Boot to Toot
Marco:
all right i'm recording from what the hell is this sonoma sequoia sequoia there we go sequoia i've been doing that for a little while now yeah is it is it okay like i just installed it today like yeah i upgraded on day one so i've done all the episodes since then i've heard absolutely nothing about it from anybody so i guess it's fine no news is good news although you're gonna you're gonna hear more about it in uh in the show today uh-oh did i make a mistake no it's fine
Casey:
Although actually, I don't know if we have a better time to bring this up.
Casey:
And I was thinking about this literally like half an hour ago.
Casey:
And so I'll just bring it up now.
Casey:
I am really, really enjoying, what is the official term for it?
Casey:
iPhone mirroring.
Casey:
I was going to say iPhone remote control, but iPhone mirroring.
Casey:
I used it all the time at first, I think in a small part because it was new and fun and fancy.
Casey:
But it is really convenient to be able to effectively, I don't think this is literal, but effectively VNC into your phone.
Casey:
and control it from your Mac.
Casey:
And it seems to do a pretty good job of like mirroring the clipboard and stuff like that.
Casey:
The one thing that drives me bananas about it is that all of the different gestures that I've trained for the iOS simulator are not the same.
Casey:
So as an example, to scroll in the iOS simulator, you have to click and drag, whereas in this, you scroll.
Casey:
And command shift H is
Casey:
in the ios simulator is hit you know hit the home button and in this it's command one of all things which like fine it's an easier gesture but it is so wildly different than what we're used to um yeah so as an ios developer it's kind of a pain in the butt but
Casey:
But in every other way, it is freaking great.
Casey:
And it'll even pull through audio, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
We've only done that like once or twice.
Casey:
But I genuinely, I'm not just saying this because you're sitting right here, Marco.
Casey:
I genuinely think that the Overcast macOS app, as long as you're running on an Apple Silicon Mac, hi, John, is actually pretty good.
Casey:
But if you don't fancy that, or for some reason you can't install it on like your work computer or whatever, but you can do the iPhone mirroring thing,
Casey:
You can pull the audio right through and use Overcast on your iPhone, even though it's sending the audio through your Mac.
Casey:
It is really well done, and I've been really impressed with it.
Casey:
And I don't think we had talked about it yet on the show.
Marco:
Honestly, I haven't even used it yet, so I wouldn't have said anything about it.
Marco:
John doesn't use iPhones, so he wouldn't have said anything about it.
John:
We did talk about it.
John:
Actually, maybe it was Rectifs.
John:
We were talking about using it to rearrange stuff.
John:
That was Rectifs, I believe.
John:
All right, anyway, I have used it.
John:
Yeah, did you know that iPhone mirroring works on Intel Macs?
Casey:
I'm actually a little bit surprised.
Casey:
I really honestly am.
Marco:
I mean, but that's good.
Marco:
Like if you want to use Overcast on your Intel Mac, that's how you do it.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
Actually, I didn't even think about that.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
There's a website too, I hear.
Casey:
There is an Overcast website, allegedly.
Casey:
Is there?
Casey:
It may or may not last for long, but it's there.
Casey:
Uh, we were discussing a couple of notebook LM podcasts.
Casey:
Uh, one of which was a regurgitation of one of your posts, John, one of which was a semi regurgitation of your pasta recipe, which I saw a handful of people ask for, which I got a chuckle out of.
Casey:
Um, but apparently we, we may or may not have messed something up.
Casey:
Can you explain what's going on here, please?
John:
Regurgitation is actually a good word.
John:
I'll get to that in a second.
John:
Many people pointed out that one of the things I was complaining about the generated podcast that it didn't mention a specific example from my article.
John:
It did mention it.
John:
Basically, I totally missed when I mentioned it because it was at the very beginning and I was too busy snarking about something else.
John:
But the other reason I missed it is that it mentioned it, but then used it as like, it was the, the mention of like emailing the artist to do something.
John:
It uses that as an example of the person who created it, uh, maintaining the copyright, right?
John:
So the artist creates it, they have the copyright for themselves when I expected them to use it, uh, as I did as an example of transferring the copyright in exchange for payment.
John:
Um, so I, I apologize to the notebook LM, uh, podcasts for missing their mention of that at the very top because I was too busy snarking about something else.
John:
But yeah,
John:
Do you think it has follow-up?
John:
Yeah, that's one place we definitely got them beat.
John:
There's not going to be a follow-up podcast unless you specifically spoon-feed it to them.
John:
But Casey's word that he used, and I'm glad he used that because I couldn't think of a good word for it.
John:
I was trying to think before the show started how I should describe this.
John:
The more I thought about and discussed the Notebook LM podcast with people, like just going back and forth on Macedon and stuff about it, the more it seems to me that the podcast it generated...
John:
The best way to describe them would be, at least for the first portion of it, as sort of a... I was going to say a...
John:
paraphrasing of the content regurgitation is similar and then it's like okay so here's the article and then the the hosts of the podcast the ai host of the podcast basically do the equivalent of rewriting the article into podcast speak like they just speak it out loud rather than reading it but they're not doing anything more than trying to basically rewording sentence by sentence point by points in slightly different orders
John:
Yeah.
John:
Uh, and I, I feel that's, that's part of why I think a lot of people when they hear these generated podcasts think they go on too long is that they are, um,
John:
They're longer than the article.
John:
You could have just read the article and it would take less time.
John:
And it's not because they have a lot of commentary.
John:
It's because they take a long time to get around with everything.
John:
Anyway, we talked about that last episode.
John:
If you want to hear those podcasts, if you skipped them last time and you want to hear them, you can take a look.
John:
But I will say that doing live commentary on something you've never heard before is a lot harder than it sounds.
John:
There's a reason like Mystery Science Theater 3000.
John:
They pre-write and script all those jokes, believe it or not.
John:
They just don't do it in real time.
John:
I don't ruin the illusion.
Marco:
So in Notebook LM's defense, number one, I think there is a lot of media out there is just regurgitation of some source post or source material or source press release.
Marco:
So there is a place for that.
Marco:
But also in Notebook LM's defense –
Marco:
In each of those two examples, I only gave it one article.
Marco:
I think the actual use of the tool is meant for larger data sets.
Marco:
Like, oh, I have these 15 documents or all these different sources that I'm trying to get some info out of or summarize or get some bullet points out of.
Marco:
When you feed it more information, it would not necessarily behave exactly like that.
Marco:
I mean, it would still generate the same type of thing with some of the same benefits and pitfalls, but it would have more broad source material in most
John:
uses but but it's not just limited like i'm i don't know the don't know the details notebook lm but i have to think that it is what apple would describe as a quote world knowledge lm because the parts parts where i was complaining that it sounded like it was reading for wikipedia page it clearly has lots of world knowledge in like before you feed it anything right it could comment on ai and all those things that wasn't in the article that's why i'm like oh it's reading from wikipedia page again about some just it has a lot of general knowledge that's what it's bringing to the table so yes you only fed it the one article
John:
But it's got however many billions of words that it was trained on.
Casey:
Well, I'm just glad I could contribute a recurgitation to the lexicon for this.
John:
Yeah, that's good.
John:
And, you know, like Margo said, sometimes that's exactly what you want.
John:
And we have tons of forms of media out there today where that's what we pay people to do because it is a service.
John:
Like, it saves you the trouble of having to have, you know, read the thing yourself or whatever.
John:
Usually you want it to be either compressing it or adding some analysis or insight.
John:
But even just straight regurgitation does have a role.
John:
I'm not sure I'd want those particular AI hosts doing the regurgitation, but to each their own.
Marco:
To be fair, there are lots of things in my life where I would want real humans doing a podcast about whatever I want to hear about, but I can't say there's nothing I would ever want this kind of thing to do.
Marco:
This kind of thing, I don't intend to make it a big part of my life, but
Marco:
I probably will actually use it for something sometime, either in either this exact product or some future version of it.
John:
What was that thing that Marilyn talks about?
John:
Like the shipping news thing?
John:
Some people in the UK know what I'm talking about.
Marco:
Yeah, the maritime report.
John:
Yeah, the maritime report where this human would read it with a certain intonation and basically just reading off like
John:
the weather report or whatever like it's just it could very easily be done by an ai trained voice because it's very standardized there's no riffing or anything but people find it comforting and they like to have it read to them and whatever that pleasing british person's voices can we talk about the camera control buttons on apple's cases john
John:
Yeah, but I kept referring to, like, the thing that Apple puts on them to transfer the capacitiveness of your touch as a quartz thing, but it's not.
John:
It's sapphire.
John:
Many people wanted to correct me on that.
John:
I am happy to be corrected.
John:
I just want someone to make a case with a sapphire.
John:
Or, like, it doesn't even have to be sapphire.
John:
It can be that plastic thing with the metal things through it.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Something that's not a big hole and...
John:
Another week has gone by, another week filled with Instagram ads for iPhone cases, and another week without me finding anything exciting or good.
Marco:
Well, I have a case from Spigen here that just arrived today that has a button overlay.
John:
Yeah, they're out there.
John:
Like I said, is it the one with the copper dots or is it a sapphire thing?
Marco:
um it's it appears to be just solid white but you can tell but it has a rim like if you look real closely you can see like there is a rim around its perimeter of some other material so i think it might be doing the same trick apple does with theirs of just like
Marco:
Some kind of, you know, solid material that with like a conductive rim around the outside.
Marco:
But it does work.
Marco:
It's the Spigen clear case.
Marco:
I'll put a link.
Marco:
They have a thousand cases.
Marco:
And, you know, you go on Amazon.
Marco:
You try to find this exact one.
Marco:
You won't find it.
Marco:
It's just in a sea of other cases often by them.
Marco:
So it's hard to find.
Marco:
But anyway, I'll put a link.
Marco:
Somebody else, I think, referred me to it.
Marco:
And as a clear case goes, it's fine.
Marco:
It's better than Apple's in certain ways.
Marco:
The buttons feel better.
Marco:
It does, unfortunately, have a closed bottom, unlike Apple's.
Marco:
So that keeps getting in my way.
Marco:
And it's a clear case, so it looks okay.
Marco:
It doesn't look amazing.
Marco:
But we actually have other case recommendations.
Marco:
Or at least experiences.
John:
Yeah, the case situation is grim, but many, many people want to suggest cases.
John:
And I've gotten the main reason I want to read these out is to stop people from suggesting.
John:
Oh, wow.
John:
Maybe someone else will find them useful.
John:
So here's the first one.
John:
This has been suggested for years, not just this year, but every year we talk about cases.
John:
There is a contingent of people who really, really like this case.
John:
And maybe, you know, one of the people's listening, they might like this case, too.
John:
But the fact that they keep recommending it to me.
John:
it boggles my mind because it is like the opposite of everything they want out of a case they're like oh you want an open bottom well how about this uh we'll put a link in the show notes this is the arc pulse case i'm not sure if different brands have similar designs in past years and i would say case is is a is a generous term for this yeah this is yeah the way the way i would describe it is it's like uh princess leia's metal bikini from return of the jedi but for your phone
John:
that's exactly what this is it is a very uncomfortable looking piece of metal that just sort of covers the corners of your phone it goes like around the camera mesa and it covers the top and bottom corners of the phone and you know has an open bottom and that's it they're like this is great because really you just need the corners to be protected because that's the main part that's going to hit the ground if you drop it or whatever which i'll just pause right there and say that's mostly true
John:
But it is very, very possible to drop your phone onto something like, say, a set of cement stairs or something where you will hit the sides, and maybe your screen doesn't break, but you're going to scar up the sides.
John:
So right away, I'm not even accepting the premise that the corners are the only thing you need to protect.
John:
But why would I like this?
John:
I want a leather case for the grippiness of the leather, and I want it to cover everything, including all the buttons and including the camera button with a pass-through thingy of some kind of there.
John:
So this is...
John:
absolutely nothing like anything that i want out of a case and yet people keep recommending it to me so a please stop and b if you want a case like this and have never seen one because it is a very rare very interesting form of case we will put a link in the show notes uh and you can try it out because it basically gives you the feel of a naked phone with substantial protection for the corners
Marco:
And actually, building off of that, the opposite of that is the next section.
Marco:
If you want a totally textured back but no protection of any of the corners or sides, there is this entire category called leather or just magnetic case backs.
Marco:
It's basically a flat plate.
Marco:
Yeah, so many people are suggesting this because, hey, guess what?
John:
Open bottom, also open top, also open left, also open right, right?
John:
And honestly, this is actually closer because it does have leather on it.
John:
So I can see people saying, hey, you want a leather case and you want an open bottom.
John:
this you don't have to worry about the camera pastor because there's nothing on the sides i do find these attractive but i will clarify that the leather i want on my phone is partly and maybe for the most part the majority wise for the sides because that's where i grip my phone and the leather makes my phone grippy when i grip it from the side so not having anything on the sides is not a feature for me and then yes obviously there's the fact that i do drop my phone i do actually want some additional protection and
John:
And yeah, the leather that goes around helps with that.
John:
But if you want a case that's not really a case, but has a really nice look to it, and it looks like it might be comfy on the back, hey, there's lots of magnetic back thingies that aren't really cases.
Marco:
These caught my eye because back in the iPhone 4 days...
Marco:
I had, for my iPhone 4, I had basically a stick-on piece of leather that had a little tiny circle cut out for the camera on the iPhone 4.
