Your Judgement About Pockets
Marco:
We missed you all.
Casey:
We did.
Casey:
But John and I, I assume, John, you had a relaxing time on Long Island.
Marco:
Nice.
Marco:
Pretty okay weather.
Casey:
Good.
Casey:
I saw a lot of bird pictures.
Marco:
Do we get any kind of vacation dump here for like a technical side of it or...
John:
I didn't even get to – I recorded Rectifs last night.
John:
I didn't even get to vacation results on Rectifs yet because we, in typical fashion, got derailed onto other things.
John:
But I will eventually have vacation results on Rectifs.
John:
But for here, there's no real tech updates, I don't think.
Marco:
Yeah, cameras held up.
Marco:
Everything worked the way you –
John:
Yeah, although I think I might have either lost my camera lens cleaning kit in the house or I left it there because I was going to clean my cameras today and I couldn't find my kit.
John:
It's just like a little, you know, microfiber cloth and lens cleaning solutions.
John:
Like it's not expensive stuff.
John:
So I just ordered some new stuff.
Marco:
uh from b and h in fact uh but i ordered it in the hopes that as soon as i placed the order i would find it in the house and that didn't work don't you wear glasses i do okay i've been wearing glasses for like two seconds and i already have like the huge box of zeiss lens wipes and i use one almost every day
John:
I don't use fancy camera quality lens wipes on my glasses.
John:
They're the same wipes.
John:
The Zeiss lens wipes.
John:
I know.
John:
I don't use any lens wipes on my glasses.
John:
I use water.
John:
I use water on my glasses and soap.
John:
Oh, no, no, no.
Casey:
That seems nuts to me.
John:
but you do you i've been wearing glasses since fourth grade it's perfectly fine i assure you look you're looking through smears all the time then i'm not looking through smears my glasses are pristine my family is looking through smears because they don't even clean their glasses they make me clean their glasses for them because i don't think they even know how and they get sick of looking through smears my glasses are very clean
Casey:
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
Well, I'm glad your vacation results were good.
Casey:
We did a good job this year and scheduled our vacations concurrently, definitely on purpose.
Casey:
Definitely, definitely on purpose.
John:
Oh, one vacation result relevant to this show, Marco cursed me with all of the eye stinging sunscreen things.
John:
I'm like, oh, you know, yeah, it does sting if you get it in your eyes, but I'm usually pretty careful that doesn't happen.
John:
I got the worst eye stinging of my entire life on this vacation in like my left eye only on one particular day.
John:
I have no idea what happened differently that day.
John:
But I think for next year, I got to get some of that fancy stuff.
Marco:
Oh, you're going to come around, huh?
John:
You cursed me.
John:
It was like, you know, it's always like, oh, it gets in your eyes if you're not careful.
John:
And it's a little stinging.
John:
And remember I talked about like, well, some people, you made it seem like some people maybe don't feel the stinging or you may feel it worse than other people.
John:
I don't know if any of that are true.
John:
All I know is this was the worst thing I've ever felt in my entire life from sunscreen.
John:
It's the same sunscreen I've been using for like a decade, right?
John:
And just it was a disaster.
John:
I'm like, well, no, that's, you know, this is a sign.
John:
well i got news for you every sunscreen available in the u.s will have exactly the same problem i know i know it's i mean thanks avobenzone yeah i'm aware like i'm aware of the stinginess i'm very familiar with the stinginess but normally it's like oh just i got a tiny little bit a tiny little sting towards the end of the day when you get sloppy with the sweat or whatever but but like this was just this first of all was not at the end of the day it was early in the day and it was terrible
Marco:
It only takes one little slip up, one misplaced finger or wiped edge or even just a drop of sweat.
John:
Yeah, I don't even know what happened.
John:
It's like cutting hot peppers and rubbing your eyes.
John:
At least you know what happened there.
John:
I didn't even know what happened this time, but it was bad.
John:
Sometimes you don't know.
Marco:
Also, it can migrate.
Marco:
It's really fun.
John:
I've heard about the migration.
Marco:
Yeah, it's amazing.
Marco:
Yes, we know, but Mineral Sound of Green has its own trade-offs.
Marco:
We talked about it a few episodes ago.
Marco:
Please don't write it.
John:
Yeah, no, I'd rather have my eye sting than have that damage to my car.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
Honestly, maybe me too.
John:
I feel better, but the car never recovers.
Marco:
Honestly, since I have been using the Japanese sunscreen, it has radically changed my relationship to sunscreen.
Marco:
Now I am putting it on every day.
Marco:
I'm reapplying if I put it on in the morning and I go out in the afternoon.
Marco:
I have worn more sunscreen in the last two weeks than I have probably in the last five years.
Marco:
It becomes like, oh, there's no downside anymore.
Marco:
It's major downsides for every other kind that's available in the U.S.
Marco:
And this has just had, oh, there's no downsides.
Marco:
It's like wearing moisturizer.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
You just put it on.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
Life-changing.
Casey:
We need to acknowledge Tim kissing the ring yet again.
Casey:
It's so freaking gross.
Casey:
I hate this so much.
Casey:
I hate it.
John:
Do you have a little bit of admiration for making a gold trinket?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
I have a little bit of admiration for that.
Casey:
I hate it.
Casey:
I hate it.
Casey:
I hate it.
John:
It's so gross.
John:
It's so transparently kindergarten.
John:
He likes shiny things.
John:
Get him something gold.
John:
When does Apple ever make anything gold aside from the Apple Watch edition?
Yeah.
Marco:
can we drop like the the pretense that a lot of apple commentators have that this is all part of some big strategy that he has to do this like he doesn't have to but he's choosing to do it yeah this is direct support and kissing tim cook is clearly a trump supporter and he's not you gotta stop with that oh my god he's not what's the difference between like honestly between this and any other support what's the difference
John:
The difference would be that he would have campaigned for Trump to get elected and he would have been at rallies jumping up in the air, making a giant X with his body.
John:
And he would have been, you know, donating hundreds of million dollars to the campaign to get him elected before he was president.
John:
He would have expressed support for the president for the for him when he was running for president.
John:
Both times, he would be constantly saying how much he loves Trump and loves everything he does.
John:
Yada, yada, yada.
John:
Now he's kissing his butt because he thinks that's what he needs to do.
John:
As part of his job.
John:
He's supporting.
John:
I disagree with that, but he doesn't actually like Trump.
John:
He doesn't actually support Trump, but he is debasing himself to essentially bribe our corrupt president and our corrupt system, embarrassing himself and our country and all Apple supporters to kiss up to this idiot.
John:
That's what's happening.
Marco:
Okay, so that's a very generous read, but I urge everyone out there who's trying to bend over backwards into the shape that you would have to be to kiss your own butt, trying to defend Tim Cook here.
Marco:
Why are you working so hard to try to excuse this as obviously not him actually being a Trump supporter?
Marco:
When...
Marco:
He gave him a million dollars for the inauguration.
Marco:
He was there with all the other tech billionaires who everyone says are obviously Trump supporters.
Marco:
He's there doing all the same things that all these other people are doing.
Marco:
He's directly supporting him with money and gifts and trinkets and support and public endorsement, effectively, publicly doing things with him.
Marco:
How is that different from support?
Marco:
I honestly don't see a huge difference.
John:
And by the way... There's a difference in motivation.
John:
It's why are you doing it?
John:
In this case, actually, in this case... No, we don't know the motivation.
John:
Right, but it's pretty obvious what it is.
John:
Is it?
Marco:
No, see, what it is... And before, when he gave the million dollars, when it was just Tim Cook personally giving him the million dollars, and we could all say, oh, well, it's distancing it from Apple.
Marco:
This is...
Marco:
Now, this is Apple.
Marco:
This is an Apple logo on a gift made of gold sitting on Trump's desk.
Marco:
This is Apple supporting Trump directly.
Marco:
Don't you think that's a clever manipulation?
Marco:
No, I think it's direct support.
Marco:
And it looks bad for... I'll tell you a quick little story here.
Marco:
When I went to go pick up my kid from camp, it was a nerd camp.
Marco:
And so I always wear nerdy shirts when I go to... Because there's a little ceremony opening and closing for the camp.
Marco:
So it's an audience full of nerds.
Marco:
So I always wear my nerdiest shirts.
Marco:
In the past, I have worn Apple shirts.
Marco:
And I actually put on an Apple shirt, like some Apple shirt I got from the Visitor Center over the years.
Marco:
They have pretty fun designs.
Marco:
So I put on an Apple T-shirt and I almost... And I'm like, you know what?
Marco:
Actually, I don't think I can wear this right now.
Marco:
Because Apple in the past, the brand of Apple, used to be neutral to liberal and pretty widely accepted.
Marco:
Today, I don't think it is.
Marco:
Today...
Marco:
Tim Cook and Apple now are directly cooperating with, supporting, and sucking the ass of Donald Trump.
Marco:
The brand damage that is happening here, not to mention the fact that it's a huge middle finger to all of Apple's employees who do not agree with this, which is many of them, and all the groups of people that Trump is actively committing violence against who also happen to work for Apple.
Marco:
This is unconscionable.
Marco:
And why?
Marco:
The last time everyone said, oh, well, obviously, Tim Cook wants to make sure Apple survives the tariffs and everything.
Marco:
And that's part of it.
Marco:
By the way, those are problems that Tim Cook created.
Marco:
But OK, that's part of it.
Marco:
But also, Tim Cook wants the Justice Department out of Apple's business.
Marco:
They don't want regulation.
Marco:
They don't want antitrust.
Marco:
There's a lot behind this.
Marco:
Also, Tim Cook's a billionaire.
Marco:
We don't question why other billionaires support Trump.
Marco:
It's obvious.
Marco:
It's for money and power reasons.
Marco:
Tim Cook might have those same reasons.
Marco:
We don't know.
Marco:
We don't know much about Tim Cook.
Marco:
So what I'm saying is not only is Tim Cook obviously directly supporting Trump the same way lots of other billionaire CEOs do, and we didn't try to defend them at all, but also he has roped Apple in so much that he is doing profound damage to Apple's brand.
Marco:
It's time for Tim to go.
Marco:
What are we waiting for?
John:
i agree with you i agree with you on that point but for different reasons but but i have to say like in this particular case what he's you know his little dog and pony show and his little bribe and everything is actually about a thing that apple was doing anyway and is as a good thing in this case like putting money into u.s manufacturing like it's not that big of a deal like again we talked about this the first time they did this that in the previous year apple had put had made basically this same exact press release with an inflation adjusted amount that is the same amount but either way
John:
Apple investing in U.S.
John:
manufacturing is a thing Apple should be doing and is a good thing that I think we can all agree is a good thing.
John:
So that is what is actually being done here.
John:
The embarrassing part is obviously doing a dog and pony show in public with Trump, which is essentially, you know, supporting him and lending him Apple's name.
John:
And then giving him the gold trinket thing, which is a very low cost bribe in the grand scheme of things, because it is instead of having to give him a million dollars, you can give him a gold trinket that he'll be just as happy about.
John:
It's probably more effective when you're, you know, bribing the idiot dictator.
John:
I think you're ignoring the cost to the brand.
John:
Yeah, well, so we'll see what the cost of the brand is long term.
John:
Obviously, this is not good for the brand, but we'll see what the brand damage is.
John:
I don't think it's going to be beneficial, but how much damage really depends on how much people pay attention to this and, you know, the specifics of Apple doing this versus all the other people who are kissing up to it.
John:
To give an example, I would think that the reputational damage to Columbia University is worse than Apple has endured so far with its bribe.
John:
So Tim continues to try to walk that line.
John:
He's not walking the line.
John:
He fell over the line.
John:
We'll see, because Apple is reaping benefits from these bribes.
John:
I mean, they are getting they are, you know, avoiding some of the worst of the tariff stuff and getting exemptions for things.
John:
And it's it's a terrible situation.
John:
Our company, our country is in a bad situation.
John:
And this is how Tim Cook is dealing with it.
John:
And I don't think he should be CEO anymore, but not for this specific reason.
John:
But it's certainly on the pile.
John:
Yeah.
