Downstairs Downstairs
Marco:
it has been so long since we recorded so since we last recorded i have gotten the new macbook air already did an entire three-hour podcast about it with john gruber the talk show 352 i dfu restored my 14 inch macbook pro which i think has fixed most of its problems and i went to two fish concerts oh
John:
We went to two fish concerts?
John:
Why are we going to two?
Casey:
Yeah, we got a poll on that thread in a second.
Casey:
But since we're doing our quick updates.
Casey:
Meanwhile, I went to Cape Charles for a week and Michaela got her second shot.
Casey:
So the List family is as vaccinated as we can possibly be right now.
Casey:
And I'm very excited about that.
John:
All right.
Casey:
John, what have you been doing?
John:
I've been on Long Island just hanging out at the beach.
John:
I'm back now.
John:
My most exciting upcoming news.
John:
Oh, I did get my M2 MacBook Air.
John:
Well, it's not mine.
John:
I am doing a MacBook Air for my son.
John:
He's got that up on his desk and is using it as if nothing has changed from his M1 MacBook Air.
John:
So that's fine.
John:
But my exciting news is that my television, in theory, is arriving on Monday.
Casey:
Did you prepare the way?
John:
The way is not yet prepared.
John:
I just got back from vacation literally today.
John:
Oh, goodness.
John:
I really haven't.
John:
I've just barely started unpacking stuff and plugging things back in.
John:
Oh, I had an ominous email for my Synology while I was gone, too.
John:
Saying what?
John:
Tell me if you ever got this one.
John:
Let me see.
John:
Synology detected an abnormal power failure that occurred on Drive 2 and Volume 1.
John:
Oh, that doesn't sound good.
John:
Are there normal power failures?
John:
What is an abnormal power failure that occurred on Drive?
John:
How can a power failure occur on a Drive?
John:
Anyway, I didn't do anything to it yet.
John:
I went downstairs and looked at it, and all the lights are on, and all the lights are angry.
John:
It says to for more information, go to storage manager storage and check the suggestions under the corresponding volume.
John:
The suggestion probably is, hey, don't use hard drives for eight years.
Marco:
I mean, that's a pretty good suggestion.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But anyway, I haven't looked into my synology yet, but I'm tomorrow.
John:
In theory, I will begin preparing the way for the television.
John:
That's got to be a big job.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So I was going to ask, like, we don't have to go into the nitty gritty, but would you mind giving just like the briefest overview of what you expect preparing the way to look like?
John:
So I have to rip everything out that's under my television stand thing now.
John:
So I've got a receiver.
John:
I've got a bunch of game consoles.
John:
I've got a TiVo.
John:
I've got a PlayStation 3.
John:
Let's see.
John:
Apple TV.
John:
There's a lot of crap back there.
John:
And, of course, all the plugs and surge strips and all the other stuff that it plugs into.
John:
That's all got to come out because some of those game consoles either can't connect to my television or won't be connecting to my television.
John:
um the playstation 3 is just going into cold storage because i have a dedicated blu-ray player and that's the only thing i was using that thing for um and then i have to get my plasma television off of the stand leaving the stand empty and then i have to repopulate the stand by sticking in my new receiver putting in the game consoles that i'm going to continue to keep slash use as decorative items some of the game consoles i'm
John:
going to become decorative items i know i could buy an adapter to like you know uh connect things i'm not sure what i'm gonna do i have the component video cable for my uh you know gamecube and uh wii and the wii u is hdmi so i could get adapters for those things but it's not probably not worth it so i'll probably leave some of them in there as space fillers and decorations but really the main task is putting the new receiver in and connecting the umpteen speaker wires to it and
John:
swapping an all new fancy 4k high frame rate blah blah blah whatever HDMI cables for the old ones which don't support any of the new fancy stuff and in theory fingers crossed I have all the things that I need
John:
I have the cables.
John:
I have the receiver.
John:
I have the Blu-ray player that had a little minor surgery, as we talked about in a past episode.
John:
So the preparing the way, if it all goes well, when the television arrives, there will be a television stand with all new equipment in it with no television on top of it.
John:
And they will just drop off the television and hopefully leave my house.
John:
And then I have to connect the third-party stand to my television.
John:
And we'll see how that goes.
John:
You'll hear about it in the next episode, I'm sure.
Casey:
So how is your MacBook Air to pop the stack a little bit?
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So I did a much longer review on the talk show, but my gist of it here is it feels strikingly good.
Marco:
Like when you pick it up or move it or open it up to use it or close it, it feels really good.
Marco:
It is really fast and it sounds like crap.
Marco:
what do you mean it sounds like the speakers are garbage but oh everything yeah the speak when you compare to the macbook pro 14 most of the differences where the macbook pro is like is an upgrade when you're using them you know side by side or when you switch between them you don't really notice them like you the differences aren't that noticeable in like you know the screen quality um the you know promotion like i don't notice when promotion is not there really um
Marco:
I do very much notice the speaker difference.
Marco:
It is extremely obvious every time the computer plays any kind of sound.
Marco:
The MacBook Air speakers are pretty rough when you are used to the MacBook Pro speakers.
Marco:
They're good in absolute terms compared to other small, inexpensive laptops, but compared to the 14-inch MacBook Pro, it's no contest.
Marco:
The speakers in the MacBook Pro are both much, much louder and much better sound quality in general.
Marco:
The MacBook Air speakers sound like small, tinny speakers, but...
Marco:
Everything else in its comparable category and like, you know, the PC market and stuff, you know, it compares very well to those.
Marco:
But compared to the 14 inch, it's no contest.
Marco:
However, the way it feels, oh my God, it feels so thin and light when you compare it to the 14 inch.
Marco:
And the difference on paper doesn't seem like it would be that much, but it matters a lot.
Marco:
It is extremely noticeable and it just feels fantastic when you have to pick it up or hold it or whatever.
Marco:
It's fantastic.
Marco:
That's awesome.
Marco:
So very, very happy with it.
Marco:
I'm already finding lots of various uses for now having three computers.
Marco:
I love it.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
And if you are at all on the fence on whether you might want a MacBook Air, go for it.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
I did get Silver.
Marco:
I think it is the...
Marco:
generally the best color that's available i think right now um it is the most boring color well i wouldn't say space gray is the most boring color um but silver is is certainly a close second in that in that regard um it is a boring color but i as i mentioned before i think the um the new super dark blue in pre in practice is very fingerprinty and usually looks just black um and i don't i don't love that um but
Marco:
And the gold, I think, is nice if you don't have any other silver aluminum on your desk.
Marco:
But if you have any other silver aluminum on your desk, it doesn't quite match it, and it looks kind of wrong.
Marco:
So that's up to you whether that's a problem for you or not.
Marco:
But yeah, I love this thing.
Marco:
I think it's great.
Marco:
I did notice they moved the headphone jack back to the wrong side.
Marco:
Oh, did they?
Marco:
Because from the 2016 dark days, we had the headphone jack move to the right.
Marco:
And of course, listeners heard me complain about that forever on this show, because headphones typically that have only one ear cup connecting to the wire, usually that's the left side of the headphone.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
It doesn't make a lot of sense to put the headphone jack on the right because not only does it intrude into your mouse space, if you're a right-handed mouse user, if you have them next to the laptop, but then also it has to then wrap around to the left side of the laptop, either crossing behind it or in front of it to get to the left ear cup of a left-wired headphone.
Marco:
So they moved the headphone jack back over to the left on the new MacBook Pros when they came out last year, but it's for some reason staying on the right for the MacBook Air.
Marco:
So that's, you know...
Marco:
It's not great.
John:
It's the same complaint about all the ports on the MacBook Air.
John:
Like the fact it's got two, you know, the MagSafe and the two Thunderbolt ports or whatever, and they're all on the left side.
John:
And it would be nice if there was one port on one side and one port on the other.
John:
You can see that if they put them on one on one side and one of the other, people would complain that they aren't both on the same side.
John:
So there's no perfect solution there.
John:
I understand that.
John:
Like we're just, you don't see the other side of it.
John:
But yeah, the headphone port being over there,
John:
seems to be the same oh no i know it's not on the left it's on the right it's like it's part of that whole the left is occupied by all the other ports so the right is the place with space uh remaining to put stuff but it's kind of weird because if you look at the motherboard they they did uh the thing they've done for many years now and made the ports modular so if you break a port or something you don't have to replace your entire logic board you just you know they take off that little module and put another one on
John:
But of course, you've got to get all the traces and everything to the place where the thing is.
John:
So yeah, it's kind of a shame that they didn't flip the thing around.
John:
But speaking of audio stuff, did I miss the part where you compared the M2 MacBook Air to the M1 MacBook Air speakers?
Marco:
I would if I still had that computer in my possession, but I do not.
John:
But based on your memory, though, because you're saying, oh, the speaker sounds terrible.
John:
Like I would expect that they would sound worse than the much thicker or much more expensive fancy computer.
John:
But I'm wondering how it sounds.
John:
I mean, I guess I have both of them in my house.
John:
I can check it out.
John:
I just honestly never use those speakers.
John:
My son always has his AirPods in or some other headphones in.
John:
But I'll check.
John:
I have both machines.
John:
Let's see if we can check back in next week if I remember.
Marco:
yeah i don't want to assign homework because i'm not allowed to um however i would love to know that information from you but i'm guessing it's it's probably you know i'm sure it compares well to its its own predecessor and previous macbook errors but yeah it's in general this thing i mean they're going to sell an absolute ton of these things and i think for the first time well i guess no the m1 you should say the same thing with the m1 but
Marco:
There's no longer a cheap but bad option in the Apple laptop lineup that you shouldn't buy.
Marco:
There's the 13-inch MacBook Pro that you shouldn't buy, but that's not that cheap.
Marco:
Whether you get the M1 MacBook Air, which is still being sold now, or whether you get this, they're both amazing computers.
Marco:
They've done such a great job with this, and
Marco:
Man, the laptop lineup is in such a great place right now.
Marco:
Again, with the exception of that stupid 13-inch, which... It's not a... It isn't a bad computer.
Marco:
There are just much better computers right next to it in the lineup.
Marco:
But with that sole weird spot, you really can't make a bad decision in this lineup.
Marco:
It's just... It's great.
Marco:
All of them are great, and...
Marco:
You get to kind of just pick what size and features and price you want, and it's a great place to be.
Marco:
And it's especially heartening after we had so many kind of dark years there in the middle, and those times are now very, very well behind us, and it's a great place to be right now.
John:
Well, I mean, the one bad decision you can make is if you get the base model of the MacBook Air or MacBook Pro M2, because the base models have slow SSDs with a single chip, and...
John:
It's probably not that big a deal, but you should probably get a bigger SSD anyway.
John:
So that's the bad decision you can make.
John:
Don't get ones with 256 gigs of storage for multiple reasons, but in particular on this round of things because it is slower.
Marco:
I mean, it is, but again, I don't think that's a thing, really, that's going to matter to almost anybody.
Marco:
Really, what you will feel is running out of space.
Marco:
So the real reason you shouldn't get 256 is that it's just not enough space for comfortable use.
Marco:
Get 512.
Marco:
And if you can't afford 512, either wait until you can or get the M1 MacBook Air, which is still for sale with that having 512.
John:
I mean, the M1 MacBook Air is the problem here.
John:
Let's say you have an M1 MacBook Air and you want to get an M2 because one is more than two, or two is more than one maybe.
John:
And you want to do that upgrade.