Marco:
It was exactly what this creates.
Marco:
Metal sides, otherwise no case feel, but a very nice textured leather back for grip, and I think, honestly, for looks.
Marco:
And that I was so happy with.
Marco:
I freaking loved that thing.
Marco:
Just a stick on piece of leather for the back.
Marco:
That was it.
Marco:
Granted, the phones were a lot smaller and lighter back then.
Marco:
So grip and side protection were not quite as needed as they are today.
Marco:
But it was glorious.
Marco:
So I decided to try one of these.
Marco:
The one that most people recommend is by Nomad Goods.
Marco:
I actually ordered that one as well.
Marco:
I'm going to compare it.
Marco:
But the one I've been using for the last week is by this brand Suti, S-U-T-I.
Marco:
And I also found one by Atom Studios, A-T-O-M Studios.
Marco:
They have a whole bunch that use like vegan leather.
Marco:
So I'm going to try one of those as well.
Marco:
The reason why I got one and I'm now ordering three is that I freaking love this thing.
Marco:
I don't know if I'm going to stick with this form factor, but it looks and feels fantastic.
Marco:
It does, however, as John pointed out, offer really no protection against drops at all.
Marco:
If you drop your phone, do not do this.
Marco:
If you don't drop your phone and you just want some extra grip and some texture and some looks and maybe some surface grippiness, like when you lay it down on a surface, you don't want to feel like it's sliding off all the time,
Marco:
This could be it.
Marco:
I'm, I think it's really, the Sooty one is the one I have so far.
Marco:
I think it's really, really good.
Marco:
The only reason I started branching out to the Nomad and the Atom Studios ones is that the Sooty one, the leather is only the flat part of the back.
Marco:
As it rounds the corner around the edges, there's like a big plastic gasket that goes around the whole thing.
Marco:
So it's not as grippy around the edges.
Marco:
Whereas the Nomad and the Atom Studio ones, the leather appears to wrap around the edges.
Marco:
So I'm kind of curious to see how that feels.
Marco:
Feel the different kinds of leather.
Marco:
In particular, the Adam Studios one, as I mentioned, that's a plant-based fake leather.
Marco:
So that honestly is more attractive to me if it's good.
Marco:
So I'm going to see how these work.
Marco:
But honestly, this is an interesting option.
Marco:
Because then you are using all of the...
Marco:
actual buttons on your phone so you don't have to worry about buttons feeling bad or being covered or uncovered or anything like that and again it looks I think it looks fantastic like the I have the white phone so I have like the bright silver band around it with this with a black leather plate on the back I think it looks really good
John:
I think I look good too.
John:
And that is a good point that one of the reasons I do like leather is for the surface.
John:
Like when I put my phone down screen up on a surface, like the couch arm or something that it gives a little bit of extra friction for it not slipping off.
John:
But yeah, unfortunately I need to have the sides.
John:
That's the whole, that's the main reason I want leather is those side grips when I'm holding my phone.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
As soon as I use, I use this for like two hours and I immediately ordered another one and ordered Apple care.
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, I guess you're also getting the same ads that I have on Instagram for cactus leather.
John:
That's how they brand some of the plant-based leather.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, of course.
Marco:
There's all sorts.
Marco:
I've tried pineapple leather before.
Marco:
There's a whole bunch.
John:
Yeah, and honestly, Apple, I mean, well, Apple seems kind of stuck on the closed bottom with the exception of their clear case and the Beats case.
John:
But Apple really needs to go back to the leather well and just be like...
John:
Find something that looks and feels like leather, but that is not leather.
John:
Every other company in the world is doing it.
John:
There's so many variations.
John:
Plastic, cactus, pineapple, like whatever.
John:
Try something.
John:
But yeah, find one of them, wasn't it?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And to be fair, like a lot of these, you know, the non, you know, cow based, you know, other leathers that are plant based.
Marco:
There is oftentimes, I think, a non-trivial amount of carbon footprint there.
Marco:
Yeah, plastic isn't great for the environment either.
Marco:
Yeah, they're plastic-based or they're otherwise petroleum-based in some form.
Marco:
So I think there's a lot of – I think it's a tricky problem for them to solve.
Marco:
And then they have to scale it.
Marco:
So it's certainly not a trivial thing for them to do, but I think they can do it.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
I'm still going caseless, although I will say I have come crawling back a little bit to my pop socket.
John:
Oh, no!
Casey:
I know.
John:
My goodness, you've become a pop socket dependent.
Casey:
I know, I have.
Casey:
It's terrible.
Casey:
I don't know what the issue is.
Casey:
Maybe it's because the back is so slippery, like we're both saying.
John:
Yeah, maybe you should try a case.
John:
A case might be your pop socket that's not a pop socket.
Casey:
Yeah, but I don't like any of the cases.
John:
So you don't want a case, but you're going to stick this.
John:
I mean, I know PopSockets compressed to be really small, but once you're doing that, just like try a case.
John:
Try Marco's back leather thing.
Casey:
I was looking at them.
Marco:
I'm probably about to have two that I don't want.
Casey:
Am I going to get a box?
Casey:
Hey, you know, my Kindle charging port, I think, is on its way out.
Casey:
So if you want to send a leather case padded in Kindles, let me know.
Marco:
Honestly, the way it looks with the Suti one that I have, it looks like a nice camera.
Marco:
You have aluminum and black leather.
Marco:
It just looks really nice.
Marco:
And again, it feels great.
Marco:
Although that leather looked a little bit rumply.
John:
I don't like the rumply leather.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
It's textured.
John:
Yeah, it looks like lizard skin or whatever.
Casey:
We are sponsored this week by Tailscale.
Casey:
Tailscale is incredible.
Casey:
It's the easiest and best way to connect devices and services to each other, no matter where they are.
Casey:
That is the blurb they wanted me to read.
Casey:
But let me tell you, and they can't pay me to say this...
Casey:
It's true.
Casey:
I use Tailscale all day, every day.
Casey:
I really mean it.
Casey:
It is incredible.
Casey:
So here's the situation.
Casey:
I have my Synology here at the house.
Casey:
I have servers that run at Linode, at DigitalOcean, some on this continent, some not.
Casey:
And I want to be able to talk to all of them, and I want to do it transparently.
Casey:
I don't want to have to worry about whether or not my Synology and my iPhone are on the same network.
Casey:
And I don't
Casey:
I want to do port forwarding in order to figure out how to tunnel through the internet into my LAN at home.
Casey:
I just want them to connect to each other securely and privately always, no matter what networks they're on.
Casey:
And that's what Tailscale does.
Casey:
I'm telling you, folks, it's magic.
Casey:
It really is.
Casey:
So what Tailscale does is it builds a mesh network of all of your devices that, again, connect to each other securely and privately.
Casey:
And it doesn't matter what firewall they're behind always.
Casey:
Almost always, thanks to the absolutely bananas acrobatics that Tailscale does, they can get a direct connection from one device to another.
Casey:
I've seen it.
Casey:
It's incredible.
Casey:
So what should you do?
Casey:
You should do yourself a favor.
Casey:
Not me.
Casey:
Do yourself a favor and go to tailscale.com slash ATP.
Casey:
T-A-I-L-S-C-A-L-E dot com slash ATP.
Casey:
Check out their personal plan.
Casey:
Their personal plan is free and always will be because they are so confident, as they should be, that you will love it, that you will bring it to your workplace and say, you know what?
Casey:
This is so much better than what we've got.
Casey:
We should do tail scale at work.
Casey:
So that's why the personal plan is free.
Casey:
So you get up to 100 devices and three users for free, F-R-E-E, free.
Casey:
at tailscale.com slash ATP.
Casey:
So please go and check them out.
Casey:
Again, they cannot pay me to say this.
Casey:
This is incredible software that I use all the time, all day, every day.
Casey:
tailscale.com slash ATP.
Casey:
Thank you to Tailscale for sponsoring the show.
Casey:
All right, Marco, we have hopefully tons of suggestions from you since you've done all your homework about sleep tagging apps, about Windows anti-malware, about active transparency.
Casey:
So in the hours of homework that you've performed, can you tell us some results, please?
Marco:
Honestly, it might have actually been that long.
Marco:
So I requested a couple of recommendations last episode.
Marco:
One was for an app for me to tag my sleep each night that I'm tracking with the Apple Watch to tag it with arbitrary tags.
Marco:
Things like
Marco:
you know, beach or alcohol, like, you know, like whatever, like things that might affect my sleep.
Marco:
And then I want, I want to be able to see over time, like, you know, if I have a heavy meal, like if that's one of the heavy meal, like, is that, does that make me sleep worse?
Marco:
And, you know, it's like 15% worse if, you know, every time I have, like that kind of stuff.
Marco:
That's what I wanted.
Marco:
And, and I complained last week that the apps that I had tried to find that, that claimed to do this were all, you know, these massive complicated things
Marco:
Comically privacy invading and surprisingly expensive subscription based apps that all tried to be everything to everyone to solve every possible sleep or fitness or health need you might possibly have.
Marco:
I got a lot of recommendations from a lot of people.
Marco:
I tried them all.
Marco:
I have not found what I'm looking for.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Marco:
All I have found is mostly more very expensive, very privacy-invading apps that try to do everything to everyone.
Marco:
It is such a mess of these massive sleep suites.
Marco:
We're not going to just solve your sleep.
Marco:
We're going to solve your workout recovery and your health and your stress.
Marco:
And they have all these massive arrays of features that...
Marco:
Almost every single one of them requires you to make an account on their service to hold your health info.
Marco:
And almost all of them force you to subscribe to their subscription, as I described last time, with no way to close the box and skip it or anything.
Marco:
And they're like $40 a year for almost all of them.
Marco:
So I'm like, first of all, the App Store is...
Marco:
It's always changing.
Marco:
The app store is certainly always changing.
Marco:
This is not a category that shows off the best of the app store by any means.
Marco:
So anyway, I am still looking.
Marco:
I'm getting a little bit tired of looking.
Marco:
I might take a break.
Marco:
I have yet to find this app, and I'm starting to think that maybe I just should not be doing this.
Marco:
Need to write it?
Marco:
Just use notes.
John:
Just write down.
John:
Every day when you go to bed, the time you went to bed, and any notes, any tags, you just write them as words with commas between them.
John:
And then if you ever want to look at, like, honestly, this really still reminds me of Exist.io stuff.
John:
Like, I'm lighter when I eat sausage.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Or, you know, like, I don't know.
John:
I take more steps when I'm at the beach.
John:
Like, I don't know what you're hoping to get from this, huh?
John:
So on this, the number of data points I have is five.
John:
And out of those, it says, inconclusive.
John:
When I eat a big meal, sometimes I sleep well and sometimes I don't.
John:
Like, what are you...
John:
You're hoping to get actionable information out of this, but I feel like your data set is going to be too small for you to get actionable information unless there's something really obvious.
John:
And if there's something really obvious, you don't need an app to tell you, when I eat spicy food, I get heartburn.
John:
I'll tell you that now.
John:
When you eat spicy food, you get heartburn.
John:
So just use notes.
John:
Write it down.
John:
You've got your app right there.
John:
And then you can scroll back through those notes and look for patterns.
John:
And if you say, well, it's really hard to find patterns in these notes.
John:
I wish an app could do it for me.
John:
The app's not going to do any better.
John:
It's not a pattern that you can see.
John:
You can write a little program that reads your notes and tries to do some sort of statistical analysis, but you'll find out you have too few data points and it's just noise.
Marco:
And you certainly touched upon, I think, a major problem with almost any kind of sleep tracking and quantification of that kind of stuff is...
Marco:
it is not particularly actionable a lot of times because usually everyone knows, yeah, you should probably get more sleep.
Marco:
You should probably drink less coffee.
Marco:
You should probably not have alcohol.
Marco:
Like, you know, everyone knows these things.
Marco:
I had coffee before I went to bed and I had bad sleep.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Like last night I was congested.
Marco:
I took Sudafed.
Marco:
That was a terrible idea.
Marco:
My sleep sucked because my heart rate was way up for the whole night.
Marco:
I can see that already.
Marco:
And I know, hmm, I probably shouldn't take Sudafed even though my nose was stuffy and maybe it would have been worse.
Marco:
But who knows?
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
you know it like i i kind of know what i should and shouldn't do already but i was just i was hoping to find other insights but you are right like the actionability of those is is limited and challenging but ultimately the app i want is a very very simple thing that does only this in exactly the way i want it so someday maybe i'll make that app i think that's the answer um
John:
the all the answer you've only been talking about the the thing the actions you would take with the app which is when i go to bed i know this i know the x i know i know how my sleep was i know i tag it with things i did but then what's step three like say you had an app that did that presumably you're not entering this information just for the hell of it you want some the app or you or something to do something that's the i feel like the hard part what happens after you have a tag my sleep app and you tag your sleep for a year then what happens
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And that's the challenge is, like, how actionable would it be?
Marco:
So, for instance, if I learn, like, oh, when I sleep better at the beach than not at the beach, well, I'm also not – like, that's also not the school year, first of all.
Marco:
So, like, maybe I just sleep better when it's not the school year because I'm not waking up super early.
Marco:
Like, that's – there's different stresses or different logistics, like –
Marco:
And it's like I can't really just live at the beach all the time during middle school and high school, so I'm not able to do anything about that.
