Torsional Rigidity Check
Casey:
I participated, and this is actually going to tie into our other part of the pre-show, but I participated in the podcast-a-thon, the RelayFM podcast-a-thon to raise money for St.
Casey:
Jude.
Casey:
We're going to talk more about that in a moment.
Casey:
And as part of that, myself and a handful of other Relay hosts played RelayFM feuding families.
Casey:
And we played a game that might be like a television show you may have seen.
Casey:
We had various questions, some of which I was prepared for, some of which I was not.
Casey:
The final question in The Feuding Families, however, was something that was quite funny.
Casey:
And I have to ask, Marco, let me start with you.
Casey:
Did you happen to have the chance to see this segment of the, what was it, six hour, eight hour, eight hour podcast-a-thon?
Marco:
Sadly, I did not.
Casey:
Okay, well, you missed a true gem.
Casey:
I mean, the whole thing was great.
Casey:
You should watch all of it.
Casey:
But this in particular was excellent.
Casey:
The final question, just to finish this up, is name something that is important.
Casey:
Name something that John Syracuse cares about.
Casey:
And imagine me just losing it when that question was asked.
Casey:
Because of the three of us, I was the only one participating in the feuding families.
Casey:
I was rolling listening to that question.
Casey:
The answers, if you would like to be spoiled, and we will put a timestamp link in the show notes.
John:
I think you might have to explain the premise of Family Feud briefly.
Casey:
Well, I don't know what Family Feud is about because this definitely was not it.
Casey:
Definitely distinct.
Casey:
But the idea with feuding families is the Relay listeners, and anyone really could participate, but the Relay listeners filled out a survey basically and filled out free-form answers to several different questions.
Casey:
Then Jason Snell, our game master, if you will, dungeon master, since I lost, actually, I was very sad.
Casey:
But anyway, Jason, as our game master, would assemble these, I think perhaps some other people helped him, but would assemble these answers and pick the top several.
Casey:
And the amount of people that wrote in that answer is the amount of points you earn for guessing that answer.
Casey:
And there's two teams, and each team would make a guess.
Casey:
And whichever team had the higher guess—well, this is not exactly how it worked, but basically whichever team makes the higher guess gets to try to name all the different options—
Casey:
And if they succeed, they get all the points.
Casey:
If they don't name all the options, if they have three incorrect answers, then the other team gets a chance.
Casey:
And if they name any of the remaining options, they steal all the points.
Casey:
And so we had, in this case, one, two, three, four, five, six available answers to what does John Syracuse care about?
Casey:
And I was curious, John, what your thoughts were.
Casey:
I will go through the list now.
John:
Well, actually, did Marco already spoil yourself by looking at the show notes?
John:
No, I did not.
John:
All right.
John:
So Marco should play the game.
John:
This is perfect.
Casey:
I love this.
Casey:
Thank you, John.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
What does John Syracuse care about?
John:
I remember the trick about this game and all and Family Feud that was on TV or whatever is...
John:
It doesn't matter what the actual answer is.
John:
It only matters what people who filled out the survey said.
John:
So if the survey was like name a fruit, like most people would like pick an apple or something as their number one, right?
John:
It's the first thing that comes to mind.
John:
So you have to guess what most people said in the answer to this question, not what I actually care about.
John:
Right.
Marco:
So I'm going to say, I mean, this might be too broad, but Italian food.
Marco:
That's one X. Not on the list.
Marco:
Are you able to tell me like is a particular one like tomato sauce?
Marco:
Like is that just too broad?
John:
The game Family Feud and Jason S. Host are both very generous in terms of letting you get close.
John:
There is nothing even close to that on here.
John:
So no, the Italian food is not on the list.
John:
We should do the thing that they do in the show that this is legally distinct from and that Jason does, which is you do survey says or show me Italian food.
John:
And then the big red X comes because you didn't get it.
Marco:
All right.
John:
I can't believe you're doing this badly because you don't have any of the six.
John:
You just have to pick one of the top six that the listeners pick and you came up with Italian food.
John:
I mean, that's a reasonable guess.
John:
Because these are people filling out a survey.
John:
Many of them might not even know who I am, but the ones that do probably know who I am from listening to podcasts.
Marco:
televisions number one choice boom number one answer now we're getting somewhere all right 30 people said all right so i'm just gonna keep going until i lose or guess all six yeah until you get three x's right yeah okay so yeah all right i'm gonna go with uh apple
Marco:
not on the list i'm not going to give you that one jason was very generous with this choice in the show but no apple is not on the list good good guess though but no so one of the things i thought of was movies but i wonder if that's included in well television's a hardware thing all right i'm gonna say movies nope is that two is that is that two x's no that's two all right follow up
John:
Nope.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Wow.
John:
You're doing so badly at this game.
John:
I got to remember not to be on Feuding Families with Marco on my team.
John:
You are on a show with me.
John:
The only place people would know me from is listening to me on podcasts.
John:
All right.
John:
Forget about the game, Marco.
John:
Name a bunch of stuff that I'm known for on the show.
John:
Just rattle them off.
Marco:
I mean, you make really good arguments.
Marco:
No, come on.
Marco:
Are you this bad?
Marco:
I mean, you're all about the Mac Pro.
Casey:
All right, chat room.
Casey:
I will give you half credit for the Mac Pro because the 123455.
Marco:
Something having to do with the Mac is a good choice.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, Pro Macs, I would say.
Marco:
Yeah, Pro Macs.
Marco:
I mean, you're all about Perl.
John:
That's a good guess.
John:
You just missed the list, but that's a good one.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
There's, of course, file systems.
John:
That's on the list.
John:
That's number six.
John:
All right, all right.
John:
You're the one who rings the bell.
John:
You didn't guess file systems?
John:
All right, go on.
John:
Cheese graters?
John:
Yes, that's on the list.
John:
Number three.
John:
See how much better you're doing now that you're not in whatever mental state you're in for the game mode?
Marco:
Let's see.
Marco:
Other things, I mean, if it isn't just limited to this show, you definitely care a lot about secret British people.
John:
um that's true that's only a recent development but people wouldn't have known that i mean i mean you're doing okay here but like uh let's just because you already lost let's tell you the other ones toasters number two oh yeah come on right i mean no that's not that's not recent but you remember you're serving a bunch of people who may have heard listen to a podcast with me on it like once a long time ago toasters yeah that's number two choose where this is number three
John:
Number four, you probably wouldn't get.
Casey:
Excuse me, number four, I believe that was my pick, if memory serves.
John:
Thank you very much.
John:
I'm going to have your turn in a second.
John:
Number four is fan noise.
John:
I mean, true, yes.
Marco:
I mean, yeah, I think I guess things that are way more prominent than that.
John:
Yeah, but that's the secret of the listeners, right?
John:
That's the secret of the game.
John:
Well, so here's what you should have done, Casey, because as you noted in earlier rounds, sometimes the rounds were sort of focused on particular people's expertise.
John:
Like they had a question about Microsoft stores.
John:
One team had...
John:
One, maybe two, Microsoft employees, right?
John:
So that's unfair.
John:
There was a Pokemon question.
John:
Obviously, there were people with varying degrees of Pokemon expertise, which may have helped or hurt them.
John:
But in the question about me, you are the expert, Casey.
John:
You're right there.
John:
You're on a podcast with me all the time.
John:
You could have guessed all of these as just a question of narrowing it down.
John:
It's like you were in the position of the Pokemon people.
John:
They know all the Pokemon is just a question of narrowing it down.
John:
You didn't listen to Jason earlier when he said, hey, when your team has their turn...
John:
You can, if you want, rattle off a bunch of things that you're thinking of, knowing full well that you're giving hints to the other team.
John:
Because if you named three things, right, and your team loses, the other team can just name those things that you listed, right?
John:
But you knew your team didn't know me that well.
John:
I think one of the people didn't even know me at all, right?
John:
So you should have given them other choices to choose from, especially when you had zero strikes.
John:
You should have said, okay, team, I know you guys don't know John as well as I do.
John:
So what I'm thinking of is cheese graters, toasters, and file systems.
John:
And I know those sound weird to you, but those are three valid choices.
John:
Instinctively lunged for the bell again.
John:
Right.
John:
And so then you could have sent fan noise and then that was correct.
John:
And then the rest of your team would have had three easy choices instead of coming up with the wrong answers that they came up with because they have no idea who I am.
Casey:
So I'm presently, I wish I had saved this.
Casey:
I thought I had scanned it, but I didn't.
Casey:
I'm rifling through my garbage.
Casey:
Oh, here it is.
Casey:
Let me see what I actually wrote down during the recording, because I was taking notes for myself.
Casey:
All right, here we go.
Casey:
What do I have here?
Casey:
I have, I can't even read my own writing.
Casey:
Noise slash fans, file systems, cars, movies, Sprite, cheese graters.
Casey:
This was in no particular order, by the way.
Casey:
redundancy i think with regard to backups yeah backup someone he guessed and i can't believe that wasn't on the list as jason noted jason said i think john cares more about that than is represented in this survey and he's right uh game controllers which i think marco had mentioned uh yeah but too late what is what does this say oh simpsons and pop culture references that was that was my list of items that i mean it tails off pretty quickly but this is a reasonable top six
John:
so you you begrudgingly approve or you just straight up approve yeah so let's if we had to do it from marco ready um i'm gonna do marco here let's see what would i say that the survey people would say uh i would say um see how am i supposed to judge this because like we don't have those sort of results i know i know but like you just gotta name like things that people would know about you uh things i care about
John:
yeah right i mean fish yep that's way up there i mean i put it in the headers of our website for god's sake i love i love the three answers in the chat room consistently between the three of them spending money there probably might there might have been something about that in there but fish i would throw in there um some people might say php just because it's one of the things you're known for
John:
I wouldn't say I care that much about PHP.
John:
I know, I know.
John:
But it's like, what do people associate with you?
John:
Fancy watches, maybe?
John:
Yeah, I'm falling out of that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
What would people say?
John:
What if they have to, like, what's on their index card for Marco?
John:
New York.
John:
Spending money.
John:
No.
John:
Headphones.
John:
Oh, yeah, that's an easy one.
John:
pittsburgh is a deep cut i don't think that would be on the top list by i mean i loved living there but that was a long time ago and there would be there the difficult one is finding like the apple related stuff would people say iphone would they say the mac you know like right that's why i kind of went with apple you know right you know ios right stuff like that podcasting podcasts something like that somebody said somebody said cars and i i reject that because marco drives an appliance now he doesn't drive a car anymore
Marco:
I will say I had quite a lot of time in that appliance today, and I really quite enjoyed it.
Marco:
Well, I guess Casey's talking about a Tesla, isn't he?
Casey:
Yes.
Marco:
Sorry, I missed it.
Marco:
I was in the Land Rover all day, which now, by the way, wears a watch, but that's a separate story.
Casey:
The Land Rover wears a watch?
Marco:
That's correct.
Marco:
i do want to unpack this at some point in the future so we'll get to it in the watch in the watch discussion later oh perfect okay all right then oh i guess marco you do casey now oh no i thought i was gonna get away with this how does somebody doing this for me not mention fire island and dogs i mean dogs is so like who doesn't love oh i like babies i mean okay sure
John:
Do you like dogs more than I like dogs?
John:
We both have one dog.
John:
And I've owned more dogs than you.
Marco:
I think so.
Marco:
I've seen, well, let's see.
Marco:
You like babies more than I do, for sure.
Casey:
There's not a human that likes babies more than John Syracuse.
Casey:
I know.
John:
i think i like dogs more but it's a it's a close call because you also love dogs so yeah i don't think everybody loves dogs who doesn't love dogs a lot of people i don't know how they survive yeah like what is what is their joy in life if not for dogs yeah and i was trying to do it from a survey perspective like people might not know that much about you but it's not like we talk about you know you mentioned your dog but it's not like you spend a lot of time dwelling on it on the show or whatever so what's what's casey
John:
And again, these are the survey answers.
John:
Cars.
John:
Number one cars.
John:
I don't know if that would be number one.
John:
I think number one might be Velveeta, but you know.
John:
But you know Velveeta would be on the list, right?
Casey:
See, the thing is, I actually don't care about Velveeta that much at all.
Casey:
I know, but it's on your index card.
Casey:
But I 1,000% agree that it would end up on the list.
John:
Because it's odd and it's a thing that's associated with you.
Casey:
No, I completely agree.
Casey:
Completely agree.
John:
I'm going to say fatherhood.
Marco:
oh i appreciate that that's kind of maybe because you know in part because you know you are super into it now but even before you were a father you were basically a dad like to the world you would like in the worst you were constantly emitting dad jokes and you know big dad dad energy bad jokes yeah i think so that's all right i'll still take it as a compliment you're not a dad they just call them bad jokes once you become a dad you have a new name for it but it's the same humor
John:
i'm gonna take that i don't know how that was meant but i'm gonna take it as a compliment so we can we can go on with that um i'd also i gotta throw in plex yeah plexus would be that's a good one that's a good one yeah i mean i but the viber slap is for synology right yeah that's correct and you know you have to think of yourself as a character on a tv show so you're looking for like catchphrases or things that come up not necessarily things that are actually the most important to you that you care about but just that are odd enough that people would remember them and associate with them so like i
John:
Casey's not super into Velveeta, but because we talk about it and we both don't like it and he does, it becomes associated with him.
John:
So anyway, that was a little game theory in case you're ever on feuding families, which is legally distinct from family feud.
Casey:
Oh, my word.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So why did we play Feuding Families?
Casey:
Thank you, John.
Casey:
That went a direction I was not expecting, but that was fun.
Casey:
Why did we play Feuding Families?
Casey:
Well, like I mentioned earlier, it was because that we were trying to raise money for St.
Casey:
Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Casey:
So here's the thing.
Casey:
You have at least one dollar, probably more than one, but at least one.
Casey:
And they would like to accept that dollar and put it to good use.
Casey:
And maybe, maybe that $1 will be the $1 that just tips them over the edge in being able to fund the cure for childhood cancer.
Casey:
Yeah, it may not happen, but you never know.
Casey:
You never know.
Casey:
It could be your one dollar.
Casey:
So here's the thing.
Casey:
You've got a dollar, maybe several, maybe hundreds, maybe even thousands, and they would like to accept that one, several, or hundreds, or thousands at stjude.org slash ATP.
Casey:
S-T-J-U-D-E dot org slash ATP.
Casey:
And if you can, and if you would like, you can throw a little bit of money towards St.
Casey:
Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Casey:
Why St.
Casey:
Jude, you ask?
Casey:
Well, thank you for asking.
Casey:
It's because their mission
Casey:
which has been going on for 60 years, is to have no child pass away from childhood cancer.
Casey:
And they have made tremendous, tremendous strides in these last 60 years.
Casey:
I don't have the figures in front of me, but they've absolutely flipped the ratios from being absolutely terrible to at least okay, which is a humongous improvement, if not actually good.
Casey:
So they are working tirelessly to try to end childhood cancer.
Casey:
The research that they do, they share with the world, so this isn't just an American thing.
Casey:
Yes, the American healthcare system is utterly and probably forever broken, but that's not the only thing that St.
Casey:
Jude does.
Casey:
They help all of their families, even international families, and they share all their research, and they do this without charging families a dime, which is really incredible, especially here in America.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
Please go to stjude.org slash ATP and throw a little bit of money their way.
Casey:
Also, I would like to do a little bit of quick follow-up with regard to St.
Casey:
Jude.
Casey:
Guillaume has been located and stickers have already been dispatched.
Casey:
In fact, they may have already arrived.
Casey:
He was the individual, is, as far as I know, the individual leader for individual donations.
Casey:
And we still also want to send one more thanks to the fine folks at 1Password who are far and away the group leaders today.
Casey:
But Guillaume was the individual leader.
