The Phone-Box Lottery
Marco:
I have to ask a favor.
Marco:
You aren't allowed to make me laugh tonight because this is one of those days where, like, it was ab day for the workout.
Marco:
You know, a little while ago, I'm like, man, what did I eat?
Marco:
My stomach hurts.
Marco:
Like, oh, that's right.
Marco:
So this is one of those days.
Marco:
So we have to, okay, so Casey, you aren't allowed to talk about food.
Marco:
John, you aren't allowed to talk about anything.
Marco:
I can't, I'm not supposed to laugh.
Casey:
Is there anything depressing that we could talk about to keep you from being happy and laughing?
Marco:
Let's talk about Middle Eastern politics.
Marco:
That'll do it.
Casey:
I don't know how to handle this, right?
Casey:
Because I don't think that any of the three of us want to ignore it because that's not really right.
Casey:
And I'm kind of proud of how the three of us treat these sorts of really terrible things.
Casey:
And I'm proud that we stand up for what we believe is right.
Casey:
But I don't know what the right answer is and what to say that's not going to upset somebody.
Casey:
Not saying things is upsetting people.
Casey:
I can understand that.
Casey:
Saying things is probably going to upset potentially even more people.
Casey:
And I don't want to upset people.
Casey:
It's really complicated for me because of my heritage and background.
Casey:
So my dad grew up Jewish, full stop.
Casey:
His grandfather was a rabbi.
Casey:
His brother, their whole family is Jewish.
Casey:
My mom is Catholic, and because of that, I was raised feeling guilty about everything, but otherwise not much of anything.
Casey:
But that being said, it's an odd thing for me, because even though I don't feel terribly religiously Jewish, and we recognize some holidays, and we're probably terrible Jews, my immediate family, as in both my parents and my brothers and myself, but also Aaron and me and the kids—
Casey:
We recognize some of the bigger holidays, but I don't feel terribly religiously Jewish.
Casey:
And one could make an argument I'm an imposter.
Casey:
But I do feel, to some degree, ethnically Jewish.
Casey:
And I hope that's not offensive because I don't mean it that way at all.
Casey:
But I feel like that's a part of my heritage, whether or not I embrace the religious side of things.
Casey:
And to see what happened in the Middle East...
Casey:
It hurts.
Casey:
Even as someone who is pretty well removed from it, by any definition, it hurts.
Casey:
It doesn't feel good.
Casey:
And to know that more Jews were killed on a single day than any day since the Holocaust, that's not cool.
Casey:
I don't care what your particular opinions are about Israel, about Palestine, about Palestinians, about Israelis.
Casey:
Murdering innocent civilians, particularly children, is
Casey:
that ain't okay.
Casey:
It's just not okay.
Casey:
We can have, well, I don't know if I'm capable of it, but one could have a nuanced conversation about the politics in the Middle East, about how we got to where we are today.
Casey:
But I think it's important to note that anti-Semitism, from everything I've seen, not personally, thankfully, but everything I've seen is that it seems to be on the rise, and that's not good.
Casey:
And I don't care who it is,
Casey:
murdering and kidnapping and doing terrible things to civilians, particularly children, is unequivocally not okay.
Casey:
There is no justification for that in my mind.
Casey:
There's just none.
Casey:
There's just none.
Casey:
And I wanted to say that, and I think we, to a degree, wanted to say that, and I don't know if either of you guys have, maybe Marco, you might have something to add too, but I just want to make it plain that this is uncomfortable for me and for us because we know that there's so much that we don't know.
Casey:
But we wanted to acknowledge that this is messed up and it ain't right.
Casey:
And there's a lot more messed up things that will be happening that are also not right.
Casey:
It stinks.
Casey:
It just really stinks that here in the year 2023, this is still going on with anyone.
Casey:
Like, I feel like humans should be better than this, but we're just not.
Casey:
And it sucks.
Casey:
And I don't know what else to say other than I feel so bad for everyone involved.
Casey:
And it sucks.
Marco:
Honestly, I think you put it really well, and you've actually said a lot of what I wanted to say, so I'll be short.
Marco:
I don't have any personal connections.
Marco:
I don't have any heritage in the region.
Marco:
I am no longer religious, but I was brought up Catholic, and besides having a ton of Jewish friends, because I grew up mostly in Jewish neighborhoods, almost all of my ex-girlfriends happen to be Jewish.
Marco:
You know, look, I have a type.
Marco:
LAUGHTER
Marco:
But it doesn't affect me personally in that way.
Marco:
And largely, I mean, geez, I don't know anything about Middle Eastern politics except that it's very complicated and very messy and there's no simple solutions.
Marco:
And so I don't think it's a good idea for me to comment on the politics side because I don't have any idea what I'm talking about in that area.
Marco:
At first, right after this happened, we could have talked about this on last week's show, but I kind of viewed it as like I didn't want to do more harm than good by talking about Middle Eastern politics because I don't know anything about it.
Marco:
But you don't have to talk about the politics of the region to talk about the actions of a terrorist group against civilians.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I was afraid to talk about the politics, but I'm not afraid to talk about that.
Marco:
In the past, the positions we've advocated for on the show at various – whenever various issues came up, black rights, trans rights, women's rights, the arguments we've made back then at various issues of the day were mostly boiling down to equal rights and basic safety no matter who you are.
Marco:
And I think it's perfectly consistent and valid to argue for that.
Marco:
And therefore, I don't believe it's ever justifiable to mass murder civilians.
Marco:
From that point of view, the Hamas attacks in Israel were definitely terrorist acts that intentionally murdered civilians.
Marco:
And that is never justifiable.
Marco:
And I think it's perfectly valid to consider that separately from your opinion on Israel or its actions in this area.
Marco:
The actions of a state or a terrorist group
Marco:
don't represent the entire population.
Marco:
And so the politics are very complicated, but the human rights angle, I think, is not complicated.
Marco:
Murdering civilians is always wrong.
Marco:
That's my hot take.
Marco:
Murdering civilians is always wrong.
Marco:
That, to me, is not that arguable, to be honest.
Marco:
I don't consider that that complicated of a thought.
Marco:
And there's a lot of very good reasons for a lot of people around the world to be angry or scared or very deeply saddened by all of this.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
My heart goes out to anyone affected by this, and I will always condemn the murdering of civilians no matter who's doing it, whether it's us, whether it's our fringe terrorist groups that we have in the U.S., like white Christian nationalists, or whether it's across the world.
Marco:
Murdering civilians is never justifiable.
Casey:
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
Casey:
Very briefly, Casey Neistat, who is a very popular YouTuber that you may or may not enjoy or may or may not be familiar with.
Casey:
His almost nine minute video on this, which was a few days ago as we record, I thought was just perfect and worth watching.
Casey:
And if memory serves, that Casey grew up
Casey:
He grew up religiously Jewish and also ethnically Jewish in the same way I was describing.
Casey:
And so it hits home stronger for him than it did for me.
Casey:
But I think it's a really good video and a really good encapsulation of kind of how I feel, too, if I'm allowed to glob on to what he had said.
Casey:
We're trying.
Casey:
We're learning.
Casey:
We're doing our best.
Casey:
And yeah, I guess the only thing that the three of us can do from here is to just try to do a regular show and try to put a smile on your face.
Casey:
But not make Marco laugh because that's a step too far.
Casey:
Step too far.
Marco:
Not today.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So, uh, we, uh, hopefully we'll turn that frown upside down and tell you, well, if you're American, if you're, if you're frowning in British, I don't know what to tell you, but if you're American, we're going to turn that frown upside down.
Casey:
And, uh, we have a new member special that we released a few hours ago.
Casey:
We are recording this, this that you're listening to now we were recording on Monday night.
Casey:
So if all the fun things happen, uh, Tuesday or, or Wednesday or what have you, then are bad.
Casey:
It's just, we had a little bit of a scheduling change for this week.
Casey:
So, uh,
Casey:
When Nintendo inevitably gets bought by Apple tomorrow, our apologies.
Casey:
But nevertheless, we released today on Monday a new member special, which John brought to Marco and I and told us basically nothing about what we were about to discuss before we recorded.
Casey:
John, I will leave it up to you because whatever I choose will be wrong.
Casey:
How much would you like to reveal about the member special that we just released?
John:
I mean, whoever posted that on Mastodon already revealed a lot about it.
John:
But so the title is ATP Diamond Dogs, which is a reference to the Ted Lasso show.
John:
I'm not sure if we explain that on the show.
John:
But anyway, we did Google for Google for Ted Lasso Diamond Dogs and you will find an explanation.
John:
Maybe we'll put a link in the show notes if you remember.
John:
um uh colon because that's the way that the specials work it's some phrase colon and then a title so atp diamond dogs colon talk me out of it and the topic i was bringing was something that i was thinking about that i was wanted marco and casey to talk me out of doing i think the the post-imacidon said it was a project i won't reveal more than that but it was
John:
some project I was considering embarking on and it seemed to me to not be a great idea.
John:
So I said, Marco and Casey talked me out of it, but really what I wanted to do was like, let's, let's weigh the pros and cons of this approach or of this project.
John:
Should I do it?
John:
Should I not do it?
John:
Um, and even if you don't care about the project or whether or not I do it, I, because I'll spoil that the product is somewhat relevant to the show.
John:
Right.
John:
So it's not just like a house painting project.
John:
I thought it would be interesting to, uh,
John:
To have people with some experience in the area that I'm considering diving into to talk about the pros and cons, just to sort of see how we think about making decisions and sort of map out the space.
John:
So there you have it.
John:
ATP Diamond Dogs.
John:
Will this be the one and only episode of Diamond Dogs?
John:
Or will we have other instances where one of us wants advice from the others?
John:
We'll see.
Marco:
It's really good.
Marco:
Look, our member specials, there's a lot of winners among them.
Marco:
I will happily toot our horn in that direction.
Marco:
This one is particularly good, and so you should really check this out.
Casey:
I had a lot of fun with it.
Casey:
It took me by surprise.
Casey:
I didn't know where we were going with it, obviously, but I did have a lot of fun with it.
Casey:
All right, let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
And we actually got some interesting follow-up from Will Kiefer, who is the CTO from Rewind AI, which is the company that does the live streams.
Casey:
And Will wrote in to say, I'm the CTO at Rewind AI, and more importantly, an avid listener to ATP and the expanded ATP universe for at least eight years.
Casey:
Well, thank you, Will.
Casey:
I appreciate how even your discussion of the rewind pendant was in episode 556.
Casey:
It is a terrifying yet likely future for technology, and you can count me in as a skeptic.
Casey:
However, I'm hoping that we can develop it in a way to establish proper privacy baselines and expectations for the entire class of product.
Casey:
The same goes for Mac, iOS, and Windows apps, forever private.
Casey:
For example, when we launch Backup or Sync, it will be fully end-to-end encrypted forever.
Casey:
No employers or governments should ever have access.
Casey:
And this is even more important as what we capture extends beyond your personal Mac or iPhone.
Marco:
that's a pretty good answer it is i mean i i'm first of all i'm glad to hear that somebody responsible for one of the products that we talked about and criticized wrote in in a way that was very constructive and not like making us feel terrible for having said anything bad about it yeah um that's that's that's good because things have gone in the direction sometimes um
Marco:
But I think it's good that important people like Will at Rewind have their heads in the right place for terms of privacy and everything.
Marco:
I think the concerns remain about the possibility of this product.
Marco:
And this technology, whether they do it or not,
Marco:
Largely, when we talk about this kind of stuff, we try to generalize it because it's not quite really just about what if this particular company does a product that does these things.
Marco:
But there's a larger issue of like, well, now that it's possible to make this kind of technology reasonably practically and reasonably easily and reasonably affordably, if there's some line that Rewind AI chooses not to cross –
Marco:
Someone else will cross it.
Marco:
Some product will come out that does this thing that even if they choose not to.
Marco:
The specific actions of this one particular company I think are less relevant than the ideas in general of like, wow, now that consumer tech is so capable and so cheap and we have these new AI capabilities that are becoming so accessible and, again, cheap and widely available –
Marco:
what's going to be possible in the world, what products will exist, not just if Rewind makes it, but if some random company with a name full of vowels on Amazon sells it to you for $35.
Marco:
If they don't do it, someone else will, basically.
Marco:
And what does the world look like once that becomes commonplace?
John:
Couldn't agree more.
John:
I just thought it was real nice because they sent this email and I replied and said, I assume that you don't want me to say any of the stuff that you wrote in this email on the show.
John:
And he said, no, you can say anything on the show.
John:
So I thought that was really nice.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Alexander F. writes, listening to Casey's segment on 80% charge limit setting, I think you might have misunderstood this battery setting.
Casey:
The intention is not to simply stop charging at 80% and leaving you with a less charged phone.
Casey:
The intention is to stop charging at 80% until an hour or so before you take the phone off the charger and then top it off to 100%.
Casey:
As the setting text says, the, quote, iPhone learns from your daily charging routine, quote.
Casey:
I have this setting on.
Casey:
I charge my phone every night.
Casey:
It is always 100% when I take it off the charger in the morning.
Casey:
So I don't think I did a particularly good job explaining what I was talking about if this is one of the emails that we got in.
Casey:
Because that is one of the three options that is on the iPhone's 15s.
Casey:
And that is, what do they call that?
Marco:
It's like... Optimized battery charging.
Marco:
Yeah, that's been around for a few years.
Marco:
And please, everyone, stop writing in.
Marco:
Just give us a second to finish this thought.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Now, with the iPhone's 15, there's optimized battery charging, which is what we just spoke about.
Casey:
There's none, which is, you know, always charged to 100% anytime you're on the charger.
Casey:
And this new thing that I was describing last episode, which is referred to in the settings as 80% limit.
Casey:
And so reading from an Apple support document...
Casey:
With iPhone 15 models, you can choose between optimized battery charging, 80% limit, and none.
Casey:
When you choose 80% limit, your iPhone will charge up to about 80% and then stop charging.
Casey:
If the battery charge level gets down to 75%, charging will resume until your battery charge level reaches about 80% again.
Casey:
With the 80% limit enabled, your iPhone will occasionally charge to 100% to maintain accurate battery state of charge estimates.
Casey:
This is what I was talking about.
Casey:
So it's a hard stop with asterisk.
Casey:
A hard stop at 80%.
Casey:
That's what I was playing with for a few days, and...
Casey:
If I wasn't such a ball of stress, I think I would have stuck with it.
Casey:
But that is what I'm talking about.
Casey:
Now, what I've fallen back to and what my phone is currently on is what we've had for a few years now, this optimized battery charging, where it kind of hovers at 80% overnight until just before it thinks you're going to wake up and start messing with your phone again, then it'll crank it all the way up to 100%.
Casey:
However, Scott Martindale wrote in with a very, very justified complaint, which I share.
Casey:
Scott writes,
Casey:
When the phone is at 80%, I feel like it immediately goes below 80%.
