Whatever It Takes to Get the Laundry Folded
Casey:
When Declan was really little, I'm saying like two-ish years old, Aaron typically would bring him to what I like to call baby gym.
Casey:
It was a place called Romp and Roll where you would bring your infant or your toddler and you would do like not gymnastics, but like they would run around and play and sing songs and do games and whatever the case may be.
Marco:
Collect viruses.
Casey:
She did this with him constantly.
Casey:
I went on Sundays with Declan and we would go in the morning and do a romp and roll together.
Casey:
We would have lunch together.
Casey:
And this gave Aaron some time to not be mom and be Aaron.
Casey:
And one of the times that I went to this barbecue place with Declan, it was like two or three at the time.
Casey:
I had gotten myself some French fries and I thought, you know what?
Casey:
I'll let him try a French fry because what's it going to hurt if he tries it just once?
Casey:
And this was early on in dad life when I didn't realize that much like with a dog, if you try something just once with a child, especially of that age, it's not just once, baby.
Casey:
Guess what?
Casey:
Declan's going to demand French fries every time for the rest of time.
Marco:
It's like trying heroin just once.
Casey:
Right, exactly.
Casey:
And so I learned my lesson.
Casey:
But fast forward to earlier today, and for reasons unknown, Declan has decided that he would like to listen to at least a little bit of ATP tonight.
Casey:
And so I believe that through the wall behind me, he and his sister are, and maybe Aaron, are listening to me.
Casey:
And he was very excited to find the delay between when he hears me laughing through the wall and when I'm laughing on the live broadcast.
Casey:
So now I don't know what to do with myself because I love that he's there interested in this, but...
Casey:
I don't know if this is a French fry situation where I will regret the monsters that I've created or if this is nothing but a healthy thing.
Casey:
So say hi to the rest of the family, you two, because apparently for at least a few minutes, they're here as well.
John:
Hi, the rest of the family.
John:
Sorry about the heroin joke.
John:
Don't you assume that your amazingly powerful dad uncoolness will repel him eventually?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Or that our combined three-way dad uncoolness, because we have a potent dose of dad uncoolness here.
Casey:
And so there's only, I mean, how old is he now?
Casey:
Declan is 10.
Casey:
He is close to 11.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
One or two more years and he will not be able to tolerate how uncool we all are as dads.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
Now, Michaela, she is seven and a half now.
Casey:
And so I think I am still at least slightly cool for the most part.
Casey:
Of course, some of the, oh, dead, so uncool will bleed from him to her at some point.
Casey:
But yes, by our powers combined, the three of us can repel any child.
Casey:
I'm quite sure.
John:
Is Declan interested in computer stuff?
Casey:
Not in the way that you mean, I don't think.
Casey:
He's become more and more interested in futzing about with his phone.
Casey:
Like earlier today, another example of the French fry thing.
Casey:
We have both of them have older iPhones that don't have cellular service.
Casey:
I've mentioned this many times in the past.
Casey:
But they use them as a noise maker when they sleep.
Casey:
And they also can text only Aaron and myself because we have parental controls, whatever it's called, screen time and all that set up in such a way that they can only text us.
Casey:
But earlier today, we relented.
Casey:
And now they are allowed to text each other via their respective email addresses, which are used only for this purpose.
Casey:
And I don't know if there's another french fry situation where all of a sudden I've created a monster or two monsters, really, where they will start texting each other.
Casey:
You know, it is the second they're both awake.
Casey:
Now, granted, we have times that I don't think they can use the messages app until like seven in the morning or something like that.
Casey:
But who knows what monsters we've created.
Casey:
But I'm enjoying as much as I joke.
Casey:
I'm enjoying this.
Casey:
a surprising amount of interest in what dad does for a living because usually it's you know oh he he clickety clacks on the keyboard and yaps into the microphone from time to time and that's mostly accurate if i'm honest maybe it'll stop you from having such a potty mouth that's the thing yeah now i gotta really watch myself right our first topic today is how to bypass screen time protection he doesn't need us for that right that's probably true
Casey:
All right, let's do some follow up.
Casey:
And we, I think it was John quipped last episode.
Casey:
Do you think there's anybody listening to this right now who is currently wearing a Vision Pro?
John:
Nope, it was Marco.
Casey:
Oh, wasn't Marco?
Casey:
See, the one time I... Just the opposite of what you think.
Casey:
It's so true.
John:
Anyway, it stands as a technique.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So anyway, so Marco quipped, do you think there's anybody listening to this right now who's currently wearing a vision pro?
Casey:
And I think both of both John and I simultaneously said no.
Casey:
Well, it turns out front of the show, D Griffin Jones is and was that person.
Casey:
So make that one right.
Casey:
Steve Griffin Jones.
Casey:
It's a great device to wear while doing chores.
Casey:
So you can have a floating video while you fold laundry or play pause media with soapy dish hands, which is an interesting take that I hadn't considered.
Casey:
And I think I kind of like it.
John:
I can see like watching like a show or something while you're washing dishes or something with the floating window but it's a podcast like there's no visual elements you can just use airpods but you know I really thought like I wasn't doing that as a joke I really thought it would be literally zero apparently it's at least one and that amazes me but you know everyone's got their own things that work for them whatever it takes to get the laundry folded and the dishes washed.
Marco:
But I mean, couldn't he literally just put his phone with the speaker on the counter and do the same thing?
John:
There's lots of other options.
John:
We'll put in a link to his toot.
John:
He posted like a screenshot so you can see what he's experiencing, which is a floating ATP window that's playing audio while he does dishes with the Vision Pro on.
John:
So, you know, well, again, whatever it takes.
Casey:
I think the thought technology that was new to me was what D. Griffin John said about you can play pause by just picking up your hands and pinching, which even if you're grabbing the stalk of an AirPod, as I can attest, apparently water damage can occur.
Casey:
So it is a safer approach, leaving aside the fact that you have a $3,500 thing on your face right above a pile of water.
Casey:
But we'll ignore that.
Yeah.
Casey:
Last episode, I had scared Marco by saying, oh, I just rejiggered my desk.
Casey:
And as it turns out, there was later an issue with Marco's recording, which, with respect, I thought was hilarious.
Casey:
And I'm very happy it wasn't me.
Casey:
So I guess it's going to be my turn this time.
Casey:
But anyways, I briefly mentioned that part of the reason I got this TS5 Plus was because I wanted the 10 gigabit Ethernet.
Casey:
And it's part of the TS5, specifically the Plus model.
Casey:
And I had done as of last episode, which was just a couple of days ago as we sit here, I had done some performance testing using Samba and using a command line app called iPerf3.
Casey:
And I had noticed that I was not getting anywhere near full 10 gigabits a second.
Casey:
And we had some theories, which I think knowing what little we knew at the time were reasonable theories.
Casey:
Marco had said, hey, you're not going to get that much data off of a spinning disk, especially a 7200 RPM spinning disk, which is completely fair.
Casey:
Marco or John, one of you, I don't know which one.
Casey:
I don't even know who is the opposite because I don't know who to guess.
Marco:
It was like four days ago.
Casey:
Yeah, I know, man.
Casey:
But a lot has happened since then.
Casey:
I've been busy.
Casey:
But one of you said that, oh, it could be CPU problems or excuse me.
Casey:
Yeah, I think one of you did say CPU problems and that's what it was.
Casey:
Well, I have since found a tutorial, which was probably pointed to me by someone, but I lost who that somebody was.
Casey:
I will put a link in the show notes, but suffice to say this tutorial talks about how, yes, iPerf 3 is often CPU bound.
Casey:
And the easy fix for this is to just multi-thread it.
Casey:
And they provide some examples of how you can do that.
Casey:
I did that and I forgot to capture a screenshot, but at one point I was definitely getting like nine and change gigabits per second transfers.
Casey:
So yeah.
Casey:
That is what I wanted to see.
Casey:
That makes me very happy, and I can consider this issue solved for now.
Casey:
John, speaking of things that Marco and I are just deeply concerned about, what's going on with your toaster?
John:
I mentioned I had an error code last episode and called support and they said, well, it's working now, so don't worry about it.
John:
A couple other people wrote in with info about the same error code.
John:
JP Teddy writes, I have the same toaster as you and I've owned it for five or six years.
John:
I see the E01 code about twice a year.
John:
I unplug it and plug it back in five minutes later.
John:
In all the other respects, the toaster works flawlessly.
John:
I never bother to check the manual or call Breville because it doesn't bother me enough.
John:
but maybe I will next time it happens.
John:
So that's not great.
John:
Seems like it's common enough that another person had the problem.
John:
John F. wrote in to say, I get the easier one on my toaster oven maybe once every one to two months.
John:
It pretty much always occurs when using another kitchen appliance on the same circuit, most frequently my espresso machine.
John:
For that appliance, the toaster freaks out just at the moment I turn off the pump after pulling a shot.
John:
I presume the toaster is hypersensitive to disruptions in power, either from brief voltage shifts or possibly noise introduced from the appliances.
John:
My toaster is newer than John's original, but predates the revised plug design.
John:
That sounds even more like mine because I was using the stovetop at the time.
John:
I wasn't using the toaster at all.
John:
I was just sitting there, but maybe it's the computers are more sophisticated and it's cranky about voltage fluctuations.
John:
Unfortunately, unlike things like television or computer, I don't particularly feel comfortable hooking up my toaster to like a UPS or something to smooth out the voltage because that is probably ill-advised and I don't have room for it anyway.
John:
So...
John:
At least I have some some anecdotal evidence that, you know, voltage fluctuations in my ancient crappy house with a too small power panel may be to blame.
John:
So we'll say I will probably like wait a year.
John:
I'll tell you how many times during that year did I see E0-1 and then plug and unplug it.
John:
So we have one report of, you know, once or twice a year and one report of once every one to two months.
John:
I hope I am in the once or twice a year category, but we'll see.
Marco:
It would be really funny to get a toaster UPS.
Marco:
To supply enough power, it would have to be a pretty beefy UPS.
Marco:
Yeah, I think that's not a thing you should do.
Marco:
I mean, you can.
Marco:
You can get UPSs that are rated for 1,500 watts or whatever it would be.
Marco:
You can totally do that, and as long as it's rated for that much current, it would be fine.
Marco:
But those just tend to be really big UPSs.
John:
Where would you even put it on your counter?
John:
I'd have to put it in the garage or something.
Yeah.