Marco:
And that's kind of my – I think long term, I think what I would realize if I actually endured one of these other apps that does a thousand other things plus maybe some version of this feature, I think I would probably find that.
Marco:
I would probably find – I would tire of the manual entry and I would tire of – and by the time I actually had a lot of data –
Marco:
I think I would find limited insights, which is probably why I shouldn't make this.
Marco:
I have so many app ideas that I eventually talk myself out of.
Marco:
This is why I haven't made a podcast editor.
Marco:
I shouldn't make a podcast editor for lots of reasons, and I haven't.
Marco:
I should probably not make a jam band music listening app either, and so far I haven't.
Casey:
No, you shouldn't because there's going to be some sort of anti-Dave Matthews band something or other in there.
Casey:
It just wouldn't play.
Marco:
It's not a jam band.
Casey:
What was Alan Pike's app or Steam Clock's app?
Marco:
Yeah, it was a DJ app that it wouldn't play.
Casey:
Nickelback.
Marco:
Nickelback, yeah.
Casey:
And this was from Canadians, no less.
Casey:
No, I will take issue with your inevitable jam band app and your anti-Dave Matthews band hatred, which is unnecessary.
Casey:
But I do think this is your next app because it's a fairly simple app.
Casey:
I think, or at least at a glance, it seems like a fairly simple.
John:
Collecting the data is simple.
John:
You can make an app that does that, but then what does it do with that data?
John:
How does it even present you the analysis that you want it to perform, let alone how does it perform that analysis?
Marco:
It's exist.io.
Marco:
You're making exist.io.
Casey:
Yeah, pretty much.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I think the answer is I probably shouldn't make this app because I probably don't really want it.
Casey:
Yeah, that's probably true.
Marco:
Well, that was productive.
John:
And the .io domain might be going away.
Casey:
Did we just do ATP Diamond Dogs?
John:
A little bit, except you talked me out of something.
John:
That's what we're supposed to do.
John:
And my thing, it was talking me out of something.
John:
It was successful.
John:
I didn't do it.
Casey:
We're so good for each other.
Casey:
Yeah, but you should, except you shouldn't.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So I also I asked for anti-malware Windows software recommendations and got a few good ones.
Marco:
Pretty much everybody said, yeah, just use Malwarebytes.
Marco:
And many people suggested I definitely should not use CrowdStrike.
Marco:
Apparently it is really not made for that.
Marco:
At least one person said you should do it because it would be fun for the podcast.
Marco:
Oh, that's true.
Marco:
In a way that it would be terrible.
Marco:
But anyway, so I installed Malwarebytes.
Marco:
I got the paid versions that would do like automatic scans.
Marco:
It found like seven or eight things.
Marco:
And I have not heard about it since, which is probably a good sign.
Marco:
Finally, in the Marco corner here, sorry, it's been a long time.
Marco:
I mentioned a couple episodes ago when John was talking about the AirPods noise pass-through modes and noise cancellation modes.
Marco:
I had said that I had not found the adaptive transparency mode very useful.
Marco:
And we heard from a bunch of people who were in to say, it's amazing.
Marco:
I use it myself.
Marco:
It's gotten better since it launched.
Marco:
Try it again.
Marco:
So since then, I have been trying it again.
Marco:
And I still don't love it.
Marco:
However, it is better than it was.
Marco:
I'm not going to use it most of the time.
Marco:
I'm still going to stick with transparency and noise cancellation that I toggle manually when I feel like it.
Marco:
But the issue I found with it... One of the days I was walking around Manhattan a lot with it.
Marco:
And so a decent amount of... I've taken this big, long walk in Manhattan.
Marco:
So a lot of street noise, a lot of road noise.
Marco:
And I'm trying to listen to a podcast.
Marco:
So I tried it then, and what I found was...
Marco:
it was blocking out too much information to the point where I couldn't hear vehicles that were turning into my crosswalk area.
Marco:
And that's not good.
Marco:
I found it to be unsafe.
Marco:
Now, there are tweaks.
Marco:
You can actually adjust some of the noise levels and things like that.
Marco:
It became somewhat adjustable since its introduction as well.
Marco:
So it is getting better all the time, but...
Marco:
I found it was not good enough, and it blocked out too much of the surround of noise for my own purposes.
Marco:
But that being said, like, your purposes might be different.
Marco:
It's very situationally dependent, you know, whether this is right for you or not.
Marco:
So I'd say if you have AirPods Pro and you're curious about this kind of stuff, try adaptive mode, because it is different.
Marco:
Like, it is better than it used to be, and it is different from the other two modes.
Marco:
Give it a shot.
Marco:
It was enlightening, even though I'm choosing, at the end of the day, not to use it most of the time.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree that it's definitely worth trying again.
Casey:
I had mostly sworn off of it after having a not great initial experience.
Casey:
And I do think it's actually that and conversation awareness.
Casey:
Neither of them are great, but both of them are better than I thought they were and better than I think they initially were.
Casey:
The one thing that I really dislike about transparency mode is that I want it to filter droning noise out automatically.
Casey:
quicker.
Casey:
So as an example, I think it was yesterday, I mowed the lawn and I had transparency mode on.
John:
You mean adaptive transparency, right?
Casey:
What did I just call it?
John:
You keep selling it transparency, which is a different mode.
Casey:
Oh, yes.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
You're right.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
This whole time I went adaptive transparency.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
So I had adaptive on when I started the lawnmower and it took a solid like three, four, five seconds for it to decide, okay, I need to filter this out.
Casey:
Is that a big deal?
Casey:
Of course not.
Casey:
But, you know, I don't feel like it's really saving me that much trouble from just deliberately putting on noise canceling mode if I felt like I knew I was going to need it.
Casey:
So I'm still sticking with it for now and just messing, just kind of going about my day when I do have my AirPods in and seeing what I think of it.
Casey:
But I'm not sure I'm going to stick with it.
Casey:
But I do absolutely agree with Marco, especially if you haven't tried it in a long time.
Casey:
It's worth trying out again and seeing if it works better for you.
John:
I think that delay is actually a feature, or at least it was cited as a feature by many people who are recommending it.
John:
They like the idea that it lets you hear the loud sound briefly before it tamped it down as a way of letting you be more aware of what's going on around you.
Casey:
Yeah, that's fair.
John:
Based on all the people recommending it, I also gave it a second try.
John:
um one update on that marco was saying hey you can change the uh the things that are available as you cycle through the various noise canceling nodes pretty sure that's only a feature on the pros on the airpods 4 with active noise canceling the ui looks different in the setting screen and i cannot choose to not have one of those things in the rotation as far as i could tell oh no but anyway i left them all in the rotation and i have been trying at adaptive and i
John:
i think i found some instances where i use it but especially i mean this may be different on the pros because their their characteristics are very different but for the airpods 4 where they don't actually seal your ears and sound is always going to get around them i find that adaptive transparency is noise canceling when it chooses to cancel out a noise like a droning noise or like you know white noise type of thing it's just not as good as full noise canceling
John:
When you put on full noise canceling, it cancels more noise.
John:
And so I've been using Adaptive kind of around the house without conversational awareness.
John:
But I think with the personal volume thing where it tries to crank up the volume when things get loud around you, I think that's a good balance for me.
John:
But when I'm like, for example, in bed at night watching something on my iPad, I switch to straight up noise canceling because my wife has like the window fan on or something, right?
John:
noise canceling released with the airpods for cancels noise way better than the best adaptive ever even attempts to do so i have found a place for adaptive in my life and i do use it when i'm just like walking around the house but i still go into full noise canceling so i kind of wish that adaptive was like full noise canceling when it felt like it was safe but not but i guess maybe i'm asking too much like i'm kind of asking for adaptive to be like a uh
John:
for it to pick which mode it wants to do.
John:
Like I want adaptive to be a thing where it says, I see your other three modes and I cycle you between them based on what I think is safe, but that's not how it works.
John:
So adaptive is in my rotation, but I still have to manually choose the mode that I want occasionally.
Casey:
It remains a mode in your lineup.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
iPhone 16 can wirelessly recover from other phones using a phone-to-phone resuscitation.
Casey:
So this is reading from Ars Technica.
Casey:
If you've ever had an iPhone update go bad, you may have used recovery mode to resuscitate your device.
Casey:
A device booted into recovery mode can't do anything by itself, but it can be connected to a working Mac or PC with a cable.
Casey:
And that Mac or PC can download a fresh copy of iOS and all of your phone's related firmware to restore it to a factory default state.
Casey:
You'll need a backup to recover your personal data, but it beats having to take a trip to the Apple store or send your phone in for repairs.
Casey:
The new iPhone 16, 16 Pro models add a new option for phones that are in recovery mode.
Casey:
Rudimentary wireless communication, so phones that need to be recovered can be placed near another iPhone or iPad and can be restored without using a cable, a PC, or a Mac.
John:
Yeah.
John:
why would i need a mac or pc i just have my phone and you realize oh not everyone in the world has a mac or pc or wants a mac or pc and any part of the phone process that requires a mac or pc is like broken and so apple doing this by saying okay well maybe you don't have a mac or pc but maybe you have an old phone obviously if you're in a situation where your thing is hosed and you need something else to help you recover from it you do have to have something else but allowing that something else to be a phone i think is great and it makes me wonder what the heck they're waiting for on the watch
John:
which is still completely dependent on the phone.
John:
I mean, obviously there's a synergy there where they want you to buy a phone and a watch, but they want you to buy a Mac too.
John:
But I feel like the phone is overdue for a little bit, you know, take off some of the train wheels, let it be a little bit more independent.
John:
Hey, it's got its own phone number.
John:
It can make phone calls, but it's still so tied to its parent phone.
John:
And I think they should edge that along.
John:
But it's nice to see the phone continuing to assert its independence.
Casey:
Do you think that this is indicative of perhaps non-pro phones going without a cable at all?
Casey:
We've been talking about this for years, like no ports, no ports.
Casey:
I don't think this indicates that that's where Apple's going, especially since the response from USB-C seems to be universal praise.
Casey:
But it makes me wonder.
Casey:
It makes me wonder.
John:
Yeah, maybe.
John:
Apple doesn't seem to be in a hurry, and I don't think users are in a hurry either.
John:
I feel like it's kind of one of those things, kind of like USB-C, that when Apple finally decides to do it, it will be after the point when it's... They'll let it be non-controversial, right?
John:
If it did today, it would be controversial, but there will come a point where few people will care about it, and they'll just do it, but...
John:
As someone who continues to charge with the wire pretty much all the time except when I'm in the car on the MagSafe mount, I still could give it a few more years before they go full wireless.
Marco:
Honestly, I don't see it happening.
Marco:
I think phones use too much power and the inefficiency and inconvenience in a lot of cases of wireless charging.
Marco:
The carbon neutrality, yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Obviously, carbon neutrality over the last term of the product, it would go up, what, 30% or something if it was wireless only?
John:
I do wonder how many people, what the percentages are.
John:
Only Apple knows.
John:
Wireless charging used to be 0% because the phone didn't support it.
John:
Right now, what percent of phone charging in terms of...
John:
I don't know, battery capacity or milliamp hours added to the phone.
John:
Is that?
John:
And then you do the math on the massive inefficiency of wireless charging versus wired and see how much waste heat we're throwing out and how much energy that adds.
John:
Yeah, that could be another thing keeping Apple from doing this for a while.
Marco:
Well, I think also like, I mean, how many like regulars out there do you see using MagSafe for wireless charging instead of cables?
Marco:
I see almost no one using it.
John:
Yeah, it's a good pop culture thing to watch.
John:
Like in pop culture, you will very often see people complaining in modern TV shows and movies that their phone is out of charge and they're desperate to find a charger and they're always plugging a wire into it.
John:
Right.
John:
We'll know that that turnover has happened when in pop culture we see the person who's desperate for their phone to be charged.
John:
I don't know sticking it to a MagSafe puck I'm not even sure how they would do it but yeah obviously this that's a trailing indicator not a leading indicator but uh yeah the wires are still pretty prevalent in popular media also think about like the the practicality of that like a lot of people carry a phone charger with them for whatever reason that you know a lot of people need to do that
Marco:
are they going to carry around like a usb plug and like a giant magsafe puck in their bag yeah magsafe pucks are not small right and like or what what about like if you have to charge up from some like battery out of a vending machine like people do that that's a thing like how is that going to work there's there are so many contexts where i think regular people just use wire to charge their phone the vast majority of the time based on just my anecdotal observation frayed broken wires
Marco:
Sure, whatever, and oftentimes cheap third-party ones.
Marco:
Bought in a drugstore.
Marco:
Of course, but that's what people do.
Marco:
If I need a fast charge, if my phone's low and I'm going to be in my house for a while, let me charge this up in 15 minutes, I'll use USB-C.
Marco:
I'll use it almost every time.
Marco:
I think a lot of people use the wire.
Marco:
I think the whole idea of we're going to make a phone that has no port on it whatsoever –
Marco:
I can't say they would never do that, but I can't see that ever being the mainstream phone option.
Marco:
Like, you know, maybe, you know, the rumor about the iPhone 17 Slim that might come out next year.
Marco:
Maybe something like that, if that wasn't intended to be the mainstream model.
Marco:
Not enough room for USB-C.
