Casey:
I think I would be fine, but I'm so scared to touch anything at this point that I figure I'll just wait it out for a little while.
Casey:
But yeah, all seems well in my computing world, at least for the time being.
Casey:
And I really am impressed.
Casey:
I really honestly am impressed with how well the internet recovery worked.
Casey:
on the macbook because you know i have a gigabit connection uh basically both directions and it was it didn't take uh considerably longer than i would have expected it took you know about as long as i expected especially given that it's a macbook which is slow and underpowered etc uh and it worked really really really well and so i think everything's good believe it or not i don't know we'll see
Casey:
Tell me, gentlemen, I did not put this in the show notes, but as soon as one of you did, I kind of slapped my forehead and realized, oh, man, I completely forgot about this.
Casey:
Did FaceTime attention correction ship?
John:
I'd check on my phone, but my phone is still not running iOS 13 because I'm a scaredy cat.
John:
Why don't one of you check for me?
Casey:
All right, so where would this be?
Casey:
I'm looking in settings.
Casey:
Let me search for FaceTime.
John:
Well, that's assuming the search is working.
Casey:
Yeah, that's true, too.
John:
No, don't search.
John:
Just search with your eyeballs.
Casey:
Well, I'm looking at the FaceTime portion of settings.
Casey:
I see allows FaceTime to access Siri and search, FaceTime on or off, my Apple ID, where I can be reached, my caller ID, FaceTime live photos, and blocked contacts, and that is it.
Marco:
And I can verify on 13.2, it's exactly the same.
Casey:
Interesting.
Casey:
So I would say that no, it has not shipped.
Casey:
Where did we come down on this?
Casey:
If I recall correctly, I thought that this was really cool.
Casey:
And I thought that both of you guys were kind of anti-attention correction.
Casey:
Is that right?
John:
I was very anti for reasons beyond the technical because I just thought it was...
Marco:
the wrong thing to try to accomplish i don't remember what marco's stance was mine was almost as anti as you basically like it's a very risky thing to try to do because if you do it even slightly wrong it really messes up badly
John:
Yeah, I was saying that even if you did it perfectly right and perhaps especially if you did it perfectly right, I still don't like it.
John:
Anyway, we'll add that to the bin of things that didn't quite make it into 13.0 or 13.1 or 13.2.
John:
Stay tuned.
Casey:
Brutal.
Casey:
And speaking of, one of you has noticed that at apple.com slash macOS slash Catalina slash features, we'll put a link in the show notes, there is a genuinely long list of features.
Casey:
I didn't even realize this page was here.
Casey:
A very long list of features that are new in Catalina.
Casey:
But if you look closely, two of them have little asterisks next to them.
Casey:
One of them is iCloud Drive folder sharing, which I think I speak for all three of us in saying...
Casey:
We were very excited to have because we could have maybe stopped using Dropbox for sharing audio files between the three of us.
John:
You two were excited about that.
John:
I was not.
John:
I continue not to be excited by iCloud Drive or folder sharing or anything related to it.
John:
Well, now I'm not.
Marco:
Like, I was very excited about that.
Marco:
But now I'm thinking, like, when it comes out, are we going to trust it?
Marco:
You know, like, it has had such a, you know, rocky summer.
Marco:
Like, the early betas, like, the reason it was delayed, it seemed, was that the early betas were really bad and people were losing data and files.
Marco:
Like, and it seems like now it's even, it was so hard, apparently, to fix that and get it right that they were delaying it until next spring.
Marco:
So, like,
Marco:
I don't know, when it does finally come out, are any of us going to trust it?
Marco:
Like, how long is it going to take for any of us to trust it?
Casey:
I mean, I feel like in this context specifically, so the three of us are trying to share files amongst ourselves, where presumably these files will get caught up by time machine on each of our respective computers within an hour of them being generated—
Casey:
I feel like I would be okay with it.
Casey:
I don't think I would be too scared.
Casey:
But, you know, you never really know what can happen, especially when it comes to iCloud.
Casey:
I haven't yet been burned by iCloud really badly.
Casey:
And I almost wonder if that shoe is about to drop, especially given the conversation we just had about everything else, my computing life being a little rough these days.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I feel like Apple has had themselves burned by this whole beta experience.
Casey:
And one would hope that they have learned their lesson and one would hope that they will not make this mistake again.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
With Apple, especially when it comes to services, can you ever really be confident ever?
Marco:
Well, a lot of their services do work well, but the ones that don't, they seem to never really fix in a way that earns our trust.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, some of them they've done a good job with.
John:
I feel like the back end for the Photos app, we had so many reasons not to trust it, and there were bugs in the beginning, and people did lose photos and have weird glitches and stuff.
John:
But overall, at this point, I think the Photos back end has matured to the point where
John:
The vast majority of complaints about photos have nothing to do with the back end and everything to do with the application that through which you use the back end.
John:
But in general, I think the photo back end sinks.
John:
And that's a hard problem.
John:
I mean, like because photos are numerous and large and just ever growing and incredible.
John:
You know, there's I don't think there are as many light users of photos because iCloud Drive, you could put three or four things there and that's it.
John:
Right.
John:
Whereas photos, if you take any photos, presumably, if you continue to live, you will take more photos and you probably don't delete your old photos.
John:
And so it's it's very, you know, it's a large volume problem.
John:
The main reason I put this in the notes is we've talked about iCloud Drive folder sharing being delayed or whatever.
John:
And we're thinking like, oh, maybe it's delayed until 13.1 or maybe 13.2 if you want to be pessimistic.
John:
But as Marco already noted, this page from Apple says coming this spring, which you'll note is next year, like even by the fall or by the end of the year or January.
Marco:
in you know early next year i guess spring could be early next year but as marco also noted on twitter today this spring or whatever you're saying mid-year or whatever could also mean like wwdc i guess i guess this spring can't mean wwdc yeah talking about the the ming chi quo rumor about second half or q2 and it's like or like you know first half but it's like you know the first half of the year ends in june uh and so like you know anything that says oh it's going to be you know announced by q1 or q2 like that could be wwdc
John:
yeah anyway this they're they're giving themselves a lot of time which is fine like you know that's like if that's how long it takes that's how long it takes none of us want them to ship this in a broken state so you know take your time and get it done hopefully you get it done before you know whatever's after catalina uh you know there's one more item here that i hadn't even recalled but i saw it on the same feature page which is
John:
communication limits where it's kind of like part of the screen time where you can limit who your children can communicate with during certain period during certain periods maybe or all the time like you know when they're in downtime they can use the messages app but they can only use the messages app to communicate to you and not to their friends or something like that that feature is apparently so complicated that it's also not coming until spring
Casey:
It is a cool feature, though.
Casey:
I don't remember them having talked about that at all when I saw this in the show notes.
John:
I remember it because I'm more attuned to the parental control-y type things, mostly because I don't know.
John:
I do use screen time, and it's basically like a bedtime enforcement mechanism just so the kids don't secret their phones into the bed and stay up until 1 a.m.
John:
texting under the covers.
John:
They need to get sleep, right?
John:
But I do want their devices to be useful in an emergency, so Apple has all these sort of exceptions where you can carve out
John:
you know like if they're stranded on the side of the road they can always call you they can message you they can you know email you they can do all sorts of things uh but it's very difficult to strike the balance between having a device that works in emergencies for everything they could possibly need maps so on and so forth but also that doesn't let them uh burn too many hours of sleep uh chatting with friends
Casey:
Makes sense.
Casey:
Can we pivot ever so slightly?
Casey:
What are your guys' expectations with regard to the remainder of this month in an Apple event?
Casey:
Because a week or two ago, I would have said, without question, there's going to be an Apple event, you know, shortly before Halloween, just like there was last year.
Casey:
And that is going to be the deal.
Casey:
There'll be new MacBook Pros.
Casey:
There will probably be a new iPad Pro.
Casey:
We'll get more details about your beloved Mac Pro.
Casey:
God rest my soul.
Casey:
and you know we'll probably get some of the things that have been promised software wise like photoshop for ipad but i don't know after seeing this ming chi quo rumor and some of some of the other talking heads like ourselves have started to pump the brakes a little bit on this and now i'm starting to waffle a bit and wonder do you guys still think there will be an october event and if so what do you think will be there and let's start with marco
Marco:
The rumors are – the latest rumors are basically that like new MacBooks with scissor keyboards are coming out basically next year by June.
Marco:
But that is actually – like we've actually heard rumblings of that same thing before with that same schedule.
Marco:
What those rumors didn't mention is the rumored 16-inch MacBook Pro.
Marco:
Those rumors were about the other models of various Apple laptops.
Marco:
The 16-inch is still unknown, but the latest rumors of the 16-inch were that it's coming imminently, that it's coming this fall, possibly even this month.
Marco:
So as far as I know, or as far as we've heard, rather, that hasn't changed.
Marco:
So, I still believe, I'm still holding on to the dream that we're getting this 16-inch.
Marco:
You know, I could really, really use a 16-inch laptop this weekend.
Marco:
And so, therefore, it's going to be announced next week because I need it this weekend.
Casey:
So, thank you, Marco.
Marco:
So, to answer your question, like...
Marco:
There is still so much that's rumored in the pipeline that seems like it's fairly imminent.
Marco:
So things like the little tag tile tracker things that the U1 chip is supposed to help locate.
Marco:
The rumored, and we'll talk about later maybe, the leaked image of the AirPods with the rubber tips.
Marco:
So some kind of new AirPods model.
Marco:
A rumored cheaper HomePod that was rumored recently.
Marco:
There's all this different stuff.
Marco:
Not to mention, maybe when the TV service launches, maybe they'll want to do something too.
Marco:
Oh, there's also rumored Apple TV hardware update as well.
Marco:
There's all this rumored stuff about these lower priority products that are all still waiting in the wings somewhere.
Marco:
And the iPhone event did seem like some stuff was cut out of it.
Marco:
So I'm still holding on to hope.
Marco:
I'm not actually hopeful for iPads.
Marco:
iPads seem like the rumors are all saying next year, and that's fine.
Marco:
The iPad Pro was just updated one year ago, and they tend to be on a year and a half or so cycle.
Marco:
So that would be totally fine.
Marco:
But I still think there is room for a smaller event that would be the 16-inch MacBook Pro,
John:
new home pod new air pods new apple tv maybe you know something like that and maybe that that tile tag tracker thing yeah i started to get doubtful about the ipad yeah ipads after the uh phone event just had the cheap one it's like why wouldn't they save that for the ipad event oh maybe there's not going to be an ipad event but it seemed like it was still a thing they could do but this new rumor about the next ipad having uh a what they keep calling a
John:
3d tof or time of flight camera which is basically a camera that emits stuff i think it's light uh and uh tracks how long it takes uh to bounce off things stuff yeah i mean it might be i don't know if it if it's ir if it's visible light if it's a laser if it's you know whatever anyway it times how long it takes to hit something and bounce back to it to get like a good a better depth map for the purposes of ar and all that other stuff um
John:
that that's the rumor that the next ipad pro has that on its rear camera um and and also coming along with that rumor is and it's coming in the first half of next year so that i feel like if there's any foundation at all kind of squashes any hope of a boring ipad pro update which is basically take the existing ipad pro put an a13 in it you know that doesn't seem like it's going to happen um but yeah like marco said the 16 inch rumor is
John:
continue to be that this is a thing that apple could announce at any time obviously all the rest of the laptops have never really been rumored for imminent release and are probably into the next year that's fine i think the laptop can carry an october event now what do you have besides the laptop i think you you can have the laptop and like
John:
One other thing, and it's fine.
John:
I don't think all the things Marco listed are going to be there.
John:
You can have laptop and the tiles.
John:
Fine, there's your event.
John:
You can have laptop and Apple TV.
John:
Fine, there's your event.
John:
And you can have laptop and earbuds.
John:
Fine, there's your event.
John:
Because if Apple's smart, well, I don't know.
John:
I don't know if this is the right PR move.
John:
But I think it would make everyone feel better for Apple to make a very big deal about how great this new laptop is.
John:
Now, they don't have to have sort of any self-flagellation about, oh, we made a bad keyboard.
John:
We're so sorry.
John:
But they know that we know that they know, you know, and they're just like, this is, look at our amazing new laptop.
John:
This is the best laptop we've ever made, and we're really proud of it.
John:
They can say all positive things, and we'll get the subtext.
John:
The subtext is, they're not crap anymore.
John:
And, you know, actually, they have to make it not crap, right?
John:
So...
John:
New keyboard and one new port.
John:
That's all we ask, and we'll probably get half of that.
John:
Anyway, we're hungry for new laptops.
John:
Apple tends to make us think when they say, like, this is what all our laptops will look like going forward.
John:
Presumably, this is that moment that we've been waiting for for so long.
John:
So, yeah, I think they just need that laptop and one other thing.
