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i've had my airpods pro 2 now for i mean how many weeks have they been shipping to people like three or four weeks yeah something like that i learned yesterday how to do the volume gesture have you done it don't you just swipe up and down what do you mean learned the whole time you did you forget that the feature existed no i so okay here's what so i you know i get them and i you know i'm trying them out and
i couldn't get it i couldn't get the volume gesture to work and like one time i got it to work once and i just couldn't repeat it i'm like are they broken am i broken like what what's going on here um but i you know i had a lot of stuff going on and so i'm like you know what at some point i'll be in an apple store and i'll like i'll bring them and i'll deal with it you know but
I don't know why you're having trouble with this.
I'm sure there's clear markings on the outside of the AirPods showing you exactly where to move your finger, right?
Or are they just white?
It's probably just like dark white markings on the white case.
Yeah, no, there's actually two tiny arrows and some words telling you start swiping here and swiping there, but they're a very, very, very light gray, and they're, you know, .025 point text.
Yeah, so anyway...
So I've been using them, you know, just fine.
And I like them overall.
I think there's a little, there's a couple of bugs with adaptive transparency.
But overall, I like them a lot.
The noise cancellation is amazingly better.
Like, and it was already pretty good before, but it's really good now.
So anyway, I've been enjoying those, but I just couldn't get the stupid volume gesture to work.
So I just thought like, maybe they're defective or maybe I'm, you know, I don't know what.
And then the other day, for some reason, I decided to do it a little bit differently.
I don't even know why I tried this.
And then it started working.
I'm like, oh, my God.
All this time.
So I've been doing it now for like two days.
And it's perfect and flawless.
And I was just doing it wrong.
So what I was doing was sliding both my thumb and first finger up and down the stick.
Almost to the point where you'd almost pull them out.
and i and which and which at first i'm like this doesn't this isn't a very useful gesture why were you doing that i am not mature enough for this conversation yeah i know it's hard but stay strong stay strong yeah no promises but like i that just seemed logical like oh you know you you swipe i don't know didn't you see the videos showing showing like the apple marketing materials show people using this feature and they never grabbed the little stick with their thumb and forefinger
Well, that was a long time ago.
And I haven't rewatched it.
Anyway, so that's what I was doing.
And I kept almost pulling them out, and I couldn't get it to work.
I'm like, this is just a stupid feature.
And it turns out what you're supposed to do is leave your thumb, like if you're using your right hand, leave your thumb behind the stick to hold it in place and swipe up and down with your index finger on the other side.
So one finger is holding it, and only the other finger moves.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
So much better.
So which surface, to be clear, which surface are you talking about?
Is it the surface that faces the way your eyeballs face?
Is it the surface that faces the way your ear holes face?
Which surface are you running your finger up and down?
I am the finger that is stationary is behind my ear.
And this finger that is moving is the direction that my eyeballs face.
It's like hitting that surface.
Okay, so if I was looking straight at you, and if I was a product designer that thought it might be important for the customer to know where to move their finger, they might put a black line such that when I was staring at you head on, I would see two black lines coming down the sides of your AirPods, and those black lines would be what you'd run your finger down.
I think so.
All right.
So now you know.
So anyway, that's how, for anyone else out there, you know what?
Write in.
If you didn't know either, if you've been doing it wrong too, I just want to know if I'm the only one.
If you've been doing it right, I don't care.
I don't want to hear from you.
It's probably everybody.
But if for like the two people out there who have been doing it wrong and who I just like, you know, blew your mind with how to do it correctly, please let me know if there were any of you out there.
There probably aren't.
Hey, John, I hear something curious.
It sounds...
It sounded like a chicken, John.
Beautiful impression.
Thank you.
So, hey, it's that time of year again.
The ATP store is back.
The ATP holiday season store, whatever you want to call it.
And we have some exciting new merchandise for you this year.
As always, the URL is atp.fm slash store.
Run right there now and see what we've got.
And the most exciting thing we have for you is a brand new product this year that started...
Let me see.
I wrote this down somewhere.
In November of 2021, we were contacted by Dan at Studio Neat, maker of many fine products that you may have heard of, studioneat.com.
And he said, hey, I heard you talking about your chicken hat.
on the episode.
This was a recent episode in 2021.
It gave him an idea.
What do you think about the idea of trying to replicate that chicken hat?
Studio Neat makes all sorts of products, so they have expertise in this area.
And I said, all right, sure, we could try that.
And it has more or less taken this long to get everything together.
Obviously, COVID, supply chain, blah, blah, blah.
But we went through a process over the course of several months, or I guess more than a year now, of...
Sourcing materials and comparing to my original one and only chicken hat to try to make a reproduction of my personal chicken hat.
Now, there are many caveats to this, OK?
Many things to consider.
For people who don't know the story, my chicken hat is a winter hat that I really like.
And I was musing on a show apparently in 2021.
that I just have this one hat, and if I lose this hat, I can't buy another one like it, and I never see anything like it in the store anymore.
And there are multiple things that make this hat unique, not to rehash everything I said there, but it's kind of a weird shape.
Dan has a post about it at Studio Neat.
We'll put a link to his blog post as well.
You can see a picture of me wearing the hat.
He says you can't find hats of this shape.
You can find hats of this shape, but you can't find hats that are both this shape and also this construction, constructed in this way of this material, right?
I just never see anything like it, and I'm always buying hats, trying to be replacements with hats, and I can't do it.
So now I've essentially made one of my own.
Now, my hat that's like this, my chicken hat, is over 20 years old.
I can't put an exact date on it, but I did find photos showing it's at least 20 years old.
It's been through the wash many times.
I'm sure it has changed size over the course of 20 years I'm going through the wash.
How could it not?
Right.
But that's where we're at.
Right.
So we made a chicken hat reproduction that exactly matches the size, the current size of my chicken.
That's all I've got to go.
I have no idea how big this hat was when I started making it.
20 years of being stretched out, basically.
Or shrinking in the dryer.
I don't know.
All right.
Second thing that my chicken hat is one size fits all.
It says it right on the tag inside the hat.
So I don't have a small hat, a medium hat, a large hat.
This hat was sold in whatever year I bought it as one size fits all.
So the hat we made is one size fits all.
It is exactly the same size.
Like you could lay it because I went through several prototypes.
You can lay this hat down on top of my hat.
They are exactly the same size.
um is that good is that bad i don't know now another thing we went through materials and the student folks sent me many many stacks of like felty type materials from the same company that makes we figured out polar tech made the material for my hat so we were talking to polar tech to get their list of materials nobody makes exactly the same materials this hat is made of which isn't surprising since it was made more than 20 years ago right but we got as close as we could but as close as we could
is different than this hat in a couple of specific ways one it is definitely thinner than my hat which i think for people who are considering buying this is a bonus because my hat is extremely thick and extremely hot and most people would not want to wear it because on a day that's not you know negative 20 degrees you get hot and sweaty in it so this one is thinner but i think that's an advantage and the second thing is my hat after 20 years of going through the dryer feels a little tight on my head
this reproduction hat which is exactly the same size when you lay them on top of each other does not feel as tight because the material is not as thick so it gives more so i'm hoping it will fit more people with big heads i don't know about people with small heads i don't know how much of this one's going to shrink what will this hat look like in 20 years i don't know but we did the best we could with the material we have which is we've got the one hat
And we reproduced it as closely as possible.
I wish I had taken up some better photos of like my hat and this hat laying on top of each other.
The seams line up.
The construction is the same way.
Every dimension is identical.
And it is as close to the same material as we get.
I spared the world the exact matching of the color because my hat is kind of a forest green.
I don't know why it's that color.
I don't think I even picked this hat.
My dad might have originally bought it and I could have stolen it from.
I don't know.
Why is my hat green?
I don't know.
We could have made this one green, but we didn't.
So we had mercy on people who might consider buying this as a joke or whatever.
It is black.
The ATP chicken hat is black.
That goes with more stuff.
And it also matches our logo.
We got a little tag on the side that has our logo on it.
So...
there you go uh we didn't know how many of these things we would sell as a joke or whatever does anyone want to wear a chicken hat does anyone wear winter hats at all who knows uh but we had to guess at how many we might sell and then we had to calculate how many we would have to sell to make up these are the type we buy ahead of time right so we have to sell a certain number of these even just to break even so please if you if you're even remotely inclined to buy this hat please do so we don't lose money on them to find out that no one in the world wants chicken hats
Otherwise, John will have to buy hundreds and hundreds of chicken hats.
Yeah, I've now made hundreds of backup hats myself.
Which itself might be a fun bit for the show.
Yeah, that's true.
On the flip side of that, if everybody wants to get this because it's a funny joke and you could say, hey, look at my funny chicken hat, they could all sell out by tomorrow and then sorry because we don't have the ability to make more of these instantaneously if
they do sell out and there seems to be more demand maybe we'll do it next year but probably this is a one-time thing so if you want an atp chicken hat i think they're good hats i think the chicken shape is a valuable shape i think it's distinctive and i think this is a comfortable hat and it's nice and i think again the fact that it is thinner than my really really thick hat is an advantage not a disadvantage because almost everybody who has ever seen or tried out of my hat says i could never wear this it would be too hot
So that's the chicken hat.
That is the chicken hat.
I am genuinely so glad and thankful that Dan and the studio team were able to, were willing to reach out and deal with you who must be the world's worst client.
I say that with love, but, uh, I mean, like I got many different samples, but it was clear which direction we were going.
That's the other thing.
When you're comparing like a little fabric squares, right?
When you're comparing them,
I'm comparing them to a 20 year old hat that's been through the wash a million times.
It's not going to be the same with a brand new fabric sample.
I don't know what these fabric samples are going to look like after 20 years in the wash.
So you just got to do the best you can.
But there was some clear winners towards the end.
It was down to, you know, one or two options.
And I think we picked the right one.
So there you go.
That's the chicken hat.
We also have an M2 shirt.
It's like the M1 shirt, but it has one more number on the front.
The chip on the back is, in fact, the M2.
It is not the M1 chip on the back.
It's the same as we've always done.
We've got the horrendously expensive one with the chip on the back and the rainbow colors in the front that takes like eight printing passes to make.
And then we have the monochrome one that is less expensive.
And speaking of costs...
Last time we had a sale, we said that our prices were going, our cost to us was going up in all these things because of, you know, who knows, whatever.
But we were keeping the prices the same, but that probably wouldn't continue.
Well, this is the part where it doesn't continue because we held the prices down on the last sale.
I hope you enjoyed them.
Now the price of pretty much everything is increased because the cost to us is increased.
And we haven't passed on all the cost to us.
We have passed on some of it, though.
So we apologize for the high prices, but...
If we had kept the prices the same, there are some products in our lineup that we would literally be losing money on every one we sold.
So we actually had to increase the prices.
We know it sucks.
You know, what can I tell you?
It is what it is.
That's why, you know, that's why we do things like the monochrome shirt because the monochrome shirt is less expensive than the other one because we have to do fewer printing passes.
So consider that if you want to save money.
And of course, we have our regular ATP shirt that we always have.
We have the ATP hoodie, which is still fantastic.
It's kind of like the chicken hat.
I kind of dread the day that the ATP hoodie goes away because I think they're great.
My kids really love them.
It's a great hoodie.
And of course, we have the pint glass that we're still selling through, believe it or not.
Still got some pint glasses left over.
I don't understand how.
I love the pint glass.
It's like my only glass that I regularly use at home.
It's so good.
My family loves them.
We ordered four more on the last sale, I think.
Yeah, I think I have a total of like six or eight now because I got like two the first time, realized that was nowhere near enough, and then ordered another like four or six or something like that.
Yep.
And then finally, the most exciting thing, the ATP mug with the red lining is back.
Last time we had to get it with the gray lining because we literally couldn't get the one with the red lining.
And I think the gray lining looks nice, too.
And I hope everybody who wants to have a more chill mug got the gray lining ones last time.
But the red ones, the red ones are back and only the red ones.
And again, these are the type of the mugs are the type of thing where we have to guess how many we're going to sell and we buy them all ahead of time.
So fingers crossed on the mugs.
We've got mugs.
We've got pint glasses, hoodies, T-shirts.
and of course the chicken hat so um if you're this sale runs until sunday november 13th uh we try to do the sales early as possible to have a hope of getting shipments out before the holidays hopefully it will all work out no guarantees obviously but um we're gonna do our best there
And if you are listening to the show and you would like someone to buy you one of these things as a holiday present, you have to send them the URL.
Like you can't be subtle about it.
The sale only runs until, you know, November 13th.
You have to send the link and say, hey, you have three weeks to buy me something from this store.
Here's what I want.
You can't be subtle about it.
Don't just hope, you know, your significant other is going to hear you listening to the podcast and say, oh, that's a great idea.
I should get one of those things.
Just just give them the link.
Right.
Because people want to know what they want to buy for you.
And if you want some of those weird nerdy stuff, they're not going to guess.
They're not going to find it on their own.
We have no SEO.
Our only SEO is you.
Also, John, if you wanted to save a little money, how would you go about doing that?
Yes, that's right.
I almost forgot about that.
Thank you, Casey.
If you are an ATP member, as always, you get 15% off everything in the store.
If you're not an ATP member, you can become an ATP member and get that 50% off.
And it's pretty easy due to the high prices, everything in the stupid store to make up the cost of membership for one month in the savings that you get.
So absolutely.
As always, you can do the thing where you become a member for one month, you get your 15% off, you buy a bunch of t-shirts, and then when the month is over, you cancel your membership.
We make it very easy to do that.
It's like the good services that use the iCloud subscribe page.
It's really easy to sign up, watch Adlasso, and unsubscribe, then sign up again and watch something and unsubscribe.