Casey:
So thank you.
Casey:
And stickers have been dispatched already.
Casey:
Like I said, probably already there.
Casey:
So stjude.org slash ATP.
Casey:
That being said, we have one more piece of housekeeping.
Casey:
We also have another episode of ATP Movie Club for members.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
And we spent some time on the episode discussing why I picked this movie, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
We recorded it a couple of weeks ago now, but I believe we did.
Casey:
If we need to, we can cover that another time.
Casey:
But suffice to say, I did not choose what everyone expected, The Hunt for October.
Casey:
And instead, I chose the, what is it, 2003?
Casey:
I should have this in front of me.
Casey:
I think it's 2003.
Casey:
Classic, absolute classic, starring Dwayne Johnson and Sean William Scott, The Rundown.
Casey:
Absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, a modern classic.
Casey:
So if you would like to hear me and Marco and John discuss the modern classic, the 2003 film The Rundown, check it out at atp.fm slash join.
Casey:
Oh, and we should also do one more minor piece of housekeeping.
Casey:
Marco, do you want to talk about the bootleg versus non-bootleg, etc.
Casey:
feeds with regard to the movie club?
Casey:
Please and thank you.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Since this is the very first premium member content we ever published, a bunch of weird edge cases and questions came up as we were doing it, and a couple of CMS bugs even that I fixed.
Marco:
Anyway, so the question came, should this be in the bootleg feed?
Marco:
Because the bootleg contains the unedited live streams of the show, and there was no unedited live stream of the member specials.
Marco:
There's only an edited version.
Marco:
And so at first, the CMS was was unintentionally written, quote, you know, written to to only put it in the main feed.
Marco:
But many members subscribe only to the bootleg feed because that's just how they prefer to listen to the show.
Marco:
They prefer the unedited show.
Marco:
And so once I fix the glitch, there's actually a bug and unintended behavior that it was leaving those out.
Marco:
Now these will appear in both feeds.
Marco:
So the only inconvenience is if you happen to subscribe to both the member ad-free feed and the bootleg feed, you will get two copies, one in each feed.
Marco:
But I think most people pick one or the other and don't usually subscribe to both.
Marco:
And that way, no matter which feed you subscribe to, if there is any member-specific content, whether it has a bootleg version or not, you will get that episode.
John:
I think this is one more opportunity to remind people that, hey, if you're an ATP member, you get access to both of those things.
John:
The bootleg feed, which is the unedited feed of the show, which I'm not sure why people want to listen to, but they do.
John:
And the edited feed, which is the show as it's released to everybody, but you get a version with no ads in it.
Casey:
Yeah, it's pretty sweet no matter how you slice it.
Casey:
So atp.fm slash join.
Casey:
Thank you for everyone who has already a member, who has joined, who has commented on the recordings.
Casey:
We had a lot of fun doing them.
Casey:
Again, we don't have sitting here now any particular plans for future members-only content.
Casey:
I'm sure it will happen eventually.
Casey:
But we aren't currently planning on making a habit of it.
Casey:
But it was a lot of fun to do something just for the members because we love everyone that listens.
Casey:
We might love our members just a touch more, though.
Casey:
I'm going to be honest.
Casey:
So atp.fm slash join.
John:
And let us know what you think of it.
John:
And let us know your wacky ideas for members-only content.
John:
Again, no promises that we will listen to any of them, but I love hearing them because you have a lot of good ideas.
Casey:
Yeah, that is genuinely very true.
Casey:
The tough thing is, is that we're all very lazy and we don't want to do something super involved.
John:
Speak for yourself.
John:
I'm ready to do stuff all the time.
John:
It's just, you know, if it's like go skydiving together, it's probably not going to happen.
John:
But hey, interesting idea.
Casey:
Well, but I think the thing that would be the most fun would be for all of us to play Destiny together, and I have no equipment with which to play Destiny.
Marco:
The thing that would be the most fun is cooking with John, but that just wants to be a video show, and we can't make video.
John:
That's a lot of things that have a high bar and that don't lend themselves well to podcasting.
John:
Keep that in mind.
Marco:
Someday we're going to find a way to do cooking with John in audio form.
Marco:
I don't know how.
Casey:
I was thinking earlier, like, how could we do this?
Casey:
What if we did the sort of thing where it's what is is it Brad and Mike do the build a Lego set, but only one of them has the instructions and the other one is doing the building for.
Casey:
Isn't that their member special on Relay every year?
Casey:
What if we did something like that?
Marco:
Yeah, but I think that even that kind of thing, I think that wants to be video.
Marco:
And Cooking with John, it has to be like a live reaction video.
Marco:
You have to have John live reacting to one of us trying to cook food in his style and doing everything wrong.
Marco:
That's what that show would be.
Marco:
And yeah, I don't know how we do that in audio form.
Casey:
Let me remind you, if I remember, I will put it in the show notes, but I, well, all three of us, it wasn't just me, all three of us were together many moons ago at John's house around Christmas time.
Casey:
I don't remember exactly when it was.
John:
This is just a big trauma in your life.
John:
You've repeated it like six times in the show.
Casey:
It is a trauma.
John:
I'm sorry, this is such a profound...
Casey:
It was a profound moment in my life, John.
Casey:
He asked me to help him make pizza, and my recollection of the pizza was that it was very, very good.
Casey:
I was happy to help him make pizza.
Casey:
He asked me to shred, what was it, mozzarella?
Casey:
I don't even remember what cheese it was.
Casey:
It was surely mozzarella.
Casey:
And I attempted to shred it, and he immediately was aghast and informed me that I had done this utterly incorrectly, took his beloved cheese grater from my cold, dead hands, which had died from embarrassment, and
Casey:
and then immediately on the same plate showed me and instructed me on the correct way to to grate cheese so cooking with john should happen eventually one day but no promises you were doing it like someone who had never grated cheese before like literally had never done it before i had done it before but not a lot well i mean it showed so that's why you know i found it i found it all right i just needed to take over
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Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Can you tell me, John, about Apple Pay looking for a quote unquote valid address, please?
John:
I complained about this.
John:
Last week, Etsy was rejecting my Apple Pay payments because I thought all my addresses were invalid.
John:
And then I got the same rejection when I was buying my iPhone.
John:
But luckily, it went through eventually.
John:
Tons of people wrote in to say, hey, I've had that happen to me as well.
John:
It's very difficult to tell whether it actually is a problem or it's just that when you say you've experienced a problem, you'll hear from all the other people who did experience the problem.
John:
So I don't know if this is a new thing or whatever, but it is very common.
John:
Graham Dobby wrote in about an Apple Pay issue that he was having at Etsy as well.
John:
He said, I had the same issue paying Etsy using Apple Pay.
John:
No combination of changing or deleting addresses made any difference, but Apple Pay worked perfectly well on other websites.
John:
After back and forth with Etsy support, the issue was left unresolved.
John:
The last I heard was this, quote, our team is still looking into things with the engineers.
John:
In the meantime, checking out not using Apple Pay will allow you to proceed with the purchase.
John:
This was in October 2018.
John:
So that does not bode well for Etsy working out whatever the problem was with Apple Pay on their website.
John:
That's not great.
John:
The only thing I heard about this that was sort of substantive and not like, you know, just like people relaying their own experiences.
John:
was the idea that some shipping or logistics companies will give you a discount, will give like the site, the store, the e-commerce site, a discount on their shipping if the address that they send to is on their pre-approved list of like known valid addresses or whatever, right?
John:
Because that's what explains like why would a store ever stop you from checking out?
John:
Like you don't want anything in the checkout flow that stops you from, you know, from making the purchase.
John:
So what could possibly motivate sites to do this or payment processors to do this?
John:
And when it comes to the sites doing this, because websites also sometimes complain about your address.
John:
or offer your alternatives or whatever is they're trying to get a cheaper shipping rate for themselves you know whether or not they pass that on to you they're trying to get a cheaper shipping rate and saying hey you entered 123 main street you sure you didn't mean this address one it's always in all caps one two three main st period would you like to send to that one you know and usually you can pick no i want to send to the one that i wrote not the one that you wrote but in some cases in some countries in some situations
John:
there is a financial incentive for them to only send to one of these lists of pre-approved addresses.
John:
And maybe that has something to do with what's happening with that play thing, or it could be something totally unrelated.
John:
I don't know.
John:
But anyway, it's a common problem and no one knows of a solution.
Casey:
So the iPhone 14, 14 Pro and 14 Max have all been released.
Casey:
We're going to talk about that in a little bit.
Casey:
But the iPhone 14 in particular has a completely new design.
Casey:
And reading from iFixit, Apple has completely redesigned the internals of the iPhone 14 to make it easier to repair.
Casey:
It is not at all visible from the outside, but this is a big deal.
Casey:
It's the most significant design change to the iPhone in a long time.
Casey:
The iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max models still have the old architecture.
Casey:
When you drop an iPhone 13, its metal frame absorbs that shock, transmitting and spreading the force across the glued-in battery in sturdily adhered rear glass.
Casey:
The iPhone 14 meets the same challenge, but achieves the required torsional rigidity in a totally different way.
Casey:
A new mid-frame sits between the display and the guts of the phone and takes the brunt of force distribution across the frame and battery.
Casey:
That is super cool, and in a way, I kind of wish I had a 14 and not a 14 Pro.
John:
Yeah, the big sale here is like that it used to be that phones you could open up from the screen side, like you'd pop off the screen and then you could, you know, replace the screen and do other stuff.
John:
But you couldn't open it from the back.
John:
It was basically like a bathtub kind of and then the screen with lid on the top.
John:
So if you needed to replace something that was basically exposed on the back of the phone, you would have to open up the front, dig out all the guts and get to the thing that was underneath that you wanted to repair.
John:
And the new 14, you can open it from the front or the back.
John:
And the mid frame they're talking about, it's like there's a, you know, so there's the ring around the outside that you feel, you know, when you grab the phone.
John:
And then inside the phone, there's this skinny metal piece that sits kind of in the middle of the sandwich.
John:
And the back stuff is on the back side of that.
John:
And the front stuff is on the front side of that.
John:
So if you want to replace something that's on the back, now you can take off the back part.
John:
Or if you break the back, like if you break the glass back on your iPhone, now they can just take off that back glass and replace it.
John:
Or if you want to get at something that's on the very back of the iPhone, you can just pry off the back glass and get at it immediately.
John:
And the screen, same deal.
John:
If you just want to replace the screen, you pull that off the front of the phone.
John:
way more repairable.
John:
You should watch the video of how well they've done this, how all the connectors are threaded through, and you could remove all the pieces.
John:
Big change in repairability.
John:
And as you noted, the Pro and the Pro Max do not have this new design.
John:
They still have the old design where you can open up the front real easily, but the back
John:
is just one piece and it's really difficult to do and that is reflected in the repair prices so this is like no apple care out of warranty like you broke it how much does it cost to fix it the iphone 14 if you break the back glass 150 to repair it if it's out of warranty you know that's nothing that's awesome that's amazing the iphone 14 pro max 550 for that same oh
John:
and the iFixit people say and like that's not because they're ripping you off it's because the huge amount of labor and like because you have to basically pull all the guts out of the phone to get because you have to you know remove that the the part that's broken you got to pull all the guts out of it they even show like in one of the older phones probably sure the new ones do to get like to sort of unglu the back from like the the magsafe or the
John:
What do you call it?
John:
The wireless charging coil or whatever.
John:
They had like a laser they would use to like burn off the adhesive and it would go back and forth.
John:
Or you'd have to like shatter the glass and pull off little shards of glass with tweezers.
John:
It was expensive because it took a huge amount of time and it was so labor intensive.
John:
So it's fascinating that the iPhone 14, the non-pro one, has this way better design for repairability, but the expensive phones don't.
John:
And I think it will eventually trickle up to the rest of the iPhone line because people are like, wonder why Apple's doing this.
John:
Are they being so nice?
John:
No, of course Apple's doing this.
John:
When they have repairs that are easier to do, that helps them because you have fewer botched repairs and fewer situations.
John:
So you have to like, oh, we screwed up your phone trying to repair it and we have to give you a whole new phone or whatever.
John:
Repairability helps Apple a lot.
John:
helps customers a little too in terms of paying less when you break it or whatever.
John:
But there's no question about why Apple would be motivated to make its phones easier to repair.
John:
That's why almost everything they've done with all their products to make it easier to repair is easy to justify because, hey, if someone comes in with a MacBook Air and they broke the USB port, wouldn't it be great if we could just remove the little USB port?
John:
Yeah, so that's why it's on a submodule.
John:
It just makes the repair faster and easier.
John:
It gets the customer in and out faster.
John:
And if it's under warranty, you don't have to pay for a whole new logic board, right?
John:
So this makes a lot of sense.
John:
It's just a shame that it didn't make it to the expensive phones, but watch for it in the next few years.
Casey:
So with regard to U.S.
Casey:
phones, they don't have any sort of SIM slot, or at least so we think.
Casey:
But then iFixit opened it up, and apparently there is the space for it.
Casey:
It wasn't used for anything else, and they just put a little plastic spacer in there.
Casey:
So reading from iFixit, it's still a little eerie and very un-Apple-like to weigh space like this.
Casey:
The plastic spacer is roughly the same size as a 2x2 Lego brick and weighs half a gram.
John:
You should look at the picture of it on the iPixit thing.
John:
It's literally like just a chunk of inert plastic, just a space filler.
John:
So, you know, we talked about that not having a SIM tray gives you more internal space that you can fill with stuff.
John:
In this phone, they have not filled it with stuff because, I mean, I guess I think it's only the U.S.
John:
phones that don't have a SIM tray.
John:
Well, anyway, the majority of phones are sold outside the U.S., I would imagine, if you count all the rest of the world.
John:
And they didn't want to make two different models.
John:
So, yeah, we don't get that space savings.
John:
But as soon as they can go eSIM everywhere, you can bet they're going to reclaim that space.
John:
But it is hilarious that in this tightest of spaces where they have so many components jammed in and everything...
John:
They basically just designed the same phone.
John:
And they said, you know, on the US ones, the band around the outside won't have a hole in it.
John:
And inside, you can see all the contacts where the SIM tray would go.
John:
Like the board is the same.
John:
Everything's the same.
John:
There's just no SIM tray.
John:
But we have to put something there, you know, for rigidity or whatever.
John:
Little plastic spacer.
Casey:
Nice.
Casey:
John, tell me about your phone case or cases.
John:
I'm going to talk more about my... We'll all talk more about our purchase experiences a little later, but people wanted to know what kind of cases I'm getting.
John:
I mentioned last week that I had ordered the bullstrap black leather case with an open bottom on it in MagSafe.
John:
And we'll put another link to that in this week's show notes so you can find it.
John:
I ordered a second leather case just because... I don't know.
John:
Redundancy.
John:
I'll talk about them in the show.
John:
This one is from...
John:
In case I didn't like the bull strap case, because I know I'm probably not going to like the buttons on the bull strap case, right?
John:
I ordered a second one from Ryan London, and it's a black leather case with an open bottom.
John:
Shocker.
John:
The buttons look a little bit different than they do on the bull strap.
John:
We'll see how it goes.
Marco:
I also I have a couple of case updates, too.
Marco:
I have the the Apple clear case for my iPhone 14, which this is the first year I've actually gotten Apple's clear case.
Marco:
Like I started experimenting with clear cases last year and and I use some third party ones and they were they were decent overall.
Marco:
Fine.
Marco:
This year, the only one I could get on day one for guaranteed day one delivery was Apple's.
Marco:
And so I thought, oh, let me give it a try.
Marco:
Maybe I won't like it, but I at least want to live with it.
Marco:
And it's actually okay.
Marco:
I'm actually enjoying it.
Marco:
I think it is much nicer looking than the third-party ones that I've used.