John:
And surely, of all the stuff that was possible for release in the September event, one of those things should be ready to be announced alongside.
John:
Maybe not shipping.
John:
I mean, forget about shipping.
John:
But if you've got an event, you can announce stuff.
John:
And especially for things like the noise-canceling AirPods, which I remember thinking about that way back when.
John:
I'm like, how can you make an AirPod noise-canceling?
John:
But I kept thinking of the AirPod as like a current AirPod.
John:
You can't make...
John:
the current airport noise counseling, I suppose, because it doesn't seal your ear canal.
John:
It just kind of rattles around there, which is fine when you're just emitting sound.
John:
But if you want to counteract outside sound, you have to have a much more controlled sort of sound chamber, so you've got to plug it up.
John:
So anyway, the rumors of those things are...
John:
AirPods that look more like... I don't know what you would call them.
John:
Are they... They'll call those in-ear?
John:
I think they're just like, not quite in-ear, but squishy into-ear.
John:
I mean, yeah, they look like Powerbeats, but without the ear hook.
Marco:
Yeah, what do you call that style of...
John:
of ear thing i you know they they're not quite in-ear monitors because they don't really seal right yeah i don't i don't actually know what that style it's just like it's a rubber tipped ear earbud basically it used to be the only kind of earbud before i think they started popular as the kind that don't actually squish into your ear canal in any way like the air pods just kind of
John:
you know are grasped by the funny little cartilage in your ear and they just hang out there but they don't shove into your ear hole in any way whatsoever and before that if you had said earbuds you would have thought of something that looks like these air pods with a little rubbery tip maybe changeable tips maybe that's too much for apple anyway no the the power beats have changeable tips it's really nice actually yeah i mean i suppose they have to make the changeable tips because if it's shoving into your ear canal it's it's harder to come up with a one-size-fits-all even harder than it is for the air pod so i suppose it has to be changeable
Marco:
I'm really hoping they ship something like that because I like the Powerbeats.
Marco:
I have both Powerbeats and AirPods.
Marco:
I don't use the AirPods frequently because they are not very comfortable on me even with the little aftermarket silicone wraps that I put around them.
Marco:
That makes them a little bit better but they're still not very comfortable on me.
Marco:
The Powerbeats, which have those changeable rubber tips, and they come with three or four sets of them in different sizes, those fit me very well, but they have the giant ear hook and the giant case to accommodate that.
Marco:
And, you know, so they're a much bigger thing that's harder to pocket.
Marco:
If Apple can make something that's close to AirPods in size and form factor that can also have a pocketable case like AirPods do, but that has that rubber tip for a better, more comfortable fit, I am so in on that.
Marco:
I really, really hope they do.
John:
Yeah, because you always wanted to use the AirPods, but they don't quite fit your ears.
John:
So this is another chance for Apple to not fit your ears.
Marco:
Well, and not only that, but if they have this kind of changeable tip thing, that also means that even if Apple totally blows it and doesn't give you multiple tips, other people can probably make them and sell them because they probably will have one of those little stick port things on it that all these headphones do.
Marco:
It would take two seconds for a third-party manufacturer to design something that could fit it if it's any kind of removable rubber tip.
Marco:
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Again, their hardware is great.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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John:
can we talk a little bit about this has been going around and on other podcasts and in our various slacks and i know we talked about it in the past but i want to revisit it again the the idea of oh i know why it came up because there was a story about how you can get apple to replace your airpod uh when the batteries go go dead the idea that uh airpods are completely sealed and you use them and eventually use them for a certain amount of time and the battery no longer holds a charge and then what recourse do you have because you can't change the batteries apple can't change the batteries
John:
You just have to essentially either throw them away, buy new ones, or get them replaced.
John:
And the story, well, we should find a link for the show notes for this, but the story was like, if you know the magic words to say, you can go into an Apple store and be like, I've had these AirPods for two years and now they last like 20 minutes.
John:
Can I get a battery service?
John:
Can I get the battery service for them?
John:
And they charge you less than the price of new AirPods and essentially give you new AirPods.
John:
Like, they don't actually change your batteries, but...
John:
And it's not much less than the AirPod.
John:
I think you have to pay $98, and then you get two refurbished AirPods, which is cheaper than $160.
John:
So maybe go in and, say, battery service.
John:
Obviously, if your batteries are crappy within the one-year warranty, they'll just give you new ones for free or whatever.
John:
We find the article, see the other options.
John:
But anyway, this has renewed the debate about...
John:
Is this product a good idea?
John:
Like, yeah, we all love our AirPods, but it's another Apple thing with sealed batteries.
John:
And unlike some of the other sealed batteries, this literally can't be replaced because it's just totally glued in there and there's no way to get it out without destroying the thing.
John:
So...
John:
once those batteries die which they inevitably will because the lithium-ion batteries only last a certain number of cycles and then they're no good um it seems wasteful to throw that not well let's i mean i don't want to say it seems wasteful look here here are the different the different angles on why it's bad one is that it costs you lots of money you paid 160 that lasts you 18 months then you have to pay another 160 then you get 18 months that's not a great treadmill to be on these are not a cheap product no one wants to keep paying for that
John:
says the person who buys a new phone for a thousand dollars every two years anyway um or a new computer for 12 grand every 10 years anyway i think you're getting with just 12 yeah yeah that's laughable well we'll see well no um the so there's that's the cost argument doesn't feel good to spend that money second is environmental argument uh
John:
you buy this thing and you just throw it away and then you buy another one and you throw it away.
John:
Um, what's, is there a third argument?
John:
Let's see.
John:
You got cost environmental, uh, as a right to repair angle.
John:
I mean, I feel like you have the right to try to repair that, but they're assembled in such a way that it's not going to happen.
John:
Uh, I mean, yeah, I think, I think those are the two major angles, cost environmental, unless there's some other thing that I'm thinking of.
Um,
John:
Anyway, I've been thinking about them, and we talked about it last time, and last time I think where I came down was I would rather have – an AirPod with a changeable battery on it would be a worse product given the technology that existed at the time because it would have to be bigger and bulkier, and it wouldn't be as sort of lightweight and svelte and perfect and beautiful as the AirPod is.
John:
But, you know, we're on our second generation of AirPods now, and it's been a few years.
John:
And I think it's worth revisiting the idea of, you know, revisiting the idea of these particular harms and how they could be mitigated.
Casey:
I have such mixed feelings about this.
Casey:
I agree that this is an example of consumerism kind of run amok.
Casey:
I happily spent almost $200 on my AirPods 2 with wireless charging case just two years after I spent $150 or whatever it was on the AirPods 1.
Casey:
And I use my AirPods every day.
Casey:
I freaking love these things.
Casey:
I still think they might be the best Apple product I've ever purchased.
Casey:
And if they were made appreciably worse by having, say, a removable battery, that would make me really, really sad.
Casey:
That being said, it is bananas that in probably another year and a half or whatever it's been since I bought this set, I will be buying yet another set of AirPods.
Casey:
And it is bananas that the old ones are probably just going to end up in a landfill somewhere.
Casey:
And that's really, really crummy.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
Is it really, really crummy?
John:
How crummy is it?
Casey:
Well, I think it's really crummy from an environmental perspective.
Casey:
But why?
Casey:
Well, because it's just very wasteful.
John:
It's very wasteful as compared to what?
Marco:
I mean, yeah, I think it pales in comparison to the other waste that we will generate over that same timescale.
John:
How much mass is in an AirPod?
John:
And how much mass is in every disposable plastic cup you get from a fast food restaurant in a month or whatever?
John:
AirPods are very small and very light.
John:
Now, there is a manufacturing cost because they're not just simple plastic.
John:
There's electronics inside them.
John:
There's mining that goes into that.
John:
They punch above their weight in terms of environmental costs.
John:
But the bottom line is they're very small.
John:
There is very little actual mass in these things.
John:
And when I think about a replaceable battery from the environmental perspective, it's like, I mean, like the cost thing aside, from an environmental perspective, if you had to throw out, what percentage of the mass of AirPods do you think the battery is?
John:
Over 50, surely, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
60, 70%, 80% of the mass is battery.
John:
So if you're like, this isn't wasteful, I'll just put in a new battery.
John:
You're basically throwing away 80% of the device anyway.
John:
And it's not a particularly environmentally friendly 80% because lithium-ion batteries are not great at sitting in a landfill.
John:
But...
John:
Mass-wise, as compared to almost anything else that we consume and throw out a wrapper, a waste, packaging, whatever from, it's so small.
John:
Every two years, you throw out, like, the equivalent of 1 18th of a golf ball worth of...
John:
industrial waste that's nothing compared to the amount of crap that the average person throws out and how many airpods are there in the world given that they're like a 200 wireless earbud that nobody actually really needs again as compared to like anything else that you can imagine plastic shopping bags before they were banned everywhere uh cups fast food cups containers like just you know all the the plastic stuff that comes in the packaging of all the food that we buy every
John:
package thing of strawberries and blueberries or whatever and yeah some of that can be recycled and you know see that depressing uh what was it 99 invisible i forget some depressing podcast episode about exactly how grim the recycling situation is but bottom line is airpods are really small now it's not saying we should throw them out i'm saying of all the things that you should be concerned about waste wise i feel like you can offset that waste by
John:
buying three fewer plastic cups per every two years and you've offset most of the plastic the manufacturing and the sort of the microchip part of that or whatever i can see where you know that's that again it punches above its weight in terms of how much energy it takes to actually create these things and all the mining involved
John:
But it's still so tiny.
John:
So tiny compared to almost anything else.
John:
The old laptop that you have.
John:
How much more electronics is an old laptop that you're no longer using that you maybe didn't throw away because you remembered how much it cost?
John:
But bottom line is you're going to eventually throw it away if you didn't sell it immediately because it becomes obsolete.
John:
And phone's the same deal.
John:
Like, it's just AirPods, environmentally speaking, I'm not saying it doesn't matter.
John:
I'm saying it is not...
John:
the top of my list for concern and furthermore that replaceable batteries does not really help the environmental story for these like lithium ion batteries are not great for the environment because they have a limited number of charge cycles and when they're done we don't have a good way of to dispose of them again a single nissan leaf that didn't come with climate control for the battery to save costs and therefore destroys its battery in like three to five years
John:
How many AirPods worth of lithium-ion battery cells are in a Nissan Leaf?
John:
All of them?
John:
All the AirPods ever manufactured?
Casey:
I don't know.
John:
Maybe.
John:
So I don't think there's a good solution to the environmental thing.
John:
Even replaceable batteries, although it would make people feel better, doesn't actually solve the environmental impact of AirPods, which itself is tiny.
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, you make a really good point.
Casey:
And can we just address that you and I drive combustion cars?
Casey:
Because anytime anyone says anything about the environment, then we have to address the fact that we drive a car that does not burn electricity, good grief, that does not use electricity.
John:
It's like incredible mileage.
John:
It's like a 1.5 liter four-cylinder, naturally aspirated.
John:
Come on.
Casey:
You get a lot better mileage than me.
Casey:
But yes, the thing is, you can what about your way all the way down when it comes to really anything, but particularly the environmental stuff.
Casey:
And I am just so tired of hearing what about your car.
Casey:
But anyway, to come back to the actual point, you make a very good point, actually, that these things in terms of mass alone are not big.
Casey:
And even if millions upon millions of them have been produced, while there's been millions and millions of
Casey:
of accords produced and we don't know where all of that scrap metal ended up and we don't know where all of the car batteries that have ever been replaced in the history of time have ended up we don't know where marco's prior tesla's battery pack ended up and so yeah i think you're right and maybe maybe it's one of these things that i'm majoring on a minor well i mean i don't
Casey:
I'm not really my engine is not really that revved one way or another about this.
Casey:
But for the purposes of this discussion, maybe I'm majoring on a minor when it comes to the AirPods.
Casey:
I do think it is unfortunate that there is no way to keep them going.
Casey:
You know, the advantage of, say, my car and yours, John, and maybe Marco's, is that even when we're done with them, in fact,
Casey:
They can continue on in the hands of somebody else and continue to be used as a car.
Casey:
And then hopefully eventually when they are no longer being used by someone else, they will be, you know, piecemeal taken apart and used in other cars or sold for scrap metal or what have you.
Casey:
But I just, I kind of wish, it's so hard because I kind of wish that I had a computer with a removable battery, for example, so I could easily prolong the life of that computer and do that myself.
Casey:
You know, my first Mac laptop had a removable battery, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And it eventually swole, swelled, swelled and swole.
Casey:
Swole or something else.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
It went to the gym, got a real swole.
Casey:
Anyway, it eventually swelled and it got replaced and it was pretty easy.
Casey:
And I kind of miss those days.
Casey:
But that being said, I freaking love carrying my MacBook Adorable.
Casey:
I freaking love that my AirPods fit in the little change pocket in my jeans.