You can do that with ATP membership.
you shouldn't though but it can be done it's really easy to do we know that people do it so there it is don't it like if you're honestly if you're going to buy literally anything in the store just become a member get the discount like it's it's almost not worth it to you know anyway at top of the page it has links to do all that stuff 15% off for all members and if you are a member go to your member page grab your coupon code and put it in the promo code field during checkout at the cotton bureau site and you will get 15% off
Please, I beg you.
This is the time where I have to make the speech.
And without fail, every year, somebody reaches out.
Oh, you were right.
You were right.
So here's the thing.
Especially if you're looking for a chicken hat, a mug, or a glass.
Because those things are... There are a limited amount of them.
But even for the shirts, you don't want to miss out.
For the hoodie, you don't want to miss out on the hoodie.
It's a freaking delightful hoodie.
So...
If you're not in a position to order right now at atp.fm.store, think about the next time you can.
Maybe it's at your desk at work if you're going back to work.
Maybe it's your desk at home.
Maybe it's once you get to the place you're driving right now or walking or what have you or bicycling.
Think, envision, put yourself in that place and think to yourself...
I need to treat myself and go to atp.fm slash store when I get to that place.
You don't need to stop walking, particularly if you're in Manhattan.
Don't stop walking.
Just go where you're going.
You don't need to stop in the middle of the road.
You don't even need to pull over necessarily, but envision the place you're going.
And go to atp.fm slash store and buy yourself a chicken hat or a mug or a glass or one of the shirts or hoodies or what have you.
Do that.
Make everyone happy.
And also remember to go to atp.fm slash join and join if you haven't already.
And unlike what John says, you have mine and Marco's full permission to forget to cancel your membership.
That is totally okay.
We are okay with that, Marco and I. Maybe not John, but Marco and I are okay with you forgetting to cancel.
it's not about forgetting to cancel it's about once you have the membership and you start listening to the show without ads or you enjoyed the bootleg or something like that or you hear the uh the member special content with our three uh atp movie club things you're like hey membership is actually kind of good that's why you keep doing it because it provides value to you is when you go back to the regular feed and it's not as good anymore so yeah stay a member for that reason i hope yeah definitely
All right, we will remind you just a couple more times and that'll be that.
Yeah, we do structure these sales so we have three episodes where we can remind you.
That's how we arrange the dates, just FYI.
And speaking of like not missing out on things, there's missing out on the sale, which is like, oh, I forgot about the sale and now it's over because like on November 15th, you're like, oh no, I missed it, right?
but I can tell you inventory wise, the thing we have the least number of is the pint glasses and we are not ordering any more of them.
So if you really want a pint glass, get that ASAP.
The second least number of things we have are mugs and chicken hats.
So if you were interested in mug, chicken hat, or pint glasses, just order it now so you don't miss out.
I'm not sure that we're going to sell out of all these things, but better safe than sorry.
And the other ones are print on demand.
We see how many we buy and then we print that many of them.
So the only thing you have to worry about for the shirts and the hoodie is...
buying before the sale ends on November 13th.
Yep, please and thank you.
Let's do some follow-up.
A couple episodes ago, I believe it was, I was going and waxing poetic about how much I love my new Sonos setup, and I got a Costco flyer in the physical snail mail, I think it was yesterday, the day before, where I noticed that a couple of the items that I purchased are actually going to be on sale at Costco right after our sale ends, coincidentally.
The Sonos ARC
that I have kind of, and I'll explain in a second, is going to be on sale for $700.
Normally retails for $900.
There is a catch there.
We'll come back to that in a sec.
The One SL, which is a speaker that you can use either singularly or in a stereo pair.
But what I did is, and this is what Sonos often recommends, is I use them as my rear speakers.
Those are going down from $400 to $300.
Now, one catch...
All of these, the ARC and the 1SL, it's actually an ARC SL and a 1SL.
SL, I don't know what it actually stands for, but what it means in Sonospeak is it does not have any sort of like microphone or voice recognition, which in some ways is a feature, not a bug.
But I will say that Sonos' voice control is really, really good.
And I think we spoke briefly about it an episode or two ago, that it's actually Gus Spring or whatever.
What's the guy's name from Breaking Bad?
Yeah, the actor who plays Gus Frang.
I forget the actor's name.
Yeah, same.
But anyway, he does the voice, which is kind of funny.
And it's actually really, really good because as far as I'm aware, it's all local on device.
So it doesn't do anything super complex.
But in terms of like, you know, turn it up, turn it down, stop playback, join such and such, etc.
It's really, really good.
And I like having it on my ARC because I do not have the ARC SL.
I have just the ARC.
Again, SL means no voice control.
But for what it's worth, the Arc goes down $200.
The One goes down $100.
And actually, I believe that's for a pair of Ones.
I'm sorry, I didn't say that earlier.
So it's two of the rear speakers goes from $400 to $300.
And one of the soundbars goes from $900 to $700.
If you happen to be near an American Costco, I just wanted you to be aware.
Then we got some fascinating feedback from Andrew Chase.
Andrew is a pilot for a major American airline, and he wanted to share some things.
So he said, I want to share with you some things regarding personal electronic devices.
The FAA and airlines started really evaluating the threat of battery fires once Samsung had their phone that was routinely catching fire.
I don't know how many, but there were several incidents as a result of defective Samsung devices.
There have been other issues where devices have been either crushed by the seats or in the overhead bins.
The pilots on this particular airline
Each have an 11-inch iPad Pro, and all of our flight attendants have large screen iPhones.
Andrew couldn't remember exactly which model.
The threat is so great that we have to carry two thermal containment bags and fire-retardant gloves.
We have one bag large enough to fit our iPads that we keep on the flight deck, and there's another bag kept in the passenger cabin that can hold up to a 17-inch laptop.
And there's a picture that has been attached that hopefully will be the chapter art in the MP3.
I find this fascinating.
This is all, I'm sorry, I forgot to establish context.
This is all with regard to don't reach in between the seats to get your phone.
Step aside and let the flight attendant handle it for you.
Well, this is why, because these things, apparently there's a real honest to goodness fear that something will catch on fire.
I just found this absolutely fascinating.
Yeah, I do wonder if people would be able to get to those materials in time, if there's a device that catches fire.
I don't know if you've ever seen like those videos online of what it looks like when a lithium ion battery goes up.
It goes up fast, then it goes up big.
Of course, you need the gloves because it's not like you can grab this thing and put it in the fire bag or whatever.
So first you need the gloves, then you need the bag.
Then you need the wherewithal to grab this thing with the gloves.
You think, oh, so what?
I have the gloves on.
They protect me from the fire.
Watch the videos.
You probably don't want to come with an arm's length of something that's going off like one of these things.
Then you put it in the bag.
Then presumably you seal up the bag, I guess, so the flames don't shoot everywhere.
Anyway, firearm planes, no good.
Do not want.
Can you tell me about Apple mouse shape history, please?
I can, but first some real-time follow-up from someone in the chat room was asking.
It's hard to tell what the chicken hat might look like on someone's head.
In fact, if you've never experienced a hat like this, you might be wondering, how do I even wear it?
Like, which direction does it face on my head?
So if you go to the show notes for this episode, you can find the show notes at ATP.fm.
um you will see a link to the studio neat a blog post about this collaboration and in the studio neat blog post it's a picture of me wearing the hat at some point in the fairly distant past and i'm not wearing this hat i'm wearing my original hat but as i said this hat if you lay it down on top of my original hat exactly lines up in every feature so the photo is accurate just imagine the hat being not that color green and imagine uh you know me being a lot older than i am in that picture
All right.
Tell me about mouse shapes.
Yeah.
So this is about, Marco was talking about how he loves the, uh, the current Apple sushi mouse, uh, and, uh, you know, it's a high quality mouse and he likes the shape of it and he likes the features.
And when I was listening back to the show, as I do, I was reminded of, I thought I'd even said this on the show, but I guess I didn't.
I was reminded of, uh, my various, uh,
Apple mouse loves over the years, right?
So the very first mouse I ever used was the mouse on the original Macintosh in 1984, which was basically a box with the corners knocked off the top edge.
Extremely, I mean, extremely boxy.
It was a box, right?
And the contemporary mice on other systems were also similar.
Like, it was easier to make a box with a mouse ball in it and a button on it or whatever.
But it had some style.
It had some panache.
But I think that first mouse...
basically dictated how i would use a mouse for the rest of my life because it was a box it's got you know it's a rectangle it's got flat sides right and i that's why i grip the mouse with my thumb and my like pinky and ring finger on opposing sides of the mouse with two fingers on top of it right and
because the flat sides let you do that and so any mouse that does not have a flat side for me to grip in that way feels weird to me because that's what i'm always trying to do if you try to grab the sushi sushi mouse from the sides with your thumb on one side and your pinky and ring finger on the other it doesn't work because the sides aren't straight the sides are very small and if you actually do squeeze it it like pushes the mouse upward it's not how you're supposed to use that mouse so that kind of cemented that but the reason i brought this up is
That was, you know, the mouse on the Mac 128 and the, you know, the original Macintosh, the 512, the Plus.
But when the SE came out, Apple changed the shape of the mouse.
Drastically changed the shape of the mouse.
You look what the mouse on the SE looked like.
It was way lower profile.
It still had flat sides, and they're still higher than the Sushi Mouse.
But the top of it was, like, angled like a little ramp that, you know, leaned forward.
And it was a smaller ramp on the back.
I don't know.
You can find some pictures of it online.
But anyway...
um and i was like whoa what are you doing apple i i liked your old mouse it fit my hand well and now you give me this really it was almost like the sushi mouse like that's so small and slight and you know in reality it was huge compared to the sushi mouse but it was a big change and over the years apple has always well for the most part has made
mice for its computers that are high quality there were some exceptions up there with like the what was that one with the little rollerball in it it was like what era was that that was like the imac g5 era maybe that was not a good one the original mighty mouse anyway over the years apple has made a bunch of mice but every
I was going to say every decade or two, every five, ten years, they would radically change their mouse.
So there was the mouse on the SE.
Then the next big one was the ADB mouse that was very curved and everything.
That mouse was great.
Loved it.
It was still kind of low profile, but the shape was very comfortable.
It looked modern, had a huge button on top of it.
It was the whole front half of it was a button.
Right.
There was the puck mouse.
Nobody likes that.
There was the apology mouse, which I kind of liked, even though, again, it was still kind of low profile.
There's the sushi mouse like this.
There was the mighty mouse mixed in there.
I bring this up because Marco loves sushi mouse.
Someday, if Marco keeps on living, Apple's going to change the mouse and they're probably going to change it in a way that he doesn't like.
So I want you to give some perspective from my history with Apple is that Apple makes high quality mice, but they don't make the same mouse forever.
And when they change it, they tend to leave behind all the people who love the previous one because the new one reflects the new thinking.
And, you know, in the case of the hockey puck, they leave behind anyone because the hockey puck, I guess some people still like the hockey puck, but it was fatally flawed, let's say.
Even when they put a divot in the button so you could tell which direction it was facing.
Nice job, Apple.
So be aware.
If you love your Apple mouse, maybe get as many of them as you can and hope they work for your computers for a long time.
Kind of like people did with the Apple Extended Keyboard 2.
I mean, the funny thing is like, you know, well, first of all, I don't think it's ever going to be difficult to find these since like everyone who's ever bought an iMac probably has one in their closet unopened.
You know, there's so many of these lying around that people got like the as pack-ins for their desktops that they never used.
But eventually you'll need like, like we used to have the USB to ADB adapters that people use the Apple extended.
Eventually you're going to need some kind of adapter to use these things with like, especially since they're Bluetooth, right?
It would have to be some kind of like software adapter or Bluetooth dongle once, you know, the new version of Bluetooth comes out.
Not only are they Bluetooth, they're lightning.
And this is where, like, if they're ever going to kill off this mouse, maybe it'll be during the USB-C transition.
That, I think, I'm afraid because when they go to USB-C, they are presumably going to, at some point during that transition, update this mouse.
Now, that being said, I think it's probably going to be one of the last things they update.
I mean, they might never update it because I don't think the EU is going to mandate that.
We'll get to that in a little bit.
But...
also i can imagine them not wanting to really do much to make this change and possibly doing it like in the most half-assed way possible which would basically just be like just keep the entire existing design and just make the port usbc instead of like i think i got chi charging like the mouse is definitely something that where you can do chi charging and it makes way more sense to have a charging thing on the bottom when it's chi charging than it does to have a thing on the bottom when it's usbc or lightning
But then there's no pairing story because you pair it by using the cable.
Although I think there is a thing where you can hold it down and blink it into Bluetooth mode or whatever.
I think there's probably some kind of override for that.
But anyway, I don't expect they're going to be touching this more than they have to.
But if they do...
It is the wonderful combination of being both extremely common and widely hated.
So there's going to be a ton of them for sale forever on eBay, totally unopened.
So no problem.
I've got a bunch still in their original boxes up in my attic because I never even take them out.
Exactly.
Yeah.
There's so many people like you who buy desktop Macs that come with these who don't ever use them because everyone except me hates them.
So don't worry.
I got a huge supply.
The other thing you have going for you is that Apple doesn't pay much attention to the desktop Macs.
Witness our continued wait for the Mac Pro.
So they're not going to redesign the mouse as often as they did in the past because it used to be much more important to their product line.
But now that they've gone basically all laptop and some of their desktop computers don't even come with the mouse like the Mac Mini, it's pretty low down on the list.
But I do think it will make a USB-C transition or a Qi transition because once they go all USB-C,
They're just going to start knocking out the products one by one.
Eventually, you know, as as lightning phases out, it will eventually be as hard to find as a 30 pin connector.
And so they're not going to want to keep selling a product with that in it.
I think I might like assuming that at some point in the future, I can't use this mouse anymore and there's no replacement that I like, which those are two pretty big assumptions.
But but assuming that happens.
I might just go to trackpad.
Because I love having the direct manipulation scrolling on the mouse so much.