Casey:
I completely agree with both the things Scott said.
Casey:
One of the nice things about on the Mac is when you have the battery dingus in the menu bar, it says, you know, charging on hold, rarely used on battery.
Casey:
And my battery is currently sitting at 80%.
Casey:
But there's a nice menu bar or a menu item right there.
Casey:
Charge to full now.
Casey:
And I'll give you one guess what that does and what I kind of want.
Casey:
I don't know where they would put it, to be honest with you, but I kind of want that somewhere.
Casey:
I guess it would have to be buried in the battery settings, but I want that for my phone.
Casey:
Maybe control center?
Casey:
Maybe.
Casey:
That's actually not a bad point.
Casey:
But one way or another, I agree with Scott that I wish that was there.
Casey:
But I apologize for the confusion.
Casey:
If I had done a better job explaining it last episode, I guess we wouldn't have gotten some of these emails.
Casey:
So my bad.
John:
Why is the 80% limited iPhone 15 only feature?
John:
Everything I've heard is not like the iPhone 15s have so much more battery life than the 14s that only they can handle this feature.
John:
It seems like a really weird kind of model differentiation thing.
John:
Like I can't choose to only charge my iPhone 14 Pro to 80%.
John:
I don't quite get that one.
John:
I hope they fix that in an update.
John:
Yeah, I don't get it either.
Casey:
Speaking of optimized charging, watchOS 10 is now embracing the same thing.
Casey:
So this is, again, from a different Apple knowledge-based document.
Casey:
Optimized charge limit learns from your daily usage to determine when to charge to an optimized limit and when to allow full charge.
Casey:
Optimized charge limit is on by default when you set up your Apple Watch.
Casey:
And then Mark Wickens wrote in, this feature builds on the existing optimized charging feature found on the Apple Watch and most other Apple devices.
Casey:
Now, though, if the watch notices that you typically only use, say, 30% of the battery capacity on the daily basis, but still charge it every night, then instead of charging to 100%, it might stop short at, say, 70% instead.
Marco:
I believe the Ultra had this since the beginning last year, but this now came to the non-Ultra watches.
Marco:
I think this makes a lot more sense on the Apple Watch because the Apple Watch, I think, gets upgraded a lot less often than phones.
Marco:
That's just a hunch based on what I see in the real world.
Marco:
It could be totally wrong.
Marco:
And of course, not everyone has an Apple Watch.
Marco:
But I think the life cycle of an Apple Watch for most people tends to be, I'm going to keep this thing until either...
Marco:
It breaks, or more likely, until the battery no longer holds a useful charge.
Marco:
That seems to be what kills Apple Watches for people.
Marco:
The battery no longer holds it.
Marco:
Most people are not super jumping on the idea of, I need an Apple Watch with a faster processor.
Marco:
There's no camera.
Marco:
There's a lot fewer upgrade drivers for the Apple Watch.
Marco:
It seems to be more about, does it still work for me?
Marco:
One of the biggest manufacturers is, does the battery make it through the day?
Marco:
For Apple to add a feature that should theoretically help long-term Apple Watch battery health and help the Apple Watch have a longer, useful life for a lot of its customers is pretty cool.
Marco:
If that's the reason they did this, and it probably is, first of all, it's very unselfish by them in the sense that it's kind of the opposite of planned obsolescence.
Marco:
It's like, I guess, planned extension technology.
Marco:
lessons this is a pretty cool thing if if that's going to be the outcome of apple watches lasting longer out in the field um and and so the way i the way i would view this probably working out for people is they leave it on the default for the first few years once the battery has degraded to the point where it's not super useful at 80 they can then just turn the setting off and charge to 100 from that point forward and get a bit more time out of it before it can no longer make it through the day so
Marco:
That's a pretty cool feature.
Marco:
And for the handful of power users who actually need a larger part of the battery from the beginning, like if you're using it for sleep tracking, it might be inconvenient to limit it to 80% for that use, depending on how and when you charge it.
Marco:
But for most people who are not using it for sleep tracking and are just wearing it during the day, this is a cool feature.
Marco:
On the phone side of it, I think it's far less likely to be used.
Marco:
I think a lot more people, and that's probably why the phone version is not on by default, because I think they know that, first of all, again, they run the risk of causing a scandal.
Marco:
Oh, your phone only has 80% of battery life by default.
Marco:
You could go into this secret setting Apple doesn't want you to know about to get your whole battery.
Marco:
You could see that going badly on the phone.
Marco:
But also I think people are less likely to give up the day-to-day capacity on their phones.
Marco:
I think they always want all of it on the phone because they actually often use it.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Hatch and the Hatch Restore 2.
Marco:
Look, if you are still using an alarm clock, God forbid, or waking up to your phone alarm...
Marco:
you should hear about this so the hatchery store 2 is basically a really nice version of an alarm clock and it goes so far beyond what you think of it's an all-in-one dream machine this is a sophisticated sound machine light and alarm clock and it's beautifully designed fits right next to your bed you know i i gotta say i was a little skeptical whether i would enjoy this and i really do i've just been using my phone for years as my alarm clock
Marco:
But before that, I used one of those like sunrise simulating alarm clocks that lights up slowly.
Marco:
And I really liked it, but it was never very bright.
Marco:
And the sounds were horrendous and very limited.
Marco:
The Hatch Restore 2 is an amazing version of that.
Marco:
So the light, you can customize it, different colors, different brightnesses, whatever you want it to be.
Marco:
They have a whole bunch of like cool presets like Desert Sunrise or, you know, Jungle Mountain or whatever.
Marco:
And they're all really cool.
Marco:
And I kind of like switching between them.
Marco:
And there's so many more features with the Hatch Restore 2.
Marco:
They have mindfulness exercises, meditations.
Marco:
They have sound machines.
Marco:
If you want to sleep with sound or if you want to kind of like chill out for a while, they have all that supported.
Marco:
And of course, it's also a really good alarm clock.
Marco:
It has all these modern features, this amazing light feature, these wonderful sounds that are much more graceful and much nicer than what I've heard before with other products.
Marco:
Check it out.
Marco:
Great sleep cannot be forced, but it can be learned.
Marco:
Revolutionize your mornings with Hatch.
Marco:
Right now, Hatch is offering you $20 off your purchase of a Hatch Restore 2 and free shipping at hatch.co slash ATP.
Marco:
Sleep deeply and wake gently with the Restore 2.
Marco:
Go to hatch.co slash ATP to get $20 off and free shipping.
Marco:
That's hatch.co slash ATP.
Marco:
I strongly suggest you check this out.
Marco:
Again,
Marco:
This is so much nicer than waking up with your phone, and there's so many more features beyond that.
Marco:
So check it out, hatch.co.atp.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Hatch for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, let's enter the photos section of the follow-up.
Casey:
And we have a fair bit of follow-up that was very interesting and useful with regard to, I think it was an Ask ATP from last week.
Casey:
How do I back up photos from an iOS device?
Casey:
And so we got a smattering of different pieces of follow-up about that.
Casey:
Jonathan Freese writes, a paid Flickr account.
Casey:
They still exist.
Casey:
A paid Flickr account can be used to back up all the photos from an iPad or iPhone using the Flickr app.
Casey:
I've used this approach as a backup solution for years.
Casey:
Dan Lithio writes, Photosync, and actually a lot of people wrote about Photosync.
Casey:
Photosync, even if you only have the space-optimized version on the iPad, Photosync will download the full-quality original and then back it up wherever you want.
Casey:
For live photos, it will back up both the photo and the video, which can be read and combined by Mac Photo app, should you need to restore.
Casey:
And it works with many different storage backends, both local and cloud.
Casey:
Samba, Dropbox, Samba, Samba, I don't know, Network Shares, Dropbox, S3, Backblaze B2, and I think even USB drives, et cetera.
Casey:
And then Dan continued, Google Photos.
Casey:
Even if you only have the space-optimized version on the iPad, Google Photos will force the original to download and then upload that to Google.
Casey:
I'm guessing the reason that you guys shot down Google Photos and wouldn't be thrilled about Photosync either is that they don't back up your photo library metadata.
Casey:
However, with iCloud as the main backup for everything, I would say that some people wouldn't mind a backup of the raw picks without metadata or edits if that's all they could get.
Casey:
Renee Fouquet writes, I probably pronounced it wrong, I'm sorry.
Casey:
Anyway, Renee writes, Synology Photos has an iOS app that automatically backs up photo and video originals in the background.
Casey:
You need to open the app from time to time to re-enable the background processing, but that's only every few weeks or so, and it reminds you with a local notification.
Casey:
It works very reliably for me.
Casey:
I've really wanted to dabble with Synology Photos, but I feel like my photo solution, as convoluted and ridiculous as it is, is working for me, and so I have no real dire need or reason to mess with it, but I've really thought about it, and I've heard mostly good things.
Casey:
Ping Liu writes, I'm using iCloud, OneDrive photo backup, and Google Photos to backup all my photos from the iPhone and iPads to the different services simultaneously.
Casey:
And Pete Spree chimes in, the OneDrive family plan allows up to six users to have one terabyte each for a total of six terabytes.
Casey:
Even if you don't have four kids, you can create six accounts, link them together via shared folders that allow users to read and write to the additional account space.
Casey:
Casey will be interested in this additional hack.
Casey:
You can use the Synology Cloud Sync package to back up your NAS to all of these accounts, as well as simultaneously allowing all six user accounts to be synced with whatever Synology shares you have to take advantage of all the storage.
Casey:
The six terabytes of cloud storage is $100 per year from Costco, and you get Office 365 for all the users as part of the package.
Casey:
I think it's the best deal going when compared to Amazon, Google, or iCloud Drive Space.
Casey:
And then finally, Chris Kioffi, I think that's how it's pronounced, writes, Amazon Prime comes with photo backup.
Casey:
It's included with Prime, so while it's not free, many people already have access.
Casey:
Like you said in the show, it's far from a great solution, though.
Casey:
First, the initial upload is painful, even for moderate photo libraries, since it needs to first download the full-size image from iCloud before it sends it to Amazon.
Casey:
Second, it doesn't really run in the background, so I had to create a one-action shortcut to launch the Amazon photo app every few days.
Casey:
And then finally, it might be a cheaper or easier option for those of us without a Mac.
Casey:
Oh, and I'm sorry, one more thing.
Casey:
Several people wrote in about Dropbox for iOS has a photo upload feature as well.
John:
Yeah, these are all backup solutions that are trying to work within the constraints of iPad, iOS devices to push to cloud backups, essentially a cloud backup that's not iCloud.
John:
And there's more of a backup than a live thing.
John:
So a lot of these services, like you're just going to take the photos and chuck them into this bucket and it's not connected to your iCloud library.
John:
So if that gets hosed, you still have these backups.
John:
So it is an additional backup, but it's also an additional cloud backup and all these little,
John:
shenanigans you have to go through oh don't make sure it's you launch every once in a while to make sure it's running and of course if it's downloading photos in the background and then pushing them up to the cloud it's potentially burning your battery while it does that I think these are all better than nothing and reasonable options but like we were talking about in the last show where we were saying that we thought Macs should have iCloud backup like the phones do and we thought phones should have Time Machine like the Mac does and Time Machine is kind of a different more of an old school kind of thing where it's like
John:
you know, obviously you wouldn't connect the hard drive to your phone or maybe you would in the USB-C days.
John:
But anyway, it's like a batch process where like I'm going to run time machine backup now and it's going to backup stuff over some fast connection, either a local network or a wire to something that is in my house right now.
John:
And there's a place for all of these in your own personal backup vortex.
John:
You should have cloud backups.
John:
You should have local backups.
John:
You should have backups that happen transparently in the background that you don't have to think about.
John:
You should have backups that run periodically and are more heavyweight.
John:
And I think in this discussion we've learned is that both the Mac and the iPhone and the iPad have holes in what Apple provides for backups.
John:
If you have both of them, if you buy everything from Apple, you can use the Mac to help backup stuff, obviously, because once you get your iCloud photo library onto your Mac, then you can use all the Mac backup solutions.
John:
And do a time machine backup of your local photo library or whatever.
John:
And then cloud backups are probably available pretty well in both of them.
John:
But of course, cloud backup in the Mac is not built in like it is in the phone.
John:
But yeah, the original question was, what if I don't have Mac?
John:
What if I just have a phone?
John:
And if you just have one of these platforms or not the other, that's when you really start to see the whole.
John:
I'm glad there are parties that are fighting the good fight and trying to find a solution to this.
John:
But I feel like, I mean, I guess Photosync is the one that maybe does USB drives.
John:
Maybe with the advent of USB-C, there'll be more of this.
John:
But I feel like most of the path of resistance on the phone and the iPad is cloud backups.
John:
And even that, there is some resistance because you have to essentially make sure that you're running somehow and force download the full quality one because you probably don't have the originals being downloaded onto your phone all the time.
John:
And then force upload them and then get rid of the cloud one.
John:
And it's just...
John:
I feel for the people writing these apps, but they're out there if you want to give them a try.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then continuing in the photos section of the world, an anonymous person wrote in with regard to photos remembering the crop aspect ratios that drives John nuts in macOS 14.1, the beta.
Casey:
This anonymous person writes, photos will only remember whether you selected freeform or original last.
Casey:
All other aspect ratios are ignored since Photos never wants to change the crop aspect ratio when you enter the cropped tool on unadjusted Photos.
Casey:
Also, Photos does store the specific aspect ratio applied to each photo.
Casey:
For every adjusted photo, Photos stores a crop rectangle and a cropped aspect ratio.
Casey:
When selecting Freeform, it stores 00 as an aspect ratio.
Casey:
Additionally, Photos now stores a user default, indicating whether the user prefers a locked aspect ratio, original, or not.
Casey:
That value is only changed when the user either clicks on original or Freeform, and nothing else.
John:
Yeah, this is clarifying.
John:
Before when I heard about this feature on the last episode, I thought, oh, that means it's just every time I crop something to something else, like now the next photo I view is going to be viewed like cropped to square because the last photo I did was square.
John:
But I'm happy to hear that it doesn't do that.
John:
It just looks at freeform and original and ignores all the other ones, which is great.
John:
It's also nice to hear that they're already storing the selected aspect ratio for photos with the
John:
Clever 00 programmer hack as the aspect ratio for freeform.
John:
Still probably a more thorough implementation of this would be to have an actual preference in preferences that says, hey, when you come upon a photo that you've never selected an aspect ratio for, what do you want me to pick?
John:
uh they don't have that in fact there are no editing specific preferences in photos so i can understand why them maybe not wanting to go through all the trouble of saying we're going to have a new breed of preference in photos have you ever looked at by the way the mac photos uh i keep saying preferences the settings in the mac photos app there's not a lot there for for an application that's so big and so important very sparse preferences it is not one of those applications like mine that has a million preferences for every possible setting it is not
John:
a power user type, uh, preference slash setting screen.