Marco:
Yeah, like if that wasn't intended to be the mainstream model iPhone, maybe that could be a way they could get that.
Marco:
But I think most people don't want that.
Marco:
Most people want a cable.
John:
Yeah, if you want to know how they could get to no cable in a way that is not controversial to people –
John:
rather than thinking of advances in wireless technology, what you have to do is fast forward to the point where, I mean, who knows if we'll get this far, but if silicon continues to advance and the wall that we know we're inevitably going to hit is farther out than we think it is,
John:
You could get to the point where the total amount of energy inside a phone in the battery, you know, for all day battery life is just lower.
John:
And then you don't need like advances, super advances and charging technology.
John:
You use the same stupid inductive coils we have now.
John:
But because you're filling a battery that's a quarter of the size.
John:
all these issues become much less right and if you have solid state batteries and they charge really fast like i think that's how you would get to it it would essentially require advances continued advances in silicon which are slowing rapidly as we all know and also advances in battery technology and then we get to the point where it's like okay well all those issues they used to talk about about charging your phone and heat or whatever that's ridiculous because now it charges in 35 seconds off of an inductive coil and nobody cares
Casey:
Yeah, for what it's worth, I very rarely use a cable deliberately to charge my phone.
Casey:
You know, the bedside charger is a Qi charger, and Aaron's bedside charger is a MagSafe puck, the original version of it.
Casey:
We do have a spare laptop charger that I just happen to have laying around downstairs, actually by our turntable.
Casey:
And so that's our, it with a cable, of course, and that's our, oh no, I really need a bunch of charge right now charger.
Casey:
And obviously if I'm plugging in to do debugging or something like that, but for the most part, both of us, both Erin and myself, and she is very normie in a way that I think we can all agree I'm not.
Casey:
We almost exclusively Qi charge.
Casey:
I mean, this is one data point or two, I guess, but for what it's worth.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
End-to-end encryption is coming for iPhone to Android RCS messages.
Casey:
So if you recall, in iOS 18, Apple embraced or adopted RCS, which is a better version of SMS that supports delivery receipts and things like that.
Casey:
But it is not end-to-end encrypted.
Casey:
Well, apparently, reading from MacRumors, the GSM Association, or GSMA, the organization responsible for developing the Rich Communication Services, or RCS Standard, announced on Tuesday that it is working to implement the end-to-end encryption for messages sent between Android and iPhone devices, though no specific timeline for the implementation has been provided.
Casey:
Currently, not all RCS providers offer end-to-end encryption.
Casey:
Google Messages, which enabled end-to-end encryption by default for RCS conversations last year, is one of the exceptions.
Casey:
Apple's proprietary iMessage system also features end-to-end encryption, but this protection does not extend to RCS messages.
John:
I'm not sure how they're going to do this, because I think the way Google did it, like you essentially need key exchange servers, like essentially the servers that Apple runs for iMessage that handle like negotiations between the parties and sort of like allow the intent encryption to happen.
John:
Right.
John:
They're not they can't obviously they can't see or infiltrate it.
John:
That's the whole point.
John:
But you still need kind of like a middle party to mediate the exchange.
John:
And so Google has that.
John:
So if you're doing like Android RCS from another Android phone, it goes through Google servers, just like iMessage goes through Apple servers.
John:
But that doesn't help.
John:
When you're using RCS between an iPhone and an Android phone, you don't get the encryption in the air.
John:
So the GSM Association is coming up with a standard for this, but then who's going to run the servers?
John:
Like, does Apple stand up its own sort of RCS key exchange servers?
John:
Does Google open up its servers to everybody?
John:
Do the carriers run the servers?
John:
I'm not quite sure how this is going to work, but it's good to see that they're working on it a little bit.
John:
It would be better if the RCS standard came out of the gate with a solution to this problem, but it absolutely did not.
John:
I want to ask Casey, though, because I think you're the main one who has complained about having conversations with Android people and dropping messages and everything.
John:
Have you actually used RCS to your knowledge, and is it better than it was when you were just using SMS?
Casey:
I have some.
Casey:
So here's the funny situation.
Casey:
The one...
Casey:
group chat because I do exchange messages with individuals that are on Android, but not terribly often.
Casey:
But there's one group chat that I talk on maybe once a week, and that is Aaron's brother and his wife, so my brother-in-law and sister-in-law.
Casey:
And
Casey:
Aaron's brother, my brother-in-law, is on Android, has always been on Android, will likely always be on Android, but my sister-in-law is enlightened in this regard and has had an iPhone since she's been part of the family.
Casey:
And so...
Casey:
I noticed that I was not sending RCS messages in that group chat, and yet I did have an occasion to send a text to my brother-in-law, and that was RCS.
Casey:
So I think I've gotten screwed by my damn sister-in-law, who hasn't updated her damn phone to iOS 18.
Casey:
And I think that's the issue.
John:
so i haven't yelled at her yet to get on the update train but i need to do so at some point there's also some confusion about when the ios messages app shows rcs like as placeholder text in the text field to tell you that it's rcs but in some cases it's not really rcs it might just show that now even when it's just doing mms stuff i don't know there's some confusion about that but anyway good luck in getting everyone upgraded and let us know if that improves your life
Casey:
yeah i will say though that you know in the brief exchange that my brother-in-law and i had directly it was definitely better you know i got a delivery receipt as an example which was nice and i mean the big thing is the images aren't terribly over compressed thumbnails right yeah i feel i don't remember which conversation it was in but i do feel like i did receive one image that was not you know potato quality um and that was a extremely welcome improvement so i was very happy to see that
Casey:
Moving right along, Apple is still tweaking their screen recording app permissions, and they're further decreasing the pop-up frequency in Sequoia 15.1, reading from MacRumors.
Casey:
In the release notes for the sixth beta of MacOS Sequoia 15.1 update, Apple says that users aren't going to see as many screen recording permission pop-ups for apps they regularly use.
Casey:
Quote,
Casey:
Applications using our deprecated content capture technologies now have enhanced user awareness policies.
Casey:
Users will see fewer dialogues if they regularly use apps in which they have already acknowledged and accepted the risks.
John:
I mean, again, I don't know how this affects the thing we talked about in the past where you can just use the plist thing to override it, although one of the feedback that we got was that 15.1 was the one that used...
John:
bundle identifiers in the plist instead of using pass to the application so i guess that thing is still there but like i've now that we know that that exists and until apple invalidates that this entire thing just seems like a waste of time like don't bother trying to
John:
do things to make it less annoying because the only reason that anyone would ever be accepted of any annoyance here is in exchange for increased security for the purpose they wanted to do you know so you don't have an app that's recording without your knowledge that you forget about it or didn't know about it and you want the os say hey you might not know this or you might not remember this but app x is recording your screen that is the supposed security benefit right and there are many possible scenarios in which that could be beneficial
John:
But stuff like this where it's like, oh, if you use it frequently, you'll see fewer dialogues or if someone just sets the P list key, you'll like according to I wish I should have pulled the quote from Snell, but he was saying his understanding is that every time you use the app, essentially it kicks the can down the road a little bit farther for you seeing the dialogue.
John:
And if that's true, you could just keep using the app every day and never see the dialogue.
John:
But.
John:
Like, what are we even doing here?
John:
If this is one Google search away from, you know, a domestic abuser making it so you never see this dialogue, we're not getting any benefit and you're just annoying people who don't benefit from this feature at all.
John:
But anyway, glad to see Apple still working on it.
John:
Great.
Casey:
John, can you tell us about hotkey registration in Sequoia, please?
John:
This is a weird one.
John:
It came up because I actually use this.
John:
Sequoia now requires global hotkeys to use at least one modifier that is not shift or option.
John:
Possibly only for sandbox apps.
John:
So I have been able to confirm that a global modifier is like if you know hit command shift 3 take a screenshot, right?
John:
It doesn't matter what app you're in that keyboard shortcut in theory works anywhere in macOS That's a global keyboard shortcut and in sequoia You better use a modifier.
John:
That's not shifter option or you can't do it and the reasons come but for me is I have a glue I had
John:
uh although i think i still have it because i think the app's not sandboxed a global key modifier in keyboard maestro which is option c which centers the front most window uh which is surprisingly useful if you're taking screenshots and stuff like that and it's a cool thing that keyboard maestro can do and i used option c because i couldn't think of any app that i used where option c was a keyboard shortcut that i use frequently but in sequoia
John:
I guess if Keyboard Maestro was a sandbox app, that wouldn't work.
John:
And there's a comment in Apple's developer forums from an Apple Frameworks engineer saying the following.
John:
This was an intentional change in macOS Sequoia to limit the ability of key logging malware to observe keys in other applications.
John:
The issue of concern was that shift and option can be used to generate alternate characters and passwords, such as the zero with a line through it, which is shift option O. So this is like...
John:
Basically, apps can't, I guess, again, maybe only sandbox app, can't monitor for keystrokes globally that use shift and option because those are modifiers that you might use when typing a password.
John:
A lot of people in the forums also had trouble parsing like, yeah, but...
John:
is this like how does it stop key logging aren't they just registering with this like an api call to register for a hotkey they're just registering for option c they're not going to see any other keystrokes unless someone hits option c how could you get someone's password that way it's very confusing but clearly it was intentional and so yeah i hope you didn't have any global hotkeys that used either only shift or only option
Casey:
That is a little wonky to me, but whatever.
John:
Maybe they'll reverse it in 15.2.
Casey:
Who knows?
Casey:
And then Anonymous writes in and says, I just learned that on select Macs running Sequoia, there is USB-C liquid detection.
Casey:
I assume it works similar to how the iPhone does when wet in that it refuses to charge and pops up a dialogue warning you that the iPhone may be wet with the always inadvisable and baffling option to override and charge anyway.
Casey:
I've encountered this warning before after using my iPhone while in a pool.
Casey:
I thought it was dry enough and foolishly plugged it into charge.
Casey:
I ended up just charging wirelessly for a day or two, a significant benefit of having MagSafe.
Casey:
Related to this, I was at a UVA game this past weekend, and the ground was a little dewy.
Casey:
You know, I had a little bit of moisture on it because it was a noon game because, whatever, I hate noon games, but here we are.
Casey:
Anyways, I had a USB-C cable that I had let flop into the grass that I was using to charge my phone, and
Casey:
And when I put it back in my phone, it took a few seconds, but all of a sudden, and I can't recall if Bluetooth audio playback had stopped at this point, or maybe it had continued, but all of a sudden I heard this kind of distressing alarm coming from somewhere that was vaguely in the direction of both the speaker and also my phone.
Casey:
And I eventually realized, oh, it's my phone.
Casey:
I don't think I've ever heard my phone make this noise before.
Casey:
And sure enough, I picked it up and it was like,
Casey:
For the love of God, your USB-C port may be wet.
Casey:
It was very upset.
Casey:
And so I immediately unplugged the cable and it was very happy again.
Casey:
But I had seen something like this maybe last year, but certainly on Lightning phones.
Casey:
And it was far less aggressive.
Casey:
And it definitely, like I said, it made an audible alarm.
Casey:
Was it like the flash flood warning?
Casey:
It's similar, not quite so traumatic, but similar if memory serves.
Casey:
But interestingly, it did so even though I'm pretty damn sure the phone was silenced because my phone is almost never silenced.
Casey:
Excuse me, almost never on loud.
Casey:
And so it made that noise regardless, which I get, you know, if this is a potentially dangerous thing for the phone, I get that it would override silent mode.
Casey:
But it was very striking and very surprising.
John:
did it give you the option to charge anyway like this uh i don't think so but i wasn't looking that closely to be honest anyway look for this uh coming soon to a mac near you maybe yeah i mean i think it's a good idea like if they have these liquid detectors and they can detect that there's liquid in the port saying hey i know you just plugged it in but i'm choosing not to charge because i've detected liquid and again maybe not with an option to override but uh
John:
It may be in really humid places.
John:
They get that every time they plug in.
John:
But yeah, it's good for Mac OS to get those features as well because anybody who's got a USB-C port, there could be water in there.
John:
Yep.
Casey:
I mean, Lightning too, but definitely with USB-C.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So we have some breaking news from I think the day before yesterday as we record.
Casey:
Google apparently has to open Android up for third-party stores and a bunch of other things.
Casey:
And this is thanks to our quote-unquote friends over at Epic.
Casey:
Reading from The Verge.
Casey:
On October 7th, Judge James Donato issued his final ruling on Epic vs. Google, ordering Google to effectively open up the Google Play app store to competition for three whole years.
Casey:
Google will have to distribute rival third-party app stores within Google Play, which is different.
Casey:
And it must give rival third-party app stores access to the full catalog of Google Play apps.
Casey:
I'm sorry, what?
Casey:
Unless developers opt out individually.
Casey:
These were Epic's biggest asks, and they might change the Android app marketplace forever if they aren't immediately paused or blocked on appeal.
Casey:
And that's not all that Epic has won.
Casey:
Starting on November 1, 2024, which is in, what, like three weeks?
Casey:
And ending on November 1, 2027, Google must also, number one, stop requiring Google Play billing for apps distributed on the Google Play Store.
Casey:
The jury found that Google had illegally tied its payment system to its app store.
Casey:
Number two...
Casey:
Let Android developers tell users about other ways to pay from within the Play Store.