Marco:
We'll see how it ages.
Marco:
Clear cases have a tendency to yellow over time.
Marco:
Even the ones that say they have anti-yellowing technology also themselves do yellow over time.
Marco:
So we'll see.
Marco:
And this is, as John mentioned last week, the only Apple phone case that's sold right now that has an open bottom.
Marco:
And as much as it pains me to admit it, I think John was right.
Marco:
I think open bottoms are awesome.
Casey:
I think the open bottom is better, but, and I'm jumping ahead a little bit here, but I have the official Apple leather case.
Casey:
It definitely has a non-open bottom and you can feel it when you do the little swipey up home gesture.
Casey:
It does not bother me.
Casey:
In the story of ATP for the last 10 years, it does not bother me nearly as much as it bothers either of you.
John:
I remember the correct, no,
John:
this is bare bottom that's what we're going oh my mistake open bottom slightly more appealing i feel like yeah so if we're doing this now then we're doing this guilty oh gosh please stop um i was gonna save this for later but since marco mentioned it i also got the clear case as mentioned before this is my tied me over case because both of those leather cases are coming like mid-october or something best case scenario so i need a case until then so i got the clear apple one because it's got the open bottom
John:
This is the worst case I have ever owned for any iPhone.
John:
Oh, my word.
John:
I like it.
John:
It's all right.
John:
I didn't think it was going to be a big deal.
John:
It's a clear case.
John:
I don't like how it looks.
John:
It'll probably feel weird.
John:
But, you know, whatever.
John:
It's just to tide me over.
John:
I was not prepared for the thing that would bother me the most about this case.
John:
It's not, oh, you get crumbs underneath it.
John:
It's not like, oh, it's too slippery or whatever.
John:
It's not that it's clear and ugly or whatever.
John:
All those things are factors, but I knew about those.
John:
I think it would be fine.
John:
I don't know if you're going to be able to hear this.
John:
I'm going to put this in front of my microphone.
John:
See if you can pick this up at all.
John:
If not, then I will just describe it later.
John:
I hear some crinkling almost.
Marco:
Is that like when you push the buttons?
Marco:
Is it making a creaking sound?
John:
When I put my phone into this case, directly out of the box, directly into the case, like not touched by human hands, clean room style, right?
John:
So phone case goes in or whatever.
John:
This thing creaks inside this case like crazy.
John:
It's like the phone is constantly moving micrometers back and forth.
John:
And each time it does, it overcomes the static friction against the case and then re-sticks to it.
John:
It's like...
John:
You can imagine like something sticking to it and then pulling away, sticking to it.
John:
Every time I pick up this phone, I feel the case move.
John:
It moves in, it moves out.
John:
The phone moves up, moves down.
John:
You'd be saying, maybe you don't have the phone seated all the way.
John:
Believe me, I checked a million times.
John:
Is this not seated?
John:
Is it not in the case?
John:
It's in the case.
John:
Every time I grab my phone, it's like this case...
John:
does like it's not like it doesn't fit it's not like it's too loose but it creaks and it moves it feels terrible it sounds terrible i thought it would get broken in over time like maybe it's just creaking because it's new but it hasn't every time i pick up my phone i hate this case more nothing's being weird nothing to do with the ugliness nothing to do with the crumbs all those things happen i cannot stand this case i've almost thought of like maybe i should just go bare without it because it's so bad and
John:
How could they screw this up so badly?
John:
When I pick up my phone, I don't want to feel anything move, let alone hear creaking or snapping or pulling away.
John:
Oh, so bad.
John:
So bad.
John:
I hate it so much.
Marco:
I mean, for whatever it's worth, mine doesn't do any of those things.
Marco:
And I have the exact same phone in the exact same case.
Marco:
So maybe it's just a flaw.
John:
Can you pick up your phone now and do a little bit of torsional rigidity check?
John:
Do you feel the case moving?
Marco:
If I literally twist the phone, I can get a very slight movement.
Marco:
But in regular picking up and handling, that never happens.
John:
Pick up the phone, put your fans on either side of it, and just squeeze.
John:
Just squeeze the sides.
Marco:
Does the case move?
Marco:
My finger is just cracked.
Marco:
But no, the case does not move, no.
John:
My case does.
John:
If I'm squeezing, look on the back where the circle almost meets the vertical line.
John:
Put your fingers on the opposite side of that and squeeze.
Marco:
I mean, it's kind of low, but no, it's also not there either.
Marco:
No, no matter where I squeeze in the sides, it doesn't do it.
John:
Maybe my case is flawed or has some problem with it or whatever, but it is so bad.
John:
And you wouldn't think this would bother you that much.
John:
Every time I pick it up, I grab it, and it's like I feel that case move, and it feels insecure, and it feels gross, and I hate it.
I hate it so much.
Marco:
Yeah, mine definitely does not do that.
Marco:
And the only complaint I have about this case is that it is not as grippy feeling as the third party ones are.
Marco:
The Apple case is made for me like a little bit harder plastic that's a little bit less tacky.
Marco:
But it's fine.
Marco:
I mean, you know, once it was kind of weird the very first day, it seemed to be, I guess, for manufacturing or something, it seemed to be coated in like a slight layer of grease.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh, neat.
Marco:
That was kind of off-putting, but within one day of handling it, that all had rubbed off, and so now it just feels like plastic, and it feels fine.
Marco:
Yeah, we'll see how it ages, but so far, I like it a lot.
John:
Yeah, obviously, this will be immediately coming off the phone when any of my other cases come, but in the meantime, I'm just grinding my teeth and burying it.
Marco:
I'll also say that the only other case I've ordered so far is the only one that I couldn't get last year due to various backorder issues that everyone recommended, the Pitaka.
Marco:
So I have that one coming.
Marco:
It's going to be here, I think, in a few days, and I'll let you know how it goes.
Marco:
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Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But I had heard through the grapevine that the right way to do this is to do what John did, which is get a HD Home Run Prime, I believe it's called.
Casey:
And that has a cable card input.
Casey:
And that would let you, if you speak to your cable company, if they support it.
Casey:
That would let you get basically everything that you get on cable, except maybe like premium channels, which I don't pay for anyway.
Casey:
And you don't have to stream it.
Casey:
It's not coming across the air or anything like that.
Casey:
It's pretty much exactly like having a TiVo.
Casey:
Right, John?
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Anyway, so I had a listener who was kind enough to send one of these to me, and I sat on it for a couple of weeks, and then I finally got around to asking my Verizon Fios people for a cable card.
Casey:
That came in.
Casey:
uh it is which i knew but had forgotten it is pretty much a pc mcia card most of you are probably like uh what's that which is the correct response that's amazing you just mean a p it's a pc card though it's not a pc mcia what's the difference that's the same it's just they later renamed it to pc card it's that's what i thought but it's a newer isn't pc card a newer standard
Marco:
It might be like, you know, version two of the same thing, but like, I think it was just a shortening of the name in a newer version to make it a little bit more consumer friendly than a PC MCI.
John:
It's like a PCI, the PCI bus version two versus PCI bus version three, except they renamed it between two and three, I think.
John:
But anyway, you can say PC card.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Regardless.
Marco:
If you say PC card, people might think like just a slot card, like a PCI card that you put in a PC.
Marco:
Yeah, I know.
Marco:
They picked a bad name.
Marco:
Yeah, they went from one bad name to a slightly less bad name.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
It's a good thing we have USB 4 version 2.0 coming soon.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
Yeah, same as it ever was.
Casey:
Yeah, and I'm looking, I'm glancing at the Wikipedia entries.
Casey:
There is a different entry for PC card versus PCMCIA.
Casey:
I'm unclear.
Casey:
Oh, I guess PCMCIA is the association, whereas the PC card is, strictly speaking, you're right, John.
Marco:
I believe that was retconned that way.
Casey:
See, okay, that's what I thought, too.
John:
Yeah, well, that's the way all these names work, like USB 3.0 Gen 2.
John:
Yeah, right, right, right.
John:
It used to be USB 3.2 or whatever.
John:
Remember when they briefly did 2x2, USB 3.0, 3.2, 2x2?
John:
PCMCIA has something going for it.
John:
The USB 4 version 2.0 hasn't dared to do yet.
John:
Roman numerals.
John:
Throw them in the mix.
John:
Why not?
John:
Because they've got type 2, type 3, type 4, all Roman numerals.
John:
Nice.
Casey:
In any case, so yeah, the cable card is to my eyes.
Casey:
I don't care if it's PCMCIA, PC card, whatever.
Casey:
It's one of those things.
Casey:
One of the things that us people, like Marco and me, would get a PCMCIA wireless adapter for our laptops back when we were in college.
Casey:
That was the last time I had worked with one of these.
Casey:
Oh, and we talked about like X-Jack or whatever it's called, where you had a modem and the little thing would like, what do you call that, where you push in and the thing pops out.
Casey:
It had like a little receptacle for the RJ-11.
Casey:
It was super cool.
John:
You call it really breakable.
Casey:
Yeah, well, that's a fact.
Casey:
That's a fact.
Casey:
So anyway, so I get this HD Home Run Prime from a very kind listener.
Casey:
I asked Verizon to send me the cable card.
Casey:
They do.
Casey:
I plug it all in.
Casey:
I try to set it all up.
Casey:
And of course, I tried to do the online self-service activation.
Casey:
It didn't work.
Casey:
I forget exactly why.
Casey:
So then I have to get on a chat with the Verizon people and I read to them the magical numerals that I need to read to them.
Casey:
And that didn't work.
Casey:
And then, of course, they're like, well, look at the TV and tell me this.
Casey:
And I had to explain...
Casey:
It's not connected to a TV, you see.
Casey:
It's like a capture box and this and that, and that didn't go over well, especially over chat.
Marco:
You're like their worst nightmare.
Casey:
Oh, I know.
John:
You can get the cable card info right from the channel's web UI.
Casey:
Well, I don't think I got it from the channel's web UI, but I absolutely could get it from the HD Home Run web UI.
John:
Yeah, that too.
Casey:
And so anyways, one way or another, it eventually turned out that the person I was speaking to was very kind, escalated to some other magical person.
Casey:
And that other magical person, with no further info from me, flipped magical switches, and then it all got working.
Casey:
So it was a bit of a pain in the butt.
Casey:
But I got to tell you, once you have this set up, and as much as I'm snarking on John and his beloved TiVo, like I've never had a TiVo.
Casey:
I don't know what the TiVo experience is like.
John:
TiVo gets the premium channels with a cable card, just FYI.
Casey:
Oh, fair, fair.
Casey:
Well, maybe that is possible with channels.
Casey:
I honestly don't know.
Casey:
I'm not saying it is or it isn't.
Casey:
I didn't think it was possible, but I am not sure.
Casey:
One way or the other, this is so nice.
Casey:
Like, if you're going to pay for a TV setup, which most people, including me, probably shouldn't, it is so nice because then I have the entirety of my cable everywhere.
Casey:
Because like Plex, channels will work outside the house, inside the house.
Casey:
And now, instead of having a big honking table box, a big honking cable box,
Casey:
with uh with a spinning hard drive in it in my living room now the cable box has just arrived back in verizon today because i don't need it anymore and i am saving a whopping like two dollars a month by not having a dvr in my house because instead of charging me like thirteen dollars they're charging me ten dollars so i guess i'm saving three bucks a month but um they're charging me ten dollars for the cable card instead of fifteen for the dvr with its god-awful interface
Casey:
But it is really, really nice.
Casey:
I'm really, really enjoying it so far.
Casey:
And what's super cool about it is when we tailgate, which was discussed on Upgrade Plus this week, when we tailgate at the University of Virginia, which is where my wife went to school, we will have a TV set up there.
Casey:
And if you want to watch another football game, like, for example, the Virginia Tech game, which is where I went to school, you can hook up an iPad,
Casey:
to the TV and have it play your cable at home through the network, through the internet, through my Verizon wireless connection to the TV sitting in the middle of a field at UVA, which is pretty freaking rad.
Casey:
So granted, I could have done this with streaming and it was like directly from ESPN, but the quality would probably be worse.
Casey:
It's still, it's really cool.
Casey:
Nobody should care about this, but if you do care about it, it's super great, which is another theme for ATV.
Casey:
Marco, tell me about your glasses and blue blocking lenses, please.
Marco:
I don't know how much follow up I can really do yet because I don't actually have good glasses yet.
Marco:
But we did hear from a number of people about the topic of the blue blocking lenses.
Marco:
The consensus seems to be there are various degrees of blue light blockage.
Marco:
And they correspond directly to how much they do give a yellowish color cast to the image that you see.
Marco:
Because, of course, you know, like I had asked last episode because I had heard from the optometrist that you don't really notice.
Marco:
There is no noticeable color cast.
Marco:
And, yeah, it turns out that's probably BS that...
John:
I think it might be true in the same sense that if you've ever gone skiing and worn yellow ski goggles because you were born in the 70s, you put the ski goggles over your face, yellow or orange ski goggles that are like super yellow or super orange, right?
John:
But then after you've had the goggles on for a little bit, your brain adjusts and you stop noticing that everything looks like pee.
John:
The reason you always look like the reason you keep noticing it with night shift is because only your phone looks like pee.
John:
Right.
John:
The rest of the world doesn't.
John:
But when you put the goggles on your face or I would imagine blue blocking glasses, your brain just recalibrates and everything looks normal.
John:
And in the case of ski goggles, until you pick the ski goggles up and then the snow is blindingly blue.
John:
Right.
John:
So I imagine that's what the eye doctor is trying to say.
John:
Oh, you don't notice, but it absolutely colors things.
John:
And with glasses, unlike goggles, you can look under or over the glasses, which is how I spend half my life, you know, getting away with wearing my driving glasses and then being able to read my phone.
John:
You look under your glasses.
John:
because i'm not quite ready to have progressives or bifocals yet um so you still with glasses you can still see the true colors out of your peripheral vision and under your glasses and i think that would make you continue to notice uh the fact that they are giving everything a yellowish cast but i guess if you get like big old person wraparound blue blockers maybe you're kind of like ski goggles you'll you won't be able to see any unfiltered light and your brain will just readjust
Marco:
I mean, for a number of years now, my preferred driving sunglasses have had like slightly gold lenses and they do the same thing intentionally.
Marco:
And the reason I like them for driving is that it allows me to have...
Marco:
They're decent glasses.
Marco:
They have good quality lenses and they're polarized, but they're not that dark.
Marco:
But they are slightly gold or brown tinted, which means they block more blue.
Marco:
And so what this does is it allows me to have a lot of eye relief during driving from sun and stuff, but without making the, I guess, image too dark.
Marco:
And so I love them in the winter because, you know, there's a lot of glare in the winter in various directions and everything.
Marco:
But there's not a ton of overall light necessarily in the winter.
Marco:
And it's great for that.
Marco:
But it definitely does make everything look a little bit warmer color temperature wise.
Marco:
And so anyway, so what we heard from we heard from a lot of listeners who have tried blue blocking glasses, you know, for just regular eyeglasses.
Marco:
And the I believe the opinion was pretty solidly negative on them.
Marco:
Most people who tried them did not like them.
Marco:
And most people said, you know, don't even bother slash.
Marco:
I tried them and hate them, you know, whatever.
Marco:
So overall, not strong reviews.
Marco:
Anyway, so I got a couple of cheap readers from Amazon that came in today that I think are probably unusable.
Marco:
I also, in order to try out different things, a lot of people recommended that I try out intermediate distance readers, which are made more for computer screen distances than holding a book distances.
Marco:
So I ordered one of those from one of the cheap places.
Marco:
And people kept recommending Zenni Optical and iBuy Direct.
Marco:
So I ordered a couple from each that are really cheap.
Marco:
And so I got an intermediate on order.