John:
Um, but yeah, if you don't want to go that far, if you don't want to have a setting for that, uh, doing it this way, which is essentially like having that setting, but having it be invisible and having that setting get set every time you hit free form original, I think this will work out just fine for me.
John:
And I probably won't have any more complaints, but we'll see once it actually ships, I'm not going to run the beta.
John:
All right.
Casey:
John, tell me about your issues with Chrome, other than the fact that it's Chrome.
John:
This was last week.
John:
I was talking about getting Docker image up and running to do dev work on the ATP CMS.
John:
And that was all swell, except Chrome kept throwing this network error, error network changed error.
John:
uh and i couldn't figure out what it was until i realized it was only there when i was running docker and so i did look more into this because it was basically making it so that i couldn't do atp cms development work in chrome and by the way i like to do the development chrome because i like the chrome dev tools a little bit better or maybe i'm just used to them more but anyway that's was my go-to is to use the chrome dev tools to have them open while i'm doing stuff
John:
But it became untenable because it was like 50 percent of the HTTP requests sent from the browser would die with failure because of our network changed.
John:
So I started Googling and Googling was one of those depressing, you know, search sequences where you're like, oh, I'm not the only one who has this problem.
John:
And it's super old.
John:
And I was finding the bug reports, bug reports against Chromium or whatever, like the whatever the open source project is that underlies the engine where this error is taking place.
John:
You could find reports starting in 2019 for network change when Docker is running.
Casey:
Cool.
John:
And so the first one was open in June 17th, and it was closed as a won't fixed in July of 2019.
John:
And then November 15th one was filed, and that was closed as won't fixed on December 1st, 2021.
John:
Speaking of 2021, more are different.
John:
These are all new reports.
John:
March 29th of 2021, that one was closed as won't fix on September 28th.
John:
September 29th, another one was filed.
John:
That one is still open.
John:
But this is a depressing series.
John:
I read through all these threads.
John:
Like, why are they being closed won't fix?
John:
I still don't have a good answer to that.
John:
Like the browser, the people who do the browser engine are saying, well, the network did change.
John:
And so this is legitimate error.
John:
And the people who are following the bug saying, I'm just trying to use your web browser.
John:
And I happen to be running Docker and it becomes useless.
John:
Like you can't use the web browser to browse the web.
John:
Like if you, if you, maybe you wouldn't notice this if you didn't know the dev tools, but if you open up the network pane on the dev tools and just do literally anything in Chrome, it just fills with red, error network changer.
John:
And like those, those requests fail.
John:
right i mean it made me very impressed with how like robust gmail is because with like 50 of the requests failing gmail is just like battling its way through you get that little yellow banner at the top and it says you can click to rethrive it didn't break the app it just made it you know very slow and terrible but many other applications just totally break because if they can't run http requests they're like oh the network's gone i don't know what's going on um here's the thing about this bug um
John:
Other web browsers work fine, right?
John:
If you were on Safari when Docker is running, you'd never get these errors.
John:
It is a Chrome-specific thing.
John:
And the theory, I don't know about the internals here, but the theory that is put forward in a lot of these bug reports is Chrome notices that something relating to the network for this computer has changed.
John:
And the argument of the people in the bug reports is, yeah, but if the thing that changed is totally irrelevant to Chrome, like if it's some networking thing that Docker is using that has no relation to any of the connections that Chrome has, why does it care?
John:
Why doesn't it just keep using its connections?
John:
They're fine.
John:
All its connections are fine.
John:
Docker's not messing with Chrome's connections.
John:
You can make HTTP requests on any port that you want.
John:
Everything's fine.
John:
But Chrome says something about the networking changed.
John:
Nope.
John:
Kill everything.
John:
And for years, since 2019, they've just been closing these bugs.
John:
This won't fix.
John:
No, this is working as a design.
John:
Network change, we kill everything.
John:
And I feel, again, I don't know the details, but I feel like the strongest argument is this doesn't happen with other web browsers.
John:
So I feel like it shouldn't happen with Chrome.
John:
Um, so that was disappointing.
John:
I had to switch my web dev to Safari and their dev tools have gotten better over the years.
John:
So, um, I'm just not quite used to them.
John:
So anyway, uh, I switched to Safari and then Gavin Harris went in to say that he swapped away from Docker desktop on the Mac to use orb stack, O-R-B-S-T-A-C-K.dev.
John:
He says it works great for me and it has the added benefit of being able to run a Linux VM.
John:
And their motto on their website is orb stack is the fast, light, easy way to run Docker containers and Linux.
Um,
John:
I mean, it does run Linux VMs if that's something you want.
John:
It's not what I want.
John:
But it basically, kind of a drop-in replacement for Docker Desktop on the Mac.
John:
Like, you can just run Docker containers just as is in them.
John:
It is another thing that runs Docker.
John:
And I had high hopes that this would solve my problems.
John:
it's a native mac app instead of like electron app like docker is and it's you know there's nothing to install it's just a little app thing but it does first of all it asks you if you want to import all your images and containers and stuff from docker which i did and that worked but i'm like hmm now you're now you're kind of like i had to look at what this thing was installing it like installs a new like socket for the docker networking thing installs it wants to install a new privilege helper and
John:
Anyway, I tried it.
John:
It didn't solve the problem.
John:
Chrome still flips out over there and network changed things when you're running OrbStack.
John:
So I uninstalled it.
John:
I think it's also, you can get to pay for a subscription at some point.
John:
Anyway, if you're looking for some fun way to run Linux VMs and Docker, OrbStack is very cool and it's probably preferable to using the default Docker Desktop.
John:
But I just went back to Docker Desktop just because, you know, it didn't solve my problem and I'm used to Docker Desktop.
John:
So...
John:
uh i don't know um i mean i don't this is not a bug that i care about that much because you know whatever i'll just use safari but the bad thing is when i'm running docker not only can i not do development work in chrome i can't do anything in chrome like chrome is basically just dead right and the only way to undeadify it is to quit docker like to quit the docker engine so please if there are any chrome or chromium devs
John:
Looking at this, I have high hopes that that one issue opened in September 29th of 2021 is still marked as available and open.
John:
Please someone find that and don't close it as won't fix like all the other ones.
John:
But this just seems like, again, if every other web browser works in Chrome doesn't, I think this is a Chrome problem.
Casey:
For what it's worth, John, if you recall, I was having some issues where my Docker containers on my Mac Mini were failing after a long time, especially after heavy network use.
Casey:
And that's when somebody, a listener, had suggested Colima, which is not a portmanteau, but it's...
Casey:
Something about like containers for Linux on the Mac, C-O-L-I-M-A or something like that.
Casey:
This is all command line stuff.
Casey:
There's no fancy GUI thing like OrbStack has, but it might be worth trying.
Casey:
I suspect that you will run into the exact same problem as you were with OrbStack and with regular Docker desktop, but you could give that a shot.
Casey:
We'll put a link in the show notes just in case.
John:
Yeah, and by the way, I did try all the, we'll put links in the show notes to these issues.
John:
I did try all the suggestions.
John:
There was all sorts of suggestions how you can change the configuration of the Docker engine.
John:
Some people were saying, oh, it's Eero.
John:
Eero is advertising this IPv6 thing and doing it over and over again and screwing everything up.
John:
And some people said you should disable IPv6 entirely.
John:
I tried all these things.
John:
First of all, I looked at my Eero config and realized I had always had IPv6 off in my Eero config.
John:
So I tried with it on and tried with it off.
John:
But I'd always had that off.
John:
I also have the thread radio thing off on my Eeros.
John:
I don't know when I did that, but I agree with past me.
John:
But anyway, I did try switching them, and it didn't make a difference.
John:
Then I turned IPv6 off on all my network interfaces on my Mac.
John:
Didn't make a difference.
John:
I tried the, like, there's a bunch of config things in these things about...
John:
setting uh fixed cider addresses for ipv6 or turning ipv6 off in the docker engine tried all those things none of them worked so i mean i i again i don't know what docker is doing to change the network but nothing i have tried has stopped it so yeah and i don't i don't have much faith that colima would help considering orb stack didn't but agreed but you know if you wanted to try yet another thing you could yeah no i'll just i'll just use safari
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We had a bunch of feedback with regard to AirPods Pro as hearing protection, including I've only started Upgrade this week, but Jason apparently had a similar idea and went to a concert recently and had a lot of the same experiences that Marco did.
Casey:
So we'll put a link to Upgrade in the show notes.
Casey:
But anyways, Wes wrote in, I was also curious and tried my AirPods Pro at a monster truck rally at the beginning of the year.
Casey:
Noise canceling could not handle it.
Casey:
It just filled my ears with static.
Casey:
I switched quickly over to earplugs.
Casey:
That was kind of funny.
Casey:
Then somebody sent us a link to noisyworld.org, which has all sorts of reviews about noise canceling things and dinguses and whatnot.
Casey:
And there's a whole post about AirPods Pro for hearing protection there.
Casey:
And then finally, Samuel Levine writes, I'm a doctor.
Casey:
I am a neurotologist who has some expertise in concerts and hearing loss.
Casey:
I studied this problem of loud concerts.
Casey:
Without going into the whole science thing, we found that the start and the end of the concert is the loudest and most damaging to hearing.
Casey:
The type of music didn't really matter.
Casey:
We tried a couple of different concerts.
Casey:
The position in the hall made no difference.
Casey:
Active noise cancellation really does what it says.
Casey:
It really reduces the noise before it hits the eardrum.
Casey:
We tested a couple of different earplugs which helped out but did not eliminate really loud sounds.
Casey:
Your lack of ringing is a sign of how well it worked.
Casey:
Ringing is a sign of hearing loss.
Casey:
Immediately after the concert, you're seeing temporary threshold changes.
Casey:
Attending more concerts will convert it to permanent.
Casey:
A quick rule of thumb is that your hearing at 8 kHz is roughly your age.
Casey:
If you get old enough, you lose appreciation of music, which sounds friggin' terrible, but that's the reality.
Marco:
This was very good to hear, because I was very careful last time to say, look, I used AirPods Pro as earplugs at a concert, and it seemed to work, and it seemed to not hurt my ears and everything else.
Marco:
But I said, I'm not a doctor, I don't know for sure.
Marco:
And so it was good to hear from actual doctors and actual people who know what they're talking about that...
Marco:
Basically confirms that, yes, active noise cancellation, when it cancels out that noise from reaching your ear, that does physically prevent it from harming the ear.
Marco:
Now, it doesn't attenuate all frequencies evenly.
Marco:
You know, if you're like operating a jackhammer or working like next to a giant machine all day, like...
Marco:
in some kind of like you know industrial or professional setting where you are constantly needing real hearing protection all the time or maybe if you go to a concert every weekend or you run concerts for a living or you are a musician for a living and you're always on stage like in in situations like that where you are always in very loud environments uh you should get something that's purpose-built for that like you should not be using your airpods pro for your only hearing protection in that kind of situation
Marco:
But so far, the feedback seems to indicate that if you are an occasional concert goer like me and you want easy hearing protection that also lets you hear the music very, very well, using the AirPods Pro seemed to work really well.
Marco:
And there seems to be no major downsides, except, you know, as mentioned last time,
Marco:
It is a little bit weird in how it processes the sound sometimes, and it's a little bit non-ideal, but it's still way better than all the concert earplugs that I tried.
Marco:
So pretty cool to hear that the protection it offers, while it is not massive protection, it is real protection.
John:
Yeah, we also got a really long email from someone who worked in a symphony orchestra who plays in a symphony orchestra.
John:
And apparently wearing earplugs in a symphony orchestra is a thing for all the musicians because it is very loud there at various points.
John:
And he was also using AirPods, but with foam tips and his big suggestion, one of his big suggestions in a very long email that unfortunately we couldn't find a way to summarize here.
John:
was that the fit of the thing that goes into your ear is really important to the noise blocking.
John:
And so if you want to use AirPods Pro in a more serious capacity, like you know you're going to for your job, you're going to be in a symphony orchestra and it's super loud, don't use the default things.
John:
You can both get the better phone ones and also those ones where they make a mold of your ear canal so they're custom fit just for you.
John:
That's the road you should be traveling down if you are chronically going to be in a very loud environment.
Marco:
We are brought to you this episode by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online.
Marco:
Whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything, your products, your content, even your time, all in one place and all on your terms.
Marco:
Squarespace makes it super easy to make all kinds of websites and they have amazing business and storefront capabilities.
Marco:
So they have this fluid engine.
Marco:
This is the next gen website design system from Squarespace.
Marco:
It has never been easier to unlock unbreakable creativity.
Marco:
You start with their amazing templates and then you customize every design detail.
Marco:
So they have all this wonderful drag and drop tech.
Marco:
Now it works on mobile, too, everywhere.
Marco:
You can stretch your imagination, really, with the Fluid Engine.
Marco:
It's built into all new Squarespace sites.
Marco:
And, of course, online storefront features.
Marco:
Whether you sell physical goods, digital goods, services, maybe even time slots if you're a consultant or something or a trainer, Squarespace has all the tools you need to start selling online.
Marco:
They have amazing checkout experiences for your customers.
Marco:
Make sure you get high conversion rates and make sure everyone loves you and is happy to pay you.
Marco:
Of course, credit cards, PayPal, Apple Pay.
Marco:
Afterpay, Clearpay, whatever ways you can pay that people want to use.
Marco:
Squarespace supports it.
Marco:
They have wonderful analytics to back it all up so you can really use insights to grow your business.
Marco:
And your site doesn't look like a cheesy template site.
Marco:
It looks like your site because you have customized it with your branding and your colors and your theme choices and everything else.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
See it for yourself today at Squarespace.com.
Marco:
You can start a free trial there.
Marco:
Build the whole site.
Marco:
See how much you like it.
Marco:
I bet you're going to love it.
Marco:
When you are ready to launch, go to Squarespace.com slash ATP to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.
Marco:
Once again, Squarespace.com slash ATP to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, so let me remind you, like I said earlier, that we are recording this on the evening of Monday, October 16.
Casey:
And depending on what rumors you are listening to, everything in the world is going to change in the next couple of days.
Casey:
Or nothing at all.
Casey:
Who knows?
Casey:
Or nothing at all.
Casey:
Yeah, who really knows?
Casey:
But one of us, I think it was John, had a pretty good idea.
Casey:
I think that...
Casey:
We could sit here and try to predict what will happen.
Casey:
But what if we talked about instead, what do we think should happen?
Casey:
And I think, John, it was you who wrote, what hardware needs to be updated?
Casey:
So, John, since this is your topic, how do you want to quarterback this?
John:
Yeah, so the rumor is partly because the rumor mill is such a mess for October.
John:
Very often there's an October event and you get stuff that's not the phone or the watch because those happen in September.
John:
Very often it's Mac stuff and we're interested in that or sometimes it's iPad stuff.