John:
Well, if you get that upgrade and you make the mistake of getting the base model, it could be that some things that you do are actually slower on your fancy new computer.
John:
And that's a bummer.
John:
So, you know, it doesn't matter for the general public.
John:
But if you're going M1 MacBook Air to M2 MacBook Air, continue to be aware.
John:
Do not buy the base model.
John:
It's too little storage and the storage is slow and they may affect your performance if you do anything that is somewhat governed by the SSD speed.
John:
Yeah.
Yeah.
Casey:
So going back up the stack, down the stack, whatever, across the stack, you went to two, not one, but two, count them, two Phish concerts over the last couple of weeks.
Casey:
Were both of these in Jones Beach?
Marco:
You're forgetting.
Marco:
I also DFU restored my 14-inch.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, that's right.
Marco:
I forgot about that.
Marco:
quite an experience so so so for those of you who don't know the details of all this stuff so um you at some point you might have had to do this to an iphone or an ipad so there's this process called dfu exchange for device firmware update and this is one of the things where if the os on your iphone or ipad gets really hosed like to the point where like it's it's just there's a major problem it it can't you know boot up and get updates or whatever or where a more common reason you might have seen this is if you ever want to downgrade from a beta back to the previous os release
Marco:
the way you have to do this is you have to put the phone in in this special dfu mode which basically involves like you hold down the power button for a long time and then the screen turns black and it shows up you have to like connect it to a mac and it shows up in like the you know itunes kind of interface and it says like this device is in you know firmware restore mode and you have to like tell it to restore an update like and the computer controls the whole thing
Marco:
Well, the way that you can restore M1 and M2-based Macs, they basically have that exact same process available on them.
Marco:
Now, this isn't the only way you need to restore them, but the issues I was having with my 14-inch were so weird and seemed like it might be some kind of possibly firmware-level problems that I was having with some component of it, maybe.
Marco:
I decided, let me restore this in the most, to use a foreshadowism, the most blow-away way that I possibly can.
Marco:
so i looked up you know how to do this and the process is hilarious because it basically comes down to like you know you turn it off connect it to another computer like to another mac with a usb cable and then like you turn it on holding down these keys and holding the power button for a certain amount of time and you do the sequence with holding down buttons for a long time and then your laptop
Marco:
pops up as a DFU mode thing in the other computer you connected it to.
Marco:
So it's like a giant iPhone that you're restoring.
Marco:
The process is very, very similar, and it actually worked surprisingly easily and well.
Marco:
And so far, I've only had it this way for about a week, but it seems like my problems may have been solved.
Marco:
Now, I was having...
Marco:
two recent major problems one was uh that i would plug it in sometimes and sometimes it wouldn't accept a charge from either magsafe or usbc until i shut it down and restarted it that was a fairly recent thing that seems to have been a software problem introduced in mac os 12.4 that seems to be fixed in mac os 12.5 which came out recently
Marco:
So I've heard from a lot of people who had this issue.
Marco:
If you had this issue where it, where your computer, you know, your, your recent MacBook pro wouldn't accept a charge until you started to shut it down, update to 12.5.
Marco:
And that seems to be fixing this problem for everybody.
Marco:
So good luck with that.
Marco:
Um, it has fixed it for me so far, but again, it's only been a week.
Marco:
And then my other problem was it would kind of not receive FaceTime calls and other weird stuff until it would restart it.
Marco:
And it would work for a little while and then it would stop receiving stuff again.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
So far, that has been fixed as well since I did the DFU blow away thing.
Marco:
So we'll see if that continues.
Marco:
But so far, so good on that.
Marco:
So that's it.
Marco:
It's restored.
Marco:
It's done.
Marco:
And the restore process, by the way, what I did was I just created a whole time machine back up to a USB drive.
Marco:
did the whole restore, had it restored from the time machine backup.
Marco:
So I didn't have to reinstall anything.
Marco:
It brought over all the passwords and everything.
Marco:
I didn't have to reset up anything.
Marco:
Everything transferred properly with that time machine round trip situation.
Marco:
And so far it's fixed.
Marco:
So I'm very happy about that so far.
John:
Speaking of weird iPhone things that you do with your computer, when I got the M2 MacBook Air, I was setting it up and I was using Migration Assistant.
John:
I think we talked about this before, how great that program is and how it transfers everything, how you can change transport method while it's running.
John:
And I did that.
John:
Like, I mean, I connected the two things together with a Thunderbolt cable that I'm pretty sure was a Thunderbolt 3 cable because I think it came with like a Thunderbolt 3 peripheral that I bought or whatever.
John:
And I plugged it in, and I saw the M2 change its connection, and it said this connection has been sampled to transfer whatever umpteen gigabits per second that it lists for Thunderbolt, and I was, great, that's going to work great.
John:
And then the donor machine, the M1 MacBook Air, was saying, like,
John:
preparing documents and something or other.
John:
Right.
John:
And it sat on that preparing step for a really long time.
John:
And I'm like, I'll give it a while.
John:
So I gave it like two hours, came back.
John:
It was still in that preparing step.
John:
I'm like, okay, this can't possibly be right.
John:
I'm going from an M1 MacBook Air to an M2 MacBook Air.
John:
They're both pretty fast.
John:
Uh, they don't have much stuff on them.
John:
This should progress.
John:
Uh,
John:
And I noticed that the M1 had a disagreement with the M2 about how they were connected.
John:
The M2 said we're connected by a Thunderbolt.
John:
The M1 said we're connected by Ethernet.
John:
There was no Ethernet involved.
John:
There's no Ethernet involved anywhere in this thing.
John:
And so eventually I just had to give up and cancel and say, no, stop.
John:
That was a little bit tricky because once you cancel, the M2 MacBook Air wants to continue through the setup process.
John:
I'm like, do you want to transfer anything?
John:
No, I canceled the migration.
John:
It's like, okay, well, let's keep setting this up.
John:
I'm like, no, no, I don't want to set up.
John:
eventually i found some way to go backwards instead of forwards because they just kept bouncing me forwards to uh you know make a user account do all this stuff like no no i don't want to do any of that i think i just restarted or whatever anyway second time it worked but just fyi if you're ever because i googled this while i was waiting if you're ever doing a migration and it seems like it's stuck on like some kind of step you know there's no progress bar and it's like preparing to do something for hours and hours
John:
it's it's tough for me to say oh it's probably not going to progress you just kind of have to know like are there 17 million files in this and preparing should take three hours and i have to wait it out is it like casey's synology where what was it like resilvering the drive or like migrating the content took some obscene amount of time because that's just how long it's going to take you have to kind of know in your gut like it back in the envelope like is this a reasonable amount of time for the job that it's doing because
John:
because you don't want to be like, well, I waited two hours, and if it hasn't progressed in two hours, I need to just, you know, cut it off and pull the plug.
John:
That might not be true.
John:
You'll never successfully do the thing if the thing is going to take actually eight hours to get through the preparing step.
John:
But this felt like it shouldn't take two hours to do the preparing step, so I did a second try.
John:
And lo and behold, on the second try, everything went way fast.
John:
The preparing step was over in mere minutes, and it transferred all the data, and everything worked fine, so...
John:
Word to the wise there.
John:
And also, it is possible to opt out of a migration, to cancel a migration job, and not continue with the setup.
John:
Like, what I didn't want to happen was, oh, continue with the setup and make a user account.
John:
And this is stupid and probably means nothing and probably has no effect on migration systems, but not behind the scenes.
John:
I'm like, oh, but I really want my son's account to be UID501 or whatever, like the first number that it picks.
John:
You know what I mean?
Ha ha ha!
John:
Because it's his laptop.
John:
And if I make a new user account, like a temporary one, and then when Migration Assistant runs, it's going to pick 502.
John:
And that's just not the way it should be.
Casey:
Like an animal.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
John:
Anyway, it is possible to just not create any user accounts and redo the whole thing.
John:
If I didn't, I might have to DFU update.
John:
I think the only time I ever did, I don't know if it was called DFU update, it was like...
John:
Maybe it was one of my T2-based Macs or maybe it was a work Mac or whatever.
John:
I use Apple Configurator 2.
John:
Is that the program you use to do the thing?
John:
Yes.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I love how it's called Apple Configurator 2.
John:
I don't know what happened to Apple Configurator 1 and why 2 was always in the name.
John:
But anyway, I did that to a T2 Mac and they... It was Discovery D?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And they were... It's not in parentheses.
John:
And the T2 Macs were enough like the modern ARM Macs that this was the process.
John:
I've never had to do it to an ARM Mac and hopefully I never will, but...
John:
Fingers crossed there.
John:
I have, I have been updating Ventura on my little external drive here and the Ventura betas supposedly do update the like bridge OS version.
John:
So technically when I boot into my old safe Monterey, I'm using the new version of bridge OS, but so far it hasn't hosed.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I haven't, I know I haven't learned my lesson last.
John:
Remember last time when I hosed myself by updating, uh,
John:
I do it for the show.
John:
I get the latest Ventura beta and get in there and see what's going on.
John:
We appreciate your sacrifice.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Are we finally at fish time?
Casey:
Because I am curious how you ended up seeing two concerts in the span of just a week.
Marco:
All right, so Fish, even though no one likes them except me, they somehow are able to sell out arenas and stuff really easily.
John:
It's the same 3,000 people, you know.
John:
I mean, you've gone to two concerts.
John:
Now you're seeing how it works.
John:
Hmm, if I go to every concert, I become one of the 3,000.
Marco:
Anyway, so they were playing here at a local theater, Jones Beach, in the Long Island region.
Marco:
I don't think it's actually on Long Island because it's on, I think it's on Cap Tree Island or Jones Beach Island.
Marco:
Anyway, it's not on Long Island for whatever it's worth.
Marco:
It's a different island.
Marco:
But anyway, they were playing two nights in a row there.
Marco:
And when Fish plays in, when they play multiple nights in one location, they don't repeat songs between those two nights.
Marco:
Like the two shows will be 100% different from each other in like what songs they play.
Marco:
Not to mention the fact that they're a jam band, so even if they would play the same song, it would be pretty different both times.
Marco:
But ignoring that fact, they always play different stuff on different nights in the same place.
Marco:
And I'd gone to two shows previously, one last year and one 10 years ago.
Marco:
And in both of those shows, they were decent, but I didn't get a lot of my favorites played.
Marco:
And I thought, well, here I'm going to be going to, you know, because each of those that I went to before, those were each three-night runs that I was going to, like, the middle night of.
Marco:
Well, this time I was going to two nights in a row of a two-night run.
Marco:
So I figured my odds of hearing my favorite songs, or at least some of them, are way higher if I do that.
Marco:
So let's do it.
Marco:
What the heck?
Marco:
You know, let me see what it's like.
Marco:
I've never been to two concerts in a row, like, you know, two days right in a row.
Marco:
Never done that.
Marco:
never been to jones beach at all anyway and i heard it was a great venue tiff went there when she was younger and she loved it and everyone else said it's a great venue so it is a great venue i thought let's do it what the heck it wasn't that expensive and you know when i was arranging logistics because there's there's a question of like how do you get from fire island to jones yes i asked you this in slack and you ignored me i guess for this very moment
Marco:
it looks like you could just kind of take a boat and just zip over um but and and theoretically one could do that and in fact i asked the water taxi company hey can we just get a boat like all the way there and the answer is yes we could except there's apparently a five mile an hour speed limit most of the way and it would take like three hours oh cool so not not an option anybody would actually want to do
Marco:
um and you can't drive there because a you would have to drive over a part of fire island which you can't really do and b you really can't do it in the summertime so uh even people with driving permits cannot drive on the island in the summer because it's there's too many people everywhere so anyway uh the way you get to jones beach from fire island is you have to take the ferry from fire island back to long island that's you know a half hour on the boat then you
Marco:
Have somebody, you or a car service, somebody, drive you from there to the concert venue.
