You Have 24 Hours to Comply
Marco:
It's a sad week in the Armin household.
Marco:
We had to say goodbye to our dog this week.
Casey:
i'm so sorry we obviously john and i knew this already i'm not going to feign ignorance right now but i i know i speak for john and john will probably speak for himself but i speak for john and saying you know we're very sorry uh having met hops many times he was the goodest dog he was a great great great dog and and i know that john and i will miss him to the degree that we can miss somebody else's dog and i'm sure that you guys are going to miss him for quite a long time so i'm i'm very sorry
John:
Yeah, he was such a fixture in your family, like just seemed to fit in so well, it's hard to imagine everyone without him.
John:
But, you know, dogs don't live forever.
Marco:
Yeah, he, you know, he lived over 14 years.
Marco:
That's incredible.
Marco:
And we were very fortunate that he was really very healthy the vast majority of that time.
Marco:
And it was, you know, it didn't, it ended in, you know, a very reasonable and, you know, fortunate way for all of us.
Marco:
He had a very good life, so...
Marco:
We're sad.
Casey:
Well, he picked a good family and the family picked a great dog and I will miss him and John will miss him.
Casey:
And I know that the three of you will miss him dearly.
Casey:
So again, I'm very sorry.
Marco:
So Casey, cheer me up.
Marco:
How's your house going?
Casey:
Oh, my house is just freaking great.
Casey:
So we are electively redoing the primary and kids bathrooms, which are both of the upstairs of my house.
John:
Why is the word electively in there?
John:
Is there some kind of way where you would be forced to redo the Batman?
Casey:
Yeah, like if there was some sort of catastrophic failure or something like that.
John:
Okay, all right.
John:
So you're distinguishing it from repairing a problem.
John:
Correct.
John:
Foreshadowing.
Marco:
Wrecking Ball or, you know.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
Like Die Hard style crashed a car into the second story somehow.
Yeah.
Casey:
Uh, so the, we got home, we actually took a trip to Manhattan over the last few days, uh, got home yesterday and then the demolition on the primary bathroom, which here in America, we called master bathroom for the longest time.
Casey:
And I'm really trying to get rid of that vocabulary from me, but apologies in advance if I slip up.
Casey:
Uh, so the primary bathroom, you know, the, the one that's on the suite with, uh, you know, Aaron and my room, my and Aaron's room, whatever my English is terrible.
Casey:
It's been a day y'all.
Marco:
It's Aaron and Mike.
Marco:
Go ahead.
Casey:
Anyway, that room.
Casey:
So the demolition started today.
Casey:
The contractor, the broader contracting company that we're using, we at this point are pretty friendly with the gentleman who owns it.
Casey:
He did the screened in porch.
Casey:
He did the front porch.
Casey:
He did the window or his company did the windows in the house.
Casey:
So the house is becoming a ship of Theseus.
Casey:
And so we started the process today with the demolition that was going really well.
Casey:
And about 2.15, Erin sends me a text because I was upstairs working.
Casey:
She was downstairs and says, I hear water running.
Casey:
And then within seconds, all of a sudden, it escalated quickly.
Casey:
And she starts to like really get loud, loud enough that I can hear her.
Casey:
and i know this is not good and then the the two people who are doing the demolition are screaming about turn it off turn it off turn it off i don't even know what they're talking about i go sprinting out of the house to the crawl space underneath the house to turn off the master water feed for the house and then i come into the kitchen which is below the primary bathroom and water is flowing from the ceiling to the floor and
Casey:
which is not something you want to see inside of your house.
Casey:
So the temporary fix was to basically make Swiss cheese of the ceiling in order to make sure that the ceiling didn't actually collapse.
Casey:
It will obviously need to be replaced at some point.
Casey:
But there were a bunch of holes drilled into the ceiling.
Casey:
Meanwhile, the primary light fixture in the kitchen is just gushing water.
Casey:
There's water.
Casey:
There's like a quarter inch, which is what, like a half a centimeter to a centimeter of water.
Casey:
I think like a half a centimeter of water.
Casey:
It's one.
Casey:
Okay, whatever.
Marco:
2.54 centimeters to an inch.
Casey:
Okay, so a centimeter of water is standing on the kitchen floor.
Marco:
I love that even in the midst of this story, you feel the need to offer both units to our listeners.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
Because, hey, Fahrenheit is the one true temperature measure, and I will freaking block you if you argue with me this week.
Casey:
But every other measure that we have is stupid.
Casey:
Inches are stupid.
Casey:
Feet are stupid.
Casey:
They're all dumb.
Casey:
Let me have Fahrenheit.
John:
Thank you.
John:
You had at least one knuckle of water.
John:
Right.
John:
What is that in fathoms?
Casey:
Yeah, it's not too many fathoms of water, thankfully.
Casey:
But anyways, so it turns out that this bathroom remodel is now also going to include new floors in the downstairs.
Casey:
So I said to my dear friends here on the show, I might be a little bit late because we're going to be running to the floor and decor store to figure out what flooring we would like to replace the downstairs flooring with.
Casey:
There had been other minor issues over the last...
Casey:
15 almost 18 years since we moved in something like that there have been minor issues over the last several years where a little bit of water has come in for some reason or another and it wasn't it didn't seem that bad at the time but as they're ripping up the kitchen floorboards they're seeing oh there's a bunch of mold there that's not good so yeah all sorts of remediation will be happening and
Casey:
It is not off to a very good start here at the List household.
Casey:
So if Marco and I are cranky or sad or distracted or whatever, Marco has a much better reason than I, but we both have reasons.
Casey:
And so if this is not our top performance on this episode of ATP, I'm genuinely quite sorry.
Casey:
Also, apropos of nothing and definitely not apropos of needing to add thousands of dollars to the bill that I was already footing, ATP.fm slash join.
Casey:
If
Casey:
Excellent transition.
John:
You mentioned before that Aaron noticed the water and then became a lot louder.
John:
It's interesting, the things we can learn in these moments, do you recall...
John:
Uh, when, when it became clear to her that something disastrous was happening.
John:
30 seconds, I think something like that.
John:
What did she actually say?
John:
Did she call your name?
John:
Did she just yell inarticulately?
John:
Did she curse your name?
Casey:
Well, this project is largely her spearheading it.
Casey:
You know, not to say that I don't want to do the bathrooms.
Casey:
I very much do.
Casey:
Our bathrooms were gross.
Casey:
They were old.
Casey:
They were builder basic from 1998.
Casey:
They, they, no matter how much you clean them, they're never a hundred percent clean.
Casey:
It's, it's just no good.
Casey:
So anyway, so I am very on board.
Casey:
I'm not trying to paint this as though this is her ramming this through.
Casey:
But this was her baby.
Casey:
So thankfully, that means I'm not going to somehow take the blame for it or anything.
Casey:
Not that that's her style anyway.
Casey:
But yeah, so to answer your question, she starts... I don't remember.
Casey:
It was such a blur.
Casey:
But she started...
Casey:
escalating very quickly and about the same time that happened i get a notification from from home assistant that's saying oh the refrigerator has detected a leak because i had a yo link sensor right there at the refrigerator and uh that's where a lot of the water was coming in and so it started screaming and and i have the um the yo link speaker hub play like a boop boop boop if it ever detects a leak because i want to freaking know if there's ever a leak and let me tell you this was a leak
Casey:
Because there was a lot of water.
Casey:
But I don't recall exactly what she said.
Casey:
I think it was just Casey.
Casey:
Casey!
John:
Casey!
John:
That's the whole point.
John:
It's like that she was calling your name specifically and not like the name of the builders or just yelling somebody do something.
John:
It's good that she thinks of you first to come and solve this problem.
Casey:
Which is funny because I'm useless in these.
Casey:
sorts of things.
John:
Well, no, but you went right to the main water shop.
Casey:
Yeah, well, and that's the other thing that was very frustrating is, you know, the two people doing the demo were like, how do we turn off the water as I'm like pushing them out of the way to get to the crawl space?
Casey:
I guess Aaron is actually, I guess Aaron and Declan are tuning in a little bit because I'm getting real-time follow-up from inside the house.
Casey:
I was sitting at the kitchen table researching bathroom things and heard water moving fast, and it started coming out from the fridge and from the ceiling, and I started screaming that water was leaking everywhere.
Casey:
So I guess it was just, it's leaking, it's leaking!
Casey:
And that was
Casey:
that maybe your name wasn't involved okay yeah i'm sure there were many colorful expletives again it was all a blur like the thing of it is this sucks it doesn't suck as much as losing a dog but it sucks uh and in the heat of the moment like you know in all kidding and snark and whatever aside like she is bawling and she's pulling me in as we as we continue and the one dude was like where is it leaking and i was like
Marco:
everywhere yeah that's that's not it's i understand why he would ask that question in that context but it's not super helpful like in that when you have that scale of a problem you're like we're beyond you know exactly step one is like turn off everything yeah you did the right thing casey and it reminds me of the uh the dad style fire drills that i uh
John:
Have done occasionally and wish I had done more when my kids were younger and would actually listen to me.
John:
One version of this game is for young children, whoever can touch a fire extinguisher first gets a cookie.
John:
You ever play that game?
Casey:
Oh, that's very good.
John:
Because that means they need to know where they are and they need to know where the closest one is to win against a sibling or a parent or whoever they're competing against.
John:
And the other one is how fast can we get to the main water shutoff or the main breaker shutoff, which shows that you have to know where it is and know how to get there without falling down the stairs and so on and so forth.
John:
Casey knew where it was and went right to it.
John:
So good job, Casey.
Marco:
Is there like a list of these like dad games that we're supposed to know?
Marco:
No, they're supposed to just come to you naturally.
John:
I'm sure you have your own.
John:
I'm sure someday when Adam has a podcast, we'll hear about them.
Marco:
This could be like the great Syracuse book, finally.
Marco:
You thought you'd known for the OS X reviews, but now... Dad games, your children will refuse to play once they get to a certain age.
Casey:
So anyway, if Marco and I are not in top form, I'm genuinely sorry.
Casey:
We're a little distracted over here.
Marco:
Life happens.
Marco:
This is probably...
Marco:
top five worst weeks of my life i would say um this is awful i i wouldn't wish this upon anybody you know when you have a pet you know that they're going to live a lot less time than you probably and so i knew this day would come and i was fearing all this time when it would finally come and
Marco:
It has come, and it is exactly as bad as I feared.
Marco:
So we're going to get through, and it's a good time to have a therapist.
Marco:
I strongly recommend that for lots of reasons, but we'll get through.
Marco:
In the meantime, if you want to win any arguments against me, today's the day to do it, because I got nothing left.
Marco:
I am shot.
Casey:
What overcast features have I been begging for?
Casey:
I can't think of any that I've been begging for.
John:
I don't think he's in a coding state of mind either, though.
John:
That's fair.
Casey:
No, it's funny, though, because I was thinking about telling you to.
Casey:
Now, I don't have the brainpower for this today.
Casey:
But honestly, I think probably for Marco and certainly for me, I need a distraction for a little while.
Casey:
So here we go.
Casey:
And I appreciate all of you listening giving us some grace.
Casey:
So thank you.
Thank you.
Casey:
Let's start with some follow-up.
Casey:
It turns out I didn't read the fine print.
Casey:
I was all excited with myself that I was getting my express replacement done for the low, low price of $30.
Casey:
And although I have not seen the bill come through yet, enough people have told me that this is the case, that I presume it's the case.
Casey:
Apparently, express replacement is not $30, my friends, but $100.
Casey:
And so it did expressly replace my phone, which was great.
Casey:
And it did only cost $100.
Casey:
Uh, but that was not what I had signed up for.
Casey:
And I feel real dumb and guilty about that.
Casey:
Life goes on now.
Casey:
I know, but, uh, I guess express replacement is treated in the quote unquote other damage category, uh, which I was not aware of.
Casey:
And I guess, again, I did not read the fine print appropriately.
Casey:
Uh, so that's a bummer.
Casey:
Uh, ATP dot FM slash joy.
Casey:
That's just a public service announcement.
Casey:
I mean, all, all things being equal, like if you have the money, it does work really well.
Casey:
It was great.
Casey:
I got to do the transfer.
Casey:
I think John pointed this out last episode.
Casey:
I got to do the transfer in, in my own timetable in my own house, which was lovely.
Casey:
Um, I got, you know, a new battery and new everything, but I presume refurbished, but you know what I'm saying?
Casey:
Like a new to me battery and so on and so forth.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
And so it did work out really well.
Casey:
I just, I wish that I, and I'm not saying this is Apple's fault, but I wish I had read a little closer and realized that it was a hundred dollars and not 30.
Casey:
Had I known I would have saved the 70 bucks and gone to the Apple store.
John:
You would have, that was my question.
John:
Even if you had known, wouldn't you have just done the express replacement anyway, just to save the time?
Casey:
Well, in this case, maybe because I was trying to slot this in.
Casey:
I forget what day the phone thing happened.
Casey:
I think it was Sunday.
Casey:
It doesn't really matter.
Casey:
But I was trying to slot this in in the three days, three or four days we were home.
Casey:
Yeah, I think it was Sunday night and we were leaving Thursday morning for Manhattan.
Casey:
And so I only had a little bit of time to do it.
Casey:
Now, the short pump, which is the name of the area of town that the store is in the short pump, Apple store.
Casey:
Yes, it's a funny name.
Marco:
I do love that name.
Casey:
The short pump Apple store is not usually overrun.
Casey:
And so I probably could have gotten an appointment had I sought seat, sought, whatever.
Casey:
I'm tired.
Casey:
Had I tried to find one.
Casey:
Um, but I don't know in this one instance, I might have done the $100 thing.
Casey:
Um, but in any other instance, I 100% would have spent the time to save the 70 bucks for sure.
Casey:
John, what's going on with your mouse?
Casey:
And hopefully we're not talking about a rodent.
John:
no this is uh it seems to be my lot in life to uh be in this situation where i find a product that i like uh that product stops being manufactured uh and that product has a fatal flaw that causes it to break after a short period of time and so i have to troll the internet looking for backup copies of this product that i like that is no longer made
John:
And I just wanted to note as a milestone and for myself when I Google later to try to figure it out that, yes, the mouse that I like has once again died.
John:
Just like all my cheese graters that I like always die and I have to get new ones.
John:
I have been building up a backlog of backup mice, but it just...
John:
We've talked about this mouse before.
John:
We'll put a link in the show.
John:
It says the Microsoft Surface Precision Mouse.
John:
There are a lot of similar sounding products that are not this product.
John:
In particular, there's a Microsoft ergonomic Bluetooth mouse, which is not wired, which I can't use because Bluetooth signal to my computer is not satisfactory as far as I'm concerned from my distance.