John:
Like through the wall or, you know, get one of the whole house UPSs or, yeah, the whole electrical system in my house needs to be updated.
John:
But hopefully that will be somebody else's problem when we sell this house.
John:
But for now, I'm just going to cruise by on what we have.
Casey:
Do you have any intention on relocating before both kids are graduated from college?
John:
No.
Casey:
Do you have any intentions before both of you are retired?
John:
Probably not.
Casey:
To be clear, you're never allowed to retire because... I was going to say, he kind of already is retired.
Casey:
I'm trying to take the happy path, but Marco's not wrong.
Casey:
But I don't think that I can handle replacing either of you, really.
Casey:
So you two are stuck with me forever.
Casey:
I hate to break it to you.
John:
I'm irreplaceable.
John:
I mean, yeah.
Casey:
In so many ways, John.
Casey:
Don't worry about it.
John:
I got, you know, one whole kid to put through college and one one-fourth of a kid to put through college.
John:
I'm not going anywhere.
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So you heard it here first.
Casey:
John has already got one leg out the door.
Casey:
He's only got four years left.
Casey:
We need to do a Tim Cook style succession planning.
Marco:
Oh, gosh.
Marco:
We need a John Hotspair.
Casey:
We need to talk about sunscreen and Marco's new thought technology with regard to sunscreen.
Casey:
Marco, can you summarize for me what your discovery or assertion was last episode with regard to chemical versus physical sunscreen?
Casey:
And then we'll talk about the feedback we got.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
I had quickly gone through the difference between chemical and mineral sunscreen, and I had summarized it basically as saying chemical sunscreens have chemicals that absorb into your skin, and they absorb UV rays, whereas mineral sunscreens use fine metallic dust to reflect the sunlight off of the top of your skin.
Marco:
That's what I had said, which apparently is wrong.
Casey:
Prodan Stetev points us to an academic research paper, Improving Patient Communication on Sunscreen Choice, Updating Mechanistic Misconceptions.
Casey:
And was this, John, was this from Prodan or was this from the academic paper?
John:
No, this is all from the linked article.
John:
Linked article is actually a letter to the editor of some journal, but...
John:
We'll put a link in the show notes to this letter to the editor from like five different authors.
John:
The main point is that this letter cites academic papers, which were all linked from the document with the weird DOI.org thing.
John:
So if you want to see all the papers that are backing this, it's not just a crank writing in saying they have an idea.
John:
This is someone citing a bunch of studies.
Casey:
Thank you for the clarification.
Casey:
So from that letter, many assume that chemical sunscreens absorb UV light and convert the energy to heat, while physical sunscreens such as zinc oxide and titanium dioxide reflect and scatter UV light.
Casey:
However, this mechanism is at best a historic artifact from when physical sunscreen particle sizes were quite large.
Casey:
"...though such non-micronized and non-nanoparticulate physical sunscreens may have had a greater proportion of its protective mechanism from reflection and scatter in the past, these formulations have largely been abandoned for more commercially viable options with the advent of micronization technologies.
Casey:
Furthermore, even micro-sized physical sunscreen formulations have been increasingly replaced by nanoparticle formulations."
Casey:
It is important for dermatologists to recognize that the primary mechanism of action for modern physical sunscreen agents is the very same protective mechanism of chemical sunscreens, absorption of UV light.
Casey:
It was recently found that modern particulate sized physical zinc oxide and titanium oxide reflected less than 5% of incoming UV light on average.
Casey:
Rather than relying on reflection and scatter, the overwhelming majority of the attributable protective effect of zinc oxide and titanium dioxide is by UV light absorption, which excites electrons from the valence band to the higher energy conductance band.
Casey:
This energy is later primarily dissipated as heat in a manner analogous to chemical sunscreen UV light absorption.
John:
This is another one of those things that's like was probably true at one point, but technology marches on and it sounds like they're making the stuff, like the metal oxides and stuff, smaller and smaller in the sunscreen because that makes for a better product.
John:
Like it's smoother and we have the technology to make it smaller.
John:
And apparently once you make them that small, probably given the wavelength of UV light or whatever, there's been a bunch of new studies that have shown actually it's not really reflecting that much anymore.
John:
It's mostly, you know, its effect is because of this absorption effect.
John:
And there's a bunch of papers about that.
John:
And the papers seem somewhat contentious.
John:
So this may be sort of the cutting edge of research.
John:
Although this is again, this is a letter from 2023.
John:
But just to clarify from last week, apparently, it's not as cut and dried as it used to be.
John:
And, you know, technology marches on.
Casey:
With regard to Apple security for unreleased devices and the suing of John Prosser because of the leak of the liquid metal design scheme, an anonymous person writes, Apple employees with pre-release iPhone hardware can or could when I was there expense an Apple approved gun safe to store the phone in and then they are required to store the device in such a safe when not carrying it.
Casey:
This is a relaxation of the older rules requiring you to be accompanied by a, quote, physical security expert, quote, from Apple while taking unreleased hardware out of Apple secure areas.
Casey:
Or maybe two of them, two of the experts.
Marco:
I kind of love the idea that, like, your phone would have a bodyguard.
Marco:
That's kind of amazing.
Marco:
Yeah, they're not guarding you.
John:
You can get run over by a car.
John:
They don't care.
John:
They're just guarding the phone.
Casey:
What they'll do is they'll let you get run over by the car and then snatch up the phone as quickly as possible.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
With regard to the low-cost Apple laptops, Jason Anthony Guy writes, I don't think I want to read this because I know at least a handful of people from Apple listen to this program, and I don't want to give them ideas.
Casey:
All right, fine.
Casey:
I'll read it.
Casey:
Jason Anthony Guy writes, here's one more option for cost savings on the rumored low-cost Apple laptop.
Casey:
Ads on the boot, login, and wait screens, and for good measure, the screensaver.
Casey:
Coming soon, Apple MacBook, paren, fall 2025, comma, with ads, paren, with a $150 option to remove them.
Casey:
If you're not familiar with this whole shtick, Kindles, Amazon Kindles are sold as a version with ads or a version without ads.
John:
Oh, no, they don't come with ads, Casey.
John:
They come with special offers.
Casey:
Oh, sorry.
Casey:
My mistake.
John:
I am so sorry.
John:
It's a funny joke.
John:
We didn't mention it.
John:
How can they take money out of laptops?
John:
We didn't mention it for two main reasons, I feel like.
John:
One is that, and we say this every time we talk about the potential of Apple doing ads and stuff.
John:
Currently, that's not how Apple makes its money.
John:
So we're not saying that Apple is like wonderful and magnanimous.
John:
It's just it doesn't they're not incentivized to do that because that's not a big income scream stream for them.
John:
Yes, they have at various time done ads.
John:
And they still do have like search ads and everything like that.
John:
But the majority of their money comes from other things.
John:
Even though they don't break down the services revenue, the parts that we did see the breakdown, like during court cases, did not lead us to believe that ads are a massive portion of that.
John:
But two, and perhaps more importantly, when Apple has done ads, they're so bad at it.
John:
They're just really bad at it.
John:
Like, are they bad at it because institutionally they kind of like don't want to do ads?
John:
Are they bad at it because people who are really good at doing ads wouldn't go to work at Apple?
John:
I don't know the reason, but they're not good.
John:
And so it's not really a fear for me that that's going to be their go-to strategy to extract money to produce a low-cost laptop.
John:
I hope it's because they also would be repelled by the tastelessness of it.
John:
I do see a lot of complaints in the Windows world about the prevalence of ads within the Windows interface.
John:
And yes, we complain about Apple advertising its stuff to us all over its own things.
John:
But if I see like a Geico ad in system settings...
John:
that's a whole other line that has been crossed.
John:
So I, you know, this is a joke and I get it, but I also think Apple is not really into ads as a main revenue stream and they're really bad at it.
John:
So both of those things I hope will combine to make this continue to be just a joke and not a reality.
Marco:
I agree that there is a line between what they do now with like promoting Apple Music, Apple Pay, you know, all the like all the different things.
John:
F1 movie.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, that's that's a different section.
John:
But I'm saying like, you know, it's all in the Apple family.
Marco:
I know, but in the settings and as splash modal screens in their own apps, like the music app, they do heavily have advertisements for their own upsells in those apps.
Marco:
And they work like any other ad.
Marco:
I don't think we can call them anything but ads when they have the badge on the settings app, and you go in and it's like...
Marco:
you should add Apple care today, you know, or like the full screen modal and music saying you should really subscribe to Apple music.
Marco:
Like those are just ads for Apple stuff.
Marco:
So like they're definitely ads.
Marco:
There's no getting around it.
Marco:
There is a line between that and a Geico ad in settings, but I think,
Marco:
You might think that line is a bigger gap than I do.
Marco:
I don't think that's that far from what they already do.
John:
Well, the difference is they have to sell the ad to Geico.
John:
They don't have to sell it to Apple.
John:
Apple just gets that ad for free.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like the ad sales, the whole mechanism of selling ads, right?
John:
That Apple, I mean, when you sell ads, there's just
John:
look at the people who are the best in the world about selling ads.
John:
It really helps to have a lot of information to sell those ads against so you can target them.
John:
And Apple currently doesn't have that information and doesn't seem to want to collect it.
John:
And also, I think they're bad at selling ads and they're also bad at serving ads.
John:
Like where they do sell ads, like the App Store search ads, they sell those.
John:
But like,
John:
That's nothing compared to like selling ads for app installs through Facebook or whatever.
John:
It's just so much less sophisticated.
John:
So, you know, that's where you get into their bad at it.
John:
Like, I don't think they have the expertise or knowledge on how to sell ads.
John:
It's not so much about presenting them.
John:
They can put ads wherever they want.
John:
I'm sure someone was willing to put them, but to put them there, you got to sell them first.
Casey:
that's true all right so continuing my airpods not saga that's a bit dramatic but uh my airpods story um i a few people had written in saying hey you know you need to do either an online chat or you know talk to them on the phone and i didn't uh understand how you could get to this phantom online chat well patch writes in you can always talk to apple support without going through any kind of menu or tree by using their iMessage business account okay great well how do you get that
Casey:
Patch writes, if you type a message there, within two or three minutes, they'll connect you with the customer service person.
Casey:
That sounds awesome.
Casey:
Well, how do you do that?
Casey:
Well, Patch says, it looks like there are two main ways to get to this chat function.
Casey:
The first is the Apple support app on iOS or iPadOS.