Marco:
Then, eventually, drive back from the concert venue, back to the fare terminal.
Marco:
But, oops, it's too late because you get back at, like, you know, 1230 at night and there's no more ferries.
Marco:
Then you have to take a water taxi back to Fire Island.
Ha ha ha.
Marco:
so that's how you get there and anyway so i did you know when i was scheduling all that stuff i just scheduled it to do two nights in a row like hey can you can you do this like tuesday and wednesday night please at the exact same time yes okay good so it was great it was and i was very pleased my the the two shows i saw
Marco:
I think were very good shows, and I'm still in the process of listening back and kind of judging them with some distance compared to my previous shows, but I think they were my favorite shows that I've been to by a pretty big margin.
Marco:
They were great performances.
Marco:
This is a great tour.
Marco:
This is a great part of the tour, and my plan of seeing both nights of a two-night run did pay off.
Marco:
I did hear a lot of my favorite songs, and especially many that I hadn't heard in the previous two shows that I went to.
Marco:
It was a great success.
Marco:
I'm now getting more accustomed to it.
Marco:
I was very impressed by Jones Beach as a venue.
Marco:
I got the expensive old man seats, but in this case, they were actually very good because they were very central.
Marco:
You had these little boxes you could just walk out of and walk down this open aisle to this limited bathroom area.
Marco:
It was very convenient for what old people actually want, which is like
Marco:
I want a good amount of space around me, and I want to be able to get in and out quickly, and I need easy access to a bathroom.
Marco:
So it was great for all those things.
Marco:
So I was very, very happy about that.
John:
Now you know why Billy Joel takes a helicopter.
Marco:
To the bathroom?
John:
No.
John:
To get to and from his Long Island home to Madison Square Garden.
John:
You read that article?
John:
He flies out to Madison Square Garden for his concert.
John:
It's a helicopter.
John:
He sings his song, makes whatever million dollars, and goes back on the helicopter to his house.
John:
none of that surprises me i hadn't heard that but i'm not surprised because you can imagine like if you're out there and you know you're a long island beach house and you want to get to madison square garden and back for one night oh forget it yeah geographically you look like oh that doesn't seem that bad but like logistics wise even if you have someone driving you and you know a fancy car or whatever it's just a nightmare but the helicopters real quick so how long did it take just ballpark to get there and then later to get home
Marco:
If I include the time on the water and then walking back to my house from the boat, let me see.
Casey:
Like door to door.
Marco:
Yeah, like 30 there, 40-ish there.
Marco:
Yeah, about an hour and a half each way.
Casey:
I mean, that's not a short evening, but it's not a completely egregious trip.
Marco:
No, it really wasn't that bad.
Casey:
Um, if you'll allow me, who did you go with?
Marco:
I went with two different groups of people because I don't know anybody in my friend groups here who liked them enough to go to two nights in a row.
Casey:
So can I just, can I just tell you for the record?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I do not think I would, I would actively enjoy a fish concert, but if we lived closer, I would absolutely go to one with you and maybe I would enjoy it.
Casey:
Maybe I wouldn't, but I would go to one for sure.
Casey:
I mean, come on, you know, you got to try it.
Casey:
But anyway, so who, who did you go with anyone that we would know?
Marco:
yeah so night one I went with some local guy friends and I even I told him like look don't listen to fish beforehand because you know they were both like familiar with them and in a concept but they hadn't been to a concert I'm like look don't listen beforehand so I'm like I know what's gonna happen you're gonna listen you're gonna realize you hate them and you're gonna cancel
Marco:
don't just don't listen beforehand and but fortunately like they they both liked it you know i don't know if they liked it they certainly i don't think would have gone for two nights in a row but sure they both liked it and then the second night tiff joined me with another friend as well so tiff even volunteered to come with me for one of the nights and had a good time
Casey:
See, that's what I'm saying.
Casey:
I bet, you know, it's like, as an example, I really don't care for baseball.
Casey:
It's just not my thing.
Casey:
I'm not saying it's bad.
Casey:
It's just not my thing.
Casey:
But going to an actual baseball game is an entirely different experience that is quite delightful.
Casey:
I would never seek out fish or a fish concert, but I bet you I'd have a great time at a fish concert because why, how can you not?
Casey:
It's live music.
Casey:
It's hard to have a bad time at live music.
Casey:
And I am very pleased that Tiff seems to have had an okay time.
Marco:
Yeah, and I feel the exact same way.
Marco:
I'm not a sports person, as you all know.
Marco:
However, and I would never choose to watch sports on TV or follow what's going on in sports on the internet or anything.
Marco:
However, if my friends are going to a sports game and they invite me to go with them,
Marco:
and the logistics can work i will say yes because i actually like live events sometimes and it can be and it's a totally different experience when you are there live like in the sports circle cheering on with all the other people about the sports teams like that's all great and it's it's a big you know group energy experience and you pay attention you get into eat the crappy food for the thousand dollars like it's the whole experience and
Marco:
I get the appeal of that, even if it's an activity or a band or whatever that I wouldn't normally get that into or follow outside of that experience.
Marco:
So, yeah.
Marco:
So, you know, most people don't listen to Phish as much as I do when they're like, you know, just working throughout their day.
Marco:
But if you bring most people to a Phish concert and you provide them with enough chemicals to make their brain happy, they will usually enjoy it.
Marco:
And there's a whole lot of people who listen like, you know, some of my friends are like, you know, I'll be playing fish and they'll be like, yeah, I would like this if I was high right now, but not now.
Marco:
And like, OK, I understand that if that's you know, that's you don't have to like them as much as I do in order to enjoy them in that kind of context.
Marco:
But, you know, I happen to like them so much that I want to listen to it all the time.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And so since Tiff volunteered to go to a fish show with you, quid pro quo, Clarice, what are you going to do now?
Marco:
I hope it doesn't come up.
Marco:
I offered to go to the Her Dave Matthews show with her earlier this summer.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, but she was smart and said no.
Marco:
Well, yeah, fortunately, there were enough other people in that group that my company was not required.
Marco:
But I would look, I would do it.
Marco:
And you know what?
Marco:
I don't like Dave Matthews, but again, I would probably be fine at the concert.
Marco:
I can't guarantee that I would love it, but I would at least enjoy myself at a concert.
Casey:
Yeah, and that's how I feel about Phish.
Casey:
Like, I don't know if I would go leave the event saying, holy crap, that was the night of my life.
Casey:
But it is okay to go somewhere, experience something and say, that was fun.
Casey:
Maybe not something I want to do every day, but that was fun.
Marco:
You probably wouldn't buy the poster.
Marco:
We are brought to you this week by businesscards.io.
Marco:
This is a digital business card you keep in your Apple wallet.
Marco:
You can simply show your card to someone and they can access your digital business card with all your information and also send you back their information if they want to.
Marco:
So businesscards.io supports your content information, social media profile links, embedded video, custom links, and all of this is right there in your Apple wallet and even your Apple watch wallet.
Marco:
And so the advantages of this are obvious.
Marco:
So first of all, you can't forget your business cards at home.
Marco:
So even if you're at an event somewhere, you don't have to worry.
Marco:
Did I forget my cards?
Marco:
You always have your card with you.
Marco:
And suppose maybe you don't have any cards made yet and you're at an event and all of a sudden somebody wants your info.
Marco:
You can go to businesscards.io and in five minutes you can have an account set up and make brand new cards right there all from the event you're at.
Marco:
You can be sharing your card with people in five minutes.
Marco:
And suppose your phone number or your email changes.
Marco:
You don't need to throw away all your old cards and get new ones printed.
Marco:
Just update it on the site.
Marco:
It's really easy.
Marco:
And of course, because this is all digital, you have other advantages too.
Marco:
You have statistics and access stats.
Marco:
So you can see, you know, with traditional cards, you have no visibility into what people do with them.
Marco:
With digital business cards from businesscards.io, you can get access to stats on each of your cards from the dashboard.
Marco:
So you know if someone actually uses your card.
Marco:
And then unlike traditional printed business cards, when you show your digital business card to someone, they can send you back their info if they want.
Marco:
And all those contacts that you gather are available in your dashboard at businesscards.io.
Marco:
And you can quickly do things like export them to your CRM of choice.
Marco:
There's lots of different integration possibilities there.
Marco:
So visit businesscards.io and sign up for a trial today and save 15% on your subscription price with the coupon code ATP.
Marco:
Once again, that's businesscards.io and save 15% on your subscription price with coupon code ATP.
Marco:
Thank you so much to businesscards.io for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Oh, my word.
Casey:
Well, we have had an eventful couple of weeks for nothing going on in the world.
Casey:
So we actually don't have all that much follow up this week, which is extremely surprising me.
Casey:
We could have recordings that are like two days apart, you know, because of odd scheduling conflicts or whatever, and have a mountain of follow up.
Casey:
We've had two weeks and we have almost no follow up.
Casey:
But let's let's power through.
John:
Everyone's on vacation.
John:
That's fine.
Casey:
Yeah, we're always on vacation in California.
Casey:
But anyways, Fletcher O'Connor's custom domain email.
Casey:
This was an Australian fellow that wanted to do some sort of custom domain for his email, and we were trying to figure out what can you do about that.
Casey:
And Mark Voss writes that the .au domain is now available for registration, and that namespace is not well polluted yet.
Casey:
Brendan Reagan writes, there's also .id.au.
Casey:
However, there are some rules there.
Casey:
To use that, you must A, match a person's legal name, first name, or family name.
Casey:
B, have an acronym or abbreviation of the person's legal name, first name or family name.
Casey:
Or C, be a nickname of the person.
Casey:
This seems kind of flimsy to me.
Casey:
This seems super flimsy, but that's the rules.
Marco:
A nickname, that could be a lot of things.
Casey:
Yeah, but here we are.
Casey:
And a lot of people wrote in and said, and I'm making up the specifics here, but, oh, I am, you know, kclist.email or whatever.
Casey:
And apparently a lot of those weird top-level domains, like .email, for example, they can cause real big validation problems with forms, like online forms that aren't the best or aren't the most modern at doing validation.
Casey:
So using .email, I'm not even sure if that's a thing, I presume it is, using .email or an equivalent
Casey:
can be not so great because you might end up having to have a different alias that's at .com or something in order to just pass through form validation.
John:
Yeah, that's one of the worst problems you can run into because at that moment, you want to sign up for the thing.
John:
You want to create an account on the system or whatever.
John:
And it says, please enter a valid email address.
John:
Assuming it's not trivial client-side validation, or let's say you're not a web developer, assuming you can't get around it, what do you do then?
John:
You either have to have another address, like Casey said, what's the point of having your own domain if you have to have this second email address anyway?
John:
That's a mess.
John:
Or you're in the position where you're trying to contact the website somehow, get to a human to say, hey, I'm trying to sign up for an account on your website and it tells me my email address is not value, but I assure you it is.
John:
I'm emailing you from it right now.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Good luck with that.
John:
Yeah, that's a super advanced level of corporate bureaucracy penetration.