John:
And yes, you can get extenders, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Anyway, this one connects with wire.
John:
That's how I use it.
John:
Even though it does have Bluetooth, I have it connected to an actual wire that plugs into my computer.
John:
and i like it and i like how the mouse uh the shape of the mouse the size of the mouse i like how the scroll wheel feels it's a microsoft mouse i thought i was making a safe bet then microsoft stopped making it then when they sold their stuff to incase incase does not make this mouse they only make the one that's only wireless yada yada anyway here's what happens to the mouse as discussed on past episodes it doesn't just stop working like it starts working worse
John:
You move the mouse, and you're like, is it losing tracking?
Marco:
By the way, this is exactly how the sculpt ergonomic keyboard fails, too.
Marco:
It doesn't just stop working.
Marco:
You start getting lag or repeated keystrokes or missing keystrokes, and changing the batteries doesn't fix it.
Marco:
That's when you know it's dead.
John:
And it's so weird because I've been using optical mice since they've been invented, and I've never seen an optical mouse fail in this way.
John:
Honestly, I've never seen an optical mouse fail at all.
John:
I don't know if it's the optical sensor or some circuitry, but at first you think, maybe it's just me, and maybe it's always been like this, or was there something high CBU for a moment that caused a blip or whatever?
John:
But then I pull out a backup mouse, plug it in, and you're like, oh, it's perfect.
John:
So another one bites the dust.
John:
I cycled it in for another eBay special, Microsoft Precision Mouse.
John:
Anyway, time marches on.
John:
But I really wish I could find another mouse that I like to see past episodes when I tried a whole bunch of different mice that were probably a lot more reliable than this one, including like the one that my wife has been using on her computer for so many years.
John:
It just does not die.
John:
It's a Logitech mouse.
John:
These Microsoft mice kind of suck, but...
John:
uh i'm doomed to keep doing this just like i'm doomed to troll ebay for my particular eyeglass lenses which i've actually had some luck with uh my cheese really breaks uh i mean my actual thing that grates actual dairy cheese uh and now my microsoft mouse your eyeglass lenses you get from ebay eyeglass frames oh like i thought you said lenses he did say i probably did i probably said liquid metal um yeah for
John:
for many years like every time i get like a new prescription i was like let's try some new frames and i would pick out some frames and i get you know sometimes i pick ones that i didn't really like but the family approved sometimes i would pick ones that i like but the family hated but in the end they just didn't feel better than my i have two frames that i use i have my smaller frames which are for distance and my bigger frames which are for computer just for historical reasons and that's what i'm buying backups of now my computer glasses frames and my driving glasses frames so i do have backups of them and plus a bunch of other frames that i spent way too much money on that i don't really use anymore
Casey:
Cool.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let's talk AppleCare One battles.
Casey:
Everyone's battling something this week.
Casey:
What's going on here?
Casey:
Do you have any preamble or do you want me to start going through the list?
John:
We're battling AppleCare One.
John:
Dive in.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Clark Griswold writes, here's another weird detail about AppleCare One.
Casey:
If you have a device on a payment plan and you added AppleCare to it, then it won't be eligible for AppleCare One until you take a few extra steps.
Casey:
When trying to add it to AppleCare One, you will get a warning that says the device is on another plan and can't be added.
Casey:
You will have to cancel the existing plan.
Casey:
But of course, the settings page won't let you do that.
Casey:
You have to open the Apple Support app and search for Cancel AppleCare.
Casey:
A couple hours after canceling the existing AppleCare plan, the device will now be eligible to move into the AppleCare One plan.
John:
So this is specifically for devices that you chose to pay for with a payment plan.
John:
And I think that what you mean is like instead of paying with the whole sum up front, how about you pay X number of dollars a month or whatever, Apple gives that option during like the checkout process.
Casey:
Yeah, you don't want to mess with Clark Griswold.
Casey:
He's a loose cannon, that guy.
Casey:
Anonymous writes,
Casey:
The representative made it seem like I'd done something abnormal when I'd simply accepted an option offered by Apple at the time of purchase.
Casey:
Canceling the existing AppleCare Plus plan would create a refund, but the monthly installments would continue.
John:
Yeah, so this sounds like the same situation, but this person actually called Apple and Apple said, oh yeah, no, you can't do that.
John:
But they've determined, I don't know if experimentally or by talking to the support person, that if they were to cancel the AppleCare Plus plan,
John:
They would get a refund, but then they'd still have to keep paying the monthly installments with the refund that they received.
John:
That's what this message sounds like to me.
John:
But anyway, edge cases.
John:
Edge cases exist, and Apple, as always, does not seem to be handling them very well.
John:
And speaking of edge cases and other cases with AppleCareOne is an update on my AppleCareOne situation.
John:
When I talked about it in the last episode, I was saying how it was complaining about my son's computer, you know, and that it made me log into it with my Apple ID, which I did.
John:
And it was satisfied, but then he yanked it off the plan again and I was going back and forth.
John:
Eventually, I just gave up trying to add my son's laptop because even though it will let you add it and it will give you a warning and you'll satisfy that warning, it will still yank it away from you eventually.
John:
So I'm like, I don't know what its problem is, but whatever, fine.
John:
And then I also mentioned, you know, people had questions because isn't it weird that when Apple's thing prompted me, hey, you should use AppleCare One.
John:
You can put these three devices on it and you'll save this number of dollars per month.
John:
And the three devices it gave me
John:
Or my phone, my wife's phone, and one of my iPads or something.
John:
And people were asking, how can your wife's phone be on there?
John:
It has to be devices on your Apple ID.
John:
Do you share an Apple ID with your wife?
John:
And no, I don't.
John:
Well, the other shoe dropped this week.
John:
And I got an email that said, hey, we're yanking your wife's phone off of AppleCareOne unless you sign in with your Apple ID.
John:
I don't know why it waited so long.
John:
I don't know why it prompted me to add that phone if it thought there was going to be a problem.
John:
So I thought, well, what's going on now?
John:
Because that was part of my like three devices you get for $19.99 a month.
John:
Now the jig is up.
John:
Now it's like, well, you just got to remove that phone.
John:
And now does that invalidate the entire plan?
John:
But I figured I would try one last thing, which was to sign into the App Store with my Apple ID, which normally I'm signed in with my Apple ID to the App Store on all my devices.
John:
This is before the family plan.
John:
That's how you sort of share family purchases and everything.
John:
Anyway, I did that on my wife's phone and it seemed to satisfy it.
John:
Like I didn't log her out of her Apple ID or anything.
John:
All I did was log her out of the App Store, in the App Store app, and then sign into the App Store app with my Apple ID, which is the family organizer Apple ID.
John:
And that satisfied it for now.
John:
But now it's just like a real problem with this.
John:
If Apple's come on and saying, you should put these three devices on it and save this amount of money, and then they tell you, oh, one of those devices, you know, you have to sign it.
John:
Anyway, it's...
John:
Because again, I've never been signed into any of my wife's phones with my Apple ID, like actual signed in, like the iCloud.
John:
So super weird to me.
John:
But then also the Mac Studio that is, it's technically my wife's Mac Studio, but I set that computer up.
John:
I created my account on it before I created hers.
John:
I have always had an account on that Mac Studio.
John:
It is always signed in as me.
John:
And in particular, this week, I've been using it a ton, signed into my account with my Apple ID, going back and forth between my Tahoe Mac, which is I'm booting my Mac Pro into Tahoe to do dev work, and going over there to do Sequoia stuff, because again, no Mac simulators.
John:
And I got an email in the middle of doing that saying, oh, yeah, well, first of all, the wording on this email is great.
John:
They all say the same thing, right?
John:
They all say, a new Apple account has signed into your Mac Studio.
John:
To avoid losing AppleCareOne coverage, you must sign into the Mac Studio with the Apple account associated with your AppleCareOne plan.
John:
It's like, dude,
John:
I'm signed into the Apple account right now.
John:
I'm like, I got this email on the computer while signed into this account and a new Apple account has signed into your Mac studio.
John:
This is a reminder that Apple account is what Apple IDs are called now.
John:
What new Apple account?
John:
Certainly they're not going to tell you in the email because they don't have that information.
John:
And then the kicker, all these emails end the same way.
John:
You have 24 hours for when this email was sent to sign in or your Mac studio will be removed from your Apple care one plan.
John:
So I just restarted the Mac Studio, logged into my account, and again, and it satisfied it.
John:
I'm here to declare AppleCare One, I no longer recommend this service.
John:
I've been roped into it.
John:
If it worked as advertised, great.
John:
I don't think if you haven't signed up for AppleCare One, even if it tells you you can save money, don't do it.
John:
Because right now, you are always 24 hours away from some device being yanked off of AppleCare.
John:
And what if you're
John:
device has an accident during that time right or what if you don't notice that email or gets filed as spam 24 hours from when this email was sent to do a thing that you think shouldn't be necessary there's no rhyme or reason for how it works it's like screen time all over again or any of the other features that apple introduce but that never works right and there's no recourse and no one can help you and you can call support and try to do things like i got so many stories i didn't put them all in and follow up here people saying i had this problem with apple care one i talked to support and they couldn't figure it out either and they said because it's a new product or whatever it just doesn't work right i
John:
I don't know what it wants us to do.
John:
Here's the thing, Apple.
John:
Either let people put any device they want on AppleCare one, because again, you pay $5.99 per device, right?
John:
Like let it be a bundle or let it work in families, in Apple families.
John:
Everyone in an Apple family is allowed to add it to one AppleCare one.
John:
How is it called AppleCare one when it's per Apple ID, but not really per Apple ID because it will suggest that you put your wife's phone
John:
that you've never been signed into on your AppleCare One plan.
John:
Anyway, that's it.
John:
AppleCare One, do not recommend this service until and unless Apple fixes it.
John:
And historically speaking, when things like these don't work well, it's not always a sure thing that Apple will ever fix it.
John:
So AppleCare One, I wish it was dead to me.
John:
It's not dead to me.
John:
I'm still using it, but it should be dead to you.
John:
Wow.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
I don't even know where to go from here, which is too bad because I hadn't done the math in the literal or figurative senses to see if I wanted to move to this.
Casey:
I've been a little busy.
Casey:
But on the surface, this seemed like a pretty solid idea, especially because I plan to keep carrying AppleCare at least on my phone, and I have it on my Vision Pro at least for now, and potentially on my laptop.
Casey:
I think it is actually on my laptop.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
On the surface, you know, I think those three devices would be a great combination for AppleCareOne.
Casey:
But yeah, I've heard too many horror stories.
Casey:
I don't know if it's worth it.
John:
Yeah, and you could save money.
John:
So it's very tempting.
John:
And what is the name of the iCloud bundle service thing?
John:
AppleOne.
John:
AppleOne.
John:
I know.
John:
Anyway.
John:
Um, I signed up for Apple and that actually did seem to work again.
John:
I'm in favor of bundle things.
John:
So usually if you're already paying for a whole bunch of stuff individually, bundles can save you money.
John:
So I was inclined to like this because it would actually say like even just the three devices would save me like $18 a month.
John:
So it's not, you know, it's not chump change here, but this is just a disaster.
John:
Like I'm just every day I wake up and say, you know, what 24 hour timer started when I was asleep where I have to do some kind of weird dance that makes no sense to allow Apple to care to continue.
John:
I never had to worry about this before when I either paid when I did the monthly thing, which, by the way, a lot of the monthly ones got canceled for this because whenever you put added device to AppleCare one, it cancels and refunds the existing one.
John:
I wish I could get back those month to month once because they just billed me every month and it always worked or they billed me two years up front and it always worked.
John:
I didn't have to worry at any point.
John:
Some weird thing is going to say, oh, you're now no longer in compliance with our nonsensical rules that aren't consistently enforced.
John:
You have 24 hours to comply.
Marco:
Yeah, I think this seems like the kind of thing that like in like a year that maybe maybe they will have worked out a lot of these kinks and like maybe like as you buy new devices in the future, like enrolling things and keeping things on might be easier.
Marco:
But this seems like a pretty bumpy initial setup and transition process.
John:
Or it'll be like screen time and never work.
John:
like i'm not i'm not totally confident they'll ever fix it like they need to change it it should be families anything in a family instead of anything per apple id they're just making their own lives more miserable with whatever code they had to implement buggily to try to figure out if people are violating their rules and they can't do it proactively because technically like you could put a device on but they didn't take it out of the box yet so we're not going to say you can't add it because you're not signed in with your apple id so let's let it let's let people add any device they want and then after the fact they
John:
scan them or do some kind of polling to make sure they're in compliance with our rules.
John:
But again, it doesn't make any sense.
John:
The Mac Studio has always had an account sign into my Apple ID on it.
John:
Had it at the time I got... It's just broken.
John:
It's just plain broken.
Marco:
Given that this is probably a pretty important component of Apple's services revenue going forward, because keep in mind, again, services revenue...
Marco:
It's impossible to overstate how important that is for Apple's financial narrative.
Marco:
It's performing well.
Marco:
It's growing well.
Marco:
It's pretty high margin compared to hardware.
Marco:
And a lot of Apple's reputation and stock price and everything in the financial market is based on continued growth of that.
Marco:
That's why they squeeze so hard at every opportunity for things like App Store fees because so much of it is stuff like that.
Marco:
Well, you know what else is services revenue?
Marco:
AppleCare and any kind of warranty, you know, extended warranty service.
Marco:
And extended warranties are generally extremely profitable.
Marco:
Like Best Buy is basically an entire retail chain that sells extended warranties and happens to have electronics in the store to help you buy the extended warranties.
Marco:
To justify the extended warranties.
Marco:
What gets you in the door is the car stereo or whatever, and then they make all their money from the warranty.
Marco:
There's a reason that retailers push these things so hard.
Marco:
They're very high profit.
Marco:
The car stereo?
Marco:
How long ago did you work?
Casey:
You're dating yourself.
Casey:
But again, we're giving grace because it's been a long week.
Marco:
Honestly, have you been to a Best Buy in the last couple of years?
Marco:
They're ghost towns.
Marco:
It's basically full of car stereos.
John:
I think I got my most recent washing machine from them online, not in person.
John:
But I actually did go to the Best Buy in person to see appliances in person.
John:
They still exist and have appliances in the store.
Marco:
Anyway, so extended warranties are a very high profit item for retailers who sell them.
Marco:
And so Apple has a very good reason to expand their services even more with even more ways for you to buy AppleCare.
Marco:
So all that being said, like, you know, cynical takes aside, I think they have a pretty strong incentive to keep working on this to the point where it's very appealing to lots of people because anything they can do to get you paying them monthly for even more stuff is very important to the Tim Cook Apple.
Marco:
So they're going to keep pushing things like this, and they have a pretty strong incentive to make this better.