John:
But this year just the rumors are just so either they're inconsistent where they're flopping back and forth or they're sad where they're saying, hey, all the stuff that you were looking forward to.
John:
Yeah, none of that stuff is happening.
John:
It's all pushed off into 2024.
John:
And, you know, if we look back at the timelines for these things, I think we all kind of expected that the plain old M3 would be in something by now.
John:
So it seems like, I mean, again, you can't say, oh, the schedule slipped.
John:
We don't know the schedule.
John:
We just hear rumors.
John:
the rumored schedule slipped there was rumors that the m3 would be out by now in something and it's not and so you know we all want to see the m3 and we figured the plain old unadorned non-pro non-max non-ultra one would be the first one to come out and there's lots of machines that it could get it uh but you know the rumors all the rumors have been like yeah no just that's going to be like spring next year or whatever so anyway whether or not there is an october event which
John:
Whether or not new iPads and a new Apple Pencil are announced tomorrow as we record this, we don't know.
John:
But I thought it was worth thinking about, is there Apple hardware that's like long in the tooth that really needs to be updated?
John:
Whether or not it gets the M3 or not, or any hardware.
John:
Phones, obviously phones don't need to be updated.
John:
iPads or whatever.
John:
Like, what should be updated?
John:
Why have an October event at all?
John:
Is there anything that Apple should update before the holiday season so that they have, let's say, less embarrassing products on the shelves to sell to people for the holidays?
Marco:
You know, there are certain things in the Mac that we can point to, like the iMac is weirdly old right now.
Marco:
But I think one of the ways to look at this is what still has an M1?
Marco:
And, of course, the iMac is one of those things.
Marco:
But one of the more glaring things to me is basically...
Marco:
the entire iPad lineup is a little bit stale heading into the holiday season.
Marco:
And that's weird because iPads are very often given as holiday gifts, or at least asked for as holiday gifts.
Marco:
And so it's a little bit unusual and non-ideal to be heading into the holiday season with an iPad lineup that is somewhat aging and not that interesting.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
On the high end, the iPad Pro has been updated, you know, somewhat recently.
Marco:
I believe it was, what, earlier this year when it got the M2?
John:
It got the Mac Pro New label from the beginning of the show.
John:
New iPad Pro.
John:
Eh, yeah.
John:
Oh, I see.
Marco:
It's very few changes since 2018 on the iPad Pros.
Marco:
They've upgraded the guts, made a couple of little tweaks here and there, but for the most part, it hasn't had many changes since 2018.
Marco:
So the iPad Pro is a little bit boring in its design and basic physical characteristics because those haven't changed in a while, but the guts are decent.
Marco:
The iPad Air, I feel like, is kind of a weird lost product.
Marco:
So the iPad Air still has the M1, which at the time they gave it the M1 seemed, it was actually a pretty big upgrade.
Marco:
Like the iPad Air, like stepping up to get the M1 was like, wow, that's kind of overpowered for that product.
Marco:
And it remains very powerful.
Marco:
I mean, the M1 and M2 really aren't that different from each other.
Marco:
But it is weird that it's only the M1 still and it's going to slowly get outdated, you know.
Marco:
I wouldn't feel great buying a brand new M1-powered iPad today, you know, in late 2023, when I know that the M3s are on the horizon.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I think I would.
John:
Like, for the iPads, I know the M1 is older, but, like, I feel like that's... Especially for the non-pro iPads, an M1 and an iPad...
John:
it has the advantage of being less power hungry than the m2 and i think it has plenty of power for an ipad like i feel like the main the main problem with the ipad line the things that need to be updated is it's because they updated the lower end ipad to have like remove the where the facetime another facetime can remove where the uh did they just move the the pencil attachment point on that one i forget what they did to the new one
Marco:
Well, the base model iPad, it was updated to basically have the modern shape.
Marco:
Like before this latest update to the base model iPad, it still had the home button.
Marco:
So the new iPad has the new screen shape.
Marco:
It supports the magnetic pencil, I think, right?
John:
No, no, it's got the camera on the landscape side, right?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Oh, no, it does not support the magnetic pencil.
John:
But yeah, like they gave they gave a revision in where the guts are, where the external features are on the iPad to basically make it seem like more of a landscape device.
John:
And it only happened to the low end one and not to the pro.
John:
And the pro got like, oh, new guts, but everything is moved around.
John:
So it's the iPad line is in this uncomfortable situation where there is clearly new thinking about how to arrange stuff.
John:
externally and internally on an ipad but that new thinking has not spread to the entire line and so i don't think it's the m1 that is holding back the ipad line and making it seems like it needs to be updated it's the new thinking about how ipads work but
John:
The pros, I don't think they desperately need to be updated because the M2 is fine and they just got updated semi-recently.
John:
So I wouldn't put them on a list of, hey, Apple really needs to update this because it's embarrassing they're selling an M2 iPad Pro.
John:
We're just anticipating it.
John:
We all want it, especially since OLED is rumored for it or whatever.
John:
So that's a next year type product.
John:
And for any iPad that still has an M1,
John:
I think that's fine.
John:
It's the ones that have like an A14.
John:
I think the Mini has the A14 or something.
John:
It's the ones that have an A something chip that is a low number.
John:
They could go up by one or two.
John:
Those are the rumors, by the way, that like maybe by the time you're hearing this, they've already announced new A15 or A16 iPads or whatever.
John:
And that is a fine update for the holiday season.
John:
But I don't expect them to come with a rejiggering of the internals and to allow for the Apple Pencil in a different way and all that, you know.
John:
Well, they...
John:
If they find a way to deal with the magnetically attached Apple Pencil and the camera in the new position, if that comes to a non-iPad Pro first and the iPad Pro is the last model to get it, that's going to be kind of weird.
John:
The iPad is in an uncomfortable place, but I don't think that part of the product line is desperate for an update at this point.
Marco:
No, I think you're right that it's more about the inconsistencies within the iPad lineup that because they've been updated, because iPads are updated fairly infrequently, each individual model, I'm saying, is updated somewhat infrequently.
Marco:
And they've had these different ideas of, first of all, of course, different pencil shapes and charging methods and then
Marco:
you know, USB-C or not, and whether it's Touch ID, whether there's a home button or the Touch ID side button, whether there's Face ID, and now, as you mentioned, like, whether the front camera is on the long side or the short side, they've been evolving a lot of this stuff over time, but because the iPad upgrade cycle is not super, super fast,
Marco:
a lot of this stuff is still transitional across the line.
Marco:
And so there's all these ways that if you want to know, like, well, how does the iPad work or what accessory is compatible with the iPad?
Marco:
The answer is really complicated and it should be much simpler than it is.
Marco:
So what I'm looking forward to is it seems like the hardware that has been updated most recently is
Marco:
has generally had its head in the right place.
Marco:
So I'd like to see that go across the line more, but again, that might take a little while.
Marco:
And I think it forms a very confusing lineup for people.
Marco:
When you look at... First of all, it's hard to compare the iPads performance-wise because the...
Marco:
The base iPad uses the A14.
Marco:
The iPad mini, which is smaller but more expensive, uses the A15.
Marco:
Then the iPad Air uses the M1 and the iPad Pro uses the M2.
Marco:
They cross entire chip families with different naming conventions.
Marco:
They cross that whole thing within what is ostensibly one product lineup, the iPad lineup.
Marco:
And then the capabilities are so weirdly different between them all.
Marco:
And there's all these little asterisks on, you know, which one you buy, then that will mean X, Y, and Z. And it seems fairly confusing.
Marco:
Even as a person who follows this stuff as a big part of my living, if I wasn't looking at the Apple Compare page and you asked me, like, what chip does the iPad Mini have?
Marco:
I would have no idea.
Marco:
And I owned one, and I would have no idea.
Marco:
It's a very strange lineup, and there's all these weird little inconsistencies.
Marco:
And so I hope over the next cycle of updates, whenever that happens, I hope they start ironing them out.
Marco:
But all that is to say, heading into the holiday season, unless the iPad lineup changes, which is rumored to either change significantly or not at all in like 12 hours...
Marco:
So we'll see.
Marco:
But hopefully heading into the holiday season, I hope there is some kind of fresh new change to the iPad lineup.
Marco:
So far, the rumor is that it's going to at least have a new pencil, maybe.
Marco:
If that pans out, that sounds good, maybe.
Marco:
But that doesn't sound like a big thing.
Marco:
That sounds like a small thing.
Marco:
So we'll see.
John:
You know, not knowing what chip your iPad's having it is more towards my argument that it doesn't actually matter as long as the chip is fast enough.
John:
Like, the iPads are not particularly demanding, even for things like games.
John:
Like, I think most iPad games are tuned to be able to run on the inexpensive iPads because so many more of them sell.
John:
I don't think that's where these things need to be pulled up.
John:
There's still that one that's still in the old design with the home button.
John:
But I think part of the rumors for the new pencil are related to the same thing with the thing with the home button is lighting versus USB-C, right?
John:
Obviously, everything in Apple's line, we all presume, is going to shed lightning and go to USB-C.
John:
So if there is a new Apple pencil, the new iPad with the new arrangement of stuff still has the lightning Apple pencil, right?
John:
Because it doesn't have the magnetically attachment.
John:
Is there a USB-C equivalent of that kind of pencil, or do they never ship one like that?
John:
Do they finally get rid of the last iPad with the home button, or does it just keep going with the home button and lightning for longer until it gets replaced by a new design model?
John:
It is iPad-ish season, and we all want the updated iPad Pro with the OLED screen because that's the fanciest, most expensive one.
John:
But, yeah, the whole rest of the line is still kind of, you know.
John:
I think iPads can get away with a lot of older stuff.
John:
um in ways the other products can't but uh you we would like to see some revision here but for an october event i mean the reason we're talking about it all is because every other thing that we're going to get to in a little bit all the rumors are saying yeah you're not getting any of that so we're just like well i guess they could fix some ipad stuff but anyway let's let's move on to the the mac line uh you mentioned the m1i mac earlier
John:
That's super old.
John:
I don't think the M1 is the problem on that computer line.
John:
I think it's the RAM complements, right?
John:
Because again, I think the M1, I talked about this on one of our recent member specials.
John:
I think the M1 is still a phenomenal chip for Macs.
John:
It just needs to be adequately supported by everything else.
John:
And the M1 iMac has a really nice screen, beautiful industrial design.
John:
It's a fun computer.
John:
I think everything about it's great, except for SSD size and RAM, right?
John:
And those are things that Apple doesn't like to
John:
you know, move up as time marches on to our satisfaction.
John:
We're not demanding the highest end of everything.
John:
It's a very inexpensive computer, but it does need to keep up with the times.
John:
And so as the M1 iMac ages, the things that age about it the worst are the costs of the SSD options and the costs of the RAM sizes and how much RAM it comes with by default.
John:
That stuff ages.
John:
The M1, I think, is still fine.
John:
Is someone going to get an M1 iMac and feel like, I need more performance?
John:
No, they're just going to use it to, you can do everything on an M1.
John:
Like I was gonna say, you use to browse the web and read email.
John:
No, you can use Photoshop in the M1.
John:
It's fine.
John:
Like it's the M1 is not the problem.
John:
The M1 is phenomenal.
John:
It's still, I think my favorite M chip just because the M2 is better, but also hotter.
John:
And I feel like lots of, for lots of computers, that's the wrong trade-off.
John:
And for this iMac,
John:
Not that I wouldn't love to see an M3 version, we all would, but the M1 is not the problem with that computer.
John:
So I think of all the computers that Apple has, the M1 iMac is the one that most needs to be updated, but not in the way that Apple is probably going to update it.
John:
If they put an M2 in the new iMac, but keep the pricing for the SSD and RAM and keep the RAM limits all exactly the same, they haven't updated that computer.
John:
No one's saying I need the M2 in this thing.
John:
They want more SSD space for less money, and they want more RAM for less money.
John:
And those are things that add to the longevity of a machine.
John:
It's not like I've got to wait an extra 25 seconds for some batch job to finish because I have an M1 instead of an M2.
Marco:
Yeah, that's fair.
Marco:
And I think ultimately, the M1 iMac, it's a huge success design-wise, but market-wise, I think this still remains a relatively low-profile product.
Marco:
I don't think this is making headlines anymore past its cool launch with all the cool colors and everything.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And this has been true for a while.
Marco:
Apple sells a decent number of low-end iMacs, but to fairly undemanding customers, typically.
Marco:
They're usually buying it for the form factor and the look, and not necessarily having cutting-edge hardware or high-end specs.
John:
that's why i think it's okay for this line to be one of those ones that skips it's going to go m1 then m3 then m5 like that's perfectly adequate you know like that's you don't need to be that one doesn't need to be updated every single year and people like but just when you do update it i mean again i don't like obviously they're going to make an m3 version of that eventually right and that will be great and they should i hope yeah eventually not not in october probably um but
John:
when they go to update them on whatever schedule they think, you know, what kind of update schedule is justifiable given the low sales volume of this iMac?
John:
Is it every two years?
John:
Is it every three years?
John:
Whatever it is, when they do that update, don't just keep the RAM and SSD space the same because that really, that's the thing that hurts people who want to buy inexpensive computers the most.
John:
They shouldn't be so terribly punished
John:
For buying the low-end model to be constantly running out of space, to constantly pressing up.
John:
Isn't the default like 8 gigs of RAM or something on that?
John:
And I know everyone has all these fantasy notions about how the ARM CPUs need less RAM or whatever.
John:
That's not really a thing.
John:
They're just very fast and good and have fast SSDs, right?
John:
But just...
John:
you got you got to keep up you got to keep up with the pace of change in the industry every few years like we're not saying every year but like two three four years pass reconsider reconsider how much it costs to get you know a 512 gig ssd or a one terabyte can you imagine a consumer product with a one terabyte ssd like a 500 playstation 5 come on people um
John:
Apple really needs to get on the ball.
John:
This is one of the things that hurts their line the most.
John:
So should they update the M1 iMac?
John:
Yes, they should.
John:
And if they kept the M1 but just doubled the RAM and SSD for the same price, I would say that's a perfectly good update for the holiday season.
Casey:
See, I don't think I agree with you.
Casey:
All right, I'm trying to say like seven sentences all at the same time.
Casey:
So I agree with you that in actuality, the M1 is more than sufficient.
Casey:
I 100% agree with you.
Casey:
But if I'm a consumer, and I was going to say if I'm a normal person, but even as me, even as Casey, I think it would be hard for me...
Casey:
to willingly buy a machine that has a one-and-a-half to two-year-old CPU.
Casey:
You know that that means something new is imminent, and I'm just not going to want to do that, especially if I'm spending the kind of money that a computer costs.
Casey:
The older these main processors are,
Casey:
the less likely I am to want to buy one.
Casey:
And I think that's true for regular people, too.
Casey:
If they spend even a modicum of time researching, I think that they would say the same thing.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I mean, they buy these iPads with these ancient phone chips in them.