John:
Trying to get to a human who is going to answer that question, there's no good website for that.
John:
If you're trying to do google.com, some Google property, forget it.
John:
You're never going to get a human.
John:
And if you're trying to do some dinky little website that was made, you know, seven years ago by a teenager who has since moved on, you're not going to get through that.
John:
Like, there's no situation where I can imagine that going smoothly.
John:
And then you're just like, well, I can't create an account of this thing.
John:
And it just makes you feel so bad about your, you know, your fancy custom domain that you were so happy about.
John:
Two seconds, I'm going to have one address and it's going to be a domain that I own and I'm going to unify on and I'm going to own my identity and I can't use it.
John:
Even if you can't use it on just two places, it really sucks.
John:
So please...
John:
people fix your phone i mean i don't know why i'm even saying this we're still how many decades into the web we're still in a situation where they say oh you know enter your phone number here don't enter hyphens we can't handle that it's like just remove the hyphens oh my god that's still a thing and every time i see that i'm like really 2022 please enter digits only really absolutely boggles my mind i mean people who aren't programmers maybe you think that's just normal or whatever but there there never was a reason for that and there continues to not be a reason for it and yet it still exists
Marco:
By the way, have you noticed – I keep noticing this.
Marco:
I've occasionally recently signed up for some new website or whatever using the sign-in with Apple option where it can hide your email address, where it sets up a forwarding alias and then it forwards to your real address.
Marco:
I think I've done this three times in the last few months.
Marco:
And in all cases, all three times –
Marco:
right after the signup form the website has kicked me to a secondary form where it's like all right what's your email address oh really and it won't let me proceed until i give it an actual email address that's not the relay one it's like well then what the heck did i just do that for like what's the point of all this stuff now i now they have two of my email addresses and i lose the and now i have to figure out like how do i ever log in here again like it's just i leave it up to the web to ruin everything
John:
Yeah, speaking of ruining everything and web authentication and accounts, it's one of the things that struck me about the various passkey demos that Apple did at WWDC, right?
John:
Because they're showing the cool passkey things to replace them for passwords or whatever.
John:
And I think in all the demos that I've ever seen, they have like a sample, a toy app just to show what the authentication flow looks like.
John:
Since you don't have to pick a password, there is no account creation screen where they say enter your password and then confirm to enter the password.
John:
That doesn't exist anymore.
John:
But there is still a place, at least in this demo application, where it says enter, and they have on the demo, enter a username.
John:
And as we've discussed on past shows, no one should ever be prompted to enter a username.
John:
A username as in something that's not an email address, or maybe it is an email address.
John:
It's, you know, that situation where it's like your username could be an email address, but it might not be, or it has to be an email address.
John:
But anyway, in the bad old days, they made you pick usernames since you'd have to be like, you know, JSmith1234.
John:
You'd have to remember that you were JSmith1234.
John:
But if you forgot your username...
John:
the forgot password flow they also had a forgot username flow where you put your email address it's like just use the email address as the username and almost everybody got on that page but still occasionally you have to pick a username so anyway in the pasky thing the demo they show they keep showing enter a username and the people would enter like a username as like their first name space last name it reminds me of the original apple id system where your apple id could be capital j john capital s smith with a space between them that could be your apple id oh yeah yeah
John:
My original Apple ID was not an email address.
John:
It wasn't, you know, my first and last name, but it wasn't an email address.
John:
It was just a string.
John:
It was a username.
John:
And eventually Apple forced everyone to change the email address.
John:
So, you know, even if we get to the mythical future of passkeys where no one has to remember passwords anymore and authentication is great, we still have the problem of, okay, but who are you, right?
John:
Should I enter my email address?
John:
What if I want to hide my email address?
John:
That all still exists.
John:
And the thing that Marco was encountering is like, oh, so you're signing with Apple and hiding your email address.
John:
Well, we can detect that you're doing that and we don't like it.
John:
We want your real email address.
John:
So please enter that here.
John:
People can do whatever they want on their websites.
John:
Their authentication flow can support whatever features they want it to support.
John:
And if they say, hey, you can't get through the flow without giving us a real email address and we can auto detect ones that look like they're the fake Apple ones, then that's what they'll do.
John:
So I do kind of fear that
John:
Even if we defeat passwords, the username monster is still out there waiting to eat us all.
Casey:
Well, for what it's worth, you know, I will bring up Fastmail one more time.
Casey:
They didn't sponsor this episode, but hey, I would love some free Fastmail.
John:
You should put your referral link in the show notes, Casey.
Casey:
I should put my referral link in the show notes.
John:
I feel like I should have a referral link for someday when I go off Gmail.
Casey:
But anyways, they do a similar like masked email thing.
Casey:
And I will admit it's not as straightforward as the way it works with Apple where you just say, yes, I would like a masked email right now, please.
Casey:
But it's pretty straightforward to do it on their website.
Casey:
And that ends up giving you just like two random words and I think a numeral that you use as an email address, but it's at your domain.
Casey:
So it's like two random words with a couple numbers at caseylist.com, and that's a lot less obvious, I suspect, to a vendor or whatever, to a website, than the Apple alias that basically everyone is sharing, or the same Apple alias format that everyone is sharing.
Casey:
So as an example, like one of them on mine is like fuzzy.koala1234, basically, you know, or something like that.
John:
But then you can never remember what that is if you ever have to go through the forgot password flow, right?
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
But first of all, I have all this in one password.
Casey:
And second of all, they have a, not a dashboard, but they have a page on, you know, in settings where you can look at all of them and it tells you whether or not they're active, when the last message was, you know, three months ago, two months ago, yesterday, et cetera.
Casey:
And then you can go in and edit it and so on.
Casey:
So it really, really is pretty slick.
Casey:
So I will put my referral code in the show notes, but it's www.caseless.com slash fastmail.
Casey:
Just for you.
Casey:
Just to make it nice and easy.
John:
Make that URL shorter if you get off the triple W dot.
Casey:
Oh, would you stop?
Casey:
I don't want to hear it, Dad.
Casey:
Leave me alone.
Casey:
Speaking of the 90s.
Casey:
Oh, you stop it.
Casey:
I'm an old man.
Casey:
What do you expect from me?
Casey:
Anyway, moving right along.
Casey:
Chris Church writes with regard to BMW subscriptions.
Casey:
If you paid 400... Well, this is pounds, which... That's fake money, right?
Casey:
That's not real, is it?
Casey:
That's weight.
Casey:
Anyway...
Casey:
If you paid $400 for heated seats at time of purchase, you would not need to pay a subscription to use them.
Casey:
BMW said this on the BBC, quote, where heated seats or any feature available in the connected drive store have been purchased when a customer vehicle is ordered, no subsequent subscription or payment is necessary, quote.
Casey:
The subscription model enables customers to try these features later as opposed to paying up front.
Casey:
This means that the hardware to facilitate these features will be built into all models, which makes sense from a manufacturing perspective as it makes for fewer hardware configurations.
John:
i still really want to hate all of this but it does make a little bit of sense only for features that they can build in like eating the cost like again they're not going to build in the v8 when you pay for the v6 and you unlock the two cylinders so that doesn't make any monetary sense apparently seed heaters are cheap enough to include that it doesn't really add an impact but for example leather scene yeah
John:
Leather seats is not something like they put cloth over it, and if you pay extra, you can rip the cloth off underneath this leather.
John:
There's a narrow window of features that can work like that.
John:
I'm still not quite sure how it works in terms of reselling, and
John:
not having to pay for it up front makes it feel a little bit better, but then I almost feel like, okay, well, if you want me to unlock it later, can't I just do the same thing as I would have done when I purchased it as opposed to paying $12 a month forever so my steering wheel can be warm?
John:
I mean, maybe, you know, again, due to the math, but I just feel like even if the math works out that it is actually less expensive to do that than to pay $400 for the heating steering wheel, it just feels worse to pay $12 a month for a heated steering wheel, which is separate from the $18 a month for a heated butt.
Casey:
But the other nice thing about this is, so I buy presumably a white BMW and I decide I want to sell it to one of you knuckleheads.
Casey:
Well, that would never happen for many reasons, one of which being it being white.
Casey:
But nevertheless, in this fantasy world...
Casey:
Can you imagine selling a car to John?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
John:
I don't need any more oil stains in my driveway.
John:
Thanks.
Casey:
No BMWs here.
Casey:
Too soon.
Casey:
Actually, I don't think that ever leaked oil.
Casey:
That might be the only thing it didn't do.
John:
That's not true.
John:
Your BMW is leaking oil right now.
John:
There is no BMW that doesn't leak oil.
John:
It's one thing you learn from YouTube and car rebuilding channels.
John:
BMWs leak oil.
John:
It is impossible for BMWs not to leak oil.
Casey:
I don't know if it leaked.
Casey:
They definitely spent oil.
John:
I mean, maybe when it's brand new, it's not going to leak.
John:
But eventually, BMWs will get oil leaks.
John:
They leak oil from everywhere.
John:
I mean, doesn't everything leak eventually on an infinite timescale?
Marco:
I hope I don't.
John:
No, but I think in the useful lifetime of a car, it's not a given that all the seals that are supposed to keep oil in will die and need to be replaced on a frequent basis like they do with BMWs.
John:
There's a reason they have a reputation.
John:
I don't know what it is.
John:
I don't know why their gaskets don't work as well as other people's or whatever, but...
John:
There we go.
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
If I sold my hypothetical white BMW to anyone, it doesn't have to be, it doesn't matter who it is.
Casey:
But let's pretend I'm selling it to Marco because of the two of you, he's my only hope.
Casey:
I sell my BMW to Marco and because apparently I live in a place that doesn't have winter, supposedly, even though that's not true, I didn't option heated seats or heated steering wheel.
Casey:
But Marco, living in a place that indisputably has winter, he would like those things.
Casey:
Well, what's nice about the setup is he can go and pay either a one-time fee or a monthly fee or whatever and get the heated seats and heated wheel that I never bothered paying for.
Casey:
So there is something to be said for this.
Casey:
I think there is a way you can look at this that it's not absolutely disgusting, but it sure feels a little gross.
Casey:
It was originally presented to us.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where, like, some nerd somewhere made a good argument for this on nerdy principles in the company.
Casey:
Just like what we're talking about now.
Marco:
Here are some reasons that kind of academically seem justifiable.
Marco:
But at no point did anybody with any kind of, like, you know, read-the-room kind of sensibilities get this idea passed then before it went out.
Marco:
Because, you know, this...
Marco:
Yes, there are some cases where you can say, well, that actually would be useful.
Marco:
But that is so far outnumbered by the negativity or outweighed, I guess, by the negativity of this getting out in the world in the first place.
Marco:
And what we talked about last time of like...
Marco:
It's not a very luxurious experience that would be on brand with a luxury car company to feel like you're being nickel and dimed for something that you don't have to be.
Marco:
Now, that being said, you know, if the option exists to pay the 400 bucks up front and not be nickel and dimed over, you know, indefinite time span, that is better.
Marco:
But this is still, I think it's just this is a PR fumble that they is whatever they're gaining in utility or revenue is not worth the cost of the PR.
John:
I do wonder also, I don't know the details of this.
John:
I'm sure we'll find out.
John:
But like if you, if you pay up front the $400 for the heated seats and then you sell the car to someone, do the heated seats come with it?