Marco:
And I have a progressive that goes from nothing to reading.
Marco:
And I'm going to try both of those and see kind of how that goes and trying out different codings.
Marco:
And then I'll figure out what the heck is actually going to work for me.
Casey:
With regard to ZenniOptical, last episode I was trying to reach for the name of a website where I had looked, and ordering kids' glasses was just as expensive as ordering them through the eye doctor.
Casey:
And a lot of people were like, oh, you should try ZenniOptical.
Casey:
It's super cheap.
Casey:
That's the one I was thinking of, where it's basically the same money for kids' glasses.
Casey:
So coincidentally, just this week, Michaela had her annual checkup.
Casey:
She's getting new glasses.
Casey:
The way it worked this year is that it was $201 for a new set of glasses for Michaela, and I priced the exact same thing with the exact same script from Zenni, and it was $174.
Casey:
So it was basically the same money.
Casey:
Cheaper, but not a lot cheaper.
Casey:
Exactly right.
Casey:
And so I'm not saying that's true for adults.
Casey:
I'm not saying that's true for anything.
Casey:
But for me, for my uses, because I wear hard contacts, I don't get glasses regularly, and those have to be special ordered.
Casey:
But for the kids, anyhow, Zenni was actually not really any cheaper.
Casey:
But like many have said, including you, Marco, I think for adults, it's a very different ballgame.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Finally, I was casting about asking people last episode, hey, is there one true upgrade guide for what is the right way to handle upgrading a phone and or watch?
Casey:
A handful of people recommended, but Jonathan Golbrinson was the first to do it.
Casey:
Apple does have an official guide for this.
Casey:
I don't really love it.
Casey:
It's kind of choose your own adventure in a way that I'm not really in favor of, including them starting with, well, which way would you like to do it?
Casey:
And I want you to tell me, that's what I want is for you to tell me, you know, quick start, iCloud or iTunes or Finder, which, okay, fine.
Casey:
But I was looking for a little more specific guidance than that.
Casey:
And we'll talk probably right now about how we did our upgrades, but I did want to at least put that link in the show notes and thank you to the people who wrote in, including Jonathan.
Casey:
So thank you.
Thank you.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Once again, K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Collide for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
We bought and received some stuff.
Casey:
So who wants to start?
John:
Let me start with my setup process as a cautionary tale for others.
Casey:
Oh, no.
John:
I talked last week that I have such bad luck with this and I'm so bad at it.
John:
And then I re-listened to the episode and I heard myself saying a bunch of things.
John:
And I was like, you know what?
John:
I should have listened to my past self.
Casey:
Oh, no.
John:
I don't know why I didn't listen to my past self.
John:
I don't, someone needs to like have some kind of intervention for me when I get a new phone.
John:
I got my new phone and for some reason I decided based on like vague memories of dissatisfaction with the transfer process last time that I should try a technique that I hadn't done before.
John:
Right.
John:
But I should, you know, I don't remember what I did last year or the year before, but I know in the recent years I've been using it, doing iCloud or doing the direct transfer.
John:
Right.
John:
I'm like, you know what?
John:
I haven't done an iTunes backup and restore in a while.
John:
I should do that this year.
John:
Why did I think that?
John:
Even after on last week's show, I said, definitely don't do that.
John:
and i wasn't going to do it i did it so i i made an encrypted backup to the finder after fighting with this i should find the link to this document after fighting with my computer to get that to work because i plugged in my phone to my computer and you know opened the finder and it's like uh we've detected that your i forgot what the dialogue says like that your your phone needs updated version of software your mac it said it needs to do some kind of software update because i plugged in my phone this is what the finder is saying with a little dialogue i said okay go ahead and
John:
And it says downloading software.
John:
And it gives some hilarious estimates like 78 days remaining.
John:
And then it downloads in two seconds.
John:
And then it says installing software.
John:
And then it says software installation failed.
John:
Sorry.
John:
And I tried it like three times and it just did the same process, goes through the same thing, so software installation failed.
John:
I did some Googling, eventually found a page that's like, oh, you should, it's because you should try a different cable.
John:
Sometimes the cables are weird.
John:
Whatever, I just, I'll try anything.
John:
I used the cable that came in the box with my phone and I plugged it directly into my Mac Pro instead of going through a USB hub and doing all the USB, you know, kind of like a,
John:
just try anything all the normal usb debugging lo and behold plugging it directly into my mac pro with the cable it came with didn't pop up that dialogue and it did an encrypted backup oh my gosh whatever great and then i put in the new phone and you know how do you want to set up your phone it's going through the process i want to restore from a backup i want to restore from my encrypted backup it did the restore it went pretty quick um
John:
And then, you know, I looked at my phone and I was like, yep, there's all my apps in the normal places I expect to see them.
John:
And I had nothing.
John:
I had nothing on my phone.
John:
All my slacks are signed out.
John:
No Twitter accounts in my Twitter app.
John:
Nothing in my two-factor apps.
John:
Like, this phone had never seen me before.
John:
None of my preferences.
John:
None of my, like, other than the iCloud stuff, because iCloud stuff did sync.
John:
But, like, my third-party non-iCloud apps, just nothing.
John:
Like, none of my discords.
John:
None of anything.
John:
It was just everything was gone.
John:
And I was like, why did you do this?
John:
Why did you do iTunes backup?
John:
You just said in the last show how this is like a legacy code path and Apple's not working on it anymore and both iTunes and direct transfer are surely better.
John:
Why?
John:
Why did you do this?
John:
I'm like, well, I just waited the hour and a half for it to do it.
John:
So I just...
John:
manually go through there sign into all my slacks again i've got my other phone next to me at this point wouldn't it be faster to wipe the new one and just redo it the correct way i was in whatever whatever fugue state i get into and i get a new phone i've got i've got the other phone next to me right and so i'm like sign into all the slacks then also look at the order that the slacks are in the sidebar and manually reorder them i've done that a lot of times it's terrible
John:
Manually reorder the Slack store in the order that I want.
John:
Do the two-factor, at least the two-factor.
John:
My app has the export.
John:
Now do the export and the import, and then compare them.
John:
Make sure they're sane.
John:
Log into all your Twitter accounts.
John:
Reset all the preferences in Twitterific to be exactly the way they were.
John:
Go through a screen at a time, setting the preferences the same, looking at the other phone.
John:
This is terrible.
John:
Just go through it all.
John:
And then, of course, there's no help for this still because this is on Apple.
John:
And I'm sure both of you have the same experience.
John:
Go to TestFlight.
John:
Install your betas on top of the other apps.
John:
And it does a better job of putting them where they're supposed to be.
John:
Not your widgets.
John:
You got to put all your widgets back from your beta apps.
John:
And sometimes restore purchases doesn't work.
John:
And it's nothing the third-party app developers can do about it because TestFlight is buggy when it comes to store stuff.
John:
And some store kit to stuff isn't supported.
John:
Anyway...
John:
did all the things and it just took so long but i'm like this is like this is my punishment i was doing like this is my punishment being stupid and doing itunes encrypted backup even though i said on the show don't do that it's dumb and but then i got through this whole process and i thought i had it all licked and then i'm just doing the final sweep which is going through each screen and launching the apps and make sure i was oh i forgot adding all the cards to apple pay doing you know just
John:
All that, all the pay logging back into Venmo, like doing all the stupid things, logging back into all my bank apps and my finance things and setting up all.
John:
It's just just such a nightmare.
John:
Right.
John:
And then the last when I'm doing the final sweep and going through stuff and I'm launching stuff.
John:
I ranted about this in the podcast-a-thon if you wanted to see me on it, although it's not that interesting.
John:
You're hearing an abridged version of it here.
John:
The final thing that pushed me over the edge was I tapped on golfing on Mars, and I was on hole one.
John:
Oh, no!
John:
it's like no that is too far because there's nothing you can do like that app developer intentionally makes it no there's no cloud syncing if you lose your whole progress f you because that's what this game is about there's not even like a menu that's there's nothing like it that is part of this game and i was like and i just sat with that for like two hours just totally dejected and i was like
John:
No, this cannot stand.
John:
And so after spending a whole day just going through this whole process of like restoring my phone, I'm like, I have to wipe it.
John:
I can't.
Casey:
Oh, my gosh.
John:
I have to start over.
John:
Oh, my gosh.
John:
I erased my whole phone, started set up from new and did device to device transfer.
John:
Got my golf on Mars.
John:
Thousands of holes in golf on Mars were correctly restored.
John:
Still had to re-add all my cards to Apple Pay, but my slacks were signed in.
John:
The moral of the story is people do not use encrypted finder backups.
John:
Use either device-to-device transfer, my recommendation, or iCloud.
John:
and you'll be much happier and learn from my terrible mistakes oh and by the way you notice i didn't mention anything about the sim transfer worked perfectly you know it was like this yeah the screen went by so fast i barely noticed it was there it was just like oh yeah no we're transferring your number boop and it was done and then when i erased the phone this is another thing i had to try when i when i gave up and erased the phone it said oh so you're erasing content settings do you want to erase the e-sim too or do you want to leave that number on this phone and i said leave the number on this phone that worked too
John:
So the only glitch was after the second restore, I had to disable it and re-enable it once to get the text to come through or whatever.
John:
So eSIM, totally not an issue.
John:
And apparently I was distracted like a Jurassic Park clever girl and it tricked my stupid brain into doing an iTunes slash Finder encrypted backup restore, which is garbage, never do it.
John:
Anyway, my phone's set up now.
Casey:
So it's funny you say all that because I have always and forever been a devout iTunes slash finder backup person.
Casey:
That's what I've always done for years and years and years and years.
Casey:
I didn't believe any of this BS about how, oh, you can just do it phone to phone.
Casey:
It's worked so well.
Casey:
That is a bunch of baloney.
Casey:
But somebody I know said, no, I'm telling you, you have to do device to device.
Casey:
And so in my fugue state, I thought, no, there was a voice in my head that some people say sounds like Squidward that told me I need to do device to device.
Casey:
And that's what I did.
Casey:
And it worked out great.
Casey:
There was no problems.
Casey:
Now, the bad thing about device-to-device, which I had forgotten, or I guess never really known because I'd never done it, is that you lose, as far as I could tell, you lose both of your phones for anywhere between one and three hours.
Casey:
Like, they're both tied up.
Casey:
You can't do anything with them.
Casey:
You are SOL.
Casey:
And that's not great, but understandable.
Casey:
Because, you know, otherwise it would kind of be a moving target that it's trying to transfer.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
It worked really well for me.
Casey:
The eSIM transfer for me took, I want to say, somewhere on the two-minute side to two to five minutes.
Casey:
Erin, I'd never transferred her from a physical SIM to an eSIM because I kind of wanted to experience both.
Casey:
This was a deeply stressful moment for me because if I had taken her phone and started to do the transfer and then the eSIM transfer failed, then she would have been justifiably...
Casey:
Very perturbed.
Casey:
And thankfully for her, it also worked no sweat.
Casey:
Also took somewhere between two and five minutes.
Casey:
I noticed, like you guys had said, that TestFlight did not really automatically restore itself.
Casey:
But once I had TestFlight installed...
Casey:
If memory serves, I thought it automatically tried to put back everything that had previously been installed.
Casey:
So the first step was, you know, TestFlight wasn't even there.
Casey:
So I have all these blank spots on my home screens.
Casey:
Then TestFlight arrived.
Casey:
And then I think I opened TestFlight once.
Casey:
And I don't think I had to actually click install.
Casey:
I might have that incorrect, though.
Casey:
I might be wrong about that.
Casey:
But one way or another, once I did install all these apps, I forget which one of you just said it, but yes, then TestFlight and Springboard did a really good job of figuring out where these icons should be and based on where they were previously.
Casey:
That worked out real nicely.
Casey:
Although I realized that my carat weather widget was gone, which is what you were saying a moment ago, Marco, that the widgets all disappear, which is a bummer.
Casey:
But yeah, device-to-device transfer actually worked really well.
Casey:
And I had also somewhat...
Casey:
I don't know, superstitiously done the, you know, unpair your watch in order to cause it to create a backup before you do the transfer.
Casey:
And I just let it ride, man.
Casey:
I was like, screw it all in.
Casey:
Let's just see what device to device does.
Casey:
And sure enough, the device to device transfer, after it got to the new phone, at a very arbitrary seeming time, it woke up and was like, oh, you have an Apple Watch.
Casey:
Do you want to transfer that to me?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Yes, I do.
Casey:
And it worked pretty well.
Casey:
Like, I don't think there were any major issues there either.
Casey:
So I am really, really surprised at how well device-to-device transfer worked.
Casey:
I will say that you really do need to expect that, A, you're going to lose both of your phones.
Casey:
for a solid one to three hours.
Casey:
And B, I watched this happen three different times.
Casey:
I watched it with mine, with Aaron's, and then with some friends of ours.
Casey:
They actually came over and the wife and the family did her phone while they were at our house.
Casey:
And for her, it was the same story.
Casey:
It will read somewhere between three and infinity hours to complete.
Casey:
Like, oh, you'll be done in infinity.
Casey:
But if you have faith, for all three of us, whatever the estimate was, it ended up being more time than actually was needed, which was really refreshing.
Casey:
So I completely agree with John of last week and John of moments ago.
Casey:
Device to device is the way to do it.
Casey:
With all of that said, Marco, I would like to hear your story and then we can start talking about the devices.
Marco:
I actually was pretty close to yours, Casey.
Marco:
So I did device-to-device, not involving iCloud, just device-to-device, transfer everything, including all the passwords and everything.
Marco:
And it got pretty much everything.
Marco:
The only things that didn't work correctly were... And the eSIM transferred happened just fine.
Marco:
This was on AT&T.
Marco:
I don't know if this matters.
Marco:
I was doing it on Saturday instead of on Friday, because that's my island situation.
Marco:
It means I get everything one day late, so...
Marco:
So maybe things were less overloaded then.
Marco:
But everything was fine, basically, with two exceptions.
Marco:
I had to manually put in my email account again because for a while, Fastmail was offering configuration profiles to set up your email account.
Casey:
Yeah, I had a configuration profile, and that did not come with me.
Casey:
I forgot about that.
Casey:
That's a good point.
Marco:
And I think profiles aren't transferred intentionally, I think.
Marco:
I forgot about that.
Marco:
So I did it to reset up my email, and I'm like, you know what, forget it.
Marco:
I'm just going to do the old single app password method, which is what their website now offers, I think, only that.
Marco:
I think they stopped offering.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
They still do the configuration profile, but the way you do it is by going and generating a single site or single app password.
Casey:
And then if I recall correctly, it's at the bottom of the page.
Casey:
They're like, oh, you can just do a profile too.
Casey:
But you have to go through the steps of creating the password in order to get to that point, which I'm not sure.
Casey:
Maybe this is FastMail's one flaw.
Casey:
I don't know why that's the way they do it.
Casey:
When I set it up originally, when I first joined FastMail just a few months ago, that is not how I remember it happening.
Casey:
But as we've established many times on the show, my memory is garbage.
Casey:
So who knows?
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, well, anyway, I didn't do... So, anyway, I set it up just with, like, you know, single app password and regular, you know, custom IMAP setup and everything, and it was fine.
Marco:
When my phone did remind me at the arbitrary time afterwards, hey, you want to transfer your watch over?
Marco:
I was a little concerned because my phone manages two watches, mine and my son's through family setup.
Marco:
Oh, good thing.
Marco:
And family setup, it's one of those things, you know, like a lot of things that involve the watch, it's one of those things that seems...
Marco:
kind of half-baked and fragile, and I don't really want to mess with it more than I have to.
Marco:
But I thought, you know what?
Marco:
We'll do it for the show.
Marco:
Let's see what it actually does.
Marco:
And it transferred his correctly, but in the middle of transferring mine...