Casey:
And neither of those things would be true to your point, John, if they were easily serviceable.
John:
Yeah, so the cost angle is the other part of this.
John:
Set aside the environmental thing.
John:
I feel like the environmental thing, we're stuck due to battery technology no matter what Apple does.
John:
If they had 100% replaceable batteries, it wouldn't help the environmental factor.
John:
But...
John:
If they had 100% replaceable batteries, it could definitely, if Apple price is right, help the cost.
John:
Because although the battery is over 50% of the mass of AirPods, it is not over 50% of the cost, I would imagine.
John:
Maybe I'm wrong.
John:
Maybe I'm overestimating how much the integrated circuits in it cost.
John:
But either way...
John:
I feel like if Apple wanted to do the right thing and make people happier with their AirPods that eventually came out with the removable batteries, when the batteries died, as they definitely will with current lithium ion technology in a year or two, you know, when they when they get so annoyingly run down, Apple could sell you new batteries for a reasonable price.
John:
i don't know 50 bucks maybe 60 bucks for two of them for a pair like you know that's i feel like the margins and that would be good given the size of these batteries right you know as marco would know you know how big a lithium-ion battery can you get for one of your weird flashlights how much mass is in that battery as compared to how much mass is in the apple ones i know the apple ones are odd shape and the apple you know anyway
John:
I feel like there's plenty of profit margin in that.
John:
And you could bring in your AirPods when you buy the new ones and give Apple your old batteries, which they could then, I don't know, try to recycle.
John:
Is there some way to recycle lithium ion batteries, presumably?
Marco:
Yes, in general.
Marco:
I mean, I don't know about these specific ones that they're using in AirPods, but yes, you can extract some stuff out of lithium ion batteries.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, again, the mass is so small that it may not be economically worthwhile to do that, but it's the right thing to do.
John:
And it will get, if you, if you get people into your store and they're willing to, you know, again, this is the, this is the fictional air pod with an unscrewable battery stick thingy, uh, go into the store, give them 60 bucks, give them your old little sticks, screw in the new ones.
John:
And now what you're actually doing is you're saving, like once you unscrew the battery part and you realize this is what I'm saving.
John:
These two little turds here that weigh like nothing.
John:
It's like, yeah, that's where all the amazing magical smarts are.
John:
You could prolong the life of your AirPods until they eventually die from earwax impaction, as all AirPods, I presume, will eventually just keep shoving them in your ears and they get pushed into that little mesh grill.
John:
And anyway, the right to repair and right to remove earwax.
John:
um but you know i feel like that is a worthy endeavor because it makes a product that people will be more satisfied with apple like oh doesn't apple apple wants you to buy a new 160 i think apple would be fine with you buying very high margin 60 lithium ion batteries that weigh as much uh as a bird's feather every 18 months uh
John:
they would be better with you buying airpods every 18 months but unless they can keep adding new features that road is harder for apple to go down to say every year we're going to give you a reason to buy you know a brand or every 18 months we're going to give you an actual real reason why you want to buy a new pair of airpods instead right now
John:
We have to buy new AirPods if we want to keep using them because the battery ends lasting 20 minutes.
John:
And that really just makes them not useful for their intended purpose for most people.
John:
So I'm rooting for Apple to get replaceable batteries in their AirPods eventually, but not really for environmental reasons.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Plus I have them, you know, we have a few in the rest of the house, different sizes, huge, too tiny.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you so much to Fracture for sponsoring our show.
Bye.
Casey:
Let's talk about Catalina.
Casey:
We glanced off of this earlier.
Casey:
I had told you to recap from just a little while ago that I do have it on my MacBook Adorable.
Casey:
I do not yet have it on my iMac.
Casey:
And so far, so good.
Casey:
Just a few days in.
Casey:
I also wanted to quickly, before I pitched to you guys and asked what your status is, I wanted to say that having just reformatted, to use a Windowsism, reformatted both of my computers and started from scratch, surprisingly refreshing.
Casey:
I...
Casey:
feel like the iMac in particular had a lot of cruft and garbage and junk on it that I didn't even couldn't even keep track of and I don't know what about it maybe it's again all a placebo but having this like new fresh installation even of Mojave has felt really really good and I really really recommend it if you haven't done this in a long time and I'd be curious Marco particularly when I stop talking how you feel about the idea of doing that because last I had heard
Casey:
I thought Marco, you, and maybe John as well, were carrying basically a build that had been migrated from, I don't know, 15 years ago, carrying it through all the way to your iMac Pro today.
Casey:
And as a final quick note, I wanted to call attention to Homebrew Bundle, which I wrote a small blog post about this week, and I'll link that as well.
Casey:
But Homebrew Bundle is kind of like a bundler for RubyGems, if you're familiar with that at all, and basically lets you put together a file that
Casey:
That Homebrew will use to look at to install a whole bunch of software on your computer.
Casey:
And that doesn't necessarily mean just command line stuff.
Casey:
It can be Mac App Store stuff.
Casey:
It can be GUI stuff, all sorts of different things.
Casey:
And I found that having done this and worked out exactly what I wanted in my brew file, as they call it.
Casey:
uh it worked out working out exactly what i wanted my brew file for the imac and getting it kind of locked in there it made it that much easier and less daunting to go ahead and and refresh and reformat my macbook adorable because all i had to do was run this brew file i just worked on the week prior and 90 of the stuff i needed was automatically installed which was really really great so
Casey:
Let me start with Marco.
Casey:
Two questions.
Casey:
One, are you running Catalina?
Casey:
And if so, where?
Casey:
And two, are you still carrying around a 10 or 15-year-old builds, for lack of a better term?
Marco:
So in typical style, I'm going to answer your second question first and answer your first question later.
Marco:
Sorry.
Marco:
second question is uh am i still carrying the same installation yes um i i've had two unique uh mac desktop installations during my mac uh using career since 2006 uh i forget since 2004 rather uh i forget when i did the second one but it's old so like i did one for a few years then like reset it did a fresh one but went last time i did the fresh one was a long time ago um
Marco:
To answer your first question a little bit later, before that, to jump back for a second, your homebrew thing.
Marco:
So I read this blog post.
Marco:
I was very interested because, as you mentioned, that it doesn't just install command line stuff.
Marco:
I'm really curious to learn about how it can also install other apps that are not, you know, that are like in the Mac App Store and stuff.
Marco:
But my concern or my hesitation before I invest any time into this
Marco:
The idea of having a script to set up a fresh installation of macOS, I love that idea.
Marco:
I tried making one of those using Homebrew for some of my command line stuff about a year ago.
Marco:
And as has been the case with most package managers ever, and especially for me with Homebrew, it seems like if I write the script, get it all working...
Marco:
And then I buy a new computer in six months.
Marco:
The chances of the script still working are extremely low.
Marco:
And the chances that I'm going to have to mess with it and fix things that have broken in the meantime is almost 100%.
John:
Well, of course, you have to have a new version of your package manager for the new OS.
Marco:
So just do that before you get it set up.
Marco:
Right, but it's like, this gets me every time with Package Manager stuff, and especially with Homebrew.
Marco:
Homebrew is so bad about this because they change stuff so often.
Marco:
I have a really hard time getting excited about this stuff because I don't need to set up... If I had to set up five computers this week, I would get one of these going.
Marco:
If I didn't have any kind of other automation thing, I would get one of these things going, and that'd be great.
Marco:
But for my actual need for it, which is setting up a new computer maybe once or twice a year...
Marco:
it's so unlikely that it's actually going to end up saving me time because I have to mess with it the next time I actually have to use it because it breaks.
Casey:
You know, I hear you.
Casey:
I really honestly do.
Casey:
And all I can tell you is that I first started working on a brew file like a year and a half ago, maybe two years ago when I was at my jobby job, my last jobby job.
Casey:
And I think I did have to make a couple of small changes.
Casey:
And
Casey:
As I've lamented before, homebrew is a blessing and a curse.
Casey:
Like the error messaging is both obnoxious and not very useful.
Casey:
And there were a couple of things that I needed to tweak, but it was very, very low impact.
Casey:
And for me, I still had this brew file from like, I don't know, 18, 24 months ago.
Casey:
And it...
Casey:
almost entirely worked as is.
Casey:
So I totally sympathize with what you're saying.
Casey:
You are not wrong, but there's not a lot to these brew files.
Casey:
It's not like I'm running shell scripts or anything like that, which actually those don't really change over time, but you get my point, right?
Casey:
That there's not a lot of like execution that's happening here.
Casey:
I'm just pointing homebrew at a
Casey:
brew package names or whatever the case may be, and it's just going to fetch them.
Casey:
So there's so little moving parts in the brew file.
Casey:
Obviously, there's a ton of moving parts behind the scenes, but in the brew file itself, there's so few moving parts that I'm not too worried about keeping it up to date between OS releases.
Casey:
But again, I totally hear what you're saying, and especially if you're the kind of person that only does this once every five years, then this is kind of useless.
Casey:
But for me...
Casey:
I like having this as a tool in my tool belt.
Casey:
So if I get a new 16-inch laptop, for example, I can just run this file and it will make all my software just get magically installed in one shot.
Casey:
And Marco, as someone who buys computers as often as I change underwear, this seems like something that might appeal to you.
Marco:
You change nowhere about once a year?
Casey:
Yeah, I was waiting for that.
Casey:
I was waiting for it.
Casey:
Fair play.
Marco:
And to be fair, while I just said that I hardly ever change over and start fresh on my main desktop Mac, I usually will start any laptop I get fresh.
Marco:
And I usually do buy about one laptop a year.
Marco:
So
Marco:
it's yeah i do need this but i need it just infrequently enough like about once a year maybe twice if it's a really crazy year or maybe every two years if i'm if i'm exercising some self-control uh but you know like i need it infrequently enough that it usually breaks and it drives me nuts but anyway so going back to your original question about catalina
Marco:
I have not yet installed it.
Marco:
I installed the early betas here and there on second partitions, but I have not upgraded my main partitions to them.
Marco:
I didn't even keep up with the betas.
Marco:
I eventually just stopped caring and have just abandoned those partitions.
Marco:
I haven't booted into Catalina in months now.
Marco:
Because ultimately, the only reason I wanted to boot into it was to develop for Catalyst or play with SwiftUI live previewing.
Marco:
And I quickly learned that A, I wouldn't have time for either of those things this summer or fall.
Marco:
And B, I quickly learned those things were very, very, very early and had still lots of problems.
Marco:
And so I didn't want to get into it yet.
Marco:
So I'm mainly looking at Catalina now as a user, not as a developer.
Marco:
And as a user, there are so many downsides and removals and somewhat hostile changes in Catalina.
Casey:
Such as what?
Marco:
Well, all the permissions stuff, all the 32-bit apps breaking, all of the new dialogues and exceptions.
Marco:
A lot of stuff has changed under the hood for various reasons.
Marco:
The new partition thing, which might, who knows what
Marco:
what little problems that might cause for various scripts and other apps and everything.
Marco:
All the crazy stuff you have to do to get Terminal to work correctly.
Marco:
They changed my shell on me.
Marco:
There's so many changes that are going to be little pains in the ass to me that I have to look at the other side and say, all right, what's the benefit here?
Marco:
What am I getting for this?
Marco:
And there's also the risk, by the way, of quality issues.
Marco:
It's very clear that Apple has released all the software this fall, not because it's ready, not because it's good, but because it was time.
Marco:
And so, as a user, I'm not particularly excited to jump into this.
Marco:
I'm scared about it, because I know...
Marco:
that there is going to be regressions.
Marco:
There's going to be feature losses.
Marco:
I'm going to probably have to replace some old software.
Marco:
I might not even know that very quickly.
Marco:
It might take a while to even realize that.
Marco:
I know there's going to be some friction involved in getting through all the apps permissions dialogues and fixing term and all this stuff.
Marco:
I'm going to have to probably fix my PHP and Nginx setup again using Homebrew to...
Marco:
rewrite my entire script again like this happens with every OS so there is a significant cost to me as a user and I look at well okay what am I getting for it
Marco:
And I just don't see it.
Marco:
I'm not motivated at all.
Marco:
I'm not excited.
Marco:
I don't want to jump into it because it seems like what you're getting with Catalina is Apple really needs a lot of this stuff.
Marco:
It benefits Apple to remove all this crap and change all this stuff and lock everything down even more.
Marco:
does it really benefit me?
Marco:
I'm not sure a lot of it does.
Marco:
And so for me, there's just not enough carrot to take the stick, I guess.
Marco:
There's not enough good stuff here to motivate me to want to update
Marco:
And not to mention the fact I'm concerned about quality.
Marco:
And so I will eventually update to it.
Marco:
I might last another 0.1 or 0.2.
Marco:
And I'm sure whenever the new laptops come out, I'm going to buy it immediately.