John:
reasons but if we had a different ceo who was acting differently and was stridently against it or whatever there'd be other harms to apple from that as well and you know maybe that's the better way to go but there's no really good there's no win scenario in this there's just a series of loss scenarios and it depends on what kind of loss you're willing to endure how much what damage are you willing to do to what parts of what things and which people and obviously marco disagrees with the damage that uh
John:
tim is choosing to uh inflict on apple and its employees and its reputation uh but tim seems to think this is the right thing to do anyway he should go for other reasons but you know whatever reasons you have for wanting tim cook to step aside and let someone else uh run the show uh
John:
if we can all agree on that then we're making some progress see tim cook he he knows exactly as much about apple's brand as he does about computers software and design god help me for defending him because i think this is disgusting but you've put me in this position explaining why something is happening is not defending it right i think there's two different things there like i disagree with marco about why this is happening but i agree with him that it's bad
Casey:
Yes, exactly.
Casey:
So the reason this is happening is because he's the Tim Cook is the head of this giant ass company with thousands upon thousands of employees.
Casey:
And he knows that to some degree, this company is screwed if he doesn't bend over and kiss the ring.
Marco:
But no, honestly, are they?
Casey:
Yes.
Marco:
Are they like, can we challenge that for a minute?
Marco:
Because that's that's what everyone I'm not saying that you are wrong.
Marco:
That's what everyone else is saying, too.
Marco:
What would the actual damage be if Apple had to pay the tariffs like everyone else does?
Marco:
First of all, wouldn't that just be fair?
Marco:
Second of all, like, okay, their prices would go up.
Marco:
They would take a hit to margin.
Marco:
Their stock price might suffer a little bit.
Marco:
They're not going to go out of business.
Marco:
We're all going to still have iPhones.
Marco:
You know, like every tariff, the cost would be mostly borne by the public.
Marco:
The public, who, by the way, voted for this guy.
Marco:
So they kind of deserve it.
Marco:
That's what we're talking about.
Marco:
And the Department of Justice would probably continue its various investigations towards various anti-competitive and monopolistic behavior that Apple does.
Marco:
I think they're going to do that anyway, by the way.
John:
I don't think they're getting out of the DOJ stuff, no matter how much they bribe.
Marco:
Oh, well, we'll see how that goes.
Marco:
To be determined, right?
Marco:
But certainly, I guarantee you that's part of this.
Marco:
But what everyone is arguing who's saying that Tim Cook has to do this for various strategic or financial reasons is that participating in direct support of this dictator –
Casey:
is a better idea than taking a couple of quarters of a stock price hit because they would be subject to the same rules that literally every company would be subject to no you're you're putting some words in my mouth here and i understand why because if i were in your shoes i'd probably say the same thing but what i'm saying to you is it is tim's responsibility to do right by apple and i i agree with you marco that i think i would i would like to think i would make different choices but
Casey:
But ultimately, he is responsible to do right by Apple.
Casey:
Literally, his job is to do right by Apple.
Casey:
And when he looks at the chessboard in front of him, the way you do right by Apple is give the toddler in the Oval Office a shiny toy to play with.
Casey:
I agree with you.
Casey:
It's disgusting.
Casey:
It's deplorable.
Casey:
I hate every bit of it.
Casey:
I'm not arguing any of that.
Casey:
But I can absolutely see that if I'm Tim and if I'm
Casey:
if I am willing to do whatever it takes to make Apple successful, then I'm doing this.
Casey:
Now, I don't think I would make that same choice.
Casey:
I think I would say, well, you know what?
Casey:
Tough nuts.
Casey:
Like you said, this is the world that the American public somehow voted for.
Casey:
So this is where we are.
Casey:
But that's why I'm not Tim Cook, right?
Casey:
And I think that his actions, while I simultaneously find them deplorable, are extraordinarily explicable.
John:
yeah i mean it's it's the you know having to be subject to the same rules as everyone else it's a situation where all the other big tech companies are doing essentially the same thing and if everyone else is doing the wrong thing and apple sits it out and does the right thing presumably they would suffer more than their competitors so whatever hit that we think it would be and you know maybe tim cook has numbers on this and we just have speculation about what it would actually be but whatever damage it would be would be magnified by the fact that they would be a standout in a company that is not kissing his butt um
John:
But I think the universities have shown that trying to kiss his butt is a losing proposition.
John:
So far, it's been working better for Tim Cook than it has for the universities, because universities that bent over backwards said, yeah, we'll do whatever you want.
John:
They just have more and more demands.
John:
Right.
John:
Whereas Apple and Tim, again, with his, you know.
John:
One of his greatest skills, as we discussed in the past, is knowing how to deal with dictators from his experience with China.
John:
Right.
John:
Knowing how to deal with governments that are, you know, not not working according to the normal rules.
John:
So, yeah, I think he thinks he's navigating this well.
John:
History will see how well he is actually navigating it.
John:
There are a lot of risks here.
John:
The risks probably outweigh the short-term benefits, but soon Tim Cook will be retired, and that'll be the next person's problem.
Marco:
Yeah, he can tank the company's reputation and then just pass it along.
Marco:
Great.
Marco:
Good job as American CEO.
Marco:
That's perfect.
Casey:
All right, let's move on.
Casey:
Let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
HDTV Test has done things.
Casey:
I don't think anyone cares but John, so let's move on.
John:
this is important to marco but the tv is i'm kidding i'm kidding this is my favorite tv reviewer of instantio from he tv test he got around to reviewing the sony bravi a2 and also the panasonic z95b um and so we'll link to those two reviews in the show notes which i hadn't heard from him on those two things he's my favorite reviewer even if i don't always exactly agree with him i like the way he approaches things and he always has lots of good information
John:
Related to that, there was the TV shootout results, the Value Electronics TV shootout that The Verge and Ali Patel participates in.
Casey:
Hold on, hold on.
Casey:
You're skipping something important here, sir.
Casey:
What am I skipping?
Casey:
Now that's how the tables have turned.
Casey:
Ha-ha.
Casey:
So almost immediately, and to your credit, you did note this in our internal show notes, but almost immediately in the HDTV test review of the Bravia 8.2, he says the Bravia 8 what?
What?
John:
I didn't know that Margo did.
John:
Ravi had Mark too, but he lives in the UK.
John:
So yeah, they say all sorts of weird things.
John:
I didn't know anything.
Casey:
Maybe I did.
Casey:
I think Casey put that in and forgot that he put it in.
Casey:
I probably did.
Casey:
That's probably true because this was like two weeks ago.
Casey:
But yes, that's probably true.
Casey:
And yes, he did say the Sonia is apparently what I put in our show notes.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
Anyway, Sony Bravia 8 Mark II, which, if you recall, a certain co-host of mine, John, was making merciless fun of me for calling my AirPods Pro Mark IIs Mark IIs.
John:
You're not from the UK, and that's not what the company calls it.
John:
And also, he says Panasonic Z95B.
John:
You want to start saying Zed?
Casey:
No, that's ridiculous.
Casey:
But I'm taking the W. I'm taking the W on the Mark II.
John:
Anyway.
John:
All right.
John:
So in the TV shootout, the shocker headline from The Verge was like, actually, they put the word shock in there.
John:
Inside the LG G5, shocking last place finish.
John:
So I'll just give some context on that.
John:
There were four televisions in the shootout.
John:
It was the Sony Bra V8 II, the Samsung S95F, the Panasonic Z95B, and the LG G5.
John:
And the LG G5 came in last place, which means fourth place against the other top three TVs.
John:
And you can read the article to explain why I'm here to say that having seen both of these reviews from Vince Teo on the Sony Bravi A2 and the Panasonic C95B, my recommendation to Marco is still the LG G5 because the Bravi A2 just isn't better enough than the A95L and has lots of weird compromises, especially when it comes to gaming.
John:
Samsung is out because of no Dolby vision.
John:
I don't like how they handle colors.
John:
The Panasonic is weird and doesn't flush mount against the wall very well and has a speaker on the bottom and I think it's ugly.
John:
Uh, and the LG G5 is just brighter than all of them.
John:
It does HDIG really well.
John:
Marco's familiar with the LG interface, uh, and it's a really good TV.
John:
And so that's why it is still my recommendation for Marco and, uh,
John:
I would personally probably get the Bravi 8 Mark II.
John:
I would not get the Panasonic because it's too ugly and I hate their fire interface thing, but it's actually a decent TV.
John:
But yeah, the LG G5 is just brighter than all of them.
John:
And I have faith that LG will continue to update its firmware to deal with whatever issues were causing it to end up in last place on this thing.
John:
They already did fix the firmware problem that was causing it to lose out to some other TVs earlier.
John:
So they are fast on their feet.
John:
Still my recommendation for macro specific case LG G5.
John:
It wall mounts real easily.
John:
It looks real good.
John:
It has the LG interface you like.
John:
It gets real bright and it's an OLED.
Marco:
So one other point to add to the pile.
Marco:
So I do have an LG OLED, whatever, like the C7, the 2017 one, I guess.
Marco:
I forget whether it's C5 or C7, whatever it is, like one of those.
Marco:
That has been fine, but that was a long time ago.
Marco:
My more recent TVs are the Samsung frames, which are terrible.
Marco:
One of them already has a giant blue stripe through it.
Marco:
They were even terrible when they were new and working perfectly.
Marco:
Anyway, those are the ones that I'd be looking to replace, at least one of them.
Marco:
The Samsung frame, the other day, as I was watching a show,
Marco:
Put up a big notification in the upper right corner saying something like our privacy policies have been updated.
Marco:
And I had to dismiss it.
Marco:
I had to dig out the Samsung remote, which I never use.
Marco:
I'm just using the Apple TV remote usually.
Marco:
Find the Samsung remote and dismiss this thing that's overlay from the upper right third of my screen.
Marco:
What I would like... Now, I also like... Samsung's interface, also, even when it is not bothering me about that kind of stuff, the interface they have to switch inputs is the most convoluted... It basically has its own app...
Marco:
on the bottom across the bottom of like the home screen because it's trying to be the smart TV and to switch inputs you can't just push one button like on every TV that came before it you have to like you know hit whatever like the home menu button is and like navigate through that giant menu which as it very slowly tries to load whatever the hell it's trying to load I have I've never had a TV that I've hated more than my Samsung TV now at the restaurant there are two other Samsung TVs
Marco:
They are just as annoying, and they're from different times.
Marco:
So I have to imagine that whatever the five-year-old one I have in my house here and the however old the restaurant ones are, I have to imagine this is a thing that Samsung is probably presumably still doing.
Marco:
I don't like Samsung's interfaces either.
Marco:
Whatever TV I get next,
Marco:
I don't care if it has smart features or not.
Marco:
I wouldn't use them, probably.
Marco:
I want to be able to turn off any of that complexity and just, like, let me switch inputs with a button on the remote.
Marco:
Can you do that on your current LG?
John:
think so i mean i'm not as familiar with the new lg interfaces but i think if you could do it on your c7 you should be able to i know i can do it on the sony one it's just it's a single button it's input although i rarely press it because i have a receiver so it's always on the same input but you know i know i can do it on the sony and i'm assuming on the current sony's you can do it i i recommended lgd because you've been using the lg interface and it hasn't been driving you nuts so i hope you can turn things off on that i mean all the tvs are smart tvs
John:
There's actually a video from Vincent CEO of HGTV test on how to turn off all the things on the Sony thing, like turn off all the apps, turn off all the information gathering.
John:
Like it makes the interface faster if you use that interface, which I don't.
John:
But there are things you can turn off.
John:
And I'm presumably in LG.
John:
There's other places where you can turn things off.
John:
But yeah, like there's no getting around the fact that every TV is a smart TV.
John:
There is no such thing as a dumb TV for consumers that you can buy that has as good a picture as the ones we're describing here.
Marco:
Yeah, but all this is to say like even if Samsung made the best option available, I would never buy it because I hate using Samsung TV so much.
Marco:
And they don't, so don't worry.
Marco:
Good.
Marco:
But so all this is to say like the exact best specs, if the number one model has an annoying interface and the number two model doesn't, I would pick the number two model even if it's not quite as good as specs just because I've learned that's a thing that matters to me.
John:
yeah that's one of the things that's soured me on panasonic is they they have a i don't know if it's just i you know this was in the i don't know if it's just in the uk or but anyway they use the fire tv interface which i really dislike uh and they used to roll their own which was very minimal and i kind of enjoyed but yeah you know sony uses google which i find passable but again i don't use like like you i don't like i never see the smart tv interface ever so it doesn't really matter what it does as long as it doesn't present itself to my face so
John:
Again, I still say LG G5, get a return policy if the software has really annoyed you.