Marco:
iOS said, hey, we had this really important update for the iPhone 14 that fixes activation issues with messages and stuff.
Marco:
You really should install this right now.
Marco:
So I said, okay.
Marco:
Forgetting that the washer's in the middle of the transfer.
John:
Yeah, I saw that notification a lot, too, during both of my setups, and I was like, not today, Satan.
John:
Like, there's no way I'm touching that.
John:
Because I just knew, like, this is not the time to... I knew what the update was about.
John:
I had seen the bug reports, and I understood for some people, like, they couldn't get activated, and they definitely needed to do that, but...
John:
I know you want me to update it, but I need to get everything settled before I even think about touching that.
Marco:
Well, I touched it and it broke my watch setup and I had to, I ended up in the state that we've seen before and then we've heard other people report where the watch thinks nothing is wrong, but no phone thinks it's paired to the watch.
Marco:
Neither the old one nor the new one think it has the watch paired.
John:
I've been in that state many times with my wife's watch and I don't understand it and it is terrible.
Marco:
yeah and and as far as i can tell the only way to get out of the situation is to on the watch go to you know settings general reset erase the whole watch from it which feels totally wrong especially for someone like me who i don't actually own a watch the only time i ever interact with it is when i'm trying to get it set up for my wife and she's annoyed that it's taking so long so it's not exactly exactly so i went through that and i had to you know reset my whole watch up which is a big pain in the butt not as big of a pain in the butt as trying to get all your slacks back in order um but it is still a pain in the butt and uh
Marco:
So eventually I got that working and everything else went fine.
Marco:
So overall, it was only that weird watch hiccup.
Marco:
Everything else went perfectly.
Marco:
All of my stuff did transfer with all the passwords and logins and everything, including Slack, which for some reason never does.
Marco:
But it included it this time.
Marco:
So I was very pleased with the direct device to device transfer.
Marco:
It worked with the one exception of the weird watch hiccup, which I guess was partly my fault for accepting the software update.
Marco:
Other than that, it's great.
John:
Can I just post an image?
John:
I know we're going to talk about our experience with this phone, but just one thing, one thing that we don't have a bullet item for that I think is worth me mentioning here because I did not expect it.
John:
Take a look at this image I just put in the chat.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
It's a status bar, 1241.
Marco:
You have full Wi-Fi, full bars, and, you know, 80% battery.
John:
So this was like maybe my second or third day of using my new phone.
John:
And I thought something about my phone was broken because I there was just something I couldn't get.
John:
Again, it was just a mental block.
John:
This is 1241 as a time in the status bar.
John:
That's 1241 a.m.
John:
Look at my battery level.
John:
I woke up in the morning and unplugged my phone from my nightstand charger.
John:
And I use my phone all day like I normally do.
John:
Nothing weird about this particular day.
John:
And I went from waking up in the morning at like 7 a.m.
John:
to 1241 a.m.
John:
the next day.
John:
And I'm at like 80 percent charge.
Casey:
Oh, I thought you had put it on the charger for a while and it was doing that optimized charging thing.
John:
No, this is just me using my phone.
John:
And the reason I thought it was broken for the first few days that I was using my phone, every time I looked at my phone, the battery meter was full.
John:
I'm like, oh, isn't that great to have a fresh battery?
John:
You know, you got that 12 Pro, the battery's probably crappy.
John:
Now I got a nice fresh battery in this 14 Pro.
John:
And everyone's saying the 14 Pro battery life sucks.
John:
right yeah same yeah i thought maybe like i know that there was this big controversy over like putting the percentage in the thing and having not having a little like color fill the thing the color was always 100 full but then the number would say you know 62 but the the thing would like i don't have the number i'm like is my status bar broken why does my phone always show full charge and then on this day and why was that but 12 41 i don't know i was probably watching finishing watching a car rebuilding youtube video before going to bed ill-advisedly right i
John:
And I looked at my battery.
John:
I'm like, okay, this is ridiculous.
John:
How do I have 80% battery at 1241 a.m.
John:
after waking up at 7 and using my phone like I normally do?
John:
How is that even happening?
Marco:
Who knows the answer?
Marco:
What are you doing on your phone?
John:
Nothing, apparently.
Marco:
What are you not doing?
Marco:
You're probably not running Instagram.
Marco:
Definitely not running TikTok.
John:
I mean, I didn't, I wasn't using my phone any differently than I normally do in terms of which apps I use.
John:
Look at the percentage.
John:
It's like, you know, YouTube, Twitterific.
John:
Like, it's like what I do with my phone.
John:
Messages, whatever.
John:
What's the answer?
John:
What am I not remembering here?
Marco:
Do you have it on like a MagSafe charger somewhere throughout the day?
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
That's right.
John:
My MagSafe car charger.
John:
I do a lot of driving around in my car.
John:
That's not anything different than I normally do.
John:
Driving to and from school, going to the supermarket, like, you know, like just normal daily errands, right?
John:
The difference is now every time I got in the car and just smacked my phone into that magnet, it was charging.
John:
It would never go down.
John:
It would be 100% all day long because my day is just constantly broken up by driving around and doing the normal sort of like errands and stuff.
John:
And every time I was in the car, I was on the MagSafe and the trips were long enough to push it back to 100%.
John:
This totally surprised me.
John:
This has nothing to do with the phone, obviously.
John:
It has everything to do with, hey, if you have a car,
John:
and your phone has MagSafe, considering getting a MagSafe charger that plugs into the USB port in your car, it may totally change your perception of your phone's battery life if your day, like mine, involves driving around a lot.
Casey:
I did not even think about that.
Casey:
That's a good point.
Casey:
My preliminary experience, and I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but my preliminary experience is the battery... I don't feel like the battery is as good as my 13 Pro.
Casey:
Like, I feel... This is very unscientific.
Casey:
Very, very unscientific.
Casey:
But I feel like I am not doing as well.
Casey:
But I've only had the phone since Friday.
Casey:
We're recording on a Wednesday.
Casey:
I don't know how much of the, like, processing happens on battery.
Casey:
I don't know how bad the always-on display is.
Casey:
I also have the...
Casey:
haptic keyboard or i had the haptic keyboard on uh for most of the last few days maybe that's causing not problems but causing a drain i don't know but my experience problems well i i i don't i would not say that the battery has impressed me so far marco what is your experience been
Marco:
I'm like you.
Marco:
I'm still on the point where I'm assuming that there is a software bug or some kind of runaway process because my battery life has been pretty mediocre.
Marco:
And on the 13 Pro, it was pretty good most of the time.
Marco:
So I'm blaming this on iOS 16 slash new phone setup, background processes, spotlight indexing, whatever stuff is going on on a new installation.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
indexing your mail because they didn't didn't they redo how mail indexes stuff they did yeah so so it's my battery life is poor but it seems like it's that type of poor not this phone is mediocre kind of poor yeah um so you know i'm willing to give that a little while one thing while we're on the topic of the always on screen what do you think about it so far
Casey:
I, I don't have a strong opinion about it, to be honest with you.
Casey:
I, I think if I have an opinion, I slightly lean toward, I don't think I want to stick with it.
Casey:
I am sticking with it for now, but I, I don't think it affords me a whole lot because every time I look at my phone, generally speaking, my notifications, there are fewer on screen, which is by design with iOS 16, which aesthetically I think is an improvement and
Casey:
But beyond that, they're in the, I forget the term for it, but they're in the don't show details mode.
Casey:
And I think what I kind of expected, and I understand why it's not this way, but I kind of expected that let's say I have my phone on my desk and I have a, what is it, a 12 South Elevation dock or something like that.
Casey:
It's a very, very old dock, but it points the phone up at my face, right?
Casey:
You know what I'm saying?
Casey:
It's not just sitting flat on the desktop.
Casey:
It's pointed basically at me.
Casey:
And I think I had expected that with the always on display, if I look down at the phone, it would see I'm giving it attention.
Casey:
It would scan my face.
Casey:
And then it would show me the contents of all these notifications that are on my screen.
Casey:
And it doesn't do that.
Casey:
It doesn't just sit there looking to see if you're looking at it.
Casey:
It waits until you touch it.
Casey:
And I don't, I don't love that.
Casey:
Like, I understand why, because it'd be a huge battery drain, I'm sure to just sit there pinging away at the face ID sensor, but it feels kind of in common.
Casey:
It's not what I expect.
Casey:
It's not what I expect at all.
Casey:
And I'm going to stick with it for another week or two, but I think I might end up turning the always on off.
Casey:
What do you think?
John:
Here's what I did on the first day with always on.
John:
So, um, I had already set up iOS 16 lock screens on my old phone, right?
John:
So I played with them a little bit, but of course that changes the equation a little bit for always on, because now you also have a new way to see your lock screen, which is slightly dimmed.
John:
Uh, and you know, and selecting every widgets may change based on what you might want to see on the slightly dim thing or whatever.
John:
I played with that.
John:
I did, uh, you know, I made a couple of different, uh, setups that I thought would be good with always on.
Um,
John:
The first problem I encountered was that the lock screens I had made for iOS 16 and my 12 Pro pictures of my family, which I think maybe we talked about in the last show.
John:
I don't have any photos that fit a long skinny lock screen.
John:
So I had to use, you know, AI extensions of backgrounds to get the right arrangement.
John:
But anyway, it's pictures of my family.
John:
And the cool feature feature of iOS 16 is you can make it so the lock screen like has several pictures and rotates through them.
John:
So you don't have to pick just one.
John:
So I just put everything on my family.
John:
That was nice.
John:
Um, the problem with that is, and I said last week, like I keep thinking I'm getting a call, a telephone call, always on screen exacerbates that because when my phone sitting on a surface and it's always on and I glance at it and I see a picture of my wife, like, oh, my wife's calling.
John:
I must not have heard the phone vibrate.
John:
No, my wife's not calling.
John:
She's just the lock screen and it's always on, right?
John:
I expect my phone to be, you know, dark, you know, total black screen when it's sitting on the table next to me and only light up when a phone is incoming, a call is incoming, right?
Yeah.
John:
i did put a bunch of other stuff there to see if there was utility that i could extract from having a screen that was always on and i don't think i ever like maybe it's a habit i needed to get into like oh maybe i don't glance at it because i don't expect there to be anything in there and now that there is i'll glance at it maybe when third parties have better widgets on the lock screen it'll do but for now i'm not getting a lot of utility out of it this is day one with it too i'm like i just got to give it a little bit of time
John:
So when I went to bed on day one, you know, I put my phone on my nightstand as I always do.
John:
I plugged it in because I charge with the cable at night.
John:
And then I realized, wait a second, that screen's not going to go off.
John:
And yes, I could turn my phone over with the screen down.
John:
But sometimes you wake up in the night and you want to like, you know, look at something or like, I don't know.
John:
It's just...
John:
That was the last straw for me.
John:
I lasted less than 24 hours with the always on screen.
John:
I said, no, I can't.
John:
I can't have even just emitting the light into the room.
John:
And it's like if it's going to be always on, but I don't want the light and I put it facing down.
John:
Now you got light leaking out of the little edges.
John:
And it's like, well, what's the and if you're going to face it down, what's the point of it being always on anyway?
John:
And I said, I can't.
John:
I'm not ready for this.
John:
I can't do it.
John:
I don't.
John:
It's not, you know, again, I didn't give it a good chance because it was less than 24 hours, but the bedside stand, I cannot have my screen on during that time.
John:
If they had a special feature for always on that said always on except when you're sleeping, maybe I would have left it on.
Casey:
They do.
John:
But I turned it off and I haven't looked back.
John:
And I don't miss it, right?
John:
I had, you know, you know, I don't think I gave it a good chance, but I would much rather have, not that I really need it apparently, but I would much rather have the tiny amount of additional battery life that I may be getting from not having the always on screen
John:
than whatever utility i could extract from having that screen so i'm back to the old way and i like it better so they do have that mode where it automatically goes all the way off when you're sleeping and that is when you have a sleep focus i do not have a sleep focus or a sleep mode i intentionally don't have a sleep focus so i don't use focus modes i don't have a sleep thing i don't do sleep tracking and that's all intentional because i don't i i try that stuff and i don't i know a lot of people prefer to have their phone operate differently during different scenarios like this but i found that i don't prefer that so
Casey:
I might be misspeaking.
Casey:
I don't know if it's a sleep focus or a sleep mode, but maybe it's sleep mode.
Casey:
I think it predates the focus, but one way or another, when your phone is of the opinion that you are sleeping and it enters whatever sleep mode you're supposed to be in, then it will turn the screen all the way off.
John:
Yeah, I mean, because I plugged it in, put it on my nightstand, and just went to try to go to sleep, and then it was just like...
John:
shining at me maybe if i had given it 15 more minutes it would have turned off but i never gave it that chance i'm like that's it because i was already on the edge i was already on the edge of saying maybe i just want to turn this off but that was just the last straw and i'm like nope you would not you will not be lit up on my nightstand also the uh the screen will turn itself all the way off when the the phone is upside down yeah anyway like i said if you're going to do that anyway like then what's the point like why i have the always on screen is not providing any value and i don't want it to be facing down i want to be facing up
John:
I want to be able to tap it and make it come awake and maybe like scratch my little head over to his face ID to me.
John:
So I can see what that notification is from.
John:
These are all like habits built from, I guess, from the iPhone 10 on, right?
John:
The fact that the screen does wake up when you touch it, that face ID will scan you, you know, where it is on my nightstand.
John:
It's just those habits are still pretty well ingrained.
John:
So I'm going to just grab the little sliver of battery life until some other reason compels me to enable that feature.
Casey:
All right, Marco, I do want to go back to transfer stuff for a second, but before we do, why don't we finish our thoughts about the always-on display?
Marco:
So first of all, to try to solve the nightstand issue, I didn't know that the sleep... I haven't quite nailed down when the phone is in sleep mode for me, because the only two focus modes I have are Nothing and Do Not Disturb.
Marco:
And I have auto do not disturb during a set hour range at night when I'm sleeping.
Marco:
And so what I did for that, and maybe I should be doing this with a sleep focus instead, but the way I set that up before knowing this two seconds ago was I just changed my lock screen for do not disturb to have a black solid background.
Marco:
um and then that and that could that way i could still see you probably also do this from for shortcuts too like isn't there a shortcut for like when when you're in do not disturb mode run the shortcut and the shortcut could maybe the shortcut can even turn off the always on display like there's probably a lot of shortcuts yeah there is um yeah so maybe but yeah so i i just i just had like a separate screen uh that's just solid black and i reduced the number of widgets down to basically nothing except my alarm um
Marco:
and that's it and and it's fine but you know i never knew like i can't haven't figured out like when it when the screen is actually on like i woke up in the middle of the night last night and i wanted to see what time it was and the screen was off so i had to tap it to wake it up to see the time so i thought that was kind of anyway maybe maybe the phone has some concept of when i'm asleep that i didn't set up anyway i'll look into that but um going back to the was on screen itself
Marco:
I am not usually a leave the phone on the table kind of person.
Marco:
Like, usually, like, the phone's in my pocket, and I take it out when I'm using it, in which case it's on.
Marco:
One area that I have found it to be useful is when I'm showering, I prop the phone up on a shelf to play podcasts.
Marco:
and I'm able now to see what time it is.
Marco:
So if I have to be somewhere and I'm taking a quick shower before I go there, I now have a clock that I can see the whole time, not just within a minute or two of when I last tapped it.
Marco:
So that's nice.
John:
You must have the world's quietest shower.
John:
I cannot imagine even at max volume being able to hear and understand a podcast while in the shower with a phone that is not in the shower with me.
Marco:
No, it's in the shower.
Marco:
It's an outdoor shower.
Marco:
It's a whole thing.
John:
All right.