John:
They don't care.
John:
Like, I feel like the M1 iMac is at that point.
John:
They like the colors.
John:
They don't really care what...
John:
I agree that, you know, obviously we all on this program think, yeah, it should have an M3.
John:
It's time.
John:
Like, I think every other year is at a reasonable cycle for that machine or something.
John:
But I don't know.
John:
Like, that's a good question.
John:
But certainly people don't shop for iPads that way.
John:
You see people buying iPads.
John:
If you even try to tell them what's inside it, they do not care.
John:
right that's just how much does it cost how big is the screen can i get a case on it that will my kid won't break like it's only when you get into the tech nerd stuff and i that people start even asking what the processor is now max are different than ipads and i agree with that and maybe people can look at an m and see a number and understand that higher is better uh but i think the big convincer would be if you're an apple store sit down in front of the computer and use it like there's nothing you can do with that in an apple store that's going to make someone who wants to buy that computer make it seem like it seems slow
John:
And again, it should upgrade to an M3.
John:
I mean, hell, if you want to go M1 to M4, skip four.
John:
I don't care what your cadence is.
John:
Pick a cadence that is justified by the things that you sell.
John:
But when you do that update, do it for real.
John:
And if we want to be really greedy, we'd say, hey, while you're selling that M1 model for whatever number of years.
John:
until you decide to do the revision imagine during that span that you actually upgraded the base ram and storage prices imagine that that's so unheard of for apple but i think the the place where they should do that is the low end that's what we complain about all the time because we you know they're charging so much money for this eight terabyte ssd that we want to buy or whatever but the low end is where it hurts the most we see it for everybody used to get phones with too little storage right or
John:
Someone fills up their computer and they have no idea what to do.
John:
And it's like in the answer for these things is like, well, buy a new computer or learn how to boot from an external drive or like it's just it's so complicated.
John:
So I really feel like this is the weakest part of the Mac line.
John:
And when I look at the other parts of the Mac line, things are looking great.
John:
The laptops.
John:
Do any of us have any complaints about the laptops going into the holiday season?
John:
I don't.
Marco:
no the laptop line is is great i mean you know the the we're all like you know hoping for cool m3 updates soon but we don't like it's we're not really like overdue for them yet like it's still fine yeah like like if someone you knew got one of the existing ones would you be like oh no you made a mistake don't buy that the new ones are coming out no way we would say they're great you got a great computer
Marco:
Yep, I agree.
Marco:
One area that I think is kind of specialized but really, really needs to be updated, the AirPods Max.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
I forgot that those exist.
John:
They're going to be updated right alongside the big home pods.
Marco:
Yeah, no, look, I think the AirPods Max, first of all, even though there's a lot of problems with that product, I think their owners seem to like them a lot.
Marco:
Certainly Tiff likes hers, and I know a lot of people who like theirs.
Marco:
And also, I would guess they have probably sold way more AirPods Maxes than they ever sold first-gen HomePods.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
The AirPods Max, if you look at how they compare to the recent AirPods Pro, the AirPods Max have the H1 chip, like the original AirPods.
Marco:
The AirPods Pro now have the H2, and that gives them a few different advantages, like some of the more advanced processing modes and things like that that the AirPods Max don't have.
Marco:
And the AirPods Max also have, I would say, a number of significant design flaws.
Marco:
We all make fun of how terrible that weird case is for them.
Marco:
The whole, like, you know, the case and charging situation is really bad.
Marco:
They're also still lightning ports to charge and to do anything else with, so...
Marco:
I would love to see an AirPods Max update that starts to address not only the need to move to USB-C and hopefully an update to the H2 chip, but maybe some of the other design issues that they had.
Marco:
So, for instance, they're way too heavy, and they use way too much metal that's itself contributing to them being way too heavy, and the case is terrible.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
They don't fold.
Marco:
They're terrible for travel.
Marco:
There's just so many reasons why that product, it had a lot of own goals and they were unnecessary.
Marco:
So I would love to see a version two of the AirPods Max that updates it to the modern tech and hopefully tackle some of its design problems.
John:
Yeah, I mentioned the big HomePod because that also was like a first product of its kind, had a lot of problems, and Apple did not seem interested in updating it for a very long time.
John:
And I hope that doesn't happen to the Macs because, you know, it's like, hey, good first try.
John:
Can't wait to see your second try.
John:
And it's like, all right, maybe we'll just sell this thing for a few more years and discontinue it and then come out with a new one.
John:
I don't know.
John:
What's the plan?
John:
Yeah.
John:
It seems like they should have already had a second revision by now, but I would put that on the list of things that have a lightning port that shouldn't anymore, right?
John:
It's a big long line of those.
John:
It's not a reason to update them, and it's not saying, oh, you shouldn't buy one now.
John:
We're in a transition period.
John:
I get it, but yeah, the AirPods Max is a good choice because...
Marco:
how long has it been it's it's more than a year i think two years ago it was that was remember that was also released shortly before the holiday season and it was very difficult to get them because they sold out very quickly that because it's a great holiday gift if if it's a good product yeah and uh but that that is a product where if somebody bought airpods max today i might be like oh no you should have waited because they are they're getting outdated and
John:
Well, I mean, that's kind of like buying an Apple monitor now.
John:
It's like, well, yeah, it is outdated, but we really have no idea when they're ever going to make another one.
Marco:
That's true.
John:
So why not roll the dice?
John:
I mean, look, we haven't mentioned the studio display, but like, I mean, we have something in the notes about a competitor that we probably won't get to today.
John:
But...
John:
the studio display like whenever you buy an apple monitor it's like this is not cost competitive uh but it but in the case of retina resolution large monitors a it may be your only reasonable game in town and b don't worry about them replacing it because yeah they will eventually but chances are good it's not going to be this year or the next year so just buy it right and someone's going to be unlucky someone's going to lose the lottery they're
John:
they said just buy it so i bought it and then new one came out next month yeah it's gonna happen but like look at the cadence between apple revising its monitors over many many many years the gaps are long right they maybe they shouldn't be but again like there's some cost to develop these products uh and apple tends not to do the thing where they like revise the panels within them they don't like seem to like to do the thing that
John:
so many other technology companies do, even in more cut-throat, lower-margin businesses, or maybe it's because they're cut-throat, lower-margin businesses, revising it like, oh, if there's a new, better panel available for our televisions, of course, next year we're going to put in the new, better panel.
John:
Why wouldn't we?
John:
And Apple would be like, no, if Apple sold a TV, they'd be like, yeah, we're going to sell this TV for four more years, and then we'll put in a much better panel, but during those four years, we won't drop the price, and it'll be a four-year-old panel, and every other TV will be better than us.
John:
Maybe that's why Apple didn't make a TV, but it just...
John:
And it boggles my mind that they'll just sell the same monitor for the same price for so long and the monitor world moves on.
Marco:
By the real-time follow-up, the AirPods Max are three years old, not two.
Casey:
Oh, my.
Casey:
So you're not getting an XDR update for the holiday season then?
John:
I mean, who knows when that's going to happen.
John:
It feels like the higher end of the things are, the longer it is between updates, which is not really the way it should work.
Marco:
uh i would even say like the xdr i would not assume that it ever gets an update it might i hope it does but i it wouldn't surprise me if it never did they just thought they just stopped selling a monitor or they sell like a bigger one or something i don't i mean i don't know how successful a product has been like i love mine i wouldn't give it up for the world and but i uh i don't know how many other people are buying this thing i
John:
I think its margins are typical Apple margins.
John:
The volumes are low, but the margins are... Oh, they're very healthy.
John:
The margins are very healthy.
John:
I know.
John:
And so it's low volume, but the margins, I feel like, justify.
John:
I mean, this is the problem with all of their high-end products is like, can Apple, you know, get motivated?
John:
Can Apple get out of the bed in the morning for something that sells less than a hojillion, you know, copies?
John:
And it's like, well, do you want to be in this market at all?
John:
I mean, the current Mac Pro is not encouraging in that area.
John:
So I don't know, you know, we're not even talking about when, when that thing's going to be revised for the M3 ultra or whatever.
John:
And speaking of the M3 though, all the rumors, and again, I don't keep track of what the exact cadences are, but all, all the rumors before we're like, Oh, by this point, we'll be getting the plain M3.
John:
And then in spring we'd get the M3 pro and M3 max.
John:
And then, you know, after that we get the ultra and like the, the, the sort of expected cadence of how things come out.
John:
But with the M3 by all accounts, uh,
John:
you know again maybe if you're listening to this it already happened and we're you know we're wrong but anyway by all accounts people don't expect any m3 stuff this year by the rumors right but i feel like they should be here by now and the fact that they're not makes me worry what's the deal with what's the deal that we know the three nanometer process is here it's they're selling it on the phone or whatever but is there is there some problem with the m3 uh did the schedule slip for some reason
Marco:
does that mean that the you know should put this way are they going to ship something with m3 pro and m3 max before plain old m3 that seems like ridiculous to me but i'm just wondering what their schedules are my guess is that you know the the m3 almost certainly needs three nanometer production it's and it's you know it's a bigger chip than the phone versions and then the m3 pro and max and ultra are even bigger versions of that
Marco:
And my guess is they intentionally scheduled the M3 to be next year, not this fall, so that they could get so they could reserve all that three nanometer capacity for the iPhone pros for this year.
Marco:
And so my guess is it was always planned for next year.
Marco:
And then furthermore.
Marco:
There's the Vision Pro.
Marco:
Now, this affects a lot of what we were just talking about in terms of excitement, holiday-ness, things like that.
Marco:
Vision Pro is, they keep saying it's still on track to be launched, quote, early next year.
John:
And that's 5 nanometer M2, not M3.
Marco:
Correct.
Marco:
So I can't see them announcing that as an M2 product if it's going to launch after nice, cool M3 products.
Marco:
I think what's going to happen is they're going to launch the Vision Pro with its M2 chip before any M3 products are released.
Marco:
And I don't think they're holding back the M3 products to make the Vision Pro look good.
Marco:
I think it was always planned that way.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I don't think they care about the comparison across those lines.
John:
And also, I think the Vision Pro has so many difficulties in getting to market that it's just going to slip and end up going past them anyway.
John:
Everyone thinks the M3 Pro and the Pro and Max laptops are going to come early next year sometime.
John:
Basically the time that we expected them to come.
John:
And those are sort of the important products.
John:
And by the way, I think by that point, I don't know the details, but I think by that point, TSMC would be on to like the new three nanometer revision, like N3B or something instead of N3E.
John:
I can't keep track of these things.
Marco:
Yeah, the other one.
John:
Yeah, the better one.
John:
And that would make sense if you're going to make a bigger chip.
John:
You want the one that has better yields.
John:
If that is still on track, I still have trouble figuring out when are the plain old M3 products going to arrive, right?
John:
Because if they're not coming now, are they going to come at the same time as the M3 Pro and Max ones?
John:
Or are they going to come in the spring and the M3 Pro and Max ones are pushed out later in the year?
John:
like you know we're getting off track of like after october event what needs to be updated it's clear that a lot of times don't need to be updated again they're all they're they're great they're the cpus that are in them their features their prices the compliments of ram ssd space everything about them is fine they don't have lighting ports like they do not need to be updated but
John:
it would be an it would be exciting if in an october event we got m3 something and all the rumors being so strongly against us having it uh it's just you know make it kind of a kind of a sad event not that i don't care about revised ipads but especially if it's revised ipads as we discussed that they're revised in a way that doesn't clarify and unify the line which we don't expect it to they're just going to be you know
John:
It's good that they have updates, spec bump internals.
John:
It's good that they're not as old as they used to be.
John:
Prices are probably about the same.
John:
That's fine.
John:
But it is not satisfying.
John:
And the only rumor of anything new that I've heard is the Apple Pencil 3.
John:
And honestly, I'm not excited about that.
John:
I'm not excited about magnetic tips.
John:
I'm not excited about if it was lightning versus USB-C changeover.
John:
I just...
John:
I don't know.
John:
So it's not, you know, it's hard to talk about this because, again, we're recording on Monday.
John:
And by the time you hear this, maybe the event already happened.
John:
You know what it was.
John:
But going into it, I'm not very excited.
Marco:
I am curious to see if the you know, if there is a new Apple Pencil, I think that actually could be interesting.
Marco:
In a sense, it wouldn't be something that I'm going to use every day because I hardly ever use the one I have because I can't draw.
Marco:
But it's the kind of product that I look at and I see a lot of uses for other people, including in my own household.
Marco:
Both of the other members of my household use Apple Pencils regularly.
Marco:
So what is a third-gen Apple Pencil?
Marco:
Maybe it can possibly work with future large iPhones.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
Maybe they change the way it charges to be more compatible.
Marco:
Maybe they change some of the other physical aspects of it.
Marco:
Maybe they add an eraser.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
There's so many different things.
Marco:
Maybe they put a button on the side finally, for the love of God, instead of having these weird tap gestures that you always accidentally click.
Marco:
There are lots of ways that product could be improved.
Marco:
That's actually interesting.
Casey:
So you're casting about for an Apple Pencil, which is at least slightly likely to happen.
Casey:
Meanwhile, I'm looking at the displays page on Apple's website, and I just keep thinking to myself, you know what would be really cool is a high refresh rate studio display.
Casey:
I would love that.
Casey:
It's not going to happen.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Well, at least not soon.
John:
Why would the studio display get higher refresh rate before the XDR?
Casey:
Because it's got fewer pixels to refresh quicker.
John:
No, that's not.
Marco:
And more people buy it.
Casey:
And more people buy it.
Casey:
Why are you so grumpy?
Casey:
Tell me why I'm wrong.
John:
No, I mean, first of all, as people have pointed out, and this is kind of silly, but if you look at what Apple has done, it makes some sense.
John:
They called it ProMotion.
John:
And I know it's not Pro with a space.
John:
It's ProMotion squished together, right?
John:
It's a capital P, capital, right?
John:
But it does have Pro in the name.
John:
And that's kind of like it's being withheld from the non-Pro phones, which at this point, I mean, it...
John:
eventually look if they keep calling it pro like are they going to say a non-pro iphone is never going to have 120 hertz screen i think that it's inevitable it will have to just eventually it will have to so they'll have to break this rule this quote unquote unwritten rule like it has pro in the name only goes on pro products but high refresh rate like that makes things more expensive you to take advantage of it you need a powerful gpu that is capable of displaying something that you'd want to see besides the ui it's something higher than 60 frames for a second
John:
I don't, I don't see that going to the studio first and studio doesn't even have real HDR yet for crying out loud.
John:
And you, you think it's going to go promotion.
John:
I mean, you're right.
John:
Technically that they could put promotion on it easier than they can put HDR, like as in for less money.
John:
Uh, but it, that would be such a weird, a weird, uh, sort of a counter to their market segmentation, essentially like the, the pro things have these features and the non pro things don't.
John:
And that's the way it works.