John:
But form factor wise and performance wise, I think that is your pick.
John:
And second pick, if you can't tolerate that one, is I go with the Sony Bra V8 because I know their interface and it is fairly unobtrusive.
Casey:
That's glowing reviews.
Casey:
All right, let's talk AppleCare1.
Casey:
Dave Penn writes, a Reddit user called uindependent6915 has created an app called iCareCalculator, currently in test flight, that you should take a look at.
Casey:
So reading from that Reddit post, that person's Reddit post, I made a small iOS app called iCare Calculator.
Casey:
It's now available in Tesla.
Casey:
I just add all your Apple devices to the list, and the app will recommend the most cost-effective plan, showing a quick monthly price comparison between AppleCare Plus and AppleCare One.
Casey:
When possible, it even recommends a smart split that combines both plans to help you save even more money.
Casey:
Uh, then there was a different link where that, or we will put it in a link.
John:
That was a link to the, I was trying to save you from all of that, which I think you added in.
John:
That was the, in the Reddit link.
John:
If you follow it, you'll find out, oops, it's been removed by the mods for whatever, for whatever subreddit reason.
John:
And apparently the mod said that kind of post is not allowed.
John:
And everyone in that Reddit thread, uh, the post has been removed, but the comments are still there.
John:
Everyone in the Reddit thread said, this should be a website instead of an app.
John:
So the test flight doesn't work anymore.
John:
Test flight link doesn't work anymore.
John:
I don't even know if the app still exists, but guess what?
John:
Now it's a website.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
And so you can go to iCare-Calculator.Vercel.app and you can try it out.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And I feel like this is something that Apple's, you know, interface to AppleCare1 should be telling you just like it does when it initially gives you the come on, hey, join AppleCare1 and you'll save X number of dollars per month.
John:
that calculator should always be active so when you add devices it should be telling you don't add that you'll be paying two dollars more a month or do add that you'll be saving this much more month but it doesn't so that leaves room for this app uh so check it out we'll put the link in the notes um i've been battling with apple care one
John:
I mentioned last time that I had added my son's MacBook air and showed me some orange text, uh, that it was going to be removed soon.
John:
And I had to like sign into it with my Apple ID because everything in Apple care one has to be on the same Apple ID.
John:
So I made an account on my son's Mac and signed into it and the orange text went away.
John:
And then I got an email that said it had been removed and just, it was, this is battle.
John:
Right.
John:
And every time it gets added, it like cancels the previous one and gives me a refund and gets impeded back or whatever.
John:
Anyway.
John:
Um,
John:
A couple of things.
John:
One, people asking me about this on Mastodon, and I realized even though Apple's own documentation, which we read last episode, said all the devices on AppleCare won't have to be on the same Apple ID, it prompted me with its initial come on to say, you should add John's iPhone 16 Pro, Tina's iPhone 15 Pro, and, you know, one of the Macs in the house or whatever.
John:
My wife's phone doesn't have my Apple ID on it because someone asked, do you share an Apple ID with your wife?
John:
I said, no, she's got her own.
John:
I've never signed into my Apple ID on any of her phones.
John:
They're her phones.
John:
And yet it prompted me that that's one of the three devices that should be part of the $19 a month or whatever.
John:
So currently, my Apple Care One plan has my phone, my wife's phone and a Mac on it.
John:
Or no, and my iPad, I think, as part of the three that you get for $19.99 or whatever.
John:
So I don't know what explains that.
John:
Maybe in the initial AppleCare one thing, it doesn't care what Apple ID things are on.
John:
But every time I try to add my son's MacBook Air, it lets me add it and then sends me an obnoxious email a day later that says, your AppleCare one add-on has been canceled per your request.
John:
Oh, no, I'm sorry.
John:
It's not per my request.
John:
You just did it yourself.
John:
And I keep getting emails per your request.
John:
We've canceled your AppleCare one and issued a refund for $3.86.
John:
And it's like, and then what do I see when I go into the, you know, settings general AppleCare on my phone?
John:
I see Alex's MacBook Air coverage expired.
John:
And then orange text that says eligible to add to AppleCare plan.
John:
Is it eligible?
John:
Because it seems like it's not.
John:
It will let me add it.
John:
And then two days later, it will say your AppleCare one has been canceled per your request.
John:
And so I've given up.
John:
I cannot add my son's MacBook Air because every time I add it, two days go by and then I get an obnoxious email telling me it's been removed from my request.
John:
And then my wife yells at me because our credit card bill is like, you know, minus $5.99 plus $3.86, minus $5.99 plus $4.24.
John:
Like it's...
John:
It seems broken to me.
John:
So I don't know what the deal is, everybody.
John:
It seems like the come on that tells you how much you could save is real and adding your own devices should work fine.
John:
But if you're trying to add a Mac that happens to have an account with your Apple ID on it, apparently they'll let you do it and entice you to do it and ask.
John:
I mean, I'm being prompted everywhere.
John:
Add this, add Alex's MacBook Air.
John:
But and it will let me add it, but then it rejects it.
John:
So I'm a little bit soured on AppleCare one, but now I'm kind of committed to it.
Casey:
Cool.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
With regard to buying new Macs, Bruce Steinberg writes, one amazing thing about B&H Photo Video is that they stock built-order Macs available for express shipping overnight in the New York City region, often at a discount.
Casey:
Even better, they sell off their inventory of last-generation Macs at sometimes enormous discounts.
Casey:
Several years back, I got a MacBook Pro M1 Macs with maxed-out RAM for 50% off.
Casey:
Not a reefer, brand new shortly after the M2 MacBook Pros had come out.
Casey:
You can also add AppleCare Plus directly to your order, and they have all the build-to-order options for the current generation Macs.
Casey:
There's really no reason to choose to buy from Apple rather than B&H, especially because they provide a 30-day return window rather than 14 days.
Casey:
Aside from the Mac Pro, which they only sell via special order for obvious reasons.
Casey:
So I took a look at this, and this is mostly true.
Casey:
Like, I went to see if I could find my Mac, or the M4 equivalent of my Mac, because I have an M3.
Casey:
Uh, on, uh, in, in mine was a built order and blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
And I tried to find it and I couldn't find an exact equivalent.
Casey:
Uh, but I got surprisingly close and, uh, this is an eight terabyte hard drive.
Casey:
This is, um, 64 gigs of Ram.
Casey:
Like this is not a terribly commonly built computer.
Casey:
I don't think.
Casey:
And it got really, really close.
Casey:
So I was, I was surprised.
John:
Yeah, the key to this one is you have to wait until the new ones have just been released and buy one of the old ones, which is not what tech nerds want to do.
John:
They want the latest and greatest, but you can get good deals.
John:
And these are not like refurb.
John:
It's just them clearing inventory in the old fashioned sense.
John:
So it's a thing to watch out for.
John:
Sometimes you can get super good deals.
Casey:
Well, sorry, just to be clear, what I'm talking about was I tried to find an M4, a brand new equivalent of my current computer, just to see what build-to-order style options do they have.
Casey:
And the point I'm trying to make, and maybe I failed, was that they do have a surprising amount, as Bruce said, of build-to-order-like options where you can get a lot more than you would expect, a lot more different combinations than you would expect, and certainly more than what an Apple store would carry.
Casey:
But your point is about discount.
John:
I guess they just buy the inventory and like guess at what people will want.
John:
And then that's why they end up being on sales because they bought, they have to guess what configurations are going to sell.
John:
And then eventually they've just got them hanging around and the new computers are coming out and they just got to get rid of these old configs that didn't sell.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let's talk about retro computing on the web.
Casey:
This is, I presume, a carry on from overtime last week where we're two weeks ago, whatever, where we spoke about that really cool website where you can use all the different versions of Mac OS and look at preferences and settings and whatnot.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Tell me about eWorld, John.
Casey:
What the heck is eWorld?
John:
eWorld was... Remember AOL?
John:
Remember the original AOL interface?
John:
I believe the company... I don't know the historical details of this, but I believe the company that made that AOL interface, at least on the Mac...
John:
sort of like white labeled that thing where they would make an online service like that for anybody.
John:
And you just supply like the artwork.
John:
So Apple essentially made their own AOL type thing called eWorld based on the same software as the AOL client for the Mac, I believe at the time.
John:
And it was a silly online thing in the sort of pre widespread internet days.
John:
Anyway, this is an archive.org web link to a website that is no longer online.
John:
that tries to reproduce the experience of using eWorld similar to the like control panel thing we talked about in overtime last time that has like it shows you the computer right with like the monitor and everything and then it runs the like the crt has little scan lines on and everything and then it runs but this is not emulation this is not running the original mac software
John:
This is like a reproduction using, I don't know, does he use flash?
John:
Does he use, I don't even know what it uses, but it's not the real software.
John:
One of the fun things about it, not using the real software is that it can do things that actual emulation has some difficulty with.
John:
So for example, making the modem screeching noise when you connect,
John:
Like that's not part of the mode of noise comes from a hardware device that's connected to your Mac.
John:
So if you emulate Mac OS, you're not getting that noise.
John:
But in this little thing, they'll give you that noise.
John:
Right.
John:
The reason I know it's not emulation, though, is because it's very convincing.
John:
They do a really good job.
John:
Like I recognize a lot of the software it's running is because of one of the things that we discussed when talking about the control panel thing from overtime, the way the menus work.
John:
whoever wrote this forgot to implement the thing where if you click on the file menu and hold down the mouse cursor and then move the hold down the mouse button and then move the cursor down and release that it should select a menu item they just forgot that that's how one of the ways that you could use mac menu so that doesn't work at all as i'm like okay this isn't running mac os this is a clever web-based simulation of mac os and i thought that was a interesting to see because that's one of the beauties of of like actually running
John:
the the real mac os software through 15 layers of you know javascript and web assembly or whatever they need to do is because you get the real behaviors when you try to simulate it you're relying on the person who's creating the faked interface to know how everything worked and this person obviously just assumed well of course you click on the menu and then you release the button and then you go into the item you want and you click on it again that's how menus work
John:
they work another way too.
John:
At least, first of all, they work that way now.
John:
So they should have known if they're using a Mac now that you can do it that way.
John:
But second of all, they definitely work that way back in classic Mac OS days.
John:
So I thought that was funny.
John:
I also think it's cool that this website works on archive.org because so many things with just images in them break on archive.org.
John:
So if you want to see eWorld or a weird simulation of eWorld, check it out.
John:
Link will be in the notes.
Casey:
All right, let's talk about Tahoe and the new beta and so on.
Casey:
Apparently, a friend of the show, Gus Mueller, wrote, and we have a screen capture of this, I honestly thought that the checkbox button was missing in this macOS Tahoe screenshot.
Casey:
And there's a screenshot, write folder and trash.
Casey:
The folder trash is currently in the trash.
Casey:
Then there's a message, do not show this message again.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
And I looked at this after having read his message about the checkbox for a solid 60 seconds before I found where the checkbox was.
Casey:
It's to the left of the words, do not show this message again.
Casey:
I could not find it.
Casey:
I am not making this up.
Casey:
I genuinely was deeply confused for a really too long amount of time.
John:
yeah so this is this is not beta 5 this was i believe beta 4 and it's relevant because just like the day or two before i saw this post i was talking to someone about the disaster that is the tahoe interface and i said have you seen what unchecked checkboxes look like that was the specific example i chose because i couldn't believe it uh and anyway apparently people are discovering what unchecked checkboxes look like in tahoe and on the
John:
the background of a dialogue, they're basically invisible.
John:
I didn't look at the RGB values for this, but I encourage you to look at his toot, see the original image as posted to Mastodon, and see for yourself if you can see the checkbox, and if you think that's what an unchecked checkbox should look like in any circumstance.
Casey:
It isn't what it should look like ever.
John:
Also, I believe it is not a disabled checkbox.
John:
This is an enabled, actively clickable unchecked checkbox.
John:
Yeah, it's real bad.
Marco:
When the rumors were that there was going to be a big redesign of all the systems, I believe one of our concerns was that...
Marco:
You know, the Mac seems like it's it doesn't hasn't got a lot of attention recently in design and that when it does get attention, it seems like it is the last priority.