Casey:
That sounds pretty cool.
Casey:
Number three, let Android developers link to ways to download their apps outside of the Play Store.
Casey:
Also very cool.
Casey:
And finally, number four, let Android developers set their own prices for apps irrespective of Play billing.
Casey:
however google cannot share app revenue quote with any person or entity that distributes android apps quote or plans to launch an app store or app platform they cannot offer developers money or perks to launch their apps on the play store exclusively at first they cannot offer developers money or perks not to launch their apps on rival stores
Casey:
They cannot offer device makers or carriers money or perks to pre-install the Play Store, and they cannot offer device makers or carriers money or perks not to pre-install rival stores.
Casey:
In Epic vs. Google, Epic successfully argued that Google had created such a substantial array of deals with developers, carriers, and device makers that it was nigh impossible for rival stores to spring up.
Casey:
By blocking these sorts of deals and proactively helping rival app stores, it's possible that some real competition in Google's monopoly could now arrive.
Casey:
Google will still have some control over safety and security as it opens up the Google Play Store to rival stores.
Casey:
The injunction says that Google can, quote, take reasonable measures, quote, that are strictly necessary and narrowly tailored and are comparable to how it currently polices, policies, polices, I don't know.
Casey:
The Google Play Store.
Casey:
Google will be able to charge a fee for that policing, too.
Casey:
Epic has repeatedly argued that Google should not be able to deter third-party app stores through policing, so it's likely Epic and Google will keep butting heads over this.
Casey:
Would anyone that we know deter third-party app stores through policing?
No.
John:
This is such a incredibly harsh judgment in a situation where Google was already way more open than Apple.
John:
And yet the jury decided you may claim that you're open, but you've constructed all these deals and all these incentives that you really aren't open.
John:
So A, you're a monopoly and B, the stuff you're doing in Paris competition.
John:
i don't think this bodes well for apple we'll see different cases sometimes uh google has gotten worse judgments because they like were claiming that they were open but they weren't whereas apple never claims that they are they're just like it's totally closed but like oh you know it's it's so hard for third-party app stores to get going you know how it makes it really hard for third-party app stores to go and completely never allowing them at all in any possible way like apple had been doing right
John:
But look at this.
John:
They have to distribute the third party.
John:
It's as if the Epic Store had to be in the App Store, and it automatically got access to every app in the App Store unless the developer opted out.
John:
Can you imagine this judgment going against Apple?
John:
Again, with the caveat, appeals, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Who knows how this will end up?
John:
But wow, this is like...
John:
the doomsday scenario for judgments on app stores it's all of apple's worst nightmares come true and all epic streams come true uh with the exception of the security policing thing which obviously they'll they'll argue about because like if you give if you give a company like google any kind of lever any kind of oversight or input into this process google will decide how they can use it to try to get back the control that they're getting taken away by this but
John:
Man, again, this is this is in the US.
John:
So this is not DMA.
John:
This is not the EU.
John:
This was the case.
John:
We've talked about it before.
John:
Google was found to have a monopoly.
John:
How are they going to fix it?
John:
They're going to fix it by saying, yeah, Google, all that stuff you were doing, you're not doing that anymore for three years.
John:
I don't know why three years like when three years is over, did this go back to the old way?
John:
This is slightly confusing.
John:
remedy but boy this is i was about to say this is epic but i'm not going to do that this is extremely harsh google cannot be happy and i guess apple's over there thinking well boy i'm glad that will never happen to us because we're so different than google
Marco:
I mean, so, okay, in all fairness, the Google case had a lot of details that would not apply to Apple in the same way.
Marco:
What was ruled illegal or bad behavior that requires action was not just them having an app store and requiring their in-app purchase system.
Marco:
It isn't a directly applicable ruling to what Apple is doing.
Marco:
It's in the ballpark, but there's a lot of differences in the Google case, like the actual things they were doing.
John:
Mostly because Google didn't totally disallow all this stuff.
John:
They had a system that ostensibly allowed it, but then they did anti-competitive things to stop it from happening, which you would think, isn't what Apple's doing even worse?
John:
But in the past legal cases, Apple has come out ahead because they're like, Apple never even pretended they were allowing this.
John:
They weren't illegally restraining what should have been competition.
John:
There never was any competition.
John:
It was never allowed at all, and obviously the EU thinks that's bad.
John:
But so far, this has actually helped them in U.S.
John:
cases.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
Anyway, so this – you can't really read into direct conclusions that would affect Apple.
Marco:
However, it does strike in the ballpark.
Marco:
And what this shows, like if this actually is not legally intervened with, like if this actually comes to pass –
Marco:
This is a pretty disastrous result in a lot of ways.
Marco:
And so much of it is like, okay, yeah, it is better for consumers if certain things are open and competition is preserved and everything.
Marco:
However, the actual practical implementation of this remedy is going to be a mess for consumers and for developers especially.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So this kind of shows like the risk that these big platform companies take by trying and failing to self-regulate is that someone else will step in and regulate you in some other way that you have a lot less control over.
Marco:
And that way might be disastrous.
Marco:
So it is within the company's best long-term strategic interests –
Marco:
to avoid this kind of regulation by not becoming an abusive monopoly by not doing things that are that are anti-competitive and that might violate antitrust law in certain ways or that might tip off regulators that something needs to be done like ideally you as as these big platform companies avoid this kind of thing happening to you in the first place because
Marco:
When you play fast and loose and when you are too greedy and too short-sighted and you invite this kind of scrutiny and regulation and court cases, you run the risk of there being a massively destructive and not ideal resolution like this remedy.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
And who knows how destructive it will actually be, by the way.
John:
Because it obviously is destructive in that it destroys the thing that these people wanted to have.
John:
Because what they had before was what they wanted to have because they got to choose.
John:
And that's what they wanted.
John:
But like, as we've said many times over, I think it would actually behoove these companies to...
John:
have to compete right to to eventually have this competition force on them we what we would hope is that it would force them to make better products and services because now there's competitions all the things that we would complain about about these services they would say well there's no competition so they can get away with being that crappy because in the end they're
John:
still big and someone in the chat room said uh chris said the idea that you can't make a closed platform because the law explicitly says you can't is insane just to reiterate you can make a closed platform there's absolutely no problem with that the only time there becomes a problem is if you are if you are found to have monopoly power and found to have abused that monopoly power and if you're just making a closed platform you probably don't have monopoly power because you're a dinky little startup and it will take years and years and years
John:
if you're lucky for you to gain monopoly power and we could argue about is it a duopoly because apple and google are rare but there's no arguing that there is like a diversity of competition in the mobile phone app marketplace there's two things two main things especially in the u.s and the rest of the world there's more like in china and everything but like
John:
That amount of power is found to be by the EU, obviously, and also by U.S.
John:
courts to require a different set of rules to apply to you.
John:
So it's not like you can't make things integrated or whatever.
John:
It's like when you get to a certain size, when the decisions that you make, I think Jason Snell talked about this on Upgrade recently, when you get so big that the things that you decide to do affect...
John:
like the world economy and the competition across an entire industry, that's when different sets of rules apply to you.
John:
And it's easy for that to sneak up on you.
John:
And it's easy for you to stay in the mindset of just like never give an inch, keep everything.
John:
And you wake up one day and you're like the biggest company in the world and you and Google control mobile phones almost entirely.
John:
Yeah, and you get these judgments to go against you.
John:
And I think the other thing that's interesting about this case is it was a case in the U.S.
John:
and there was a jury.
John:
And the jury basically bought a lot of the arguments that are in the complaint that the DOJ has filed against Apple.
John:
That doing these things, if you're found to have monopoly power and you do these things like tying your payment system to the App Store...
John:
The jury found that that's a thing that they shouldn't be allowed to do.
John:
Well, Apple does that.
John:
And, you know, paying people to not go into rival stores or whatever.
John:
Apple doesn't do that because they just forbid the rival stores.
John:
But it shows that there are U.S.
John:
juries that are ready to say that these kinds of practices are not just, oh, that's just the way it is and I accept it.
John:
But that apparently the lawyers were able to argue in a way that convinced the jury that, yeah, they probably Google probably shouldn't be allowed to do this.
John:
Not that no company should ever be allowed to do this.
John:
Not that this is illegal, but that Google specifically, because of the things that they became convinced that Google has a legal monopoly power and so on and so forth, Google shouldn't be allowed to do these things.
John:
And a lot of those things are some of the same stuff that Apple does.
John:
Again, surrounding circumstances are also different.
John:
Cases are different.
John:
Juries are going to be different.
John:
The venue might be different.
John:
We'll see how it goes.
John:
But...
John:
I don't this is not a neutral judgment for Apple.
John:
I think this is at least a slight negative because it happened in their country and it happened to the company that is the closest to being like Apple, even though, again, there are big differences.
John:
And it happened with a U.S.
John:
jury that found some of the same things that Apple does were illegal if you have monopoly power.
Casey:
Yeah, I wish I had had the presence of mind to reread the Stratechery articles that were about this and the Apple suit.
Casey:
Because I remember Ben saying he expected Apple to do better than Google.
Casey:
But for the life of me, I can't remember what the justification was for that.
John:
it's because they never had an opening for competition so it was like the illusion of competition making you know deals all you can do x you can do y you can do z but then like uh coercing them through other means is found to be worse than just saying look there are no relationships with third-party stores we don't allow third-party stores we never have we never will
John:
It's basically like when you buy the iPhone in the before DMA days, when you buy the iPhone, you're not buying it with any expectation that there are third party stores where you bought an Android phone.
John:
It's like, oh, Android is open.
John:
I can get apps from anywhere.
John:
But the Google was essentially disallowing that.
John:
I think that was the gist of one or at least one of the arguments.
Casey:
We need a podcast to summarize it for us.
Casey:
Hey, welcome back, everyone.
Casey:
No, I find this very fascinating.
Casey:
And I also find it fascinating as someone who writes code somewhat for a living.
Casey:
Some of the requests that the judge is making, the amount of rejiggering and rewriting and just code that is going to be required to make this work,
Casey:
I just can't fathom it.
Casey:
Like, this is so much work.
Casey:
I mean, Apple was working on DMA stuff.
John:
It might be less than what Apple did for the DMA, though, don't you think?
Casey:
I don't know.
John:
Because Apple wrote so much code to make sure that they could do what they wanted to do in the way they wanted, where they could have just said, fine, third-party app source.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like, it's less work to allow more things, and Apple worked so hard and made so many frameworks, sometimes necessary, like trying to allow the browser engines while maintaining security.
John:
Like, I think that was necessary, but sometimes not necessary.
John:
Like...
John:
But, you know, that's part of the danger of having a judgment go against you.
John:
You don't get to decide.
John:
Suddenly you have to do a bunch of stuff, not on your schedule, not when you want to do it, not how you want to do it, but because a court ordered you to do it.
John:
And no one wants to develop software that way, but that's the danger of losing court cases.
John:
If you had actually self-regulated and been a little bit less controlling, you could have set your own schedule to do stuff like this.
John:
Yeah.
John:
didn't anyway we'll see you know i don't know what the schedule is like if this will get appealed for the next five years and we'll be talking about this uh you know in 2030 when apple's carbon neutral but we'll see
Casey:
Yeah, I hear you.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It's wild.
Casey:
I don't know how it makes me feel that I'm kind of pleased that Tim Sweeney's made all these changes happen.
Casey:
And, you know, I bet if we were to listen back or have a podcast summarize our podcast for us, if we were to listen back to the episodes in, I think it was like late 2020 episodes,
Casey:
about when tim deliberately and epic deliberately started taking third-party payments in their apps you know they had clearly planned to get evicted from the app stores both google and apple and it had like a whole site ready and waiting to go that they launched immediately after they got punted um i i don't remember thinking of it fondly at the time and i thought that they were being kind of pretty big turds
Casey:
But now, looking back on it, maybe it wasn't so bad.
Marco:
Oh, no.
Marco:
They're turds, too.
Marco:
They're just turds in different ways.
Marco:
Well, true.
Marco:
Because, you know, why does Epic want to run their own app store?
Marco:
Because they want 10% or 15% of everybody's purchases like that.
Marco:
Of course they want that.
John:
To be fair, they're taking a lower percentage.
John:
And you know why?
John:
Because when there's competition...
John:
You have incentive to undercut the competitor.
John:
And especially when it's like, you know, 0% margin software, you can undercut them if you're willing to take less profit.
John:
And for Epic, it's way more profit than not getting any profit from mobile platforms.
John:
So they're willing to undercut Apple.
John:
But, you know, Epic's tactics are not always been great.
John:
And sometimes they ask for unreasonable things.
John:
But that's...
John:
The result is it's causing these systems that have held up the two giant mobile platforms to come under scrutiny and to be judged and decided that they are actually impairing competition and here's how we should try to restore competition.
John:
To the extent that benefits Epic, ideally it would benefit anybody who wants to make a third-party store is now more free to do so than they were before, but we'll see.
Marco:
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Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
In 2022, a 10-year, $2.5 billion deal was signed that kept most of MLS, this is Major League Soccer, this is America's, you know, premier soccer league.
Casey:
Anyways, kept most of MLS exclusive to Apple.
Casey:
Fox and Univision would occasionally be able to air a game, but most of the league would now be behind a paywall.
Casey:
Apple's deal would eventually help incentivize one of the world's most popular soccer players ever to finish his career in America.