John:
I hope that does motivate them.
John:
It does seem really weird that these bugs are working counter to their interests.
John:
It is yanking products off and refunding me money.
John:
I was paying $5.99 a month additional for that device, and you just took it off and refunded me $3 and change, and now I'm no longer paying $5.99 a month.
John:
So somebody somewhere hopefully has some metric that says...
John:
Hey, how many devices did we yank off AppleCare One that the user just tried to put back on?
John:
And we keep saying, no, no, we don't want your $599.
John:
Take it because reasons.
Casey:
You know there's a KPI somewhere.
Casey:
Just the question of whether or not the KPI measures this.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, like, the problem is, like, when they had the argument of, like, who should we allow to do this?
John:
And the decision that came to it is it all has to be on the same Apple ID, which we read when we first introduced this feature, like, on the show.
John:
Like, it was clear that it should all be on the same Apple ID.
John:
But then...
John:
No one else got the memo on that one recommending the default devices or anything like that.
John:
And how did they come up with that?
John:
They said, well, if we let people do it within a family, it's too much.
John:
People will save too much money and our revenue will go down.
John:
Like, I get it.
John:
It's complicated.
John:
But this just seems like a stinker of a plan for now.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right, let's talk better news.
Casey:
Tahoe Beta 5 apparently has improved the checkbox contrast.
Casey:
So if you recall last episode, I think it was last episode, we talked about the dialogue that says write folder and trash.
Casey:
The folder trash is currently in the trash.
Casey:
And then there's a checkbox.
Casey:
Do not show this message again, except you couldn't see the checkbox.
Casey:
I'm looking at it again, knowing full well where it is, and I can barely make it out.
Casey:
Well, now in Beta 5, it looks a lot better.
John:
Yeah, we know beta six is out now.
John:
This is screenshot from beta five.
John:
I think it has retained its contrast in beta six.
John:
But yes, they have they have fixed the completely invisible checkbox to being the little bit too low contrast checkbox that we all dreamed it could be.
Casey:
Well said.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
With regard to the iOS betas, and specifically beta 6, reading from MacRumors, the lock screen clock has been updated with additional transparency, allowing more of the background to peek through.
Casey:
The clock also has more of a 3D floating look, which is in line with the rest of the liquid glass design.
John:
I think this is notable.
John:
We'll link to the MacRumors story where you can see these screenshots.
John:
It's notable because I feel like they'll roll something out and they'll tweak it during the betas.
John:
The tweaking...
John:
the the let's say the attempt to make things legible seems to have peaked depending on which part of which os you're looking at sometime in the past because now a lot of the tweaks have been going in the other direction so here's ios beta 6 making for example the gigantic clock on the lock screen less legible i don't think it's illegible it's really big you can still kind of read it but it is less legible so you're thinking oh they'll during the course of the beta they'll fix things and it will just get better and better
John:
No, sometimes because there was like the backlash of like, now it's not liquid enough.
John:
Now it's not glass enough, right?
John:
And so we are, you know, regardless of what changes before release, people say, well, this is it.
John:
It's not going to change for release.
John:
I think it will change.
John:
But I think now the changes, the average of all the positive and negative changes, this is going to average out to be like, this is like,
John:
we're just going, you know, we're, we're pushing and shoving a little bit to the left, a little bit to the right, a little bit to the left, a little bit to the right without any clear direction of like, let's improve legibility everywhere.
John:
So yeah, it is what it is.
John:
Maybe we'll have to wait for like, this is, this is the big wildcard.
John:
I've heard lots of discussions about this online.
John:
Um,
John:
How will people who don't listen to tech podcasts react to this?
John:
Again, everyone is citing, rightly so, I think, the iOS 18 Photos thing.
John:
Everybody in the tech nerd circles knew about the Photos app and iOS 18, and we discussed it along with the rest of the features on iOS 18.
John:
And it wasn't any more or less notable than any of the other changes.
John:
But boy, when it hit the general public, that was the thing that they cared about and noticed.
John:
And so it's very difficult to predict how...
John:
you know i don't want to say regular people how non-tech nerds how non-tech enthusiasts are going to react when this starts appearing on their devices especially if they're buying a new iphone this fall and it comes with this os and there's no option i'm going through this right now with my daughter because she's going to get a new phone for college but like oh you should wait until the 17s come out like it's so close just you know we'll get a 17 when they come out i have to have the discussion with i have to have the talk which is like you know if you get an iphone 17
John:
You'll have no choice but to use iOS 26.
John:
You can't put the older OS.
John:
Let's just know what iOS 26 is, right?
John:
You can't put the OS that you're used to on it.
John:
So do you want to get a 16 now?
John:
Or do you want to get a 17 later knowing that you have to use this?
John:
Keeping in mind that there's no going back like...
John:
You know, eventually you're going to have to get a phone that probably unless you use that phone for seven or 10 years or however long this liquid glass hangover lasts like you're going to you're going to have to do it someday.
John:
But yeah, I'm I'm just this is like the the the thing that I am paying the most attention to with this OS release is not so much like me using the OS or whatever, but it is.
John:
what the public reaction partially because yes i'm having this this wonderful sliver of hope like maybe the the general public will hate it so much they'll actually fix it uh because obviously the feedback from developers and stuff has caused them to uh for the first few betas make things more legible and then say ah
John:
We did enough.
John:
Let's just, you know, and yeah, I feel like this is the extent of, you know, how much can feedback from developers and podcasters and tech websites and people inside Apple, how much can that influence?
John:
what apple's going to launch and we're at the limit of that now and somewhat rightfully so because at a certain point you're like look this is a the audience that is currently using the betas is not representative of the public we're committed to this design let's not let's not pre-declare it a failure and lose our courage let's ship what we have and see how it goes like i understand that ethos that's wrong like
John:
And I disagree with it.
John:
But, like, you can't be in the mindset of, like, oh, no, a couple of developers don't like it.
John:
We need to really backpedal.
John:
No.
John:
Ship your 1.0 and, you know, reap what you sow.
Marco:
I have a bit of a different takeoff.
Marco:
So, first of all, you know, the difference in legibility on the lock screen clock in betas 5 and 6.
Marco:
I can't use my clock anymore on my phone.
Marco:
So, I have the always-on screen, but that when the always-on screen is in, like, dim mode, it just has a black background, not just a dim version of the wallpaper.
Marco:
in betas five and six you that you get a very translucent clock placed upon a black background so you basically have like almost total darkness and the clock see like the widgets are way brighter you know you can see all your widget content just fine and the clock is barely visible um i hope they change this but that being said
Marco:
We are at the point now, this OS is very likely to ship in a month or less.
Marco:
We are at the finish line.
Marco:
It is probably going to ship within the first two weeks of September.
Marco:
It is mid-August.
Marco:
We are less than a month probably away from this OS shipping.
Marco:
We are probably, I would say, at most two or three betas away from the GM release.
Marco:
So what we have now, like they're not going to be making major changes to this.
Marco:
You know, John's right.
Marco:
You know, the feedback from us, like we had our time.
Marco:
We had a very narrow window to influence minor changes.
Marco:
They were never going to make major changes.
Marco:
That's not how Apple works.
Marco:
When they put out a design, they say this is the direction we're going, period.
John:
As well, they should.
John:
Like I said, like that's the right attitude.
John:
You can't like do something and then get real scared and just reverse it all before the public sees it.
Marco:
Well, I mean, that does presume, I think, a higher level of care and craft that we're seeing with this.
John:
I mean, it presumes the design is good, which I disagree with.
John:
But, you know, like, as a general philosophy, I would say that if you come up with a design, take your feedback, make your tweaks, but let the public see it.
John:
Because, again, we are not a representative audience.
Marco:
Correct.
Marco:
You know, there was no chance that after they showed this off in June, there was no chance of them saying, oh, never mind, we're not going to do Liquid Glass.
Marco:
Like, that wasn't going to happen.
Marco:
And there was no chance of major changes.
Marco:
They did do a few minor ones.
Marco:
Here we are in Beta 6, and there are still a large number of animation bugs, which are concerning to me.
Marco:
There are still, like...
John:
you know designs and components and animations and apis that i try to use and when i use them there's animation bugs and i'm like well if it ships like this i can't ship this yeah and you can't assume it's going to be fixed like you just can't that's the thing that if you're not a software developer you don't understand like you think like oh i'm working in a beta sdk and there's a bug but it'll be fine by release you can never make that assumption it's just not safe because what's going to happen if it's not you just wait until the last beta and it's not fixed now you got to rewrite your app in a scramble
Marco:
exactly so what we have like whatever we have today in beta 6 like chances are most of what you see is shipping like there's very little time to fix much else and the only things that will be likely to be fixed between now and shipping are like very small things or critical bugs like that's the stage we're at in this secondly
Marco:
I hate to tell you all out there who are, you know, like us, old, but I think people are going to like this just fine.
Marco:
I don't think there's going to be a big backlash against it.
Marco:
The only thing that I suspected there'd be a big backlash against is its performance.
Marco:
It is much slower, especially on older phones, but even on modern phones, the frame rates of the animations are still not great.
Marco:
There's still dropped frames.
Marco:
Again, there's still animation bugs, but
Marco:
It was very illuminating when my son installed the beta on his phone without asking me first whether he should do it.
Marco:
When he installed the beta, he likes it.
Marco:
And young people tend to look at this and say, that's really cool.
Marco:
I like it's all clear.
Marco:
It looks cool.
Marco:
I think we're going to see that reaction from most people.
Marco:
I think most people are going to think it looks fresh and new and cool.
Marco:
I don't think we're going to see a big backlash about the design itself.
Marco:
Again, performance, probably, or maybe.
Marco:
But the design itself, I think this is just going to be... People are going to say this is cool.
Marco:
On the Mac, I think it might go a little bit worse than that, just because I think it's a significantly worse design on the Mac.
Marco:
But on the iPhone...
Marco:
people are going to be fine, or they're even going to like it.
Marco:
And I think we, as nerds who feel a little bit more ambivalent about it, I think we need to prepare ourselves that we are already, and we're going to be in the minority in our opinions of this OS compared to everyone else who's going to think it's cool.
Marco:
And I think that's... What I'm trying to do as a developer here is...
Marco:
just try to embrace the design and try to do a good job of adopting it for my app.
Marco:
So, you know, one of the, one of the ways I'm doing that is like my mini player redesign.
Marco:
You know, if you look at the overcast app and on iOS, iOS 18 now, like the part that looks the most out of place in my opinion, the part that looks the oldest when you're used to 26 is those solid top and bottom bars and the navigation screens.
Marco:
And you know, the bottom bar being the mini player.
Marco:
So, of course, I'm redesigning the mini player to be a liquid glass blob design.
Marco:
But I can do things.
Marco:
It's within my control to adjust that blob and to figure out what I'm going to put on the blob and what I'm going to put behind the blob.
Marco:
So one thing I'm doing is I am not setting up the design in such a way that will scroll brightly colored artwork behind text in the blob.
Okay.
Marco:
So in the mini player, the album artwork is on the left now.
Marco:
You know what else is on the left in the content behind it?
Marco:
All the other album artwork in the list.
Marco:
So when you're scrolling the list, making a bunch of images show behind the glass, it's only showing those images behind what's on top of the glass, an image.
Marco:
So the issues of having brightly colored images behind text on glass won't usually come up in Overcast.
Marco:
So there's ways that I can design – I can embrace this design.
Marco:
I'm not going to deny this design exists.
Marco:
I'm not going to pretend like I'm never going to use it because that will just set me behind because, again, I think people are overall going to like the design.
Marco:
So I'm embracing the design as best as I can while trying to –
Marco:
do a good job to avoid its flaws and to minimize the impact of its flaws.
Marco:
That's the path that we need to take as developers and designers.
Marco:
And, you know, like this is what we're stuck with.
Marco:
Like this design, parts of it are really good.
Marco:
Parts of it are really bad.
Marco:
Parts of it are tricky to use or have big downsides.
Marco:
And we just have to work around those things.
Marco:
Because Apple's not going to change.
Marco:
This is the design that we're going to have.
Marco:
What you see now, this is going to ship effectively unchanged.
Marco:
So this is what we have for probably at least a few years.
Marco:
So might as well make the best we can of it.
Casey:
Yeah, I think you're right that the average person is not going to be as upset with it as perhaps we are.
Casey:
I haven't put the beta on my carry phone yet, but now that we're back from all of our summer travel, it's probably going to happen sooner rather than later.
Casey:
And I'm excited to have it on anything but my iPad, but I'm also scared because I don't know if I really want to live with all the problems, but...
Casey:
When I say live with all the problems, I mostly mean like crummy battery life, crummy performance, animation hitches like you were talking about earlier.
Casey:
So I think I expect that I'm going to largely like it and largely think that the contrast or the readability and legibility is not what it should be, which is what everyone has been saying.
Casey:
I think I will echo everyone else.
Yeah.
Casey:
And from the rumblings I've heard from friends of friends who have tried it, and oftentimes without permission, if you will, like Adam did, most everyone I understand to think it's pretty good, to your point, Marco.
Casey:
So I don't think it's going to be as ruinous as perhaps we expect, but I also think it will be a more vocal, and vociferous I think is what I'm looking for, response than Apple is expecting also.
Yeah.
John:
Just to be clear, like what I said before was the tiny glimmer of hope that there would be a negative reaction.
John:
I was not predicting anything.
John:
And the example of the photos app is a great example.
John:
First of all, like even if there was a negative reaction, they wouldn't direct it at the new design because that's not a concept in their head, really.
John:
Like it's not unless they watch the keynote and all that other stuff like.
John:
It could just be some obscure corner of some app that they changed, like the Photos app.
John:
What a weird thing to latch on to with all the other changes, so you never know what people are going to be cranky about.
John:
But no, I wish people would be angry about this.
John:
I have a tiny sliver of hope that might happen, but I'm not making that prediction.
John:
Oh, I understand the chat room said, Marco, if you want to make your numerals more legible, change the clock style from glass to solid and see if that helps.
John:
Oh, I will try that right now.
John:
Thank you.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let's talk smart TV interfaces.
Casey:
Damien Shaw writes, I'm an LG G4 owner.
Casey:
So G is the line and four implies 2024.
Casey:
Is that right?
John:
It helped.
John:
Thank you.
John:
That's right.
John:
Yeah, there you go.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So Marco is now resolved.
Casey:
Marco, if you need to buzz off, we can take it.
Casey:
We can take it from here.
Casey:
Your work here is done.
Casey:
No, anyway, so Damien Shaw writes, I'm an LG G4 owner, which means the G line from 2024.
Casey:
I love this TV, but your pain points about notifications and input switching are probably its two weakest points, and the G5 gets a little worse.