John:
Or does that person then need to begin a new subscription as if the heated seats weren't already in the car because that heated seat was tied to your purchase and your identifier.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like the other thing about this is this, like I said, there's a narrow range of features that this works for.
John:
Cause if they're going to build it into the car anyway and just enable later, uh,
John:
you can do that with stuff that's basically software right um and things that are cheap enough that you can include them and it's not too expensive but that's it there's tons of like almost all the options the opportunity don't fall into that category they're the type of thing that someone needs to pay for and they're not just going to give you for free and it's not possible to unlock them better brakes better wheels you know the leather interior the wood trim right uh even things like that you know the nicer headlights like those are hardware things and
John:
i know tesla's done it where they've you know given you the bigger battery because they couldn't get the smaller ones in stock and they software locked out the battery you remember when they were doing that with the threes yeah but that's not a common thing that's that's a like temporary operational shortage kind of thing you know that's not something that's that's a feature right but it but it made people cranky about it because it's like well i know you you know i didn't pay for the you know 100 uh kilowatt whatever what is what is what are the batteries measured it doesn't matter
John:
yeah anyway i didn't pay for the 100 gigawatt yeah i paid for the 60 uh but i know you had to put 100 in because you didn't have any 60s but like whatever you know in some ways like okay but now i'm getting worse uh worse mileage now i'm getting uh less distance on a charge because i'm hauling around this big battery that i can't use all of but it doesn't feel good this is a story with some person who got the the hundred look this up it's really annoying what is the unit kilowatt hour i believe
Casey:
They had the 100 unit, or excuse me, they had a car with a 60 unit battery.
Casey:
And because of Tesla, it got replaced with a 100 unit battery.
Casey:
And at the time, I guess Tesla did not lock them out.
John:
Yeah, there was a mistake on Tesla's part.
John:
They didn't do the lockout.
John:
It's kilowatt hour.
John:
They got the 100 and it wasn't locked out, right?
John:
And so like, oh, well, you know, whatever.
John:
A bank makes a mistake in your favor.
John:
Collect $200.
John:
And then this person drove the car like this for some substantial period of time.
John:
And then Tesla realized this mistake and said, oh, never mind.
John:
And then they software updated it back down to 60.
John:
And that just doesn't.
Marco:
Oh, that's a terrible move.
John:
Right.
John:
So this is an example of like brand management.
John:
manage if you want to manage the brand to make people feel good to have a tesla if you make this mistake as tesla oh yeah we forgot the software lock it out just eat it just let that person have the 100 kilowatt hour battery for the rest of the life of their car like it's your mistake but just eat it because the ill will even just from that one customer the ill will that customer is going to feel let alone like
John:
When the person puts their story on the web and people talk about it on podcasts or whatever, it's not worth it.
John:
You already lost the money on that battery.
John:
You already put a bigger battery in there.
John:
That bigger battery costs you more money and you had to put it in there because you didn't have any smaller ones.
John:
Just eat it.
John:
I don't understand why these companies don't.
John:
It's not as a policy.
John:
It's the same thing with when you hear stories at the Apple store.
John:
A good Apple store and a good person in charge of whoever makes decisions on Apple knows when to just eat it, right?
John:
To just make the customer happy and just eat it.
John:
It's not policy.
John:
It's not tell all your friends you can come in and get this cool thing done.
John:
Tesla will replace your battery and forget the software cap it.
John:
You're not changing your policy, but on a one-off basis, know when to just say, our bad, let's make it right for you.
John:
This is not a new policy.
John:
We're making an exception in your case.
John:
The person will be happy and you haven't bankrupted the company by causing a flood of people to come in and, you know, try to get the batteries replaced.
Marco:
Do you remember when Amazon displayed to the world that they had a remote delete capability for Kindle books and which book they deleted?
Casey:
No, I don't remember this at all.
Marco:
this was amazing.
Marco:
So there was, this was 1994, right?
John:
Yes.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
In 2009, Amazon, there was a copyright issue with, with the copy of 1984 that they had and they remote deleted it from Kindles.
Marco:
Oh my gosh.
Marco:
Like of all books, that one.
Marco:
That's why you should always DRM crack all your eBooks.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
Instabug gives you the visibility you need to build top-quality apps.
Marco:
You can observe and fix issues like UI hangs, slow app launches and screen loads, network failures, and anything else that may be affecting your user experience.
Marco:
You can get a quick read on their impact on your users and access all of the granular data relevant to the issue in seconds, so you can prioritize, assign, and debug before your next update is released.
Marco:
It only takes a minute to integrate Instabug's SDK into your app, and it fits right into your workflow with integration for things like Jira, Slack, Trello, GitHub, Zendesk, and many more.
Marco:
You can stop flying blind on your mobile app issues and try Instabug today.
Marco:
Go to instabug.com and get the visibility you need to start delivering superior app performance and better user experience.
Marco:
That's instabug.com.
Marco:
Thanks to Instabug for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Moving right along very, very quickly.
Casey:
I spoke about last week the Mophie 3-in-1 charger thing that I was planning to bring on vacation, which I did.
Casey:
It worked well.
Casey:
And I lamented the fact that it's $150 for each of them.
Casey:
Steve Stutz wrote that you can actually get these from Zag, which is in contrast to what Apple says on their website, which it says only at Apple.
Casey:
But anyway, you can get it from Zag.
Casey:
And if you're willing to sign up for their email newsletter, then you can save a whole bunch of money and get like a coupon code or whatever for a whole bunch of percentage off.
Casey:
So if you're looking to get something specifically, this three in one thing, I will put a link in the notes.
Casey:
You might want to check that out.
Casey:
Moving right along.
Casey:
Vern Johnson writes in your most recent episode, you talked about EU regulations mandating USB-C for all phones and covered it well.
Casey:
Thanks.
Casey:
What I haven't heard anybody online discuss is how this will keep Apple from selling fewer expensive previous year models of phones in Europe once the requirement goes into effect.
Casey:
It seems that this might adversely affect consumers by giving them only the choice of the newest phones that include USB-C.
Casey:
Your thoughts?
Casey:
I thought that was a very interesting point.
Casey:
I still don't see a way in which this is definitely going to be the case.
Casey:
I just don't see Apple...
Casey:
being coerced into putting usbc and iphones now they may say oh we have decided now that the iphone will be usbc and mean it but i don't i just i really don't see them not fighting this or including like a stupid uh adapter thing like they did years ago for i think micro usb like i don't know do you see this happening
John:
I mean, this is flying in the face of the real Tim Cook doctrine, which is keep selling the same product.
John:
So as long as we can.
John:
But I think I mean, I don't know the details of the law here, but it's plausible that it won't apply to them because they're not new models.
John:
Right.
John:
So the thing will be like all new models introduced after such and such a date.
John:
But that's a good point.
John:
It's an interesting thought experiment that, you know, changes in regulation.
John:
uh that especially with that to do with hardware could be written in such a way that it thwarts uh you know apple's ability to do what it loves to do which is make a product and then just continue to sell it and move it down market down market down market until becomes the cheapest on the sell sell the same thing manufacture the same thing for years and years uh it makes sense from a bean counter perspective because you've got really good at building whatever it is the iphone you know i was gonna say the iphone 6 but that's that's a little bit too old but right
John:
the iphone 11 or you know uh the 10r or whatever you really get the manufacturing process down you got the parts available the quality is really good and you can just keep making that same phone until it just becomes an unviable product and during all those years you know you're you know it's pure profit because you've already uh you know recouped the cost of all the tooling and all the other stuff right um
John:
But if they ever did require some change that had to be across the entire line, that would really mess up their strategy.
John:
It would be the old Steve Jobs strategy.
John:
What he'd love to do is say, we have a new idea, and it's whatever it is.
John:
It's that our laptops are made of aluminum.
John:
And now, starting today, the only laptops we'll sell are aluminum.
John:
And those plastic ones, forget it.
John:
We're not going to continue to sell those for the last three years.
John:
You're never going to see them again.
John:
We erased them from our website.
John:
We pulled them off our store shelves.
John:
It's all aluminum.
John:
Uh, that is not the way Tim Cook operates, but I think the EU thing won't affect Apple in that way.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And you also have to figure like, you know, if Apple really sees this as something that is inevitably coming down, uh, in the future, they probably have some idea of a timescale of when they might really a hundred percent have to commit to it.
Marco:
And so, you know, if the iPhone, let's see, what are we on 14 now?
Marco:
If the iPhone 15 next year, uh,
Marco:
comes out, and that's the one with USB-C, they might be thinking, like, alright, well, we'll start USB-C next year, and we won't really have to do it for a few years, so that'll give us enough time for it to filter through the lineup.
Marco:
They also might be thinking, you know, if something happened where the old model of phone couldn't fill its role as being the cheaper one for a little while...
Marco:
That's already happened once before.
Marco:
That happened with the iPhone 5.
Marco:
And the reason why the iPhone 5C came to be, or at least one reason the iPhone 5C came to be, is that the iPhone 5, when it was the new model, it had that dark gray color that was almost black.
Marco:
And remember, it chipped along all the edges, and it really did not age well.
Marco:
So what we heard from a bunch of different rumor sources was that one of the reasons the 5C existed is that that finish on the iPhone 5 turned out to be so expensive and not durable enough that they couldn't use that really effectively to beat the cheap phone in subsequent years.
Marco:
So one of the reasons they made the 5C was because their flagship phone of year X really wasn't going to be a good cheap phone in year X plus 1 and X plus 2.
Marco:
So they just designed a new phone that had, you know, cheaper specs, and that was it.
Marco:
So if they really had to do something like that today, they could.
Marco:
You know, worst case scenario, if there's a mandate, they have to move everything over to USB-C in a couple of years.
Marco:
Well...
Marco:
the iPhone 15, whatever that comes out with USB-C will have a certain case design that will accommodate that port.
Marco:
And they can always just make a cheaper version of that case design with cheaper guts and sell that as the new, you know, cheaper model.
Marco:
So there are different ways around this.
Marco:
They probably won't need to do any of those things.
Marco:
They probably can just wait it out and just wait till USB-C filters throughout the line and it'll kind of just solve itself.
Marco:
But they certainly have options if they need them.
John:
Yeah, I don't think they've forgotten how to make new products.
John:
They just tend not to do it unless they really have to.
John:
Although the story you're saying about the... Was that the one with the chamfered edge?
John:
Yeah, it was the first one with the chamfered edge.
John:
Or as Johnny, I would say, what did he say?
John:
Chamfered instead of chamfered?
John:
Anyway, it reminds me of one of the...
John:
I don't remember which one.
John:
One of the Johnny Ive, like, love from Apple divorce articles or whatever.
John:
Or maybe it was the Trip Knuckle book.
John:
Anyway, there was a bit where someone was telling a story about it being in a design studio and someone was presenting a design and someone in the meeting brought up
John:
uh how expensive it would be to manufacture the design that was being shown and they got chastised and got evil looks from the design group because it was basically like under under the johnny ivor's name that's just not something you did was like during the design process you didn't bring up uh unseemly things like how much it's going to cost a manufacturer how difficult it would be to to do it with precision and quality control and that's how you end up with why not a thing
John:
Yeah, and that's how you end up with a phone, which has like that chamfered edge that Johnny really loved.
John:
And you talked about it so much in that presentation.
John:
And it turns out to be one of those type of, I don't know the details, but apparently if this, you know, like one of those manufacturing details that even after you've been making the phone for a year, it's still expensive and hard to do.