Casey:
The chat option there takes you to iMessage.
Casey:
The second way is if you do a search for any Apple store using Apple Maps specifically.
Casey:
In the three-dot menu, there's an option to message them, which pulls you to an iMessage chat, both on iOS and macOS.
Casey:
This is incredibly useful.
Casey:
So thank you, Patch.
Casey:
You get plus one internet points for the day.
John:
I've run across that chat thing several times, but it's not entirely out of where to find it.
John:
But, you know, I guess if you're going down one of those avenues, like if you're looking for a store only with the Apple Maps app, or if you're in the support app, supposedly it will land in your face.
John:
But it's good to know how to get there directly.
Casey:
All right, with regard to Cloudflare and AI crawlers, Thomas Shufflin writes, I recently started using Cloudflare for one of my projects now that over half of the many gigabytes of bandwidth used for images each month is from AI crawlers.
Casey:
I definitely don't want to do something to limit user access to the website and the user contributed content, but I had to take action to prevent our CDN bill from being hundreds of dollars higher each month than it was a year ago.
Casey:
Cloudflare's AI bot detection and blocking has been a massive help in that.
John:
Yeah, so this is something that sort of went unsaid, like why would Cloudflare even have a thing to block AI crawlers?
John:
What's the issue they're trying to solve?
John:
What concern do website owners have?
John:
Why are they trying to block AI crawlers?
John:
So that was our bad.
John:
We should have mentioned that.
John:
But the underlying assumption was you'd want to block AI crawlers because AI crawlers are badly behaved and are costing people money.
John:
And so here's yet more evidence of that.
John:
So this is like the small version of like, I've got a small website and they're costing me hundreds of dollars, which for my small website is significant.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Aaron Zink writes,
Casey:
So caching is little to no benefit when a bot decides to go deep exploring every possible combination.
Casey:
Some of the bots we've been seeing have been extremely tricky to identify.
Casey:
In these cases, Cloudflare has been our most effective tool by far.
Casey:
Their proprietary heuristics have been the only things that have enabled us to keep our sites online.
Casey:
The real bad guy here, my opinion, is not Cloudflare, but the aggressive AI companies who are sending DDoS levels of traffic don't honor robots.txt files and make it nearly impossible to identify and block them selectively.
Casey:
I want to reiterate again, the recent traffic levels have been truly historic.
Casey:
Additionally, Anonymous writes,
Casey:
Detecting AI crawlers is incredibly difficult.
Casey:
They source traffic from hundreds of thousands of IP addresses, and they are generally smart enough to avoid being blocked with approaches like the JA3 or JA4 signatures.
Casey:
John, what the heck does that mean?
John:
I had to look it up, but it was on the Clariflare side.
John:
In fact, we'll link to the definition.
John:
It's fingerprints that help you profile specific SSL slash TLS clients across different destinations, IPs, ports, and X509 certificates.
John:
I mean, that doesn't really tell you much, but anyway, it's a way to try to identify bots, even if they don't all come from the same IP address or whatever.
John:
I'm not quite sure how it works, but that's why we'll link to the website if you want to look it up.
John:
But the point is, those techniques don't work with the diversity of sources that the AI crawlers are using, apparently.
Casey:
Continuing from Anonymous, they're buying proxy services from companies like IP Royal, Bright Data, etc.
Casey:
These companies source the traffic from real residential IP addresses.
Casey:
Sometimes they're paying end users to install what is effectively malware, and sometimes it's sketchier than that.
Casey:
Because of this, the AI crawlers in many cases do look like legitimate user traffic.
Casey:
Cloudflare has a huge advantage over most smaller players like GitHub, precisely because so much of this traffic goes through them.
Casey:
They can afford to invest compute resources and brainpower into identifying and tracking these crawlers.
John:
This has been the story for a while now, and I was glad to hear some explanation.
John:
First of all, characterizing GitHub as a small player lets you know the scale of this problem because, you know, compared to that first person with their like personal website or whatever, down to like GitHub, it's like, oh, we're just a small player.
John:
We need Cloudflare to help out.
John:
But it's something that we're not used to because you're like, well, what's the big deal?
John:
People have been crawling the web since the advent of the web.
John:
Why is it such a problem with the AI things?
John:
And I, you know, according to this anonymous person at GitHub, part of it is basically the fact that the, you know,
John:
pretty rapidly after the advent of google it extinguished all the other big search engines and so you just had the google bot crawling the web uh there is no such monopoly in ai and it's every ai startup it's all the big ai companies and uh like this anonymous person said all the companies that want to sell data sets to any of those companies it's just this it's
John:
There's it's the web at scale, but imagine if there was 100 Googles crawling and that, you know, it's it's in their interest as the crawlers to crawl as much as fast as possible to get the biggest data set to make the most money, so on and so forth, multiplied by 100 of those things.
John:
Everyone who runs a website that is worth crawling.
John:
is seeing a huge burden from these AI crawlers.
John:
They don't care about robot set text, which arguably maybe they shouldn't, maybe they should, but whatever.
John:
They don't.
John:
Robot set text is entirely advisory.
John:
It's like, please don't crawl me.
John:
You can just ignore it and crawl anyway.
John:
And they're costing people money and they're taking down sites because they don't care how fast they go and they're not throttled.
John:
And this is all just a side effect of...
John:
you know a new influx of venture capital money in an industry that is exploding where the incentives are to grow as fast as possible and no one cares how much damage it's doing to the websites that they're constantly trying to crawl so yeah that's why blocking ai bots specifically is a feature that you know people who run websites would want and see past discussion last episode's discussion about the uh
John:
The difficult situation that puts us all in if one company has the ability to control that spigot.
Marco:
What we're seeing here is like, yes, there are reasons why Cloudflare is useful to website owners right now.
Marco:
That doesn't mean this isn't a really problematic situation to have that much centralized power in one company over that much of the Internet.
Marco:
And they can just change the way things work on a whim.
Marco:
And so while there might be decent reasons behind some of this stuff, it doesn't actually fix the problem.
Marco:
The problem is still that most smaller companies and DIY projects and things like that just won't be able to crawl pages on the web anymore before too long.
Marco:
And that's not a great place to be.
John:
Yeah, because if you're running a site, you need your site to stay up and not have your bandwidth bill double because of non-human traffic that's not giving you anything.
John:
So that's your main concern.
John:
And the email that you're getting from 20 people with their dinky websites is so much lower level concern for you just keeping your stuff online.
John:
So you can see where, you know, it's like things are on fire here.
John:
And also, as with so many things with AI, this leads to sort of thoughts about sustainability.
John:
It's like, can...
John:
the web withstand an arbitrary number of ai crawlers constantly crawling like it's kind of like email and spam like how sustainable is it when you know 10 of email is spam 50 90 99 how many nines percent of email can be spammed before the email system falls down like we've kind of run that experiment and it's got the percentage of spam has got frighteningly high well what percentage of traffic on the web can be ai crawlers before it becomes economically unfeasible to run websites because
John:
You're not actually running them for humans.
John:
You're just running them for AI crawlers that are extracting value from your site and never sending anything back.
John:
And this is just another version of the same, you know, well, they're taking my content and not sending any people to my site and I didn't want to give them rights to my content.
John:
It's just, it's another sustainability thing of like, how are we going to work this out?
John:
We need a system where people are still incentivized to make things and publish them.
John:
Uh, because if not, all those AI crawlers are going to run out of stuff to crawl.
John:
Like they, you know, it's the, uh,
John:
Goose lays the golden egg.
John:
Once you eat the goose, you've got a problem.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Public service announcement as of, I believe, today as we record this.
Casey:
The 26 betas, the iOS 26, iPadOS 26, et cetera, are all out and available.
Casey:
You can go to beta.apple.com if you want to go on that crazy ride.
Casey:
For what it's worth...
Casey:
I am still not running anything on my carry phone.
Casey:
I heard the most recent under the radar where you were encouraging people to do that.
Casey:
And I largely agree with you, but we have a couple of pieces of travel coming up that I really do not want to mess with having a beta on my phone, which I know professionally is a little questionable, but personally I think is a very sound decision.
Casey:
So I don't know, Marco, if you would recommend for non-developers to put the beta on their phones, but now would be the time to try to wave people off if that's the case.
Marco:
I think what you're doing with signing up for the beta, in any year, what you're signing up for is some stuff that works now might not work.
Marco:
And stepping back from the beta is possible, but it requires basically a reformat of your phone, and you can't just migrate everything back from your current installation to it.
Marco:
So going back from a beta is such a high pain in the butt for most people that
Marco:
Unless you have a second device, you're probably not going back.
Marco:
It's probably like a one-way door for you.
Marco:
So it's not advisable if you don't have a really good reason.
Marco:
What qualifies as a really good reason, that's kind of up for interpretation.
Marco:
And what I was saying under the radar is anybody who's a developer or a designer responsible for the design of an app on iOS should definitely have the beta installed on their carry phone now.
Marco:
because there is a lot that you kind of have to live with with the new design to get a feel for how your app should be designed.
Marco:
And that, of course, assumes that the new design is a fixed target, which it is not.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
It's it's not a great beta season, but it is one that if you have any tolerance for beta problems, you should get in it now if you aren't already in it, because it is very illuminating, especially if you are a developer, it is very helpful.
Marco:
And the more people use it.
Marco:
the more problems that will be found and the more noise will be made about them.
Marco:
And if we have any chance of Apple sanding off some of the rough edges or fixing some of the bugs, we're going to need as many people as possible.
Marco:
It's simple as that.
Marco:
I will say, you know, as betas go, we are now on beta 4.
Marco:
In most years, beta 4 is a reasonably stable time to jump in.
Marco:
That is true this year, but beta 4 is more like a beta 2 or a beta 3 of most years.
Marco:
They are behind in quality.
Marco:
You do still have weird bugs all over the place in apps.
Marco:
You do still have significant rendering and animation glitches all over the UI, all over the system.
Marco:
Now, stuff does actually end up working most of the time.
Marco:
I'm no longer having to do things like reboot my phone to connect my AirPods or force quit apps in the middle of typing a text message because the keyboard crashes.
Marco:
That has been mostly fixed in the recent two betas.
Marco:
So the really big bugs are gone, but there's tons of visual glitches all over the place.
Marco:
And that's not even counting the design itself being...