Casey:
You can turn off most notifications in the LG interface, but certainly not all.
Casey:
The best solution is to run all firmware updates and then disconnect it from the internet, assuming you're going to use an Apple TV as a
Casey:
On the LG G4 quote-unquote magic remote, which by the way is what they call it, there is a single input switch button, but it does not switch input immediately.
Casey:
There may be a setting to do this, but I haven't investigated.
Casey:
Instead, it brings up a lower third menu that previews all the outputs on all the inputs, and you have to hit select on the one you want.
Casey:
Pressing the switch input will scroll your selection or you can use the arrow keys on the LG G5.
Casey:
They have a new magic remote that has removed that button entirely.
Casey:
I believe you can switch your remote to use the old magic remote, but I couldn't quickly find confirmation that the old remotes work with the G5.
John:
yeah they uh the sony even the sony button that i described uh there's an input button uh and when you first hit it it brings up the menu but if you just keep hitting that same button it just rotates through the input so the days are gone when you could hit the button and the one hit of the button would change the input which honestly is probably a good thing because how many people accidentally hit the input button and then like their parents can't figure out how the tv works because they switched inputs accidentally bringing up the menu first i think is the right move but you should just be able to bounce on that same button to cycle through the inputs and just stop on the one that you want which is
John:
But anyway, it seems like there's been backsliding since the C7, which was 2017, not 2027.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
And part of why this frustrates me is that whenever, like when I use like the ones I was originally complaining about, the Samsung TVs that have like their whole menu to switch inputs that you have to go through everything.
Marco:
It's just so much slower than it used to be.
Marco:
Like old TVs, old five-year-old TVs, you just push the select input button and it switches within a few seconds.
John:
Smart stuff was a big downgrade in speed, as you noted.
John:
But I do think that given that they used webOS on your C7 and they're still using webOS with much faster processors, it should actually be more responsive than your C7.
John:
And I don't know what the hell Samsung's doing, but I agree their interfaces are both ugly and slow.
Marco:
It's an area of technology where they're adding so much functionality, even though we don't always want it, but the basics are just getting so much more annoying and worse and slower and less reliable, harder to use.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I feel like this.
Marco:
I feel like that's like a tragedy of the industry.
John:
I mean, at least that makes me thankful for the Apple TV because it does let you never have to look at your smart TV's interface except for the input switching, which I mean, so obviously I would promote the use of receiver, which you don't want, but still HDMI CC.
John:
I still have it enabled because honestly, I don't even know if I can enable it on my current modern setup.
John:
I'm not an HDMI CC unicorn.
John:
It occasionally does something wonky, but most of the time.
John:
it's pretty miraculous like if i just grab the my switch to pro controller and hit the little home button hold down the home button it wakes my switch up oh it turns on my receiver turns on my television changes the input to be the dedicated changes the input on my tv to be the dedicated input that the switch connects to because i don't have it going through the receiver for uh for input lag reasons and
John:
And it amazed me the first time that worked.
John:
I'm like, HDMI CEC, you're actually doing what you're supposed to do, unlike AppleCareOne.
John:
Occasionally, you know, again, things get wonky, but HDMI CEC can take you a long way to not having to hit the input button.
John:
Not all the way, but a long way.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Running your own mail server.
Casey:
I, in particular, was quite snarky about this last episode.
Casey:
And the user potato.zip writes, on episode 651, you mentioned that you should never run your own mail server.
Casey:
Apple offers running iCloud mail on a domain you own so you can have a customer address.
Casey:
How does this work?
Casey:
Does it require maintenance?
Casey:
Would you recommend it?
Casey:
This is pretty different.
Casey:
And I haven't done this myself, but this is just pointing like MX records for your domain at Apple, right?
Casey:
It's a little more than that, is it?
John:
Yeah, it goes through some Apple interface, but basically you, my understanding, because I haven't actually done this myself, is that you buy a domain, whatever, you know, your cool domain name dot com, whatever.
John:
But then you tell Apple, Apple, I want you to have to receive email for this thing and have an email account for me.
John:
So I'll, you know, hook up to with my mail apps or whatever.
John:
But my understanding is that Apple runs the mail server for you.
John:
Apple receives the mail.
John:
You send your mail through Apple.
John:
The only thing you bring to the party is the domain that you previously purchased and paid for.
John:
That's my understanding of how it works.
John:
Again, haven't used it.
John:
Does it require maintenance?
John:
I don't think so.
John:
And the reason I haven't used it is the answer to the question, would you recommend it?
John:
Absolutely not.
John:
I don't like how Apple does mail.
John:
I've had an iTools account, a MobileMe account, a Mac.com account, an iCloud.
John:
I've had Apple email for as long as they've offered Apple email.
John:
And they just offer no visibility or control into what they're doing with your email.
John:
And very often I've gotten supposedly gotten emails that Apple has disappeared.
John:
probably through some well-meaning spam filtering that I have no way to know.
John:
I don't know that that happened.
John:
I don't have a way to get them back.
John:
I basically don't consider Apple to be a reliable place for me personally to receive email, given the volume of the email I received and how important it is to what I do.
John:
On the other hand, I have tons of family members who have an Apple email account and they think it's fine.
John:
uh i also by the way i think their spam filtering is terrible but anyway i don't recommend it because i don't think they do a good job of providing reliable emails no email service is perfect but i want some visibility into it i want i want it to be deterministic and i want like if i have to go in there and manually correct something i want to be able to do that having no recourse and total silence and no ability to debug is not how i roll so that's why i don't recommend it uh but that's just me
John:
what were you using for email if you're willing to share prior to gmail because you have a gmail account now and that's been the case i think since we met but what were you doing before then mindspring uh my isp uh my isp from in the dial-up days well i actually was netcom netcom.com i think but anyway mindspring uh it was my isp and they were i
John:
think they were national isp and they gave you an email address and i used that as my main email address for years because uh i don't know i was younger and more foolish than i am now i'm still foolish i'm still using gmail i should be using my own domain but anyway it's a complicated topic but uh but yeah i i was using mindspring i went straight from mindspring to gmail
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Sticking with the same theme, Peter Polio writes, one solution for dealing with spam that I never, ever hear discussed is using Hide My Email, the iCloud Plus feature.
Casey:
Yes, it requires a lot of upfront work, but I get maybe 20 spam emails a week now at most.
Casey:
I'm not trying to imply with what I'm about to say that Peter is wrong or anything like that, but I don't really understand how...
Casey:
the hide my email feature decreases spam because you're the whole hide my email feature is that it gives a completely unintelligible unintelligible email to the vendor that you're working with and they can still email that address whenever they want and it'll get forwarded to you they just never get your real proper email address so just is peter just shutting down these prior um hide my email emails does you know do you know what i mean like i
John:
That's the whole point.
John:
Basically, if there's a data breach and your email gets leaked, your email is not your email.
John:
It's some random number at Apple, whatever.
John:
It's gobbledygook.
John:
It's obfuscation.
John:
They will auto-generate you.
John:
It's like those one-time use credit card numbers from back in the day.
John:
Remember those?
John:
They will auto-generate you an email address that you don't need to know or remember, but that Apple keeps track of.
John:
And if there's data breach at pets.com or whatever, and they leak all your email addresses, you just kill that email address.
John:
You just say like, okay, well, I'm going to delete that account and I'm going to turn off that email address.
John:
So now that email address no longer even forwards to my regular one.
John:
So spammers who got it from the data dump, they can spam it all they want because it doesn't deliver to me anymore.
John:
I don't like surprise.
John:
I don't like this feature either because of the lack of visibility and because I don't like not knowing the account name, like the email address associated with all these accounts.
John:
I know Apple takes care of it for you when you log in, you have to do it.
John:
But like what I have to log in from a non Apple device, I have to go through through iCloud website to find like I don't like that disconnection.
John:
It was hard enough for me going from like bespoke passwords to auto generated passwords decades ago.
John:
I'm not ready to go to, you don't even know what the email address is that you sign into this thing with.
John:
On the other hand, my email address has been public for so long, I get the maximum amount of possible spam.
John:
So it's not really a concern for me.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then again, continuing with the same theme, Jason Diller writes, I've been running my own mail server for about 20 years.
Casey:
I would never dream of yelling at someone who didn't want to do it.
Hmm.
Casey:
But I do think the downsides and quote-unquote horror show aspects get blown out of proportion sometimes.
Casey:
The worst thing about it nowadays is that you're suspicious by default if you're on any kind of cloud server or consumer ISP IP address.
Casey:
Deliverability can be a challenge even if you do all the right things with DKIM and SPF.
Casey:
My outbound has been relayed through AWS for a few years now so I can ride on their reputation.
Casey:
I got blocked by Microsoft with no recourse before I made that change.
Casey:
All in all, it's not a huge amount of work day to day, but I've sunk a lot of hours in over those 20 years.
Casey:
I only do it because I get some enjoyment out of it.
Casey:
Perfectly reasonable to not want the hassle.
John:
So this was the mildest of the people telling us that actually running your own mail server is easy.
John:
Lots of people say, I do it and it's fine.
John:
Stop scaring people away from it.
John:
It's not that bad.
John:
So we just want to give you the other side of it.
John:
People who have been doing this for a while say that it is definitely a thing that you can do and they're fine with it.
John:
I do have to say that the volume of email we've gotten and the volume of things I've read online still heavily lean in favor of do not run your own mail server.
John:
But I just want to let you know the other side does exist.
John:
It can be done if you want to.
Casey:
So Lisa Oogre writes, in last episode's overtime, you discussed post-quantum cryptography and noted that quantum computers capable of breaking today's cryptography don't currently exist.
Casey:
This is true, but that doesn't mean transitioning to PQC isn't urgent.
Casey:
It's widely believed that there are actors currently recording encrypted traffic with the intention of decrypting it once such quantum computers exist.
Casey:
I tried to go for the acronym and realized I couldn't.
Casey:
Using algorithms that have already been written, despite not yet having hardware on which to run them.
Casey:
And so, John, what do we call this?
John:
It's called Harvest Now, Decrypt Later, and I meant to mention it last week, and I didn't, and I was punished for it.
John:
It's also called Store Now, Decrypt Later.
John:
We'll link to the Wikipedia page.
John:
This is a well-known concept.
John:
The idea is...
John:
We got to save all this garbage data because it's garbage to us now.
John:
But in the future, we might be able to trivially decrypt it all.
John:
So let's save it.
John:
Now, this is kind of an interesting wager here because it kind of assumes that quantum computers will be around in time that will make it valuable to decrypt it.
John:
So let's say just for sake of argument, if a quantum computer capable of breaking today's encryption decrypt,
John:
didn't exist until 500 years from now, that stored data, if it still exists, will most be of interest to historians.
John:
But if quantum computers come out two years from now, it's of interest to a lot of people.
John:
So, yeah, many people wrote it today.
John:
All the assumptions that, like, you know, world governments are storing data, other bad actors are storing data.
John:
The tricky bit is which data do we store and how much of it and for how long because you can't, like...
John:
I don't even want to say this.
John:
You can't record all the Internet's traffic and save it forever, right, NSA?
John:
Anyway, we hope someone's not doing that.
John:
But yeah, they're definitely saving this data because, you know, it could end up being a goldmine if those quantum computers come online in a reasonable time frame.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Saul Sutherland writes, PQ3 was actually first brought to iOS 17.4 to improve encryption of iMessage chats.
Casey:
I think we talked about this way back then.
John:
We did.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
February 21 of 2024, iMessage with PQ3, the new state of the art in quantum secure messaging at scale.
Casey:
And this is from Apple's security blog.
Casey:
And that also mentions the same harvest now, decrypt later thing.
Casey:
brian jarvis writes what will compel network infrastructure manufacturers to adopt pqc the government nist the nsa and various other scary agencies have established an expectation that cloud service providers browser and os vendors network hardware manufacturers basically everyone up and down the tech stack that uses public key cryptography must get their collective butts in gear and adopt pqc gradually over the next decade this will impact the awarding of government contracts so there's a pretty hefty financial incentive to migrate even if the security argument doesn't compel you
Casey:
This also presupposes that we have a functional American government, but that's neither.
John:
I mean, I'm assuming world government's doing the same thing.
John:
It's kind of the same reason that network hardware everywhere supports IPv6.
John:
Like we've been successful at making sure that the hardware stack supports it.
John:
And we did get some feedback I didn't put in here of like,
John:
Mobile networks in particular, since they have more control over the network and since most people don't care, like your your your phone when using cellular data is probably using IPv6 to communicate instead of IPv4.
John:
It's just the more of the existing infrastructure sort of.
John:
terrestrial internet access still has a lot of ipv4 stuff in it so anyway um what we're talking about is like let's make sure this hardware can work with pqc because of the things we talked about in overtime that the packet sizes change and some hardware manufacturers made assumptions that will no longer be true that would cause their hardware to fail and so this is motivating them to say at least make sure your hardware can do this
John:
And so in that respect, IPv6, again, see last episode's over time comparing this to the IPv6 transition.
John:
IPv6 has essentially completely rolled out to pretty much everywhere in terms of does the hardware and software stack support it?
John:
It doesn't mean that everyone's computer is now communicating over IPv6 on the internet.
John:
It doesn't mean that web servers still only exist on IPv4, including, by the way, as many people pointed out,
John:
Many of our own web servers, ATP.fm, my personal website, might not even be listening on an IPv6 address, mostly because it's a complexity that I'm not a networking guru.
John:
And it's a complexity that I don't want to take on unless I have to.
John:
But sometimes if you're hosting a website elsewhere, it's pretty easy to add support for it.
John:
So maybe I'll get around to it eventually.
Marco:
You need an ah record on your DNS.
Marco:
You do.
John:
I do think that's very clever, like multiplying it out by the number of bits.
John:
But yeah, it is an ah record.
Yeah.
Casey:
uh saber writes chrome has been shipping pqc and tls for a long time it's true that some tls specific hardware uh broke but these are not that common for consume for the consumer internet this is mostly done in software for big sites here's a post about pqc from cloudflare in 2024 called the state of post quant of the post quantum internet and
Casey:
And in there, they write, Today, nearly 2% of all TLS 1.3 connections established with Cloudflare are secured with post-quantum cryptography.
Casey:
We expect to see double-digit adoption by the end of 2024.
Casey:
Now back to Saber.
Casey:
They now say one-third of Cloudflare traffic is using PQC, and we'll put a link to a different blog post in the show notes.
John:
So there's some upside of a huge amount of traffic going through Cloudflare.
John:
When they decide to adopt PQC, they can have a large effect on the percentage of traffic that is using it.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Let's talk about you going to war, John Syracuse.
Casey:
What's going on?