I would imagine I would rather just go directly to double trackpad.
Because I already have trackpad on the left.
And I could just get a second one.
It would be more symmetric.
But I miss all my Teflon mousepads.
well uh stephen hackett predictably has a good post that shows all the mice that i was just talking about the original one the one with the just the one for the apple 2c and the lisa which are kind of gross uh then there's the the first adb mouse and then there's the apple desktop mouse 2 which i incorrectly said was the first apple desktop mouse uh but there was the other one was adb before that there's a cool black one that came with the apple no the apple the macintosh television man i would love to get one of those black mice
Then there's the puck, the apology mouse, the stupid mighty mouse, and the sushi mouse.
So I think there might have been another ones in between there, but we'll put that link in the show notes.
It's an excellent page with some good photos.
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Let's talk about some stuff that you've been up to recently, Mr. Syracuse.
So tell me about your app updates.
Yeah, I didn't think I was going to do this this year, but I just, you know, the timing more or less worked out.
I had mentioned on the last show, we were talking about like what we do with version control or whatever, that I was adding a major feature to my app and the branch I made for that feature kind of morphed into the 2.0 branch because I just kept adding stuff.
And so I was working on version two of my little app switcher thing, Switch Glass, and version two was kind of more or less ready around the time of the Ventura launch.
In fact, I had to change a bunch of code in it to deal with Ventura, which I might talk about it in, well, I'll talk about it now briefly, I guess.
Anyway, the big feature that I added was the number one requested feature was people wanted to be able to reorder stuff in the app switcher.
They already had a bunch of different sort orders.
You could sort alphabetically in reverse and by launch order.
But they said, what if I just wanted to say, like, I want Finder to be at the top.
I want this to be on the bottom, whatever.
So I added that feature.
Adding that feature, as I alluded to on past episodes when we talked about our dev efforts, required me to bump the minimum OS version to Monterey, Mac OS 12 Monterey, because that app switch review is SwiftUI, and the features for drag and drop that I needed from SwiftUI only run on Monterey or later.
So it was a big bump in minimum system version, but honestly not that many people use my app anyway, so whatever.
Who cares?
I wish I could have kept it lower, but like
I couldn't have and still actually had a reasonable drag-and-drop interface.
And there's so many SwiftUI bugs in all the OSs anyway, I'm glad to be on something a little bit newer.
So I kind of pulled an Apple and I was like, you know what?
Ventura's coming out soon.
And if I just kind of say, this is my underscore, no new features.
What is his little sign that he puts up?
I think it's no new features.
I know it has a boat to represent shipping.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was just like, this is the line.
I'm not doing any more features.
I'm just doing debugging from this point on.
Even though I had more features in the queue, I said, this is it.
Let me just cut it off here.
I sent myself a pull request, Casey.
Nice.
It sounds like something you should do alone.
Yeah.
Wow.
And push it out to the store.
And I didn't think AppReview was going to get to it in time.
But lo and behold, on Ventura launch day, both of my applications were ready with new versions.
Front and center, the only thing I changed in it was a thing related to login items, which is
I'll give a little summary here and it turns out to be a thing I'll talk about another show.
But anyway, Ventura has a new API for making applications register themselves to launch on login.
There's been a surprisingly sordid history of how apps do that on the Mac.
You would think it's such a simple feature.
It's just that one checkbox in the bottom of a bunch of apps you use.
Hey, do you want me to launch this app on login?
And you check it and you think that's all there is to it.
The ways they've done that, none of them are good.
There's a new way in Ventura, which is better than the past ones, but is buggy and has a bunch of caveats.
Anyway, I put a bunch of stuff in my FAQ about it, if you care.
Oh, don't worry, because the second anybody updates to Ventura...
I forget which version it was.
A couple of Mac OS versions ago when you had to approve permissions for a whole bunch of new things.
The first launch experience of running that version was just a wall of notifications from all your apps that all of a sudden needed a new permission that didn't exist before.
That's what it is for Ventura with these launch things.
Like, the first time I launched it, I have it on my laptop.
The very first time it launched with the final version, the entire right side of the screen was just filled with, like, 14 of these notifications to approve these background items.
And it was all stuff I knew about except for, like, one, like, weird thing left over by some driver I installed forever ago.
But it was, like...
you know shell scripts i have to run there's backblaze dropbox you know all the stuff or not dropbox but maestro my dropbox client um like all the stuff that you want to run and expect to run but it was like yeah you have to basically like re be re-notified about everything the good thing is that the default seems to be if it was running before let it keep running
So you don't have to actually do anything besides maybe review them if there's any you want to turn off and turn them off.
And it is nice that there is this new method to do that.
So I think it's a good feature overall because before, there were so many ways that things could be starting at startup or behind the scenes that were not apparent to the user and were very difficult for the user to ever remove.
Yeah, the problem with this briefly with respect to my app is both of my apps have the option to launch on login because the type of apps you run all the time front and center changes your window layering, you probably want that running all the time if you can use it at all and switch glasses and apps which you probably want that running all the time just like the doc is running all the time.
So having them both launch on login makes tons of sense.
That's all they do.
They launch on login, they're just regular apps and instead of you having to double click them or launch them from the doc or whatever, you can get them to launch themselves.
That's it.
But because there is a new API to do that in Ventura, there was a series of old APIs on pre-Ventura systems, right?
So I use the new API on Ventura, but because my apps run on older OSs, even, you know, even Switchglass that I had to bump up to Monterey, it runs on Monterey.
And the Ventura APIs don't exist on Monterey.
So my app has to support the APIs that exist on Monterey, right?
And
If your app uses the Monterey or earlier APIs, on Ventura, when you use the new API to say, please launch me on login, Ventura files your app under a section in system settings that says, these apps run in the background.
My apps don't run in the background.
they have no way to run the background there's nothing in them that runs the background they don't have any kind of demons they only run in the foreground like they're just apps you just double click them and they run they can't do anything when they're not running right but because it uses an older api that it has to it doesn't use it includes code for an older api because it does that on ventura it's filed under this app runs in the background and so now i have to brace myself for people sending me emails saying why does your app run in the background what kind of sneaky stuff is it doing i have to say
it doesn't run in the background they decide but the os says it runs in the background look let me send you a screenshot of system settings here's your app listed in the apps that run in the background they may perform tasks when they're not open right like i assure you my app cannot do anything when it is not running i install no launch dep list there's no demon there's no background server i am not you know they're run activity monitor sat run ps satisfy yourself but then why is it showing so
I filed a feedback on this and it's kind of frustrating.
And that gets to your wall of notifications.
Half of those notifications are going to say so-and-so application wants to run in the background.
Sometimes you will get a notification that says something wants to run in the background when all it wants to do is launch on login.
But sometimes it really does want to run something in the background.
So when you go into system settings in, you know, whatever general login items and you see like the allow and background list or whatever, you can't tell by looking at that list.
Which one of these things actually runs in the background versus which one of these things is just an application that supports a Preventure OS that just wants to launch itself on login?
There's no way to tell.
Most of them probably do run in the background.
But only if you have experience to know, like, oh, I understand this is an updater demon that really does run in the background.
Or this, you know, this thing does make a, you know, a launch agent with launch D. You're not going to know that by looking at this list.
So...
Anyway, that's why I had to add a FAQ item to both of my dinky little products that says, hey, what is your app listed as running in the background?
Does it do anything in the background?
I have to say, no, it doesn't, I swear.
So that's frustrating.
And then the second frustrating thing is, maybe this is only true for people running development and test flight builds or whatever, but the new API in Ventura, when it gets added to launch on login,
It's very specific as in this specific app should launch on login, which I think is good.
But if you're doing development and like when you run Xcode and it builds a version of your app and whatever that folder is like under the drive data, where does it put like the temporary like debug builds of your apps?
oh god it's somewhere very deep i never know i always have to like you know debug print like with the path of the binary like drag it out of the target uh area command click it on the dock right what oh yeah yeah i guess oh well not for the simulator yeah yeah you're not using mac apps sorry yeah it's mac apps you command click on the dock but yeah like what it it built when you're running xcode it builds a copy of your app and it puts it somewhere but it's not like even if you're ranking a mac app it doesn't put it in your applications folder
So when you run the dev build and you call the Ventura API to launch us on login, I think what it's doing is saying, okay, I'll launch the application located at library developer Xcode, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I'll launch that at login, right?
But the version of the application sitting in your application folder is also registered to launch in login.
So I got into a situation where I had like three copies of switch class listed in my open at login list.
And by the way, that whole thing about allowing background, your app will also show up in the open at login thing.
So it does correctly show up there, but it also appears in the allow in the background list.
So anyway, I've been in situations where there are multiple copies of my apps listed in open at login.
And I think it's because there literally are multiple copies of my apps running around on the disk.
And unlike previous versions of macOS, this one tracks all of them and will send you a notification every time you do a new build and you launch it.
It's like, oh, just so you know, this app that we've never seen before that just got built and run.
It just registers itself to launch on login.
And we wanted you to know about it with a notification.
fun that's super crappy so anyway my apps are updated it's switch class 2 is a free update for the five people who use it uh i'm still having fun developing it in fact i just did a test flight build with a bunch of fun new features and people are finding fun new bugs i'm enjoying test flight it's way better than trying to send people betas test flight on the mac when it's working and when app store connect is working correctly is
a real godsend so um i i made a petition for new uh testers in my blog post about it we'll put a link in the show notes to that post so you can read it it's only a couple paragraphs if you want to be a tester you can send me an email and i'll let you test it and you can find fun bugs and i'll fix them that's the plan anyway oh one more thing related to the blog post i put a mail to link like the in the uh the thing that says you know if you want to become a tester let me know and the words let me know are a link and they're a mail to link
I said, you know what?
Let me put a subject line on the mail to link.
I know there's a sort of convention for doing that.
I'm not sure if it's a real standard, but I've seen it done many different times and, you know, whatever.
So, you know, the URL of that link is mail mail to colon and then my email address and then question mark subject equals.
And then you type the subject line.
Right.
And the subject line is switch glass test flight membership with spaces between the words.
Right.
When you put spaces in the, you know, the href field of a link, you're supposed to URL encode them, you know, with percent 20.
Or I think you can do pluses that might only be for the address bar.
But anyway, percent 20, right?
That's the hexadecimal, you know, the way you put hexadecimal codes for ASCII code points, you know, that's a space, right?
Or you can use a plus and break half the clients out there.
Right.
So here's the thing.
I put percent 20 because it's the right thing to do.
And I make valid markup when I can.
Right.
I immediately found out that every single person who clicked that link was somehow using some kind of browser or system that has no idea what that is.
And I got a bunch of email with the subject line switch glass percent 20, you know, test flight percent 20 membership percent 20.
all right so and like literally not a single one was correct i'm like okay i'll be i tested it myself by the way chrome on the mac and safari works fine you get spaces right but whatever maybe it's the email client i don't know where the problem lies but i was getting emails with percent 20s in subject line i changed it to pluses i just got emails with pluses in it
like and literally not a single email from any mail you know i think it's probably the mail client that's screwing it up because i think like safari and chrome probably send it correctly but the mail clients don't know that it's anyway i had to change it to spaces which is not valid but apparently it's the only way to get spaces you know so in if you look at the markup says a href you know blah blah question mark subject equals switch glass space test flight space membership and that works
for now i'm getting a lot of subject lines it's invalid it's invalid html you put spaces just the web you just can't escape it it just amazes me that like this is not a new convention the subject line and mail to links what is that from the 90s and still somehow there's a broken link in this chain again i think it's the mail clients i think if the mail clients are getting a url and they are not correctly parsing the query string out of the you know the url part of it they're like they're not obviously not decoding the percent 20s and not decoding the pluses
sad sad state of affairs this is so i mean i'll be the first one to admit when you know email is bad because that's much of the time but i've never had this problem like i use that convention frequently i we even have it in our in our member panel at ap.fm join
If you go to your member panel at slash member, at the bottom, there's a link to contact us.
And it's a mail to link that includes not only spaces, but escaped colons and parentheses, all percent encoded.
And I get, you know, I get an email from that maybe, you know, a couple times a week, maybe, you know, three or four times a week.
None of them have ever had like, you know, wrongly escaped things in them.
It's never happened.
yeah maybe it's just small sample size because i think only 10 people email me but every single one of that 10 had percents or pluses i was i was shocked i was shocked how could how in this day and age how could something but there you have it so yeah that's that's why that's why the web is full of invalid things because people learn through through trial and error that if you want it to quote unquote work everywhere you have to use invalid markup in some cases
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All right, I got a new treat today.
Ooh.
I went to Apple, the local Apple store in Short Pump, and I got myself a picked up, yes, everyone thinks it's so funny.
That also sounds like something you do when you're alone.
uh i've been married a long time marco anyway um so i went to the store and i got complimented on my m2 shirt which just happened to be the top shirt in my pile when i got dressed this morning and or excuse me not m2 i didn't get a pre-release m2 shirt m1 i was gonna say you don't have an early copy of the m2 shirt no no no no my apologies my m1 shirt um somebody commented on it and said nice shirt and i and i was very appreciative of that and the and the other person helping me was very kind and they
They smiled and nodded very effectively when I told them about my podcast, which I'm sure they were so excited to hear about.
But they did a very good job of making me feel like they actually gave a crap.
So anyway.
You should listen to my podcast.
It's about computers.
You would like it.
I was totally that guy.
I was wearing my own shirt.
It was so bad.
It was terrible.
That's why I don't wear the shirts out in public.
just in case i don't want to be that guy oh no i don't care i i have no shame i'm 40 now man i mean so are you but uh i'm 40 now i don't care um but anyway so i picked up my ipad pro i gotta say in general if you live in a place that is not like boston or new york city and you have one of the slower apple stores like the one in short pump um it is pretty delightful um
Going in and picking up your devices because you get them first thing in the morning.