John:
Like it doesn't, you know, it's not like it was one of those things where you, oh, we get the hang of it.
John:
We get the machine set up right.
John:
And then it's just, you know, we bang them out after that, right?
John:
um or like no matter how we manufactured it's just not durable whatever the problem may be but like the when i read that i was like the idea that you'd be in a design meeting and someone would bring up something unseemly like money and they would get you know dirty looks like i understand there could be like a brainstorming part where it's like there's no bad ideas let's just talk this through whatever but i feel like when you say design you have to include all the factors and you know two of those big factors are manufacturability and cost and
John:
I'm not saying they should drive everything.
John:
I'm not saying those should be dominant.
John:
Otherwise, you just end up making a bunch of ugly plastic crap.
John:
And I would not include the iPhone 5C in that because the iPhone 5C was an amazing phone on the outside anyway.
John:
The insides were kind of crappy.
John:
But that's the challenge of design.
John:
If you say, okay, well, I'm going to make an amazing thing, but I don't want anyone to talk to me about money or manufacturability, you're not a designer.
John:
And I'm not saying Johnny Ive does that.
John:
He does care about manufacturability and how things will be put together or whatever.
John:
But
John:
You know, if that story is to be believed, the idea that the design group didn't want to hear about money in any stage of the design process, I feel that's kind of ridiculous because, you know, so we're going to put diamonds along all the outside and someone brings up money and say, shh, we're in the brainstorming phase.
Casey:
No one talks about it.
John:
There's no bad ideas here.
John:
I'm like, no, diamonds around the outside is a bad idea.
John:
you need to include that i mean that in theory that's they have so much expertise like that's why that person is in the room the manufacturing expert who says uh you know here's uh why that would be expensive to make and the other thing about that with all these stories from the you know the the innovations that apple's done in manufacturing is very often that person will be in the room and say you can't do that it's too expensive right and then the job of apple as a business is to say okay let's find a way to
John:
to make it economically feasible to do unibody, you know, aluminum, you know, CNC machined cases.
John:
I know it's too expensive now.
John:
What would it take to make that not expensive?
John:
Let's now solve that problem.
John:
Let's put millions of dollars into a company that builds these tools.
John:
Like, can we get on the other side of this after a decade of making these things or whatever, where we become experts at it, where it is, you know, we can do it in a way that doesn't break the bank.
John:
And also we get the design things that, you know, that's why it has to be part of the conversation.
John:
And you have to listen to that person when they tell you it's too expensive to do.
John:
You have to say, OK, now here's another problem we have to solve.
John:
And apparently with the chamfered edge, they didn't do that.
John:
They said, we're just going to do it anyway.
John:
And it turned out it was either more expensive or not as durable or both.
John:
And then they had to retreat from it.
John:
That's that's not a win in my book.
Casey:
Soluble Apps writes, you asked whether the order of addresses and contacts matters.
Casey:
It definitely does when you send email to a group in mail, as the first address is always chosen.
Casey:
I had to add a feature to my app to change the first address.
John:
That's bad.
John:
I mentioned before, like, going through contacts and deleting all the emails and then re-adding them in the right order.
John:
Like, you can't reorder them, but apparently the first one is important.
John:
Ugh.
John:
this is really bad.
John:
Like maybe this is not Apple's fault.
John:
Maybe it has to do with whatever that a V card spec is, doesn't include this, but just, I don't know how you get into like the V card spec version two, let alone version three or four or whatever the heck number we're on and not think about the fact that you support multiple email addresses, but don't support any kind of prioritization or ordering or sort of stealth do, but I don't like it.
John:
I hope I know, I know we're talking about features being at the contacts.
John:
It's not a, you know, exciting feature, but yeah,
John:
I would like that sometime in the next decade or so.
John:
Now that we've got shared photo libraries, this is going to be my new thing.
Casey:
Prioritize multiple elements in context.
Casey:
Then Sharif Hassabo writes, the preferred target when you message someone is actually based on how the message thread was created.
Casey:
If the thread was originally sent to the iCloud address, it will suggest that first.
John:
This is not a happy solution.
John:
I heard from a couple of people who said, yeah, I had the same problem.
John:
And my solution was I deleted the thread with the person.
John:
So if you go to messages and you see your spouse, their face, and the thread that you have ongoing with them, if this is to be believed, if that thread was started by you sending a message to your spouse's phone number, forever, when you type your spouse's name in an autocomplete, it will autocomplete to their phone number.
John:
And so you can fix that by just deleting the thread.
John:
But I don't want to delete a literally years long thread with like my son to just to delete, lose all those messages, delete entirely and start a new one with his Apple ID.
John:
But apparently that is the only solution that people have told me that they tried and actually worked.
John:
So Apple, get on that.
Marco:
I've been with them for, I think, about a decade now, and
Marco:
It's just a great thing to be a Linux customer because you have everything at your fingertips you might need from a hosting company from the basic server compute instances to things like specialty needs, GPU plans, high memory plans, and other services now.
Marco:
They have things like block storage as a service.
Marco:
They recently launched a managed database service.
Marco:
So this is fully managed databases for MySQL, Postgres, and Mongo.
Marco:
Redis is coming later this year, and they have everything you would expect from managed database services.
Marco:
You have simple, fast deployment, redundancy, secure access, backups.
Marco:
It's everything you would want from a managed database.
Marco:
They have all that at Linode now with their managed database service.
Marco:
And it's just great.
Marco:
You know, at Linode, you have great support if you need it.
Marco:
And it's all an incredible value.
Marco:
This is their key.
Marco:
You know, value is not something that is that fun to talk about.
Marco:
I'm telling you, Linode has the best value in the business.
Marco:
And that's why I went with them in the first place.
Marco:
And that's one of the biggest reasons why I've stuck with them all this time, because I don't know how they offer what they offer and why no one else does.
Marco:
But the fact is, they're the best value in the business.
Marco:
And they have been the entire time I've been with them.
Marco:
So Linode makes cloud computing fast, simple, and affordable.
Marco:
So you can focus on your projects, not your infrastructure.
Marco:
Go to linode.com slash ATP, create a free account there, and you get $100 in credit.
Marco:
Once again, linode.com slash ATP.
Marco:
New accounts get $100 in credit.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all my stuff and for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, that's it for follow-up.
Casey:
And since not all that much is going on these days, we thought we'd clear the decks with some Ask ATP.
Casey:
Abel DeMose writes, I've had a jobby job as an iOS developer for a while now and recently started thinking about creating my own app on the side.
Casey:
I frequently listen to podcasts and use Reddit and Twitter.
Casey:
As such, the types of apps that seem most interesting for me to build are Twitter clients, podcast players, and Reddit clients.
Casey:
However, it seems like it's next to impossible to compete with the likes of Tweetbot, Overcast, and Apollo.
Casey:
These apps have been in production for years.
Casey:
As such, they have numerous complex competitive features that would take new developers several years to build.
Casey:
By the time said features are built into the new apps, the existing apps will have gained even more new features.
Casey:
Assuming that the new apps can even catch up to their competitors in terms of features, then they need to be marketed differently before seeing any downloads.
Casey:
Is it too late to have a successful indie app as a new entrant to a market with well-established indie apps?
Casey:
And should iOS developers instead focus on advancing their careers in their jobby job?
Casey:
I actually went back and forth with Abel on this a little bit.
Casey:
And I pointed out, I don't remember, I want to say it's Aviary, which is a new-ish Twitter client.
Casey:
And I believe there was a new version that just came out in the last week or two.
Casey:
I have not personally used it, but it seems fairly impressive from what little I've seen of it.
Casey:
And that's just come out in the last year or two.
Casey:
And so that is an example of something where you could make something brand new or have a different approach to something old.
Casey:
And it might work, but I do understand the general gist of what is being said here.
Casey:
I mean, Marco, when you wrote Overcast, there were plenty of podcast players in the world, and yet somehow you made it work.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, certainly, you know, there are different times and there are different times when it's easier or harder to get into these markets.
Marco:
However, it's worth remembering that Apollo was not the first Reddit app, not the first big Reddit app.
Marco:
Tweetbot was not the first big Twitter client, and Overcast was not the first podcast app.
Marco:
And there were many apps in these categories before each of these three examples were present.
Marco:
And whatever you use might seem dominant to you now, but...
Marco:
I don't know what TweetBot has as market share relative to every Twitter user.
Marco:
I don't know what Apollo has in terms of market share and relevant to everyone who uses Reddit.
Marco:
But I can tell you that Overcast market share among everyone who listens to podcasts is something like 1.5%.
Marco:
So that's 98.5% of everyone who listens to podcasts who could be looking for something else.
Marco:
And yes, it's hard to get a lot of this market, and marketing is difficult and expensive now because there's so much competition, but...
Marco:
When I started Overcast, before I wrote a single line of code, I made a notes document, which I think it wasn't even in notes at the time.
Marco:
I think it was in task paper because Apple Notes was not the way we know today.
Marco:
It was the old version that sucked with the marker felt.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
I sketched out other big apps at the time.
Marco:
Apple Podcasts, I believe Downcast, which is what I was using at the time, Pocket Casts.
Marco:
I think that might be it.
Marco:
Oh, and Instacast.
Marco:
Those are the four that I considered the big podcast apps at the time.
Marco:
Well, Instacast doesn't even exist anymore.
Marco:
You know, to tell you how much this market can change and, you know, not that much time.
Marco:
And, you know, the dynamics certainly... Like, you know, right now, if I were making that list today, Apple Podcasts would still be there.
Marco:
But my biggest competitors are not Instacast or Downcast or Pocketcasts.
Marco:
My biggest competitors are Apple, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.
Marco:
So, you know, things change over time.
Marco:
And anyway, so what I did when I made this list was...
Marco:
I wrote down each of these apps, what their advantages were over what I was going to build, what their disadvantages were, and why somebody might choose their app instead of mine, and why somebody might choose my app instead of theirs.
Marco:
And I went through and I took screenshots of all these apps, and I had these folders that had like, you know, here's each of these apps, their list screens, their now playing screens, their, you know, podcast view screens, their directory screens...
Marco:
And I did some basic just market surveying, market research of like, what's out there?
Marco:
And then that helped me figure out, first of all, do I have a chance here?
Marco:
Are there any openings here to do things differently?
Marco:
And can I do that?
Marco:
And how will my app differentiate itself?
Marco:
And how can I market that?
Marco:
Where can I reach people?
Marco:
If you have good answers to those questions, there is still room for new stuff.
Marco:
I think what you have to realize is that everyone wants things a little bit differently.
Marco:
This is why, I mean, look, there's a to-do app that ships with every platform of everything for the last very long time.
Marco:
And yet, to-do apps are a healthy category of products.
Marco:
And the reason why is because everyone is only ever about 75% satisfied with their to-do app.
Marco:
And everybody wants something a little bit different from everybody else.
Marco:
And so there's basically an infinite market for to-do apps.
Marco:
See also weather apps.
Marco:
There are certain categories, note-taking apps, there are certain categories where people just want different things and they have different priorities.
Marco:
And if you can make something that appeals to some people, that's enough to differentiate you.
Marco:
Now, in cases of these specific categories, you know, I'll address Twitter and Reddit first.
Marco:
I would say don't make a Twitter app because Twitter as a company is all over the place with its relationship with developers.
Marco:
And the feature set of what people expect from a Twitter client is just massive.
Marco:
So I would not... I would stay away from that, if I were you.
Marco:
Reddit, you still have a pretty large feature set.