John:
uh i think this is something that every developer is doing for the 26 os's because apple changed you know the new design everywhere but also they changed uh their recommended icon style across all the os's including adding like supporting a clear variant in addition to the dark and light ones and tinted ones and yada yada um i've been battling this with my apps um
John:
when they do something like change the icon style, you start realizing, Hey, I don't have three apps.
John:
Like I have three apps in the app store.
John:
I actually have five because I have two little dinky things that are not in the app store, but they have icons.
John:
So I am messing with five icons at once.
John:
And I wanted to give a little bit of background on that and explain why it is difficult.
John:
So, uh,
John:
um we'll put a link in the show notes to apple's wwc video uh and their documentation on their website about what app icons are supposed to look like and the wwc video is called create icons with icon composer icon composer is a new version of an icon creation app i think it existed or at least there were icon apps creation apps that existed before this from apple but here is the latest iteration and here's the thing about icon composer so it is an app
John:
that lets you make icons in the style that apple wants you to make icons but it doesn't it's not just like a bitmap editor it has you make the icons out of vector shapes and attributes on them it's very limited what you end up getting out of it is it's like i don't know like a property list it's like kind of like an svg or whatever it's just like you get a text file from this and the text file says
John:
Draw a circle here, draw an oval there.
John:
It should have this highlight from this thing.
John:
It should be this.
John:
The effects are on on this.
John:
This should have a gradient.
John:
This is the starting colors, the ending color.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I haven't looked into the details of what languages or whatever.
John:
It's not SVG directly.
John:
It is very limited.
John:
It's like you can have shapes, you can apply styles to them.
John:
If you open the icon composer app, you will see like a layers palette essentially.
John:
And then for each layer, you can pick from a handful of properties.
John:
And it just writes those properties in there.
John:
You put a value for this property.
John:
What's the X position?
John:
What's the Y position?
John:
What's the scale?
John:
Is this on, off, whatever?
John:
It just writes all those numbers, all those booleans, all those things into a structured text file.
John:
And that describes your icon.
John:
That describes all your icons.
John:
You make one of those things with Icon Composer.
John:
And you can tweak it to say, here's what I want the dark one to look like.
John:
Here's what I want the light one to look like.
John:
Here's what I want the clear one to look like.
John:
But it's all from the same base text file.
John:
This is very different than in the past where they would ask for differently sized bitmaps for their icons.
John:
You know, it started off, there was like 128 pixel icons in Mac OS X. That's huge.
John:
Now we have like 1024 because it's like 512 at 2X.
John:
Maybe we wouldn't have 512 at 3X.
John:
I forget.
John:
But anyway...
John:
The days of bitmap, according to Apple, are over.
John:
Instead, here's how we want icons to look.
John:
And if you've seen the icons in any of the 26 OSs, you know what they look like.
John:
It's kind of like a fuzzy, liquidy glass kind of thing where it's like colored layers on top of each other.
John:
And you can put regular graphics in there, too.
John:
You don't have to do everything as a bunch of vector things.
John:
You can import bitmaps into the icon composer and put them in there.
John:
But they want you to make everything out of vectors and outlines.
John:
If you look at Apple's own terrible icons, especially on the Mac in Tahoe, they're all made like this.
John:
So this is what icons are going to look like.
John:
I'm mostly spending my time on Tahoe, but the same is true on the phone and the iPad.
John:
All the apps you know and love from Apple, the mail app, Safari, system settings, those are all made with this app in this style, or if not with this app, with an app that puts output that's like this.
John:
And again, they are described as a text file, and then on the fly generates the bitmaps that are displayed on the screen.
John:
This presents a bit of a problem, maybe for all apps, but certainly for me on the Mac, because as much as I despise this new icon style, and as much as I love my current icons, I do want my Mac apps to fit in on Tahoe.
John:
So I want them to have, quote unquote, Tahoe native icons.
John:
I could just draw different icons on Tahoe with bitmaps or whatever, but I'm gonna use Icon Composer like they say, you know, whatever.
John:
But I think the Tahoe icons are hideous.
John:
I don't want them to be on macOS versions before Tahoe.
John:
And in fact, they wouldn't fit in in that context because in Tahoe, all the icons look like that.
John:
In Sequoia and earlier, none of the icons look like that.
John:
So I want to keep my old icons before Tahoe and the new icon after Tahoe.
John:
And it kind of boggles my mind that one of the main points of Apple's documentation or their videos wasn't here's how you can do this thing that we know people are going to want to do.
John:
I don't know if they just assume that people are leaving behind every old OS as soon as they do a Tahoe icon or they're going to release a new version of the app that only runs on Tahoe or something.
John:
But it's like, guys, people support more than the latest version of OS is sometimes with their apps.
John:
Nobody wants their Tahoe icon showing up on earlier OSs because everybody knows they're hideous.
John:
And even if they weren't hideous, even if they looked awesome and we love them, they just don't fit in on the old OS.
John:
Like they fit in when all the icons around them look like this.
John:
So, anyway, Apple didn't explain how to do that, but people quickly figured out if you just give the icon composer file the same file name minus the file name extension as your existing app icon, it does what you want.
John:
When you're on Tahoe, you get the icon composer thing, and on pre-Tahoe, it doesn't know anything about the icon composer thing, and you get the old icon.
John:
But then, of course, they broke that in beta 5, I believe.
John:
And all of a sudden, all my apps start showing the Tahoe icon everywhere.
John:
And I'd burned basically an entire week going back and forth a Mastodon with a bunch of people smarter than me, figuring out how to restore that functionality.
John:
Turns out, after much gnashing of teeth and custom build phases and other things like that, eventually, um...
John:
Who is it?
John:
I think it was Václav Slavik figured out how to do it.
John:
First, a very complicated way and then a simpler way.
John:
All of it hinged on an undocumented flag that I guess they found by running strings on Apple's binary of like the the AC tool asset catalog compiler that compiles your asset catalog in your app.
John:
Apparently there's an option in there that will tell it don't like like leave the icons alone for pre Tahoe OSes, but let Tahoe anyway.
John:
This was very frustrating.
John:
I filed a bunch of feedbacks on it.
John:
So I filed a feedback that said, hey, there should be a way to do this.
John:
Like there should be like a documented actual, like Apple should say, if you want to do this very common thing, here's how we recommend doing it instead of all of us just trying to figure it out on our own.
John:
Right.
John:
So that was one of my feedbacks.
John:
The second feedback was it used to work in betas one, two, three and four.
John:
It stopped working beta five.
John:
So it's a regression.
John:
So I did a second feedback, depending on which might be more appealing if anyone ever looks at these, which they probably won't.
John:
And then the final feedback I put in was another aspect of the icon system in Tahoe is that, we've mentioned this before, but if you have a non-Tahoe icon on Tahoe and that icon is not a Big Sur-style squircle, as in a rounded rectangle where nothing breaks the frame of the rounded rectangle squircle thing, then
John:
Your icon will be put into squirkle jail.
John:
It will be shrunken, shoved onto a gray squirkle background, and your app will look terrible.
John:
It is punitive.
John:
And one of the earliest feedback I filed is get rid of squirkle jail.
John:
It's punitive.
John:
If developers don't update their icons, their punishment is that their icon doesn't fit in with the other icons.
John:
Don't punish them further by shrinking their icon by 80% and putting it on a gray background.
John:
It looks terrible and it's super mean.
John:
I think they should just get rid of squirkle jail.
John:
All these feedback numbers will be in the show notes.
John:
Not that I think that will make any difference.
John:
So anyway, if Squircle Jail actually ships, which it probably will because there are no one's ever going to look at my feedback.
John:
If it's not, if it hasn't just been a tool during the betas to scare developers into making Tahoe icons, which, by the way, would have been a good strategy, but get rid of it for release.
John:
But anyway, if it ships, I would expect to see more articles like this one that was on nine to five Mac this week, which is the title, which is Mac OS Tahoe.
John:
Put your icons, your apps in icon jail.
John:
Here's how to fix it.
John:
And where they basically say is like, here's a website and go to Mac OS icons.com or whatever and find a squircle compatible icon for your app.
John:
That's in squircle jail.
John:
And then using the finder, get info on the app and copy and paste the icon onto it.
John:
That works fine until your app auto updates and then rewrites back the old icon and you're back in squircle jail.
John:
But anyway, um,
John:
regardless of whether people like the new interface or not i don't think anybody is going to like seeing their app icons especially ones that are in the dock that they see all the time being shrunken and put in a gray rectangle like people like try explaining that to somebody for some reason my icon of this app i use every day now is like small and a gray thing can you fix that
John:
Just like the amount of explanation that we required or like explaining you can fix it, but when the app updates, it will unfix itself.
John:
Squircle Jail is punitive to users.
John:
It's punitive to developers.
John:
I think it has served its purpose because they silently did Squircle Jail and scared everybody into making Tahoe icons.
John:
Now they need to revert it.
John:
But anyway, I just wanted to link to all this stuff to let you benefit from
John:
the pain that I and others have been experiencing and to thank the people who figured out how to do this.
John:
So interestingly, by the way, one of the ways that we figured out how to do this for the custom build phase seemed to work great.
John:
I updated all five of my apps with this custom build phase.
John:
So they were all compliant, set out new test flights, still actually didn't set out new flights, planned to set out new test flights and found out that when I uploaded it to App Store Connect, it said, oh, you're missing some icon resources, rejected.
John:
Like I couldn't even upload to App Store Connect.
John:
They worked fine.
John:
Like I tested them going back and forth to the other Mac that's logged into my Apple ID all the time.
John:
They worked fine here.
John:
They worked, but App Store Connect thought they were missing icon resources.
John:
So it was like back to the drawing board.
John:
Even if you get something that works, you only know if it really works.
John:
If you do a real archive build, sign it with developer ID, look at it on a Tahoe machine, look at it on a Sequoia machine, then also upload to App Store Connect and make sure it redownloads and everything works fine and blah, blah, blah.
John:
So anyway, I had to do it like nine times for all of my apps.
John:
And now all of my apps, I think, are compliant with the simpler system.
John:
Just wanted to let the world know that A, this is happening.
John:
And B, if icons look a little bit weird, especially in Tahoe, this is why.
John:
Apple has kind of dropped the ball on this.
John:
And I want to say...
John:
i think the icon composer format and idea is actually kind of a good one maintaining 700 different icon resolutions and bitmaps is not efficient and it's kind of annoying i know ios or i think ios changed recently to be able to let you say let me just make one really big high-res icon it'll make all the other ones is that true uh yes yeah they didn't do it on the mac because who cares about the mac um but even that like you know having a sort of
John:
a definition file for icons if you plan to have i want to be able to make a clear one a light one a dark one if you want to be able to programmatically do that with a specific icon style that to be clear i do not like but i do respect that this format is a clever solution to that problem so i'm not against icon composer or the tahoe icons i'm against having an obvious built-in way to only have those icons on tahoe and forward and obviously this was the problem will solve itself in a few years when nobody cares about those old icons but
John:
I think what Apple is trying to avoid is a repeat of the Big Sur thing where they said, hey, in Big Sur and from now on, everyone should use squircle icons.
John:
And everyone was like, nah, don't feel like it.
John:
And they didn't.
John:
Some people did.
John:
Most people didn't.
John:
And I think that's why squircle jail exists, which is like, no, seriously, this time we demand that you make your icons look like our icons.
John:
And if you do not, you will be punished.
Marco:
This is the direction Apple is going with their new OSs.
Marco:
And when Apple tries to maintain compatibility with old OSs, they don't face the same issues that we do with their apps because most Apple apps are built into the operating system.
Marco:
So they don't need like the same code that's running on iOS 18 to be running at like as the same bundle in the app store as what's going to run on iOS 26.
Marco:
And same thing with the Mac OS equivalents and all the like they don't they don't need to worry about that.
Marco:
Like the team that writes Apple Mail, they have their, you know, before 26 builds and they have their 26 builds.
Marco:
And those are basically different apps or at least probably a different branch or whatever.
John:
Yeah, the closest they get is Safari on the Mac because they do ship a version of the new Safari on the old OS.
John:
But I imagine that's just an entirely separate build.
Marco:
Probably.
Marco:
And so, you know, in areas that Apple does not face the same challenges or face them in the same way as developers...
Marco:
they generally really don't care how hard it is for us.
Marco:
They really honestly... And it's not like a cynical or snobby way.
Marco:
They just kind of institutionally... Apple has never been amazing at dogfooding the developer experience.
Marco:
They don't really know...
Marco:
People in Apple don't usually fully appreciate what developers need to do in certain ways or around certain problems because they just don't face those problems themselves and they don't care.
Marco:
Or they are not important enough to them for them to care more.
Marco:
And also...
Marco:
Once Apple goes in a new direction, whether that's a software update or a redesign or whatever else, that's a one-way transition for Apple.
Marco:
And this has been Apple forever, even back to Steve Jobs.
Marco:
As soon as they are on the new thing, they don't care about the old thing at all.
Marco:
And so for us to be like, well, we kind of do need to still care about the old OS for a while.
Marco:
They're like, we've moved on.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
So this is the kind of area that tends to be underserved in Apple's tools and solutions and everything because they just don't care the way we have to.
Marco:
So this is an area where like
Marco:
When I build my app, the iOS app, when I build it with the new icon and it runs on iOS 18, it shows a flattened rendering of the glass icon as the new app icon on iOS 18.
Marco:
Maybe I could hack around that the same way you're trying to here, but I'm not going to because it's just not worth it.
Marco:
There's only so much fighting I can do
Marco:
And the reality is, for my app, I know this is very different for the Mac.
Marco:
For my app, I'm going to probably be above 90% on iOS 26 by December.
Marco:
So it's only a problem for a few months for me, really.
John:
And also, all iOS apps were already squircles.
John:
Like, I know they changed the radius of the curve, as we talked about.
John:
And also, your particular, the overcast icon, does lend itself well to this style.
John:
Like, you didn't have, like, a photorealistic... Like, I mean, my Switch Class icon, which I love, by the way, is, like, by Brad Ellis, is like a...
John:
semi photorealistic, like 3D clear piece of glass on an angle.
John:
Like it is not in a squircle.
John:
It is not like it just it's it does not fit with the Tahoe thing at all.
John:
There's no like making a Tahoe version of that.
John:
And I love that icon.
John:
So I don't want it to go away.
John:
But your icon was already a squircle.
John:
is a flat rendering that doesn't have like 3D shapes that are rotated or shaded and stuff like that.
John:
You can make a Tahoe version of your icon that doesn't look that different than the regular version.
John:
Whereas if I showed the Tahoe icon of any of my apps on pre-Tahoe, it would stand out like a sore thumb because none of my apps look anything like that pre-Tahoe.