Marco:
pretty controversial and rough in a lot of places but there are still tons of animation bugs tons of little glitches occasional layout bugs that do require you know apps to be four square or something but at least you can generally not lose data most of the time anymore so it's it's rough performance wise battery life isn't too bad anymore
Marco:
but it still chugs.
Marco:
You still have a lot of dropped frames.
Marco:
You have a lot of glitchy and dropped animations.
Marco:
Frankly, I don't know how Apple is going to land this plane by early September.
Marco:
I think it's going to be a really rough release in terms of just a huge number of mostly tiny bugs everywhere, especially animation and layout bugs.
Marco:
So if you can tolerate that and you want to see the new design and you want to experience it, jump in.
Marco:
You're probably not going to lose data or things like that anymore.
Marco:
Those times are past us, probably.
Marco:
But it is rough.
Marco:
And by the way, and I'm saying, it's chugging along, it's slow, it drops frames.
Marco:
I have an iPhone 16 Pro.
Marco:
So if you have an older device that you were going to maybe think about testing this on...
Marco:
I would maybe think again.
Marco:
And I'll say it now.
Marco:
My prediction for the fall, people around our circles are saying users are going to hate this design or it's going to be really controversial.
Marco:
I think we're not going to hear too much about that from non-nerds.
Marco:
What we will hear about is how incredibly slow it is.
Marco:
If you recall, that was one of the big criticisms of iOS 7 is, I put this on my iPhone and now it is much slower.
Marco:
This is going to be one of those years.
Marco:
Literally, if we're already in beta 4 and their current fastest phone available...
Marco:
can't run the animation smoothly you know we're in for a rough time in that front so keep that in mind as well it will probably be fine and if you do if you are really curious about the new design everywhere or if you are responsible for software design of an ios app you really should jump in now
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
John, tell me about Tahoe Beta 4 specifically, please.
John:
Yeah, just a couple of quick hits from this before we go into our first topic, which is tied to this.
John:
When Beta 4 came out, the only beta still I'm running is macOS, but I'm running it a lot to test my apps and stuff.
John:
waiting oh so patiently for apple to fix some of the bugs uh one of which is a showstopper for me which actually has been fixed uh but it isn't out in beta 4 yet anyway um just wandering through the us because i'm living in it and one of the things that you do when you're living in the us and uh booting from your internal to your external drive and stuff is you're changing the startup disk and
John:
And I happened upon the startup disk screen in system settings and was struck by the fact that I'm not sure if it's a backslide from beta 4, although some things are, especially in iOS and other betas that I'm not running.
John:
But I was struck by the fact that this system settings screen
John:
seems to be part of some sort of contest within Apple to figure out how low contrast can we make something while it's still technically selected.
John:
So it shows two disks, a Tahoe disk, and then my other disk.
John:
And they're huge.
John:
They're really big.
John:
They're like 64 by 64 icons, maybe even bigger, with a big rectangle.
John:
There's text underneath it with a big rectangle around it.
John:
And the selected one has a background, and the non-selected one does not.
John:
But man, is that background hard to see.
John:
So I posted it on Mastodon.
John:
After I posted it, I did some investigation to see just how slight is the highlight in that rounded rectangle highlight.
John:
So here's the thing.
John:
The rounded rectile highlight, which is big, it's like one inch by two inches on your screen.
John:
It's big.
John:
OK, this is not a subtle highlight.
John:
It's a big rectangle.
John:
Um, it has a darker rim and a body color to it.
John:
And then of course there's the window background.
John:
Um, the background of the selection is 1.6% darker than the window background.
Casey:
That's not enough.
Casey:
Hold on a second.
Casey:
Hold on a second.
Casey:
I love that you did this research and this math.
Casey:
This is one of those moments that you being independent is such a perk for the show.
Casey:
And I mean that genuinely.
Casey:
How did you come to this conclusion?
Casey:
I'm not arguing.
Casey:
I'm genuinely wondering.
Casey:
How did you determine this?
Casey:
What was the process to figure this out?
John:
I mean, so I took the screenshot in Tahoe.
John:
So I figure out whatever they're doing with the screenshot, I'm going to trust the color values.
John:
And then I just pulled it up in Photoshop and then just got the RGB values.
John:
So the RGB values are 0 to 255 for the R, the G, and the B, the red, the green, and the blue.
John:
It's a gray color, so the red, the green, and the blue are all equal values.
John:
The background is 251, and the selection is 247.
John:
So it's a difference of four, which is about 1.57%.
John:
The rim is 3.5% darker.
John:
So I think the only reason a lot of people can see the rounded rectangle is because the rim is 3.5% darker.
John:
This is one of those, you know, I put I put a mastodon both as a joke and not as a joke.
John:
Many people said I cannot see the selection on my screen because my screen is a crappy quality, you know, older display or something like that.
John:
It's ridiculous.
John:
Now, here's the thing.
John:
Startup disk system setting in Sequoia also doesn't have a lot of contrast, but it's still twice what Tahoe is.
John:
So on Sequoia, it's three point one percent for the body and seven percent for the rim.
John:
It was already bad.
John:
So I'm not saying like Tahoe made this mistake or whatever.
John:
Why I find this baffling is because as far as I can tell, it's not like they redesigned the startup desk system setting in Tahoe.
John:
Just something about Tahoe came by and sideswiped the already bad startup desk thing to make the contrast half as much as it used to be.
John:
And when I posted this on Mastodon, many people said, until I read your text, I didn't know what you were talking about because I couldn't see a selection at all.
John:
It's
John:
I mean, again, there is a increased contrast option and accessibility, but this is a perfect example of like, well, it's example of two things.
John:
One, that this, it needs to be higher contrast, even when that setting's not turned on, because it is, it's ridiculous, right?
John:
Even on a really high quality screen.
John:
And two, what Marco just said, do you think anyone has time to worry about the contrast of the highlight and the startups
John:
system setting when they're trying to get the os to just work and have the animations run at the right speed that's not a god this is mac os they don't care that much about it anyway so i'm really concerned that stuff like this is just forget about this being fixed or changed or improved in any way before this thing releases because it's they have so much bigger fish to fry um so this is just a little thing but i just thought i'd point out because i just found it absurd i i encourage you to look at the images that we will link in the show notes um
John:
And see for yourself if on your screen you can see that it's highlighted.
John:
You're going in knowing one of them is highlighted and one of them is not.
John:
I'm telling you that that's the case.
John:
And still you may not be able to see it depending on your monitor.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's not great.
Marco:
It's amazing.
Marco:
And so what has probably happened here is the Mac APIs and the iOS APIs, they have kind of semantic color values.
Marco:
So like not every color is specified.
Marco:
Okay, it's R this, G this, B this.
Marco:
Most colors in the UI, especially in Apple's apps, presumably, are specified by colors like background one, background two, like that kind of thing.
Marco:
Or like, you know, light background, lighter background.
John:
Do you have the thing on iOS?
John:
The constants on macOS are called primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary.
John:
Like they use the whatever.
Marco:
We do have those as well.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And so that's kind of, that's like the newer Swift UI way of doing it.
Marco:
So basically, the colors are not specified on everything by color value.
Marco:
They're specified semantically in a lot of things.
Marco:
So what Apple has done with the redesign is change a lot of what those colors mean.
Marco:
So they can change that in one place in some system definition of that.
Marco:
And then all the other apps that compile against that will have their colors changed.
Marco:
And what John was just saying is, like, they're not going to have time to go through every single place those are used and see, like, is this still legible?
Marco:
Is this still usable?
Marco:
Does this still even look right?
Marco:
Or does it look like a rendering error?
John:
Or, I mean, what they could do is perhaps say, hey...
John:
Does primary on top of secondary, is that readable?
John:
Is the delta between primary?
John:
Because think of it like the contest thing.
John:
If there was a contest to do this, given just plain RGB values, integer RGB values, let's set aside floating point.
John:
The only way you can win this contest is by having a difference of one.
John:
So you could have 251 and 252.
John:
Yeah.
John:
If you can't do fractions, that's as close as you can get.
John:
RGB 251, 251, 251, and then 252.
John:
It's one away, unless you go into floating point values.
John:
And I guess you could do opacity tricks, which is floating point as well.
John:
But you're really getting up to, seriously, it's either the same color or it's not.
John:
How close can we get to the same color without it being the same color?
John:
And if you have two constants...
John:
whether it's the primary, secondary, tertiary, or like window background, light, lighter, lightest, whatever, like whatever sequence of constant names that you have, the distance between one constant name and the other that you expect to be next to each other should probably be discernible.
John:
So there should be some kind of like acceptance test to say, hey, if you're going through the US and changing all these colors,
John:
Make sure you change them in a way that two colors that the two of the colors aren't like literally the same when they're supposed to be used on top of each other.
John:
This is all setting aside whether the fact that the startup system setting uses these colors at all, because for all we know, the person who programmed this 55 years ago just did RGB values because they felt like it or just did opacity like a black with an opacity of point zero zero one.
John:
Like who knows what the code does?
John:
It could be anything.
John:
Again, this is not a highly trafficked, highly revised area of the OS.
Marco:
Keep in mind the scale of what we're dealing with here.
Marco:
When iOS 7 was released, that was 100 years ago.
Marco:
Everything was less.
Marco:
Everything was smaller.
Marco:
There were fewer platforms.
Marco:
There were fewer apps on those platforms.
Marco:
The apps themselves had less code and fewer screens and fewer features and less UI.
Marco:
It was a long time ago.
Marco:
Now, the number of possible areas that changing these system constants and metrics and things, the number of areas those affect is huge now.
Marco:
There's so much surface area to test and to revise and to fix.
Marco:
And that's why I was saying a couple months ago when there were rumors of a big redesign coming, that's why I was saying it's a really big deal because it touches everything.
Marco:
And what we're going to see for a year maybe at least, maybe two years, we're going to keep finding little edges of the UI or screens of apps.
Marco:
Oh, that button is now an ellipsis because the text is being cut off because the metrics changed.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Or, oh, this button over here that used to be a contrast button that you could see, now it's gray on gray on gray because those colors changed.
Marco:
We're going to have a year or two of that across not only the OSs and Apple's apps, but then across third-party apps.
Marco:
Because when third-party apps compile against the new API, there is a flag that you can opt out of the entire new design.
Marco:
You can put it in your info plist.
Marco:
And I think a lot of apps are going to do that for a while.
Marco:
But if you want any of the new design, you have to take all of the new design.