Marco:
And so I'll have Catalina on that.
Marco:
But otherwise, on my desktop, I'm not motivated yet to upgrade because there just seems to be not enough upside.
Marco:
And there's significant possible downsides.
Casey:
You know, I think the key thing you just said was on my desktop, because the one thing that I really was enthusiastic about putting Catalina on my MacBook was Sidecar, which is the Luna Display-esque, you know, use your iPad as a secondary display when you're perhaps away from the house.
Casey:
So as an example, I did not use it this morning, but this would have been the sort of time I would have.
Casey:
I went to Wegmans, which is a local fancy pants grocery store, and
Casey:
kind of in the vein of Whole Foods, if you will.
Casey:
And I was sitting in their little cafe area, and I was using both my laptop and my iPad.
Casey:
Now, today, it just so happened I was doing different things on both.
Casey:
But generally speaking, especially if you have, oh, I don't know, a 12-inch laptop, that would have been the perfect opportunity to use Sidecar.
Casey:
And I am really excited to use it.
Casey:
I did use it very briefly when I first installed Catalina just to try it out.
Casey:
And in the literally five minutes I used it, it seemed to work really, really well.
Casey:
And so I think if you're the kind of person who likes having two displays when you're, I don't know, on a graycation, then maybe you would enjoy Catalina on a laptop.
Casey:
But I think that's ultimately why I am not in a huge rush to put it on my iMac.
Casey:
Like, of course, I want the new shiny.
Casey:
But to your point, Marco, on a desktop anyway, there's nothing that I can think of off the top of my head that I can point to that makes me say, this is what I need Catalina for.
Casey:
And I need it for now.
Casey:
It's my OS and I want it now.
Casey:
So I'm curious how long both of us last before our iMacs, well, in your case, iMac Pro gets Catalina.
Casey:
Any other thoughts before we punt to John?
Marco:
I mean, I think what's going to finally make me do it is when I want to start playing with Catalyst.
Marco:
At Overcast, I'm finally catching up with some of the stuff I want to do this summer, and I would still like to do a Catalyst app.
Marco:
I still have a lot of work to do before that's a good idea.
Marco:
but I'm probably going to do it over the next month or two.
Marco:
So I'm guessing I'm probably going to upgrade, I don't know, in a month or two.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
And sitting here now, to the best you're willing to share, you view Catalyst and a Mac app as more important or interesting to you than doing something with SwiftUI?
Marco:
At this point, yes.
Marco:
I think Catalyst is going to change over the next few years, a lot less than SwiftUI will.
Marco:
It seems very clear, looking at what they've done with Catalyst and what's considered okay and what's some things that seem not okay that they're considering okay.
Marco:
It seems clear to me that Catalyst is not going to be an area of heavy investment for Apple.
Marco:
I think the direction they're trying to go is SwiftUI.
Marco:
Catalyst is like, let's put iPad code in a window and very lightly reskin some parts of it to be kind of Mac-like.
Marco:
Whereas SwiftUI is, let's let people write higher-level code that doesn't give a lot of the specifics, and then the operating systems can deal with these specifics differently in ways that are native to them.
Marco:
That's probably the better approach for cross-platform code.
Marco:
And it does seem like SwiftUI is the ultimate plan of where Apple wants us to go in the future.
Marco:
And it seems like Catalyst is a stopgap.
Marco:
Catalyst is our carbon to the carbon-cocoa divide of years ago.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
It will serve a function, but I don't know how much investment it's going to get, and it certainly doesn't seem like it's going to be the focus of a whole lot of excitement or necessarily high-quality apps.
Marco:
It's still super early.
Marco:
Like everything else they shipped this summer, it's not really ready yet.
Marco:
in a lot of ways there's still some pretty uh annoying limitations and and uh just like oversights like like one of the one of the things that a lot of people are facing is that you can't share purchases and it can't be the same bundle id and you can't like there's all sorts of like weird stuff because like they're it's still two separate app stores uh and so it's just it's a whole thing but anyway um i
Marco:
I am not excited about Catalyst at all.
Marco:
I view it simply as a tool.
Marco:
I'm as excited about Catalyst as I am about App Store Connect.
Marco:
This is a tool that I will have to use to achieve a goal I want, but I'm not excited about it at all.
Casey:
Yeah, I hear you.
Casey:
And for the record, I think that that is the correct call.
Casey:
Not that you really need my approval, but I think Catalyst probably makes a lot more sense for you than doing something with SwiftUI.
Casey:
But, you know, I view them as somewhat related since both of them to be used properly really do require Catalina.
Marco:
And SwiftUI, I think, is going to be very important to me in the future, but I kind of want to hold off.
Marco:
My initial plan of SwiftUI was to redo my watch app with SwiftUI first, learn it there on that much simpler, smaller canvas and smaller problem space, and then be able to apply those skills to other stuff in the main app.
Marco:
And that's probably still what I'm going to do.
Marco:
I haven't started yet.
Marco:
That's probably still what I'm going to do.
Marco:
But even doing the Watch app in SwiftUI, SwiftUI itself is still so early and still so, like almost everything Apple has done recently, so poorly documented and undiscoverable.
Marco:
And it's still, as mentioned before, the error messages are comically hostile and it's still very obtuse in lots of ways.
Marco:
And so...
Casey:
uh i might even wait still on that but swift ui i think has a much more exciting future than catalyst uh the in the present frankly i'm not that excited about either of them yeah that makes sense can we do a quick tangent if you don't mind and you can just do through the magic yeah through the magic of editing you can just put this somewhere where it makes sense how is the documentation so bad this year how is this a thing
Marco:
Honestly, it's not just this year.
Marco:
I think it's worse this year than in previous years, but almost all new APIs that Apple has released over the last few years have very little to no documentation.
Marco:
There is so often that I have to jump into the header file for something just to see what the heck even the methods and properties do.
Marco:
Speaking of that, with Swift not having header files, how do you deal with that?
Marco:
I haven't had to deal with that yet, but that's going to be an issue.
Marco:
And even the things that aren't header file based, a lot of the APIs, the documentation is, oh, go watch this WBDC session video from three years ago.
Marco:
That's the only time this was ever explained.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And that just grinds my gears so much.
Casey:
It's so unbelievably frustrating.
Casey:
You know, Apple says, here, developer, here's this magical API that we allege will do exactly what you've wanted to do.
Casey:
But you figure it out yourself.
Casey:
Like, it's just so frustrating.
Casey:
And I understand that...
Casey:
It is more important to have a functional API, and you were kind of going on a tear about this briefly earlier on Twitter, Marco, and I agree with you.
Casey:
It is more important to have a functional API, which doesn't always work these days with Apple, but it is more important to have a functional API than it is perfect documentation.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
It is genuinely unfortunate and frustrating, and I would almost go so far as to say unfair, that Apple is expecting all these developers like you, like me, to adopt all these new APIs, but yet there is no formal documentation for them.
Casey:
And I know that some of the developers internal to Apple will put just unbelievably good documentation in their header files.
Casey:
Like, look at the CollectionView header files and how unbelievably good they are with all of the ASCII art that's in there.
Casey:
But is there any good collection view proper documentation on any of this stuff?
Casey:
I haven't seen much.
Casey:
And a lot of times it's like you said, go to the dub dub session and you'll be fine.
Casey:
And that's just not acceptable.
Casey:
And it makes me wonder if the people who are writing like collection view and some of these other things can't,
Casey:
are taking the time to do this header documentation, is that because something outside of their org is preventing them from doing the real documentation?
Casey:
Like, is it that the lawyers are holding it up or the people who, maybe it's a different org that writes the documentation, which actually is probably the case, and they're just behind or slow or gosh knows what else.
Casey:
But man, what a frustrating and silly self-own, at least to my eyes.
Marco:
Honestly, that's kind of the story of a lot of the Apple stuff recently.
Marco:
You mentioned a second ago that it's probably a separate team that writes the documentation.
Marco:
First of all, that's probably true.
Marco:
It seems like that should be an easy thing to scale.
Marco:
Yeah, one would think.
Marco:
Because you don't have to have the engineers who wrote the stuff be the ones who documented everything.
Marco:
And it seems like it should be relatively easy, because that's relatively orthogonal to the development of the APIs.
Marco:
You can have people who make documentation.
Marco:
You can have people who make sample code and sample projects.
Marco:
That seems like it would be easy to hire totally separate people to do those things.
Marco:
One of the biggest problems that I have as a developer with Apple's APIs, in addition to the lack of documentation...
Marco:
is that a lot of the APIs simply don't work.
Marco:
And it seems like no one in Apple ever actually tried to use them.
Marco:
And this is yet another thing that you would think a similar orthogonal group could do.
Marco:
Have a group of people at Apple employed who just try to build something with every new API they make using only the public stuff that developers get to use.
Marco:
Because I've faced so many problems over the last few years of seeming like I'm the only person who's trying to build on something or building on an API that's like two years old and finding critical flaws in it where it doesn't actually work.
Marco:
And it's like, has anybody actually shipped anything using this API over the last two years?
Marco:
Because you can't.
Marco:
And it seems like with so much of their stuff, they don't seem to actually be even trying it before they ship it or after they ship it.
Casey:
Anyway, John, I'm sorry.
Casey:
We got on a tangent, which was my fault.
Casey:
So tell me, how do you feel about Catalina?
Casey:
And how many decades has this Mac Pro been in existence?
Casey:
Has that build lived?
John:
Actually, before we get off that tangent, I'm really surprised that Marco would be even considering SwiftUI in any form, except for the fact that it's your only option if you want to do like
John:
good watch kit apps like that's because swift ui is it's not as young as the original swift but it's close the only reason i say it's not it's because the uh the integration with xcode necessarily is much richer than the original swift had because of the whole like you know real-time updates of the
John:
UI and the thing or whatever, Swift 1.0 didn't have that.
John:
But other than that, I would imagine Swift UI is probably going to go through the same sort of tumultuous series of changes that Swift 2.0 through 4.0 went through.
John:
Hopefully not syntax-wise and breaking your code-wise, but
John:
it's got a long way to go.
John:
But we see the promise, much more so than with Swift itself, I think.
John:
We see what SwiftUI could bring when it gets more full-featured, when the tooling gets even better, when, as you both complain, the error messages get better.
John:
And by the way, it's not just a matter of writing good error messages.
John:
Structurally, there are things about the way SwiftUI works that's going to make it very difficult to be sensible.
John:
And they have to come up with solutions for all of those problems.
John:
It's not just, oh, we didn't have time to make good error messages.
John:
It's like sort of the tooling around React or any other kind of like various event-driven frameworks where things happen asynchronously, where just getting a stack trace tells you nothing.
John:
Right.
John:
And just getting an error from the point where it occurs tells you nothing about where it originated.
John:
Right.
John:
Because of the nature of the sort of execution model and the fact that it is declarative and not imperative.
John:
And you're not controlling when everything happens.
John:
Things just happen in response to things that you declared, but you're not quite sure what thing you declared caused that thing to happen at that time.
John:
And, you know.
John:
it's a hard problem to solve so uh for how long marco stayed away from swift i'm really surprised that he's even looking at swift ui at all except when forced like with the watch app so in other words that's that just tells you how bad watch kit is well yeah because because it's an upgrade over like just describe a window for me and i'll put it on the screen for you like at least you get to use two interactive elements and you like draw things and stuff
Marco:
WatchKit is that much of a bane of my existence whenever I go near it.
Marco:
I hate WatchKit so much that I will tolerate learning the new craziness with SwiftUI because WatchKit's that bad.
John:
Plus, you would imagine there's not that many controls on WatchKit.
John:
Even with the current limits of SwiftUI, plus or minus the error messages, you're not going to have that many controls on screen at once.
John:
They're not going to be that complicated, so it feels like it actually is a good fit for a first foray.
John:
But then, you know...
John:
And you'll have to change all that code like next year and the year after as they break stuff or quote unquote, not quote unquote, they will improve things.
John:
And that will mean your crusty old original Swift UI stuff has to be changed.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, that's okay.
Marco:
My watch app every couple of years anyway.
Casey:
Who doesn't, right?
Casey:
Really quickly, Scott Horn on Twitter just posted, which I thought was very well put.
Casey:
If you can't properly document your API, the chances are that it works as intended are slim to none.
Casey:
Documentation forces testing.
Casey:
And I think that's a very good call.
John:
And documentation forces testing.
John:
So optimistic.
John:
You know what tells you if your API works?
John:
Tests.
John:
That's what tells you if your API works.
John:
But here's what documentation does.
John:
Documentation, this is why I always press at work and no one ever believes me.
John:
So I'm the only person who thinks this, but it is actually right.
John:
Writing documentation.
Casey:
Of course it is.
Casey:
Everyone else is wrong, John.
John:
You'll agree with me.
John:
Writing documentation for your API, your code, your library.