Marco:
It seems like its design kind of has like the least effort put into it and problems take a long time to get solved.
Marco:
I think that's panning out.
Marco:
Like, this new design, all the liquid glass era stuff, like, it's on the Mac.
Marco:
It seems like it makes the least sense on the Mac, and there has been the least testing.
Marco:
And this is the kind of thing, you know, like what we saw last time with the disk image selector, which I guess we're about to talk about.
Marco:
But this is one of the things, like, we're going to have a lot of this kind of stuff on the Mac of just, like,
Marco:
Ways in which the new design just falls down, not because it can't be good, but just because stuff was changed and it wasn't tested enough or it wasn't considered enough on the Mac.
Marco:
And that's the reality of them doing a redesign these days.
Marco:
So it just kind of goes along with the territory.
John:
Someone in the chat room tried to pull up the RGB values from, I'm assuming, from Gus's Mastodon post.
John:
And it's RGB 237 versus RGB 239.
John:
So a difference of two.
John:
They could get it better if they just did 238 to 239.
John:
Anyway, one more thing from Gus Mueller.
John:
We had another toot.
John:
says trick question is this tahoe slider enabled or disabled the answer is either it draws exactly the same either way neat so i found this as well when messing with my mac apps that a lot of times controls that are enabled look like they're disabled and then apparently in the case of this slider the enabled and disabled state are exactly the same
John:
That's wonderful.
John:
That seems like a fundamental problem.
Marco:
I've been adopting the new design for Overcast and just going through different screens and figuring out how to do certain controls and everything.
Marco:
One of the challenges I'm having with the new design in adoption is there's a lot of controls or design consideration where I'm just like, I don't think I can make this look good.
Marco:
With the current design language, so I'm left with like, okay, do I
Marco:
Do I buck the design language and go my own way, which has a lot of downsides and a lot of costs?
Marco:
And I think is risky.
Marco:
Or do I adopt the design language and make something that I think is a little bit hard to see or hard to distinguish or hard to use?
Marco:
And that has its own set of trade-offs.
Marco:
This has been a very difficult design language to adopt.
Marco:
As soon as your app does not look exactly like Apple's pretty screenshots, and even when it does sometimes, it's very hard to work with this design language effectively.
Marco:
And certainly by us running into this as we try to adopt our apps to use it, certainly Apple's internal developers for Apple's apps have probably had similar challenges.
Marco:
It's a really hard language to use in a way that is usable and clear and versatile across lots of different content.
Marco:
And so, again, I...
Marco:
I mean, I don't know who uses computers more, Alan Dyer, Tim Cook, but it's hard to see, like, how do they get out of this?
Marco:
Like, I'm not asking them to throw away the whole design, but there's a lot of parts of it that need, I think, substantially more tweaks than what we are likely to see in the next handful of weeks before release.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
This is what's going to ship, basically.
Marco:
And we're going to have a lot of stuff you can't see on the Mac.
John:
And we'll have to deal with it.
John:
Well, good news on the tweaking front.
John:
Now getting to Tahoe Beta 5, which was released today, I believe.
John:
They did, quote-unquote, fix the startup disk thing.
John:
And by fix, I mean...
John:
they changed it to be the same amount of contrast it had in sequoia which as i said in the last episode when we talked about this it was already bad in sequoia so changing it back to be what it was like in sequoia is not really fixing it but at least it's doing no harm so previously in beta 4 it was like a 1.5 percent difference in uh
John:
uh dark and rgb values between the gray of the background and the gray of the selection now it's back up to 3.1 which is double what it was in beta 4 which is pretty much exactly what it was in sequoia so i don't know if that was on purpose or by accident probably by accident because that seems a lot of things happen here but yeah they should really be cranking up the contrast dial on a lot of things in tahoe and at least this one little corner of the us
John:
is no longer getting worse in beta 5 but who knows what beta 6 will bring oh and they changed the hard drive icons to be the hideous uh things where there's no vanishing point but uh there was a whole surprisingly large dust up about that across the entire little uh community including multiple web i think even the verge ran a story on it over the hard drive icon anyway it is hideous it is bad it doesn't look good it's dumb it's really like so much in in liquid glass but in the end it's just a hard drive icon so it's whatever
Marco:
But the perspective is so comically wrong.
Marco:
When you see it, it kind of breaks your brain a little bit.
Marco:
And it makes you wonder, how did this get out of Apple?
Marco:
How did this get out of the designer's desk who made it?
Marco:
It's really weird.
Marco:
The perspective is so comically wrong.
John:
did you see the thing that i uh retweeted of someone who 3d modeled it in blender to show how it would work like an l-shaped l-shaped so when you you make it l-shaped so when you turned it head on the l-shaped one looks exactly like apple's one because it doesn't make any sense from from it has no vanishing point and you can see the top of it completely but also the front of it and it's just it's it's bad uh whatever like yeah
John:
hopefully they will tweak these icons and next year's release and we'll get some kind of improvement.
John:
I'm, I'm, I'm mostly upset that they don't, they don't look appealing to me.
John:
Like, I don't, I don't think they look good, especially for things like hard drive icons.
John:
It's like, it doesn't really have much of, you know, it could have been a place for them to try to come up with it.
John:
It's a difficult problem, right?
John:
Because hard drives are no longer, uh,
John:
physical drives inside our computers they're like chips that are soldered onto our motherboards or you know like they're it's hard to think of how i'd represent them with an icon so it's a fun problem and apple's like no we're not we're not dealing with that problem we're just going to show for the internal drive we're going to show an abstracted version of what external drives look like in the past decade in an incorrect perspective and unappealing art style so good job like i like i
Marco:
I understand.
Marco:
I mean, granted, this has got to hit home with you with the hyperspace icon.
Marco:
But I understand that they wanted to get away from the old hard drive icon because it looked like a hard drive.
Marco:
And no modern Macs really have hard drives anymore.
Marco:
A spinning hard drive.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
A hard drive.
Marco:
So I understand wanting to get away from that and wanting to freshen up the icon.
Marco:
But don't do it if you're going to do this.
Marco:
If you're going to freshen it up, do a good job.
Marco:
No one is forcing.
Marco:
They haven't sold hard drives on Macs for a long time.
Marco:
This didn't have to happen right now.
Marco:
No one's forcing you to do this icon today.
Marco:
Go back.
Marco:
Take a few days.
Marco:
Do a better one.
Marco:
It'll be fine.
Marco:
You have plenty of time.
John:
Yeah, when I came up with the design idea for the Hyperspace Icon, I was talking with the artist at Icon Factory who was doing it.
John:
We discussed this very point.
John:
Are we sure you want to do a spinning disk?
John:
And I was like, no, it should definitely be a spinning disk.
John:
I'm not saying that people have spinning disks or that you should use my app with spinning disks, but...
John:
It looks better in the icon for it to be a spinning disk.
John:
And anyone who's going to buy my app is probably old enough to remember spinning disks.
John:
And I was like, it's going to be clear.
John:
I'm not changing my icon.
John:
It's going to be spinning disk forever.
John:
Think of it as a retro thing.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Justin Bradford writes with regard to ejecting USB storage on Windows.
Casey:
In version 1809 of Windows 10, which was around 2019, Microsoft changed the default behavior of USB storage devices to disable cache writes to allow removal of a drive basically any time the drive appears idle.
Casey:
There's an option for the old method, but then it is recommended that you click the dialogue that Marco was talking about to write the cache and then eject the drive.
Casey:
I have to imagine this was the result of many, many users corrupting a thumb drive by removing it while a write was active.
Casey:
Here's a link with more info, which we'll put in the show notes.
Casey:
The default removal policy from that link, the default removal policy for external storage media was changed by Microsoft in Windows 10 version 1809 from better performance to quick removal, which for some users may translate to faster removal times with degraded performance.
John:
Quick removal.
John:
Yeah, we'll just make it be slow all the time to give you the ability to yank it out whenever you feel like it because you can't be trusted to unmount things.
John:
This is why you can't have nice things.
Casey:
Then finally, we have a couple of topics with regard to the art and science of user interface design.
Casey:
Anonymous writes, Syracuse is probably almost right in that the science is lost in UI design.
Casey:
It's not lost in the games industry.
Casey:
I work at a very large games company.
Casey:
We employ UX researchers and all aspects of our games are tested on regular people.
Casey:
Their reactions to the menus, game mechanics, et cetera, are recorded and studied.
John:
This is an interesting case here because what's different about the games industry than the computer industry today?
John:
The difference is the games industry is fiercely competitive, especially if you are making a game and you're not one of the platform like this.
John:
You know, there's not too many platformers, but lots of companies make games.
John:
If you make a game, there's not much barrier for someone deciding not to play or not to buy or not to subscribe to or whatever your game and to go to somebody else's game because there's not a lot of game lock in.
John:
so you have to like there's competition i'm saying people want to make games that people enjoy playing and so in a competitive environment yeah you better believe they employ ux researchers to figure out can people figure out how to play our game do they get frustrated is it easy to use like all these user interface things that the games industry wants those people because it contributes to their bottom line in what situation would that not contribute to the bottom line
John:
What if there's massive platform lock-in like on Windows or Mac or iOS or Android or whatever, where there's not a lot of platforms to choose from.
John:
And then once you commit to one, it's a monetary investment.
John:
It's an investment of skills and learning how the ecosystem works, buying apps for it, all that other stuff.
John:
It just shows how uncompetitive
John:
our technology market, personal computers and phones and iPads, all that, all that stuff is compared to another technology based market of games where there are tons of game companies and tons of games fighting tooth and nail to get those consumers to play their game and not somebody else's.
John:
And I, I mean, I think that that's my explanation for why, you know, why it's so important for them and not important because just look what's happening with, uh, with liquid glass, which I will continue to call liquid metal accidentally.
John:
Um,
John:
Yeah, they're shipping it.
John:
People are grumpy about it.
John:
But people are like, what are you going to do?
John:
Switch to Android?
John:
It's it takes so much to, you know, there's so much platform lock in that.
John:
Like Apple could be like, we ship an interface that people don't really like or ship a version of photos that people complain about if we mess up the phone for a little bit or whatever.
John:
we can probably weather that storm because we'd have to really, really mess up for people to give up all the apps they bought and all the things they bought on all services and all the skills and experience they have with our platform for them to leave us versus like you come out with a cruddy version of call of duty and people go play a different FPS.
John:
And that happens all the time and people aren't, you know, abandoning platforms as much.
John:
So I think this is a, you know, the lack of scientific rigor and user experience design at Apple and other major platforms is further evidence of the lack of competition.
Casey:
And then with regard to game design concepts and software, Wes Davis writes, when you guys talked about using game design approaches for software, John talked about the coyote time approach of letting a player jump moments after leaving a ledge.
Casey:
For years, I've thought about exactly that concept every time an iOS notification pops in right as I'm about to tap a control at the top of the screen and hijacks what I was trying to do.
Casey:
Please, Apple, give me a coyote time for banner notifications.
Casey:
Coy notification time?
Casey:
Eh?
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
uh the that that name is ridiculous but and i know it was said in jest but this happens to me freaking constantly so this is a tricky problem the reason i put this in here is because it's not as simple as the coyote time for like ledge jumping and stuff like that there's no like oh they should obviously do this and it will fix it because the problem is you see the screen you have a thought and then it takes some time for that thought to translate into motion in your fingers touching the thing that's on the screen
John:
and between the time you decide to tap that button and the signal goes down your arm and to your finger and you're going to tap like there's between that when that happens a notification appears and it turns out your finger hits the screen just as the notification appears you could kind of coyote time that to say okay notifications aren't tappable for the first end milliseconds but then if you're really quick on the draw and you know notification is coming and it comes up and you tap it and nothing happens it feels broken
John:
Because you're like, well, I just tapped it.
John:
And so how many milliseconds do you set that time to be?
John:
So this is one of the things that's really hard to like dial in unless you have a very controlled situation where you know exactly what the person is doing, exactly what their reaction time is.
John:
Because both ways, like ignoring the clip, click or tap or allowing the tap or like allowing the tap to go to the things underneath the notification because that's what you intended to hit because your finger started moving before the notification appeared.
John:
It's a really hard problem.
John:
Um, a lot of the problems like the Coyote time thing and platforming are not that hard.