Marco:
I've heard from Christian Seeley, who makes Apollo, on a podcast recently.
Marco:
I forget which one, sorry.
Marco:
But I've heard that Reddit's actually pretty good with its API, and it's pretty good towards developers.
Marco:
So that's something worth looking at, for sure.
Marco:
And podcasting, I think...
Marco:
There's so many different ways people want to listen to and organize and discover their podcasts.
Marco:
And I get feature requests and design complaints all the time that I'm not going to do because it doesn't fit within my vision or it wouldn't work well in my app or whatever.
Marco:
And so there is a lot of room there for doing things a little bit differently.
Marco:
And one of the best examples of that is Castro.
Marco:
If you look at what Castro did, they still are operating.
Marco:
I don't know if they're super active anymore, but they still are operating.
Marco:
And Castro had a totally different take on organization.
Marco:
It was more of this kind of like inbox queue kind of system with this triage mechanism.
Marco:
And that's something that...
Marco:
I still get feature requests every week or so from somebody who used to use Castro is now using Overcast for some reason and wants more of those features to be an Overcast.
Marco:
And some of that kind of fits with what I'm doing.
Marco:
A lot of it doesn't.
Marco:
Some of it I will never do as well as Castro did because you kind of have to specialize your app design to do that really well.
Marco:
So there's all sorts of different ways people might choose to use this.
Marco:
Now, on the technical side...
Marco:
By starting new, you have a number of major advantages.
Marco:
So first of all, you can learn from everyone else's mistakes in the past.
Marco:
There are certain things that other apps have done that their developers probably have talked about somewhere before that weren't worth the time or that ended up being big headaches down the road.
Marco:
So you can learn...
Marco:
Not to do those things.
Marco:
There are certain things that you can just do in much less code than the previous entrants did because the APIs are different now.
Marco:
There are newer, easier APIs to use.
Marco:
And then finally, you have no legacy.
Marco:
You have no existing audience and you have no legacy code base.
Marco:
If I were to start a brand new podcast app today, I wouldn't just rebuild everything that's in Overcast exactly the way I built it the first time.
Marco:
I would do things differently, and I would do fewer things.
Marco:
There are certain features I wouldn't do at all.
Marco:
Such as?
Marco:
streaming i wouldn't do it causes a lot of weird issues in this era of dynamic ad insertion it's even weirder i would not do streaming at all um there are certain certain kind of like you know back-end changes i would definitely do differently um i might not even do sync i wouldn't do a website i wouldn't i would probably not even run servers like there's a lot of things i would do differently
Marco:
There are certain options I wouldn't have.
Marco:
I wouldn't have the dark mode override.
Marco:
That's a massive pain in my rear end.
Marco:
Certain things I just wouldn't do.
Marco:
But if you're starting new, you can do only the easy things.
Marco:
You can cherry pick.
Marco:
You can use AV player and not do all my sound processing stuff.
Marco:
And that saves you a ton of time.
Marco:
You can use Swift UI and Swift as the backend and CloudKit.
Marco:
CloudKit didn't exist when I started.
Marco:
I probably would have based it on CloudKit if it did.
Marco:
There are so many advantages you have by starting new.
Marco:
And because you don't have an existing audience that have been using your app for all this time, nobody will complain about some feature not being there that they just got taken away from them because you're starting fresh.
Marco:
So you can start with iOS 16, you can start with a basic feature set, and you can add from there, and you can differentiate in ways that the other entrants in the market can't or won't do.
Marco:
So for instance, a pretty big part of Overcast is its playlist organization system.
Marco:
And you can have multiple playlists.
Marco:
One of the reasons Castor was able to do what it did with its triage system is that it didn't have that.
Marco:
It had like this one main inbox kind of thing or this one queue thing.
Marco:
And forgive me if I'm getting the details wrong.
Marco:
I never actually really used it myself besides just looking at it for two seconds.
Marco:
But they were able to structure their app in a way that I literally can't do that in overcast without massive structural changes.
Marco:
So there's stuff like that, that you have freedom when you're starting new that existing entrants won't do.
Marco:
Other things, so for instance, I am not in the Reddit community.
Marco:
I don't use Reddit.
Marco:
I don't use TikTok for much, except occasional viewing.
Marco:
I barely use Instagram.
Marco:
If you can integrate with these services in ways that I can't, you have a differentiating factor there.
Marco:
You can do social features that Apple would never do.
Marco:
Or that I would never do.
Marco:
So there's lots of room to address these problems in ways that the other entrants either can't, won't, or at least haven't.
Marco:
And so there's always room for that.
Marco:
There might not be a ton of room.
Marco:
There might not be a ton of money to be made there.
Marco:
But when the markets are this big, even a very small percentage of it, that can be a business.
John:
The difficult part of all this is kind of like...
John:
You know, I want to make an app that's like the apps that I like.
John:
So I listen to podcasts and read it or whatever.
John:
You have to really kind of be honest with yourself about expectations, right?
John:
How many apps have you made?
John:
How complicated an app have you ever made before?
John:
You know.
John:
do you think you can make an app that will be good enough to get any percentage of the market in a very crowded market in a complex problem space?
John:
Not that these are particularly complex, but like, so let's say, you know, pick the Mac where it's easier to pick an example.
John:
I'm going to make a Photoshop competitor.
John:
Boy, that's tough.
John:
I mean, there's a lot of graphic editor apps and there are ones that are less complicated than Photoshop, but even the less complicated ones are pretty complicated.
John:
Image editing is...
John:
Not simple.
John:
And if you do make a simple image editor that's basically like the equivalent of MS Paint, I'm not sure there's a market for that.
John:
Or if there is, it's a different market than Photoshop, right?
John:
So you really just, you know, just because like I love using Photoshop, I love using Pixelmator, like I'm going to make an app like that.
John:
I've never made an app before.
John:
I'm going to try it.
John:
Like, be careful about, you know, I like watching baseball.
John:
Therefore, I'm going to be a major league basketball player.
John:
Right.
John:
Be careful what you choose to build and be honest with what you're, you know, what you can expect to make on your first outing or second outing or whatever.
John:
um because it's not easy like you only hear from the successful people you don't hear for the you hear it from marco and his podcast app you don't hear the 50 people who tried to make podcast apps and did and put them put them on the app store and you can use them to you know subscribe to an rss feed and hit play and make a playlist and no one hears about those apps because they did what they did just fine but they didn't have anything to differentiate them and you know it just ends up being too much to add uh you know all the features that uh they would differentiate them so
John:
Yeah, especially when you're looking at like all these things that interest you, like pick one.
John:
Don't try to make a podcast, Reddit, Twitter client, right?
John:
It's too much in a single application.
John:
Even just doing one of those is very difficult.
John:
And then when you do the market research, like Marco described, like looking at what the competitive landscape is and thinking about what you have to offer there, that should give you an idea of like,
John:
all right if i did this successfully could it work and now let me look at let me look at what i've signed myself up for okay so i'm going to make an app that's like x y and z oh and by the way it has to look nice and be nice and be bug free and have good performance and it's it's tall i don't want to be discouraging but i feel like in some ways it's easier to make uh you know an app for organizing your model train parts than it is to make a twitter client right or a reddit client even
John:
Because how many apps are there that organize model train parts?
John:
Probably not that many.
John:
And if you're super into model trains and you have a really good idea about how you would like to organize your parts,
John:
you have unique insight and you have a market that doesn't have as many competitors.
John:
And even if your app is a little bit janky, it could be one of two or three model train part organizing applications in the entire app store and the other two haven't been updated in five years.
John:
And that gives you a big advantage right out of the gate as opposed to a Twitter client or a Reddit client or a podcast player where there is tons more competition and that competition is active and experienced and the ones that are left alive are probably pretty good.
Marco:
yeah i would say too like you know building on that a little bit you know you said that on the mac that you know a photoshop uh replacement is a pretty complex thing and that's true and even the market for those already has you know you have um acorn you have pixel mater you have um whatever that one is all the designers affinity photo yeah affinity yeah you have very strong entrance already that's a lot of competition and those are very big apps but
Marco:
Two apps that I use, one app that I use all the time is called PaintCode.
Marco:
And PaintCode is in some ways a replacement for Adobe Illustrator, but it's so programmer specific.
Marco:
It's like a programmer's, specifically an Apple programmer's vector drawing app because it can export source code to draw these things.
Marco:
And even when I'm drawing something that doesn't need to be represented in source code,
Marco:
I still will often use paint code because I know it and it's simpler and it fits my view of how these things should work very well.
Marco:
Whereas something like Adobe Illustrator, I never really learned and it's very big and complex and intimidating for me.
Marco:
Another good app is Monodraw.
Marco:
we talked about before is an app that specializes in making ASCII art.
Marco:
It's basically a drawing app on the Mac for making ASCII art.
Marco:
And the author of this app did an incredibly high polished, amazing job for this extremely nerdy specialized app.
Marco:
And there are lots of areas like that where, you know, if you, I mean, we've all had this experience.
Marco:
You are on your phone somewhere.
Marco:
You don't have your computer nearby and you have some need.
Marco:
Oh, I need to put a few images together or, you know, crop something or remove a splotch from the, you know, you have some need that you have to do on your phone and you search the app store and there's 10,000 garbage apps to do it.
Marco:
And that's it.
Marco:
There are so many examples of that that we run into as just iPhone users that every one of those could be, you know what, I could just make a really good version of this in two weeks and just put it up there.
Marco:
And I think there's a lot to be said for the underscore David Smith approach of just start making stuff whenever you see an opening.
Marco:
Just make something and get it to a reasonably usable, sellable level.
Marco:
And just put it up there and throw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks because eventually stuff does start to stick.
Marco:
And there are so many areas where there is underserved or unserved demand that
Marco:
And all that's out there is crap because computer nerds like us weren't paying that much attention to it.
Marco:
We have tons of great podcast apps and Reddit clients and Twitter apps because all of us nerds use those and pay attention to those areas.
Marco:
Meanwhile, look at anyone else's phone in your life and see the apps they use.
Marco:
And you'll find at least some crazy, stupid subscription scam based app that they only have it to like crop an image.
Marco:
And they're paying two bucks a week for it because of some stupid scam.
Marco:
Like there's so much out there that's being badly served or underserved.
Marco:
And so even if you don't get like the high profile, you know, big popular nerd app categories, there's a lot of other stuff out there that you can try for.
Marco:
And a lot of that stuff, you can make an app in two weeks or less and just stick it out there and see if it works before you invest more time into it and just place a bunch of bets on the table and see which ones pay off.
Casey:
All right, moving right along.
Casey:
Russell Burnow writes, I remember hearing you advise people to stick with battle-tested, well-supported languages instead of chasing the newest ones.
Casey:
But you don't follow your own advice.
Casey:
Now that you've felt the pain of switching to Swift and SwiftUI, have you considered trying to learn a battle-tested cross-platform language, or maybe even a middleware instead?
Casey:
If you're committing to learning something brand new anyway, why not take the opportunity to ship on all platforms instead of being limited to just apples, before anyone answers this?
Casey:
Let me give a little more context, because I also exchanged emails with Russell a little bit.
Casey:
Apparently, I save all my good stuff for email instead of bringing it to the show, because I'm a professional.
Marco:
What's your FastMail credit link there, Casey?
Casey:
Seriously.
Casey:
How are you storing all this email and sending it?
Casey:
Exactly right.