Marco:
And so as soon as you want any of the new design, all of these little, subtle constants and metrics in the APIs will change across your entire app.
Marco:
And so you have to go through every single screen and retest everything and fix it in a way that's not going to mess up your iOS 18 and earlier compatibility as well, if you're still maintaining that compatibility.
Marco:
So the workload...
Marco:
for both Apple and its apps, and for third-party developers, is massive.
Marco:
And you just can't do this in a summer.
Marco:
Like, I kind of, I mean, I kind of, I don't, I hate to go here, but I kind of feel like the design team is doging through the system here, just ripping stuff out and just rushing to change things that have huge effects that they either don't fully appreciate or maybe are just disregarding, but the reality is, whatever their reasons are thinking behind it,
Marco:
It takes a lot of time to adapt the software to the changes they're making.
Marco:
And I think it takes way more time than they have.
Marco:
So that's why I think it's going to be a year of UI bugs everywhere across everyone's apps.
John:
And speaking of the contrast, one of the changes that I had to do to switch glass, I have a thing in my appearance setting that lets you pick where the palettes are on the screen.
John:
And it shows a little rectangle that's supposed to represent your screen with radio buttons and the cardinal directions, top, bottom, left, right, upper right, upper left, so on and so forth.
John:
And it shows a desktop background.
John:
And it's hard to believe for such an old school Mac user, but the idea of having a desktop background image and then putting a radio button on top of that image is
John:
It seems like you should always be able to see the radio button because radio buttons are circle and they have an outline and inside them is a dot.
John:
Like how could how could a radio button not be visible?
John:
It's like they used to be opaque, right?
John:
It was an opaque circle.
John:
So I don't care what the background is.
John:
I don't care what desktop background you have.
John:
When I put a radio button control on top of your desktop background image, you should still be able to see the radio button.
John:
Right.
John:
And that was true right up to Tahoe.
John:
If you put a Tahoe radio button on top of lots of different kinds of desktop backgrounds, it is basically invisible, basically like this highlight color that you see here.
John:
So I had to literally draw a circle, like I'm drawing a custom drawing of a opaque circle around the radio button when it's not selected to say, here's the radio button, because Apple's own controls are not visible on many different, even just like solid color backgrounds.
John:
Forget about cool patterns and stuff like that.
John:
That's the type of attention that needs to be done to every single screen to say,
John:
Are the controls still visible?
John:
You mentioned again with a button.
John:
I bet there's a lot of screens that are going to come up even during the setup process.
John:
People are going to be like, how do I keep going in this process?
John:
Is that word a button?
John:
It's kind of like iOS 7 all over again, only instead of not drawing the borders around the buttons, they're trying to draw the borders around the buttons.
John:
They're just so low contrast, you can't see them.
Casey:
All right, and in our final piece of follow-up for tonight, Apple Intelligence news summaries are back, baby, with a big red disclaimer that reads, Summarization may change the meaning of the original headlines.
Casey:
Verify information.
Casey:
Reading from Ars Technica, Apple Intelligence notification summaries for news apps are back in Tahoe Beta 4.
Casey:
Upon installing the new update, users of Apple Intelligence-compatible devices will be asked to enable or disable three broad categories of notifications.
Casey:
Those for news and entertainment apps, for communication and social apps, and for all other apps.
Casey:
The operating systems will list sample apps based on what you currently have installed on your device.
Casey:
Apple disabled news notification summaries as part of the iOS 18.3 update in January.
Casey:
Incorrect summaries circulating on social media prompted news organizations to complain to Apple, particularly after one summary said that Luigi Mangione, the alleged murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had died by suicide.
Casey:
He had not and has not.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So this screen is interesting because that red text that you read, it says summarization may change the meaning of original headlines, verify information that only appears on the news and entertainment one.
John:
The communication, social, social and all other apps don't have that warning.
John:
So, you know, again, when Apple just disabled this feature because people were complaining, you know, it's like, as I said at the time, the reason they disabled is because they can't fix it.
John:
Like there's no way to make an LLM that doesn't make mistakes.
John:
Yeah.
John:
when trying to summarize stuff because that's just the nature of the technology as it currently exists it's not an unsolvable problem it's just that Apple has not solved it and I believe nobody has solved it so unless they come up with a breakthrough they're just going to have errors and Apple's solution was disable it wait a little while
John:
and turn it back on still doesn't work all the time but if we put a big red warning on it like our hands are clean done and done uh anyway at least they give you the option and the red they pulled out the red text the red text is there and it says verify information so we'll summarize it for you but don't believe what we say you got to click through to check
John:
Uh, and so I think that kind of nullifies the usefulness of the summary.
John:
But, uh, I saw Gruber say online, he said, well, it doesn't matter because if I see anything that looks weird, I'll always click through on it to figure it out.
John:
The tricky bit is sometimes incorrect information doesn't look weird.
John:
Sometimes it just looks fine.
John:
Like the result of a sporting event.
John:
Maybe one team wins.
John:
Maybe another team wins.
John:
Maybe it's a lopsided contest and you're like, really?
John:
They won?
John:
But if it was closely contested and they say Team A won when really Team B won and it was a close game, are you going to click through on that because it looks weird to you?
John:
No, you'd be like, hey, Team A won.
John:
But you're wrong.
John:
They didn't.
John:
It was incorrectly summarized.
John:
Verify information or just disable news summaries.
John:
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John:
If you are not a member, we're here to tell you about ATP membership.
John:
What is it and why should you get it?
John:
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John:
Yes, you can.
John:
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John:
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John:
If you like the show, you'll like the show better if you're a member.
John:
First of all, you don't have to hear any ads.
John:
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John:
You certainly won't hear any other ads.
John:
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John:
So you get an ad free version of the show.
John:
Second, you get ATP overtime, which is in every single episode.
John:
There's another topic that we talk about that's usually pretty good and juicy that you don't get to hear if you're not a member.
John:
Uh, if you want to hear the quote unquote bootleg version of the show, which is the unedited feed or with all of our cursing and mistakes or whatever, that includes everything.
John:
And that's published like the second we stop recording, you can also get access to that.
John:
Also, we do once a month, roughly bonus episodes where we talk about all sorts of stuff.
John:
We have maybe 30 of those bonus episodes up and every month we make another one.
John:
So you get access to all the bonus episodes if you remember.
John:
And then finally, when we have our merch sales, uh, you get 15% off during those time limited sales.
John:
So that's what I think makes the show better.
John:
And that's my pitch for membership.
John:
How did I do?
John:
Pretty well.
John:
Is that a good ad?
John:
I came in under time.
John:
Was this the first ad you've ever done?
John:
I think it is.
John:
It's not really an ad because I'm just trying to tell people to pay for the show that I'm on.
Casey:
But, you know, it counts.
Casey:
It's his first ad read.
Casey:
So congratulations.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
No, I did a BB added ad read back in the day.
Marco:
This is pretty.
Marco:
And it was only like 90 seconds to this is pretty impressive.
John:
yeah i'm very impressed my angle on it just behind the curtain my angle on it is to tell people what they're getting we always try to tell people what they're getting i think casey did a pretty good job on a recent episode like here's what you get with membership but he forgot overtime there's a lot of stuff but like that's my pitch it makes the show if you like the show you will like it better with membership yes and you pay money for it did i make that clear that you pay for it right you can either pay monthly or annually
John:
And if you like the show a lot and it's a big part of your life and you can fit us into your entertainment budget, the show will get better.
John:
It's not just you pay us because you feel like it and you're being nice to us or whatever and you're supporting the show, which you are, but whatever.
John:
The show will be better.
John:
That's the reason why I pay for all the podcasts I pay for.
John:
Yes, I want to support the shows, but also the shows become better when you don't have to hear ads, when you get access to episodes sooner, when you get the bonus episodes.
John:
That's why I pay for things.
John:
That's the pitch.
John:
Membership.
John:
It's good.
John:
You'll like it more.
Marco:
If you like us, it will give you more of us and better of us.
Marco:
Done.
Marco:
And less of not us.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Less of not us, right.
Casey:
No, it's very true.
Casey:
And, you know, I can't say enough good things about all the members that we have been lucky enough to amass over the years.
Casey:
And it really is what makes the show possible.
Casey:
I mean...
Casey:
It's no secret that ads have been down, particularly in podcasts, for a long time.
Casey:
In fact, I just listened to Backstage, which is the Relay members podcast earlier today, and they were lamenting the same problem and saying much of the same thing, that if it wasn't for their members, Relay would be in a bad spot.
Casey:
And I can tell you for certainty, if it wasn't for the members of ATP...
Casey:
ATP may or may not even be a thing anymore if it wasn't for members.
Casey:
And so it really truly helps make this show happen.
Casey:
That's not just lip service.
Casey:
It really, really does.
Casey:
And we can't say enough good things for how much we appreciate any of you who have signed up.
Casey:
And it makes a tremendous difference.
Casey:
And one thing that John didn't mention this time is that, Hey, what if you're not in a position to pay us?
Casey:
I don't even remember what we charge, but pay us whatever.
Casey:
About eight bucks a month.
Casey:
I think it's like 88 bucks a year or something like that.
Casey:
If you're not in a position to pay that money, you can also ask for a gift.
Casey:
And John slaved over, let me reboot that.
Casey:
John spent a lot of time working on how to make gift memberships possible.
Casey:
And you can do that on the website.
Casey:
And it's
Casey:
very, very easy and very straightforward.
Casey:
So you can ask for a gift for a birthday or a holiday or something like that.
Casey:
And you can be gifted ATP membership.
Casey:
So really and truly, I really think John's hit the nail on the head.
Casey:
It makes it better for you.
Casey:
And it honestly makes it better for us too.
Casey:
So everyone wins.
John:
At the end of the year where I do the thing where I like thank the patrons, which I'm not going to do now.
John:
Well, can you get to your time at the end of the year?
John:
But like, and this is not like thanking the members, but just to let everyone know, members make the show possible.
John:
If you're not a member, you should also be thankful to the members because they're helping, you know.
John:
subsidize the show that you're listening to lots of times i'll listen to a podcast that i'm not a member of because i only listen to an episode every once in a while but that show has members that are making it possible and i'm thankful to those members so if you know ever like i like i said when i pitched the patron thing at the beginning of the year everyone's got to decide like what is their entertainment budget and how much do i even like this show um you know how much can i afford and it's it's a balance everyone has to make that decision for themselves but like part of the thing that makes patrons possible whatever some people like yeah
John:
I like the show fine.