John:
There are sort of known solutions for them and you just have to implement them the right way.
John:
But yeah, this, this happens to me.
John:
This happens to everybody.
John:
Uh, it's tricky.
John:
Uh, and that's, that's one of the things about interfaces.
John:
Like you have to rethink, like say you were trying to make an interface for, I don't want to do the, uh,
John:
like the Navy ship that crashed into something because of bad user interface.
John:
But if you're trying to do an interface for like steering a gigantic, you know, boat on the water, maybe don't have things that pop up on the screen over controls that people try to hit.
John:
Whereas on the phone, that's part of the interface is notifications appear and they just cover things that are on the screen that we just accept that because the miss hitting a notification is not the same as missteering a boat into another boat.
John:
But yeah, that's part of the design of the interfaces.
John:
If it's really important for that never to happen,
Marco:
Don't pop up new interface elements unbidden on top of other ones.
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Casey:
The iPhone 17 Pro's rumored new MagSafe design.
Casey:
We're reading from MacRumors.
Casey:
Leaker Majin Boo today shared a photo of the alleged MagSafe magnet arrays for third-party iPhone 17 Pro cases.
Casey:
On existing iPhone models of MagSafe, the magnets form a complete circle, but the new layout has an opening in it.
Casey:
And there is a link to Majin's official website, and we will also link the picture of the iPhone 16 Pro.
Casey:
with a MagSafe case where you can see clear as day that there is a circle of MagSafe magnets.
Casey:
The Apple logo is pretty much directly in the center of it.
Casey:
And in the 17 Pro, allegedly the Apple logo has been moved down.
Casey:
So it's kind of in the way of the bottom of the magnet circle.
Casey:
And so there is no magnet circle.
John:
So here's the thing.
John:
If you look at the Majin Buu things, like the parts that he's got, if you scroll down the page and see those teal little pieces, you see that?
John:
Mm-hmm.
John:
There's no Apple logo on those.
John:
So while I'm willing to believe that this incomplete MagSafe circle is the design for the back of the phone, because these parts leaks seem, you know, it's around that time that we'd be getting these types of leaks.
Yeah.
John:
I'm currently wondering what does that mean for the Apple logo on the back of the phone?
John:
Because I don't think they're going to put it where this Mac rumors mock-up put it.
John:
Like they, what they did is they, the back of the iPhone 17 pro basically has a full width camera Mesa and then below it has another rounded rectangle and they put the Apple logo in the center and
John:
of the lower rounded rectangle but the center of the lower rounded rectangle is not the center of the mag safe circle it's lower than that so that's where the mock-up put the apple logo i guess you could just move the apple logo up and put it in the center of the partial circle or what do you think of this no apple logo on the back of the iphone 17 pro no way well so what's what what's your what's your guess for where will the apple logo be positioned or will there be one assuming that this mag safe design is true
Casey:
I think it'll be where it is today.
Casey:
Just, you know, there's just going to be less MagSafe stuff beneath it.
John:
Do you think it'll be centered in the partial circle?
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
Well, see, I don't know.
John:
It's interesting they chose not to do that because I think one of the other rumors, you'll see, I think there are separate rumor stories that are like, the Apollo is going to be centered in the rounded rectangle, not where it used to be.
Marco:
I don't know what to think.
Marco:
I mean, the actual back of the phone, you don't see the MagSafe shape.
Marco:
So this is only an issue when you have a clear case.
Marco:
This kind of thing... I can see Apple just maybe discontinuing the clear case if that's going to be a big problem.
Casey:
No, that's fair.
Marco:
I think ultimately...
Marco:
the Apple logo, I think, will remain in the middle of the circle, not in the middle of the flat area.
Marco:
Because with the Apple logo in the middle of the flat area of the back of the phone, it puts it pretty far below the overall center of the phone, and I think it kind of just makes it look droopy.
Marco:
You don't want the Apple logo to look like it's beneath something.
Marco:
Obviously, Tim Cook is beneath a lot of dignity right now, but you don't want the Apple logo... Couldn't help yourself...
Marco:
No, of course not.
Marco:
You don't want the Apple logo to be down on the shape of the phone.
Marco:
You want it to be prominent, center or up.
Marco:
You don't want it to be on the lower half.
Marco:
And that's what this is depicting.
Marco:
I can't see Apple doing that.
John:
Yeah, I think they're still going to have the clear case.
John:
I think the Apple logo does actually look better centered in the, in the rectangular part, just because if, if it is styled as they're showing here, where it's like two color, two tone, like it's different color than the rest of it.
John:
So you can clearly see it.
John:
But, uh, I'm thinking back to, do you remember the, um, the case, the Apple case with a bunch of holes in it?
John:
I think it was on the, was it on the C phones?
Casey:
Yeah, it was on the 5C.
John:
Remember how badly those holes lined up with, like, the Apple logo or whatever that was on the back of the phone?
John:
It looked very un-Apple-like.
John:
I think they're willing to have awkward alignment between the phone body and the case.
John:
But we'll see.
John:
This is one of the more interesting rumors.
John:
Because these phones have been so thoroughly leaked with, like, down to the fraction of a millimeter models of every single phone in the lineup of being out for months now.
John:
Yeah.
John:
that this is this is one thing we that that it seems there seems to be disagreement on is where the apple logo will go because the mock-ups for case designs don't actually include that information because it's not important when you're designing a case because the apple logo is not it's not indented it's not poking out it's just part of the flat surface so keep an eye out for where will the apple logo be or will there be one i agree that will probably still be one
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Apple's new Answers team eyes ChatGPT-like product in AI push, writes Mark Gurman.
Casey:
Apple has a new Answers team developing a stripped-down rival to ChatGPT to help users access world knowledge.
Casey:
Earlier this year, Apple formed a new team called Answers Knowledge and Information, or AKI.
Casey:
This group, I'm told, is exploring a number of in-house AI services with the goal of creating a new ChatGPT-like search experience.
Casey:
The AKI team is led by our former friend, Robbie Walker, a senior director reporting to AI chief John G. and Andrea.
Casey:
Walker previously oversaw Siri but lost control of it after engineering delays.
Casey:
Following that shakeup, he was assigned to the New Answers Initiative and has brought along several key team members from his Siri days.
Casey:
While still in early stages, the team is building what it calls an answer engine, a system capable of crawling the web to respond to general knowledge questions.
Casey:
A standalone app is currently under exploration alongside new backend infrastructure meant to power search capabilities in future versions of Siri, Spotlight, and Safari.
Casey:
Apple's recently begun advertising job openings for the team on its career site.
Casey:
Several listings specifically mention experience with search algorithms and engine development.
John:
I can't tell from this rumor whether the answer engine thing...
John:
Is a search engine?
John:
Or is an LLM?
John:
Or both?
John:
Because this is described as a chat GPT-like search experience.
John:
When I think of an answers team...
John:
I mean, I guess it depends on what they're being asked to answer.
John:
But like, I think there's still a place in Apple software stack for something they can answer questions from like a knowledge base.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Not make up statistically likely answers from a knowledge base that it was trained on, but like literally look stuff up.
John:
Kind of like what, you know, Gruber is going on about when the whole thing about like who won the Super Bowls.
John:
You can just put all the Super Bowl winners and the scores and info in like a structured database and have a thing that knows how to pull that info out.
John:
And it won't be wrong because it knows as long as it correctly interprets which Super Bowl you're talking about, it can look it up in the structured database and just give you the answer that it has in its database.
John:
And I guess the info in the database could be wrong.
John:
But, you know, once you get the database right...
John:
There's not a lot of variability.
John:
It will give you the scores.
John:
It will give you the teams.
John:
It will give you the years.
John:
It will give you whatever is in the database.
John:
That's not an LLM.
John:
The LLM may parse your question, but this could be a tool that the LLM uses to say, hey, if anyone asks you about the Super Bowl, if you interpret whatever mumbo jumbo they told you that they're asking about the Super Bowl, LLM thing, use this tool, and then the tool would be the answer engine that goes and looks up all the state capitals, the populations of various countries, you know, like facts.
John:
to have a fact right and i think there's a place for that siri used to do that like that was basically how siri worked if you asked it sort of quote unquote world knowledge questions it either had some kind of database with the structured information that it could give you or it didn't and it'd be like i couldn't tell you that but in in the age of lms with quote unquote world knowledge they'll make up anything you can ask them anything and they'll tell you something all right and that's why people are you
John:
trying to make lms to be essentially like tool using devices where their their job is to interpret what the request is and to figure out which tool to use and then those tools are not probabilistic word generator things but are instead specific tools that do a particular task like look up some data in a database or whatever i hope that's what they're making because one of the things that i feel like is
John:
A frustration with LM type stuff is we expect from our experience in the past with computers, we expect computers to be good at the things that humans are not good at.
John:
So computers can do math really, really fast.
John:
Humans can't.
John:
And computers get the answers right all the time unless it's a hardware failure.
John:
Humans don't.
John:
But with LLMs, that all changes.
John:
All the things that we expect them to be good at, like their speed and infallibility, don't exist anymore.
John:
And it's sometimes tricky to find out how to get value out of a thing like that.
John:
Like we want them to be like, well, the computer says it must be right.
John:
I asked it about the Super Bowl and it understood my question and it told me this team won and this was the score.
John:
But it turns out that's just statistically probable nonsense and it's wrong, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Having a plain old boring set of structured data retrieval tools like an answer engine that can be used by an LLM to look stuff up once it understands what the user wants seems like a really great idea for me.
John:
And I really hope that's what they're doing.
John:
But then seeing the names associated with this, like Robbie Walker, who got all that bad press about the Siri stuff, it also seems kind of like, well, we kicked all these people off Siri.
John:
So we need something to do.
John:
So give them this other thing.
John:
And it doesn't make me feel like it is a high priority project.
Marco:
I mean, we'll see what happens with all their AI efforts and projects.
Marco:
It's obviously finally in a state of significant flux.
Marco:
That's good.
Marco:
That's where we wanted them to be because I think we can agree they were heading in some bad directions before or simply not heading nowhere.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
There's going to be a lot of fits and starts and big attempts, small attempts.
Marco:
I think this is great.
Marco:
At least they are trying things now that seem like they are both achievable and important to their customers.
Marco:
If they were going to have some big moonshoot projects...
Marco:
I'd rather than try to build a world knowledge AI than a car or a VR headset, honestly.
Marco:
So I think this is good news.
Marco:
Even if it never becomes anything or even if they try it and it sucks, I'd rather they try this kind of stuff than not.
John:
I can't tell if you're saying moonshoot as a humorous reference to your past saying of that word, or you've just forgotten that it's moonshot.
John:
I forgot.
Marco:
Now I remember.
John:
Here's the thing.
John:
Do you remember when they, whatever they announced, there might have been a WWDC, the Apple Intelligence one, they're like, and we've fed Siri knowledge about our products, and now you can ask it about our products, and then people tried it, and it would just...
John:
tell you to go to settings that don't exist in settings and stuff like that like the value of features like that essentially goes to zero if you can't rely on it giving you answers and it's kind of embarrassing for like apple's own products like if they're advertising the fact that you can ask your phone how to like you know how do i turn on dark mode and it tells you go to settings go here go this like if it's wrong
John:
You're like, you're the phone.
John:
The one thing you should know about is where the stuff is in you.
John:
And once you get a wrong answer once or twice from that, you're going to stop asking it because it seems like it's just wasting your time.
John:
This is where an answer engine can come in handy.
John:
I feel like you could structure that data in some way.
John:
that it would always give you an answer that is relevant to whatever operating system your phone is running whatever you know like it should it should know this right this is a knowable tractable thing it's just so much more work to do it that way than to just feed all the knowledge base articles and documentation to an lm and then cross your fingers which is what everyone wants to do they're just like we'll just throw all the stuff at it and and then put it in front of customers and it it's right most of the time so that's good right yeah
John:
So my fingers are really crossed about this knowledge engine thing because I want this to be a deterministic tool that is used by the LLMs.
John:
And I don't want it to be, we just fed a bunch of documentation to a different LLM so it can give you a different set of maybe right answers.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I mean, I agree with you that I think this is definitely something that they should be exploring.
Casey:
I also agree that if the reporting about Robbie Walker in particular, and Gianandrea actually, is anywhere near true, and they are...