You don't have to stalk the UPS truck.
It's wonderful.
And there's almost never any big line.
Like even on iPhone day, because if you recall, I did pick up for the first time in years for these iPhones last month.
And even then I waited like, I don't know, 10 minutes, maybe, maybe.
And I was in and out in five after I tried to get upsell, upsold on AppleCare and screen protectors and all the other various and sundry things Apple wants to make money off of.
But that's neither here nor there.
For whatever it's worth, by the way, just sorry to interrupt here.
I've had great experiences with the Long Island Apple stores.
Like, you know, the Westchester ones are pretty decent.
The ones in the city are, you know, very crowded, very dense.
You know, you have to wait online.
It's a little chaotic.
The ones in Westchester are much nicer.
The ones on Long Island have been, honestly, even better.
I'm really surprised.
And I think it's mostly because there's not a lot of nerds on Long Island.
I don't know where they all are.
I haven't located them.
What are you talking about?
Oh, John's upset.
John's upset.
Not a lot of nerds on Long Island.
nerd where do they where do they keep them where where they're all they're all too busy doing extracurricular activities so they look good on their college applications well they're not in the apple store and so therefore they're never crowded but they're but they're probably working at the apple store well yeah that's true because the the staff has been great like i'm i'm actually uh there's there's two stores i go to that are that are close to me on long island here and they're both so far fantastic like i've
And because there are no more nerds on Long Island who don't already work at the Apple stores, there's almost no one ever in there.
And so there's tons of staff, very few customers, instant service.
It's been fantastic.
And also you're going there when people would work.
It occurs to me that I have no idea where any Apple stores are on Long Island because I didn't live there when Apple stores became a thing.
So what stores are you going to?
My primary one is the Walt Whitman mall one.
I was going to say like Walt Whitman was my first guess where one would be.
Although I mean, I don't really relish going there, but I haven't been in ages.
But yeah, that's, you know, ones in malls have the advantage that malls are dying.
So there's probably not a lot there except for like, you know, the Orange Julius and the Apple store.
Oh, Orange Julius.
Yes.
Oh, I love being Orange Julius.
Are they still in business?
I don't know.
It is weird walking through malls these days, though.
Like, because you walk past, like, there's, you know, most of the stores, well, like, there's, you know, different kinds of malls.
Spirit Halloween is in most of the places, right?
What?
because they always go and swoop in the like defunct stores and take over around halloween time you don't know about spirit halloween oh yeah just yeah there's like cheap you know seasonal stores um yeah but anyway uh no there's uh let me see where's the other one that i went to the other one was in uh smith haven yeah that's the other one that mall is not in as good a shape um but uh walt whitman is in really good shape and and so
and you know and it's all like it's internet brands it's like you know casper and um warby parker like it's all you know the podcast ad brands that you hear like they have they now have stores in upscale malls and that's that's what's taking all the mall stuff now anyway it is weird though walking through a mall uh because even even the good malls are you know a shadow of what they once were and are largely empty uh it's it's very strange
I bought my wedding ring at a jewelry store in Smith Haven Mall.
Aw.
I used to ride my bike there.
Wow.
You were very close.
So, yeah, so I picked up my iPad Pro.
I did not get any accessories because my hope, in theory, was I could repurpose all the accessories for my 2018 iPad Pro, which is going to be retired.
I had spoken briefly about, oh, maybe I'll just cancel this, but because I'm a big liar, I did not cancel this, obviously.
But I did get it.
I have not had a lot of time to play with it.
But you know what?
It's like a much better batteried, much faster, I guess, much less scratch screen version of my 2018 iPad Pro.
I put it in the 2018, or no, I guess it was 2020 Magic Keyboard case, and it fit no problem.
In fact, if I recall correctly, when they came out with last year's iPad Pro, they said, oh, it's not going to fit in the 2020 edition case.
It's not going to fit right.
And then they came out a few days later, a week later, and was like, well, it'll fit, but it's going to be not 100% perfect.
Maybe I just don't have the eye for it, but it seems like it fits perfectly, which is great.
So...
I'm using the Magic Keyboard, which I love.
The Pencil, you know, synced, no problem.
Wait, what about the camera hole?
Oh, or did the Magic Keyboard come out late enough so that it had the larger camera plateau of the M1 iPad?
Correct.
Well, I don't think it was an M1 at the time, but it was... The spirit of what you're saying is correct, that it had the big square hole.
Oh, the A12Z iPad, the one that added the LiDAR sensor, right?
That's what... Yeah.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, so yeah, that fit.
No problem.
All good.
Uh, pencil obviously works.
No problem.
All good.
And so I've dug out my old, uh, my, what is it?
The keyboard, not folio, the key, the, the thing, the, that's not a kickstandy one, not the new kickstandy one, but like the magic folio keyboard.
Oh, it is?
Okay, thank you.
The Smart Keyboard Folio.
That's the one I use.
Yeah, the Smart Magic Folio Keyboard Folio.
Oh, God, it's so bad.
Anyway, but yes, that thing.
So I busted that back out.
I like what Gruber clarified.
Magic means it has a trackpad, right?
So that clarifies one whole section of it.
It's so clear.
I don't know why it's not obvious.
Right, yeah.
Trackpads are magic.
right oh man i you know i i was just thinking earlier as i was washing dishes because that's when i do my thinking wouldn't it be amazing if apple just had like one ipad keyboard and one ipad cover that you could use on all of their 11-ish inch ipads and then like i instantly knew why they don't do that like it because you
Even after all this time, the iPad is still not designed for covers or keyboards to attach to them very well.
If they were, they would have to make sacrifices on the physical shape in some way, like maybe having an attachment slot, kind of like the way the Apple Watch straps slide into a groove in the case.
Mm-hmm.
um if there was something like that or you know some way for things to physically attach securely to an ipad without just magnetically sticking to the back i mean the magnets are pretty good though i think they do i i like the magnets i think they do a good job with getting the cases i didn't think i would like them because i used to have like on my original 9.7 inch pro do you remember the cases that came apple cases for the 9.7 inch pro they actually like wrapped around the edges and hooked over the front
Those were great.
Very secure.
I really love that.
My son's got that iPad now, although it's kind of fun.
It's last legs.
But the flat ones, the sort of ice cream sandwich ones that go on the flat ones now, it doesn't look like it should work, but they work pretty well.
I think where things start to fall apart is the keyboard stuff, because I'm just talking about the flat cases or whatever.
But once you start putting more heavyweight things in there or trying to construct a little...
precarious laptop out of it that's where you need like the apparently extremely expensive technology in the well you should finish telling me the adjective things magic means it has a track lab what does it mean when it costs 300 something dollars and had like this weird armature inside oh that just means ipad keyboard
No, you know the one I'm talking about?
It's Casey's one.
The one that like holds the thing up.
Is there a word in the product name that lets me know it's that one or is it just the price?
No, the price tells you very clearly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, it's... And so as far as I can tell, I don't... Is Magic ever used with folio?
or those mutually exclusive because i think folio means the old kind where it's just like two flat things that sandwich together right and and there's usually it was actually a word that means something so i give them some leeway on that one like it makes some sense yeah and there's no trackpad with folio as far as i'm aware well slow down slow you're getting this all wrong the magic keyboard folio is a 250 thing that has a trackpad that is for the ipad which by the way i did play with in store very briefly
It was good.
Oh, smart is what's mutually exclusive from magic.
All right.
So it can either be smart or magic.
And smart means it does not have a trackpad.
Magic means it does and costs a bajillion dollars.
Not that the smart ones are particularly inexpensive.
They're just less insanely expensive.
and that again makes no sense because magic is not the opposite of smart and either one says anything about track bands yeah i know but anyway it it is i would love to someday get to a point in apple's ipad lineup and obviously it's all jumbled up right now and you know we discussed possibly why with supply chain and whatever but i would love to get to a point in apple's lineup where every new ipad doesn't have its own completely different and incompatible set of accessories because if they're going to have this lineup that has many different models in it
Obviously, between the 11-inch size class and the 12.9-inch, yeah, you've got to have a different keyboard for that because it's a very different size.
But there are so many iPads now in the 11-inch range that are all almost the same size.
Like, if they just...
made them all the same size, and made them all use the same freaking pencil, and the same two or three keyboard options, you know, different price and complexity categories, that would be so nice.
Because as it is right now, it's so absurdly, I mean, it's expensive for one, but I don't think they would see that as a bad thing.
But it's also just incredibly wasteful.
When I upgraded from my old A12X 2018 iPad that Casey just updated away from to the M1 this past summer, I had to get a new keyboard cover because the old one wouldn't fit the camera plateau of the new one.
oh yeah that's a bummer and that it felt it felt dumb like why am i like there goes 180 bucks or whatever that like that i didn't have to spend and then and then what do i do with this keyboard like i i tried to give it away to family members who who still had the old ipad they didn't need it i ended up it's in a closet somewhere i've forgotten exactly where and you know probably in two or three years i'll find it and throw it away
that's a waste.
And there's so many situations like that where if they would stop changing the accessories every year for these iPads that change a few millimeters here and there and the camera bump gets a little bit bigger, moves around, if they could design them in a more holistic and forward-looking way so that
both the ipads and the accessories like design them both together to create a world where there's just like there's an ipad keyboard and there's an ipad keyboard with trackpad and those come in two sizes and that's it like that would be amazing now those uh keyboards and covers that attach though are in many respects wear items for ipads like that they're not
They are the outside of the thing.
They are going to wear down.
They are going to degrade, just like the brakes on your car and the oil in your engine.
Not your engine, Marco.
Well, one of your engines, anyway.
And so I think their useful lifetime is not great, which really argues on not being $300 items.
Because by the time you're done with that iPad, if it has a nice long life, those accessories, if you actually use them, are pretty beat up.
I think what they've currently done, like with the Pro lines, the flat-sided iPad Pros,
They've had some amount of accessory continuity, but I don't think you can hope for accessory continuity for any longer stretches than you get on the laptops.
Not that laptops have many accessories, but there are generational form factor changes, and there's no way that Apple is going to make an accessory or a form factor change
with an eye towards making the same accessory work across generations like that they just won't the cameras will change and move they will decide it's a different size a different shape has different accessories different ports different attachment things for the pencil like there's no way that they're going to have that continuity because and you know on the on the phone occasionally they've had multiple years in a row where you could share accessories but that's about it uh and the phone is probably the closest analog because why do they keep changing size and shape well
arguably the phone has even less reason to change size and shape because the possible forms you know the possible sizes for phones are much more narrow than uh an ipad which goes from the mini to the 12.9 inch and could go even bigger than that like there's plenty of room for a bigger ipad that we talk about all the time uh
And the cameras move around all the buttons around.
I don't think you're ever going to see continuity in that area.
It would be nice if they could at least have continuity of attachment point and then just have the cutouts be different or whatever.
But I mean, if like if you think of it like you don't have continuity of keyboards across laptops, when you buy a new laptop, it comes with its own new keyboard that exactly fits that laptop because they don't detach.
They're not detachable.
But because the iPad is a floppy keyboard sold a la carte,
You have to end up buying the accessories and you should count yourself lucky if, like Casey, your accessory actually lasts through more than one device.
But I don't think, you know, we're not like we're going to reach a point where they say, well, we're done with the cameras.
We're not going to improve them anymore.
And I also don't think Apple is going to do the thing where they say, let's make a camera race that's massive that will hold us for the next 10 years because that's just not the Apple way.
To that end, though, the Magic Keyboard, right?
Not the Folio, but the Magic Keyboard, the cantilever thing.
Mine is definitely showing its age after just a couple of years.
And I don't travel with my iPad.
I shouldn't say travel.
I don't bring my iPad everywhere.
I use it probably daily.
And I will often bring it in, like, the car or something if I'm going to be a passenger for a while.
But it is definitely showing its age.
Like, you know, some of the outer...
I don't know how to describe this, but, like, the outer thin layers kind of peeling away to show, like, the interior layer on some of the, like, edges in some spots.
And, yeah, it is a wear item at, what is this, like, $350 that I paid for this or something like that, whatever obscene amounts of money it is.
Yeah, $300.
I think it's, like, $300 and $350 for the two sizes.
Wait till you find out how much brake pads cost.
Yeah, right.
A lot of that's labor, though, so still.
Yeah.
Especially if you drive a German car, let me tell you.
But anyway, yeah, it's $300.
I think you are right, Marco.
Does the car's nationality make it drive faster and need more braking?
It does make the parts more expensive.
It makes the parts more expensive.
But I did play very briefly with Magic Keyboard Folio and the new iPad 10th generation.
I only spent just 30, 45 seconds with it.
But, I mean, it was nice.
I liked it.
I don't have too much to say about it.
I agree that kickstands are not really my jam because I do use my iPad on my lap, especially in the car, but not exclusively in the car, kind of a lot, and kickstands are not a great fit for that.
I do like the kind of tear-ability of this new Magic Keyboard Folio where you can just kind of tear the iPad off of it and the keyboard is kind of left behind and you still have the kickstand attached.
But honestly, it's not particularly hard to get the iPad out of the Magic Keyboard, the cantilevered Magic Keyboard itself.
So I don't think this is for me, obviously, but if you're a folio kickstand-y kind of person, then it's nice.
But yeah, my new iPad, I like it.
It is not a revolutionary change from the 2018 model, which I knew.
One of the things I like about it is that it does have 5G and much faster cellular because I am a huge fan, as I think we covered last week, huge fan of cellular iPads.
And so I am looking forward to being able to use this on my beloved, don't call it a park bench, but picnic table and hypothetically get my ridiculously fast speeds.
I was very flummoxed for a moment as I was doing the transfer from one iPad to the other because it wouldn't let me just port the cellular account.
And I was like, what?
And it said that it was there, but it was like grayed out.
Like I couldn't port it from the old iPad.
Oh, right.
This has actual physical SIM.