Um,
John:
I would much rather see a studio display that remains 60 Hertz, but has HDR, because as far as I'm concerned for the people who buy that monitor, HDR is going to be more beneficial because they can see all the pictures they take on their iPhones on their big Mac screen, the way they're supposed to be seen in HDR, just like they see them on their phone screen.
John:
Uh,
John:
uh and who needs 120 hertz like oh scrolling is smoother in a way that only a few nerds can tell or can you find a game that can even render it more than 60 frames a second that you care about that runs on your mac that you have a studio display attached to uh so yeah but anyway it's all moot point because the studio display is not going to be updated for another starter clocks four years let's say i don't know
John:
remember the rumors when it was like as soon as casey bought it they were gonna update it to for uh hdr with a mini led that didn't happen i was so excited because hey it's a new world apple's releasing monitors maybe they won't do it like they used to maybe they will revise this but so far they seem to be on the old apple monitor update track which is very slow
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
I just think I agree with you that HDR would also be great.
Casey:
I'm not as convinced about your segmentation theory, but I mean, por qué no los dos?
Casey:
Give me HDR and fast refresh rate.
Casey:
Why not, baby?
Casey:
I'll take both.
Casey:
It's not going to happen, or at least not anytime soon, but I'll take both.
Casey:
Is there anything else we need to talk about?
Casey:
Do we have that covered?
Casey:
Are we good now?
Casey:
Because watch is new.
Casey:
Phones are new.
Casey:
We talked about iPad and Mac.
Casey:
Vision Pro ain't out yet.
Casey:
The HomePod.
Casey:
Apple TV.
Casey:
I mean, I don't know what they would do to the Apple TV other than... Wasn't it actually updated fairly recently?
Casey:
Yeah, it was a few months ago.
John:
Yeah, I know.
John:
You can just keep putting a bigger and faster SoC in it so people can play better games on their remote as a controller.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Like...
Marco:
And the HomePod Mini is slightly old, but it's not old enough.
Marco:
It's still fine.
Marco:
And they're not going to update it to anything people actually want.
Marco:
I'm kind of down on that.
Marco:
I'm kind of living the Sonos lifestyle now.
Marco:
I'm kind of down on my HomePod.
Casey:
When are we talking about that?
Casey:
I want to talk about it.
Casey:
Eventually.
John:
We have one more interesting topic for today that I thought was just strange and hilarious and it's going around the internet as of this Monday.
John:
And that is Mark Gurman had a rumor.
John:
The title of this is Apple Readies System to Load Up Latest Software on Open iPhones.
John:
Here it is, quoting from Gurman.
John:
Apple is planning a new system for its retail stores that will update the software on iPhones prior to sale.
John:
The company has developed a proprietary pad-like device that the store can place boxes of iPhones on top of.
John:
The system can then wirelessly turn on the phone, update its software, and then power it back down all without the phone's packaging ever being opened.
John:
The company aims to begin rolling this out to its stars before the end of the year.
John:
So at first I saw this and I was like, this is a joke, right?
John:
Like we all know the problem.
John:
You get a phone, you take it out of the box, and the first thing it needs to do is run a software out there because it was manufactured two weeks ago or whatever, and there's been an update since then.
John:
In fact, we've had situations where a new iPhone comes out and everyone's like, before you even try to transfer, it was this year, right?
John:
Before you even try to transfer data from your old phone, make sure you update the OS.
John:
Like it'll prompt you to do it and do it, right?
John:
Because if you don't, the transfer could fail, blah, blah, blah, right?
John:
This is always the problem with hardware.
John:
You have to put that has to put an operating system on all these phones, put them in boxes, seal them up.
John:
And, you know, during that time, they get sealed up and they're being sent to you.
John:
New versions of the operating system come out, maybe critical fixes come out.
John:
And so they're, you know, I understand why Apple wants this.
John:
The thing I immediately thought of before considering the silliness of this whole thing is like Apple's move from air to sea instead of shipping things by plane, which puts a lot more carbon in the atmosphere.
John:
They want to ship things by boat, which is much more efficient in terms of carbon per phone shipped.
John:
boats are way slower, which means you have to have even more lead time.
John:
So instead of making them a week before and putting whatever the OS is a week before, now you've got to put the OS that's on them two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, a month.
John:
That really hurts Apple's lead times on when the operating system needs to be done.
John:
Unless when the boxes arrive in the Apple store, you can put each one in turn on top of a magic pad that will turn on the iPhone inside the box and update the OS and then turn it off.
John:
Now, the obvious problem is...
John:
The OS update doesn't want to run on phones if your battery is too low.
John:
It'll be like, sorry, I can't run this OS update.
John:
You better plug in your phone.
John:
What is it, 50% charge that it demands?
John:
I think so, yeah.
John:
When you get a phone out of a box, it doesn't have 100% charge.
John:
It usually has more than 50.
John:
And presumably, they'll do the smart thing and say, hey, if you put this box, this phone on top of this box...
John:
magic pad and it wakes up the phone and determines that it has you know 49 charge it will refuse to update it but if that's the case what's the point of this system you're either gonna make sure all the phones are updated or you're only gonna make sure the lucky phones are updated the ones that happen to retain enough charge on their journey across the sea they can be updated so when you get a phone you never know what you're gonna get until you open it was it one of the lucky ones that was able to be updated
John:
Never mind if something goes wrong with the processor or goes into like a boot loop inside the box or whatever and you open up this box and you get a weird software DOA brick phone because they hosed it by putting on top of a little magic pad at the Apple stores.
John:
I'm not sure this is the right solution to this problem, but it is very neat sounding.
Marco:
I had the same thought of like the power question.
Marco:
Like, are they going to somehow power the phones?
Casey:
Just put a little hole in the side of the box and you can shove a camera.
Casey:
I mean, Qi charging is a thing, and I know it's not supposed to be the range that we're talking about here.
John:
Yeah, you put the iPhone really close to the bottom of the box.
Casey:
Maybe this is the air power thing or whatever.
Casey:
What was it called?
Casey:
The plate thing.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
It's coming back around.
Marco:
I mean if – oh, remember it wasn't – there was that startup for like – I forget what it was called.
Marco:
P-Cell, wasn't it?
Marco:
Yeah, Power Over Air.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Like I don't think that ever went anywhere.
Marco:
But I think we have a significant problem of powering.
Marco:
And so, John, what you were saying was basically assuming that they probably wouldn't be able to power it.
Marco:
But that's my first thought is like if they can't power the phone –
Marco:
is this really going to work and then second of all how long does it does this take for each box to take its turn on top of the pad right right and like does do the stores have the time and the and like to handle the volume of phones they're selling to put every phone through this process
Marco:
like 40 minutes like how long does it take to do an os update like 30 minutes sometimes i mean the smaller ones take yeah it's not super fast and what like are they just going to like image some of the or you know stick some of the phones for this process and maybe have to bypass it for others like i i don't know and then how do you keep i guess you keep track of which ones because you'd put them on
John:
To be clear, there are ways to deliver power to a phone even when it's in the middle of the box, but a lot of them involve potential heat.
John:
Do you really want to be messing with a phone that's in a box at all?
John:
I almost feel like the hole in the box that you can plug them in is actually the better solution to this because it's straightforward and then you don't have to worry about power.
John:
wow so so weird like this is and maybe this has nothing to do with the boats but this is such a weird problem to be tackling and in such a weird way and in a way that just seems like it couldn't possibly really really solve the problem it can make it better but but in exchange for having this weird phone box i guess the phone box lottery already exists because the ones in the factories now are getting a new version of the u.s versus the ones that shipped in the original thing so i maybe that's not as bad as i think it is but
John:
What a weird thing to even think about doing.
Marco:
Well, I think if this is something that you want to do, I think it's possible to do it correctly and well.
Marco:
I think you would have to have power delivery.
Marco:
And that could be achieved if you redesign the packaging to put the phone's charging coil near the bottom of the box.
John:
but that's kind of a strange packaging design then i mean like there's other things like you'd have to like you know lift the cable off the front or whatever i mean you could have a thing plugged into it you could have like a little thing plugged into it like it's kind of like the the xbox elite controller when you put it in its case it has a little it has like a little hole for the plug like you could have a thing plugged into the usbc port like a little ribbon thing that's just for packaging it's not a real thing that that goes down to the bottom of the box and has like an inductive coil in the cardboard or something
Marco:
If you just put the phone upside down, put the phone upside down on the box so that you open it up, you see the Apple logo inside of the screen, and then put it really close to the lid, and then you could put the box upside down.
John:
I mean, you don't want it close to the lid, though, for breakability reasons, right?
John:
Like, you do want it to... I know.
Marco:
Well, if it's the back, it's pretty sturdy.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
This is a very convoluted thought process to try to solve this problem.
Marco:
But it's like, how big of a problem is this?
Marco:
And does it deserve this really convoluted solution?
Marco:
And I don't know how the retail staff is going to deal with this.
Marco:
It just seems like a very cumbersome process, even if the pad is fully automated, to have to put every single phone that's going to be sold to customers through this process.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
That sounds difficult.
Marco:
I don't know.
Casey:
I agree with everything you guys are saying, but, um, to play the role of contrarian, I think we talked about on the show.
Casey:
I don't remember if I just told you guys privately, but when I went to return the fine woven case on like Wednesday or something like that, um, or no, no, I was at the Apple store for some other reason.
Casey:
I can't remember what it was.
Casey:
Oh no, it was to pick up the case.
Casey:
That's what it was.
Casey:
I pick up, picked up the case on Wednesday.
Casey:
The
Casey:
And I was making conversation with the salesperson, and I asked, oh, when do you get all the phones in?
Casey:
Do they arrive Thursday night or whatever?
Casey:
And he was like, no, they're here now on Wednesday.
Casey:
And so if that's a normal thing, that gives you two additional days.
Casey:
If they came in sometime like midday Wednesday or whatever, they could spend all afternoon and all evening Wednesday and all day Thursday and all overnight Friday getting all these phones ready to hand to customers.
Casey:
Again, I'm not trying to say that you guys are wrong.
Casey:
I'm just saying it is possible that
Casey:
Also, how does how does the watch work?
Casey:
Like, is the is everything flashed during manufacturing or do they have something like this before it goes in the box?
Casey:
Does it happen after it's in the box?
Casey:
Because I got to imagine they've got they've got to have already conquered this for the watch potentially.
Casey:
Right.
Marco:
By the way, real time follow up.
Marco:
I just I just checked an unboxing video.
Marco:
Modern iPhones already ship face down in the box.
Marco:
So they actually are the back of the iPhone where the charging cable is actually already close to the top edge of the box.
John:
that's interesting yeah i mean obviously they'll get it close just for the for the data transfer and the waking up like it has obviously some signaling has to happen through the thing i just wonder if it's close enough for power without a lot of potential for heat i mean i guess they could have you know a huge fleet of these pads and so you're doing many of them in parallel and you just have people rotating the boxes every time something beeps like you can come up with solutions to this but it's
John:
I mean, that's why I had to think it had to be in service of the boat shipment thing, because why would you go through all this trouble?
John:
And maybe it's just like it's not feasible to hit the September date with boats if you're not willing to ship the phones from the factory with an OS that you essentially know isn't final.
John:
And maybe they really will say, look, either you successfully update it by putting it on the little pad or you don't sell it.
John:
Right.
John:
Because they'll ship with, you know, whatever the beta is or like, I don't know what they would ship with, but I don't think they've solved it for the phone to answer your question or for the watch to answer your question, Casey.
John:
I think it's the same deal.
John:
They put whatever OS they have at the time on the watches.
John:
And if you buy a watch that's been sitting in the back of an Apple store for ages, it's got some ancient version of watch OS on it.
John:
it almost seems like i mean we're not at this point now but like in some future they could ship them with essentially nothing and they would all just like boot and do internet recovery the first time they boot up so they don't even come with an os you know what i mean but i think people would find that tremendously frustrating given how long it takes would take to do that you know um but at this point it's almost like that it's like yeah it comes out of the box with an os but
John:
it demands to be updated as soon as you open the box now i suppose if it's not like a problem like it was for the 15s where i wouldn't it could fail during data transfer yeah you could say yeah yeah i'll update you later just you know transfer my data and then you know you get prompted that night to to update or it updates overnight at the moment like i think that's something that people are normally useful used to but
John:
If they really want to give themselves more breathing room when shipping the phones, whether it's for a boat trip or not, just to have more breathing room so they can work on the software up until the very last minute, I think they'd have to say that we're going to update them all.
John:
Don't sell it unless you can put it on this little pad and it confirms it's got whatever the minimum OS is where we say you can sell the phone.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
But it doesn't have to be this way.
Marco:
Imagine a world where only secure devices could access your cloud apps.
Marco:
In that world, phished credentials would be useless to hackers.
Marco:
And you could manage every OS, even Linux, from a single dashboard.
Marco:
And you could get employees to fix their own device security issues without creating more work for IT.
Marco:
The great news is you don't have to imagine that world.
Marco:
You can just start using Collide.
Marco:
Collide is a device trust solution for companies with Okta.
Marco:
And it ensures that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps.
Marco:
Visit collide.com slash ATP to watch a demo and see how it works.
Marco:
That's Collide spelled with a K. So K-O-L-I-D-E.
Marco:
K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Collide for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
And we're going to start with Luke Askwith, who writes, if you could choose any three fixed focal lengths in your phone, which would you choose?
Casey:
Would you go for maximum range at the expense of doing a lot of digital zooming in between steps or a closer trio for maximum quality with the photos you take the most often?
Casey:
And a follow-up question, if Apple introduced a fourth lens to the Ultra Pro Max phone next year, what do you think they would choose?
Casey:
For me, this is really tough to choose just three.
Casey:
Because I adore the 5X on my fancy new oversized phone, but there are definitely occasions where I want something more than one and something less than five.
Casey:
I feel like if I had to pick, I would probably choose one, three, and five, but I'm not at all confident about my answer here.
Casey:
And I bet you, after listening to you two, I'll probably change my mind.
John:
Wait, one, three, and five?
John:
Yeah, why not?
John:
Because I want to get no wide point, no point five.
Casey:
I don't you know, if I if I only get three, I don't think so.
Casey:
If I get four, absolutely.
Casey:
But I don't use the ultra wide that often, I don't think.
Casey:
And but maybe maybe I'm lying to myself.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Tell me what what is the right answer, Marco?
Marco:
I had a really hard time with this, honestly.
Marco:
In the past, when the 2X didn't have a great solution, I would have said that should be one of them.
Marco:
But now I feel like the using of the middle of the 1X sensor as the 2X lens has pretty decent quality, given that's what it's doing.
Marco:
And it has better quality than the real 2X lenses ever had.
Marco:
So I think they're satisfying that okay for now.
Marco:
So I think I'm going to go with the boring answer and say...
Marco:
I would probably choose the three focal lengths that your phone already has, not mine.