Casey:
not as great as maybe they should be to be put in these positions.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
That scares me a little bit.
Casey:
And it's certainly like a, well, we don't want to fire you, but just go over here and play for a little while, like a toddler, right?
Casey:
Like distract, distract.
John:
It doesn't seem like it's the a team.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
Which I mean, maybe, and maybe we're darn wrong.
Casey:
Maybe Robbie Walker and John G and Andrea were completely, uh, you know, riddled.
John:
I mean, all we know is that they didn't produce results.
John:
We don't know why, but like the,
John:
we do know that they had a job and they didn't do it.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
But we'll see.
Casey:
I mean, I, I I'm, I'm really hopeful that this will turn out to be something fruitful.
Casey:
I don't even really care if it's an LLM or not, as long as it works, but yeah, we'll see.
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Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP where Steve writes, I have a desktop laptop MacBook Air.
Casey:
It has an external SSD permanently attached, which I use for time machine backups.
Casey:
Whenever the MacBook wakes from sleep, it pings a notification, disk not ejected properly.
Casey:
Eject M1 time machine before disconnecting it or turning it off.
Casey:
Can I stop this from happening without having to dismount and remount the drive every time I walk away from the computer?
Casey:
It's annoying and worrying that I might be corrupting my backups.
Casey:
Before John starts fussing about desktop laptops...
Casey:
We know that desktops would solve this problem, but you can't move a desktop, John.
Casey:
That's the other problem.
John:
I don't know if desktops would solve this problem because the problem is like going to sleep and waking from sleep.
John:
Desktops also go to sleep and wake from sleep.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
See, I was trying to get ahead of all the complaining and moaning about laptops, but it turns out you're not complaining and moaning.
John:
What I'm saying is you're worried you might be corrupting your backups.
John:
Yeah, you should be worried.
Yeah.
John:
If it says disk not ejected properly, that's not an annoyance that you should live with.
John:
That's an indication that something is going wrong.
John:
And we've talked about this in past episodes.
John:
What's going wrong?
John:
Is it whatever chipset is running the interface on your external drive mechanism?
John:
Is it some driver issue with your version?
John:
Whatever it is, it's a problem and you should do something about it because you can't allow this to stand.
John:
Anyway, one of the workarounds, believe it or not, there is an app for this.
John:
from St.
John:
Clair Software.
John:
What else do they make?
John:
They make a keyboard maestro and a bunch of other stuff.
John:
Anyway, it's called Jettison.
John:
The tagline is manually take control of your external disks directly from your menu bar.
John:
Automatically eject disks before your Mac sleeps or after your display powers off.
John:
With Jettison, just close your MacBook, unplug, and go.
John:
This is working around this apparently issue that is common with external disks with macOS by saying, install this software and you don't have to remember to manually unmount your things when you put your thing to sleep.
John:
We will automatically unmount them before your MacBook goes to sleep and maybe remount them or whatever.
John:
But this is a...
John:
Not hacky, but this is an unfortunate workaround for a disc that keeps remounting itself.
John:
Really, your disc should not be unmounting itself when your Mac goes to sleep.
John:
As someone who has had many, many external drives connected to many, many Macs, you should be able to put it to sleep and wake it up, and you should receive no messages about volumes unmounting.
John:
It's not happened, but we don't live in a perfect world, so check out Jettison.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Jeff writes,
Casey:
developer was taking up around 50 gigs so i tried putting xcode onto an external ssd i already stored my projects there it seemed to make no difference so i moved it back to my internal hard drive i was about to pull the trigger on a two thousand dollar mac mini with 48 gigs of memory and two terabytes of storage when this morning i checked my storage and 100 gigs had suddenly rematerialized can you explain this or give me some insight on how the storage relating to xcode works john tell me about file systems if you please
John:
Yeah, so free space in macOS is tricky because of the fancy features of the Apple file system.
John:
It's just a fact of life.
John:
You can't have these fancy features without some confusion about free space.
John:
There is no obvious thing that Apple should do that would make it clear to everybody all the time.
John:
There just isn't.
John:
So that's an unfortunate complexity of modern computing life.
John:
The workaround is just buy so much storage you never need to worry about it, but that's very expensive, especially in Apple world.
John:
One of the things that could be making your hogging your space and then having your space suddenly reappear are local time machine backups.
John:
If you are running time machine and it's not clear if Jeff is, but if you're running time machine, time machine does this thing where it makes local snapshots, where it takes a point in time snapshot of your entire volume periodically, sometimes several of them.
John:
And those snapshots keep data alive, even if it's subsequently deleted.
John:
Because as long as data is referenced by any existing snapshots, it can't be actually freed up.
John:
So if you take a snapshot, or Time Machine takes a snapshot behind the scenes without you knowing, and again, this has nothing to do with like an external Time Machine disk.
John:
I'm saying if you're running Time Machine,
John:
And like you unplug the time machine disk doesn't matter.
John:
These are local snapshots on the volume that is going to be backed up.
John:
It makes these snapshots because that's what it can back up from.
John:
It takes a snapshot and then you delete 200 gigs worth of stuff.
John:
You're not getting that space back until the snapshot that references those 200 gigs also goes away.
John:
Time Machine will delete these local snapshots periodically.
John:
It doesn't make them forever.
John:
So they sort of go off the end.
John:
I don't know how many it keeps.
John:
I don't know how long it keeps.
John:
The policy always changes or whatever.
John:
But like within a few days or hours or whatever, the snapshot that referenced those 200 gigs of files that you deleted, that snapshot will be deleted or discarded.
John:
And now nothing references that 200 gigs worth of data.
John:
And then you get it back as free space.
John:
You can see the complexity of the finder trying to show what your free space is.
John:
When you delete those 200 gigs, don't you want to see the number go up by 200 gigs?
John:
But what if it didn't really delete it?
John:
What if it's still referenced in a snapshot?
John:
Should it lie to you and tell you that's free space?
John:
Sometimes it does because in theory,
John:
there's this system in mac os that considers that space quote unquote purgeable so if it needs space and it doesn't have enough it can say what can i purge and one of the things that can purge is your time machine snapshot so it might show you that you have that 200 gigs free knowing that if any app tries to use that space it's a the mac os would be like oh actually that space isn't free but i can make it free just hang on a second i'll just delete the snapshot and that's time consuming it's tricky and the big complaint about mac os is
John:
It doesn't purge the purgeable space fast enough or in a timely enough manner.
John:
So even though there's supposedly space available, it doesn't become available fast enough.
John:
Anyway, we'll put a link, a couple links in the show notes explaining what time machine local snapshots are and how you can view them.
John:
You used to have to use a command line tool to do this, but now plain old disk utility will show you your time machine snapshots and will let your local time machine snapshots and will let you delete them with a little minus button.
John:
in disk utility so no longer do you have to do command line hacking i have found in my experience i often have to manually delete local time machine snapshots to free up space in a timely manner because mac os is just too slow and too reticent to purge that purgeable space so that's one thing the other thing is xcode taking up space xcode does take up tons of space in places that people might not realize so much so that there is a pretty good app
John:
dedicated to this called dev cleaner that i've been running for a long time do you guys run dev cleaner yes i do no there you go okay so you found an app for you so it is it runs periodically even if you forget to run it it will it will periodically pop up a notification and say hey you haven't run this in a while you should probably run it now
John:
And it shows you all the space being taken up for Xcode stuff that you can safely delete.
John:
Now, safely is, you know, one of the things that will show you is how much space is being taken up with archive builds of your app.
John:
You probably don't want to delete those.
John:
At least I don't.
John:
Maybe I'm just hoarding them or they're good for debugging or whatever.
John:
But like it will show you those.
John:
So don't think you can just delete everything.
John:
You have to have some knowledge to use this tool.
John:
It will show you things like SDKs that you've downloaded that you're not using anymore.
John:
Oh, I'm not doing iPad development anymore.
John:
And in fact, there's two different iPad SDKs downloaded.
John:
I can delete those.
John:
You can delete those because if you ever need them again, Xcode will redownload them for you or you can redownload them from Xcode.
John:
It'll show you...
John:
locally cached documentation it will show you everyone's favorite derived data it will show you all sorts of other stuff it will show you and the sizes and you can decide which one of these things do you want to delete and i always forget about it until a notification appears and says hey you haven't run dev cleaning rod you want to run it and that will find some stuff that you can delete now i don't think it explains jeff's situation where hundreds of gigs are disappearing it shouldn't be that big but it does let you get a handle on
John:
xcode and the space that it's using uh i would also check if you have like multiple versions of xcode or like if you have the .zip file sitting in your download folder and you know this gets into just general like using something like grand perspective or daisy disk or whatever to find what's using space on your disk but for xcode in particular there's an app for that it's called dev cleaner check it out
Marco:
Yeah, and if you are on the Xcode beta train or just if you use Xcode for long enough to have multiple versions of Xcode or have gone through multiple versions of iOS or whatever the platforms are, when Xcode downloads the iOS runtime files or the watchOS runtime files or downloading those components after you install the actual app,
Marco:
It doesn't delete the old ones.
Marco:
So if you're on the beta train, like this summer, we're on the beta train, we're on beta 5.
Marco:
Every time you download the new beta, it downloads the iOS support files for that version of the beta, which are like 7 gigs.
Marco:
When you get the new beta, those old files stick around.
Marco:
They're no longer used if you replace beta 4 of Xcode with beta 5 of Xcode or whatever.
Marco:
But those stick around.
Marco:
recently those have moved to a system folder that tools like dev cleaner can't clean but xcode itself if you go into the xcode settings there's a tab called components and if you scroll down to the bottom it will show you all the old versions of those components of basically like you know old ios builds and stuff that you probably can delete support for because you probably don't need them anymore because the version of xcode you're running you usually can't even use them if you wanted to
Marco:
Or if it's for some ancient version of Xcode, do you really need separate support files for iOS 18.4 and 18.1 and 18.0?
Marco:
Like, probably not.
Marco:
And you can always redownload that kind of stuff if you need it.
Marco:
So go into the Xcode components menu, and you'll be able to delete a lot of stuff from there.
Marco:
And then secondly, if you are running the iOS simulator, say, on your Mac to test out things on iOS, I run into this problem a lot because my app that I'm testing is Overcast, and it downloads files.
Marco:
Downloads podcasts.
Marco:
And so if I like launch a new simulator and I log into an existing test account that already has some podcasts subscribed, it's going to start downloading those files off the internet to my Mac.
Marco:
And it's going to keep those in like a file container for that instance of that simulator.
Marco:
So it could be downloading like a gig or two of MP3s if it's like a big enough account.
Marco:
And those are just sitting in some container folder somewhere.
Marco:
And I'm testing with them and everything.
Marco:
But then later on, if a new version of Xcode or iOS comes out and I start building my simulator against that...
Marco:
It is a new copy of the simulator with its own container.
Marco:
And the old one just gets abandoned.
Marco:
And so buried deep inside usually your library folder somewhere, there's device support or simulator folders that contain all of the data that has been downloaded by your app running in the simulator in various times.
Marco:
And if you aren't actively going and cleaning those out, those will add up too.
Marco:
So you do have to be fairly diligent with Xcode development for disk space, both Xcode itself in the component menu and if you're running simulators, what's going on in those simulators and are you then abandoning them with gigs of data just sitting there forever?
Marco:
So there's a lot of potential to reclaim disk space by kind of watching Xcode like a hawk.
Marco:
And almost none of it has to do with, as Jeff said, like moving the Xcode app itself to an external disk because that won't change anything.
Marco:
It's still going to be storing all these other folders on your boot drive, whatever that is.
Marco:
And that being said, I would suggest if you have the ability to
Marco:
no computer from apple that you intend to use xcode with should have less than a terabyte of ssd and even the terabyte you do have to babysit like that's the terabyte is what i use from my travel laptop and the the reason i know all this stuff about where all these folders are right now is because like two days ago it was down to like 30 gigs free i'm like what
Marco:
out of a terabyte what happened and sure enough i had like 200 gigs of xcode waste going on across the computer it was it was quite quite something to find um but even even a terabyte like if i had the 512 i wouldn't fit like that would that that would not be enough for all the stuff that i do even for a travel laptop because i'm also doing xcode
Marco:
Terabyte, if you can, should be your minimum.
Marco:
And I think next time I buy one, I might even go two terabytes.