Casey:
As part of Lionel Messi's agreement with InterMiami,
Casey:
I'll see you next time.
Casey:
Messi and Inter Miami's dominance this season wasn't a major storyline that sports observers were paying attention to are covering.
Casey:
Highlights have appeared frequently on SportsCenter.
Casey:
Major online highlight factories like Bleacher Report and Overtime also haven't made much mention of Messi since he made his debut in 2023.
Casey:
We don't need to talk too much about this, but I thought it was fascinating that here it is.
Casey:
You know, soccer slash football.
Casey:
We don't need to hear feedback on this, please.
Casey:
Soccer is arguably the most popular, maybe not even arguably, the most popular sport in the world.
Casey:
I think F1 in soccer, it depends on who you ask, but they're both up there.
Casey:
Anyways, one of the most popular sports in the world.
Casey:
And here is, I think, arguably the best sport.
Casey:
current active player of the most popular sport in the world.
Casey:
And nobody's paying attention.
Casey:
I only follow certain sports and I don't follow them super closely, but typically I'm aware enough that if something major is going on, you know, like my friend who had sent this to me, someone will mention it in a group chat that we're in, or you will call my attention to it or whatever.
Casey:
I don't typically watch SportsCenter or anything like that, but these sorts of things bubble up.
Casey:
I haven't heard diddly squat about MLS nor Lionel Messi outside of Apple initially mentioning him every four seconds when the deal was still new.
Casey:
I don't know if you guys remember that.
Casey:
But it is fascinating to me that Apple...
Casey:
understandably to my eyes, made a gamble that, hey, let's bring the world's greatest player, let's bring him into American soccer, let's put these golden handcuffs on him, and let's make a great deal so that he will only be performing for us in so many words.
Casey:
And yet, because it's behind Apple's paywall, it seems like nobody at all is paying attention.
Casey:
And that just is totally wild to me.
Casey:
And it shows that even when you throw a
Casey:
that doesn't necessarily fix the problem, especially if you don't understand it very well.
John:
Is it because of the paywall, though, or is it just because Americans don't like soccer?
Casey:
That's a very fair question.
John:
That's the easier solution.
John:
And the other thing is, I don't know much about soccer or this person, but from the article you read, incentivized him to finish his career in America.
John:
I am assuming he was the greatest soccer player, but now he's getting kind of old.
John:
And so...
John:
You can have an equivalent of other sports, a great sports player that maybe has passed their prime, and by far they would be the biggest player in the MLS, but who are they playing with?
John:
Are they playing with all of their rivals from the peak of their career?
John:
No, they're back playing the real soccer in the rest of the world, right?
John:
So even to a big soccer fan, it's like, well, they got this great guy at the end of his career.
John:
It's great he got put out to pasture, and he can go beat up on the Americans who aren't as good at soccer.
John:
But like that's that's not enough to support a league.
John:
The rest of the soccer world has all the stars of soccer playing each other, which is much more exciting.
John:
And I mean, the paywall probably doesn't help here.
John:
I'm it's one of the most fascinating things about this deal is that they were able to finagle it so that he gets a percentage of his subscription revenue.
John:
That's star power to have a deal with Apple.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
percentage of subscription revenue like that just shows that he is the only player that matters in the league because i don't think there are many other players in mls that are getting a percentage of apple subscription revenue well but he probably only gets 70 um he's probably getting a tiny percent but any percent it's like when movie stars get big enough to start getting like percentage of gross right that's even bigger than that so i i think this the answer is that that americans just aren't into soccer but yeah and you know
John:
So Apple couldn't get the NFL.
John:
That's what it comes down to.
John:
They tried.
John:
They couldn't get it.
Casey:
Well, I don't know, though.
Casey:
Is it that they couldn't get it or that they just didn't really try hard?
John:
I mean, I think they literally couldn't because I think they one of the things I heard was that they were insisting on certain provisions that the NFL would not agree to.
John:
As in like, you know, we need to have these rights or be able to shoot the games in this way or whatever.
John:
And if I wasn't willing to give that up.
John:
And Apple wasn't willing to do the deal without it.
John:
So it's not just a matter of money.
John:
It was a matter of like conditions, maybe.
John:
But either way, they didn't get it.
John:
And I think a lot of Americans, I don't know what the percentages are, but I bet a lot of Americans, maybe even more than 50%, pay to see the NFL, even though technically there's over-the-air broadcasts that they could be getting.
John:
right and so i don't even think the paywall issue is the big deal like if you put the nfl entirely behind a paywall and took it off over the air people would complain uh and the viewership numbers would go down but it would still probably be more popular than baseball uh yes and no because honestly uh the nfl is easier than ever to get well there's asterisks and daggers and double daggers there but for
Casey:
So broadly speaking, the NFL is easier than ever to get access to because it used to be that the only way to have access to what's called Sunday ticket, which is basically you get to see all of the football games, again, asterisk, dagger, double dagger.
Casey:
You can see all the football games really easily.
Casey:
And it used to be you had to have a DirecTV subscription, which was a satellite cable, not a cable provider, but a satellite provider here in the States.
Casey:
It was easier overseas, but here in the States, you had to have a DirecTV dish.
Casey:
You had to have a DirecTV subscription, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
um now you can do it on youtube tv but it's something like five hundred dollars a year it is astronomical the price of nfl sunday ticket it is hilariously expensive and because of that i think that a lot of people will go to fairly stark lengths in order to avoid paying that money and
Casey:
Uh, let's just say I've looked into this and there are not a lot of great options that I've found, but, um, it is, it is extremely expensive and I don't, I don't know how it would turn out if the NFL came off of terrestrial TV, but
John:
No, I'm just saying it came off of over-the-air waves.
John:
Like it would still be on basic cable for your home team or whatever.
John:
I don't know the terms.
John:
But anyway, the NFL Sunday ticket is for the people who need to see every game or whatever.
John:
It's very expensive.
John:
But I'm saying if the NFL was not available for free, then in other words, you had to pay for cable television, for example, to see games, right?
John:
We're not in that situation now.
John:
Basically, I'm wondering how many people watch the NFL on over-the-air broadcasts.
Casey:
I don't think it would be that many, to be honest with you.
Casey:
Also, before I forget, real-time follow-up.
Casey:
It's not Lionel.
Casey:
It's Lionel Messi.
Casey:
My American is showing, and I apologize.
Casey:
I'm sure we've gotten a thousand emails and tweets.
Casey:
I'm sorry about that.
Casey:
But no, to come back to the NFL, I don't know.
Casey:
I think some of what's going on with the MLS, as you said, is just that Americans don't care about soccer.
Casey:
But I do feel like if this content was easier to consume, you would see more of it.
Casey:
So as an example...
Casey:
I don't pay much attention to the NBA, even though I would actually like to pay more attention to it, but I just never think about it.
Casey:
I don't pay much attention to the NBA, but I'll see interesting plays bubble up through one of several different group chats.
Casey:
I'll see it occasionally through, you know, Mastodon or...
Casey:
If for some reason I do open Twitter, usually to look at a single tweet and then dismiss it, then oftentimes I'll see a basketball play or sequence floating by.
Casey:
NBA Twitter, from what I gather, is phenomenal.
Casey:
There's so much that bubbles up, and I think a large part of that, and this is what this story is trying to say, is that so much of that is because it's easy to capture, it's easy to share, it's easy to get to.
John:
That's because Americans like basketball.
John:
That's awesome.
John:
That's why.
John:
It's really popular.
John:
I think Canadian invented it, maybe, but it's basically practically an American sport.
Casey:
For the love of God, John, it was invented in Springfield, Mass.
John:
All right, I can't forget it was a Canadian peach basket.
John:
Anyway, the point is, Americans like basketball.
John:
That's why you're seeing clips from it.
Casey:
Well, I think it's both, though.
John:
I don't think you're seeing a lot of clips of basketball games in other parts of the world where it's not popular, but it's really popular in this country.
John:
Have you heard of Michael Jordan?
Yeah.
Casey:
That was a long time ago.
Casey:
Larry Bird?
Casey:
Oh, my God, you're getting older.
Casey:
You're getting older.
John:
I'm just saying, like, it's been popular for a long time.
John:
Obviously, the NFL has come from out of nowhere to become the most popular sport.
John:
But, like, of course you're going to see highlights.
John:
You're going to even see highlights from baseball, the American pastime, even though the NFL is more popular, right?
John:
I think that's a better explanation and not the venue for the thing.
John:
But, you know, maybe they need, like, they had Drive to Survive to try to get Americans interested in F1.
John:
They need, like...
John:
boot to toot or something for saving American Vintage into soccer.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
Good luck with that.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
I'm pleased that we had an actual conversation about this.
Casey:
I feel quite satisfied now.
Casey:
Thank you for indulging me, gentlemen.
Casey:
Oh, my goodness.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let's move back to tech stuff or strictly tech stuff.
Casey:
uh apple has said or is being said that apple is no longer in talks to join open ai's investment round uh we had already heard that they were not going to take a board seat if i'm not mistaken but now it's they're apparently not even investing so reading from the wall street journal apple is no longer in talks to participate in open ai funding round expected to raise as much as 6.5 billion dollars and 11th hour end to what would have been a rare investment by the iphone maker and another major silicon valley company
Casey:
according to a knowledgeable person.
Casey:
The two other tech giants, Microsoft and Nvidia, have also been in talks to participate in the round.
Casey:
Microsoft is expected to invest around $1 billion, adding to the $13 billion it already has put into the company, according to people familiar with Matter.
Casey:
The funding talks aren't completed, and it is possible the participants' investment amounts could change.
Casey:
OpenAI is also in the process of overhauling its corporate structure from a nonprofit into a for-profit company.
Casey:
That change, which was encouraged by many of the investors in the round, you don't say, will be a complicated process for the startup.
Casey:
If it doesn't complete the change within two years, investors in the current round will have the right to request their money back.
John:
Apple hasn't even shipped their OpenAI integration, and already they're just like, eh.
John:
We've talked about this before, how OpenAI's culture and Apple's culture are not a good match.
John:
But that's sometimes just the way it is with a young company and an older company.
John:
Young, upstart, right?
John:
Maybe they kick out their CEO and he comes back and kicks out everyone.
John:
Yeah.
John:
a lot of drama going on there recently their cto left and a bunch of other people like it's open ai a lot of drama and apple doesn't like drama but they did the deal they did the deal with open ai they talked about them in the keynote when you know your thing on your phone can't figure it out you'll have the option of sending it to open ai and they did this deal which supposedly no money's changing hands so they don't know the details and they were going to be an investor and they were going to have a
John:
board seat oh no board seat and actually you know what maybe we're going to sit this one out investment wise maybe we just don't think there's a big upside there and i don't and apple was really touting like you know we did the deal with open ai but we're almost we've almost got a deal with google for gemini and we haven't heard anything about that since
John:
when they were like, yeah, totally.
John:
It's not just OpenAI.
John:
This Gemini deal is probably going to happen real soon now.
John:
Not that they said that, but they were hinting in that direction.
John:
And so far, no Gemini deal.
John:
OpenAI is ostensibly going to ship as a feature of our phones at some point in the future.
John:
And Apple is rapidly...
John:
not distancing, distancing itself, but getting less cozy than they were before with open AI.
John:
Maybe they just didn't, they just figured, you know, we can have better use of our money.
John:
We've got the deal that we want.
John:
We don't need to invest.
John:
Or maybe they're really just, you know, hedging their bets.
John:
And, you know, I don't think they're going to be investing in Google anytime soon, but, uh, and maybe that's part of it.
John:
Maybe open AI is getting so big and has so much funding.
John:
I think they've raised more money than any quote unquote startup ever.
John:
If you can call this company, a startup at this point.
John:
Um,
John:
But yeah, maybe they're just like, they don't need our help.
John:
And maybe we're we'll talk about this in overtime, but maybe they think maybe we're like accidentally funding our future biggest rival and we don't want to do that.
John:
Or maybe they just are rethinking getting even tighter with this company that seems to be in constant turmoil.
Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
And let's start with James Sutcliffe asking, will John be buying the new $700 Sony PlayStation Pro?
Casey:
And can you, John, give me the two-second overview on what makes the PlayStation Pro Pro and also $700, please?
John:
Yeah, this is a thing that Sony's been doing where it's not a mid-cycle update, but like...
John:
at some point in the life of their console generation they will release a better version of the same console that plays all the same games but plays them better in some way so the PS4 and the PS4 Pro this is in addition to the slim model which is just the plain PS4 and it was the PS4 slim anyway there's the PS5 which I have then they made the PS5 slim which is a slimmer version of the PS5
John:
And now they've announced the PS5 Pro.
John:
And what makes it better?
John:
It's got a beefier GPU, a little bit better CPU.
John:
Sometimes they have more RAM.
John:
I don't know the technical details that much for the PlayStation 5 Pro.
John:
But I do know the effect on the games.
John:
And the effect is...
John:
Uh, sometimes they run at a higher frame rate.
John:
Sometimes they run at higher resolution or higher apparent resolution with upscaling.
John:
Uh, but they run all the same games just a little bit better.
John:
I always buy the pros models because I want to run the same games a little bit better.
John:
Uh, and very often they will be not remasters, but like game existing games that they've already shipped will be updated to look better on the pro version of the console.