How quickly we forget what physical SIMs are.
So I just had a brain fart and I didn't even remember it.
Um,
It is a little weird, though, that this M2-equipped iPad Pro is on paper kind of sort of more powerful than the MacBook Pro I'm talking to you on right now.
I looked up Geekbench scores.
I only spent a moment on this, but I found a Geekbench score that I think is for an equivalent of my M1 Max MacBook Pro.
Single-core score, 1337, elite.
Multi-core, 10155.
So 1,337, 10,155.
On the M2 MacBook Air, because I couldn't find one on the iPad Pro, M2 MacBook Air, which hypothetically should be the same, single core is 1,930.
So a change of about 44%, if I did that math right.
So it's 1930 instead of 1337.
Multi-core score is down a bit, though.
8926 instead of 10155.
So in single core, anyway, this iPad is faster than my computer, even though iPadOS is crippling it in every measurable way.
But that's neither here nor there.
It's a weird feeling.
I'm not sure how I feel about that.
But nevertheless, it's fast.
I like it.
The transfer process was a little bit wonky, but all in all, it worked mostly okay.
One of the things that I really love about Apple, I just love this, is that there are times when there's a spinner...
And that's it.
It's just spinning.
I don't have a progress bar.
I don't have any feedback.
No sort of log or anything I can look at.
Just spinning.
You should count yourself lucky to have a spinner because the ailment that I see in a lot of Apple's UIs, they do this thing that I've been conditioned by years as a web developer never to do, which is you do something to go to the next step in a process.
Click a button, tap a link, enter something in a field or whatever.
And before you get to the point where it shows a spinner or any kind of progress, there is this long period of time where all the controls on the screen that you're on are still perfectly active, still sitting there.
That button that you pressed, it may have even highlighted when you pressed it.
It could be a button that says next, continue, save, update, whatever it is that you think you did.
You pressed it.
Maybe if you're lucky, you saw it highlight when you pressed it.
And there's this period of time where the page is just staring at you going like,
Yeah, here I am on the screen that you just thought you interacted with, right?
Nothing on the screen, absolutely nothing.
And then six seconds later, oh, a spinner appears.
It's like that is the worst because I understand maybe it's like there's a lag or a server thing or whatever, but because on the web you're accustomed to the idea that you are distant from your user, you must provide immediate feedback that says...
You know, don't hit, you know, disable the submit button, like cover the screen with something immediately.
Client side, let them know that you have successfully performed an operation that we are then going to do something about.
You don't have to click anymore.
Don't try to interact with the screen anymore.
You're done with this screen.
You have to communicate that immediately, not in a way that requires you to get a response from a server before you do that.
I cannot count the number of things I've done with Apple, including things like buying stuff or whatever, where you interact with the screen and then it just sits there staring at you, looking exactly like it did before you interacted with it.
And you're like, okay, did that work?
Should I press it?
Oh, a spinner.
Okay.
Okay.
the worst the worst apple there should be apple university there should i know that's not what the apple university about but there should be an apple university that reminds people of the basic rules of user interface let the user know immediately that they have successfully done the thing and do not let them attempt to do anything else i'm smart enough not to go back and start stabbing at the screen but how many people are just like oh did that work let me press it again let me press it again disable the buttons cover the screen put something up immediately anyway rant over
well so I was at the stage enter iPad passcode you know and it says the passcode you use to unlock this iPad will also be used to access save passwords and other sensitive data you store in iCloud so I entered it and the next or continue or done whatever button in the upper right hand corner of this like window turned into a spinner
and i waited and i waited and i waited i have no idea what's happening it would be super cool apple if you could give me any amount of feedback as to whether or not this is progressing so eventually i mashed down on the lock button and it puts puts up a little like alert saying oh you haven't done setting up you're you haven't finished setting up what do you want to do how long was eventually
I don't know.
I think I had like five minutes, maybe.
And maybe it was spinning.
Who knows?
Who knows?
I feel like the amount of time that you wait in an indeterminate spinner is sort of like it's always based on your estimation of how long you think this should take and also your estimation of the what are the consequences if I interrupt this in the middle and it screws stuff up.
Setting up an iPad, consequences don't seem that bad.
You haven't actually done anything yet.
It's not filled with your stuff yet, or even if you can always redo it.
So you might have not much patience there, but there are other operations where you're like, I'm literally going to let this sit overnight because if it screws up, you know, I'm going to have a real problem.
Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more.
But please, Apple, I know you're allergic to providing any sort of, I don't know, useful frigging feedback about what's going on.
But it would be nice if, hey, I don't know, maybe you could give us a little bit of feedback other than it's spinning.
It's spinning.
It's spinning.
Like, come on, please.
At least you got the spinner.
That's true.
So anyway, so what I ended up doing was shutting it down, restarting it.
And to Apple's credit, like, you know, everything came up and when I went to settings, it was like, oh, you're not finished setting up your iPad.
Let's continue where you left off.
And by not finished setting up, it means you haven't signed up for Apple Arcade yet.
Yeah, true.
But the most annoying thing... More ads.
Just more ads.
So the most annoying thing about it, though, in my personal opinion, is TestFlight apps, which maybe this is like a... It's fine for Marco, Merlin, whatever sort of thing.
But TestFlight apps don't do any sort of auto-downloading.
Like, TestFlight itself auto-downloads, but then you have to go in and, like, download them all.
And on the iPad, anyway, it didn't put them back in the location, the icons back in locations.
I wanted the icons, you know, from the last iPad.
I think it might have done that properly on the phone, I don't recall.
But that was really frustrating.
I'd really like it if Apple could fix that.
The time estimate it gave for the transfer was under-promised and over-delivered, so I was happy about that.
It took me about an hour and change, I think, something along those lines.
But all in all, it's nice.
The hover thing is cool.
I mean, I don't know if it's really doing much for me, but it's neat that it works in that it, you know, when you're using the pencil as kind of like a pointer, it feels very similar to basically the same, in fact, as having the point, you know, the mouse pointer or cursor or whatever, the mouse pointer.
you know, jiggling around the screen, which is neat.
I like it.
And when you're writing a note, you can see a little dot for where you're about to start writing and notes.
Yeah, I like it.
There's nothing about this that has revolutionized my world yet, but I am happy to have a four year newer battery.
I'm happy to have a four year less, you know, damaged screen.
Not that I dropped it or anything.
It's just the other one has a lot of scratches.
I'm happy to have 5G.
So far, so good.
And I'm genuinely very, very happy that the old accessories do indeed, they're the ones I care about anyway, do indeed still work with this, which was a welcome change.
I mean, I knew that was supposed to be the case, but it's not the way it often is.
So I'm pretty happy about that.
So far, I would say if you're coming off a 2018 or newer model, eh, I mean, do you want to spend a whole bunch of money or do you not?
But if you're coming off of something older or perhaps not an iPad Pro, heck yeah, man, go for it.
It's good stuff.
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All right, let's talk about Ventura 16.1, iPadOS 16.1, and so on.
I really, really, really want to talk about Stage Manager, but let's save that for a moment.
Did you know system preferences on Ventura is a hot friggin' mess?
Oh my God, why didn't anyone say anything about this?
It's terrible.
I think you mean system settings.
Whatever.
No, it is bad.
It doesn't look good.
I don't think it functions well.
I think there are decent bones here, and I think it could get better, but it is not good right now.
Do not want it.
Yeah, I've only used it briefly.
So, you know, we were saying earlier about how, you know, the login items thing has changed.
There are areas of it that are better.
You know, there is new functionality.
There is old functionality that has been improved.
Like some of the ways that you had to give permissions for certain things earlier or like approve permissions.
kernel extension and stuff like that like the way in the old system preferences app was a disaster anything that had like the lock on the bottom of the screen you had to like first notice that unlock it yeah you know like that that there were so many things about the old settings app the system preferences app rather uh that were terrible and that needed to be improved and
And so this is not to say that we should necessarily keep it the same forever the way it used to be.
However, the new settings app is just a really cheap and crappy feeling.
It feels like a web view.
It feels like a non-native app.
It feels like something that we would make fun of.
Web views are resizable.
oh yeah yeah like it it just it does not feel like a high quality app it does not fit in with the system at all it is like all the little dumb little like ios switches that i have to now control with a mouse awkwardly like apple has been arguing for years touch interfaces and computer like desktop laptop interfaces and
And it's best to design them differently and optimize for their respective inputs and input methods.
I guess all that logic went out the window because now they've brought over iOS switch controls and stuff that make no sense on the Mac in the name of, I guess, consistency.
But I think it's more like they don't have any more engineers working inside of Apple who know AppKit.
And so they're forced to use...
all of this SwiftUI stuff.
I don't know.
But whatever it is, they've changed this major part of the Mac.
The settings app is a major part of the Mac.
Alongside some of the good they have done with the additional functionality and the rethinking of some of the crappier areas of the old sister preferences app, alongside of that, they've wrapped this all in this
Pretty terrible UI.
Both the technical bones of it, I think, are really kind of sloppy.
And more importantly, the UI design of it.
Technical bugs you can improve over time.
The whole UI paradigm and the UI design of it are just terrible.
And they just feel crappy.
They don't feel like you're using a Mac.
It feels like you're using a Samsung-made web app that's made to look... Remember when the iPhone first came out and it was the hot thing?
People made these WordPress themes that would make your WordPress blog appear like an iPhone app when viewed in mobile Safari.
Remember those?
And they were horrible.
Like fake table views and the whole rigmarole.
Yeah.
And like, you know, fake navigation bars, you know, and so it would it would be like skinned like an iOS app in your WordPress blog when viewed in mobile Safari back forever ago.
Right.
And but you'd use it as the user and it just felt like a crappy web page version of an iOS interface, not like the real thing.
I feel like that's insulting to web pages because if I had given this job, hey, we have system preferences.
It's a mess.
We need to be redesigned.
Give that to any web designer.
They will design something better than this because they'll understand the job.
They'll know they have to make it responsive.
They'll make it work well in the allotted space.
Maybe if you make the window wider, it will expand into that place.
The state of the art of web design could tackle this problem.
It is basically an information architecture problem.
which is a discipline that maybe by a different name, you know, maybe they call it under the umbrella of UX these days.
But I used to be a big thing back in the early days of the web.
And the problem was, oh, we've got this big company, we got to make a website.
How do we make that?
How do we organize that and make it tractable and able to serve the user's needs?
Because when someone comes to our website, they probably want to accomplish something.
Do they want to find out what the hours of a restaurant is?
Do they want to download the menu?
Do they want to find out what the locations of our stores are?
Do they want to shop for something and buy it?
Do they want to find out information about our products?
Like, do they want to find a contact address?
Like, that's just information architecture.
I mean, faced with an entire website for like a big company, web designers would come in and they would figure out how do we organize this information?
How do we present it to people in a way that they can navigate it, that they understand where they are, that they can find what they want and accomplish their task.
And that is a, you know, I mean, it's not the web is not the place where all those disciplines came out, but it is the most recent and most closely analogous problem to organizing system settings.
When I look at this, I say any half decent web designer would have done better at this.
Forget about the technologies behind it.
I think if you did it as a web view, it would still be nicer than this.
But what they wouldn't do is make it a fixed size two pane master detail thing with multiple levels of hidden hierarchy that within each thing pops up additional windows on top of everything that look incredibly janky.
There are places in this thing where there's like, you have to know that the little eye in a circle next to something is actually a button that leads you to more settings in a pop up window that displays over the top of things.
And there's also a button called options.
And there's also a little button with three dots on it and a downward facing arrow.
All on the same screen.
What is this?
Have they ever seen a computer before?
No one on the web would do that.
No one would ever put those controls on the web because nobody has any idea where they are.
It is such a mess.
It makes me so angry.
And this is setting aside any bugs of like, oh, it doesn't display properly and something is truncated or whatever.
this just i mean i i'm getting angry about this because like during the whole time it's like oh it's just a beta it'll get better you'll see whatever and i held my tongue because let's see what it looks like but in the end the like you said marco the bones of this thing they're they're wrong they're bad and you know comparing it to the web is like seriously this is a web design task it's it's not that tricky it's not as big as a big corporate website but that's it could it should have been tackled in that way and when i look at this i think about
Windows, which I have limited experience with, but you know, anyone who's used Windows had seen the various runs that Microsoft has taken at reimagining and reorganizing their system settings from Windows 7 to Windows 8 to Windows 10.
I'm not going to particularly endorse the approaches that they've taken, but every single one of those approaches to redesigning settings in Windows is more thoughtful and better executed than system settings in Ventura.
And when I'm saying something in Windows was not necessarily better, but more thoughtful and better executed.
When I look at settings in Windows 10, I can understand how they arrived at this, how they put their minds together, the meetings they have.
I said, here's what we have to organize.
Here's the things that most people do.
How can we put that in a UI?
And I know it's working because I have no idea where anything is in Windows.
And I can navigate it to get my jobs done.
It annoys me because I think it is...
a wrapper over the real settings that are underneath and you got to click properties to get to the thing you really want down in some UI from 1995.
Like I'm not endorsing the windows approach, but it's clear that it was better thought out than this.
Cause this is like, this strikes me as something where they had too small of a team and not the right people on this team, because what you needed, not that you needed web designers, but you needed information architects and,
And UI designers and then secondarily, a very good tech team to actually do the hard work.
And I don't want to discredit the hard work of actually making a new UI and all these very technical things under the covers because they didn't change all the underlying stuff, but they have to put a new UI and all that's a huge task.
They accomplished that task, but the UI they put on top looks like an afterthought and it makes me angry.
Yeah, it looks bad.
It feels bad.
It does not look or feel anything like anything else on the Mac, nor should it.
Like nothing else on the Mac should look like that.
Don't copy this in your app.
Yeah, please don't.
And I hope this isn't the direction Apple's bringing their other apps.
But that's an interesting question.