Marco:
These things are only growing over time, especially as we're getting into LLMs and downloading models and stuff like that.
Marco:
It's only going to keep getting bigger over time.
John:
It's also worth noting that the DevCleaner thing is apparently open source on GitHub as well.
John:
So it's on the Mac App Store, but you can also see the source code and try to build it yourself or whatever.
John:
So that's nice.
John:
And then I've seen a bunch of stories recently about people who are like, my Mac was fine, had plenty of free space, and then overnight I lost 500 gigs.
John:
And it turns out to be like...
John:
and a spotlight importer, uh, that just got it caught in a loop and was just making tons of little files or some driver that kept crashing.
John:
And every time it crashed, it made like a four kilobyte crash log and it was crashing hundreds of times a second.
John:
Uh, and there was a directory with six, literally 6 million files in it.
John:
Um,
John:
stuff like that can happen uh with first party and third party software how do you find that how do you find what's happening how did these people find what the problem is uh we'll put a link in the notes to the app that i use which is a grand perspective what was the what was the other app before grand perspective i always there was omni disk sweeper i always was a big fan of space gremlin and daisy disk is the one that everyone else likes
John:
Yeah, I like Tasty Diss.
John:
But Grand Perspective is a clone of an app that was exactly like Grand Perspective that had a different name.
John:
Anyway.
Casey:
Oh, yes.
Casey:
I know what you're thinking of, but I can't remember the damn name of it.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Grand Perspective gives you a bunch of visual squares, each square, the area of each rectangle.
John:
The area of each rectangle represents the number of bytes.
John:
And I forget if it's free or cheap.
John:
But anyway, it's well worth the money because...
John:
You can see the big boxes.
John:
It takes a long time to do a scan, but just look for where the big rectangle is or look for where the giant fleets of tiny rectangles are, and you'll find... If there's a directory with 6 million files in it, after you run Grand Perspective and let it run over 48 hours or however long it takes to do it, you'll see the 6 million files that you didn't expect to be there because they will dwarf everything else.
John:
The only advice I will give on Grand Perspective is in this modern age and in any kind of multi-user type environment,
John:
If you have more than one account on your Mac, keep in mind that it cannot see stuff happening in other people's accounts when you run it on your account.
John:
So you should go to that other account and run it there as well to get a complete picture.
John:
Cause you're not gonna, cause it can't like, it can't read those directories.
John:
I don't think it like, it runs as rude.
John:
At least the Mac app store one doesn't like run as rude and have admin permissions.
John:
that's how you find those things.
John:
I mean, you can do it from the command line.
John:
There's a million different ways you can do it, but if you're looking for a GUI app, run this thing, let it run.
John:
It will take a long time and it will show you a graphical representation that you can then hover your mouse cursor over all these little rectangles and show the little info pane.
John:
It'll tell you exactly what file you're hovering over or what directory
John:
And then you can reveal that on the finder and you'll find where the problem is.
John:
Fixing the problem might be tricky, especially if it's a spotlight importer or something, but that's part of the detective work that's required.
John:
So yeah, I recommend you do the same, Marco, if you're pushing up against the limits of a one terabyte thing and you only found 200 gigs of Xcode waste to delete.
John:
So maybe there's something else going wrong.
Marco:
yeah i mean and you know also part of it is like you know i have there's 200 gigs of photos that are that were downloaded not even with keep origin if you're gonna put you try to put your photo library on that laptop too yeah yeah yeah like and not even with keep originals just like you know with the automatic storage thing yeah that's that's the problem with the oh optimized storage sure we'll use every ounce of free space you have and never purge it when you want space back is that what you want it
Marco:
Yeah, remember back in the day, I used to keep my iCloud photo library file in a disk image that had a quota set on it.
Marco:
I haven't done that in a long time.
Marco:
I wonder if that still would work.
John:
I mean, I'm surprised it ever worked, but I understand the motivation.
John:
But just like there should be a setting in photos that says optimize storage.
John:
Underneath that, it should say and never use more than X amount.
John:
And it can put a minimum on it like, well, you have to let me use at least this much because you have this many photos.
Casey:
photos or whatever but it doesn't and so it just does whatever it feels like it's doing by the way the chat room has uh told us all that the uh the grand perspective predecessor was called disk inventory x or 10 ah yes all right uh and then finally tonight alan bale ward writes how do you recommend dealing with spam for those of us running our own mail server well i can stop here don't run your own mail server it's it's that simple like i can't i
Casey:
I'm not trying to be a turd, but I am happy to read the rest of this.
Casey:
But truly, I get the motivation for not wanting to do Gmail or not wanting to do Fastmail, even though I cannot overstate how good my experience with Fastmail has been.
Casey:
I get the motivation.
Casey:
I am super duper into self-hosting these days.
Casey:
I get it.
Casey:
But this is a bad idea.
Casey:
It's just not a good idea to run your own mail server.
Casey:
I cannot stress enough.
Casey:
It's not a good plan.
Casey:
I'm going to
Casey:
If it matters, I'm using OpenSRS for my few domains used by myself and a few friends and family, which costs 50 cents per mailbox per month, a lot better than the $18 Canadian per user per month from G Suite.
John:
I think this question isn't just saying if you run your own mail server, which I agree you should not do it because it's just asking.
John:
It's just a nightmare, which is a shame, by the way.
John:
It should be possible to do it, but the...
John:
The current situation, the current spam environment makes it pretty much untenable for you to do that.
John:
But even if you're not running your own mail server, but you're simply not using a service that has its own decent spam filtering built in like Gmail tries to have, for example, Apple's mail services.
John:
They're doing something related to spam that you have, let's see if this sounds familiar, no visibility into and no control over.
John:
One of the reasons I've never used my Apple email account as my main email account is because I have learned so many hard lessons about
John:
uh their spam filtering a that's not good at filtering spam and b it has stopped me from receiving legitimate messages many times with no explanation and no recourse so i don't like apple's email service for that reason but a lot of people use it and find it fine anyway um
John:
SpamSiv I used for years, but of course, Alan has identified the problem.
John:
SpamSiv is a thing that runs on your Mac.
John:
For it to do its work, it needs to be running and it only works on the Mac that it's running on.
John:
That was good for the days of pop before we had even IMAP where all the email was just downloaded onto each individual Mac.
John:
That's not the world we live in, although SpamSiv is really good, and it's tunable and configurable, and if you're in a situation where... And if you're using it with IMAP, it will be reflected back up on the server, obviously, because when it files things in spam, it's filing them in an IMAP spam folder.
John:
So SpamSiv is not just for POP.
John:
So I do actually recommend that, but if you're not running your Mac, then SpamSiv isn't doing its work, and if you don't have an always-on Mac, I see the problem there.
John:
MailRoute, MailRoute, whatever, former sponsor of the show ages and ages ago, that I'm still using...
John:
Is a server side mail filtering service where you basically have your mail delivered to mail route and then they filter spam and then forward it on to where it was really supposed to go.
John:
I like that because it runs on a server that I don't have to deal with someplace else.
John:
It's basically transparent.
John:
It doesn't matter what mail client user or whatever, because as far as your client is concerned, when the mail arrives, it's already been filtered.
John:
And I think they do a pretty good job.
John:
I use that for a bunch of my like non Gmail account things and it blocks a lot of spam.
John:
It's and I never need to do anything with it.
John:
Now, does it block all the spam?
John:
No, but it has rarely caught a message that I wanted to get through.
John:
And it does send digest emails saying, here's some messages that were questionable about.
John:
And you can click on individual ones and say, no, let that one through.
John:
I don't know if it learns from me doing that, but every once in a while I have to say, no, let that one through.
John:
Anyway, mail route, that's another option.
John:
I'm sure there are similar services like that.
John:
That's what I would look into.
John:
Instead, you know, if you don't have something that's running all the time where you can run spam civ on a Mac or whatever, look for a server side solution that runs on a server that you do not run.
John:
Like,
John:
again you can just go to fast mail as casey was suggesting which should do presumably all this for you but if you want to assemble your mail life experience from pieces and like and why am i using mail right why don't i use it well because i have a bunch of email addresses for domains that aren't real i didn't want to use google domains or anything like that i just wanted to be freestanding and eventually i started getting enough email that spam became an issue and i was looking for a solution to that so i plugged in mail route and it's so far been working for me but i'm sure there are other alternatives
Marco:
Yeah, I would say I used MailRite for a long time, and they were a sponsor.
Marco:
And my experience with them was pretty good overall.
Marco:
However, I did have to go in and occasionally check their maybe quarantine.
Marco:
Because it would occasionally catch messages that I did want and flag them as spam.
Marco:
So I did have to babysit it a little bit.
Marco:
But it did do a very good job of filtering out spam in the meantime.
Marco:
But overall, Casey is the most right among us.
Marco:
Don't do this.
Marco:
Don't run your email server in this day and age.
Marco:
There's lots of reasons that it's becoming increasingly difficult to do that in a way that is – in a way that both you can reliably deliver mail to everybody and that you can reliably filter out spam.
John:
It's like the Cloudflare situation.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Because it cost so little to send email, spam became prevalent, and then spam eventually overwhelmed all the legitimate mail.
John:
And that allowed a few powerful mail providers to become so big that then they could do deals amongst themselves about sort of mail exchange and who they'll trust and the rules that they're set.
John:
And now if you don't have a mail account on one of the big mail providers...
John:
it's very difficult to be independent.
John:
So now those big mail providers have an inordinate amount of control over the mail ecosystem.
John:
So whatever they decide to do amongst themselves, you are subject to that.
John:
You are, if they just decide we're not going to accept any mail unless it does X, Y, and Z, you better do X, Y, and Z. Otherwise you can't deliver to millions and millions of people.
John:
And this is just another, yeah, I mean, so there's two things.
John:
One, bad actors ruin stuff for everybody.
John:
And the bad actors in the cloud of full case would be the AI crawlers that are crawling too aggressively.
John:
So they make an environment where,
John:
We can't have nice things.
John:
You know, someone's in there just making a mess and stomping around and breaking everything.
John:
And so you need someone to try to create order.
John:
And that creates these big, powerful companies which now have too much power.
John:
So, yeah, I'm sure I don't know if this is tragedy of the commons or there's some there's some common cliche or parable or lesson that repeats itself over and over again that I don't remember the name of that.
John:
This is an example of.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thank you very much for listening, everybody.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Delete Me.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
One of the many perks of membership is you get to hear more of us every week in our ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic.
Marco:
This week's Overtime, we're going to be talking about post-quantum cryptography, which is exactly as cool as it sounds.
Marco:
Post-quantum cryptography support in the 26 OSs in the networking stack.
Marco:
We're going to be talking about that.
Marco:
You can hear us by joining atv.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thank you, everybody.
Marco:
We'll talk to you next week.
John:
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.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-
Marco:
This is safe space, right?
Casey:
I'm not loving that neither of you has confirmed that this is a safe space for me.
John:
Well, we'll do our best.
John:
Yeah, no promises here.
John:
I think once you say what you have to say, once you give us the situation here, I want us all to do our counts.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Uh, I got home from the beach on Sunday and we went out to dinner with some friends of ours and I forget what was, I think it was like a late breaking dinner in the sense that we hadn't really, really planned on going.
Casey:
And then all of a sudden it was like, all right, let's get in the car and go.
Casey:
And I was in my workout clothes, which is a ATP, uh, athletic shirt.
Casey:
You know, the, it's kind of under armor style, athletic shirt that I love and
Casey:
And a pair of exercise shorts from a former sponsor, which I adore.
Casey:
I really, truly do.
Casey:
That being said, the zipper on these shorts has given up the ghost on both sides.
Casey:
So I don't generally go out and like do social things in this outfit in no small part because I often stink.
Casey:
But here we are.
Casey:
But occasionally exceptions have to be made.
Casey:
And this is one of those exceptions.
Casey:
And so we went to dinner and then I was getting back into Aaron's car in the passenger seat as I was leaving dinner.
Casey:
And Aaron said, oh, I just heard something fall.
Casey:
Was that your phone?
Casey:
To which I said, oh, no.
Casey:
Yes, it was.
Casey:
And sure enough, I shattered the back of my phone.
Casey:
This is, I believe, the third phone I've done this to.
Casey:
I had a very...
Casey:
very long stretch of never having done this.