John:
It's okay.
John:
But also I have a huge amount of money.
John:
So this is nothing to me.
John:
Or someone's like, this is my favorite part of every single week.
John:
And even though I don't have a lot of money, it's worth it for me to pay, you know, $8 a month for this show.
John:
Everyone's got to make that decision to themselves.
John:
So not going to, you know, just if you, if you can't pay for it, the show is still free.
John:
It's fine.
John:
But if you can pay for it, we thank you because you're making the show possible for us to make and for everyone else to listen to.
Marco:
Yeah, I couldn't have said it better myself.
Marco:
So thanks to members who are not hearing this, I guess.
Marco:
If you are hearing this, it is the members who keep the show going in addition to the very crappy ad market.
Marco:
And it is the member, it is the success of the member program
Marco:
that has allowed us to keep our ads reasonably high quality.
Marco:
There's a lot more ads to be had in the podcast space if we basically do dynamic ad insertion and stick in radio-style ads for weird car dealerships in your area and stuff like that and do creepy targeting.
Marco:
We could do that, but thanks to membership, we don't need to.
Casey:
Not yet, anyway.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And thanks to membership, we are able to be a little picky about who we advertise for.
Marco:
So if there's some sponsor that we're like, I don't really want to shill for that on the show, we don't have to.
Marco:
We can say no to that.
Marco:
And that's all thanks to members because we have the little bit of headroom there to afford to say no to stuff that we don't feel good about.
Marco:
And so podcast listeners out there,
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
If you also are not super crazy about podcast ads, we are giving you that option, and it's a great option.
Marco:
You get all that other stuff.
Marco:
You get more of us.
Marco:
You get better of us and all that other fun stuff, plus cheaper T-shirts.
Marco:
So definitely check it out.
Marco:
ATP.fm slash join is where you get that.
John:
You have to repeat the call to action three times, Marco, and do it verbatim, please.
John:
That's ATP.fm slash join.
Marco:
The only way to get this deal is to go to ATP.fm slash join.
Marco:
That's ATP.fm slash join.
John:
I think you did it four times.
John:
Nope, that's it.
John:
Wrong.
John:
Sorry.
Marco:
Make good.
Marco:
That's a make good.
John:
That's a make good.
John:
If you just go to ATP.fm, you'll find it.
Marco:
Yeah, we don't hide it.
Casey:
All right, let's do some topics.
Casey:
And apparently, John, you want to take us on a tour of Apple and interfaces.
John:
Yeah, I've been thinking about this since we've been talking about all the liquid metal stuff.
John:
And it's kind of like the thing with the AI crawlers causing large bandwidth or whatever.
John:
Something that sort of goes unsaid.
John:
But I think it's worth saying because not everybody has the same context for these discussions.
John:
Certainly, they don't have the...
John:
old man historic context that i have um but i do feel like as time passes on like part of the reason we're in this situation with liquid uh glass and everything is because institutional knowledge and historic knowledge just goes by the wayside so i want to just give like a brief refresher on um
John:
Some of the foundational things that are being left by the wayside as we continue in this modern age.
John:
And that is the idea that trying to make interfaces for computers so people can use them.
John:
There is a science aspect to that.
John:
Apple at various times has been at the forefront of that science.
John:
I'll put a link in the notes to a couple of books from Bruce Tognizini, who was a user interface expert who worked at Apple many, many years ago and was very influential in the field.
John:
Tog on interface and Tog on software design.
John:
Tog is short for Tognizini, his last name.
John:
talks about the science of interface design you've probably heard of some of the science things if you're kind of an old school mac user like fitz law which is like okay well with graphical user interfaces we have pointing devices the user has to put the pointing device on a target to you know click on it or do a thing with it so that whole task of targeting how easy is it for people to get a pointing device onto a target when using a mouse or whatever
John:
Um, and you can imagine similar things for using your finger on a screen and stuff like that.
John:
And they, you know, use science to say, okay, well that turns out to be a function of the size of the target, the distance from you are like the, the, the, how does the interface work?
John:
Is it one-to-one?
John:
Does it have an acceleration curve?
John:
You can,
John:
Do science, come up with ideas, test them, run experiments, and try to determine more efficient, more useful, easier to understand interfaces.
John:
Apple, and especially in the early days around the era, the early days of the Mac, a lot of the things...
John:
both in the Mac and subsequently following on from the initial Mac OS to the later ones, were informed by this scientific progress.
John:
And this also includes user testing, saying we have an idea for an interface, but does it make the computer easy to use?
John:
Do people understand it?
John:
Some of the ideas that are in the original Mac are like, let's make a standardized interface.
John:
So you learn how to use a scroll bar.
John:
You can reuse that knowledge.
John:
Every app has a standard scroll bar.
John:
Every app has a standard window with a title bar and a closed box so that when you learn one app, it's the same everywhere.
John:
This was a revolutionary idea in user interface design from the previous days when every application just did whatever the heck it wanted interface wise.
John:
But the Mac was like every Mac app has Mac windows and Mac scroll bars and Mac buttons and Mac radio buttons and Mac checkboxes.
John:
standard controls right that it sounds boring now but this was a this was in advance and it was you know it's it's an idea and it was tested and it has uh rationale behind it to make the interfaces easy to use so that's the science aspect of user interfaces
John:
There's another aspect of making good user interfaces, which is the art of it.
John:
Apple's Aqua introduction, which I don't have a video of because maybe they didn't give that on the W2C disks.
John:
But anyways, Macworld's, or not W2C, Macworld San Francisco 2000.
John:
We'll put a link in the show notes to your YouTube video of it.
John:
The quality is terrible, but I don't have a better one.
John:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
The quality is so bad.
Casey:
I watched it earlier today and I don't think I'd ever seen it before because I was not in the Apple world in 2000.
Casey:
I will briefly sidetrack us and say that a direct quote from Jobs during this presentation is he says, menus are semi-transparent too, except for the text.
Casey:
And I was just like, oh, really now?
Casey:
It just made me think of all the liquid glass discourse of these days and how that relates all the way back to 2000.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, again, I wish there was a higher quality one, but I think the Aqua introduction, this is the first time the Aqua user interface was revealed to the public, and it was quite shocking coming from the classic macOS interface, which was nothing like this at all.
John:
That shows some of the art, because there's lots of things that are in Aqua that are there not for...
John:
scientifically backed user interface reasons, but because they want to evoke an emotional response.
John:
As Jobs said in the keynote, one of the design goals was that when you see the interface, you want to lick it.
John:
There's not a usability angle on that.
John:
That's part of the art of it.
John:
You want to make it attractive, fun, cool-looking.
John:
And that is an important part of interface design because the, you know, there's, you know, there's a YouTube channel I watch that it's a food channel.
John:
I forget what the name of it is, but they always talk about the different aspects of taste of like, I forget what it is, like sweet, sour, bitter, umami.
John:
What am I forgetting?
John:
Whatever.
John:
A whole bunch of salty, salty.
John:
There you go.
John:
Thank you.
John:
But then he always adds, I think, and unfortunately named, but an important thing, which is the human factor.
John:
which is like, how does the food look?
John:
What memories do you have of your childhood or whatever?
John:
And you think, well, that's not an aspect of taste, but it is.
John:
It's such a big part of the food experience.
John:
Yes, there's all the taste factors that go into a food, but there's always the human element.
John:
In any interface design, making something cool or lickable or attractive or makes it feel fun or makes you want to use it and want to touch it and want to manipulate it,
John:
that's an art uh to it and so ideally any good computer interface is has ideas that are founded in science that we found to be a good way to let people use a computer that it makes them be able to be successful makes them make fewer errors makes it understandable makes it easier to use makes it makes it powerful so they can do the things they want to do without lots of effort and
John:
And also the art of interface design that makes it attractive and makes you want to play with it and makes you excited about using it and makes it feel like a pleasant place to be and does not cause anxiety and like a million different things, right?
John:
And that whole science aspect of interfaces sometimes feels to me entirely forgotten by everybody, not just Apple, not just people who work in the industry, by users, by journalists, by everybody.
John:
It's like forgetting the idea that there even is an aspect of user interfaces on that can be founded in science.
John:
You can test things and see if they make the interfaces better.
John:
And you can have ideas about how you might make the interface better that are founded in reason.
John:
Maybe if we have standard scroll bars everywhere, then once someone learns how that scroll bar works, they'll be able to scroll in every application instead of having to relearn it.
John:
That's an idea.
John:
And then they can test that idea.
John:
And the idea, there's reasoning behind it.
John:
There's logic behind it.
John:
Let's have an idea for improving the interface founded in some kind of logic that seems like it should make sense.
John:
And let's test that idea.
John:
And I can't remember the last time I've seen anything like that anywhere having anything to do with interfaces across this entire industry for like decades.
John:
All I ever see is the art and debate about the art and whether the art is good or bad or whether they like how it looks and whether they don't like us.
John:
Do you think it's cool?
John:
Do you not think it's cool?
John:
And the art part is important, but it's not the only part of interface design.
John:
So if you're listening to this and you've never heard anything about this, you don't know anything about the science of using interface design or it sounds boring or whatever, I encourage you to...
John:
either buy or find an ebook or PDF download or whatever of these very old, like they're thrown in the nineties, this toggle on interface and toggle on software design and just read them.
John:
Is it relevant to today's things?
John:
Not really, but it will give you the mindset of like, how do I think about interface design?
John:
If I want to use logic and reason to come up with ideas that I think will make the interface better and then test those ideas, because that seems so incredibly absent.
John:
All the debates about the look, uh, I keep saying liquid metal.
John:
I know I do all the liquid glass interface stuff.
John:
Um,
John:
it many people say oh it's misguided the foundations are wrong so on and so forth that the reasons they give for it as marco has said in past shows like the reasons they give don't make any sense and are basically bs because they don't they're not logical like the things they say that it does it doesn't do and even if it did do it it doesn't it doesn't make any logical sense why that would make the interface better it's like it's it's a tautological thing we wanted to do this therefore we wanted to do it therefore it's good like
John:
They don't even attempt to say how like it's just anyway.
John:
So I just feel like that's entirely missing.
John:
And then part of it is, you know, so when Jobs came back, he was so heavily into the art and he didn't like all these nerd eggheads doing the science part of it.
John:
You know, he changed the balance for sure.