Marco:
My phone has the 0.5, 1, and 3, and I find the 3 to be both too zoomed in to be optically good in the sense that the phone can't give it a good sensor at that zoomed in level, but not zoomed in enough for long reach.
Marco:
At least the 5X lens that you have
Marco:
While it has the same sensor size and optical challenges that the 3X has, it at least gives you more reach, so it makes it a little more useful from a functional level.
Marco:
And a lot of people... There was a great episode of Mac Power Users.
Marco:
Tyler Stallman was on it, and he's a really great photographer, and he was talking all about the lenses.
Marco:
And one point that he brought up is that from a photographer's point of view...
Marco:
the 120 millimeter equivalent, uh, five X lens compared to like the like 77 ish millimeter equivalent of the three X, the three X lens is actually, it's close to 85 millimeters, which is a much more commonly used focal length by photographers for things like portraits.
Marco:
Whereas 120 is, is much more zoomed in than most photographers use for most creative needs.
Marco:
It's that, that becomes, you know, much more like telephoto use, you know, long reach stuff.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
I mentioned that I personally love shooting on 135mm primes, but that's fairly unusual.
Marco:
Most photographers, they go to 85mm for that and for the same things I was using 135mm for.
Marco:
I think a lot of photographers would say, add an 85mm.
Marco:
The 85mm would be a 3.5mm or whatever, and then maybe something longer if you want.
Marco:
But I actually really like 135mm perspective.
Marco:
And I've had 85s before back in my camera days, and I never use them.
Marco:
Like I would try it here and there.
Marco:
I was never that happy with it.
Marco:
And so I use them very infrequently.
Marco:
So I'm weird in the sense that I actually want the lenses that Apple just delivered for your phone, but I want them in a phone the size of mine.
Marco:
Now, the follow-up question, if they added a fourth lens next year to the Ultra or Pro, what do you think they would choose?
Marco:
That's, of course, different from what I would choose.
Marco:
But I think what Apple would choose, it depends on what they can fit.
Marco:
But it wouldn't surprise me if instead of having, like on the big phone, instead of having 0.5, 1, and 5, maybe they do something like 0.5, 1, 3, and 6.
Marco:
Put something in the middle and push the telephoto a little bit further out.
John:
No, no, no.
John:
If they do four, what do you think they would choose?
John:
First, I don't think they're going to do four, but if they did, they're going to do 0.5, 1, 1, and 3.
Marco:
Oh, for video capture for Vision Pro.
John:
Two 1X cameras for Vision Pro stuff.
John:
Assuming that catches on in any way, having two of the best cameras that are equal cameras to do a Vision Pro capture.
John:
I mean, if Vision Pro fizzles, then if you do that, it would be a mistake.
John:
But...
John:
uh right now i think that is the most obvious choice for two because they're really cutting it fine to say like oh well you know i want a different focal length people already i feel like are overwhelmed with i mean you don't see it you just see like in the camera app you just pick what you want but like there's more than enough camera lenses to give people the range that they want especially with the advent of the 5x and the fact that people don't care about the fact that it's a digital zoom a lot of the time if you pinch way too much
John:
I see my kids do it all the time.
John:
They don't know what digital zoom is.
John:
They don't care.
John:
They just pinch until the picture shows what they want.
Marco:
And it's like, no one cares.
John:
It's just, it's an oil painting.
John:
Like it's just, I don't even, I don't know what sensor is he using, but I know none of the cameras can zoom at this range.
John:
So they just take the picture.
John:
They don't care.
Marco:
i've never seen a non-nerd out in the world use any of the preset focal length buttons on the bottom of the camera app they always just pinch to zoom wherever they want and that's it and that's fine until you're pinching way past the limit of any of the lenses even like on casey's thing oh they don't care it's 20x it's fine i want it to be 20x i can see my kid on stage like is that your kid or is that like five blobs of color no no one cares except us yep can confirm but we do care
John:
For my three fixed focal lengths, I'll hack this question a little bit and say, I would just like 0.5, 1, and 3, but I want the 3x to be like a huge number of megapixels so I can crop it down to like 6x and it doesn't look like garbage.
John:
Because that is didn't specify within given sensor technology or within the current sensor sizes.
John:
Just give me a huge number of pixels on a sensor in a 3X.
John:
The thing about the 5X is I like the 3X.
John:
I don't want to be that zoomed in all the time.
John:
It's the same thing you were talking about, Casey.
John:
That's a big jump from the 1 slash 2 to the 5.
John:
That's why I want a 3 with enough pixels that I can crop down to 5 or 6.
John:
If that's not possible, I would still do 0.5, 1, and 3.
John:
The reason I keep pushing for the 0.5 is...
John:
And there are situations where there's no alternative to that.
John:
Like in particular, like if you're trying to take a picture of an interior space, not that you're a realtor or whatever, but like even just like I was moving my son into his dorm room, it's a little dorm room and you want to show like, here's what Alex's dorm room looks like.
John:
So it's like a picture of it or whatever.
John:
0.5 you know you're backed into a corner you put it in 0.5 you can see all the stuff right yeah any kind of interior thing or any kind of like fun landscape thing it's the same like i don't love the 0.5 camera it's not great but it's it's just like the 3x like sometimes if you just have a 5 and a 1
John:
There's nothing you can do to get that 3 or the 0.5.
John:
So I want to span the range.
John:
Like, yeah, it's not going to look great, but I've got the 0.5.
John:
I can get that shot now, even though it's not great.
John:
And the 3 lets me get that shot without, you know, having to, like, zoom in on the 1x before I can jump to the 5.
John:
So that's a boring answer, but it's, yeah, it's the lenses I've got on my phone right now.
John:
I just want the 3x1 to have so many more megapixels that I can crop it down to get the equivalent of a 5x or a 6x.
John:
I know talking in these X's is silly because, you know, Marco was talking in millimeters, like actual camera things.
John:
But like when I think of my phone, I think of it in terms of 0.5123 or whatever, because that's the language that Apple uses with its things.
John:
And because honestly, the focal lengths,
John:
like i don't have any intuition about them because the sensors are so small right that the someone sent us like the table of like what is the full frame equivalent of the light gathering ability at various focal lengths and it's it's like off the charts like i think it was like the 3x lens was like f21 equivalent or something it's just like these numbers don't make any sense in real camera parlance so i'm sticking with the the 0.51x3x
Marco:
I always think back to the distinction between I'm using my iPhone camera to take a great picture versus I'm using my iPhone camera for some kind of function, like a functional need.
Marco:
I want to remember where I'm parked, so let me snap a picture of the sign in the lot that says… Or I want to get a picture of a receipt or something up close or…
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
There's so many times that I'm using the iPhone camera for some kind of functional need, not some kind of artistic or memory capture need.
Marco:
And those are the times when I use things like the 3X to zoom in to see, oh, I'm in parking zone 3 blue.
Marco:
Or I use the 0.5X so I can say, look, here's the room I'm in.
Marco:
There are so many times like that where...
John:
the the optical quality is not super important but what's important is trying to capture some kind of information or or see some kind of information and so isn't the point isn't the point five the only macro one as well isn't that what it switches to for macro yes it can focus the closest yeah i mean and macro people use i use of that all the time all the time i reach my phone around the back of an appliance take a picture with the flash so i can see what the stupid serial number is 0.5 because i'm going to be a centimeter from it like that is a functional need
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
Like having close focus ability is extremely useful on a phone camera.
Marco:
So that's why like as much of like, you know, trying to capture like artistically pleasing pictures at super wide focal lengths is difficult.
Marco:
And optically, that sensor is not great, but that is a very functionally useful camera.
Marco:
The 0.5 is very functionally useful, so I don't want to give it up, even though I never use it for artistic reasons.
Marco:
The One X is where I'm taking most of my pictures, and it looks pretty good most of the time, etc., etc.
Marco:
Honestly, I would rather have... If they gave me a certain number of square millimeters of sensor size to spend however I wanted...
Marco:
I would put it all in the 1X sensor.
Marco:
Like, leave the 0.5 where it is.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
And then put any other possible camera expansion you're willing to do, make the 1X sensor bigger and better.
Marco:
I'd rather have that than almost anything else.
Casey:
Nick writes, is there any way to add music to the music app on iOS without a Mac or PC or buying it via iTunes, for example, with no computer access at all?
Casey:
I don't listen enough to justify monthly fees for Spotify or Apple Music.
Casey:
If not, is there an app that can do this?
Casey:
I don't know what it is with all you people and refusing to buy computers these days.
Casey:
I don't have any freaking clue.
Casey:
I've got nothing.
John:
I do wonder.
John:
I mean, we talk about this all the time that the iPhone or the iPad is like the primary only computer for so many people.
John:
It's just people.
John:
I know this is a show for people who are, quote unquote, into computers.
John:
And we think of that being Macs or, you know, the Windows being PCs.
John:
But I do wonder, you know, just I think most people just get by with their phone.
John:
And it's true if they're, you know, someone writing this in knows that it used to be possible.
John:
Like if they had a Mac or a PC, there are ways to do it because there's some app that you can run on your Mac or your PC that you can transfer MP3 files onto your phone and listen to them.
John:
But like, but what if I don't have a Mac or PC?
John:
What do I do then?
John:
The problem with this question is it says, I want to add music to the music app, as in the Apple music app.
John:
I'm sure there are third-party music-playing apps that let you do this.
John:
Maybe they even use the camera connection kit where you just plug in a thing and put an SD card and read your MP3s off of it.
John:
You could do that, but the music app, Apple's music app, essentially, how do you get things into your quote-unquote iTunes library without a Mac or a PC?
John:
There are ways to do it.
John:
The only one I got to the point where I was going to try, like I started walking through the process was using GarageBand, believe it or not, because apparently you can put something you can put something at iCloud Drive and then GarageBand can pull it from iCloud Drive and then GarageBand can send it to your iTunes, your quote unquote iTunes library.
John:
That makes me think there's got to be, I mean, is that a public API that garage met?
John:
There's got to be some way to get things into there.
John:
Like, but it just, it seems so weird that there would be no way at all to this.
John:
And the reason I put this, you know, I think this is relevant to what we're talking about is we just got done talking about, Hey, I've got an iPad and I want to back up my photos.
John:
Um, besides just doing an iCloud thing, what can I use for that?
John:
So I guess right in, if you know a way to do this, is there a third party app that can jam things into your quote unquote iTunes library?
John:
Um,
John:
The question, and I know people are going to say just use this third party app that has nothing to do with Apple's music app, but that's not what the question asks.
John:
And if the answer to this is like GarageBand or nothing, that's not a great answer.
Marco:
Also, so what Nick says in this question is, I don't listen enough to justify monthly fees for Spotify or Apple Music.
Marco:
That kind of sounds to me like Nick wouldn't have iTunes match either.
Marco:
Apple Music includes iTunes Match, and iTunes Match was that feature a million years ago where you could basically sync your iTunes music library with files that you uploaded between different devices that you owned.
Marco:
At that point, Max, I think this was before iPhones even existed, I think, or at least it was around that time.
Casey:
No, it was during iPhone time.
Marco:
But anyway, so this would require iTunes Match or the equivalent functionality in Apple Music because what you're asking is somehow add files.
Marco:
I guess if you're adding it from your phone, you want it to be available in the Music app on your phone, so maybe it wouldn't count as a different device, but I don't know.
Marco:
Regardless, the answer is basically no.
John:
Yeah, I mean, there's always the GarageBand approach.
John:
And you can Google for it.
John:
It's Byzantine, though.
John:
I would never try to do it for, you know, large volumes of music.
John:
You basically have to make a new GarageBand track and pull a thing into it as like an instrument or a loop or something as the one and only track.
John:
And then it's ridiculous.
John:
I gave up before I accomplished it.
John:
But I do believe that it is possible.
John:
um itunes match there was some discussion about this recently i i recently unsubscribed from itunes match which i had been subscribed to out of fear for ages even though i'm also an album music subscriber and i unsubscribed to it and they're like everything went fine nothing bad happened but apparently what this means is that if you were to re-download a song from your library on another device
John:
if you had iTunes match and that song was something that you like ripped from a CD and put into your library, if you subscribe to iTunes match, when you read, download that on another device, like saying, I don't have it on this device, but I know I uploaded to my max music library and I subscribed to iTunes match.
John:
So here I am on this other computer or this other device.
John:
I should be able to download that, that particular file.
John:
Uh, if you subscribe to iTunes match, you get a DRM free.
John:
If you don't subscribe to iTunes match, when you download that file, you get a DRM copy.
Um,
John:
And the whole thing with iTunes Match is what they're saying is we will match your songs.
John:
Like what you just want is like, how about I just put a bunch of MP3s in a folder and you sync them everywhere, Apple, and then I can play them.
John:
How about that?
John:
And Apple says no.
John:
What Apple says is, okay, you ripped a bunch of MP3s from CDs back in the 90s, right?
John:
And you put them in your iTunes library.
John:
What we'll do is we'll analyze those MP3s.
John:
Figure out what song we think it is and then put a little bit in your database entry that says, OK, this person has this song by this artist because we saw they had an MP3 over here.
John:
And so when they're on another machine and they ask us, hey, can I get that song that I wrote for my CD?
John:
We're not going to take the file from their Mac and upload it to the cloud and download it.
John:
No, no, no.
John:
we're going to do is look for our little record and says, yeah, we saw your MP3 and we think it's this song by this artist.
John:
If you're an iTunes match subscriber, here's a DRM free copy of it.
John:
If you're not, here's an Apple music DRM encumbered copy of it.
John:
And you're like, but I've got a DRM free MP3 over there.
John:
Why don't you just give me that one?
John:
I ripped out at 128 kilobits per second in 1994.
John:
Give me that file.
John:
And Apple again says no.
John:
So I think this is like a weird system.
John:
That's a,
John:
You know, has weird historical baggage behind it.
John:
The fact that it's called a match, the whole idea is they are matching your MP3s with what song they think it is and deciding what version to give to you.
John:
I don't regret unsubscribing from iTunes Match, but iTunes Match of all the Apple services, it was a bargain.
John:
It was $25 for an entire year.
John:
And what it essentially gave you was the illusion of, you know, a folder that syncs filled with your music.
John:
Again, there's got to be third-party music apps that are just like, I don't know anything or care anything about Apple and iTunes.
John:
You just give me a bunch of MP3s and I'll sync them everywhere.
John:
And you could do that yourself with Dropbox or whatever.
John:
I guess you could just play them from the Dropbox interface.
John:
You can fashion yourself your own third-party music playing application out of one of these many cloud sync services.
John:
Apple Music is very encumbered by historical baggage and weirdness.
John:
And I think part of the result of that is the answer to the next question is, at least we don't know a good way to do it.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Rock Ripley writes, I just got a Synology and was working on making the Synology available when away from home for, you know, basically via the internet.
Casey:
Well, there's more than one way to do this.