Marco:
yeah exactly but but again like this is an area where like i'm on the easy side because i'm on ios and apple you know they do everything with ios first and first priority and with the most effort and mac os gets table scraps and that's what's happening here on that front james thompson's apps or i think it was james thompson and somebody else um oh it's underscore i think
John:
Uh, some, let's put it this way.
John:
Some iOS developers went a little overboard with the custom icons.
John:
Casey went a little bit, didn't go overboard.
John:
He has some custom icons, but like, I think James Thompson has like 50 icons or something.
John:
And I think maybe underscore was saying that Widget Smith has like 150 or something.
John:
Uh,
John:
And they were saying that the build phase in Xcode when just doing like dev builds of trying to build all the icon bitmaps from those icon composer description files that I just was taking a lot of time.
John:
So they were trying to figure out ways to basically like make like conditional build steps to say when you're doing a dev build, don't build all the icons because it was taking like I think James Thompson said it was taking like five minutes.
John:
just to do that phase of his build so that's another example like apple doesn't have that many custom icons they might be thinking who's gonna have more than one or two custom icons well you know yeah that's again it's another area where like no apple app has more than a couple of custom icon if any you know i think it's probably just like apple sports right isn't that probably the only one that has any so like and who knows what's apple gets to use whatever weird system they want to use for they don't have to use the ones that we do
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So like, you know, when you face a problem in your app that Apple doesn't really face much themselves, it doesn't tend again, doesn't tend to get great tooling support, doesn't get a lot of attention from Apple.
Marco:
So I think the pragmatic solution here is you kind of have to decide how much you're willing to fight on this.
Marco:
How much is it worth doing?
Marco:
And in my case, as I said, with showing my glass icon on iOS 18, I don't care.
Marco:
It's not worth the fight.
Marco:
I have so many other things to deal with that that's not a hill I'm going to die on.
Marco:
That's not something I'm going to spend any time looking at because...
Marco:
The glass icon, like that's like people who are going to hold on to iOS 18 because they hate liquid glass.
Marco:
They're probably going to have a problem with it, but that's not going to be that many people over time.
Marco:
And it's I'm so much better spending the time continuing to move the app forward and not thinking too much about the past.
Marco:
And that's exactly how Apple thinks.
Marco:
They move their stuff forward and they don't spend too much time thinking about or working on or enabling the past.
Marco:
And so if you try to swim against the current, you can.
Marco:
It's hard.
Marco:
You will spend a lot of time doing it, and it might not be the best use of your time and effort.
Marco:
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Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
Daniel Liu writes, do you think the decreased information and interface density in liquid glass in macOS might make the interface potentially more touch-friendly?
Casey:
Setting aside the myriad of problems with legibility, consistency, and liquid glass's brittleness, to use Snell's term, what do you think of the new macOS as being a step toward touch max?
Casey:
I have not used any of this on macOS, so I have nothing to contribute.
Casey:
John, what do you think?
John:
Well, first, I just want to defend Daniel's honor and say that even though you read a myriad of, he wrote correctly the myriad of problems without an of in there.
John:
That's the way you should use that word.
John:
Casey just inserted the of because that's the way a lot of people say it.
John:
And anyway, setting aside the myriad problems, I believe that is correct.
John:
And that is what Daniel wrote.
John:
Anyway, I see where they're going with this.
John:
We all kind of had similar thoughts when they made the menu bar taller.
John:
Turns out that was just for the notch.
John:
But here's the thing.
John:
The notch making the menu bar taller, the setting that's in accessibility that does nothing in Tahoe.
John:
But anyway, there's a setting in accessibility, I believe, that says, do you want me to show the regular menu bar on macOS or do you want me to show the large menu bar?
John:
Again, I think it does nothing in Tahoe, but that doesn't mean it's always going to do nothing or do nothing in Sequoia.
John:
The lower information density and the larger controls in Liquid Glass and macOS and on iOS and on iPadOS, even though pretty clearly none of that was designed
John:
uh with the intention of making it easier to make touch macs in the end it does put them one micro step farther down that road now here's the thing in a world of thoughtful interface design that acknowledges that there is a science to it and that things can be known and tested an actual mac interface designed for touch would do a lot more than liquid glass is doing right
John:
But I do think that every step they take to sort of puff up the interface on the Mac specifically sets them up for a future where they could enable touch without making too many changes.
John:
And honestly, like...
John:
Setting aside the retina transition, Apple has tried to hold the line on the Mac in terms of like DPI and how big things are on the screen, not for touch reasons, not for like the size of the tip of your finger because, you know, Macs don't have touch.
John:
But they've tried to make things kind of sort of stay the same size.
John:
But if you there's lots of people posting historical information.
John:
uh images like here's how this graphic looked in mac os for the past 20 years or something online these days because of the liquid glass stuff if you look at some of those you even when they account for retina and like don't do the 1x 2x thing older versions of mac os especially when you go back to classic things were smaller because screens were smaller like physically like they had fewer inches like people had 13 inch crts not 32 inch
John:
LCDs.
Marco:
People were smaller.
Marco:
The world was smaller.
John:
Yeah, everything.
John:
Right.
John:
So things have been getting bigger.
John:
And I think I mean, I think that's a good thing just because when you have so much screen real estate, there's not as much reason to make everything as small as you possibly can.
John:
You don't need a lot of nine and ten point text everywhere in the UI because you're on a nine inch monochrome screen.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Um, so even though I think, you know, liquid glass has probably set us backwards from touch in many other areas, things getting a little bit bigger, assuming it stays that way until, you know, if touch max ever comment, assuming the liquid glass stuff stays and someone doesn't come in and undo all that, it does bring us a tiny little bit closer, but only accidentally.
Marco:
I wouldn't read too much into the liquid glasses design being ported pretty closely to the Mac, like from the iPad.
Marco:
I think that's just because they don't really care as much about the Mac as the iOS devices, and they just brought the design straight over.
Marco:
And I think you can say, well, why would they make the Mac have these bigger elements?
Marco:
Well, one reason is to make touchscreen Macs.
Marco:
Another reason is it allows them to use basically the same design between iPad and macOS, which makes their own development of their own apps easier.
Marco:
That's probably the reason they did it.
Marco:
If you look at how much consideration has been put into this design for things like touch target sizing, legibility...
Marco:
Pretty significant usability factors.
Marco:
It's very clear that there is no big grand master plan here.
Marco:
They made something that they thought looked cool.
Marco:
And usability was a pretty far secondary concern in that list.
Marco:
So, you know, the fact that they made things bigger, they're not thinking, ooh, now they're touchable.
Marco:
And in fact, in many cases, as I said, like in many cases, like the touch targets are actually way too small, even on the touch devices on their own native designs.
Marco:
So I don't think they're thinking that hard about it.
Marco:
I think it's they wanted to make one unified design language across all their devices.
Marco:
And that makes their jobs easier.
Marco:
And it gives them, you know, the brand unity that they've been wanting all these years.
Marco:
That's why the Mac design got bigger.
Marco:
I don't think it's at all about touchscreen considerations and some future strategy.
Marco:
I think it's all about the pretty shallow reasons that we can see right now.
John:
Slime, what related to this, one of the ideas floating around out there, because people always want to... It's not a conspiracy theory.
John:
People want to...
John:
They want to see intention where it may not actually exist.
John:
That's why you get questions like, well, putting these chips in makes cellular more possible.
John:
They're doing this because they're planning for future touch max or whatever.
John:
Again, I don't think they are planning for it, but in the end controls being a little bit bigger does help in that direction, but it's not the intention at all.
John:
Um, a lot of people have been trying to play that game with the liquid glass, uh, design, uh,
John:
decision to put margins around and everything so all of marco's you know bottom and top bars they used to go edge to edge on the screen which meant from the edges of the screen you would move in from the literal edge of the screen by some margin and then you could have content now you've got to have empty margin where there's nothing beginning of capsule new margin inside the capsule and only then can you begin
John:
toolbar button right so that's what you were saying marco that actually the touch targets in some cases get smaller even as the amount of room taken up by the interface element gets larger and people look at that and say yeah but assuming apple is all-knowing and all-powerful which is not true um there must be some reason they're making this terrible design decision of putting margins around everything and floating content floating controls over content harming legibility for no use of blah blah blah see past episodes and
John:
There must be a reason they're doing this.
John:
And the reason I've heard passed around a lot is, well, when the folding phone comes out and the screen wraps around and has a waterfall edge or whatever, not having, for example, bottom bars in iOS apps,
John:
actually extend to the edges of the screen will help because that part of the edge of the screen might be wrapping around like a waterfall design or bending over a hinge or whatever, depending on how the app is oriented.
John:
And so the liquid glass design is forward looking for devices that have not yet been released, in particular the folding devices.
John:
I don't think that's why they did it.
John:
Again, like the touch things, depending on what the folding device looks like,
John:
this design might help but i don't think that's why they chose to do this design i actually don't know why they chose to do this other than someone thought it looked good i think it's a terrible idea and i don't think it looks good but here we are um but that is i just want to put that out there is if the folding phone comes out and apple says you were wondering why we screwed with your interfaces so much well it was all because of the folding phone like they're never going to say that but they it might be the case that when the folding phone comes out
John:
the floating elements everywhere with margins around them that reduces the touch target size might make slightly more sense.
John:
But I would say again, probably only accidentally.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Like there, there really was not a lot of consideration in a lot of parts of this design.
Marco:
So I don't, again, I don't think like John, like I don't think there is like,
Marco:
a grand plan here i think that's that's that's us projecting what we assume or hope might be the case there is no grand plan they made a design that looks cool and they they seem to slap it together you know kind of at the last minute in a pretty slapdash fashion that's what we have and it's going to look cool and we're going to live with it and it'll be fine but there is no grand plan here
John:
It's like when you're a kid and you think that adults know how everything works and are doing things for the reason, and then you become an adult and you go, oh.
John:
Exactly.
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
Ian Anderson writes, it has been discussed in recent episodes that Tim Cook does not have, quote, good product sense, quote.
Casey:
As someone early in a tech career with ambitions to be a leader one day in what could be considered a product organization, what sorts of things should I start doing?
Casey:
What books should I be reading, et cetera, to cultivate good product sense now?
Marco:
So this depends a lot on what, you know, what we mean by product.
Marco:
There's an entire discipline and profession called product management.
Marco:
I'm not an expert in that field.
Marco:
I read a good book on it by Marty Kagan called Inspired a little while ago.
Marco:
I'll link that in the show notes.
Marco:
So that's a great book if you are like a product manager.
Marco:
manager, director, whatever, to practice the actual science and profession of product management.
Marco:
When I say Tim Cook is not a good product person or doesn't have good product sense, I'm not really quite talking about that version of what that means.
Marco:
I'm more talking about in the...
Marco:
visionary, kind of like the Steve Jobs sense of having a really good instincts for the direction that they should go with product design, with what products to make, different choices while making them, different things to prioritize.
Marco:
And the profession of product management does have a lot of overlap with that.
Marco:
There is a lot of product management, the discipline that can help with that.
Marco:
But it's kind of like having good artistic talent or good musical talent.
Marco:
There's a lot of science behind it and a lot of practice that you can get into it to make yourself better at it, to educate yourself on the fundamentals and the sciences and music theory, various forms of art instruction and art theory.
Marco:
There's educational paths you can and should take.
Marco:
But there's also kind of fundamental aptitudes or talents that can really help you be the next level.
Marco:
For a company like Apple, coming off of Steve Jobs' life, he was so good at that.
Marco:
And they were so well-known for their products that just had that – they just had such a knack for making great products pretty reliably with great attributes and great combinations of things, great spirit behind them.
Marco:
And a lot of that was Steve and a lot of the people under Steve.
Marco:
And he was also a great editor and a great director and a great collaborator.
Marco:
And so –
Marco:
He had more than just like the science and discipline of product sensibility.
Marco:
He was also just like a natural talent at identifying like what makes great products and what should we do?
Marco:
What direction should we go?
Marco:
How should we tweak these little things to make this product a little bit cooler, a little bit more kind of must-have or more delightful?
Marco:
He was great at that.
Marco:
Tim Cook is none of that.
Marco:
Whatever you want to say about Tim Cook's pragmatism or operational expertise, he's really good at making money.
Marco:
He is none of that.
Marco:
He doesn't seem to get that.
Marco:
He doesn't seem to value that.
Marco:
He knows he's not that.
Marco:
But because he's so not that, he's not able to, I think, pick good people to serve those roles either.
Marco:
And good people who could serve those roles, I don't think, thrive in his organization.
Marco:
And so when I say he doesn't have product sense, what I'm talking about is is that kind of like the the spirit, the the natural or or developed sense of like what makes cool got to have not like good products that that fit with what people really want and and can can, you know, break into new areas and set new set new trends and everything.
Marco:
He has none of those sensibilities.
Marco:
whatever product successes Apple has had in the Tim Cook era had nothing to do with him and probably happened despite him, not anything because of him.
John:
Yeah, this question is about like, how do I prepare myself for a leadership role one day in a tech career in a product organization?
John:
And it really kind of depends on
John:
at what level do you aspire to operate, right?
John:
So if you aspire to be CEO, as Margaret said, the CEO level is different kettle of fish than being in charge of one product or being in charge of a set of products.
John:
Because when you are at the CEO level, you're thinking about things like,
John:
What should this company be doing?
John:
Are we in the right business?
John:
Should we pivot to video?
John:
Should we start making self-driving cars?
John:
Where is our next area of growth going to come from?
John:
And in many respects, like those are the things that Tim Cook has been very good at is like the sort of setting aside the fact that it's Apple, which, you know, it's difficult to do.
John:
And we'll get back to in a second.
John:
If you are the CEO of any really big company, one of your jobs is to sort of steer the ship to figure out
John:
What's next for Apple?
John:
How does Apple continue to succeed and yes, continue to grow and continue to make money?
John:
And Tim Cook has been pretty darn good at figuring out how to make Apple continue to grow and make money.
John:
Unfortunately, Apple as a company is basically defined because of the second Steve Jobs era as being a company that is successful because of its great products, not because Steve Jobs is a genius at figuring out where the next growth thing was going to come from.
John:
He wasn't like the whole things that Tim Cook has done with like services revenue and all the things that he's done with the financials and like that was not Steve Jobs' strength.
John:
He didn't do that.
John:
He didn't care about that.
John:
He had other people handling it.
John:
He would not have done as good a job as it as Tim Cook has.
John:
But when we think of Apple, a lot of us still have that image in our mind of the company that like Apple was successful because they made great products, which is not true of lots of really big companies.
John:
The bigger the company gets, the more it's like, well, is Exxon Mobil successful?
John:
It's not because of really great gasoline, right?
There's.
John:
All sorts of other reasons that make these giant corporations able to be big and grow and like strategic, boring corporate stuff that we don't know.