John:
is a great way to let you know if you have a good API.
John:
Because if you find yourself struggling to explain how something works, if you find yourself having to write paragraph after paragraph, including caveats and prerequisites and assumptions and everything, you have a bad API.
John:
It may work great and the tests may all pass, but then you're like, when it comes time to explain the purpose of this function, explain what arguments it takes and what it returns under what conditions, if you end up writing a choose-your-own-adventure novel underneath that thing...
John:
guess what you just discovered that you're and that's why you can't leave uh that your api is bad you can't leave this to the end because at the end when you're all done like we wrote our api and people are building on it and all our tests passed and it's awesome we did performance improvements now finally the last step the cherry on top i'm gonna go write the docs and you're like oh my god this api is terrible we have to change this
John:
There's no way I can explain to a user how to use this API.
John:
Like I'm embarrassed for myself that I have to say these words like, well, I can do this.
John:
But if you pass that and does that, make sure you do this.
John:
But don't call it in this context.
John:
And it is like, oh, God, what have we done?
John:
Like it works.
John:
But so you can't save the documentation at the end.
John:
You have to write the docs, maybe not at the beginning, but somewhere in the middle, because you will learn that your API is screwed up through writing the documentation or someone else will learn and come tell you.
Casey:
Well put.
Casey:
You're right.
Casey:
I did end up agreeing with you.
Casey:
All right, I'm going to stop talking.
Casey:
Marco is hopefully going to stop talking.
Casey:
Tell us about Catalina.
John:
I'm going to tell you about my, you know, so I do upgrade installs on my Mac forever.
John:
I am pretty sure that I have files on my Mac that came from classic Mac OS.
Casey:
Wow, that's interesting.
John:
Because remember, you know, my blue and white G3 was purchased with and ran for most of its life.
John:
Classic Mac OS.
John:
Eventually it ran Mac OS 10, but I installed it on top of
John:
my installation of Classic Mac OS.
John:
So, yeah, I've just been... I just peeked in my library preferences folder, and the oldest file I have in there was last modified in 2003, so I have files that 3D both of your use of the Mac.
John:
You know they're old files from Classic when the file names don't have file name extensions.
John:
That's a good way to tell.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
Anyway, that's what I do, and I will continue to do with my installs.
John:
Although, it's like...
John:
transferring to the new Mac Pro is going to be... I've got to figure out how I can actually connect them with a cable that's not ridiculously slow.
John:
Firewire to Thunderbolt to USB to... Maybe I'll just do Ethernet.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'll figure something out, but it's going to take a while because I have a lot of files.
John:
So Catalina, obviously I'm not running it on this Mac because I can't.
John:
Oh, womp womp.
John:
I feel very similar to Marco in that
John:
like there's not much pulling me into catalina and there's lots of stuff keeping me away aside from bugs like oh i'm afraid the first version will be buggy or whatever um there's the whole 32-bit apps going away i have a lot of 32-bit apps most of which i've been you know saying my goodbyes to be like all right i'm gonna live without you like saying my goodbyes to drag thing all my all my games and like all you know
John:
there's a lot of stuff, but there's a couple of ones that are really just, I bought a new version of Microsoft office because my version, the purchase of Microsoft office I had was so old that I don't know if it was 64 bit or not, but it was like, I was just, let me just solve that problem.
John:
Um, the one that's really killing me though, is Photoshop CS six.
John:
Um,
John:
uh and i checked photoshop csx as soon as i knew that apple was dropping like it was like two years ago when they made the announcement like this version will run 32-bit and then they stopped talking it's like okay well the next version won't like well i have to buy a new photoshop and i did a little you know get in if i launched photoshop my mac and i got info oh photoshop cs6 is a 64-bit process everything's fine and then i forgot about it and then i redid it i downloaded like that uh
John:
Sinclair software has this go 64 application that will just scan your thing for 64 bit applications and 32 bit applications and you know Photoshop CS6 it's a 64 bit application I'm okay right but I did notice a lot of other 32 bit things with the word Adobe and I'm like so this is a question I have I should I meant to tweet it earlier today I'd already have the answer by now if I had tweeted but I'll just I shouldn't ask it on the program but anyway
John:
um because i don't i don't want a million people to tell me i'll find out next week um but the question i have is if i upgrade to catalina can i even launch cs6 or what you know like it's a 64 bit app presumably will launch will it immediately crash because some adobe utility won't work or is like you can launch it but you can't use like bridge or some import functionality that i never use like um
John:
I'm a very light user of Photoshop, but I do want to have it.
John:
I'm accustomed to it.
John:
And I don't want to pay Adobe a monthly or yearly fee for Photoshop because I use it so rarely.
John:
I basically use it as an image resizer, slight modification.
John:
I do...
John:
Yeah, whatever weird T-shirt designs we're doing, sometimes I do in Photoshop, you know, or mock-ups.
John:
Like, I don't use it that much.
John:
It's not worth it.
John:
It's not worth it for me to pay even like $5 a month for Photoshop or the equivalent yearly fee.
John:
And you can't, as far as I know, you can't buy Photoshop anymore.
John:
I bought CS6 specifically because it was the last version that wasn't infected with Creative Cloud.
John:
Not infected.
John:
I'm not against that model.
John:
I think it's fine.
John:
It just doesn't fit my use of Photoshop.
John:
I'm not a professional person who makes their living using Photoshop.
John:
Put it that way.
John:
So I don't want to upgrade to Catalina and lose Photoshop.
John:
And that's currently my biggest barrier.
John:
And there's one application my wife uses for budgeting that...
John:
she's saying her goodbyes too.
John:
And she's like, she's told me before she left on another one of her, uh, trips, like don't upgrade my computer when I'm gone because I know that my budgeting application, uh, is, will not be supported anymore.
John:
And I'm auditioning a new one, but until it happens, you can't upgrade it.
John:
So there are a couple of things keeping me away from it.
John:
And,
John:
The main thing pulling me into it is I'm not really interested in Sidecar, but I am interested in the new applications, believe it or not, like the ability to watch 4K video if I wanted it.
John:
Yay, I'm entering the modern era.
John:
The new version of Photos, I spend a lot of time in Photos, and I'm always hungry for a new version of Photos, which tends to be tied to the OS.
John:
This new version of photos might be good, might be bad.
John:
But, you know, any change is an opportunity for things to be better.
John:
Whereas, you know, just for the entire life of Mojave, I was like, yeah, here's photos.
John:
It's never going to get any better until the new version.
John:
So I do want to see that.
John:
And by the way, my favorite plug-in for doing the books that I print, Mimeo,
John:
That is not ready for Catalina yet either, so I've got to wait for that update.
John:
There's an update coming soon that will make it work in Catalina.
John:
And all the permission dialogue stuff, I'm not really too worried about that.
John:
It will be annoying, but I'm the type of user that can handle that, assuming I eventually defeat it all and it goes away.
John:
So the iMac hasn't been upgraded, a long way of saying.
John:
But I did willingly upgrade the laptop, the MacBook Air,
John:
uh because mostly because i want screen time because that's the kids uh homework quote-unquote homework laptop but it's also their bypass of screen time if they want to watch youtube all hours of the night they can do so on the laptop um so i and also i just wanted to see what it was like i had a catalina installed on a separate apfs volumes on in my apfs container on on the imax i'd seen catalina before i'd run a bunch of the betas i'd looked at it like it's not like i'm too surprised but
John:
i upgraded the uh macbook air to catalina so far seems fine a little bit wonkiness around apple id stuff as usual like it's always not a great first run experience like you know it's a bunch of permission dialogues this app wants to do that do you want to allow this after that go through all that thing then i go into system preferences and i go to the new apple id screen it's got like a red badge on it that's like you need to update your apple id
John:
settings or something like all right fine whatever enter your apple id password all right fine enter your mac password all right fine and then it grinds for a really long time and then it's done grinding and then i'm like okay i guess i'm done but the badge is still on the thing it's like close system preferences and then later i come back to the computer and it's like you need to update your apple id settings
John:
I went to the NAS like six times.
John:
The badge never went away.
John:
I kept asking.
John:
I'm like, what do you want from me?
John:
You want to update my Apple ID settings?
John:
Then do it.
John:
It never did.
John:
I just logged out.
John:
I set up the kids' accounts.
John:
I launched all the stuff and got rid of all the permission dialogues for them.
John:
I set up screen time on the Mac, which I'm assuming will work, which is a big assumption because I have to say these screen time reports for family sharing, like where you can see what your kids' usage is or whatever across all their devices –
John:
how long has that been out now a year and a half two years it has never worked right and continues not to work right some devices don't show up at all some activity doesn't show up at all sometimes i go into my kids screen time report and it's just blank there's like no activity activity will appear here once people use their devices oh really once people use their devices two years later something will show up here
John:
sometimes it shows up sometimes i can see one device but not another like it's really bad it's really it's so unreliable it's like what what am i even getting reports on you know like i don't think i've ever seen anything reported for my son's ipad but i do see his phone sometimes and it just doesn't make any sense it's it's one of those features it's like is this a feature or is this a thing that like might work sometimes but you know check back later same thing with the
John:
you know the weird first run bugs in Catalina um but I'm actually kind of interested in seeing the new music app and having the the all the device stuff in the finder like most of those UI changes and the new applications I'm actually interested in the new is the new version I think maps is not the new good version right uh messages got changed a little bit anyway I am interested in an OS but I'm just scared to lose all my stuff and scared to break things so
John:
on the laptop it goes and and you know i have to say other than my complaints about those weird things it's been okay like it hasn't crashed it seems to be running fine it's not making the fan spin i you know i did a full time machine back above it and that all seemed to go well um so you know i don't recommend people upgrade to catalina but it has not been disastrous to me so far
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
So if you're doing over $10,000 a month in revenue, find out how you can receive ClearBank capital by getting your 20-minute term sheet at clearbank.com slash ATP.
Marco:
ClearBank, stop pitching and get back to doing what you love, growing your business.
Casey:
All right, let's bring back Ask ATP.
Casey:
I think because we've been just full of stuff to talk about, we've skipped it for the last couple of weeks.
Casey:
And so let's bring it back.
Casey:
Dan Stanton writes, with the advent of family sharing, speaking of, why do you think contacts have been ignored?
Casey:
In my mind, contacts in a family should be bucketed just like calendar entries, yours, mine, and ours.
Casey:
Dan's wife doesn't want to see a couple hundred of my work acquaintances in her dress book, but it would be nice if I updated a random aunt's info that my wife got the change.
Casey:
Do you all experience this issue?
Casey:
Any creative solutions?
Casey:
Yes, this is a problem that Aaron and I face.
Casey:
Because I am...
Casey:
I don't know, like a pack rat of contact information.
Casey:
I have the kind of official contact list of the family, but that causes Aaron to oftentimes have to ask me, oh, what's so-and-so's address?
Casey:
What's this person's phone number?
Casey:
What's this person's email address?
Casey:
And so on, which is fine, but it's frustrating for both of us.
Casey:
I don't know of any fix.
Casey:
I would imagine that if you had some sort of like Google app set up, which we actually do, maybe you could share contacts that way, or perhaps like I could log Aaron into my Gmail account and send
Casey:
And I could have both of us sharing our contacts with my Gmail account, even if she doesn't look at my email.
Casey:
But that seems very, I don't know, kludgy.
Casey:
So I don't have any really good solutions.
Casey:
But Dan, I feel your pain.
Casey:
Marco, I get the feeling you have not a lot of input here.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, Tiff and I both have contacts.
Marco:
We occasionally have to ask each other, like, hey, can you iMessage me that contact card for somebody so we can get it?
Marco:
But we don't have so much overlap that it's a frequent problem.
Marco:
But that being said, I would love for Dan's Proposed Solution here to bucket them as yours, mine, and ours.
Marco:
That would be awesome.
Marco:
We do that with 1Password.
Marco:
We have a 1Password family set up.
Marco:
So we each have our own vaults, but we can also put stuff in the shared area that we can both access.
Marco:
And I think that would be wonderful.
Marco:
But Apple's not historically great at supporting things that families need to do.
John:
I was just trying to Google to find out exactly how long ago No iLife is an Island episode of Hypercritical was.
John:
This is the exact same problem again.
John:
It occurs to me, I usually complain about it in the context of photos, but contacts is a perfect opportunity for Apple to work out what are, I was going to say to be fair, but I would say what are difficult issues.
John:
It's not easy to do this in a way where the UI makes sense to people.
John:
It is a difficult interface problem.
John:
but i feel like contacts as i've complained about in the past just for a single person the current siloed version of contacts still sometimes doesn't work for inexplicable reasons we went through on this show several episode run of trying to figure out with like contacts aren't syncing because the images are the wrong size and it just silently doesn't sync and you would never figure that out if you didn't listen to weird tech podcasts or
John:
For us, if we didn't have listeners who knew this weird information and told us that we then broadcast in our weird tech podcast.