All the Apple apps on the platform, their preferences windows look like the old system preferences.
Are they going to go through all of their apps and redo all their preferences to look like system settings now?
I hope not.
But it's also weird that they're different now.
It just...
Apple is so rapidly losing the ability to make Mac software.
And it's very concerning for the company that makes the most and the most important Mac software.
Like, it's been a long time since they've made a great Mac app, let's be honest.
But, I mean, this is another level of...
willfully throwing away the things that make a Mac good.
And it's not to say that you can never update those things and change those things with changing times.
You can, and you should, and they should, and they have.
And not all the changes have been good, but at least, you know, they have moved the Mac forward over time.
But I don't know how anybody can look at this and say, this is good.
The only defenses I've ever heard about it were people who play whataboutism by pointing out flaws in the old system preferences app.
Which, again, those are valid.
There are tons of flaws in the old system preferences app that could be made better and should be made better.
And it could use an overhaul.
It needed an overhaul.
I'm not saying it's not an overhaul.
It absolutely needs to be overhauled.
And all of the things that any complaint that you hear is like, oh, I can't find anything.
Like, there's always going to be unfamiliarity when you have an overhaul.
But the old one needed an overhaul.
It's just not this overhaul.
It needed a better overhaul.
An overhaul that was better thought out.
In some ways, this...
you know it constrained itself too much to the old style in particular the fixed size window and it just like that that seems to dictate the whole i can picture in my head the designery you know dribble style mock-up of like what a real modern system preference would be like jason snell talked about it in a few of his articles we'll put links in the show notes of like imagine if this had been like
Even if it's just been as good as a decent iPad port of a phone app where it becomes a three column view or you have an actual hierarchy where things are organized better, where when you get to the leaf nodes, they look reasonably well thought out instead of the weirdest jumble of controls you've ever seen in your entire life.
I wish I should find the ones with the little eye and the like the eye and the options button, all the other things like you look at this and as a Mac user, as a web user, as an iOS user, you have no idea what's a control where it might lead to.
It just caused it to crash by clicking around in it.
There are some clicks too, but whatever.
It's baffling to me that the things that are in the detail pane, that they think that is a Mac UI.
I don't know what it is.
It's not even a good web page.
Yeah, it's
You're right.
I guess comparing it to a web page earlier, and what I was really saying was it's like those old iOS themes of WordPress, which were terrible, but it's like the Mac UI version of that.
It's trying to look like a Mac UI, sort of, and also trying to look like an iPad UI, sort of, and it's doing a terrible job at both of those things, and it ends up looking and feeling and working horribly
horribly and it feels like again like it's like it's like those whole WordPress themes like it feels like so or like you know you ever have like some you know some crappy Linux window manager thing that tries to theme itself to look like a Mac it's it's not even that good it's worse than those it is a terrible imitation UI Samsung makes better UIs now than that and Samsung rips off Apple style better than that
How this shipped... Who approved this?
Okay, have a project in the company to redo the system preferences app.
Yeah, it was getting old.
But who...
approved this design direction and who made the call presumably maybe this spring sometime to say we're going to get this shipped in this release because neither of those things should have happened this design should never have gotten past initial review and whoever's above that maybe it's federighi should never have said this is ready to ship in this version of the os neither of those like those are two massive failures at probably pretty high levels in the company
Again, this keeps happening.
What's going on over there?
I try to cut them slack and I try to make sure we always celebrate all the good stuff that's going out of the company because there's a lot of it.
But man, the same problems keep happening.
What's going on?
Are they learning?
Are they trying to get better?
Do they even think it's a problem?
I don't know the answer to any of those is yes.
I just put the little screenshot of my little friend that I was describing in our Slack channel if you want to take a look at it.
For those at home, if you want to take a look at it, if you have Ventura, go to the network thing.
It's the, like, third item down on the sidebar.
And then scroll to the bottom, and you get this friendly fellow just peeking at you over there.
It's a three-dot dropdown?
Like...
so like yeah so what the ios and the web convention is three dots means like a menu with more stuff and that kind of came from the phone where there's not a lot of room on the phone and if you want to indicate like there's the hamburger thing with three lines and variations on that to say there's a menu but also the three dots it's a convention we're familiar with from the phones where space is constrained i am on a 6k display and this window can't get any bigger than it is and at the very bottom there is three dots and also a downward facing chevron and that is not a mac control
i don't know what it is now can you guess what's can you guess what's under that without clicking on it it's the network thing and you see network and it shows it's just a linear list of items that are making very poor use of the space each of which has a chevron on the right because of course there's multiple layers of hierarchy in this window that can't get any wider right uh with no animations between them um and then at the very very bottom next to the help question mark there is three buttons in a chevron
A lot of things in this, like you're helped by knowledge of the old system preferences because basically, look, if you knew something exists in the old system preferences and you're pretty sure it still exists here, but you don't see it where you expect, try clicking all the secret buttons.
Click all the little eyes, click all the little chevrons, and maybe at the very bottom, there's a thing lurking that has three dots and a downward facing arrow.
Or maybe there's an advanced button, or maybe there's an option button.
Or maybe there's all three of those in a single pane.
It's not good.
Cool.
Yeah, so system preferences, it's bad.
System settings, not preferences.
Whatever.
Because as we've been complaining in Slacks and everything about this, I'm so used to writing sysprefs.
It's the shorter way, you know, it's S-Y-S space P-R-E-F-S.
But I can't say sysets.
P-R-E-F-S.
Syssettings.
And when I complained about it, it makes me type more.
Yeah, I'm not enjoying it.
By the way, that's one of the most important updates when you're updating a Mac app for Ventura.
You've got to change all your preferences menu items to say settings, which I did.
They say preferences when you run it on pre-Ventura systems, which is another, you know, you have to be careful to do that.
And so you have to change all your help text.
It's great writing the help text.
It says, go to the menu and select settings or preferences.
And you have to explain which OS systems apply to every time you mention in help text what menu item people have to go to.
You've got to do this little dance.
Lots of fun.
Cool.
You know what else is lots of fun?
Watching the spectacular ways in which stage manager breaks on both iPad and on Mac OS.
Again, did anyone, why didn't anyone say that this is a mess?
Because holy frigging crap, this is a mess.
I feel like it's way more stable on Mac OS.
I think it's more interesting and useful, for me anyway, on iPad OS.
But it is unusable on iPad OS.
Like, it is so, so bad.
It's so bad on iPad.
And on the Mac...
I don't care for it, but it mostly works.
I don't know.
I think part of the problem is I'm a devout Spaces user, as we've talked about a few times recently.
I really like using Spaces.
I think Spaces are great.
I like having different Spaces, and even in some cases, like having one or two full-screen apps in a space.
I am a heavy, heavy Spaces user.
This is why...
I could never get away from the Magic Mouse or now the Magic Trackpad because I need those gestures, you know, two-finger swipe and the Magic Mouse, three fingers on the trackpad, in order to go between spaces.
It's just part of how I work.
I feel like Stage Manager is like a...
crappy version of Spaces, and that's probably unfair because maybe it's just Spaces for a different purpose, but from my point of view, it's like a crappy version of Spaces.
On the Mac, I tend to have one space on the Ultrafine, so on my accessory monitor, I have one space that's maybe two-thirds Slack and one-third Messages and tiled, so they're both, you know, they're not literally full-screen, but, you know, they're in full-screen mode, tiled two-thirds and one-third.
and when i have stage manager turned on when i swiped to the when i would swipe to that space messages the first party app would be black for a beat and then the ui would show up swipe away come back black oh there it is which was not annoying at all uh and then the multi-monitor support in general on mac os seemed really really wonky i don't know it just it didn't seem right to me things that were
happening on the left-hand monitor would occasionally affect the right-hand monitor, but then occasionally they wouldn't.
It was super weird.
On iPadOS, I forget specifically what I was doing, but I think I was trying to share something in a share sheet and then send it as a text message or an iMessage and type into that iMessage and the keyboard was not within the window of the message window or something like that, or the on-screen keyboard was totally out of whack.
There's a bunch of on-screen keyboard bugs in iPad OS 16.1.
I thought it was just the betas, but now I'm pretty sure I'm on the release.
I removed the beta profile, and it says there's no new updates or whatever.
And lots of people have been reporting situations where they're on their iPad, and they're supposed to be able to use the keyboard to enter text in the thing, and it doesn't work.
Some people were saying they would see a flash, or it would appear and disappear.
My bug is you put the insertion point in a text field,
And no keyboard appears in any orientation.
Just none.
There's no way out of it.
The only way out of it is to leave the app or restart the iPad.
And that's not great.
It's like trying to use your Mac and all of a sudden someone steals your keyboard and won't give you another one.
Because I suppose I could try to find a Bluetooth keyboard to connect to my iPad to enter text.
But if I'm in the middle of doing something and the keyboard literally won't come up, that's a pretty frustrating bug in a shipping OS.
Yep.
So stage manager, all the rumors were true.
It's a mess.
System settings, all the rumors were true.
It's a mess.
I haven't yet tried the photos shared library, whatever it's called, the shared photo library thing.
I'm very keen to try it, but I haven't gotten around to updating Aaron's stuff yet, and that's the whole purpose of this is to...
is for Aaron to finally get to see all of the family's photos in the same way you, John, would finally get to see all the family's photos because I and Tina, or Tina and myself, are the keepers of the official family photo albums or photo libraries.
So have you been playing with the shared library stuff yet?
I certainly have.
So first of all, we didn't mention this, but on Ventura, like the word on the street is that it seems pretty good for an initial release.
And as predicted on a past show, I knew I would not be able to like wait the appropriate amount of time to install this OS and start using because I've been waited for whatever is a decade and 12 years, whatever, for the shared library feature.
So I installed Ventura on every single Mac in the house on day one.
And I updated all the phones.
16.1.
I just went all in.
I did massive amounts of backups first, but I went all in because I just, I want this feature.
And to get the benefit of this feature, you kind of have to update everybody because I didn't want to like mix and match.
And, you know, so...
my experience so far having it's wednesday i installed i've been doing everything on monday everything's been fine in terms of os stability compatibility or whatever all the complaints about system settings are like it's annoying but like things aren't crashing didn't break a bunch of my software it's been very stable for me for whatever that's worth three days experience on like five different macs i give it a thumbs up and i did this because i wanted to use the photo shared library um
And I, I tried to be cautious about it.
Like, so the first thing is now that it's really real installed, like the first time I ever used my real Apple IDs in this, whatever.
My first decision I had to make was who will create the shared library?
Will it be my wife who owns the current real family library?
Or would it be me?
I'm not sure what the correct move to do there is, but it's kind of important because it's difficult to change your mind on that in the future.
Either way, we're on like an iCloud family plan.
We all share like the family.
So it's not like a storage thing.
We don't have, you know, individual store.
I think it's like all big one family, whatever it is, the Apple one giant pool of storage thing.
So that's fine.
I kind of regret having my wife's Apple ID own the family library because that means, as we discussed in the past episodes, I still have to log in as her on my Mac to do stuff because shared photo library does not share albums or book projects or slideshows or any other stuff that I work on.
So I have to be in her library to mess with those things because I've got years worth of those things in there and I, you know, make new ones there.
So it's not like I can be logged into myself.
I'm like, well, maybe if I own the shared library,
for whatever that's worth whatever quote-unquote owning the shared library even means uh maybe i can slowly transition the library to me but in the end i wimped out and i said she's gonna own the shared library again i'm not sure what owning means the something i read probably on six colors from snell said basically like the uh the storage for photos in a shared library like the icloud storage is attributed to whoever created the shared library and
And again, not that it matters storage wise, but I'll just have her own.
So I created the shared library from her account.
And then as I was going to start cautiously playing with this feature now that everybody's updated and it occurred to me something I hadn't really thought about before.
So my photo library is pushing a terabyte these days.
It used to be on a 500 gig drive.
It outgrew that.
Now it's pushing a terabyte.
Um, and both I and my wife's Mac, we have four terabyte boot drives and our four terabyte boot drives pretty much hold all of our stuff.
Plus a complete copy of our photo library.
Right.
And then with some room to spare.
Right.
And I figured, okay, if I go through this in my head and I make this shared photo library and I start moving essentially all of the photos for my wife's, you know, photo library into the shared library, cause that's the family thing.
and I have photos set to download originals, that will mean that on my Mac, where currently, if I log in as my wife, she's got the full photo library with download original set, I'll have a second copy of every single one of those photos in my photo library.
Because even though they're the same photos on the cloud side, as far as my Mac is concerned, there are two users, me and my wife,
who both have iCloud Photo Library turned on, who both have the option check to download originals.
And it fits when it's one terabyte of photos in my wife's account.
But when I, because on my Mac, I have a download originals from my photo library too.
I think that counts for the shared photo library as well.
So I'm like, I can't actually fit two copies of my photo library on my Mac, on my boot drive.
So I wasn't sure what to do about that, but I figured, well, I mean, my photo library is not really used.
Like the only thing that's in my photo library that's not in the family library are things like when I take pictures of receipts or random, you know, things that aren't that I'm not going to keep.
Right.
And there's a lot of those, but pretty much everything else is a copy of in the big library.
So I decided the only way I could deal with this is to change the option in photos on my account to be optimized storage instead of download originals.
And I was hoping that would allow me not to blow through my storage.
So that's what I did.
And then I started moving photos into it.
So I went to her computer, you know, because I figured why not, instead of pushing back and forth on accounts on my computer, I went to her computer and I dragged, you know, the recent five or 10 photos into the shared library.
And then I looked over at my computer and I saw them appear.
I'm like, cool.
Then I selected a hundred of them.
And I said, you know, move to Shared Photo Library.
I got a message about, like, some of these photos haven't been saved.
They have to be saved first before you can move them to the Shared Photo Library.
I'm like, what?
Saved?
They're saving in the Photos app on the Mac?