Casey:
And then we had the incident where I jumped up to wash her former Volvo while I had the phone in a back pocket of regular shorts, terrible decision, a hundred percent my fault.
Casey:
Uh, and it shattered on the ground thereafter.
Casey:
Uh, and then I'm pretty sure I broke another one, although I don't recall how now.
Casey:
And then I think this is my third.
Marco:
Um, and to be clear, um, what is your case situation?
Um,
Casey:
I am caseless, caseless.
Casey:
And I have dropped this phone several times, not on concrete, like I did this time.
Casey:
I don't know if you want to offer this additional information.
Casey:
No, I mean, I know full well the risk I'm taking.
Casey:
I know full well the risk I'm taking.
John:
So you think your count is three.
John:
You have shattered three phones.
Casey:
I think that's right.
Casey:
And that one watch, that also happened when watching Aaron's car.
John:
We're not talking about watches.
John:
This is just phones.
John:
It's not actually big.
John:
You've had an iPhone since, what, the first one?
John:
The 3G?
Casey:
The 3GS was my first.
Casey:
That was the third one.
John:
Yeah, so that's a pretty good run for only three shattered phones, although it is concerning that all three of them are fairly recent.
Casey:
Semi-recent, yeah, yeah.
John:
Something has changed in your judgment about pockets or something.
John:
Oh.
Casey:
Apparently.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
But I mean, this was ultimately my fault.
Casey:
It's still my fault.
Casey:
But I put myself in a position that I'm not usually in.
Casey:
I'm in a pair of shorts that I know is not the best phone containment mechanism.
Casey:
And I left the house, which is something I don't typically do in these shorts.
Casey:
And so it's my fault, but mistakes have been made.
John:
Well, so what actually happened, though?
John:
Was the phone in your pocket and the act of getting into the car squirted it out?
Marco:
That's right.
John:
Okay.
John:
What's your count, Marco?
Marco:
My count of what?
John:
How many phones have you shattered?
John:
Zero.
John:
Zero as well.
Casey:
Not once?
Casey:
Wow, I'm impressed.
John:
Genuinely.
John:
I'm going to add iPod Touches because although I didn't get my first iPhone to the iPhone 7, I had the iPod Touch since the very first one.
John:
So I have always had phone-shaped phones.
Marco:
things with screens on them although granted it probably didn't take the ipod touch out of the house although i did but i had it in a pouch you know anyway i'm at zero i'm trying to think i don't think i have ever broken an electronic device i'm i i can't remember anything off the top of my head like maybe i'm forgetting something but didn't you sit on someone sat on an ipad in your house someone did sit on an ipad in my house it was not me it was not your butt huh no it was a different butt in the house that's fine i don't think i've ever broken anything like that
Casey:
I'm very impressed.
Casey:
Like I said, I had a very long run.
Casey:
This is coincidentally, I think this is actually all Stephen Hackett's fault because Stephen was breaking phones left and right for years and I had never broken one.
Casey:
Now, to my recollection, Stephen hasn't broken a phone in a long time.
Casey:
Did he start using a case?
Casey:
Maybe.
Casey:
I don't know.
John:
He's traded.
John:
He started it in case you stopped.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
Um, so no, that's right.
Casey:
I just listened to connected and I believe he said he is caseless in the winter, if I recall correctly, in case in the summer.
Casey:
So that would have saved me if I had followed his, his strategy.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And by the way, speaking of the sounds of phones hitting the ground, once your children get a little older, you will start to become more familiar with that sound.
John:
I cannot count the number of times that I can now recognize whose phone it is and where they're dropping it in the house.
John:
The phones have been dropped down the stairs, dropped onto the floor, just like...
John:
onto onto the concrete like what you're getting into a car and falling out onto the ground has happened so many times uh thus far i believe cases have saved it in all circumstances although there's a very deep scratch on my daughter's phone screen she says she doesn't know where it came from but i'm not surprised because
John:
it's dropped all the time like she's literally dropped it down the stair like boom hits you know like from the top of the stairs to the bottom hitting all the stairs on the way down and somehow to survive with just an apple clear case on it that phone is getting replaced with her graduation gift slash college phone because she's used this phone for like five years i think four or five years so she's getting a new phone to go off to college but it's been a it's been a trooper um but yeah you'll probably be more familiar with that sound i'm saying is get cases for your kids phones
Casey:
Oh, no, absolutely.
Casey:
Absolutely.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
And that will be a requirement.
Casey:
But I was doing the, you know, Apple care is my case, which I do not advise.
Casey:
I do not advise this.
Casey:
This is insanity.
John:
I mean, it seemed to work out for you because in the notes here, like you had Apple care on it, right?
Casey:
I did.
Casey:
So, uh, I did an express replacement because I've learned from my mistakes with regard to the air, to the AirPods.
John:
That's why you dropped it.
John:
Cause you just wanted to use the knowledge you had gained from past episodes before you forgot it.
Casey:
Shoot.
Casey:
And now that I think about it, I could, I could have written off the 30 bucks, whatever it is to repair it.
Casey:
But, uh, what I did was that night, which was Sunday night, I went on Apple's website and said, I would like a, um, express replacement, please.
Casey:
You know, I broke in the black back glass, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
That was easy peasy.
Casey:
It arrived yesterday, which is Tuesday.
Casey:
Um, I did the transfer, which took forever.
Casey:
I will, no matter what I do to transfer phones, I always make the wrong choice and always, it always takes forever.
John:
And I think some of that just have a lot of data.
Casey:
I was about to say, I think some of that is I just have a lot of data.
Casey:
But some of that, I think I'm just making maybe not the best choice.
Casey:
But either way, it did transfer.
Casey:
Most everything worked just fine.
Casey:
I didn't have any major issues.
Casey:
Then I wiped the old phone, put it in the box that the new phone came in, dropped it off this morning at FedEx.
Casey:
And the way this works is there is a $1,300 hold on my credit card because if I don't return the old phone, they basically think that I've stolen one.
Casey:
So they're going to bill me for it, which fair enough.
Casey:
But sometime in the next, you know, 24 to 48 hours, presumably they will get the old phone.
Casey:
They will look at it and laugh at my misfortune.
Casey:
And then they will refund or I guess release all but $30 in order to, because I'm pretty sure the repair is $30.
Casey:
It used to be a lot more for the back glass.
Casey:
Now it's $30.
Casey:
And I got to tell you, Apple Express Replacement, I wish I had listened to everyone when they've told us this numerous times over the years.
Casey:
But it was pretty great.
Casey:
I don't have any particular problem with my local Apple store.
Casey:
They're always very nice there.
Casey:
They're usually relatively quick, despite serving a tremendous geographic area, as I've whined about many times on the show.
Casey:
But it worked out pretty great.
Casey:
So I really do suggest if you are in a position where you can do an Express Replacement for a product, you should give it a shot.
Casey:
It worked out well.
John:
I think also regarding you dropping your phone and being lucky enough to shatter the back glass, I think a lot of people would just put a case in that phone and just keep using it.
John:
I mean, obviously, if they didn't have AppleCare, but sometimes I see so many people using phones with shattered screens, which I don't advise.
John:
But shattered back, it's like, oh, just put a case in that and just forget it even exists, right?
Yeah.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
But if I were to get a case, I would want some sort of leather case, maybe not the exact one that you like, but something similar.
Casey:
And that's the cost of two replacements of the back glass.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
John:
No, I'm not saying you so.
John:
You had AppleCare.
John:
You should get a new phone.
John:
But I think a lot of people without AppleCare would have just chosen to continue using that phone.
John:
I see a lot of beat up phones in the world.
Casey:
Oh, absolutely.
Casey:
If I had to pay the like $400 or whatever it is in August when I'm likely to get a new phone, let me check my math, next freaking month, there's no chance I would have got this repaired.
Casey:
But that being said, I do intend to pass this down to either family members or perhaps resell it or what have you, maybe trade it in.
Casey:
Um, and so because of that, I would like it to be in at least decent shape when that happens.
Casey:
And so, uh, yeah, I paid my, well, I presumably will be eventually build 30 bucks, which kudos to Apple for bringing that down from, I think it used to be a hundred bucks on for the back glass.
Casey:
Now it's 30 bucks.
Casey:
I believe maybe, maybe I'm in for a rude awakening, but I'm pretty sure that's right.
Casey:
And, uh, and it was basically zero time without a phone.
Casey:
I guess it was the two hours that took the phone to transfer, which, uh,
Casey:
I feel like if I were to go to the Apple store, maybe they would replace the back glass, but it wouldn't surprise me if they just handed me a refurb there as well.
Casey:
So one way or another, again, express replacement gets two thumbs up if you already are paying for AppleCare.
John:
And you got a fresh battery for your kids or whoever gets that phone next.
Casey:
Also thought about that too.
Casey:
Very true.
Marco:
I mean, the really remarkable thing is that if you totaled your car and then within a few years you totaled two other cars, I would be surprised if your insurance company continued to want your business.
Marco:
In this case, it is kind of remarkable that Apple isn't dropping you from AppleCare.
Yeah.
Casey:
You know, I never thought of it that way, but you're not wrong.
John:
The risk is spread over a very large risk pool of billions of iPhone users.
John:
So I'm not sure they're going to start narrowing it down to finding people who are prone to breaking phones because we just all pay for all our Apple care plans that we pay for that don't result in any kind of repair that helps pay for the cases of the world.
John:
That's how risk pools work.
Casey:
anyway so yeah that is my uh that is my follow-up if you will about uh express replacement you should try it oh you know what i didn't i didn't mention though is that i'm on my like sixth screen protector or something like that yeah well that is just obviously it's a bad screen protector that doesn't agree with your life but you're just like if you keep giving me free ones i'll keep taking exactly
John:
Like at a certain point, like you should just maybe try a different screen protector maybe for your next phone.
Casey:
Well, no, but here's the thing.
Casey:
I actually had this conversation with myself because I, I thought I was going to quote unquote lose my screen protector because it didn't, I didn't think it was damaged during the fall.
Casey:
It was all in the back and I'm not going to like, even though I would like to, I'm not unfair or untruthful enough to deliberately damage it so I can send the picture to Belkin to be like, Oh, guess what?
Casey:
It's broken.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
As it turns out, though, there was a little bit of damage on the front that I just didn't see at first.
Casey:
And so just seconds ago as we were recording, I got the email from Belkin saying they're sending me what I think is literally my fifth or sixth screen protector.
John:
Belkin's going to be the one who drops you to be like, sorry.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
That's all 100%.
Casey:
100%.
Casey:
But that being said, I was thinking, you know, these Belkin ones, to your point, John, I'm constantly freaking breaking them.
Casey:
And some of that is surely on me, but some of that may be the screen protector.
Casey:
And I thought about doing, like, one of these other ones.
Casey:
Like, I forget which one it was.
Casey:
I can look it up.
Casey:
But somebody had recommended a particular kind of screen protector.
Casey:
Like, just strong recommendation for a different kind of screen protector.
Casey:
And I think they had, like, two in the screen protector box that you buy.
Casey:
Now, granted, I think this one was, like, $10 or $15.
Casey:
The Belkin one was, like, $40.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
two apparently is not enough for me and I don't think most other screen protectors do this like basically infinite conga line of replacements.
John:
Putting more than one in the box doesn't give me hope that it's going to be very sturdy.
John:
Exactly.
John:
It's like there's something to you knowing it's going to break.
Marco:
I think it's more like whenever I get screen protectors like from Amazon Brando Brands, they always come in batches of like six, you know, nine dollars.
Marco:
I think the reality is screen protectors just don't really cost anything to make and
Marco:
it's fine like they don't really care if they throw in a bunch of extras you know compared to like the cost of okay so so you know obviously one of the challenges of screen protectors is if you apply it and you got a speck of dust under it you know sometimes you can fix it sometimes you can't sometimes you just kind of like ruin one you gotta try again
Marco:
And like imagine all the people who would like be angry and leave one star reviews if they only had one or whatever.
Marco:
And they're like, oh, well, we gave you two.
Marco:
And so you can just try again.
Marco:
Like I bet it's worth the companies who make these things like giving a bunch of extras in lots of cases because it's just so cheap.
Marco:
It's no sweat off their back.
Marco:
Meanwhile, the customers have better experiences with them and you feel like you're getting a good deal.