John:
So I kind of understand why they haven't done the harder thing because they can't even get the easy thing right all the time, which I find endlessly frustrating.
John:
But if and when they tackle this idea, contacts is a perfect place to do it because the data volume is so much lower than photos.
John:
Like it's just text and some small images and the number of contacts you have does not, as I mentioned before, grow with essentially without bound like photos does because you just don't keep meeting that many people like, you know, maybe for yourself.
John:
maybe if you're like a salesperson and you want to keep every single contact they just keep growing but in general people have a much smaller normal contacts than photos it doesn't grow as fast and the data is really tiny so this would be a perfect test bet apple to finally figure out a solution to hey families exist and you know you figure that out and you can make a family and by the way families don't want to have two three four copies of grandma's address
John:
Or someone's got their birthday and someone has the anniversary and someone has the address, but you have the old address, but you have the new phone number.
John:
It's, it's a nightmare.
John:
We all do it.
John:
It's like, which one of our address folks has this person's address?
John:
And so many things are duplicated.
John:
Family.
John:
Perfect.
John:
They're all, they're all of our family.
John:
It's not like I just have my parents and my wife just has her parents.
John:
We both have both parents, right?
John:
Common friends.
Yeah.
John:
when an address is updated now we have to update it in both places now every time i have to do this thing like every time i want to contact somebody or mail somebody something in the mail which you rarely do these days i have to diff both of them have to say here's what i have for the address here's what you have for the address which one was updated more recently and which one looks like it's more right no that's that's when we mail people things like we mail christmas cards every year to you know a bunch of friends and like that's like that's contact hell as like tiff and i go back and forth like oh do
John:
you have what's didn't they move what do you have their address like what's the more recent one yeah right exactly well i i updated this more recently but i don't know if the address is more recent because you don't have per times and it's so bad it's just and and this is the case where it is a regression from the old system which is you'd have a family address book of this little black book somewhere in your house that you'd write people's addresses and phone numbers in and when someone updated their address you updated it in one place and multiple people in the family could pick up that address book
John:
uh yeah so i feel like we have the technology to solve this problem apple's not tackled it they totally should and here's the thing asking dan is asking for like you know any creative solutions there are all sorts of quote-unquote creative solutions i don't recommend any of them i know because my parents who apparently still want that old black book have tried so many different things to achieve this because they have almost all the same contacts they
John:
They don't want them to have separate pools of things.
John:
They get very frustrated when they have to update it in two places or it's just in one place.
John:
It's just, it is a nightmare.
John:
They've tried all the terrible things like trying to sync it through some third-party service or sharing an Apple ID.
John:
Do not do this.
John:
Like any way you go off the sort of the way Apple wants you to do things, you're just asking for more problems and bugs.
John:
And even if you can get it to work for some brief moment in time,
John:
It will eventually break and you'll end up with duplicated or lost contacts.
John:
And just the pain and suffering of using, of sharing an Apple ID, but also wanting to have your own separate Apple IDs and then trying to figure out what's what.
John:
It's not an easy thing for people who are not tech enthusiasts to keep track of.
John:
And it does eventually break and they can't fix it and they get even more frustrated.
John:
So there are creative solutions, but I don't recommend any of them.
John:
Please just, you know, Apple needs to solve this problem for us.
John:
It's not that hard to solve, and they should do it in Contacts.
John:
It's a great first place to try it, so take Dan's recommendation to Apple and do this now.
John:
I would prefer you to do Photos because I spend more time interacting with Photos than with Contacts, but I understand that Contacts are easier.
Casey:
If there's an app in the App Store that does this and does this well, I would love to hear about it, so please tweet at me.
John:
There are apps that do it well.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
Because anytime you're asking an application to programmatically modify one of your sort of precious data sets, oh, programmatically modify my contacts in response to something else, the potential for danger is big.
John:
And again, I'll endorse the idea that you can back up your entire contacts database from within the contacts application.
John:
uh i recommend that the data again the data set is small you will make a little archive file worst case scenario you can just destroy everything delete everything delete it all from iCloud delete it all from your content just delete delete delete and then restore it with your context database i think it's lossless i've had to do it a few times so i hope it's lossless if i'm losing something i haven't noticed what i'm losing uh but unlike photos it's so easy to do that make it an address book database backup
John:
Make five of them.
John:
Stick them in a little folder.
John:
Stick those in Dropbox.
John:
Have them go to Time Machine.
John:
Have them go to Backblaze.
John:
Like, have a million backups.
John:
Then start your experimentation and enjoy your life and contact hell as they duplicate and copy all the plays and revert back to old versions.
John:
It's not good.
Casey:
Also, I'd really like to quickly reiterate what Marco said about 1Password.
Casey:
We went to 1Password for families right when that was first announced.
Casey:
And I cannot speak enough good things about 1Password in general, but particularly about families.
Casey:
And it is extremely convenient to have, like Marco said, my personal vaults.
Casey:
My Limitless vault, which is my LLC, to have a family vault.
Casey:
So things like social security numbers or something like that can go in the family vault, whereas a login to Twitter that Aaron doesn't ever need can go in my personal vault.
Casey:
And stuff like that is super convenient.
Casey:
And we do the exact same thing as you and Tiff, and I cannot recommend it enough.
John:
It's right there in the name on one password for families.
John:
And it seems like someone at one password understands what families do when they live together and exist as a family.
John:
March 11th, March 11th, 2011, by the way.
John:
No, I life was an island.
John:
We're not at a 10 year anniversary, but we'll be sure to celebrate that.
Casey:
Cameron writes, Casey and John don't always upgrade their phones every year.
Casey:
Why not use the iPhone upgrade program?
Casey:
For me, a couple of reasons.
Casey:
First of all, it used to be, and I don't know if this is true, that you needed to unfreeze your credit in order to join the program, and I'm just too lazy to do that.
Casey:
Secondly, I don't always buy AppleCare, but as recently discussed on this very program, I am glad I did this year.
Casey:
Third of all, I'm kind of...
Casey:
allergic to having something that I don't own.
Casey:
Like, I mean, obviously I don't own my home outright, but I really try hard not to have a loan of any sort if I can avoid it.
Casey:
And that to the best of my understanding is exactly what this is.
Casey:
Now it last I had looked, it's not really costing users of the upgrade program money.
Casey:
Like when it first came out, I remember doing the math and it was within like a nickel and
Casey:
If you were to take the cost of the iPhone plus AppleCare plus and add that up, and it turns out if you divide by 24 or whatever, that was the exact monthly price.
Casey:
They weren't like fleecing you or anything with the iPhone upgrade program, and I presume that's still the case.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I just don't really like...
Casey:
I don't like owing people money if I can avoid it.
Casey:
And that's what this feels like to me.
Casey:
So it's probably not a logical answer.
Casey:
It's probably an emotional one, but I'm an emotional being.
Casey:
John is a logical being.
Casey:
Why aren't you on the upgrade program, man?
John:
I just want the control of when I get a new phone and when I don't.
John:
Like having another, as John Rock was another eel, another like sort of payment and contract and thing I have to remember that exists in terms of service.
John:
And it's just so much easier to say like when I want a new phone, I'll buy one.
John:
When I don't want one, I won't.
John:
And it's a much simpler relationship.
John:
And as you noted, like it's not...
John:
It's not a money, you know, even if there was a discount, even if you saved money by doing this, I probably still wouldn't do it just for the convenience reason.
John:
Like, because who knows when I'm going to buy a phone again?
John:
Just, you know, I have been getting one every two years, but they could come out with a phone that I really don't like and I would keep my phone for an extra year.
John:
And I know you can do that with the upgrade program, but it's just one more thing to have sort of running in the background that you have to keep track of.
John:
And yeah, it's not to my taste.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
Philip writes, what non-high-tech tech do you like at the moment slash which items have had a nice impact on your lives?
Casey:
And Philip continues, for example, I have a nice hairdryer that automatically lowers the temperature when it gets hot, and that's just so especially nice.
Casey:
I came up with two answers.
Casey:
One is kind of cribbing what Philip had said.
Casey:
We recently joined the early 2000s and got...
Casey:
electric toothbrushes and one of the nice features about this is that they uh will obviously they're shaking and you know there's a motor running uh as you're brushing your teeth and they will like i don't know change the rpm or do something so it sounds like a you know an obvious change in pitch when you need to move to a different section of your mouth and then it'll turn itself off after like a couple of minutes or whatever it is when you can be all done and i really like that
John:
Do you think electric toothbrushes were invented in the early 2000s?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
My point was a long time ago.
Casey:
My point was a long time ago.
John:
Aren't they from like the 50s?
John:
Well, okay.
John:
Well, these ones tell you when you need to move to the next tooth.
Casey:
Exactly.
John:
Otherwise, you would just grind that one tooth down to nothing.
John:
You'd be like, oh, this brush never told me to move.
Casey:
I just wanted to do you guys.
Casey:
I didn't know what to do.
Casey:
Uh, and then the other one, which is probably an even better answer is, um, I don't know if there's like a technical name for this.
Casey:
The one that I found that most closely resembles the one we have is listed as in all caps cast iron apple peeler.
Casey:
And then it goes on for another 35 minutes with different words.
Casey:
And, and I don't know, uh,
Casey:
random stuff to spam the search engine but anyways and game the search engine what this is is you put an apple on a series of three spikes and you and attached to those spikes is a hand crank and you crank this apple through like a a circular uh cutter and then there's a thing around the outside that peels the apple at the same side and in summary what you end up with is apple slices that are peeled when all you have done is turn to crank for a
Casey:
And this particular one I'm looking at is 30 bucks on Amazon.
Casey:
And I generally follow the Elton Brown school of thought, which, you know, you don't have a unit tasker.
Casey:
That's a waste.
Casey:
And certainly you can do all this by hand for sure.
Casey:
But if your wife makes a phenomenal apple pie, as mine does, and you want to make sure that she does that as frequently as possible, as I do, then one of these is super helpful and it saves a whole ton of time.
John:
Well, you say it saves time, but speaking of wives, my wife is actually a very fast apple peeler.
John:
She's one of the kitchen skills that I don't have, which is, you know the thing where you cut with a paring knife towards your thumb?
John:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
To peel things?
John:
I...
John:
I cannot master that skill.
John:
I mean, I can do it, but it's clumsy and slow and I take off way too much apple.
John:
She can do that with any shape thing, potato, apple or whatever.
John:
And this thing goes whizzes right through in two seconds, but you do have to mount it first.
John:
And so I would be interested to see an actual competition starting from apple on table.
John:
between mounting and whizzing and unmounting and her just going sheep sheep sheep sheep sheep with the little paring knife but yeah these things are super cool uh for me because i'm terrible at peeling apples if i had to make an apple pie i would love to have one of these things my parents had one i don't think we have one if we do it's probably lost somewhere in the house but
John:
Yeah, she makes apple pies with her paring knife.
John:
But if I had to be involved, I hate peeling oddly shaped things.
John:
Yeah, these things are really cool.
John:
Plus, they're fun to watch.
John:
If you have kids, get them in the kitchen to watch the little peel go flying off everything.
John:
It's cool.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Marco.
Marco:
I recently did an episode of Dubai Friday, our friend's wonderful podcast.
Marco:
And I talked all about flashlights, my love of modern LED and lithium battery based flashlights.
Marco:
So I will refer people to listen to that episode.
Marco:
And specifically, I think my my two favorites right now are both by Phoenix, the PD25 and the LD12.
Marco:
And we'll put links to both of those in the show notes.
Marco:
The PD25 is a little bit smaller, but uses a kind of nonstandard kind of battery type.
Marco:
uh the ld12 is almost as small both of them are similar brightness and uses double a's or the crazy battery that is like a double a but is lithium and rechargeable and red which off the top of my head i think is a 14 500 battery something like that so anyway uh beside that i want to also refer back to uh something that i recently took out of the closet for the season
Marco:
my beloved Patagonia Micro Puff hoodie.
Marco:
We had a very cold couple of mornings here last week, and this is a jacket that weighs less than most hoodies and is warm enough to be your only winter jacket if it doesn't get too cold where you are, and certainly by far my most frequently used jacket in the winter.
Casey:
John, I don't think I ever got your answer, did I?
Casey:
I think we skipped ahead after you were commenting on my beloved apple peeler.
John:
No, I don't know.
John:
Speaking of Marco's flashlights, I've been aware of the fancy flashlight world for, I mean, since the internet existed.
John:
I think that's where I discovered it.
John:
The internet, I think one of the, you know, that wasn't the first webpage, but very soon after webpages became a thing, people would have put their...