What does that mean?
But the dialog had a button that said save.
I'm like...
i guess save i had never seen that before i'm testing with the betas but i hit save does it mean download i she her library has always been set to download originals it has never not been set to that everything is downloaded i don't know what you know anyway so i hit save and then you know so the magic of photos on the mac is when you do anything you
If there is any kind of progress indication, if you're lucky, there will be one.
And if it is there, it is cleverly hidden at the bottom of a large scrolling region.
So the sort of detail view on photos is usually scrollable.
If you scroll to the very, very bottom of that thing, if you're lucky, you will see some completely inaccurate progress description there.
right so it's the most well hidden progress indication and it lies and it doesn't make any sense and i you know i spent a lot of time with fsc usage and lsof trying to figure out is anything literally doing anything like i want to see you know i want to see file system system calls flying by and the the photo library de-processed to let me know something is happening because that progress bar has not moved in hours anyway i'm getting ahead of myself so eventually it let me you know put like 100 photos in there then i went over looked at my mac and i saw the 100 photos appear i'm like
all right and so over the course of a few days i got bolder and bolder and started selecting larger and larger collections of photos from her library i had her set to show me just her personal library i would select photos and i would either right click or click on the image menu and from either the right click context menu or the image menu in mac photos i would say move n photos to shared photo library right and
As I kept doing that, I eventually got to the point where I was selecting thousands of photos.
And once you select thousands of photos, whether you right click or you click the image menu in the menu bar, you get a beach ball.
You just got to power through that beach ball.
You just have to let it spin for a little while because what it's basically doing is figuring out, I guess, how many photos you've selected and maybe like pre-flighting them to say there's unsaved changes or honestly, I don't know what it's doing, but it blocks.
It blocks hard.
It beach balls.
Does not mean that it's broken, but you do have to wait.
And then after you wait, be careful that you don't sort of, you know, mouse off of that menu accidentally.
Because you've got to do the beach ball all over again once that thing disappears.
Oh, no.
It doesn't redisplay.
Yeah.
And so I kept doing it in batches.
And what you'll see when I do it in batches is...
It will show the hidden progress bar, the progress at the bottom, kind of like fruit on the bottom, yogurt from Dan and the progress at the bottom.
You scroll all the way down there.
And what it'll say is eventually like five or 10 seconds after you perform the command, you'll see a thing that says,
moving 10 photos to shared library moving 20 photos to share library moving 30 it's a number that counts up it counts up and then eventually it starts counting down so it's going to count up to a number that is close to the number of photos you selected and then it will count down the interesting thing is when you do the move command from the menu about three seconds later all the pictures that you told to move disappear from your view
Oh, cool.
They all disappear.
You said to move them, right?
I think they instantly appear in the shared view.
But if you're just looking at the three views you have is show me my personal library, show me my shared library, or show me both.
And I'm just in personal library because I'm winnowing down the personal library.
And it will tell you how many photos are in your personal library.
I'm trying to drain that pool, right?
So they disappear immediately.
After they disappear, at the bottom will be a progress thing that counts up and then counts back down.
So it's pretty fast.
The number tends to go in, I think, in increments of like 100 or so every few seconds.
So it's like, just go someplace else, do something, and come back.
While I was doing this, I had photos running on my Mac, and I would see how long does it take between the time they disappear there and the time they appear on my computer, and that was pretty fast.
It was actually shockingly fast.
Maybe it was just the thumbnails or whatever, but I had it set to download originals, so...
I did that over the course of the past few days.
If you look in the Slack channel, you'll see my end results here, the graphic that I just put in.
This is the message that appears on my wife's photos application now when you launch it and switch to personal library.
Personal library is empty.
There are no photos or videos in your personal library.
From the little person button in the toolbar, change your library view to the shared library to move photos and videos to the personal library.
I drained 155,000 photos and videos out of her personal library and put them into the shared library.
And the reason I did this is because as I thought about it, like I was, I did it cautiously in small batches.
The biggest batch I did was 30,000 photos.
And honestly, I didn't see much of a difference between using 30,000 and 10,000.
I didn't have the guts to do any more than that.
I tried to do 50,000 at one point.
It told me there were unsaved ones and I backed away and went for smaller batches.
The reason I went all in on this is because I have about 17 complete backups of this photo library before Ventura that are all fresh and sitting in drawers and on drives and in synologies in various places.
And if this hoses my library, I want to be able to restore from one of those and not lose anything.
So I need to go all in fast.
I need to fail fast.
Because I don't want to, if I did it slowly over the course of months and slowly move stuff in there, what I did want to find out was three months from now, oh, the library's completely hosed and corrupted, and you have to restore it from a backup that's like three months old, right?
Or you've overwritten that backup with the corrupt Ventura backup, you know, in some cases.
So I'm all in.
In my library with the both view, it says 185,000 photos and videos.
That's awesome.
And I have to say that despite the beach balling and everything,
shockingly fast, if you count like the amount of minutes it took to move 155,000 things, obviously it's not moving the data.
I know that because for one thing, I have Google Drive running on my wife's computer that is uploading images or whatever.
Google Drive didn't make a peep during this.
It did not see any new, any action going on in the photo library in terms of in the file system.
So this process of moving them as you would expect is probably just doing a series of update statements on a SQLite database somewhere, right?
It is not actually moving any photos.
It's probably not moving them in the cloud on their, you know, cloud storage.
And it doesn't seem like it's moving them on my local disk either.
If it was, if it was touching those photos at all in any way, this would have taken forever.
But I moved the entire library in like probably 24 hours ish, like casually doing batches of five, 10, eventually 20,000.
and they appeared on my computer in my library so fast it was shocking i don't even know how it's doing it i don't know if it's downloaded them all yet they appear on my phone as well so i'm going to give this feature again despite the beach balls and the terrible progress all of which are you know pre-existing conditions as they say in the insurance business i'm going to give this a thumbs up i think it actually works it didn't hose my libraries i never got any errors there were various points where i had to be very patient casey and wait much more than five seconds or five minutes and
to see anything because sometimes it says like saving or whatever and it would say like uploading 20 photos to iCloud it's like what are you uploading to iCloud just just let it be like that if you come back 15 minutes later and it still says uploading 20 photos to iCloud just let it sit come back in a half an hour that message will be gone and it will say moving 10,957 photos to shared library it will eventually hopefully get the job done
I have to say I was surprised at how fast it was.
All the testing that I had done with Ventura was with toy libraries with like 100 or so photos in it with fake Apple IDs.
This is my real photo library with my real stuff in it.
And it went pretty fast.
And then one of the weird...
Sort of side effects of having this situation is if I switch my wife's view to her personal library, it has no photos in it.
And because of the way the photos app works, like all the albums in the sidebar, they show you a little thumbnail.
I don't know, like it picks it.
Like I say, you have an album with 50 pictures in it.
It picks one of the pictures from the album and makes that the thumbnail.
I don't know why it does that.
They're so small, you can't see them anyway, right?
But when you switch to personal library and there's nothing in the personal library, all of those thumbnails disappear.
And we're like, oh, my God, did it erase all my albums?
No, but when you're in personal library view, if you click on that album, there's nothing in it because your view is my personal library only and there's nothing in the personal library.
So when you click on any of your albums, like, oh, my God, my albums, they're all empty.
There's nothing in them.
It's all gone.
You just switch to show either shared library or both and they come back.
And doing that, switching those modes is very fast.
But it also affects the sidebar, which I think is super weird.
Like, I know I switched to personal view, but the fact that it makes the whole sidebar flicker and change the icons, like, don't make me think all the photos are gone just because the right-hand side view is filtered.
You can leave the thumbnails on.
Everything's fine.
Like, it freaked me out in the beginning.
I actually took screenshots of it.
I'm like, is it changing something?
It's not changing anything.
It's just your view of the system.
So, again, this is in my wife's library.
The albums are not shared as part of the shared library, but I'm logged in as my wife.
just i'm just going to keep it on the both of you i suppose oh and the final thing is you have the option of like should it suggest to you when you should add stuff you know if you add things if you're with somebody else or if you're at your home there's a bunch of these options surprisingly one of the options is not as far as i can tell the option to say hey everything i take a picture of with my phone put it in the shared library that is not one of the options i don't think there's any way to do that which is kind of disappointing because that would be a nice option now but either way once i found out that wasn't an option i said i'll just put it on manual
Because now what I'll do instead of connecting my phone to my wife's computer, using image capture to take things off of it because the photos application cannot handle how many photos are on my phone.
I have to use image capture like Casey, like an animal.
Oh, slow down, slow down.
That's not what I do.
I used to do that like a year or two ago.
what i do now is i make a temporary bespoke photos library you know i do the like what is it hold option and double click on the photos icon make a new library do the import there and then immediately export to disk and then i use image capture just for deletions purposes oh my god the only reason i'm using image capture is because the photos lost the ability to correctly show the photos on my phone for whatever reasons i would
use image capture to pull them.
And the tricky part is knowing I have a smart folder that says like John's phone that lets me know what is the last photo I imported from my camera because that lets me know which ones I have to pull now, right?
Like based on the timestamp and everything.
It doesn't have to do any of that anymore.
Now I just go look at my personal library and if there's anything in my personal library that's not in the shared library, it's just in the personal library view.
I just select the images that I want and I right click them and say move.
And doing that for batches that are not 10,000 or 30,000 photos is,
actually pretty fast and so that will be my new workflow i'll just manually move them over when i need to same thing with my wife's thing she has an empty personal library as she fills that up it's real easy to go to personal library select all right click move to shared photo library again doing it with sane numbers of photos really fast not you know it's it's hopefully not going to be a problem so that's my plan for the workflow i don't have a solution to the to the deduping situation
ideally you'd be able to do what i used to do with itunes which was never recommended but i did it for years and it was fun i used to have my itunes music library in users shared music users shared music because the user shared director on macOS people don't know is a directory that comes with default permissions such that more than one user on the system can read from it right uh you have to mess with the permissions to actually make it read writable by multiple people but you can you can use group permissions blah blah blah
And I'd have my whole iTunes library there.
So I could have multiple accounts pointing to the same iTunes library with only one copy of the music on the disk.
This is back when my music collection was one of the bigger things on my disk, the good old days.
Probably still true of Marco.
But it would be nice if you could do that with photos because if I wanted my photo library to not be optimized storage but to be download originals, I would have two copies of every single photo.
And that would be two terabytes of photos instead of one.
And that is not insignificant.
I would love it to be able to tell photos, hey, you know how these photos are the same in the storage backend, like in the cloud?
You can make them the same on a Mac too.
But the permissions model really does not lend itself a lot of that.
And it would be additional complexity.
And I kind of understand why they didn't do it, especially in a version one.
So I'm going to be all optimized storage over here.
And my wife's count, as always, will be download originals.
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We are not going to have the time to talk about all this ad-related kerfuffle in the App Store, which we will probably get to next week.
But I did want to briefly talk about... The good news, by the way, is that the ad thing is, like, on fire right now.
And Apple's, like, issuing statements and pausing things and everything.
So, like...
it's good that we're going to save it for next week because by the time next week comes, it will probably be pretty different.
Uh, and until then, you know, we can just kind of watch the fire burn.
Yeah.
By next week, Elon Musk will own Apple.
Oh God.
Can we not?
Oh, we're never doing that.
Anyway, uh, Joanna Stern, who, whose coverage I really, really tend to like, uh, did an interview with, uh, Federici and Joswiak, uh, I guess in the last 48 ish hours.
Uh,
And this was posted over at the Wall Street Journal.
And we'll put a link in the show notes.
The video is something like 35 minutes.
And other than being extremely quiet, I don't know if you guys noticed that, but the audio mix was very, very quiet, which was a little annoying.
I used Voice Boost.
Imagine that.
No, I thought the interview was okay.
I don't know, even though I really, really like Joanna Stern a lot, but I don't think she set herself up for success with some of the things she asked because they could clearly be interpreted as, tell me about what you're going to do in the future.
Even if that's not what she meant, it could have been interpreted that way.
And you know if an Apple executive could interpret a question as, tell me what you're doing in the future, they're going to clam up immediately.
which is exactly what Jaws and Federici did.
Sometimes I felt like they dodged questions.
Actually, oftentimes I felt like they dodged questions that they really didn't need to dodge.
Like at the end, I think it was the end, she said something like, what do you wish, I forget exactly what it was, but like, what do you wish computers did that they don't?
And they were like, well, that's telling you about our future plans.
And it was, I don't know, they were kind of being jerks.
I think they should have dodged that one because there's no way they can give an honest answer to that and not reveal future Apple plans.
Which I think was the point of the question.
I disagree.
I think if you look 10, 20, 30, 40 years out, you can talk about plenty of things that you might want a computer to do.
That is not even a fart in the wind right now.
When you're talking to bigwig Apple people, part of it is the experience with...
these specific big big apple people to know what things they'll answer and what things they want and what things not to waste your time on um and that only comes from just like you know seeing a million of these interviews right uh it's still difficult to know on the day but the other thing is like talking to these people about anything like literally anything they say is going to end up in some click-baity headline like i feel for them like just look at the headlines that came out of this story it is basically impossible for them to again an honest answer about like
50 years in the future, I wish my computer would do this fantastical thing that Apple really isn't actually working on.
It's not a glimmer in anyone's eye in Apple, but this is an idea.
And the stories the next day would be Apple planning on a holographic cube or whatever the hell they talk about.
There is no...
there is no way to give an honest answer and not get destroyed with the ridiculous headlights because they're Apple.
So that's why they're so cagey and cranky because it's just, you know, it's kind of like they've just been burned so many times.
And I think if you look at what they did in this interview, the main complaint that I think you've had, Casey, and other people had is like,
that they didn't seem to answer a lot of questions.
They dodged stuff.
And despite that, there are still ridiculous stories today that make huge logical leaps and mischaracterize what was said by the people.