John:
Or maybe some stuff having to do with science of where they find the oil or like geopolitics of having to get it.
John:
Like, but there's stuff like this.
John:
There's reasons they're big, but it's not like the reasons we loved Apple so much.
John:
It's like this one company found a way by just doing really good things that people like to become tremendously successful.
Yeah.
John:
And again, Tim Cook knows that's not his strength.
John:
And so he doesn't have the choice to do that.
John:
Like it was like, well, you should learn it and get better at it.
John:
No, it would be better if he realizes what his strengths are.
John:
But as Marco said, now you got to have somebody do that and not being able to do it is one thing.
John:
But if you also can't correctly pick people to do that for you, or at the very least tell when you made a bad choice and change it up.
John:
And Tim Cook has definitely been slow to,
John:
to do that and reticent to do that, deferring a lot to other people.
John:
And it hasn't worked out that well.
John:
Anyway, getting back to Ian's question here, if you want to be CEO, it's kind of like, I mean, there's not, there's not a lot, you end up reading business books.
John:
Like, cause if you try to say like, how do I want to be a good CEO?
John:
How do I know what products my company should make?
John:
Um, just like in UI design, there is a science to doing this.
John:
Like there is business school exists.
John:
People do case studies, uh,
John:
At the company level, how do I know what products I should be making for which customers?
John:
How do I know when I should decide that we should move away from this kind of customers to these other kind of customers?
John:
Or should I be making products or should I be selling services?
John:
There's tons of people doing...
John:
phd theses and business case studies and like on all these things but all that all of that science aspect of it you'll see is not specific to anything like business school is not about the tech business or the farming business or the oil business there is such a thing as generic business knowledge and when you're steering a company at that level that's what you have to learn so if you aspire to be a ceo you should probably have some knowledge of
John:
business and companies and economies and big picture things if that doesn't interest you and you're like i'm thinking more about how do we make a really good version of iMovie like how do we make i want to be in charge of our most important products and i want to make that product the best it can be that's way smaller and now you're thinking about like product design how do i figure out this starts to get into ui design but how do we figure
John:
out should we be making a product for beginners or pros what are the trade-offs there if we do make it for pros how do we figure out what pros need again there is a science aspect to that of figuring out how do we identify customer needs what is the state of the art of figuring out what customers exist what they want what they're not getting from competing products how do we make a product that will excel there's tons of science about that there's also art to that steve jobs i think
John:
understood or cared about none of the science of it he was 100 in his gut on his gut feeling and we're lucky that his gut was right as much as it was but it wasn't always right the g4 cube wasn't the right move like lots of things that he didn't work out but his batting average was great and i think he had none of that other than like the school of hard knocks because he'd been in so many companies made so many products and so many mistakes and
John:
He was all from the gut.
John:
You can't rely on that.
John:
Don't assume that you will have the early success that Steve Jobs had that gave him the millions of dollars to be able to make multiple mistakes and to get one of his mistakes acquired by his earlier mistake.
John:
You're not going to have Steve Jobs' career.
John:
So don't follow his lesson of, I'm just going to be a really good kind of gut person and my instincts and taste will lead my company to great success.
John:
Look at all the CEOs who think they're Steve Jobs and try to do that and fail.
John:
So I would say, decide what level you want to work at.
John:
learn the science and sort of crap.
John:
I'm probably using science wrong on a lot of these things.
John:
Cause again, people would say, well, like, you know, business is not really the same, but anyway, look at the things where they, where they, it is a scientific method.
John:
You have an idea and you test it.
John:
You try things out in the market.
John:
You're like, what is the state of the art in trying to determine what we know, what we don't know and how to find out new information.
John:
And you know, all the, all like the innovators dilemma and all these various advances and are thinking about how markets work.
John:
Learn about that science of it, because don't assume that your gut instincts are going to be right as much as Steve Jobs.
John:
But don't forget about the gut, because if you just learn about like how to sell widgets or when to pivot your company from a B2B to a B2C to a SAS or whatever.
John:
you're going to be missing the essential heart of what you have to actually like, like Mark always says, you have to, if you're going to run Apple, you should really care about computers or phones or like whatever, whatever it is that you think Apple's you should, you should really super be into that.
John:
Tim Cook probably is kind of into that.
John:
He did work for compact, but he wasn't into computers like Steve Jobs was.
John:
I mean, Steve Jobs was like, no one was into computers when they were making the Apple one.
John:
He was just like, he was a nerd.
John:
He was super into this.
John:
Not a lot of people were, but he was, he comes by his computer nerd honesty.
John:
Tim Cook,
John:
I'm not entirely sure.
John:
And I think that is an important aspect to like to have that passion and to be, to have that sort of that gut and that love for the product helps you identify the,
John:
you know, helps you know that people are going to love the iMac.
John:
Even though lots of people are going to tell you it's dumb and ugly and I can't believe you're making this computer, Steve Jobs knew that it was going to work.
John:
Not because he focus tested it or did the science part of it because I don't think he even knew how to do that or cared about it at all, but just because he trusted his gut and got lucky.
John:
Again, don't follow that path.
John:
You should probably actually understand the logic and rationale behind the product decisions you are making.
John:
Otherwise, you end up with liquid glass.
John:
But then also have a passion for it and have some kind of, you know, have some kind of opinion about it and taste that hopefully will guide you right.
John:
And Marco gave a book recommendation, which is more than I have, because I never aspired to be in this part of any of the businesses that I worked for.
John:
So I don't know any like things that you should be reading, but yeah.
John:
That's my advice for like how to view this.
John:
Find what level you're going to work at, figure out what sort of science-y stuff applies there, learn it, but then also have a passion about it and bring yourself and your art to it.
Marco:
Also, nothing is better than experience in this area too.
Marco:
And you don't need to be a CEO of a tech company or a founder of a startup necessarily to get relevant product experience.
Marco:
Get an app out there in front of customers.
John:
Yeah, you can fail all on your own.
Marco:
Yeah, but even something small.
Marco:
I mean, look, even something as simple as a lawn mowing business in your town.
Marco:
Ask people, figure out what people need and try to make a solution that fits it and get it out there.
John:
How much should I charge?
John:
What services should I offer?
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Pretty much every business offering that you might have from local services like that to a store to an app on the App Store or a web app.
Marco:
If you are putting something out there for customers...
Marco:
you're going to face all these same dynamics.
Marco:
You're going to have, okay, what do you make?
Marco:
What problem are you trying to solve?
Marco:
Who is it for?
Marco:
Why would they choose your product over other products or services?
Marco:
What are their needs and how much are you going to fit those needs?
Marco:
How big is the market?
Marco:
What can you charge for it?
Marco:
How will they find your product?
Marco:
How can you market it?
Marco:
What's your go-to-market strategy?
Marco:
Whatever term you want to use, like...
Marco:
How are people going to find it?
Marco:
And then once you have something out there, if you get any users whatsoever, that's great, first of all.
Marco:
And second of all, then you can start figuring, okay, well, where do I take it next?
Marco:
How can I keep serving the customers I have?
Marco:
How can I serve them better?
Marco:
How can I get them maybe to give me more money or to use my product more or use it for more things?
Marco:
There's so much...
Marco:
of this sensibility that is it's great to read up and and you know figure out a lot of the the terminology and practices and science and theories behind it but experience actually doing it with real products in front of real customers is way more useful and well that's where the science comes from they they have ideas and they test them in the market and they don't just guess they think well
John:
this is a great idea will probably work.
John:
No, they try it and then they report.
John:
And if it doesn't work, they put that in the paper and they say, we thought, you know, doing this would, would increase sales a huge amount.
John:
And it totally didn't.
John:
And, and they write it up.
John:
Like that's, that's the nature of the science of it.
John:
Like people have all sorts of ideas.
John:
Like, I think if we do this, customers will love it.
John:
Like they go with their gut.
John:
So like companies try things, their successes and failures inform these case studies to say it's,
John:
we studied a bunch of different people who had different strategies for tackling this particular problem.
John:
Here's what actually worked and actually didn't.
John:
Rather than just going by, well, these people did it this way and the company got big, therefore that must be great.
John:
No, let's look if they get, did they get big because of that or despite that?
John:
And yeah, you do get the turns out stuff of what's his name?
John:
Blink dude of like lots of different kinds of ketchup or tomato sauce or whatever the examples are.
John:
So you got to watch out for like a little bit of like,
John:
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, sort of junk science, pop culture stuff or whatever.
John:
But there is actually like you can tackle this as a thing that is knowable.
John:
But your own personal version of that is, well, maybe you're not going to study this.
John:
Maybe you're not part of the Harvard Business Review.
John:
But in your own personal business, you do your own little experiments and you'll find out what works and what doesn't pretty quickly.
John:
It'll be painful.
John:
And it's not as much easier to read about other people making the mistake.
John:
But you will make a bunch of your own mistakes and learn from them.
Marco:
Yeah, and that is how you will develop the sense, is put something out there, iterate on it, fail, or figure out what fails and what succeeds, and you will start developing these practices.
Marco:
And again, experience is better than any book, but there are also a couple of books you can read.
John:
Ideally, you do both.
John:
I mean, and reading about it will let you know, like, for example, if you have an idea, I think I'm going to do X, Y, and Z with my product.
John:
You can learn like how to approach that.
John:
How do I try this out in a way that doesn't destroy the business if I'm wrong, right?
John:
You'll learn that in the book.
John:
You won't learn in the book whether you should add this button to your app, right?
John:
You'll learn that from experience.
John:
But what you will learn is how do I tell whether this idea is good or not?
John:
How can I test whether it's working or not?
John:
How can I control for that when so many other things are changing at the same time?
John:
How can I make sure that I don't turn something that I don't intend to be a make or break decision for my business into, oh, it turned out that was a make or break decision for the business, right?
John:
Learn that from the book instead of the hard way, right?
John:
But the actual ideas of what you do, you won't see that in a book because it's so specific to you, your business, your app, whatever problem you're solving, which hopefully is going to be unique enough that there aren't books written about it.
Casey:
I think just very quickly, it's worth adding that if product design specifically is something you're interested in, then you can learn a lot about what's good and what's not.
Casey:
Obviously, you have your own innate sense of what's good and what isn't, but you can learn a lot about why people think things are good or bad by listening to
Casey:
I guess to shows like this, but I've got I got to imagine there are other podcasts or perhaps, you know, YouTubers where they dissect the like what what makes a product good or bad.
Casey:
And, you know, as much as we poke fun at John for being hypercritical, I think one of the valuable things that I learned from listening to the hypercritical podcast was.
Casey:
what does make a design good or bad?
Casey:
And if there's something to be criticized or complained about or what have you, is that, why is that?
Casey:
And, you know, John has always, since I've paid attention to John, it's been like 15 years now, um,
Casey:
has always been very good as an example of distilling why that is.
Casey:
And you can get that from any number of places.
Casey:
And you could argue that pretty much everything in your life is a product of some sort.
Casey:
And so just thinking about what you do and do not like about things and why, and even better hearing people who do this sort of thing or who are passionate about this sort of thing, discuss why something is good, bad, or otherwise, I think is also really, really helpful.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Just to go back to the example I kept using with the art and science of UI design, um,
John:
Step one is like caring enough about it to have opinions about I like this and I don't like that or whatever, and then trying to figure out why.
John:
But also understanding that there is like there's reasoning and rationale that other people have already considered that went into it.
John:
So just to give one example, the menu bar that's at the top of the Mac screen versus the menu bar that's inside Windows on Windows, Microsoft Windows.
John:
knowing which one you feel like you like better, that's a good, that's a start, right?
John:
But understanding the different trade-offs that those two designs make, like that there was thought behind them, that there was testing on them, and they said, okay, well, the menu bar at the top of the screen, it's farther away, which is a minus.
John:
but the target height is essentially infinite because you can slam the cursor on the top, which is a plus.
John:
But now let's test that idea.
John:
Do people slam their cursors against the top of the screen or do they very carefully target the file menu and they never let their pointer touch the top of the screen?
John:
We don't know without testing it.
John:
Let's test that, right?
John:
And the menu bar inside the windows, if you like that better, okay, it's closer to you and where your cursor is likely to be and you don't take up the spot on top of the screen all the time.
John:
So you have more screen real estate.
John:
Understanding that there are
John:
like knowable objective measurable trade-offs between those two designs that were considered and weighed and then decide okay well those weights those weights are the opinion part but the science part is like they didn't just guess like it feels better to me when there's a menu bar on top of screen or i just like it when the menu bar is inside the window like having that opinion is a start but you can't just stay there and be like oh i just like it because i like it and you're a dummy
John:
right there is like logic and reasoning behind the designs not saying one is necessarily better than the other but you have to understand the mechanisms and not just be like oh it's all it's all magic and it's just like oh it's a feeling in my gut and i'm right because i'm the ceo and god so many ceos are like that don't be like right like like so many product designers like that like
John:
Like the world is knowable and understandable.
John:
It doesn't mean that you're going to come to a definitive opinion about what kind of menu bar is better, but it does mean you can understand the aspects of it that go into it and that you can test them.
John:
Again, the idea of like it being an infinite target.
John:
You can say, well, it's an infinite target.
John:
I win the argument, right?
John:
It's like, well, did you test that?
John:
Do people treat it as an infinite?
John:
Do they get that benefit?
John:
Do they get that targeting benefit because they don't have to carefully decelerate the mouse cursor when it comes up to the file menu and they can just jam it up against the top of the screen?
John:
That's something you should test instead of just assuming.
John:
right that's that's the science of this stuff like that thinking of it that way thinking that there are knowable things that go into it that then you layer on top of your opinions and your how much do you value this versus yeah how much do you value screen space versus targetability versus locality versus whatever some of those things you can test too but in the end
John:
It always comes down to like valuating of like once you think you've identified the aspects that you care about and understand the rationale behind them, then you are free to assign weights that you think will make a good product.
John:
And then you'll find out whether you're right or wrong when you put your translucent teal gumdrop shaped computer in front of the public.
John:
And then you'll really find out, do people like this or do they not?
John:
Turns out they did.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then finally tonight, Keith Heaton writes, when using the duplicate photos function in Apple Photos on macOS, I'm presented with four photos it wants to merge.
Casey:
One is two megabytes.
Casey:
The other three are one megabyte.
Casey:
One is favorited.
Casey:
The other three are not.
Casey:
One is added to an album.
Casey:
The other three are not.
Casey:
One has the camera exif data and accurate creation date.
Casey:
The other three do not.
Casey:
How the heck do I audit these properly and pick and choose which attributes become the new singular master photo?
Casey:
My library currently reports over 10,000 duplicates.
Casey:
Yes.