John:
My new recommendation is don't bring your phone in the shower with you.
John:
Get a Sonos Roam.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
The phone speaker, now that the phones are pretty waterproof, as long as you don't get water in the speaker, which makes it sound like crap and very muffled for a little while.
John:
You have it propped up and in a water-rich environment.
John:
Is this going to slip and fall into the floor of your shower and shatter?
Marco:
No, it's far enough away from the water spray that it doesn't.
Oh, my God.
John:
I'm telling you.
John:
I mean, a Sonos Roam is expensive, although I often have discounts, so you should talk to me about that.
John:
But anyway, it has better sound quality than an iPhone.
John:
You should at least appreciate that.
John:
It's not that much better.
Marco:
Anyway.
John:
The Sonos Roam is not better than the iPhone's built-in speaker.
Marco:
Wait, which is the little Toblerone bar?
Marco:
Is that the Roam?
John:
Yes, that's the Rome.
Marco:
No, it's not that much better, no.
John:
It is way better than an iPhone speaker.
Marco:
Modern iPhone speakers are actually, for podcasts, they're great.
Marco:
For music, they're okay.
Marco:
You know, in the shower context, it's fine.
Marco:
Like, I used to use this whole category of, like, cheap Bluetooth waterproof speakers that you, like, you know, someone had, like, a suction cup you could put on the wall to shower.
John:
Sonos Rome is not cheap, though.
Marco:
i know i know yeah nothing by phone is cheap but anyway like you know all of that um you know the whole category of like inexpensive waterproof bluetooth speakers that whole category now is made irrelevant by modern iphones being water resistant and having pretty decent speakers on them you're so weird with your audio things that you you insist on these super expensive headphones but your way you listen to podcasts is through the phone's built-in speakers
Marco:
Yeah, I'm team John on this one.
Marco:
Boggles my mind.
Marco:
A lot of people do it.
Marco:
Anyway, so back to the always on screen.
Marco:
That's how we got here.
Marco:
The biggest problem I have with the always on screen is that you have, as Keith was saying, it looks like it's interactive.
Marco:
And so when I try to interact with it, I can't yet.
Marco:
I have to tap it first to wake it up or lift it in such a way that makes it wake up.
Marco:
And so, so often I need to tap it and just wait.
Marco:
And I wait for it to animate in.
Marco:
And it's very frustrating.
Marco:
And I don't know what the solution to that is that's actually doable.
Marco:
You know, like I don't...
Marco:
I see it's a hard problem, and I'm not sure how to solve it.
John:
Don't you think that's a policy choice, though?
John:
I don't think there's a tech thing stopping them from having it be responsive immediately because the phone is running, the screen is on, it's obviously sensitive to your touches.
John:
They've just chosen to say the first... I mean, maybe that's like for...
John:
to avoid accidental input or similar type of stuff, because you think your phone is in basically the off-lock position.
John:
You don't want a clumsy grab to start an interaction, but I don't think there's any tech barrier to them implementing that UI policy, which is first touch counts, it goes through, it lets you interact with it.
Marco:
yeah i mean i'm sure there are reasons like that that that you know i'm sure they considered it maybe tested it figured out it wasn't worth it or maybe or maybe they're cranking down the frequency of the touch sensor and you know you know they crank down the screen refresh to be one hertz maybe the touch sensitivity is down to one hertz too to also save battery that could be a technical barrier or you know maybe or maybe you know that would be kind of unresponsive when you tap the screen to wake it up maybe it's like you know 10 hertz that's still way less than the usual rate of you know 60 or 120 so
John:
Isn't it like 240?
John:
No, it's on the iPad.
John:
That's the pencil refresh rate.
Marco:
That part is weird to me.
Marco:
I also found I left it on 16.0 for the first couple days and now I'm on the 16.1 beta.
Marco:
On 16.0
Marco:
it was very buggy.
Marco:
I had tons of always-on-screen bugs where it wouldn't wake up or it would wake up and all the notifications would be square and they would pop in as round.
Marco:
Tons of rendering problems.
Marco:
It was super buggy in 16.0, but 16.1 beta seems to be better in that respect, so I'm guessing that was just things coming in pretty hot for the release of the phones.
Marco:
Overall, I like lock screen widgets.
Marco:
I like having an always-on clock on the phone.
Marco:
everything else you know about the always on screen like it is kind of a mixed bag um i haven't noticed particular battery problems with it we'll see i do wish there was an option to have a a either a black background or at least let me set a different wallpaper for locked mode than for active mode because that would solve your wife waking up the phone with you know or your wife's looking like a phone call problem
John:
exactly and also the light emitting like that i mean that's basically how most android phones especially the initial batch of them many years ago did they're always on screen to save uh battery life is that they basically force you to have an all black screen with some dim letters that's what we thought apple was going to do we're kind of surprised right we talked about that yeah when they said no it's going to be just like literally your full image like it's it's weird that they don't even give you the option to differentiate that kind of the same way it's weird that they pair that you have to assign these pairs of like lock screen and uh
John:
A home screen, because I always want my home screen to be 100% black, but every time I make a new lock screen, I have to re-specify that over and over again, which is tedious.
Marco:
I don't just want the black background when I'm doing disturb or sleep mode.
Marco:
I want the black background always when it is locked.
Marco:
And then when I wake it up, I want it to be my nice weather face for my OS 16.
Marco:
That I want.
Marco:
And that would also help distinguish when it's not awake.
Marco:
So that can help tell me, like, I can't touch this in this mode.
Marco:
If touching this will do nothing.
John:
Yeah, because it doesn't look like a screen that's like, oh, my iPhone is on.
John:
I can drag with it.
John:
It looks like a lock screen.
John:
It looks like a sort of idle, you know, I'm just now a dumb clock with some widgets on it.
Marco:
yeah it's funny literally one second ago it turned 9 30 p.m and my screen just changed to my automatic do not disturb mode and so it just turned to all black right as we were talking about that and it looks so much better in the in the all black mode when it's sitting there on my desk you know locked it looks so much better
Marco:
So, yeah, I, you know, I mean, maybe I'll just give up and just not have a lock screen wallpaper anymore and just have it always be black and see if that works.
Marco:
But I do love that weather lock screen.
Marco:
You know, I was 16 when the phone is active in my hand.
Marco:
I love that.
Marco:
So maybe I don't know.
Marco:
I'll play with it.
Marco:
But that's the one thing.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It not being interactive and it.
Marco:
having to only be your wallpaper and not having like a separate, you know, solid color black mode or something like that.
Marco:
Those are my wishlist items.
Marco:
And I don't know how they can solve the interactive part, but I do wish they would solve the, you know, solid color preference.
Casey:
To go back very quickly to the transfer process, I forgot to mention earlier, when the transfer was happening, and this happened for both Aaron and myself, and even for a few hours after the transfer, I found that both of us were returning back to a terrible, terrible time from years ago.
Casey:
We were missing text messages.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
Yes, but it gets worse.
Casey:
I can't blame this on Android phones this time.
Casey:
We were missing iMessages.
Casey:
We were activated.
Casey:
We could send iMessages back and forth to each other, but we were in a couple of group chats together, and one of us would miss an hour or two or three worth of time in the group chats.
Casey:
This seems, knock on wood, to have righted itself.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I immediately did the 16.0.1 upgrade or whatever that update was you guys were talking about earlier, where they were like, oh, my gosh, you won't be able to iMessage unless you put this update in yesterday.
Casey:
We did that on both the phones.
Casey:
I don't know what happened, and I think it's resolved itself.
Casey:
But even on Saturday, this is almost a full 24 hours.
Casey:
Actually, I think it was a full 24 hours after we had gotten our phones out.
Casey:
Even then, I was missing a bunch of messages from a group chat, and I message only group chat.
Casey:
It hasn't happened since, I think, Saturday morning for me, but it has happened.
Casey:
That was really weird and very unusual, and I did not like it.
Casey:
Also, while I'm talking, one other thing I meant to bring up earlier, and then I think we can finally move on and talk about the Dynamic Island.
Casey:
in-store pickup when you live in a not humongously populated area.
Casey:
Oh my gosh, it was so great.
Casey:
I ended up getting, if you recall my tale of woe, where I ordered an extra phone by accident, but for shipping.
Casey:
Well, anyways, I had ordered what I believe to be our two true phones, you know, one per person.
Casey:
And I did that for an 845 in-store pickup.
Casey:
I showed up at like 830 thinking, oh, there's going to be a zoo and they're going to kick me out and say, wait around for 15 minutes.
Casey:
At the Apple store near me,
Casey:
They could not have cared less that I was there early, didn't even ask me what time it was for.
Casey:
In fact, I'm pretty sure I had overheard somebody say to a fellow employee, we don't care what time it is as long as it's for today.
Casey:
So I hypothetically could have gotten a 3 p.m.
Casey:
pickup appointment, and I don't think I would have been turned away at 8.30 in the morning.
Casey:
But anyway...
Casey:
I was in and out in the span of like 20 minutes and it was amazing.
Casey:
And I had my iPhones in my hand, but before nine o'clock in the morning.
Casey:
And when, again, if you recall where we live, we don't get UPS shipments until like five, six, seven o'clock at night.
Casey:
So I had an extra 12 hours month of my phone that I wouldn't have had otherwise.
Casey:
And for the first time possibly ever, maybe since like the five S whenever I'd done in the, the in-store pickup line last, uh,
Casey:
I was one of the first people to have my phone instead of all of my friends, even the many on the West Coast, getting their phones before me and making me very jealous.
Casey:
I really recommend if you live in a regular place, trying the in-store pickup.
Casey:
It works super well.
Casey:
Now, if you're trying to go to like Fifth Avenue or Covent Garden or whatever it is, I bet this experience would not be quite so pleasurable.
Casey:
But if you live in a normal-sized place, I really, really recommend it.
John:
I have one more setup thing as well.
John:
I totally forgot about this, probably blocked it out.
John:
After I had done the second setup, after I wiped and did device-device transfer, there were still a couple of cleanup settings that I needed to do and the test flights and stuff.
John:
And the second time around, not the first time around, the first time around I did this immediately, but the second time around...
John:
I had forgot until a little bit after I had started doing setup.
John:
Oh, yeah, I've got to rename this phone because for whatever reason, Apple has not yet cracked the algorithm of my phone naming scheme, which is John's iPhone number of iPhone.
John:
And so when I do when I do device to device transfer, my new phone is called John's iPhone 12 Pro parentheses two.
John:
Good job, Apple.
John:
Excellent.
John:
Use that machine learning.
John:
But, you know, so you go into settings, general, about and change it to John's iPhone 14 Pro.
John:
And I did that.
John:
I was like, OK, fine.
John:
But then as I was wandering around settings and looking at other things, I noticed, and also I was looking at the website or wherever, my iCloud backup and my device list and everything having to do with like the iCloud knowledge of this device says John's iPhone 12 Pro, 12 Pro parentheses two, everywhere.
John:
Says it on the website, says it on, if you look at iCloud, a backup.
John:
On my phone, says 14 Pro, right?
John:
When I pair my phone with my car, it says John's iPhone 14 Pro.
John:
But every place else, on Apple's server-side incarnation of this phone, it says John's iPhone 12 Pro parentheses, too.
John:
And again, I tried to sit with it.
John:
I'm like, ah, it'll probably fix itself in an hour or two.
John:
Eventually it didn't.
John:
And I'm like, this cannot stand.
John:
I can't, I can't have this.
John:
I can't go to like, you know, whatever the equivalent of support profile.apple.com and see my devices listed.
John:
Cause inevitably I'll get confused and say, oh, John's iPhone 12 pro.
John:
I should get rid of that.
John:
It's not mine anymore.
John:
I transferred it to my son.
John:
I should delete that device.
John:
And I would end up deleting like my actual phone.
John:
It has to say 14 pro and it wouldn't.
John:
So there I am Googling again, finding desperate people in Apple support threads having the exact same problem from three years ago.
John:
The only thing I could find, you know, a lot of the people have like, you know, suggestions for solutions and then the thread ends and you never hear like there's never any conclusion to the thread of like, well, did you try that?
John:
Did it work?
John:
The only thing I saw that someone said they did that worked.
John:
Can you guess what it is?
John:
Of course.
John:
Can you guess what it is?
John:
Restarting Discovery D. Restarting the phone.
John:
No, I wish it was that easy.
John:
Of course I did that already.
John:
No, signing out of iCloud.
Casey:
Oh, no.
John:
So guess what I did?
John:
On my newly set up second time around phone, I had to sign out of iCloud.
John:
That's no fun at all.
John:
And then sign back in.
John:
and we all know how painful that is oh yes and it was just it's just another like three and a half hours of just getting everything in going to my preferred playlist and making it download waiting for messages to sync that long period of time when you launch messages and everything is phone numbers and your contacts still aren't there and you're wondering if it's gonna work and then an hour later finally it springs into existence
John:
This is all because the phone, like, oh, I even did the thing of, like, maybe it's because it did an iCloud backup with the old name, and I just need to do a new iCloud backup with the new name.
John:
Now, I tried everything before I gave up and signed out of iCloud, but that's the only thing I did that worked.
John:
I tried everything else, restarting the phone, doing a new iCloud backup, like...
John:
changing the name again and just like just everything i could think of everything i could find nothing worked apple's server-side incarnation maybe if i had waited 48 hours or a week it would have eventually gotten a clue but i couldn't risk that because i would have just forgot about it i had to sign out of icloud and back in so i would suggest my second suggestion is one use device device transfer and two immediately go to settings general about and change the name of your phone to not be your old full name parentheses too
Casey:
I'm so sorry, John.
Casey:
All right, let's talk Dynamic Island.
Casey:
For me, I like it-ish now, but I think I'm going to really like it in the future.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I noticed that generally speaking, I don't think much of it.
Casey:
Um, when I'm watching full screen video, I don't think I like it because oftentimes I find it more obtrusive than the notch, uh, or the, the static peninsula, excuse me.
Casey:
But, um, there, the handful of occasions where I've been playing a podcast or listening to music or whatever, and you start to get that live activity stuff on the sides of, you know, the normal dynamic Island.
Casey:
That is super cool.
Casey:
When you start doing multiple things at the same time, when you've got a timer running and you're listening to Overcast, holy cow, having this multitasking switcher at the top of your screen is super-duper cool, and I am really loving that.
Casey:
And so hopefully this won't be abused by third-party developers, and I don't think there's going to be a lot of opportunity to abuse it, but my goodness, it is super-duper cool when you've got multiple things happening at once.
Casey:
The only complaint I have is the same complaint everyone else has, which is I wish they reversed touch and hold and tap.
Casey:
So if you touch and hold, that's when you get this like expanded widget thing.
Casey:
And when you tap, it just opens the app.
Casey:
I totally get why they did that and why that's the default.
Casey:
But I hope if nothing else, we could have a switch, which I know Apple's mostly allergic to, but have a switch to reverse that where if I tap, I get the little widgety thing.
Casey:
So I can just quickly interact with something.
Casey:
And then if I touch and hold, that's when I open up the entire app because it makes more sense to me, right?
Casey:
Like a tap is a shorter gesture.
Casey:
I want to spend less time with what I'm doing.
Casey:
So I just want to tap, you know, hit fast forward or rewind and overcast and then tap again elsewhere and go away.
Casey:
In contrast, what I have to do is I have to tap and hold, way to beat.
Casey:
And then I get my little, you know, widget area or whatever.
Casey:
And then I can tap away to go away.
John:
I think I prefer it this way because what I end up doing is bouncing back and forth.
John:
Like, for example, bouncing back and forth from like, you know, navigation to overcast or something.
John:
I don't you know, and even when I'm just using like using it as a multitasking, like bounce back and forth switcher.
John:
I even if that setting existed, I think I would leave it as the default.