John:
And I feel like it has only accelerated to the point where now Alan Dye, who apparently comes from like a Marcom background, which is marketing communication, like in print design, doesn't even have a background in user interface design.
John:
But I assure you, user interface design still is a field of study, at least in the academic world, where people try to make interfaces more usable to people by using reason and testing things and not just having a whim and deciding, I want stitched leather because I think it's cool and reminds me of the seat backs on my private jet or whatever the heck the story behind that was.
John:
Again, that's an important part of it, but there has to be a balance.
John:
And I feel like the balance is way, way, way, way, way too far in the direction of the art and emotion side, which again is an important factor, but it can't be the only factor.
John:
And if you're on way on the art side and you make an interface that people don't find appealing, now you've got a real problem because it's not usable.
John:
It's not useful.
John:
It's like you're making the interface worse and people don't even think it's cool looking.
John:
So hopefully lots of people will think liquid glass looks real cool because
John:
I think in many aspects, the usability of it has gotten worse and the supposed foundations of its design don't make any sense and surely weren't tested in any way because we're using the interfaces and finding all these obvious problems and they don't care and they're not fixable because the design itself is fundamentally just...
John:
flawed and it's not the end of the world like i agree with what marco said like you know you can use it it's mostly i said this since the beginning since i've been using tahoe like i don't particularly like it i see that it is doing dumb things for dumb reasons but in the end you mostly get along you know it doesn't stop you from using your mac it's not some kind of fundamental change that like now i can't even use my mac or whatever the accessibility options there are they're turned on
John:
I just don't find the art appealing.
John:
And I think they made the interface worse.
John:
And what I'm craving is a return of a better balance between the science of interface design and the art of interface design.
John:
And I, you know, this has been an industry trend for everybody for ages.
John:
And within Apple, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's like epidemic proportions of too much art, not enough science.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't even know if the really, really high ups even know that this is a science or respect it as one.
John:
Or have any people who work at Apple whose degree is in user interface design who are doing it.
Marco:
I mean, like, and I'm sure...
Marco:
I mean, I hope some of those people are still there, but it's very clear that they are not the ones making the big decisions anymore.
Marco:
And that's a shame because you're right.
Marco:
This is a knowable and known field.
Marco:
This is a studied field, a rigorous, studied, real discipline.
John:
And evolving.
John:
I'm not saying it's stuck in stone.
John:
You advance it.
John:
You try to come up with new ideas using new technology.
John:
It should always be advancing.
Marco:
Yeah, and it seems like they don't respect it.
Marco:
Because unless they're just, I mean, either they're really bad at it, or they don't even know this is a thing that they should be respecting.
Marco:
And I'm thinking the latter is more likely.
John:
I think a lot of it is the hangover from Jobs because he eventually had such a disdain for that thing because he would have an idea in his head about something that he thinks is really cool and they would say there's some aspect of it that is not good for usability and it was like don't be a naysayer like he really intentionally pushed Apple in the other direction which is
John:
you know, I have good taste.
John:
Don't tell me about the stupid science stuff.
John:
That's how you get boring interfaces.
John:
Like, Platinum was boring.
John:
Aqua is exciting.
John:
See how I fixed Apple by doing this?
John:
And in many respects, he was right that the pendulum had swung too far the other direction.
John:
But he's such a forceful person and was such a powerful leader in Apple for so long and so influential and the company was so successful that I think he was...
John:
uh very able to drive out the power and influence of the science-based user design within apple and then when he left everyone's like well we should just keep doing what jobs is doing because he's great and we're great and everything and it just continued after he was gone and i think now the company is reaping the uh
John:
uh, non-benefits, uh, reaping what they sowed.
John:
Like they, they've, they, uh, successfully expunge all people who know how to make user better user interfaces in exchange for artists.
John:
And now sometimes when the arc goes wrong, there's nothing left.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Uh, a couple of days ago yesterday, maybe I think it was as we record this, uh, Apple announced services, services, services.
Casey:
And this one is Apple care one.
Casey:
uh writing or excuse me reading from apple's announcement apple today on the 23rd unveiled apple care one a new way for customers to cover multiple apple products with one simple plan for just $19.99 per month customers can protect up to three products in one plan with the option to add more at any time for $5.99 per month for each device devices must be less than four years old and headphones must be less than one year old only devices in the customer's apple account can be covered under apple care one
Casey:
Starting tomorrow, customers in the U.S.
Casey:
can sign up for AppleCareOne directly on their iPhone, iPad, or Mac, or by visiting their nearest Apple store.
Casey:
AppleCareOne includes all of the benefits that come with AppleCare+, including unlimited repairs for accidents like drops and spills, 24-7 priority support, quick and convenient Apple-certified service, and battery coverage.
Casey:
AppleCareOne also expands theft and loss protection beyond iPhone to also cover iPad and Apple Watch.
Casey:
Fees and deductibles apply.
Casey:
AppleCare One pricing is the same regardless of the products that are covered, meaning a customer can enroll their phone, iPad, and Apple Watch and save up to $11 a month over enrolling in separate AppleCare Plus plans for each device.
Casey:
Additional items can be added for $5.99 per month each.
Casey:
With AppleCare One, customers can now add products they already own that are up to four years old if they are in good condition.
Casey:
To verify good condition, products may be required to undergo a diagnostic check using a customer's iPhone or iPad or at an Apple Store prior to being added to the plan.
Casey:
This provides customers with more opportunities to protect their devices, even beyond the current 60-day window to purchase AppleCare+.
Casey:
The Verge writes that AppleCare1 is a good deal, but not for everyone.
Casey:
AppleCare1 lets you protect up to three devices for $19.99 per month.
Casey:
Apple claims that customers can save $11 per month by enrolling in a phone, watch, and pad.
Casey:
in AppleCare One compared to paying for three individual AppleCare Plus plans for those devices.
Casey:
But that's not true across the board for all of its models.
Casey:
For example, the monthly cost for iPhone coverage with AppleCare Plus starts at $9.99 for the cheapest and oldest eligible models, whereas the iPad and Apple Watch start at $4.99 and $2.99 respectively, totaling $17.97 per month.
Casey:
In this case, AppleCare One is a slightly worse deal than buying the plans a la carte.
Casey:
where the new service shines is if you own some of apple's most expensive products like the iphone 16 pro the apple vision pro and the 12.9 inch ipad pro with the m4 chip paying for a monthly apple care plus plan for each of these three would cost 47 47 total per month that's almost 50 bucks according to a list of prices apple pr manager anna mitchell shared with the verge apple care one on the other hand would still be 1999 for any mix of three products mitchell confirmed which is obviously the better deal by a
Casey:
What's important to keep in mind is that just like AppleCare Plus, with AppleCare One, you still have to pay deductibles and fees for each and every repair, and those costs vary depending on the device as well as the type of repair you need.
Casey:
How much you can expect to pay, which is in addition to your monthly AppleCare fee, is listed on Apple's website, and we will link to a couple of things with regard to that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So the service fees and deductibles tells you like, like Casey had to pay 29 bucks or whatever for his AirPods thing.
John:
You'll see on this thing.
John:
Hey, if you get any kind of Apple care plus AirPods thing, you're going to pay $29.
John:
You can find out what that is for your product.
John:
And then we'll link to the main Apple care page, which has the plans of the prices, which will become relevant in a moment.
John:
Um, a couple of, uh, selected fact items here from Apple's Apple care page.
John:
Uh, can I add my family's devices to my Apple care one plan?
John:
That was one of my biggest questions because a lot of like the, you know, what is it called?
John:
iCloud.
John:
What is the iCloud as the, uh, Apple one, Apple one.
John:
Thank you.
John:
Apple one.
John:
Uh, that is kind of like a family thing where you can get everyone in on it.
John:
But, uh, as for Apple care one, the answer is Apple care one plans covered devices that are on the same Apple account as the subscriber.
John:
And I'll have a little bit more on that with my personal experience in a second.
John:
But if you're thinking of like, oh, I'm just going to put my whole family's devices under one AppleCare one plan.
John:
It only counts if they're on the whatever account you buy it through your Apple ID.
John:
I keep saying Apple ID, your Apple account.
John:
It's only for devices that also use that same Apple account.
John:
Uh, and then how do you buy it?
John:
Uh, it's actually kind of tricky.
John:
Uh, they have an answer in the fact which says, Oh, it's just easy.
John:
You just, you can do it online or through your app or, uh, you know, through, through your device or whatever.
John:
Uh, you will, I'm sure they will push it more, uh, harshly, but like an easiest way to do is just go to your phone, go to settings general.
John:
And then there's a warranty and repair thing and you'll see the come on at the top of the page.
John:
So for once, Apple's advertising of features that helps you to find things.
John:
I did that on my phone.
John:
um and it brought up a nice uh little after i said yes i want to try upgrading my plan brought up a nice little thing that says hey given these devices i think it just picks three random devices or maybe picks like the most attractive random devices so it says you can save up to 17.98 per month when you protect john's iphone 16 pro tina's iphone 15 pro and john's ipad pro m4 luckily i named my devices so you can tell what they all are so hey
John:
almost 18 a month in saving it's saying right there if you upgrade if you go to this instead of what you currently have you will save money um and i did that upgrade coverage thing and then it just told me you couldn't process my request because the thing is slammed um so i it took me all day to get through all day it's just been totally down like you it it brings you to the apple pay prompt you double tap you do face thing it says processing and then it says oh i couldn't do it sorry but eventually it did let me do it um
John:
And that led me to the plan prices page, because after you do this, after you see that it'll come on and says, you can save $18 a month.
John:
Do you want to do this?
John:
Yeah, I do want to.
John:
I do want to save $18 a month.
John:
So I did it.
John:
Um, and fine, you're done.
John:
But then after you've done that, so now I'm paying $19.99 in a month for these three devices and I'm saving $18 a month, but you can add more devices to this AppleCare one plan for what was it?
John:
$5.99 per device.
John:
i think that's right yeah yeah but the question is if i add this device to my apple care one is it cheaper or is it more expensive so for example with the apple watch that's 2.99 a month if i add it to the plan it becomes 5.99 a month and nowhere in the interface did they say are you sure you want to add that device because you'd be paying more no they don't tell you that
John:
at all so you have to go to the applecare.com apple.com slash applecare scroll down to the plans section click on the thing that you have like mac or iphone or display or whatever and then click on all model pricing and then look for the model that you have and it will tell you what the monthly and annual fees are it gets more complicated because like what if you're not paying month by month what if you paid for two years in advance and you're paying annually the annual prices are way cheaper than the monthly ones in some cases
John:
So you have to do a little bit of math in your head and figure out how many of my devices should I add to my AppleCare one plan so that I'm not losing.