So it's a rough situation for everybody.
It's a rough situation for the interviewer.
And as the interviewee, it's hard to be a good interviewee when you know, no matter how little you say, it's going to get, like, misinterpreted.
I agree with all of that.
But I don't know.
I think...
If you look at the Gruber interviews, oftentimes of these same two men, I think John does a far better job of riding the line of what are they willing or perhaps even excited to answer?
And what are they just going to clam up and say?
And I don't think Joanna Stern did a particularly good job of that.
He's better at it because he has much more experience.
and he knows apple more and has been on the beat for longer like it's kind of not a fair comparison but i think joanna well i would also say that they have very different goals and very different audiences too i mean you know it's it's not like you know joanna stern wasn't doing an interview for daring fireball readers and listeners like she was doing it for her audience which is extremely different over at the wall street journal you know compared to our little nerd sphere here and
And I think she has quite a lot of experience in this area, and I think she knew exactly what she was doing, but that's the kind of question that her audience wants her to ask.
Maybe.
I mean, people think they want you to ask that, but when you see the non-answers that they give, it's like, was that a constructive use of time?
I think the audience that wants it is also not satisfied because they didn't get the answers.
Anytime you watch an interview, the easiest thing to do as an audience member, and I do it all the time, especially on subjects I know a lot about, like Apple, is say,
here's the follow-up question I would have asked him, why didn't you ask it?
And there are many instances where that happened.
The one that rang out the strongest for me was when Vega was asking Federighi about app tracking transparency and how you've hurt your competitors and now you're doing advertising and whatever.
And Federighi gave this long answer that was like,
When we were, you know, the reason we do all this privacy stuff when, you know, my team gets together like it's the privacy team that is rolling this out.
It is not, you know, we're not doing this to make so we can make more service revenue like it's a it's a technology team and we are focused on privacy for its own merits and we have been for years and years.
This is not a new thing.
And this specific project you're talking about was run by, initiated by, and brought to completion by the privacy team that is interested in privacy for all the altruistic privacy reasons.
So when I, Craig Federighi, read stories that Apple, the only reason Apple did app tracking transparency is to screw Facebook and then so they can make the money on advertising.
It's ridiculous because I know that's not true because I'm in charge of the software org and I know exactly how this feature came to be.
And it sounds like a convincing answer.
You can see his passion saying like,
I'm not twisting my mustache and saying we're going to be super evil and we're going to go as ad revenue.
This is driven by the privacy team and we care about privacy.
I 100% believe that, right?
The follow-up question is, you're the head of software, though.
Apple is a big company.
There's a team that's responsible for running an ad business.
They don't work for you, but they are in the same company.
And when that part of the company looks at the big picture, they say, we're doing all this privacy stuff.
You know what?
That gives us an advantage in advertising.
You didn't do it to help the advertising people, but they're part of the same company and they sure as heck know what the consequences are going to be of app tracking transparency because it's their job to make money from ads.
And you
They are also part of Apple.
So when someone says Apple is rubbing their hands together at Facebook getting screwed because now they can make more ad revenue, no, Craig Federighi and the privacy team, that's not your motivation, but there's a whole other part of the company whose job it is to make money from ads, and they know and understand and take advantage of all of this.
So when Federighi gets indignant, he can get indignant for himself and say, don't blame me, Craig Federighi, for this because I didn't do a nasty thing, but it sounds like he's defending Apple, and it's like,
apple writ large sure as heck knows how this is going to impact facebook and is capitalizing on it and you can't like wash your hands of it departmentally and therefore say you know again the follow-up would be more more uh more concisely phrased than that it was like okay that's you but what about the advertising team what would they say if they were here and then you would have said well they're not here i'm here and i'm telling you what i think about it and
then I would say, well, Apple is bigger than just you.
And then we move on to the next question, which is why interviews are hard.
But anyway, it's very easy to second guess what people say and what follow-ups they do and don't provide.
But that's just the nature of armchair quarterbacking.
You're like, I wouldn't have thrown that pass or I would have not done a running play in that scenario.
It's easy to say while you sit on the couch eating your chips.
That is true.
And I think I'm selling Joanna short here.
I think her choices of questions were not stellar, but I still think that Federici and Joswiak stonewalled at times where I really don't think it was necessary, and that's just my opinion.
But nevertheless, one of the few times that we actually got something interesting out of them was a discussion with regard to, you know, Lightning versus USBC, and
In so many words, why are you still bothering?
Why are you still clinging to lightning?
Why is this still a thing?
And it was an interesting conversation that lasted a couple of minutes long, particularly Jaws doing most of the talking.
And there were a couple of quotes that I wanted to call out from that.
First of all, he said, the approach would have been better environmentally, like if we can stick with lightning, and it would be better for our governments not to be so prescriptive, which...
I think both of those things are actually true.
Even as someone who would like USB-C on his iPhone, I think it is probably environmentally better, potentially environmentally better, not to have a gazillion, billions of lightning cables suddenly become obsolete.
But debatable because the environmental advantage of USB-C is the sharing of infrastructure between devices that are not Apple devices and all the other devices in the world that are going to USB-C.
So...
He has some point, but I really don't think that the environmental angle is why they have stuck with lightning.
Oh, certainly not.
I think that's an excuse, not the reason.
Because the environmental argument, while there is some merit that like, okay, well...
if they do change over to USB-C, a whole bunch of lightning cables over the next few years will go into the trash.
That's true.
However, first of all, a large number of them would have gone to the trash during that same time period anyway because they are, as John said earlier, wear items.
But also, if we project outwards, like, okay, well, in the next X years, if we don't switch...
That's just more and more and more lightning cables that are going to keep being produced, keep being bought, keep being potentially lost or wasted or whatever.
Whereas if we switch now, then, yeah, it's temporarily painful.
But over the long term, I think it's clearly better to reduce e-waste and better for the environment to not have...
These two ongoing standards go indefinitely into the future.
It's way better and cleaner and more efficient and lots of different mechanisms to have one type of cable that you can use for everything.
And ignoring USB-C's many asterisks on that.
But there's one type of cable you can pretty much use for charging anything, at least.
Although, you ever have one of those devices that it has a USB-C hole to accept power, but it doesn't support USB PD?
And so it's oftentimes little cheap things.
And so you have to use one of those USB A to C cables.
And plug it into a USB-A charger.
But anyway, of course that exists, right?
But anyway, the environmental angle here is a good talking point, but it doesn't hold up to much critical thought and scrutiny.
And I think, again, they are correct.
This is a large installed base, and those cables are going to be thrown away in a few years.
But that was going to happen anyway for most of them.
And also, going forward, it's better to rip the Band-Aid off now, have that short-term pain now, because it will make a better future.
Yeah, I mean, the shared infrastructure argument, I think you'd have to do the math on that to figure out how long it would take to make up for the sudden burst of tractor lightning stuff.
But I mean, to be fair to Jaws, he didn't lean on that too much.
He threw it in as the talking point, but it's not like he was using that as an excuse.
I mean, he basically made the same arguments that we made when we've talked about this, which I still believe is like having governments prescribe the specific technical solution is not something that has a good history of fostering innovation, let's say.
uh and in this case it's kind of apple's own fault for coming to this because i still truly believe that apple would eventually have either gone to usbc or gone to you know you know no wires at all on their own but the timeline they were doing it on was not fast enough for the rest of the world and so it's you know like like so many things with apple they they were stubborn and took a little bit too long and ended up triggering an even worse government action that i don't particularly agree with the reasons we discussed on the last show but in the end the world will be a better place
place when apple goes to usbc and everything and apple it's your own stupid fault for forcing it so jaws gave the exact same arguments that i think we all gave about it's not great for the government to dictate the technical specifics and it's clear that it's clear that apple does not want to be told to do this and i think one of the most common uh clickbait headlines in this is you know jaws uh you know jaws react says that apple is going to usbc confirm the next iphone will have usbc he didn't say that at all
you don't listen to apple people said of course we will have to comply there as we've discussed there are many ways that you can comply with that law first of all it doesn't go into effect until 2024 or whatever someone was saying in the chat room that it went through the past the final hurdle so it is really the law of the land but as we discussed on a past show with the timelines the way they are it might be the 2024 iphone
that has these changes in it and second of all you can comply by just getting rid of lightning and not replacing with anything that's also compliant so headlines that you know confidently declare that apple has confirmed that the next iphone will have the next iphone will have usbc as soon as facts not in evidence as they say in court right uh and yeah i think it probably will have usbc like the timelines look like the iphone 15 ish or whatever you know again we thumbs up usbc iphones we're all for it it's good or whatever uh but apple doesn't like to be forced to do things and
I don't think either one of them gave up any information that, you know, didn't already exist.
Like, what are they going to say?
Apple plans to break the law?
I mean, I know that's a common approach in the country these days, but that's not still not the move that Apple goes to.
So, yeah, they're going to comply.
Yeah.
Well, but I also thought it was interesting Jaws' response, which was in full, or I'm sorry, later on, I think she was talking about, or Joanna was asking, well, when?
And Jaws said, the Europeans are dictating timing for European customers.
I'm emphasizing this, not he.
But there is a reading of what he said that, yes, Europeans will get SIM trays and USB-C, where Americans or other areas of the world will stick with lightning because tough noogies.
I'm not saying that is what's going to happen, but that is a way you could read this conversation.
There are many ways to comply that do not conform to the fantastical headline that next year's iPhone is going to be USB-C for the entire world.
exactly i just thought that was fascinating the rest of the talk was fine yeah i mean if for the record i i think something like that they probably wouldn't do like an eu version of the iphone that had usbc maybe or you know as discussed in a previous episode like just somehow gets rid of or disables the lightning port like like
I don't think they would do that.
Like, I think they would.
I think, you know, Jaws was reflecting the correct attitude for Apple's thought on this, which is very clearly like they really don't like being told what to do by a government with their products like they really don't like that.
And the combination of Apple kind of spitefully responding to that kind of thing, and also Jaws' personality, his built-in attitude, which I think many people find quite a bit more off-putting than he would probably like or than Apple would probably like.
But anyway, I think that's just that's just Jods.
And it's also just Apple.
Like their attitude towards this is, you know, basically screw you.
Like the same way their attitude towards all the various like, you know, App Store regulations are going on in different countries and everything.
You know, they don't like to be told what to do.
And they're going to be quite spiteful about it.
even if you know like the whole thing about you know cutting off your nose spot your face whatever it's like like when a kid gets mad at you and does something totally against their own self-interest just because they're mad at you you know like it's that's that's how apple responds to being told what to do in ways in ways they don't appreciate right i mean but apple's not being spiteful though they're grumbling about it but they are going to you know do the thing and i think honestly i think they'll they'll do the simpler thing which is just usbc everywhere like
probably if they were if they were doing the spiteful thing what they would do is make their phones they would do the thing with like a lead lighting port but put a sticker over like make their phones awkward and worse for everybody and confusing for the whole world like that would be the spiteful one because that would hurt apple right they would be you know cutting off their iphone nose to spite their face right but they are annoyed about it oh and speaking of attitude uh federighi had a this is one of my favorite parts that uh
Uh, Joanna read the, um, one of the emails that was part of one of the, uh, probably the epic case or whatever.
And it was a Federighi email.
It was the, the, the email thread where they were discussing if iMessage and Android made sense.
And Federighi had said something to the effect that, um,
He said, I'm worried that if we put iMessage on Android, all that's going to do is remove one more barrier to parents getting their kids cheap Android phones.
Right.
Essentially, like we have we have some amount of market lock in with iMessage because if a family wants to be able to message each other with a uniform interface with blue bubbles everywhere, they got to get their kids iPhones.
If we put iMessage on Android.
Isn't that going to knock that thing down?
And, you know, and Joanna asked him about that.
And you could see like the you could it's one of the rare times that you see the the permeable barrier between public CFED and inside Apple CFED.
If you look at the emails inside Apple CFED and inside Apple other people, they say all the things that we say on these podcasts.
They don't say it in public, but they say it in their internal emails because they're not dumb.
We all know the discussions you have about the pros and cons of iMessage and Android.
What are they?
We'll just say them out loud on a podcast because we don't work for Apple.
But Apple executives never say it in public.
But when they talk about it themselves, they do say it.
So here's an obvious point made by an executive inside.
But because this is outside CFED and he is in a public interview, he didn't really address the substance of that thing.
Like, hey, here's an email that shows that you know that iMessage is a lock-in and that you're saying one of the cons for us putting iMessage on Android is that it'll reduce that lock-in.
Instead, he just gave a question that was like, oh, we didn't feel like Apple could do anything great in the Android space, basically saying that we didn't think we could...
We're in a position to be as big as WhatsApp, and if we can't do that, there's only really downsides.
But you never really address this specific point of part of the reason Apple does what it does is because iMessage is a form of lock-in.
Everybody knows that.
It's an obvious thing.
It's not like, oh, Apple admits.
Everybody knows it's lock-in.
It's obvious to anybody who knows anything about the technology market.
But still, Apple executives, with their friendly face on, will not acknowledge the obvious truth that we all know.
Because they know we know, and I know they know, and it's the unspoken thing.
Joanna tried to make him speak it, and he wouldn't.
He would just say, we didn't feel like we could, and he said it in a roundabout way, we didn't feel like we could essentially become the dominant messaging platform in any market, and so therefore, that upside didn't exist, and then there were all these downsides, one of which you read.
He didn't even really say that, so...
I give her kudos for trying to get him to address that because most of the time CFED will be honest and give his real opinion, but here you could totally see him cordoning off the part of his brain that he employs to do basic strategic analysis of the competitive landscape inside Apple.
That part is not allowed out when he's doing a public interview for the Wall Street Journal.
I don't know.
It's probably worth half an hour of your time, but I wish it was different.
What are you going to do?
I think Craig needs a haircut too.
Don't we all?
you