John:
they're cool you know they're everyday carry i think that term came later but people would put their put their cool little flashlight uh stuff in there i'm like oh these flashlights are cool i would love to get this you know it's led technology it's it's uh lithium-ion batteries they can be small and powerful uh especially as leds got cheaper or whatever uh but that's where i've always run into a problem every time marco recommends these i'm like
John:
I really want one of these cool flashlights.
John:
And then I see the prices and I'm like, I don't want it that much.
John:
They're so expensive compared to a $5 stupid cheap.
John:
Especially now, you can get cheap LED flashlights for no money.
John:
I want one of the good ones, but I want them to be less money.
John:
They're so expensive.
John:
I just can't.
John:
bring myself to do it so i continue to limp along with what i consider to be a series of really terrible flashlights that cost three dollars each and they last like three years so it's like a dollar a year it's like boy i would have to i'm not going to live long enough to recoup the cost of these other flashlights mostly i use them for uh morning dog walks when it's pitch black because i live in new england uh is to be able to see the poop to pick it up right so you need a flashlight but i wanted to be a small flashlight so it can be in my pocket and everything so
Marco:
the ones i have now uh you know i get along with but i would like one of those cool ones i might i should when you put the links in maybe i'll look at them again are they still they still like 60 bucks yeah but about 60 bucks is what like what a good like you know nerd flashlight costs yeah it's too much agreed but they they seem to last forever i mean like i've had i started buying good nerd flashlights uh probably about almost 10 years ago now i've yet to have one die like they're really good they're built you know very heavy duty i think i'm gonna like lose it or break it
John:
I don't think it's going to die.
John:
I think it's going to get lost somewhere or the kids are going to lose it or I'm going to break it in some way.
Marco:
You'd have to try pretty hard to break these.
Marco:
I'm not saying that you or your kids can't do it if you've really tried.
Marco:
They're very good at breaking things.
Marco:
It would take some doing to break one of these.
Marco:
Losing it, I think, would be the bigger concern.
Marco:
If you are willing to spend $60 on a little flashlight, these are delightful.
Marco:
It's delightful like...
Marco:
First of all, like how heavy duty and just, you know, well built they are and also just like how much light you get out of something that is so tiny compared to like what we all grew up with, you know, because the world of LEDs and now like, you know, higher voltage lithium batteries, like it's, it's really amazing what you can get in a very tiny flashlight.
Marco:
oh the whole street know exactly where i'm picking up the poop i don't need to be that bright well you don't have to there's a button on it that like you select your brightness level but so like you know most of the time i don't have it on full brightness but it is nice to occasionally like if i want to like you know when i'm walking my dog at night in the winter and i want to like you know scan the poorly lit street ahead of me for like is there like a deer or a raccoon or a cat ahead of me i want to know that or a skunk yeah
Marco:
We got to watch for the skunks.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Like, I need to know that.
Marco:
And, uh, and so it's nice for, you know, to amp up the brightness for a minute while you scan around and turn it back down.
John:
Have you ever, has your dog ever gotten skunked?
Marco:
No, I've, I've dodged that.
Marco:
Fortunately.
Marco:
Be glad.
John:
I know.
John:
I've heard.
John:
Uh, all right.
John:
So my, what is this?
John:
Non, non tech, non high tech product.
John:
Uh, the moment I, I talked about this same thing on another podcast.
John:
Just like Marco talked about his on another podcast.
John:
Uh,
John:
And mine is cheap.
John:
I spend a lot of time in the kitchen.
John:
I do most of the dinner cooking.
John:
And so I spend a lot of time cutting things.
John:
And the world of fancy knives is very much like the world of fancy flashlights where you can just go nuts and
John:
like it's more like the world of watches actually because like at a certain point performance characteristics stop being meaningful and now you're buying like pieces of art or whatever anyway a while back uh after a series of knives i was you know i was fine with like we got a set of knives from a local place near my wife that we had we got when we were married and we still have that set of knives so it's fine it was cheap we didn't have a lot of money we married in our early 20s
John:
We got a set of knives, but it's still sturdy and working.
John:
And so, you know, good investment.
John:
But they weren't great knives.
John:
So I've always been looking for, you know, a good chef's knife to replace my, you know, my wedding knives.
John:
And I maybe...
John:
10 years ago or whatever, one of the many nerd cooking shows that I watch, I think it might have been Cook's Illustrated, I don't even remember, might have been America's Test Kitchen, did a thing where they test a bunch of knives and they pick their favorite, and their favorite was this...
John:
uh how do you say this uh victorinox the the swiss army knife company yeah right yeah yeah victorinox fibrox pro chef's knife eight inch uh and you can still buy this this day and i'm very glad because i don't want it to be like one of those things where i bought it and then like i want to get a new one in a decade and no longer make it i just had that experience with my garbage can by the way my garbage can finally broke after like a decade i'm like oh no
John:
I don't want to have to shop for a new... I just want this exact same garbage can again.
John:
I did find almost the same garbage can.
John:
I bought two of them.
John:
So being smart.
Casey:
Of course you did.
John:
Anyway, this knife, it's not like a great knife in terms of like how knives are, how much carbon is in the carbon steel, how fancy is the handle.
John:
It is like...
John:
The most straightforward knife you could ever possibly imagine, probably made of a middling quality of steel.
John:
The handle is just cheap, textured plastic, and that's exactly the way I want it.
John:
It's like the OXO Good Grips of chef knives.
John:
It's $36 on Amazon, and we've had ours for at least 10 years, probably longer.
John:
I just bought a second one out of paranoia.
John:
The first one was perfectly fine.
John:
I didn't want a second one because I'm like, I just need to have another one of these.
John:
It's like my main knife.
John:
Every night I cut something with that knife.
John:
I use it all the time.
John:
I've got a knife sharpener, which is, again, probably a cruddy knife sharpener.
John:
I don't care.
John:
I'll put my $36 knife into my cruddy automated knife sharpener.
John:
I feel perfectly good about that, and it's worked great for 10 years.
John:
If you don't have a chef's knife that you're happy with, maybe you have a chef's knife that costs $120 that you don't like because it's weird and uncomfortable.
John:
Get this knife.
John:
It is the OXO Goodgriffs of Chef Knives, and it's so cheap that you won't care if you dull it or sharpen it badly or, you know, it gets caught in the garbage disposal and gets bent.
John:
It's $36.
John:
Get this knife.
John:
I should buy you an infomercial.
John:
Like, you can't afford not to buy this knife.
John:
four and a half stars on amazon that is an accurate rating it is not a fancy knife and so you will feel good about using it the only thing i have to say is when i bought the new one i noticed like the ridge on the cheap handle like the mold the cheap molded plastic handle with the textured plastic there's a ridge on it but apparently that goes away after a while because i looked at my old one and it's not there and so i started using it and eventually it wears down but yeah get this knife it's great
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Linode, Fracture, and ClearBank.
John:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Margo and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter...
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-G Marco Arman S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Tech Podcast So long
Marco:
listeners of our show will know that you occasionally hear the ringing of a call bell in the background of our show it sounds something like this
John:
What's that bell sound that I always hear?
John:
It's so weird.
John:
I've been listening for years.
John:
I don't understand when that bell sound appears.
Marco:
So this bell sound originates with our friend Merlin Mann, who has a bell like this and would occasionally ring it, accenting a joke or something.
Marco:
Mostly early on, I heard it mostly on Back to Work.
Marco:
And then, of course, it has migrated to other shows as well.
Marco:
And he is the master of these bells.
John:
Speaking of mastery of the bells, by the way, this complaint has been voiced by listeners.
John:
And I kind of agree with them.
John:
You may have different things to say.
John:
As the performer of the bell, this is your instrument.
John:
I understand that you may have your particular techniques.
John:
Oh, no.
John:
Traditionally speaking, a bell of this kind should be rung by tapping and allowed to ring.
John:
And people don't like it when you mute it afterwards.
Marco:
hitting the plunger you're doing that on purpose or is it just yes because that i learned that from merlin all right you know what like merlin used to just ring it fully like that and let it ring out but then like as as he developed the you know comedic stylings of using the bell he would have like a really quick joke and do like a quick little hit and move on he's got a fever it's not a cowbell slightly less bell yeah anyway
Marco:
So a while back around like, you know, we started the show, you know, what, like 2013 or something?
Casey:
Forever.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
So, yeah, I occasionally I have a whole folder of sound clips that I I'll occasionally drop in to, you know, punctuate a joke or be funny or be a reference to something or, you know, delineate sections of the show or whatever else.
Marco:
And forever ago, I clipped out a sound effect of Merlin's bell doing that short bell, that short ring.
Marco:
And I used that for a little while here and there.
Marco:
And it was, you know, some clip I stole from back to work for like two seconds.
Marco:
Turns out.
Marco:
This was all before 2016.
Marco:
that I would occasionally use that.
Marco:
And we developed this joke on the show that I didn't want to overuse Merlin's bell because it's his.
Marco:
I don't want to steal or ruin his gag.
Marco:
So I didn't want to overuse it.
Marco:
So we kind of came into this pattern that I only would use the bell right after John mentions file systems, either file systems in general, the file system, or a particular file system, and only the first time during a show.
John:
And I just want to point out that that's not like a thing that you do sometimes.
John:
It's very consistent.
John:
Literally every single time you hear that bell, I have just said something about file systems.
John:
So it kind of amazes me that people can listen to the show for years, literally for years, and not pick up, like you always say, how good humans are at pattern matching, and they find patterns when they don't even exist.
John:
This is a definite pattern, intentionally put there, very consistently, and yet...
John:
it doesn't connect to a lot of people listening.
John:
And maybe they're tuning out because I'm talking about file systems and they're not even listening and then they hear the bell and it brings them back and they don't know what I just said.
John:
So maybe I'm to blame here.
John:
And that's why I don't answer them.
John:
And I'm not doing it to be mean, but I don't want to explain why the bell is.
John:
I want people to sort of discover the bell on their own.
John:
I mean, now, obviously, Marco's explaining it.
John:
I think that's fine after 60 years we've been podcasting or whatever the hell it's been.
John:
It's fine to explain it in the after show where half the people probably won't listen because those same people probably think that...
John:
And the show says, now the show is over.
John:
They're like, okay, well, turn this podcast off.
Casey:
Right later.
John:
Pro tip, the show is not over.
Casey:
Actually, before we go any further, I would like to point out that to the best of my recollection, once Marco acquired a physical bell, and I'm jumping slightly.
Marco:
Which I get to, yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Once Marco acquired a physical bell, I cannot remember a time that that John has mentioned, you know, one of the qualifying phrases, you know, file system, APFS, etc.
Casey:
I cannot remember a time that John has made mention of one of those things.
Casey:
And Marco has not immediately rang that bell with his hand.
Casey:
It has been unreal how consistent he has been over the course of the, I don't know, two or three years that this bell has been a thing.
Marco:
So I was using the sound effect.
Marco:
I would just put it in during editing.
Marco:
I would use the sound effect for the first couple of years.
Marco:
And because we talked a lot about file systems, John was known for it, and we got a tip a couple of months before WWDC 2016 that they were going to announce a new file system.
Marco:
And so I thought, wouldn't it be funny...
Marco:
if I brought a bell into the keynote and rang it when they said file system during the keynote.
Marco:
But I didn't have one.
Marco:
So I ordered myself a physical bell.
Marco:
I figured I have to get a physical bell.
Marco:
Then I have to teach myself how to do the short ding that I was using the sound effect for that Merlin was doing.
Marco:
So I went on Amazon and ordered a bell.
Marco:
And the one I ordered, unfortunately, had a much higher pitched sound.
Marco:
It was like the wrong note.
Marco:
And what I was trying to do was match the sound effect I've been using exactly.
Marco:
Have it be the exact same bell tone so that nobody could even tell that I was now using a real one.
Marco:
And in fact, still people who listen to the live stream are still very surprised that it's a real bell the first time they hear it.
Marco:
Um, that yes, this is actually a real bell that I'm hitting now ever since early 2016.
Marco:
Um, but anyway, so I was trying to find exactly Merlin's bell.
Marco:
First one I bought was the wrong note and you can't really search like Amazon listings for like, what is the frequency of this bell ring?
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
you know none of them really have that uh information published and so eventually i just asked merlin like hey what's what's the one that you got and he sent me this link and we'll put it in the show notes and it's it's of course it's of course this is what merlin has it is this like gag ring bell for service like like by this brand accoutrements or accoutrement i don't know it's probably french
Marco:
and uh and it's like this like gag gift belly the kind of thing you get like in a spencer gifts like this is this is the bell all right so i thought okay so i ordered that i got it and i'm sure enough it was a perfect match i've been using that bell ever since i've been bringing this bell
Marco:
Everywhere we do a live show.
Marco:
So I brought it to WWDC like literally four times or three times.
Marco:
I traveled with it to and from the beach.
Marco:
Like anywhere I'm going to where I'm recording this show, I bring this bell.
Marco:
You forgot to, by the way, for the WWDC thing, you forgot to mention the best part of that story.