Casey:
Interesting.
Casey:
Okay, fair enough.
Casey:
And Marco, I do want to hear what you have to say about that in a second.
Casey:
But all in all, I think the dynamic island today, where the only things that are really up there are like media apps that kind of get it for free.
Casey:
It's cool.
Casey:
It's nice, whatever.
Casey:
But I really, really think once you start getting like sports scores up there and lift arrivals and DoorDash arrivals, then I really think it's going to come into its own and it's going to be super duper cool.
Casey:
Marco, what are your thoughts?
Casey:
And how do you feel about the tap versus long press thing?
Marco:
So I see what everyone's saying about that, but I think Apple has it right in terms of the precedent they've already set.
Marco:
So if you look at the kind of things this replaces, we used to have, I think it's gone now with this change, but we used to have those little back buttons on the upper left of the status bar if you came to an app from another app.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marco:
It's not gone.
Marco:
It's still there.
Marco:
Oh, it is?
Marco:
Anyway, tapping that would go to that app.
Marco:
Meanwhile, if you have some kind of control center widget, say, usually a long press will expand it into a bigger blob, whereas a tap will do that thing or go to that thing.
Marco:
So I think the way they have it now fits with precedent of other behaviors on iOS where tap means open and long press means expand or go into in a different way.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
what it's mainly for i think is display first of all but i think the interaction i think it's mostly for quick switching between the apps and that's that's what i see it as and that's that's what it does that's what it's optimized for now you could make a case oh maybe it should you know open by default in the little you know expandy view before it jumps over to the app um but the way they do it now fits precedent and so far i haven't done a lot of multitasking yet but
Marco:
Like you, Casey, when it has happened that I've had something running up there, it really is delightful.
Marco:
As for my actual app, audio apps get this thing for free.
Marco:
We're in the middle of a whole bunch of family travel and events happening, and so I haven't had a chance to dive into the API yet.
Marco:
But I'm thinking it might not be worth audio apps making their own because if it would replace the existing one,
Marco:
I think anything we make would be worse because we don't have the ability to update it as quickly as Apple does.
Marco:
And so the cool thing to do with like little level meters that are actually real finally for the first time anywhere in iOS ever besides my app.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marco:
I can't I don't think the API allows me to update things that quickly and send that data that quickly.
Marco:
So I don't think I could do that if I made my own.
Marco:
And I might be able to do other custom things here and there that I might not be able to do with the Control Center API that's there now, but I think it would be minimal.
Marco:
So I'm probably not going to make my own custom thing there.
Marco:
And audio apps, I think, unless I'm wrong about what we can and can't do, I don't see audio apps doing a lot with that.
Marco:
But I see a lot of other apps doing a lot with that.
Marco:
And that is what I'm looking forward to.
Marco:
Frankly, even if it's not well adopted by third parties, which I think it will be, but even if it's not, and even until it is, even just having Apple's built-in apps having support for it is extremely useful.
Marco:
I find that to be very, very nice.
Marco:
And I don't I don't otherwise notice it that much in my day to day use.
Marco:
Like I see, you know, if I have a face ID unlock or something, you know, it balloons out of there.
Marco:
And that's that's fun.
Marco:
But otherwise, I really don't notice it, which I think is a good thing.
Casey:
Yeah, and when it does do any sort of dancing, like that whole dynamic nature is super cool and super well done.
Casey:
And I really do like it a lot.
Casey:
But I really think it's going to come into its own in the future when third parties really can embrace it.
Casey:
John, any thoughts?
John:
Yeah, so there's two things that Dynamic Island brings to the table.
John:
They're kind of combined when people talk about it, but I think it's useful to separate them.
John:
One is a lot of things you guys already talked about –
John:
There's more info and UI elements at the top of your screen that are visible all the time, right?
John:
And that is made possible by the fact that the
John:
the non-screen portion, like the face ID thing in the camera, is narrower than it has ever been.
John:
The notch was getting narrower and making more room for stuff in the ears, but this little lozenge, even if it wasn't lower down, it's narrower still.
John:
So there are more pixels available there, and one of the things Apple did was they used those pixels that are available there, not to re-expand the status bar like it used to be when it used to be full width, but instead to say, I have a better idea
John:
for things that we can put on the top of your phone that are always visible now that we have this room in the modern phone, like in the post iPhone 10 era, what can we put up there, right?
John:
And their choice was, you can put a little thing up there that you can use to switch back and forth to apps.
John:
You can put the little now playing thing.
John:
You can allow third parties to do it.
John:
everyone seems to love that because the idea of having more useful, like globally visible information is a crowd pleaser.
John:
Like there's a reason people like the fact that you can put little icons in your menu bar on the Mac.
John:
The menu bar is up there.
John:
It's space.
John:
It's going to be used anyway.
John:
People like to be able to stick stuff up there.
John:
It's,
John:
Now, they like to be able to take some of their choosing and rearrange it.
John:
The iPhone's not there yet.
John:
Maybe the iPad will get there someday if it ever has a notch or if it ever has a lozenge, although I doubt it will.
John:
But like the idea of allowing you to see more stuff and do more things without leaving the app that you're in.
John:
Thumbs up.
John:
Everybody loves it, right?
John:
And they say, well, it's limited now, but it'll get even better with third parties, as you said.
John:
There is a second aspect of the dynamic island is the way they've chosen to do that is to combine a sort of, you know...
John:
fashion accessory to hide the fact that they have a cutout on the screen by saying, okay, we're gonna have more info there, but we're gonna make it look like that info is in this black lozenge thing that, by the way, hides the middle part.
John:
You wonder why there's never anything displayed there?
John:
There's not screen there, but you don't need to know that.
John:
You won't even notice that.
John:
You'll just think, hey, they just put stuff at the edges, right?
John:
And there'll be the cute animations and the wiggling and the blob will split and the little ball will come off and all that adorable stuff, right?
John:
And that is nice and whimsical and fun.
John:
And these two things get put together.
John:
People love seeing extra info and people love the fun whimsy and animation or whatever stuff there.
John:
And I agree all those things are good.
John:
Where I have a problem with it is that the other things that they do with this that don't relate to showing more information at the top of your phone.
John:
like lean super heavily into the idea of the hiding of the stuff there.
John:
So for example, when you do face ID now, a thing that used to do, they used to just do an overlay on your screen and you'd see like whatever the little happy face thing is and it would do a face ID, right?
John:
For this phone, they decided we're going to incorporate that into the dynamic island.
John:
So now when you do face ID, the lozenges that's in the top expands downward, kind of like the dynamic peninsula might do.
John:
It spans downward to be the face ID thing and then goes back up.
John:
The aesthetic result of that is that there is a black hole at the top of your phone that periodically expands into a very large gaping black hole.
John:
And it has to be 100% black.
John:
because the whole point is it's hiding, you know, the sensor arrays that are up there, right?
John:
There is very little historically 100% black on your phone.
John:
In fact, if you're doing driving directions, when Apple Maps puts like the quote unquote black overlay out there that says two miles, right turn, exit 54, right?
John:
That's not black.
John:
It's almost black, but not quite black.
John:
And the reason you know that is because you can see the actual black lozenge of the dynamic island punched out in the middle of the almost black directions.
John:
So when that big thing comes down for face ID, it is an unprecedented intrusion of blackness of a gaping completely, you know, zero, zero, zero black hole on our phone.
John:
I don't find it particularly nice to see that black hole opening up on the top of my phone.
John:
It feels like an invasion of a black goo.
John:
I find it aesthetically less pleasing and the animation less pleasant and less pretty than the previous Face ID animation.
John:
Repeat this for every other...
John:
thing that they do that used to be done without incorporating the dynamic ion that now they decide to say oh that's not a thing that appears on your screen it actually comes out of or is a result of the growth of the dynamic ion and it results in a 100 black ui element appearing in various sizes and shapes near the top of my phone that is unrelated to
John:
to the cool stuff about the dynamic island, which is, hey, now I can see more stuff.
John:
Now I can get more status information.
John:
Like, all that stuff is good.
John:
What I disagree with is one of the things that people think is so clever, the aesthetic design decision to say, now a bunch of UI elements on the phone that previously were not 100% black are going to be 100% black, and I don't think it fits.
John:
Is it the end of the world?
John:
No, we'll get used to it.
John:
It will be fine.
John:
But I was surprised at how much that bothered me from sort of a, you know, just a beauty perspective, a fashion perspective, a feeling perspective, because it's really without any historical precedent.
John:
And I think for good reason that Apple has avoided ever doing anything 100% black because there's not part of their design language of iOS or the iPhone.
John:
But now suddenly it is.
John:
I think it works in small doses and it works as the status bar to hide the elements up there.
John:
But I mean, think of it this way.
John:
If this was 100% screened phone, I think Apple will and should continue to have all that info at the top of your phone, but they would never choose to make it 100% black.
John:
The only reason they make that choice is to hide the sensor array.
John:
And if you remove the sensor array, they can make different choices.
John:
And I think they should make different choices.
John:
to change what we would know, you know, the status bar area to be more in keeping with the rest of the design of the OS.
John:
And until they can get to that point, I would prefer that they not put things into, make things part of the dynamic island that have no reason to be because they don't involve like extra status information at the top of your phone.
John:
Like they, you know, even just in terms of like face ID, I would prefer to see it more centered on my phone, more centered on the top half of my phone.
John:
rather than coming from the very very tippy top like it does now because it has to because it has to expand to the dynamic island and this you know not a complaint i think the dynamic island's great i like it better than the notch the extra information is useful it's all good it's all it's this is a net improvement it's just this one little part of it that doesn't appeal to me personally that i feel like i would prefer if they make a different choice when they can in the future
Casey:
Yeah, see, I don't have any of those problems.
Casey:
I'm not saying you're wrong, but this has never bothered me.
Casey:
And I just looked at it again.
Casey:
It still doesn't bother me, even with my eyes open.
Casey:
I'm, again, not trying to say you're wrong, but it just does not bother me at all.
John:
I mean, it's just like an aesthetic choice.
John:
Like, it doesn't look as nice to me.
John:
And the minorest of most monochromes are I would never trade it back for the notch purely because of the extra info and UI that goes on up there.
John:
Like, it is 100% a net win.
John:
It's just I was surprised at how much it bothered me
John:
for this black hole to be opening and closing on my iPhone.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Cameras, I haven't had too much time to take any pictures with the, or I should say I haven't had the occasion to take many pictures with the cameras.
Casey:
They seem good so far.
Casey:
I don't really have too much more to say about that.
Casey:
I very, very briefly played with today's Halide update, I think it was today, where they added a toggle, a kind of fast toggle.
Casey:
to go between 48 megapixel and, you know, standard 12 megapixel binned.
Casey:
And I've played with that the tiniest little bit.
Casey:
I need to spend more time with it.
Casey:
The size of the Mesa is, it's big.
Casey:
I don't find it too offensive coming from the 13 Pro, but I got to imagine, John, you are probably disgusted coming from the 12 Pro.
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So, you know, getting back to sort of my case thing, like one of this has nothing to do with the particular case, but it's the thing that I notice when I put my phone on the table now, it's on an angle.
John:
I mean, with the 12 Pro, my phone was flat.
John:
Right.
John:
And, you know, you're like, oh, it's not going to lay flat.
John:
But I guess I didn't really think through it.
John:
Like, it's not just like, oh, it's like crooked or whatever.
John:
It is.
John:
It's tilted.
John:
It's literally tilted all the time.
John:
And it looks odd to me.
John:
It looks like my phone is about to stand up.
John:
It's like, oh, I'm coming off the table.
John:
No, it's just resting on the camera housing there.
John:
I'm sure I'll get used to it.
John:
It's fine.
John:
My use of the camera, I'm enjoying having both 2X and 3X.
John:
I was afraid that I was going to be like, oh, I'll never use the 2X or it'll be awkward to get to it.
John:
I've already used the 2X.
John:
And I don't, in practice, I don't know, especially it's sunny out taking pictures outside.
John:
I don't notice the difference, you know, in terms of the crop and everything.
John:
I took a few 48 megapixel RAWs.
John:
I found out that the camera continues to not do well when it's facing anywhere remotely near the sun when the snow is at a low angle because it just totally washes out.
John:
You know, that's just...
John:
part of phone cameras but yeah it's been working fine for me i don't have any complaints about it other than obviously it's it's giant size this graph by ryan jones that he tweeted that shows the historical size uh historical thickness of the phone and then overlaid on top of that the thickness of the mesa and the thickness of the turrets that stick out of the mesa
John:
So three different colors.
John:
The phone is blue, the Mesa is red, and the turrets on top of the Mesa are like pinkish.
John:
And you can look at the progress and it's, you know, it's what we all know.
John:
The phone got real thin real fast and then that camera Mesa just grew and grew and grew and then the turrets grew and grew and grew.
John:
And at this point, the things that are sticking out of the back of the phone are more than half the thickness of the phone body.
John:
I wouldn't be surprised if current trends continue that eventually the thing that sticks out of the back of the phone
John:
is as thick as the phone itself if we don't get to periscope cameras soon that's going to happen because they just want to keep making these cameras better and the sensors bigger and optically uh the only way out of that is periscope or just keep making the things taller um i'm reserving judgment of how much this is going to really affect my life until i get my various leather cases and see how i deal with them but already slipping this in and out of my pockets and everything
John:
it's fine i mean you get used to it it's fine like and you know and i did mention when i had my 12 pro that when i use my wife's my finger would always hit the lip on the what do you call it on a little thingy like the i read the case has like a little wall around the camera mason and i may say my fingers hit it it's true my fingers do hit it and now having used it for a few days i've actually started to use that as a way to to keep the slippery case from slipping out of my hand because now i can brace my finger against the bottom of the camera thing
John:
And it keeps it from sliding.
John:
Again, we'll see how that happens with my, you know, the ones that look more like volcanoes in my leather cases.
John:
So I'll update that on things go.
John:
But, you know, I wouldn't trade it for the 12 Pro camera because I was already feeling camera inferiority.
John:
I would constantly borrow my wife's phone to take a picture if we're out for a walk together.
John:
And now I don't have to do that anymore.
John:
So again, net win.
Marco:
The only thing that it does definitely cause problems with that might be unexpected is that the ongoing problem in the first world where your phone makes a recognizable imprint in your jeans pocket.
Marco:
Now, there is also a recognizable sub-imprint of the camera mesa.
Marco:
All summer, I was wearing these soft corduroy shorts.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And like they this thing just like the 13 Pro just like tore through like it has this massive imprint of its camera mesa like in the shorts pocket area.
Marco:
And this 14 Pro is going to be even more so in that way.
John:
well you can always go against all good sense and uh people with no apple care and not face the screen towards your leg no that's crazy i know but like hey it's it's out there as an option then what you'd get is a camera mason imprint on your thigh uh one other thing before i forget um as i'm looking at the camera mason um i got the white uh well silver whatever it's called and it's finally a decent white like and casey maybe this is your area of expertise
Marco:
it's really like so you know previous uh the last few white phones or you know close to white phones have been kind of this like off-white you know john would affectionately call them dishwater phones um starlight yeah right this starlight dishwater this is actually like you know it's it's a whitish silver like you know it's in the same way like
Marco:
Many watch faces, not Apple Watch, many analog watch faces that you think are white are really silver.
Marco:
And by the way, if you get an actual white watch, it's really striking in person.
Marco:
I actually love real white watches.
Marco:
They're pretty rare.
Marco:
Um, but, uh, you know, this is definitely one of those, like it's white in the sense that it's silver basically, but it's like a very, it's like a whitish coating of silver.
Marco:
Um, but it looks, it looks pretty nice.
Marco:
And that's one of the reasons why I think I'm going to stick with clear cases again for this generation.