John:
Like I want I'll only edit if I'm going to save money.
John:
And that was a little bit tedious.
John:
They don't make that easy.
John:
It's nice that on the very first come on, they will say, do this.
John:
And this is how much you'll save for these three devices.
John:
So I just took their advice.
John:
I said, great.
John:
Those three devices, I will save that much money.
John:
I believe you.
John:
Good.
John:
But the other devices I added, I only added devices where after I looked up the pricing and everything, I determined that it would be cheaper to add the device than to leave it.
John:
So I had to leave a bunch of devices on their existing plans, either because they're on multi-year plans that are cheaper or because they're monthly plans that are less than $599,000.
John:
Like a Mac mini is $3.49 a month.
John:
You should not add that at $5.99 a month because when you do add it, it cancels your old Apple care and it refunds you any fees, anything for like the remainder of the time that you aren't going to use or whatever.
John:
And by the way, I think it refunds it to you as an Apple gift card, which is kind of janky, but whatever, I'll end up spending it.
John:
So I did that.
John:
And then like for the family thing, one of the devices that I put on after looking up the price, it was a MacBook Air 13 inch, which its monthly fee is $6.99.
John:
My son's M2 MacBook Air is out of warranty.
John:
This is one of the good things about AppleCare one.
John:
It's been out of warranty for like years now, right?
John:
As long as it's less than four years old, you can put it back on warranty, which I don't think you think you should ever be able to do.
John:
Like I think it's like, like they said, a 60 day window.
John:
Normally after your AppleCare expires, you can put it back into AppleCare.
John:
Now you have four years to decide to put that into AppleCare.
John:
And I didn't mean for my son's Apple MacBook Air to expire.
John:
I just bought like a two year thing.
John:
And just let it expire because I forgot about it.
John:
So I want it to be back on AppleCare and $599 is cheaper than $699.
John:
So I put it back on and it worked and it did that and it put it back on.
John:
And then I saw some orange text underneath it that says this device will be removed.
John:
like on like my warranty screen where it says, here's all your Apple care one devices.
John:
And it's this device will be removed.
John:
I'm like, why, why will it be removed?
John:
And I kept tapping into it or whatever.
John:
And eventually I realized it's that rule that we said before, Apple care one only applies to devices that are on the same Apple account as the subscriber.
John:
So what I had to do was go to my son's MacBook Air, make an account for me, sign into my Apple ID on that account.
John:
And that makes it happy because now it thinks it's, quote unquote, my MacBook Air.
John:
I mean, I did pay for it and technically, you know, I do own it.
John:
But anyway.
John:
So that's your way around the family thing.
John:
That works great for Macs where I can make a second account and sign in with a different Apple ID.
John:
It doesn't work so great for phones because if your kid's got a phone, you're not going to sign into your Apple ID on your kid's phone probably.
John:
Maybe you can sign in with your Apple ID in the store or something and find some workaround, but I wouldn't want to risk it too much there.
John:
So that's my advice is look into AppleCare One.
John:
Anyone who's listening to this who has any AppleCare on anything, especially if you have expensive devices, like they said in that Verge article or whatever.
John:
If you have something with Pro in the name or some kind of expensive Mac.
John:
Uh, you'll probably save money.
John:
You can add your kids' devices, especially if they're Macs, if you have an account on it signed into your Apple ID, but just be careful that you do the math with all the links we'll put in here to figure out whether you're actually saving money or not.
John:
Oh, and I was very disappointed to learn that, like, for what I...
John:
I don't think I could get month to month or anyway, I didn't get month to month for my pro display XDR.
John:
I wish I did.
John:
It has been out of warranty for a while now.
John:
And I fear I see an underscore having the big red line on his XDR, but he keeps making appointments at the Apple store about.
John:
And then as soon as the appointment comes up, the red line goes away.
John:
So he cancels it.
John:
I fear every day that my XDR will have a problem because I, I,
John:
I don't want to get a smaller monitor, but I would never buy this big monitor again.
John:
But I can't put it like they're more than four years old.
John:
My 2019 Mac Pro and my XDR that I bought at the same time, they're both more than four years old.
John:
They're ineligible to be added to an AppleCare one plan.
John:
So I'm just sitting here with my fingers crossed.
John:
And the other thing is my wife's studio display.
John:
It's less than four years old, but it doesn't show up anywhere in the UI for me to add it to the plan.
John:
So I don't know the deal with that is.
John:
Maybe I did add her Mac mini.
John:
Sorry, her Mac Studio.
John:
But I didn't see the monitor.
John:
I don't know if that's bundled with it or something because I bought them together.
John:
But anyway, that's my advice.
John:
Check out AppleCareOne.
John:
You will probably save some money.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thank you to our members for being our exclusive sponsors today.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join to become a member.
Marco:
One of the perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic.
Marco:
It is more of us every week exclusively for members.
Marco:
If you want to hear this week's Overtime, you can go and join us as a member.
Marco:
And this week's Overtime is an amazing exploration of the Mac control panel through this amazing, I think it's one of the best web apps I've ever seen.
Marco:
It's really quite something.
Marco:
We're going to talk about it in the after show and kind of all the joy around exploring the old Mac control panel.
Marco:
That's this week's Overtime.
John:
And how it ties into what I was just talking about with the interface design.
Marco:
exactly yes there is a lot of relevant uh tie-ins there so we will talk about that and more atv.fm slash join to hear all that uh thank you everybody and we'll talk to you next week
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Mastodon, 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-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-
Marco:
Accidental Tech Podcast So long
Casey:
John, do you have a correction or an addition to an earlier topic?
John:
Yeah, my bad.
John:
I should put more detailed notes for myself.
John:
When I was talking about Apple and interfaces and the science and hardware interface, one other point that I wanted to make about the Aqua introduction, which again, I encourage everybody who either wasn't alive then or has just never seen it to watch that video because it is a trip.
John:
When they introduce Aqua, they talk a little bit about some of their reasoning behind things.
John:
But also in their human interface guidelines of the day, they talk more about it.
John:
Maybe we'll find a link to that and shove it in the show notes, but you can probably find it somewhere.
John:
And actually, it might be difficult.
John:
You might have to go to archive.org or something.
John:
Anyway, an example of a combination of
John:
of art and science with some kind of rationale behind it, which may or may not have worked out.
John:
But anyway, it's an example of something with a rationale that makes some kind of sense.
John:
Aqua has transparency in it.
John:
That was one of its innovative features.
John:
There's transparency in the interface, which was new for macOS and new for desktop OSs to the degree that Aqua did it.
John:
It was a compositing window manager that you could have like soft shadows that are transparent, lay it on top of stuff.
John:
The title bars of windows when are inactive or transparent, pull down menus for transparent, stuff like that.
John:
part of apple's pitch about hey why are these things in the os transparent and these things not had a logic behind it sheets which were an innovation in mac os 10 or um they still exist they're basically little dialogues that are attached to windows so for example if you have a document window and you want to save it
John:
back in the old days in classic Mac OS, they would throw up an app modal dialogue, which means a save dialogue will come up and say, where do you want to save this document?
John:
And that would block the whole app.
John:
Even if you had five documents open on a big screen, because you were saving one of them, you couldn't say, oh, before I decide where to save this, let me go over to this other document.
John:
It was like, nope, this document is app modal, means this entire app is currently in the mode that's saying, you are now saving, pick a directory to save this document in and give it a file name, right?
John:
totally block it you can go to other apps and use them but this dialog will block the entire app the innovation of sheets was it would be attached to the document window and yeah that window is blocked until you decide to save or hit cancel but other document windows are fine
John:
And so the sheet sort of came out of the, with an animation, sort of like vertically sort of came out of the document window towards you and then curled down to let you know unambiguously this sheet is attached to this window.
John:
First of all, it's within the bounds of this window, but also you saw it come out of this window.
John:
It is clearly like a necktie for this window.
John:
So it is document modal, right?
John:
And why is the sheet transparent?
John:
Because it's temporary.
John:
Same thing with pull-down menus from the menu bar.
John:
They appear briefly on top of something else, and they're transparent, not because it looks cool, not to highlight your content, but because in the original Aqua interface, transparent meant temporary, meant I'm going on top of stuff briefly, but then I'm going away.
John:
I'm pulling down a menu, but when I'm done, it will go away.
John:
They violated that sometimes.
John:
Certain things were transparent that weren't temporary, like the dock, which was there all the time.
John:
And they used it for other things, like the title bar of an active window was opaque, but title bars of background windows were transparent.
John:
One of the things they learned after they released it was...
John:
You can't read the titles of background windows because they're all transparent and the titles overlay each other.
John:
So they walk that back.
John:
Right.
John:
But I do want to highlight like the combination of art and science here of saying we think transparent stuff looks cool.
John:
It's a cornerstone of our lickable user interface.
John:
That's part of the art of this.
John:
It is very appealing to people.
John:
People are dazzled by it.
John:
It's great.
John:
Right.
John:
But when and where should we use transparency?
John:
Let's come up with some kind of rationale.
John:
Right.
John:
and that rationale of temporary interface elements that briefly appear and then go away those should be transparent to highlight their transient nature whereas more permanent things are opaque and yes they violated that in a few areas here or there but that's an example of combining those two things of coming up with something that you think is cool but then deciding how and where to deploy it with some kind of rationale that makes some kind of sense
John:
And yes, they should have user tested the transparent and active window title bars and realized that it makes it so you can't read the title bars of Windows because they all jumble up.
John:
I think I did a screenshot of that in my original Mac OS X review, right?
John:
So there were infallible.
John:
Aqua is not perfect.
John:
I complained about, you know, I arguably made an entire career complaining about the usability problems with Aqua, right?
John:
But I, you know, it's, it's such a, even Aqua for all the things everyone hated about it, all the things I complained about, it is such a contrast in that they at least try to explain why they were doing things.
John:
And when you hear the explanation, you go, yeah, all right, that makes sense.
John:
And still you get to then try it and see how it works out.
John:
And they probably should have done more user testing.
John:
But anyway, that was the point I meant to make earlier and I didn't.
John:
So I shoved it in the after show.
John:
Go team.
John:
Perfect.