Casey:
It seems as though you get the fastest connection if you log into the Synology through either a VPN or port forwarding.
Casey:
The internet seems to prefer the VPN, especially OpenVPN, for security reasons.
Casey:
Can someone explain why this is so?
Casey:
It looks like many Synology services only require HTTPS on port 5001, and I can only gain access after logging in with my credentials.
Casey:
So it seems conservatively I could get access to many services by making one or only a few ports available and by using an encrypted connection.
Casey:
Similarly, a VPN requires an encrypted connection and login credentials.
Casey:
So why would one be more secure than the other?
Casey:
Is it the nature of the encryption, the fact that practically many ports need to be forwarded to make port forwarding workable, or something else?
Casey:
The way I look at this is the safest approach is to not let anything poke into your network until you've already passed some sort of credential check.
Casey:
So in order to get onto the network that remotely, this is by some VPN, I don't personally use OpenVPN, but that's fine.
Casey:
Then you first, in order to get on the network, you need to authenticate.
Casey:
And then, yeah, it's a second layer of authentication to get into the Synology.
Casey:
I don't personally think that's necessary, but I think that is probably the rightest answer.
Casey:
For me, I port forward a couple of selective ports when appropriate and turn on a lot of the Synology's protections for like, you know, oh, I'm going to try 17,000 logins and hope that it doesn't lock me out or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
John, you probably have a stronger feeling and or answer about this.
Casey:
What is your recommendation or how would you like to explain it?
John:
Yeah, I don't have a strong feeling about it.
John:
If I had to do it, I would probably do the VPN approach.
John:
Maybe it's just all those years in corporate America getting me used to the idea of signing into a VPN.
John:
It just seems like a natural thing to do to protect the network.
John:
And even though, as you noted, once you're on that network, there are still many more layers of password.
John:
What I personally choose to do is not expose my synology to the Internet.
John:
So that solves that problem sort of.
John:
Um, but yeah, like I, you know, my, all of our home network security is probably not as good as it should be just because doing that type of stuff is a pain.
John:
And if you're not, even if you are a network administrator by trade, but even if you're not, it's just like, you just want it.
John:
You just want to not have to think about it.
John:
You just want to buy reasonably secure stuff.
John:
And my strategy is like, just don't expose anything to the internet if you can possibly help it.
John:
Uh, and you know, if, if,
John:
If you can get away with that, then don't worry about it.
John:
But if I had to do it, yeah, I would go with VPN.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Collide, and Hatch.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
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.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss.
Marco:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T.
Marco:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
I have a very small mini thing that's not even really a topic.
Marco:
It's more of a sentence.
Marco:
I have noticed, for whatever it's worth, the Apple Watch Series 9.
Marco:
I miss my titanium, but one thing I do not miss is times during a workout with previous Apple Watches where I'd look down and check my heart rate and it would just be dimmed out because it just wouldn't read for a little while.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, that's very frustrating.
Marco:
The Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2, one of the features they very briefly breezed past in their introduction is they both, with their new neural engine capabilities with the S9,
Marco:
They've upgraded the heart monitoring sensor as well, the heart rate monitoring sensor, to use some kind of ML to figure out your heart rate better.
Marco:
And I have noticed, for whatever it's worth, so far in my workouts using the Series 9, every single time I glance down at the watch to see my heart rate, it's there.
Marco:
And it's updating pretty frequently.
Casey:
That's nice.
Marco:
So I think that actually is... I mean, I think they kind of underplayed the importance of that, if I'm right about this.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
It seems like a pretty big upgrade.
Marco:
It seems like it is tracking my heart rate significantly better than the old ones did.
Marco:
This is the same size watch with the same strap at the same hole.
Marco:
It isn't like it's a tighter fit or anything.
Marco:
It's the big watch with the sport strap on the third hole.
Marco:
I've used this for a long time now.
Marco:
I've had the same results with previous Apple Watches, but it was the same.
Marco:
It would work
Marco:
A lot of the time, but a lot of times you look down and you'd see that grayed out heart rate.
Marco:
The new one seems significantly improved in that area.
Marco:
So while I do very much miss my titanium, that is a pretty cool upgrade that I think no one really is talking about.
Marco:
All right, we can actually get to bed at a reasonable time tonight.
Casey:
Firing on all cylinders.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
Not you, though, because you don't have any cylinders.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
Oh, my God, it's so good.
Casey:
It's got cylinders in its brakes.
Marco:
Oh, fair enough, fair enough.
Marco:
One thing I've been doing recently in the Rivian is... So part of the beach just closed because of various erosion problems that have happened, and it's too narrow to drive on.
Marco:
So I have to drive on the interior sand road for more of the trip now.
Marco:
It's basically like driving through a nature preserve, but with occasional houses.
Marco:
And one thing I have discovered, and I absolutely love it, is because it's electric, and therefore it's basically silent, although there's an asterisk on that, but it's basically silent.
Marco:
What I've been doing when I've been driving through that kind of like sandy nature preserve area is just rolling the windows down, turning off the music, and turning off the HVAC.
Marco:
So it's just nothing, and just quiet.
Marco:
quietly like silently gliding through and because i'm on soft sand there's only not any tire noise so the only noise i hear is like the little tiny whooshing noise that the car has to make to comply with like pedestrian safety standards i was gonna say like that all these cars make some kind of noise so you don't run over pedestrians
Marco:
Yeah, so it has a very slight wooshy noise, but it's... I gotta say, Rivian's version of it is pretty tasteful and, I mean, I would say difficult to notice, which I know might be going against its purpose, but, you know, it is a very tastefully done noise.
John:
Like, I've heard... Yeah, everything in the Rivian is nature sounds, right?
John:
It's like birds chirping and stuff like that.
John:
Is it making those?
John:
Because I was gonna say, I enjoy listening to the birds.
John:
No, no, not for the idle sound, but like when you unlock it and stuff like that, isn't that all like nature sounds?
Marco:
um i don't think there's a lot it doesn't make a lot of sounds at all which is good frankly uh you know i don't want my cars to make a lot of sounds but uh but yeah anyway i've loved just like hearing the birds and the crickets and the sand and like the waves like oh my god it is it is delightful silence the car and just creep through this wonderful sand you
Marco:
it it like brightens my day every time it's so it's so nice it's it's like this little joy that you know i would never have expected you know with this change to electric cars but it just it happened just so happens like what a cool thing i'm i'm really enjoying this i i just told tiff today like i'm i'm so happy with this vehicle i hope it stays good like that's my that's my only concern now is like what's gonna break like i
John:
Are you going to ruin my software updates?
John:
Are you worried about that or are you worried about stuff breaking up?
Casey:
Did you see what Steven put in Slack actually just an hour or so ago?
Marco:
Yeah, they literally just did a software update.
Marco:
I told my car to do it right before the show.
Marco:
It popped up.
Marco:
I'll see tomorrow how it is.
Marco:
But they're changing a whole bunch of various things around.
Marco:
But so far...
Marco:
I have found their UI to be pretty good.
Marco:
It's not perfect.
Marco:
I still want CarPlay for navigation and music.
Marco:
But their UI overall is pretty good.
Marco:
I'm pretty happy with it.
Marco:
So far, they have earned my trust that they won't screw it up too badly simply because of the design they've shown so far.
Marco:
We'll see over time.
Marco:
I mean, look, I originally said I enjoyed Tesla's UI for a while too.
Marco:
And then over time, they got new designers in there and ruined it.
Marco:
So we'll see, you know, hopefully that same thing won't happen to Rivian.
Marco:
But so far, I'm so enjoying this vehicle.
John:
Is one of the sounds as you silently glide through the inroad trail, the sounds of bushes scraping their branches against the side of your paint job?
Marco:
A little bit.
Marco:
Yeah, sometimes.
John:
It's so wide, you know, that sound.
Marco:
Or splashing myself through a giant deep puddle because, you know, it's very, very bumpy.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Do you get to like, I mean, I was gonna say maybe you get to sneak up on animals more, but I imagine the electronic whooshing is probably scaring them away.
Marco:
oh no the only animals that that are nearby that that are irrelevant are deer that aren't afraid of you anyway yes like i literally i drove right past a giant buck today like it was maybe eight feet away from the cars i crept by and it just looked at me like what the hell am i doing there i'm gonna screw more things to scrape up your paint job and bring those antlers over
John:
yeah you should hear the uh the electronic speaking of whooshing sounds uh so there's the external whooshing sound to protect pedestrians and stuff but there's also of course the internal sounds that every car plays on the speaker to or not every car but the sportier cars play to make you feel like you're doing something sporty obviously the internal combustion noise that we talked about for ages but
John:
Some electric cars do it as well.
John:
There are some electric cars that choose to try to make an internal combustion noise, which is weird, but a lot of them also come up with some sort of electronic sci-fi noise that they decide is exciting sounding for when you're accelerating.
John:
The most interesting one I heard recently was the
John:
The Corvette E-Ray, which is a C8 Corvette with this regular V8, but then on the front axle, it's got an electric motor that is completely independent and totally not attached to the rear of the car in any way whatsoever, except for through computers, which is fun.
John:
And that's got a skinny little tiny battery in the center tunnel.
John:
Anyway, when you accelerate in that thing, obviously it's got the actual V8 noise.
John:
It's a big, loud engine.
John:
Then I think it also has artificial V8 noise, because why wouldn't it?
John:
And then it has the sci-fi noise that it ramps up as you go faster.
John:
And by the time you're going fast, the sci-fi noise dominates the actual V8 noise.
John:
It's so weird.
John:
It's very Star Trek-y.
John:
It definitely looks fun in YouTube videos, but as some of the reviews said, it's fun the first few days, but it gets tiring.
John:
I don't know if you could turn it off.
John:
They didn't say that you could, but...
John:
I'm not looking forward to the day when I have to worry about the sounds that my car is artificially making in the hopes that I will be excited by them.
John:
Not looking forward to that at all.
Casey:
It's all right for you and me if we decide to stick with burning dead dinosaurs.
Casey:
Apparently the only people what we'll be able to get a car from is Porsche because they're saying until we electrify we're keeping the manuals.
John:
I don't believe anything any of these car companies say because the people who say it get fired or leave and the new people come and that's the problem.
John:
Remember when it was the CEO of Ferrari said we'll make an SUV over my dead body?
John:
Then they fired him.
John:
They got a new CEO and he made an SUV.
John:
Yep.
John:
so yeah Porsche will do that until they won't uh yeah it's not a stick shift like honestly it's the silly like at this point I don't even think it's safe for me to buy internal combustion combustion engine because start stop I cannot I cannot handle start stop it's really annoying a lot of cars let you disable it but then they re-enable it every time you start the car kind of like the timeline and threads probably but like some of them have like an easy way to defeat it of like putting a jumper on a fuse or doing some secret code or whatever but like
John:
I don't want to have to look to see, is it possible to have this car with the start stop thing like permanently disabled?
John:
Or is it possible you can buy one without it anymore?
John:
Like same thing with like the rev lockouts.
John:
Like it's not a big deal, but like all the YouTube videos of like, no, I got a fancy new car.
John:
Listen to my engine rev.
John:
Vroom, vroom.
John:
You know, that type of thing.
John:
All of them have soft limiters on them that say, hey, when you're sitting idle and the car is like not moving, you can't go higher than 3000 RPM.
John:
Why?
John:
Emissions testing.
John:
It's like everything is about, you know, do something that makes the car worse so we can fake like the car is better than it is within these tests.
John:
The car is not as good as it says, but like, oh, if we don't let you rev it more than 3000, then the idle emissions will never be above.
John:
It's just so dumb.
John:
So depressing.
John:
Just want a straightforward machine.
John:
there's there's an easy solution here i mean the electric i said the electronic ones make weird electronic noise i would want an electric car obviously i understand the pedestrian safety that's got to be you know make the noise on the outside i get that and hopefully it would be a pleasing noise not an annoying one but inside the car i don't want to hear anything like and the problem is the sound the actual sound of electric cars is not particularly pleasing so you kind of got to try to block it all out
John:
Like, the actual sound of, like, electric engine whine.
John:
Not artificial, but, like, the real sound.
John:
Oh, I like it.
John:
It's not a great noise.
Marco:
Because it sounds like, like, you know, in the same way that, like, you know, gas engine sounds are not pleasing at first.
Marco:
Like, the very first time you ever hear a gas engine sound, it just sounds like, you know, a long fart.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
The reason why you find it pleasing to have like a big engine sound after a while is because you associate that sound with performance and the going.
John:
That's not just it.
John:
There are pleasing engine internal combustion sounds, mostly probably because they sound like animal noises.
Marco:
and then animal noises they sound like animal gas noises but but like not all of them no but i'm saying like you associate you come to associate those sounds with the the speed and the performance that you like well once you drive electric you come to associate the electric motor sounds with speed and performance and so those sound good to you once you are used to them being a positive thing
John:
I mean, I'm not against them.
John:
I don't think they sound bad.
John:
I just find them... Mostly because they're higher pitched.
John:
I think that's what it comes down to.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Higher pitched noises can be more annoying.
John:
And unlike internal combustion engines where there's so much work done to, especially back in the olden days before...
John:
catalytic converters and emissions testing or whatever to try to tune the noise that you hear when you're sitting inside the car to be the most pleasing to you lots of cars had things where they would have various baffles and stuff that they open and close into the cabin of the car so that it sounds better inside the car because you're right lots of there are lots of noises that don't sound good at internal combustion engines but they would tune them to say let's let in the
John:
the good sounds at the right point in the, you know, the, the whole emissions and things like, so they come into the cabin to sound good or even just put as being put in a big induction scoop over the hood of the car.
John:
So that's right behind your head or whatever.
John:
But I'm not sure there are a lot of good sounds to funnel into the cabin from electric motors.
John:
There are just the sort of high pitch wind of electric motors that there's not a lot of nuance.
John:
And there are, there is a lot of like,
John:
There are bad sounds that you want to funnel out, but I'm not sure how much you can make it good.
John:
It seems like every car maker has decided for both these kinds of engines.
John:
Whatever sound it makes for real, we don't want any of that.
John:
We'll just get a sound designer to make up some BS, whether it's a BS internal combustion engine or a BS sci-fi spaceship noise, and we want you to hear that.
John:
And to the degree that we can totally damp the actual sound our car is making, we'll do that.
John:
If only we could all drive slowly on sand, then we wouldn't have tire noise either.
Marco:
It is really good.
Marco:
Well, I would love, I don't know how realistic or legal this would be, or even if it's a good idea, but I would love if the vehicle is in off-road mode if it didn't make the sound.
Marco:
I think that's kind of reasonable, but I don't know.
Marco:
That's just a random thought.
John:
Oh, you run over people in the woods, too.
John:
Like, yeah, I'm sure there's some compliance reason why they can't do that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
You can find whatever fuse it is or some secret code that you enter into the infotainment system that turns off the external sound, making you a yellow killing machine.