Marco:
Uh, in addition to just plastic being a really good material for me, practically speaking, um, in my, in my, you know, waterborne environment.
John:
I think Apple could combine that if it ever wanted to.
John:
Do you remember the white 5C?
John:
I thought that was amazing.
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, it did.
Marco:
The white 5C, I think, was the best-looking 5C.
Marco:
It just happened to be white.
John:
There you have the protection, rigidity, and lightness of plastic and pure white color, and you don't need a case.
Marco:
Yeah, and my case setup here with the Apple Clear case and the new white phone is maybe, I wouldn't say necessarily reminiscent of that in the sense that it doesn't look like a Stormtrooper or anything like that, but it has a lot of the same nice qualities of that, so I really like it.
John:
You get the downside of being a display area for all of the dust and crumbs that will eventually find their way in there.
Marco:
Yeah, they will.
Marco:
I mean, there's already some on the sidebands, and I just... The only other thing is that when you have the white phone, the blackness of those three giant camera lenses really stands out.
Marco:
And so you kind of have to embrace, like, this is not going to look like a white object.
Marco:
This is going to look like a light silver object with some very high contrast black holes in it.
Marco:
But...
Casey:
but otherwise you know so it that it has that you know kind of downside uh but overall i still like the look a lot and i still prefer it to the other colors and i still wish they would have more fun colors yeah i would agree with the fun colors thing uh the paste warning apparently is a bug i definitely have seen this it's definitely been frustrating but um somebody wrote to federighi and he replied which of course got broadcast to the entire world that it is indeed a bug it will be fixed at some point is that still going on in 16.1 marco
Casey:
I don't think so.
John:
I saw it so much.
John:
I thought it had to be a bug.
John:
I think I was like copying and pasting within the same app and I was getting it every time.
John:
This can't be intended behavior.
John:
And sure enough, it's a bug.
John:
Please fix this soon because I'm sick of that dialogue.
Casey:
Let's talk about the Apple Watch.
Casey:
I have received my Series 8 Apple Watch.
Casey:
I got the small one, the 41 millimeter.
Casey:
I got it with a way too large, which is entirely my own fault, solo loop, which I will need to figure out what it's like to exchange that.
Casey:
But hopefully, because I remember originally you had to return the whole damn watch, which was not fun.
Casey:
But anyways, that's on me.
Casey:
That's entirely on me.
Casey:
But I got this new Apple Watch.
Casey:
I'm coming from a Series 6, which I believe is 40 millimeters, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
I forget exactly what it was now.
Casey:
This thing doesn't sit any different on my wrist as compared to the Series 6, but immediately my first reaction was, holy crap, the screen is huge.
Casey:
Because it goes way further to the edges.
Casey:
And I feel like you can fit so much more stuff on here.
Casey:
That's probably not actually true.
Casey:
I bet the difference is not as big as I think it is.
Casey:
No, no, it's a big difference.
Marco:
The new 41 from the Series 7 and Series 8 is much closer to the old big watches than you think.
Marco:
The new big watches, of course, are even bigger.
Marco:
But yeah, you end up with quite a lot of screen space and it makes a big difference.
Marco:
And actually, it's a big enough difference that the Series 7 and 8 41mm ones also have the little tiny on-screen keyboard that you can occasionally need to type in your Apple ID password on when that whole thing bugs out.
Casey:
Fair.
Casey:
So yeah, the screen is bigger.
Casey:
It doesn't feel much faster or different or anything like that in terms of hardware.
Casey:
But I will say, I don't think the haptic engine or the haptic feedback is as strong as my old one was.
Casey:
The same materials, they're both aluminum.
Casey:
The other one's two years old now.
Casey:
I genuinely feel like this one is weaker, particularly when using the crown.
Casey:
I don't know if that's like a hardware difference, a software difference, a little column A, a little column B. But that is a little bit frustrating.
Casey:
But other than that, so far so good.
Casey:
I really like it.
Casey:
We ordered both of ours, both Aaron and myself, at the same time, I don't know, maybe 15 minutes after the keynote ended.
Casey:
Mine is here.
Casey:
Aaron got a pink, I forget what the actual color is, but pink solo loop instead of a blue one like I got.
Casey:
And hers hasn't even shipped yet.
Casey:
And I don't really get why.
Casey:
Like, it's fine.
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
It's not a big deal.
Casey:
But that's very, very curious to me because they're the exact same hardware just with a different band around it.
Casey:
I guess there's something about that band that made it ship slower.
Casey:
But that strikes me as a little funny.
Casey:
But so far, so good.
Casey:
It's a nice watch.
Casey:
I don't think it's a critical update for anyone that has a Series 7, which I think both of, maybe it was just Marco, but one or both of you guys said last time.
Casey:
And it wasn't even a critical update from the 6, but for battery life alone, it's nice to have a nice fresh battery again.
Casey:
But yeah, so far, so good.
Casey:
That's basically all I have to say about that.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Linode, Trade Coffee, and Collide.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at atp.fm slash join, where you will get not only the bootleg unedited feed if you want that, but also an ad-free feed and these new ATP Movie Club three episodes that we're doing.
Marco:
So check that out, atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thanks, everybody.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
John:
Now that the show is over, it's time to give to St.
John:
Jude's.
John:
They're funding research, curing diseases.
Marco:
Every year you get a new iPhone.
Casey:
Now think about the good you'll do when you're funding research.
Casey:
Childhood diseases.
Casey:
Our friends at Relay organize this annually.
Casey:
It's time to do your part.
Casey:
And give directly to S-T-J-U-D-E-C-H-I-L-D-R-E-N-S-R-E-S-E-A-R-H-C-H-O-S-P-I-T-A-L Be generous They fund the research They're curing diseases Fund the research The link is in the show notes now
Casey:
Marco, you want to tell me why your car has a watch?
Marco:
Yeah, so I briefly alluded to this earlier.
Marco:
So, yeah, so, you know, I bought the refurb Apple Watch Series 6 for my kid, and I discussed on last week's show.
Marco:
That was not the only watch I ordered that week.
Marco:
As you know, I have a weird driving situation with this whole beach, sand driving thing.
Marco:
And because you are driving on a beach that varies in width throughout the season and throughout different times of the day, it is useful to know the tide level and when you will be at low tide, when you will be at high tide.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
I have a number of different apps on my phone that can track tides.
Marco:
None of them do a great job of it in various ways.
Marco:
And I'm actually probably going to write my own little custom thing just to track my title stations just to make it a little bit easier.
Marco:
I can do it my way that I actually need.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Until I get that done, I'm like, all right, well, I'm now starting to drive on the sand.
Marco:
I've now done two sand drives in the Defender, and first of all, oh my god, it's good at it.
Marco:
It is so good at it.
Marco:
It's way better than the FJ, and the FJ was really good at it.
Marco:
I can't believe how easy it is to drive on the sand in this thing.
Marco:
I have to do nothing.
Marco:
All I do is tell it to go to sand mode, and it lifts itself up even higher to its maximum suspension height with the air suspension, and it is so far off the ground, it's hilarious, and it just flies over the sand.
Marco:
I can jump in and out of the tracks, like, oh, that track over there looks better.
Marco:
Let me just turn out of these deep ruts I'm in and just go right out of them, go right into the other ones, like...
Marco:
I can't believe how good it is, how easy it makes everything.
Marco:
It's fantastic so far.
Marco:
Anyway, so I do have this need.
Marco:
You've got to know when the tides are because at certain times of year, the beach gets more narrow with different storm and wave patterns.
Marco:
And there's you can go two different ways.
Marco:
You can go the kind of interior roadway, which has, you know, some loose sand sections, but is mostly going through like all little tiny towns.
Marco:
And so it's it's slower, but it doesn't involve the actual shoreline.
Marco:
Or you can go on the beach itself, but then you are at the whims of the waves and you don't want to go anywhere near them, of course.
Marco:
So you want to stay on the drive area, but you got to know anyway.
Marco:
So if you were in storm season, which is now, and it was high tide, you might decide to take the interior route and not go on the beach.
Marco:
So it's very useful for me to know when I'm driving...
Marco:
Is it high tide or low tide right now?
Marco:
And in the near future, when will that be?
Marco:
So I said, let me start looking at lock screen widgets, different widget apps on my phone, watch complications to try to figure out how can I most easily have the tide displayed to me in a way that is relevant and useful and reliable and accurate.
Marco:
and I just have been hitting walls with the app selection.
Marco:
They're bad.
Marco:
Every Tide app is bad.
Marco:
Even otherwise good apps that have Tide features are not great for what I'm going for.
Marco:
Some of them are reliable, and they have the info I need, but I don't like the way it's presented.
Marco:
Some of them are designed by somebody who's never used a Tide need before, and so it'll do things like...
Marco:
Not allow a second location to be set for which tidal station you're pulling from.
Marco:
It'll just pull from the nearest tidal station.
Marco:
Well, if you live near a few bodies of water, the nearest tidal station might be like in the wrong one.
Marco:
And so, like, I don't need to know the tide in the bay.
Marco:
I need to know the tide in the ocean.
John:
and before you get into how why you think a watch is solving this problem have you considered what they used to use back in the olden days before we had smartphones just get a tide table on a piece of paper and stick it in your car that i have that tides are knowable they're not random i have that they give you that with driving permit but but the thing is the the problem with the tide table is that you have to get it out and look at it and not read it wrong just stick it to your dashboard it's kind of it's as
Marco:
huge sheet of paper all right all right i mean i understand the technology has some advantages but as you rattled off all the ways that people are screwing this up it's like a tide table solves this problem but anyway continue so i had this crazy idea because uh the defender and by the way i i love i'm really growing to love many details of it the interior is
Marco:
It was really weird at first, but I'm starting to learn like, oh, this is designed in the same way that we've praised Apple for designing the new MacBook Pro and the Apple Watch Ultra in ways that maybe don't look the prettiest as they could be, but are highly functional and clearly designed with user feedback taken into consideration and designed to be function first.
Marco:
That's how the Defender is.
Marco:
I keep discovering little details as I use it more
Marco:
As I use it for things like off-roading, you know, that I'm seeing like, oh, this is why this is this way.
Marco:
Oh, that's easy.
Marco:
And that's convenient.
Marco:
Like, I just learned today that it has those cool windshield washer jets that are in the wipers.
Marco:
So it doesn't spray the whole windshield from these little dots on the hood first and then wipe across.
Marco:
It sprays from the, like, attachment point of the blade to the arm.
Marco:
And so it basically sprays right in front of the wiper as it's going so it doesn't splatter all over the place.
John:
It wants to make one more thing that's easy to break.
Casey:
Well, that's all.
Casey:
You know, you are such a pessimist.
John:
You're the one who's going to buy this British car and it's going to break all the time.
John:
I'm like, oh, overcomplicated wiper blades.
John:
I'm sure those won't break at any point.
Casey:
Probably after Mark gives away the car.
Casey:
No, that'll be fine because the Volvo has the same overcomplicated wiper blades and it's been no problem.
Casey:
The air suspension that he mentioned earlier, that's what's going to fail and fail spectacularly any minute now.
John:
Cool.
John:
Any minute.
John:
Come on.
John:
I mean, it's a brand new car.
John:
It'll be fine.
John:
It's not brand new.
John:
It's almost two years old.
John:
Anyway.
John:
Well, so I give you a good five years where nothing will break in that car and then it will be downhill.
Marco:
Yeah, that's that's when I'll get rid of it.
Marco:
Anyway, so so I'm so far I'm loving this thing.
Marco:
Anyway, so going back to I wanted a way to display the tides reliably and I was having no luck doing that on my lock screen on my phone.
Marco:
And, you know, I thought, you know what?
Marco:
Wouldn't it be great if I had like a tide clock in the car?
Marco:
They make things called tide clocks.
Marco:
The way you calculate tides is there's a whole bunch of overlapping factors, but you can basically pre-compute them for a while into the future with fairly low error rates.
Marco:
That's why you can get a tide table printed out for the whole year in advance.
Marco:
this information there's apis like on noah they're all free like you can just go to noah's site they even tell you like you can view a page with a tide station data and it'll tell you like what api call you can make to get this exact same data that we're showing on this page the way you've set it up like it's very friendly to all that stuff so the data is out there and you can pre-computer it ahead of time so this is again why like you know a widget or something makes perfect sense but
Marco:
I thought, you know, I learned a little while ago about a G-Shock model.
Marco:
I saw it on a Japanese import page.
Marco:
And most G-Shocks don't have Tide information, but they make one that does.
Marco:
And all the reviews were like, well, I don't really need the Tide information, but I guess the rest of the watch is cool.
Marco:
And I'm like, wait a minute.
Marco:
I need only the Tide information.
Oh, my gosh.
Marco:
And Amazon had it on sale for like $110.
Marco:
And the Defenders dashboard has this section above the glove box where it's basically like a bar that's about the size of a wrist with like handles behind it.
Marco:
So the passenger can grab onto that if you're like, you know, sideways on a trail somewhere.
Marco:
And so here's a picture.
Marco:
So I got this thing and I attached it to this little section above the glove box in the dash.
Marco:
It has this like highly visible MIP LCD thing.
Marco:
And it is perfect.
Marco:
I now have a tide clock, basically.
Marco:
On my dashboard, so I can always just glance and see, where's the Tide right now?
Marco:
And it doesn't require anything from me.
Marco:
I had to pair it with my phone over Bluetooth.
Marco:
Watches do Bluetooth now.
Marco:
Just to set which Tide station I was using, because it's this obscure one that no one else uses.
Marco:
So I had to set that with the Bluetooth pairing.
Marco:
But then once it's set, it's done.
Marco:
And I have to replace the battery every two years.
Marco:
And that's it.
Marco:
And it's just, it's this great, like, cool little appliance that happens to fit perfectly on my dashboard.
Marco:
And now I have a tide clock in my car.
John:
What about highly visible?
John:
Do you need your reading glasses to see this thing?
John:
That's some small numbers there.
Marco:
I mean, it's small.
Marco:
I mean, first of all, for a watch, I tried it on first.
Marco:
Because I've never owned a G-Shock before this.
Marco:
My God, it's massive.
Marco:
Like, it's...
John:
And it's not in front of you.
John:
It's in front of the passenger kind of.
John:
I mean, it's near the center console, I guess.
Marco:
Yeah, it's near the middle.
Marco:
But yeah, there was no like loop through handle section like that near the driver.
Marco:
But I put it over there and it's fine because, you know, all I need to know is, is it high tide or low tide?
Marco:
Or, you know, is it going in or coming out?
Marco:
And I can just quickly glance and see that even from the driver's seat very, very easily.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
It's a little hard to photograph these MIP LCD screens, but they are extremely visible.
Marco:
You know how the Playdate looks really good from one angle or one light angle hitting it?
John:
No, I don't know that.
John:
I don't try to rub it in.
John:
I just got an email.
John:
I just got an email.
John:
Actually, I do.
John:
I've used it in real life before.
John:
But anyway, mine is actually shipping soon, but I don't have it yet.
Marco:
Anyway, so this thing, it is like that from lots of angles with lots of light hitting it so far.
Marco:
I only had it on today for the whole drive back today.
Marco:
So I've only had one day of experience with it.
Marco:
But that one day, that covered bright sun all the way into sunset.
Marco:
And it was great.
Marco:
So I'm very impressed with this weird LCD technology.
Marco:
If for some reason I would ever go back to wearing this kind of watch, I would want one with this kind of screen.
Marco:
It's that good of a screen.
Marco:
This model is comically large on me, and I really can't wear it anymore.
Marco:
But otherwise, for the reason I got it, it's perfect.
Marco:
It's a wonderful, fairly low-tech solution to this problem.
Marco:
And it does it extremely well.
Marco:
And it happens to fit my dashboard.
Marco:
I'm delighted by how stupidly awesome this is.