John:
And that's happening with a bunch of games that I like.
John:
Uh, I think they're doing an update to, uh, the last of us part two and the last of us part two,
John:
tv series is coming out soon so i might replay through the last of us part two before the tv series just like i replayed through the original last of us uh for the third time before the tv series came out and just like i got to replay through the sort of remastered ps5 version of the last of us now i'll get to uh replay through the ps5 pro enhanced version of the last of us part two and so to answer the question yes i already pre-ordered my sony playstation 5 pro and i'm looking forward to it
John:
and i'm sorry it's replacing a regular playstation 5 yeah i'm the what's going to happen is the playstation 5 will rotate up to my son's room replacing the ps4 pro which is this is the rotation in the house so we just said when i get a new console my old one goes up to him and that'll be good because the ps4 pro even though i have an ssd attached to it it's just so much slower we're playing the same game like we're playing destiny with each other right but i have to wait for his load times and this will really be a big upgrade to his load times uh
Marco:
But it's really for you, though.
Marco:
You said you have to wait for his low times.
Marco:
Really, you're speeding up your own low times.
John:
Well, you know, he'll like having a better game console, too, even though half the time he's playing games on his iPad anyway.
John:
But the PS5 will take up way more room on his desk in his room, but he'll survive.
Casey:
You know, with all of the redundant PlayStations, you could have bought at least one Xbox.
Casey:
That's something you could have done.
Marco:
Why would I want that?
John:
Or like a gaming PC and then you can stop buying Mac Pros.
John:
Also true.
John:
I would much rather have the PlayStation than the gaming PC.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Justin Waring writes, iOS 18's vehicle motion cues mitigated John's motion sickness at all.
Casey:
So to recap, and then I would like to throw in my two cents real quick, vehicle motion cues is there's a bunch of dots, like circles that are on your phone screen as you're riding in a car.
Casey:
And let's say you're holding your phone and the car starts to accelerate, those dots will move toward the bottom of the phone a little bit.
Casey:
And I think that the way this is supposed to work is for your vision to match what your inner ear is feeling.
Casey:
Because otherwise, if you're staring at your phone and nothing's moving, there's a disconnect between what your inner ear is saying is happening and what your eyes are seeing.
Casey:
And so it's supposed to allegedly help.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I don't recall if it's on by default or not in iOS 18, but I certainly had it on for a little while.
Casey:
I guess on my iPhone 16, I believe.
Casey:
And I found it so incredibly distracting.
Casey:
And as someone who is not used to motion sickness, you know, I don't typically get motion sickness.
Casey:
I found it so distracting that it didn't take me very long to turn it off entirely.
Casey:
Erin also suffers from motion sickness when reading in the car.
Casey:
And I don't think we've been in the car very long with her as a passenger.
Casey:
So I haven't had a chance to ask her about this.
Casey:
But with that preamble aside, John, have you tried it?
John:
I get motion sick when I look at my phone, so I would never look at my phone in the car.
Casey:
Well, but this is the whole thing.
Casey:
What if you don't get motion sick now?
John:
It's like, oh, but now you'll be able to because the dots will save you.
John:
It's like, why would I ever look at my phone in the car?
John:
It's like asking you to drink this cup of Ipecac.
John:
it'll be fine no thanks wow um so here's the thing though i i was aware of this feature and i made sure when i updated and you know it's ios 18 even before i got my new phone i made sure it was on automatic because automatic is supposed to like you can turn it off or on or on automatic automatic is supposed to detect when you're in a car by like your gps location and your you know it detects when you're driving and it will turn the dots on and freaking thing never turn the dots on i'm in a car that's aaron's phone yeah yeah
John:
I'm a passenger in a car.
John:
We're driving down the highway at 45 miles an hour.
John:
Like it's not turning on.
John:
I want to know what it's waiting for.
John:
So what I did do was I added the dots thing to control center, the new customizable control center.
John:
And I had, I do actually want to try it at some point, but honestly, like I'm never going to look at my phone when I'm in the car.
John:
Like I,
John:
Everyone gets motion sick to varying degrees, and I get motion sick extremely easily.
John:
The dots are not going to save me.
John:
There's no freaking chance.
John:
I understand the theory.
John:
You stated it well, but that's not enough.
John:
Those little dots are not going to be the thing that makes me not get motion sick.
Casey:
You don't know that.
Casey:
You've never tried it.
John:
I'm going to try it, and I'm going to get sick to my stomach, and I'm going to be mad at the stupid dogs.
Casey:
Well, with that attitude, yeah, you will.
John:
I'll try it for science, but look, it's like those glasses with the liquid in them.
John:
You've seen those?
John:
It's like a bunch of glasses you wear, but they have water in them, and so as your head tilts on a boat, the water will stay level, and it's in your field of vision.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
I've never heard of this.
John:
i've heard of all the the motion sickness thing you can possibly imagine like i i i'm sure this will help this will help people if you're within the threshold that this can help you that's great i'm so far past the threshold stuff's gonna help me i'll try it for science if i remember to the next time i'm a passenger but i have dim hopes because i think nothing can help me but not moving me
Casey:
Good to know.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
Neil McGregor writes, given the timescales that we think we know about iPhone hardware lead times, it seems unlikely that this generation of iPhone was really, quote, built from the ground up for AI.
Casey:
When do you think the first true, built from the ground up for AI, iPhone will be launched?
Casey:
What specifications will be the telltale signs?
Casey:
For example, a step change in neural engine performance on characteristic jump in RAM,
Casey:
bigger battery for demanding workflows, custom compute beyond the neural engine, etc.
Casey:
The difference in this generation appears to be the RAM size, which I assume could be added to a chip design relatively late in the development, and it was likely to happen at some point anyway.
Casey:
I get what Neil's saying here, and I don't disagree, but I don't know what I would look for other than a wildly beefier neural engine.
Casey:
I'm not sure what else would be a good sign to me.
John:
We need Suruji.
John:
What's his first name?
John:
Johnny Suruji?
John:
Yeah.
John:
We need him.
John:
Every time he gets in an interview, he says this exact same thing.
John:
And he's like, I just can't get it through your thick skull, so I'm going to keep saying it.
John:
And I agree with him.
John:
What he would say if he was given this question is, we've been putting neural engines in our phone chips for years.
John:
built from the ground up for AI.
John:
That's a marketing term, but practically speaking, Apple has been putting machine learning hardware in its chips way before anyone else was.
John:
They were emphasizing it.
John:
They were building features around it.
John:
They were making APIs for it.
John:
They were making frameworks around it.
John:
they continue to do so so if you look at the phone and say what would it look like if it was built for ai would it have like a beefy neural engine well they already have that like they didn't it doesn't look like it's any different because they just make the neural engine better year after year or whatever um increasing the ramp size uh neil's right that's something that's pretty easy to do and it's pretty clear that they did that for apple intelligence but honestly i think
John:
a you know even though surely this phone was not when this hardware was being planned apple intelligence maybe wasn't even a twinkle in anyone's eye so in that respect the whole built from the ground up for ai is a little bit marketing spin a little bit of truth in that we did make sure they all had eight gigs of ram like so i give it a pass on that it's not you know it's not a completely bogus marketing thing but it's also not true that when they were planning this phone they were like this needs to run apple intelligence because they didn't even have apple intelligence based on the rumors that we've heard of when this was
John:
conceived in the three-year lead times or whatever on new phones.
John:
But honestly, a phone built from the ground up for AI wouldn't look that different than the 16 Pro and the 16 Pro Max.
John:
I don't think we should expect any massive change to the SoC for Apple Intelligence, especially since Apple Intelligence, as we record this, is still essentially an unproven feature.
John:
Do people love it and they want 100 times more of it?
John:
Or is it just like, eh, it's all right.
John:
I hope they make it better.
John:
Like Siri is a good example.
John:
A voice system is great and we take it for granted and we think it's an important feature and it should be there.
John:
But they didn't remake the entire phone around it because A, Siri wasn't good enough for that.
John:
And B, there are so many other things that we do with our phone that are not Siri that there was no reason to bend the entire phone around Siri.
John:
they did make the microphones better they did make siri better they did have the neural engine to make it beefier and beefier but like in the end are we were we previously using phones that were built from the ground up from siri like i think this is putting the cart before the horse as the entire industry is with the assumption that ai will be the most important feature on our phone and we want the entire hardware design to be focused on that feature let's see how the feature does before we completely change the hardware design of the phone around it and again give it a three-year lead time
Casey:
Sharon Gordon writes,
Casey:
passwords app even though i'm a paid one password user it's all getting a little confusing are there any articles you can recommend that really go over this especially from an apple ecosystem point of view i have largely been ignoring passkeys there's a handful of places i use them but
Casey:
Generally speaking, I don't.
Casey:
And that's mostly because of a similar ignorance.
Casey:
And also, I don't feel like I have a good understanding of how sharing a passkey would work, if such a thing is even possible.
Casey:
But there are some things that Aaron and I, like let's take Amazon as an example.
Casey:
Aaron and I both use the same Amazon login.
Casey:
And I don't know.
Casey:
I genuinely don't know.
Casey:
That's not a figure of speech.
Casey:
I truly don't know how that would work if I were to switch my Amazon login, for example, to
Casey:
I mean, my answer is pretty boring.
Marco:
Whenever a website asks me if I'd like to add a passkey, I say yes, and I add it.
Marco:
But most websites don't ask me that.
Marco:
So I only have a handful of them so far.
Marco:
I'm not taking proactive actions to move myself over to it, not out of any kind of fear or political statement about them, more just I have more important things to do most of the time.
Marco:
And that's just like that's one of those kind of like technical hygiene tasks that I think most working adults don't have time to actually really ever do.
Marco:
So I intend to maybe someday get there, but I just haven't yet.
Marco:
But whenever websites ask me, I say yes.
Casey:
John.
John:
So to help answer Sharon's question a little bit, we should link to Ricky Mondelo's post about –
John:
migrating password managers, migrating to the Apple password system and pass keys.
John:
And it's got some good advice about not trying to do like a big bang type of like, I'm going to go in there and change everything and transfer all my stuff that you can kind of do it sort of the, the,
John:
demand-paged version of it, sort of slow, gradual one.
John:
So that's actually a good... Even if you don't follow the advice in the article, it's a good mindset to get into.
John:
It's not like you're not missing some boat that's leaving and you need to get on it and it will change your life or whatever, right?
John:
Passkeys are a developing technology.
John:
I'm kind of in the same boat with Marco in that when they offer it, I take it.
John:
But as Ricky will tell you, lots of websites...
John:
uh that implement passkeys choose totally different policies for those passkeys than other websites because you can websites can choose to do whatever they want they can give you a passkey and then remove your password they can let you use a password and a passkey github uses passkeys as a second factor in a two-factor login so you enter your username and your password and then as a second factor one of the things that you can use is your passkey which is totally not the supposed intention of
John:
of passkeys but technologically there's nothing stopping you from doing it so the bottom line is that every website that uses passkeys is has some different notion of where they fit in in their website and maybe that will change over time like in the beginning we wanted to roll out passkeys just to try them out and if lots of people adopt them maybe we'll do this but like you just because a website supports passkeys or anything supports passkeys doesn't mean my my perspective is i don't know based on that
John:
how it's going to work okay so you've got pass keys when someone says like oh we support usernames and passwords i more or less know how that's going to work these days although there was a kind of a uh older people remember the somewhat annoying drawn out transition between uh sites and other things asking you for a username that was not an email address you both remember those days right mm-hmm
John:
Those were not good days.
John:
Some websites still do it.
John:
But in general, we've sort of settled on if you're going to have a login to a website that's not going to be like a third-party login, like login with Google, login with Twitter, login with Apple, whatever thing, that it's going to say a username and a password and the username is going to be an email address.
John:
But
John:
Back in the battle days, you had to come up with a username and put numbers at the end of it and do other awful things, right?
John:
That's where we are, I feel like, with passkeys.
John:
It's like, oh, so you support passkeys?
John:
I don't know what you're going to want from me.
John:
If I enable this passkey, are you going to remove my password and my password won't work anymore?
John:
Because sometimes I don't want to do that, not because I don't trust passkeys, but because I don't trust the website to implement passkeys well enough.
John:
and there are some things you know casey mentioned the sharing of passkeys which i think is trivial with apple's passwords it's just like you put it in a shared group or whatever and by the way i'm loving the shared groups i made a bunch for my family and they're really making your life better so thumbs up on that as someone who wasn't a one password user which has that feature has had it for ages it's great for me to have it now and the apple uh keychain thing but passkeys there are still some technical limitations the the sort of
John:
export import flow for passkeys is supposedly coming soon but it's not available yet they want to do it in a secure way so on and so forth and that is the limitation versus plain old passwords where it's easy for example not easy but it is very possible for example to migrate from one password to apple's password system because one password has an export and apple's password have an import
John:
Obviously, making that export is incredibly insecure because there's your passwords and plain text in a file that you're going to import or whatever.
John:
So that's not great.
John:
And Pasky is going to try to do that better.
John:
But there's no good cross-platform way to do that with Pasky's yet.
John:
And every website that uses Pasky's can pick a different policy and you really never know what it's going to be.
John:
Can you just log in with the passkey by itself?
John:
Can you keep the password in the passkey?