John:
This duplicate processing in Apple Photos, I think I talked about when it first rolled out, it tries to save you some of this pain by giving you a button that says just merge these.
John:
And it tries to essentially choose the quote unquote best one, but then combine all the metadata from all the other ones.
John:
so by best it usually means the highest resolution or the largest or both but then it will try to do a union of the metadata from all the other ones but then if there are conflicts i'm not sure how it resolves them um you can manually choose to resolve this yourself by deleting the ones that you think are not duplicates the interface for this is not great in photos it tries to be simple and the second you don't want to just trust it
John:
It gets way more complicated to the point where, as I've complained about in the past, when it sometimes identifies photos that are not actually duplicates, like you took a burst photo and you can see these are two different photos.
John:
Like they're half smiling in this one and one eye is closed in this one.
John:
These are not the same photo, but they're close enough that that Apple Photos thinks they're duplicates.
John:
There's no way to convince it that they're not duplicates.
John:
You can't say, these are not duplicates.
John:
You're wrong, Apple Photos.
John:
No, instead, you have to forever see that in the duplicate list and just remember to never merge those because they're two separate pictures.
John:
Or you just get frustrated and delete one of them that you like less.
John:
But anyway, unfortunately for Keith, the root problem here is that if you have 10,000 duplicates and a lot of them are like this, like a human description of them all,
John:
is like it's difficult for a human to even figure out how to combine these like what should be done what is the right thing to do how long does it take a human to figure out what the right thing to do is and then do it if that's your situation no computer program is going to help you because in the end uh you've got a lot of
John:
human decisions to make complicated human decisions.
John:
Now the program could be nicer about giving you all the information that I assume Keith had to look up manually that we just read off these bullet points, like the sizes, which one's favorited, which one is in an album, which one has accurate exit data.
John:
Like, you've got to investigate that.
John:
The program doesn't give you too much info.
John:
But in the end, you've just got a lot of duplicate photos.
John:
Like, assuming it's not really, really wrong, you've got a library with a lot of duplicate photos.
John:
And there's no sort of simple way to resolve that.
John:
Now, if you just want to say, you know, let go and let Apple, if they gave you a big button that said, closing my eyes, I'm assuming what you're going to do is right.
John:
Resolve all my duplicates.
John:
When you're done, it'll be like, hey, no more duplicates.
John:
And then you just go, la, la, la, I'm not listening and not think about the ones that you might have deleted that you liked, right?
John:
Those are basically your choices.
John:
You either manually drew a tremendous amount of work, kind of, you know, I don't want to do a report you saw again, but like you F'd around and you found out you have 10,000 duplicate photos, like...
John:
Where did they come from?
John:
How did they get there?
John:
This is the situation you're in.
John:
You can either resolve them all very quickly with little oversight and just not worry about what it did, or you can resolve them manually with a tremendous amount of oversight.
John:
And yes, Apple Photos should do more to help you, but there's no amount of program can help you that will absolve you of having to make these decisions if you care about these decisions, which it seems like you do.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Factor, 1Password, and Sentry.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
One of the perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic.
Marco:
This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about whether AI voice control is a threat to Apple's platforms.
Marco:
So tune in atp.fm slash join if you weren't a member.
Marco:
It's going to be fun.
Marco:
Fest overtime this week.
Marco:
And of course, there's many other perks of membership, lots of other exclusive content.
Marco:
Check it out.
Marco:
Thank you so much, everybody.
Marco:
Thanks for listening.
Marco:
We'll talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
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-
Casey:
Marco, do you have any updates on your AC?
Casey:
I've been dying to know.
Marco:
Hmm.
Marco:
Well, the updates are I spent a lot of money getting them to finally just install the stupid thermostats.
Marco:
They did not fix the problem.
Marco:
Surprise, surprise.
Marco:
They gave diagnostic codes.
Marco:
Surprise, surprise.
John:
Did you talk about that on the show already?
John:
I'm not sure.
Marco:
I think I did.
Casey:
You definitely talked about it privately.
Casey:
I don't know if you spoke about it on the show or not.
John:
You might want to give some background on the thermostats.
John:
I think you complained that they told you that I think your problem is these fancy thermostats you got and you didn't like that.
John:
But then what happened since then?
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I had at various times three or four different AC repair companies out here over the course of this spring and summer trying to get them to just fix my stupid air conditioners already.
Marco:
And every single time somebody came out here, they would make a big sneak.
Marco:
Oh, they'd point to my Echo B thermostats.
Marco:
Oh, it's the thermostats.
Marco:
It's these smart thermostats.
Marco:
They die all the time.
Marco:
It's all it's always them.
Marco:
And I'm like, okay, I assure you, you know, and I would go through and I'd show them my phone.
Marco:
Look, there is no energy saving setting on right now.
Marco:
Like, you know, because, and you can see, you can understand why.
Marco:
Like, they probably get a lot of service calls from people who install Nest or something and it goes into energy saving mode and the people say, my air conditioning is broken and they call them out.
Marco:
So, like, I understand why they would be sensitive to that, but...
Marco:
literally every like no everyone gave me so much crap about these thermostats no it must be those and then like they would call the manufacturer tech support like as they're looking at stuff and the manufacturer tech support would be like it's the thermostats oh my god they worked for five years i guarantee you it's not the thermostats but okay and eventually i said you know what eff it i'm so tired of these people you know being like this
Marco:
Just put in the Mitsubishi thermostats.
Marco:
I don't care.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
Give me a Wi-Fi thermostat from some other brand.
Marco:
I'll bridge it to home whatever if I have to.
Marco:
Fine.
Marco:
If that'll make you guys shut up and just work on my air conditioning ever, fine.
Marco:
So they did.
Marco:
So I got a repair person to finally put in the Mitsubishi thermostats.
Marco:
They've been in for a couple of weeks.
Marco:
We still don't have air conditioning.
Marco:
I'm sitting here in my office.
Marco:
It is thanks to the yodeling sensor on the wall.
Marco:
I can tell you it's 82 degrees in here.
Marco:
My forehead is wet.
John:
I think I've got that beat.
Marco:
probably um but yeah it is very hot in here um and uh and we still don't have air conditioning now it has been a pretty mild last couple of weeks like temperature wise here it's been you know we haven't really needed it most days so that's been fine but it is august there are still hot times um and august isn't over yet and september is also pretty hot so also this is our this is our heat in the winter for this house it's their heat pumps and
John:
And also you paid a lot of money for air conditioning and your house is supposed to work.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
And it's only five years old.
Marco:
And also, you know, we have... It's... Okay.
Marco:
So there's also all this drama now that the refrigerant that our system uses is R410A.
Marco:
There's, you know, every heat pump system has a refrigerant in it.
Marco:
And over time...
Marco:
They they find out like refrigerants tend to be pretty bad for the environment if they're vented into the atmosphere.
Marco:
And over time, we develop new ones that are less terrible for the environment.
Marco:
And then what happens eventually is usually states or the federal government will start restricting the old refrigerants from being used.
Marco:
And so if you have a system that uses the old refrigerant, you oftentimes after a while can't get it anymore or can't get parts or can't get it serviced anymore or can't get it recharged if there's any slow leaks over time.
Marco:
So that has now happened in New York for the refrigerant I use for tonight.
John:
In your five-year-old system.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
My five-year-old system, you can no longer buy new ones, I think, as of around now or this year.
Marco:
And they're going to phase out their refrigerant over the next X years.
Marco:
And it's going to be harder and harder to get and harder and harder to get parts and replacements.
John:
It's true refrigerators, too, by the way.
John:
I know it's right in the name, but just FYI, it's definitely true refrigerators.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So, you know, the repair guy, he's like, you know, if you want, you can, like, get some extra.
Marco:
There's two big outside condensers.
Marco:
He's like, you can get, or compressors, whatever.
Marco:
You can get two replacement ones and just, like, store them somewhere right now.
Marco:
Like, they're about to go out of stock forever.
Marco:
Put them with your keyboards.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
They're huge.
Marco:
And I'm like, okay, you know, tell me a price.
Marco:
We'll talk about it.
John:
Well, they're telling you to buy the entire unit, the whole big thing with the fan.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
To buy two extra ones to replace the thing to store in the salt air.
John:
Maybe you've got a hermetically sealed box.
John:
Right.
Marco:
And well, he recommended that I keep them like on Long Island.
John:
Do not keep them by the seashore, because when you need them, you open it up and it'll just be a chunk of rust.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But I'm like, OK, what are we talking here?
Marco:
Numbers wise.
Marco:
And what we are talking about, if I wanted to keep a spare set of condensers,
Marco:
$27,000.
Marco:
That's not surprising.
John:
What you do if these things ever go and you need to replace them is you buy the newer, more efficient ones that are available on the market now.
Marco:
So the problem is when you change the refrigerant on the outside units, chances are you probably also have to change the inside air handlers.
Marco:
And if you're really unlucky, you might even have to run new refrigerant pipelines from the outside thing to the inside things.
Marco:
And so I asked him, I'm like, OK, in that scenario, what does that look like?
Marco:
And I don't even want to tell you the number.
Marco:
He said it was substantially higher.
John:
So I'm like, oh, my God, what did he get an explanation of why you would need new like lines and inside units for refrigerant change?
Marco:
Well, every pair of compressor and air handler, they have their own specs.
Marco:
Like, okay, well, you need this diameter of pipe.
Marco:
They're all designed for each other.
Marco:
They're designed to match each other.
John:
I believe they're designed for each other.
John:
It surprises me that the refrigerant changes would be such a radical change that you can't use the existing lines and inside units because the diameter is wrong or they can't handle the pressure or something.
John:
Presumably they know, but then again, they also said it was your thermostats.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So now I'm like, I'm out literally thousands of dollars in thermostats and thermostat labor.
Marco:
And now I'm being asked to spend another 27 grand.
Marco:
Maybe I still don't have working air conditioning.
Marco:
I am not happy about the situation at all.
John:
Did you enjoy at least a moment of smugness when they put in the new thermostats and it didn't help?
John:
Yeah, seriously.
Marco:
I will enjoy that smugness once the system works.
John:
Right now, you're saving it?
Marco:
Right now, I've just spent thousands of dollars for uglier thermostats that don't work in HomeKit.
John:
Well, no, because once it works, they're going to say, see, it was the thermostats.
Yeah.
Marco:
I would have loved if it was a thermostat because that's a lot simpler and cheaper than everything else we now have to look at.
Marco:
But I'm just – the next step is they're going to like flush out the whole system and put in all new refrigerant of my apparently about to be illegal refrigerant.
Marco:
And I honestly – I think that will fix it.
Marco:
It's probably like based on all the –
John:
What they should do, I mean, I'm assuming they will do this, but if they don't talk to them about it beforehand, is they should be able to measure the amount of refrigerant that was in the system when they quote-unquote drain it because, as you noted, they shouldn't be just venting it to the atmosphere.
John:
Yeah, they do.
John:
Like when they do it on your car and they refresh your air conditioner, your refrigerator, whatever.
John:
When they collect it, they know there should be X number of liters in the system or whatever.
John:
Yes.
John:
And we got X minus 50% out.
John:
So we know there's probably a leak somewhere, right?
John:
They should be able to tell when they extract the old refrigerant, hey, has this been leaking?
Yeah.
John:
Has this been leaking out of somewhere?
John:
And hopefully they would find where it was leaking before they refilled it with fresh refrigerant because they're just going to keep leaking out or whatever.
John:
But I feel like if they don't do that, at least mention it before.
John:
And hey, you're going to measure it when you take it out.
John:
And you know, like maybe they don't know the intended volume of the system because it's not written somewhere and they don't know how long the lines are or something.
John:
But this would be a good thing to know if there is a refrigerant leak because that's what you need to fix.
Marco:
of course yeah and so that's like like that's the next step it's just okay like please look at the refrigerant that is based on the symptoms and my chat gpt research and like it's like it sure seems like the refer like it's like so now now that we have thermostats now we can see the error codes and what's great about error codes is that you can look them up on the internet and so i've of course been seeing okay well you know the the upstairs reports one code the downstairs reports a different code okay so i searched both of those and the only
Marco:
And upstairs and downstairs seem to be demonstrating very similar symptoms.
Marco:
And they have two different error codes.
Marco:
And they're two totally separate systems.
Marco:
And when you look at, like, the chat GPT summary of what these error codes might mean or what might be causing them... Can you just look up the error codes in the manual for your device, please?
Marco:
No, you can, but the code is, like, you know...
Marco:
suction sensor one or whatever like you know it's not it's not like a you know a useful human thing and but then the explanation is like why might that be happening and the explanation like the only overlap between those two venn diagrams of the explanation of those two codes is refrigerant issues and so it's like yeah that's probably right i probably had like you know like when the the earlier repair person over the spring worked on it i think they screwed it up they put in the wrong amount or whatever and it's been bad since all of the symptoms point to that
Marco:
So let's fix that.
Marco:
And maybe by December, maybe I'll have working air conditioning.
Marco:
It's been it's been a really awful week for lots of other reasons.
Marco:
That has not been one of them.
Marco:
But certainly once it continues to get hotter, I'm going to get more grumpy about that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Hasn't been a good, uh, past few months for me, appliance wise too, but on a much smaller scale, I lost an air conditioner at the beginning of the summer and replaced it at significantly less money than you were talking about because I have window units, lost my oven, had to replace it, lost my toaster, had to replace it.
John:
I didn't actually replace the oven.
John:
I fixed the oven.
John:
We'll talk about it in rectives, but anyway, yeah.
John:
Uh, sometimes these things just go and I, I think I've got another five years on my water heater and
John:
And my heating system in my house should have already broken.
John:
So we're just out here with our fingers crossed.
John:
And Casey's house is filled with water.
John:
So, you know, it's not looking great.
Marco:
Can I interest you in $27,000 worth of condensers that you won't be able to refill in a few years?
John:
Right.
John:
They're very compact.
John:
Don't take up a lot of room.
John:
They're very lightweight, easy to deal with, easy to store.
Marco:
That's what, and like, I've, you know, I've been going back and forth with the questions.
Marco:
I'm like, okay, if we do this, like, you know, they're like, they're 300 pounds each and they're huge.
John:
Yeah.
John:
How would you get them across the ferry?
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
How would I, where would I store them?
Marco:
Like they don't, they're not going to fit in my garage on the other side.
Marco:
Like where I'd have to like get a storage unit just for them and then like hire some trucker to like go pick them up.
John:
You'd want it to be like temperature control and stuff.
John:
Cause like you can't have like delicate equipment like that in like just random temperatures and humidities.
John:
I mean, it'll rust even if it's not by the seashore.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
We had a family discussion about what we should do about this, and we all decided we're not going to buy the spares, but it's a very frustrating situation.