Marco:
oh yeah well yeah so i actually did bring the bell into the keynote uh they didn't announce it during the keynote they did announce it during the state of the union and you can hear us discuss this on uh atp episode 174 titled a ding in the room i can tell you that somebody brought a bell into the state of the union and didn't tell anybody including all the co-hosts that were sitting next to him and uh and
Marco:
hit it real hard and it was clearly audible in the stream in the video uh but anyway had this bell been traveling with it all these years this year when i brought it back from the beach it got all rattly like something here i'll show you what happens you bring anything to the beach it just destroys it it's the salt air and it's yeah like it's just something was something has become mechanically wrong with my bell and i i couldn't figure out how to fix it so it sounded right again it was just all around you have the
Marco:
right to repair that bell it's not glued together i know i've tried right so i went back to the original amazon listing that i bought in 2016 and i ordered myself two more i figured let me just let me get i'll get i'll get a spare john and i'll get because i mean one lasted three years with a lot of travel let me get two more i'll leave i can leave one at the beach that'll cut out a lot of the travel and have like a travel bell and that'll be it okay
Marco:
And it was a third-party seller.
Marco:
It was all that was selling there.
Marco:
But they arrived a few days later, and it wasn't the blue box novelty ring bell for service.
Marco:
It was a generic Graphco call bell.
Marco:
And instead of sounding like this, it sounds like this, which is totally the wrong note.
Marco:
Oh, no.
Marco:
Oh, no.
Marco:
And by a lot, too.
Marco:
Like, that's totally wrong.
Marco:
It's way higher.
Marco:
So I thought, oh, God, okay.
Marco:
So I requested a return.
Marco:
I went back to the same listing, which still had the picture of the nice blue box one that I was looking for.
Marco:
And I went to a different seller that was listed there, and I ordered two more from them.
Marco:
And I figured, you know what?
Marco:
Just in case this is wrong, these aren't very expensive.
Marco:
There was another one that was significantly more money.
Marco:
it was a whole different seller it was like so you know normally that the regular price was ten dollars each the one i was ordering the second time was fourteen dollars each and there was another seller that was selling for thirty dollars each and i thought you know my word just in case these you know these are these got to be two different listings two different companies maybe this bell is out of production and they're like scalping people for you know the cost fine i need them so i i ordered two of the fourteen dollar ones and two of the thirty dollar ones from two different companies right
Marco:
All four arrived.
Marco:
All four of them are from a company called Honest Medical or HPMS or the Therapy Connection.
Marco:
The mailing labels are very similar.
Marco:
And all four of them are the wrong note.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Marco:
They're all the same generic Graph Cobell.
Marco:
So I have now...
Marco:
three different sellers that have sold me the same generic bell all of them seem to be exactly the same company behind them and now i'm getting into like oh god like this is like an amazon thing right like because this is like this is the problem with amazon like there's so much room for like bs and arbitrage and scams and counterfeiting and generic stuff like
John:
basically this listing has been corrupted by like you know this company is entering these as that item when in fact they are not that and they are they are like a generic similar item but it's not the same item that's listed or pictured right you know speaking of third-party sellers i had a weird experience with amazon recently too i mentioned my garbage can that i wanted to get more of i'm scouring the internet trying to find the garbage can eventually i track down who sells it of course it's you know i found it at walmart so i ordered at walmart but i don't know if any of you have ever ordered online from walmart
John:
They don't know how to deliver you things that you order on the web.
John:
They literally don't know how to do it.
John:
They're so bad.
John:
It's like half the time I order stuff from Walmart, I just assume I'll get an email three days later that says, yeah, that thing you ordered, we don't actually have that.
John:
Never mind.
John:
Your order is canceled.
John:
Anyway.
John:
And then I also found that on Amazon, similar deal to this bell, sketchy looking listing, third party sellers, you just send and cross your fingers, right?
John:
So a couple days later, what arrives at my house is two gigantic Walmart boxes.
John:
They're brown cardboard boxes with the Walmart name and logo wrapped all around them.
John:
It's like a blue Walmart decorations all over them.
John:
And I'm like...
John:
Good old Walmart.
John:
Finally, you know, bank makes an error in your favor.
John:
Walmart sent me two garbage cans when I just ordered.
John:
And I double checked.
John:
I went back to my email receipt.
John:
I'm like, yep, I ordered one garbage can and Walmart sent me two.
John:
Well, that kind of makes up for the 800 other times that you canceled my order without sending me anything after waiting three days.
John:
But then I also noticed that my little Alexa had a yellow ring on it.
John:
And I said, well, I already said it, whatever.
John:
I said, Alexa, notifications!
John:
And it told me that a shipment had arrived from Amazon containing a garbage can.
John:
Like, I did order one garbage can from Amazon and one from Walmart, but what arrived at my doorstep were two Walmart boxes.
John:
So as far as I can tell, Amazon sent me...
John:
a Walmart product.
John:
Like, it's not ambiguous.
John:
It is in a Walmart box that is identical to the box from Walmart proper, but they obviously both came from the same place and arrived on the same day, and they're both from... So, like, I order something at Amazon, and Walmart fulfills it?
John:
Like, what is going on?
John:
The same way that you order things from this listening...
John:
different sellers for different prices and the same stupid product that's not that product shows up i don't understand what's happening in amazon or what what even is amazon anymore is it just a place where you press a button and then somehow things arrive but you're like how is it's like going to to burger king uh and ordering a quarter pound of cheese and getting a big mac
John:
What?
John:
I don't understand it at all.
Marco:
Anyway, continue your bell story.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So I was now in possession of six of the wrong kind of bell at various prices from $10 to $30 each.
Marco:
Oh, my word.
Marco:
You're going to corner the market on bells, on incorrect bells.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
And meanwhile, of the three orders I have placed so far,
Marco:
all three of them had the same return address and a very similar company name, even though they were all three from totally differently named Amazon third-party sellers.
Marco:
And so clearly there's these companies who put themselves as lots of listings at lots of different price points, even though it's the same company.
Marco:
They're just making all these shell companies, I guess, or fake names.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
So I thought, okay, fine.
Marco:
You know what?
Marco:
Amazon is killing me here.
Marco:
They're useless.
Marco:
Meanwhile, I was searching eBay for the brand and everything.
Marco:
I was looking all over the place.
Marco:
Couldn't find them anywhere.
Marco:
And finally, I found using Google Shopping, there was this other site, which I'm not going to name for their protection.
Marco:
There was this other site that had the listing of exactly what I was looking for.
Marco:
It had the picture of the right box and everything.
Marco:
I'm like, finally, it was $21 each.
Marco:
And I'm like, you know what?
Marco:
I'm getting four of them.
Marco:
I'm just kidding.
Marco:
Obviously, this is so hard to find.
Marco:
I'm never going to be able to find them again.
Marco:
It's like John Gruber holding onto his old Apple keyboard.
Marco:
It's like, if I can find this for sale, for God's sake, I'll buy them all, right?
Marco:
I never want to have to do this again.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
So I order four of these bells from this random other site.
Marco:
They arrive a few days later, and I look at the man label, and it says Honest Medical, HPMS, therapy connection.
Marco:
It's the exact same company that was sending them from Amazon, and I was like, you've got to be effing kidding me.
Marco:
They have all the bells, obviously.
Marco:
They've cornered the market on bells.
Marco:
Sure enough, I open it up, and it's the wrong bell.
Marco:
And it's four of them from the same damn company.
John:
They just keep sending you the same bells they sent you before.
John:
You return them and get a refund, and you order them again from a different thing.
John:
We keep sending a lot of bells to this address, and they keep returning them.
Marco:
No, but I still had them all.
Marco:
At peak time, I had like 10 bells in my house.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
so because i was like we know waiting for the ups guy to come pick up the returns so like you should do a top four on bells top four bells and all the bells are that bell right yeah exactly so like so here i am i'm like you got it like no matter what i get no matter it's like groundhog daily no matter what i do the same thing shows up it's like
Marco:
oh my god so uh so and it turns out this other site that i had found was just like an amazon front site like i emailed them all pissed off i'm like you know you you i demand a refund this is not what was pictured clearly you're just reselling amazon stuff they responded not addressing the accusation that they were just an amazon shill site but their return label that they gave me was a pdf of an amazon return label oh my word so
Marco:
so you know clearly so i fell for one of these arbitrage sites but i i think i'm gonna get a refund uh we'll see so i'm like you know what i'm i'm you know blocked at every turn here what the heck am i gonna do i went back to amazon i went to all the other sellers there aren't that many sellers of this bell listed but you know they were all that same company just different names there was one company in the list
Marco:
that they had longer shipping times than the rest, and their listing, all their info that they give to Amazon, it looked a little bit different than the rest.
John:
By the way, before you get to the end of the story, I wanted to say what I would do in this situation, and what I do do when I'm in this exact situation.
John:
I always try to find if they're still in business, the actual manufacturer of the product.
John:
And I hope to hell that that manufacturer has a website.
John:
So whoever makes this ring for service, novelty bell for Spencer gifts, find the company that makes it go to their website.
John:
And if they don't have online ordering at the very least, get like the exact part number and start searching based on that rather than trusting the picture.
John:
Now, maybe it's not possible with a novelty bell, but that's my usual technique.
John:
So continue.
Marco:
I try, but this appears to be no longer produced for possibly quite some time.
Marco:
Finally, I found this one seller that looked a little bit different than the rest.
Marco:
I emailed them and I'm like, hey, here's exactly what I'm looking for.
Marco:
Can you verify whether this is exactly what you have or whether you have this other thing?
Marco:
They responded and they're like, yes, we actually have the real thing.
Marco:
We only have three left.
Marco:
great i place an order immediately not from amazon but from their site directly i got my bells what shows up a few days later is three of the correct bell so finally
Marco:
for uh you know for whatever price i think like 20 bucks each whatever it was 15 bucks each i finally have the correct bell i have three of them now that work and one of them that doesn't and so finally i'm gonna hoard these for the rest of time or at least for the rest of the however long atp runs i'm gonna hoard these bells and now finally i have them but it's just like i know this is kind of you know and not a great ending to a story but that i finally got the right thing but just like
Marco:
It just kind of shows how messed up the whole Amazon ecosystem is.
Marco:
You can get one company dominating the listings for this thing, selling a counterfeit item from all these different names, all these different price points, plus this arbitrage site that was off to the side.
John:
It's counterfeiting a garbage-y item.
John:
It's counterfeiting an Apple product or something.
John:
It's counterfeiting a Spencer Gifts thing.
Marco:
No, they're counterfeiting a $10 bill.
Yeah.
John:
oh god so i finally have the right thing and that's it that's my story you should save the the quote-unquote broken one too oh i am good good to have the parts and i feel like it you know if you have two broken ones maybe you can make one working one out of it it's still interested in exactly how this thing broke i feel like it could be i tried to repair by the way my garbage can but uh i have some if i'm i tried using crazy glue that worked for like two days as it usually does
John:
I have some mechanical ways I could try to fix it, but I'm saving the body just like my cheese graters so that I can eventually make one whole working garbage can several years now.
John:
The garbage can situation was pretty grim because what I wanted was a garbage can that...
John:
has a lid where you touch a thing on top of it and the lid open so i didn't want a foot press thingy right and where it is in my kitchen it has to open on the narrow side right so it has to be you know wider than it is long it has to be like a rectangle and the hinge has to be on the short side of the rectangle
John:
right because that's that's just how our garbage can is and where it's placed and that's not going to change unless we get our kitchen totally remodeled just try finding a garbage can that's like that they either all have foot pedals or they all open the other way like price was no object materials were almost no object i didn't care it's just impossible to find except for my one garbage can that i found um almost almost the identical garbage can i found the only difference is that there's slightly textured plastic in an area where the old plastic used to be smooth which i'm afraid will make it slightly harder to clean that part of it but
John:
It's not really visible unless you're right on top of it and you can see that it's textured.
John:
So I got two of them and I'm keeping them.
John:
Cheese Gritters, still can't find any of those.
John:
If anyone ever finds my cheese Gritter, just buy me one.
John:
I will pay you for them as long as the prices are reasonable.
John:
Not like that $75 spatula that I didn't buy.
Casey:
Oh my gosh.
Marco:
But what is the right... I mean, I would have paid $75 for one of the correct bell.
John:
yeah yeah well i mean the thing is if you don't have a working one like that's the spatula i have a working one and there's no you know but the cheese gridders i know that they break and the bells apparently now you know that they break maybe you should be more gentle with your bell i guess i'm traveling with it shoving under suitcases with a sock in the middle so it doesn't ring you should get one of those custom fitted cut foam like carrying cases for the bell yeah
John:
You can Marco this up.
John:
How expensive can you make this $10 bell?
John:
$150 custom cut Pelican carrying case for it.