John:
If so, how do you choose to use the passkey?
John:
Are you only prompted to use your passkey when you use browser X and not browser Y?
John:
Does it work on your phone or your Mac?
John:
My stance is anytime there is a passkey, I would like to use it instead of a password, but I'm not even always given that option.
John:
So I think we are in a transition period and it's fine for you to dip your toe in.
John:
Find a website that uses passkeys that you think it will make your login experience better and try it for a while.
John:
I've been on sites that took away my password and I've disabled the passkey so I could get my password back because I didn't trust yet that this website was implementing passkeys well enough that I wasn't going to get locked out of my account, right?
John:
Uh, you have to kind of make those choices on your own.
John:
So fingers crossed for me on pass keys.
John:
I am optimistic about technology, but it is still young.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, tail scale and delete me.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
One of the many perks of membership is ATP overtime, our weekly bonus topic.
Marco:
This week's overtime is on AI moats and trade secrets.
Marco:
Uh,
Marco:
So tune in.
Marco:
If you're a member, you already get it.
Marco:
If you want to hear this and you aren't a member, atv.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thank you so much, and we'll talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
Marco:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-
Marco:
So my kid's gaming PC, it's a laptop.
Marco:
It's a Razer laptop.
Marco:
All three of us in our household have Razer gaming laptops of varying ages and specs.
Marco:
And those are, together, our gaming PCs.
Marco:
Tiff's is dying and won't even boot anymore.
Marco:
Oh, cool.
Marco:
And it's actually her second one.
Marco:
Mine is perfect and works great because I hardly ever use it.
Marco:
And my kids has been having some problems, a lot of problems.
Marco:
You know, first of all, it's a Windows laptop.
Marco:
So most of the time when it is closed, for some reason, it is very hot.
Marco:
The fans still run.
Marco:
It's like it's it's like, you know, standard kind of like, you know, messed up Windows laptop problems like this thing doesn't sleep well like me with pseudo ephedrine.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So this thing does not sleep well.
Marco:
It seems to be doing a lot of work for nothing most of the time.
Marco:
The thermals are awful.
Marco:
So I thought – and he started to complain a lot about really bad performance in pretty much any action.
Marco:
Now at first I thought like maybe it's some kind of weird malware that he installed while downloading some random thing off of a Discord.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But then he actually showed me... There were some common tasks.
Marco:
I think it was opening up the browser.
Marco:
And it took so long to open.
Marco:
I'm like, okay.
Marco:
Something is more wrong with this than that.
Marco:
And any game would fail miserably.
Marco:
Maybe it's thermals.
Marco:
It's a laptop.
Marco:
It's been running its fans on high for two years.
Marco:
So...
John:
chances are there's probably a lot of dust and crap in there maybe it's clogging up one of the heat sinks or some of the fans so can i pause for a second here just point this out which i know i've mentioned this before but just to show that it's not just my family and that it is a thing uh when when we were all kids uh when there was a problem with the computer we fixed it because our parents were old and didn't understand computers and we were young and we did not every young person understood computers but we did and
John:
now that we are older i mean my parents said this to me all the time when i was a child when you get old like me your kids will have to explain technology to you but instead what happens is that our children's computers don't work and they bring them to us to fix because we understand computers now obviously we have a tech podcast for programmers like we're not the average person but i still feel like we may end up being or at least my generation gen x may end up being the only generation that
John:
had to fix all the computer problems when we were kids because our parents were tooled to understand it and still have to fix all the computer problems when we're older because young kids don't know or care anything about computers because they just take it for granted and PCs are for old people anyway.
John:
And so here you are, Marco, debugging and fixing computer problems for your kid.
John:
Where was the future we were promised where we would be old fuddy-duddies and our kids would have to fix our computers?
John:
My kids don't fix my computers.
Marco:
I think eventually my kid will know enough about computers that he won't need me anymore.
Marco:
That time has not yet come, though.
Marco:
I mean, he's only 12.
John:
My son is a junior computer science major with excellent grades, and I still fix his computer.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
anyway so i decided you know this this laptop is long out of warranty um and i and i tried i even looked like i installed some process monitoring tool and i even tried like i used the built-in task monitor or whatever and like nothing seemed to be using a lot of cpu or gpu power like there was no reason why it had to be running its fans on full blast i'm like all right well whatever let me open it up and see if i can blow out some dust
John:
unfortunately i know where the story is going so i just wanted to ask you a leading question here before you got to this stage is there anything else you noticed about the computer that gave you any pause no okay not at all proceed all right so i you know so i flip it over i get out my trusty i fix it screwdriver kit find the red screwdriver to take the bottom screws off and
Marco:
And so I do like the four corners of the screws.
Marco:
I think it's like three across the top, three across the bottom.
Marco:
So I take off the – and when I get to the corner on one of the two bottom corners when I open it up, the whole panel kind of pops up.
Marco:
not a good sign and i'm like hmm that's unusual why are the contents under pressure like that's did you shake up the laptop before you opened it i'm like hmm that's anyway so i i uh continued to open the rest of it pulled it off and i noticed the uh the battery has ballooned somewhat and
John:
And I'm like, all right.
John:
Another aside here, by the way, you posted this on, was it Massonara or Threads?
Marco:
I forget where you posted this.
John:
I keep forgetting Threads exists.
John:
All right.
John:
So there is, speaking of Threads, there is a thing that there are people writing stories about this, and it amazes me they're writing stories about this now and not last month or the month before or the month before that, because it's always been true, about Threads, things on Threads, like having the algorithm on Threads essentially promoting Threads
John:
they're calling it like engagement bait but it's kind of like the version of clickbait it was basically the well someone will post something uh innocently like pretend innocently post something that they know will be incredibly controversial and everyone will reply about and so marco unwittingly did this but not on threads posting a picture of his battery and saying do you think this looks okay and
John:
And it was exactly like the engagement bait on threads where it's like nobody would ask that.
John:
No sane person would say something like this unless it was totally like because they know a thousand people are going to reply and say, hey, dummy, don't you know about X, Y, Z?
John:
I can't think of an example from threads, but you don't need me to put an example.
John:
Open up threads right now.
John:
Go to the algorithmic timeline that it automatically switches to you even if you switch to a following because they're evil.
John:
And just look at what the top post is.
John:
And it's going to be some person innocently saying –
John:
I always thought that X, Y, and Z, but I'm not sure about whatever.
John:
And there's going to be a thousand reply guys replying to this engagement bait, and that's what Threads has become.
John:
Well, Marco is... I think it was... You have to tell me.
John:
Were you legitimately asking that question, or were you doing it just to get insane reactions?
Marco:
I was legitimately... Because, like, okay...
John:
i know that swollen batteries are a bad thing good um but i didn't like it was only a little bit puffy so i didn't know like no that is not true this is the puffiest battery i've ever seen in my entire life look like a ravioli it looked like it was about to explode i thought you should have immediately put it on your driveway and called the fire department
Marco:
Well, when I saw it, I'm like, okay, well, it has puffed up enough to push the case, but I'm like, I've never seen a Razer battery.
Marco:
I don't know what their starting state is.
Marco:
They normally look like pillows?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
It pushed the case open.
Marco:
But only, like, it wasn't, like... Only a little.
Marco:
Well, yeah, like, you know, what you normally see is, like, laptops where, like, the keyboard is starting to bend upwards or the trackpad has popped out.
John:
That's why I was asking, like, did you notice that, like, was the case bulging?
Marco:
And the reason I asked that is because I saw the battery.
Marco:
Right, but no, the case was fine.
Marco:
It was just, like, a little bit of pop on the case when I opened it up.
Marco:
So, like, it didn't... That's why I was, like, I know this is not... Like, I'm pretty sure this isn't normal, but, like...
Marco:
how far gone is this it was a perfect example of engagement bait unintentional apparently but yeah anyway so everyone reports back to me oh yeah that's bad apparently they're called spicy pillows like no one taught me this slang so but and of course every single reply is making that joke i'm like oh wow you guys really really original there
Marco:
um i assume some youtuber popularizes this term it's a i don't want to say it's a meme it is a term of art let's say in the field and yes there are pouch style batteries but there are no ravioli style batteries anyway and i heard from a bunch of people who said basically their razor laptop also had this happen including the replacement battery they got also had the same problem like within a short time consistent manufacturing
Marco:
yeah exactly so anyway um so i'm like crap like i don't like he there's a there's a possibility of a gaming pc happening in his christmas future um so i'm like i just i gotta make this last till christmas i'm like how like but now that i've seen this it's like i can't just let this go like i can't just leave it there like i have i i have to take action now that i now that i've uncovered this that's what the world was telling you the world was telling you your house will burn down
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So what I was wondering is, can I get this to work until Christmas, at least?
Marco:
And miraculously... So first, I blew out all the dust out of all the fans and everything.
Marco:
And it seemed to work.
Marco:
But then I was like, I wonder...
John:
When you say it seemed to work, I was going to say, like, you have these gaming laptops, but honestly, they're gaming desktops that are just bad desktops, because, like, who's using a gaming laptop not plugged in?
John:
Your performance will tank.
John:
So were you using this?
John:
You had removed the battery and disposed of it properly, but the thing would still boot if you just plugged into power?
Marco:
That's what I wondered, because, like...
Marco:
I would assume that a modern Apple laptop will not boot with the battery unplugged.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Because I would assume it's, like, buffering the power through that in some way.
Marco:
So, like, I thought, like, there's no way this is going to work without a battery.
Marco:
So, I'd say, you know, let me just try it.
Marco:
I took out the battery.
Marco:
It took a long time to get the battery out.
Marco:
And maybe because it had swelled.
John:
Because you were trying not to explode.
Marco:
That too.
Marco:
But, like, I think maybe, like...
Marco:
I was looking up all these different YouTube videos on how to disassemble these things.
Marco:
And of course, like every minor revision of a Razer gaming laptop is differently laid out inside enough that no YouTube video matches whatever one you happen to be needing to take apart in a given moment.
Marco:
So like it, I'd never found one that matched the one I was looking at, but it was clear to me that like, okay, I've unscrewed like the, the five screws that hold this in and it's not coming out.
Marco:
I eventually had to like bend the case slightly to like get the battery to pop out.
Marco:
So, Oh, that's good.
Marco:
I think, I think it had just swelled beyond its original size.
Marco:
Uh, anyway, I eventually pop it out and I'm thinking like, all right, let me see if I can just turn it on without the battery.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
And sure enough, it works totally fine.
Marco:
It just boots up.
Marco:
It's like, okay, fine.
Marco:
I guess I don't have a battery anymore.
Marco:
I guess I'm a desktop.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Windows is so gloriously dumb.
Marco:
It's just like, okay, cool.
Marco:
I'm a desktop.
Marco:
Boots right up.
Marco:
It doesn't even give me a message.
Marco:
Nothing is complaining.
Marco:
It just booted.
Marco:
And everything works great.
Marco:
So now...
Marco:
It's just a desktop, a crappy desktop, as John said, but a desktop on the list.
Marco:
The performance issues are gone.
Marco:
It works way better.
Marco:
Part of that is also probably the anti-malware scan that I did that removed eight unwanted programs or whatever.
Marco:
But it seems to be in a much better state now.
Marco:
I think the Christmas gaming PC is probably still going to have to happen.
Marco:
But I think we will get there now more safely.
John:
Did you tape the power cord in or something or put a little note that says, do not unplug?
Marco:
No, I mean, I told him, hey, this is not going to work on a battery anymore.
Marco:
But, like, he never used it on a battery anyway because it sucked on batteries.
John:
I was going to say, who's using a gaming laptop on a battery anyway?
Marco:
It really, I mean, and first of all, like, I can't say enough mediocrity about Razer as a company that makes gaming laptops.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
It's one of those products that's great as long as you don't use it too much.
Marco:
And there's a lot of products out there like that, especially in tech.
Marco:
So my Razer gaming PC is great because I hardly ever use it.
Marco:
It's now a few years old.
Marco:
It's worked great for the few times I've actually played games.
Marco:
That's who a gaming laptop is for.
Marco:
A gaming laptop is not for gamers.
Marco:
It's just not.
Marco:
An actual gamer who's going to use it regularly should have a desktop because these laptops are just...
Marco:
And it's an impossible problem.
Marco:
If you're going to have any kind of remotely gaming possible GPU, you're going to have such power demands and such heat production from that thing.
Marco:
It's just not going to have a long life and a laptop form factor.
Marco:
And it's going to be a crap laptop.
Marco:
And knowing this, I didn't even get a really high spec one.
Marco:
I got a mid-range GPU in his.
Marco:
I figured I know he's going to still use it as a laptop, back and forth to the beach.
Marco:
I didn't want to have too short of a life.
Marco:
So when I specced out to buy it, I specifically chose the second lowest GPU option.
Marco:
And still, even then...
Marco:
massive heat massive problems the battery life was never usable like ever uh so i think the the answer is for pc gaming desktops are the way to go so but why are you getting another laptop then i'm not i'm saying a gaming desktop is going to probably happen oh i thought you said you were gonna get another gaming laptop from yeah
Marco:
Now, if I was getting myself a gaming PC, I would most likely get another laptop if I needed to.
Marco:
But my current one works great, even though it's three years old, because I never use it.
Marco:
And so, yeah, gaming laptops.
Marco:
Great if you never use them.