Casey:
Caseless.com slash FastMail.
Casey:
But anyways, it turns out that Russell is a developer, but...
Casey:
develops against, I think it's Unity, one of the cross-platform game engines, which is a very, very different scenario than like a React Native or something like that.
Casey:
And so once I discovered that, everything clicked into place because using a cross-platform thing like React Native, I haven't fiddled with it barely at all, but I have heard universally bad things from many, many different people that I trust and respect.
Casey:
And so the reason we don't use something like a React Native is because you're always beholden to the React Native crowd to update and to do the things you want to do and make it better and do it in a timely fashion.
Casey:
And almost universally, when you use something like a React Native, it ends up being pretty obvious pretty quickly that it's not true native and...
Casey:
it's garbage or even if it seems native you can't use the latest and greatest stuff because react native hasn't updated to the you know new apis for iowa 16 or what have you um this is quite a bit different though with something like unity which i mean john jump in when you're ready but unity and what's uh unreal engine is the other one that i'm thinking of
Casey:
um both of those as far as i understand are like best in class there is no really good equivalent uh you know offered by apple or google uh game engines like these are the best of the best and it is in that is in their best interest to be the best of the best everywhere like that is the entire point of these engines and so
Casey:
I don't really think it's a very fair comparison to compare Swift and Swift UI to what it turns out is like a Unity or an Unreal Engine or something like that.
Casey:
Also, for all of Swift's problems, of which there are many and more as time goes on, I still personally like it quite a lot and prefer it to Objective-C.
Casey:
There are ways that Objective-C is better, full stop.
Casey:
I'm not saying that Swift is better than Objective-C, but in a lot of ways, I still prefer it to Objective-C.
Casey:
It feels...
Casey:
It felt better in this regard years ago, but it still feels to me... I don't know if light is the word I'm looking for, but maybe more modern is the best way to describe it.
Casey:
But there's a lot to like about Swift.
Casey:
And Swift UI, when you are within the guardrails, as we've said, both Marco and I particularly have said many times, when you're within the guardrails, it is great.
Casey:
It really honestly is.
Casey:
It's just that those guardrails, as I think I said last week, are humongously tall brick walls, and when you try to get around them, it is painful.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
That's my two cents about all this.
Casey:
Let's start with John this time.
Casey:
John, what are your thoughts here?
John:
And the whole thing about sticking with battle tennis stuff instead of chasing new stuff, I think as Marco talked about on a past show, this is exactly what he's done.
John:
If anything, he's been a little bit late.
John:
A little bit.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
When it comes to app development, we're taking our cues from Apple, the platform owner, right?
John:
And so it was clear that Apple was pushing Swift, but Marco waited many, many years before he jumped on that bandwagon.
John:
And the same thing with Swift UI.
John:
It existed for a while until Apple had to put a slide up and say, look, it's Swift UI.
John:
Just FYI, like,
John:
We will continue to support the other ones.
John:
They're great or whatever, but we're putting all of our efforts behind Swift UI.
John:
That is, you know, not jumping on the new thing in a second, waiting, you know, waiting for it to be, quote unquote, battle tested.
John:
Now, it doesn't mean it's going to be perfect or even fit for all the purposes that you need it for, because the old stuff still exists, but...
John:
Waiting that long is sort of on the trailing edge.
John:
We're not on the bleeding.
John:
If you're going to Swift and Swift UI in 2022, you are not on the bleeding edge.
John:
You are not chasing the newest hotness.
John:
You are merely doing the minimum necessary to keep up with the clear direction of the platform owner.
John:
Now with GameStop and engines,
John:
there's so much more sort of middleware, like we're talking about like React Native or even like RxSwift or stuff like that.
John:
When you're building on top of a platform that builds on top of a platform, there's just much more stuff involved.
John:
But the gaming middleware,
John:
does so much for you it's not just like a thin wrapper around existing apis it is an entire world unto itself and games in particular tend not to have uh much to apple's chagrin very big platform tie-ins like what makes a game a mac game versus a pc game versus a nintendo switch game like games do their own ui they have their own back ends and
John:
There's nothing about them in most cases that reveals anything about the platform that they're on with the exception of maybe integration with like voice chat on the consoles or whatever.
John:
But like Apple wants to use Game Center and to be able to sign in with your Apple ID and to share your scores in iCloud.
John:
And it's like, no, that's that's all Apple specific work that has no purpose.
John:
So if your goal is to sell a game on more than just Apple's platforms, doing stuff the Apple way is
John:
is a big money and time sink.
John:
And that's where, you know, Unity and Unreal Engine come in where you're like, I have to sell this game at as many platforms as I can.
John:
Any moment I spend doing something Apple specific is wasted time because the players don't care about it.
John:
And it doesn't benefit me and any of my other platforms, and it probably has nothing to do with what's going on in Unreal and Unity.
John:
And that said, though, speaking for the previous question about market opportunity or whatever, Unity and Unreal themselves are gaming middleware that replaced older, creakier gaming middleware and surpassed them in ability and scope, right?
John:
And basically any kind of modern game stuff that continues to use C++
John:
It's the cutting edge.
John:
It's what you should be using right now, but everyone hates C++, and it has memory problems, right?
John:
And so who's going to be the next big middleware engine that does game-level performance with a safer language?
John:
I don't know the details of Unreal and Unity.
John:
Maybe they have a Rust thing.
John:
Maybe they have a safe mode in C++.
John:
I don't actually know if they've already done this, but I'm not suggesting that an indie developer take on this task, but some multibillion-dollar corporation, there is a market opportunity to be the first...
John:
you know, game engine to try to compete with Unreal and Unity, but in a more memory-safe way.
John:
Because there's, you know, games by their nature care about performance much more than other kinds of applications.
John:
And so they tend to stick with...
John:
less safe, more problematic technologies, they give them the speed they need at the cost of pain and suffering of the developers who make them.
John:
It's an incredible black art.
John:
If you ever go to GDC and see what does it take to build a modern game?
John:
I'll just pick Destiny, but anything like Call of Duty, any of those type of games...
John:
Under the covers, those things are terrifying.
John:
And the people who can build those engines, there's a small group, as in probably hundreds or thousands of people on the entire planet, who have the brain capacity and skills and experience to build those type of things because they are so weird.
John:
They look nothing under the covers like an iOS app or Photoshop or Microsoft Word.
John:
And they're incredibly complicated and just...
John:
their whole worlds unto themselves that's before you even talk about the things they're running on top of like unreal unity before you even get to all that it's ferociously complicated and very difficult to do and that's why you you have to hire these huge teams and spend millions and millions of dollars to have huge qa departments because you're asking people to do this herculean task with languages where one false move gives you you know memory exception and kills your entire application right
John:
Now you got to do it multiple threads and over the network and on top of multiple platforms.
John:
I know, by the way, it has to be fast, right?
John:
So that's a big ask.
John:
And I feel like there's a market opportunity for a middleware that is more modern than the existing ones, just as they replace whatever, you know,
John:
things came before them like if you had sent this question back in the 80s it was like why are you considering using some kind of middleware thing when you could just be writing the engine yourself writing the engine yourself is battle tested or whatever it's like you know time marches on and eventually people realize that there is a new better way to do things and so i think that's that's what's happening with swift and swift ui it's the clear new and better way according to apple and they own the platform and so you better get on board that bus um
Marco:
yeah it's there's there's a dividing line between i don't want to be too early and i don't want to be the stick in the mud who's using objective c until they turn out the lights yeah and i would say too like there's a lot of context around certain areas of these choices that matters a lot so for instance you know in in the context of this question where like where you know casey discovered through his email but you can get to at caseylist.com slash
Marco:
that this was about a game got the triple w right when you're making when you're making a game that's a very important context that's different from making other kinds of apps because you know the needs and priorities and environments are very different
Marco:
When I've talked about sticking with battle-tested languages and platforms and tools in the past, what I'm usually talking about is the server side of things.
Marco:
And that's a whole different ballgame.
Marco:
And on the server side, what you're usually doing...
Marco:
is fairly boring stuff of moving data around in some kind of scalable, affordable, useful way.
Marco:
And you're doing it on a very stable and pretty unmoving platform of Linux or whatever virtualized thing you're doing.
Marco:
That platform barely changes at all over time.
Marco:
And so if you stick on top of it, other boring battle-tested tools, you're in for probably very easy time and a very stable server situation.
Marco:
The client side where, you know, again, if you're developing for like a PC, that doesn't change that much these days.
Marco:
Apple's platforms do change, though, and not, you know, super aggressively.
Marco:
I mean, Swift is eight years old and in public, at least Swift is eight years old.
Marco:
Swift UI is three years old.
Marco:
These are not, you know, Swift is I would say Swift is not cutting edge anymore.
Marco:
Swift is I mean they keep modifying it because they can't sit still for some reason and they keep adding more and more garbage on top of Swift some of which is useful much of which is not but the language itself the core of Swift is no longer the new hotness it's just what you're supposed to use.
Marco:
Like period.
Marco:
Swift is the correct language to use for Apple platform apps.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
I'm not using Swift on the server because that seems a little fringy and less likely to be super well tested and things like that.
Marco:
But on the client side, Swift is it.
Marco:
That's what you should be using.
Marco:
And any code you write that's not Swift for Apple platforms is technical debt.
Marco:
It's simple as that.
Marco:
And I say this as somebody whose app is mostly Objective-C, but that's the reality.
Marco:
The reality is you should be using Swift.
Marco:
swift ui is again it's three years old there are still a lot of shortcomings to swift ui and frankly there's just bugs and you know some of those get fixed by the by the releases some of them don't and that's just the way it is and swift ui i still do consider somewhat cutting edge
Marco:
And while I'm writing this prototype thing using SwiftUI, I'm not rewriting my whole app in it today.
Marco:
I'm writing this prototype to see how much can I get written in SwiftUI.
Marco:
And my eventual goal is to rewrite the whole UI in SwiftUI.
Marco:
But that's not going to be releasable, at least until I can require iOS 16.
Marco:
And maybe, if I run into problems that are just insurmountable, maybe iOS 17, or later, or never.
Marco:
So right now, SwiftUI, I'm still considering kind of experimental.
Marco:
I'm kind of doing it in parallel with my main codebase.
Marco:
But...
John:
that's that's still an experiment but you know for swift itself is it's like it's like objective c though like every line of ui kit code you write now is also technical debt unless something catastrophic happens with apple stated strategy right it's not that it's bad or it's broken or whatever but you basically know you're writing dead end code right because the apple has signaled swift ui is the future and maybe you have to you have to use ui kick a swift ui just plain can't do it right but you know when you're writing that code i will eventually have to change this probably
Marco:
right and yeah and you know in the very first year of swift ui maybe maybe that's a big risk like in after after one year maybe they would say you know what you know this the strategy is not working out so well see combine um and you know they would just kind of quietly walk away you know that's that happens all the time with with tech companies when they launch new stuff they try they throw something out there some new initiative doesn't work the way they want to or doesn't get enough traction and they walk away from it slowly over time um or abruptly in the
Marco:
uh but you know with swift ui being already three years in and with it's with it getting tons of updates on each of those three years and having lots of steam behind it and lots of people using it and apple putting a lot of um what is it wood behind the arrow is that the metaphor um that doesn't make a lot of sense anyway uh because aren't you supposed to be like wood behind the arrowhead do you feel better about that
Marco:
Maybe, but aren't errors supposed to be really light?
Casey:
Oh, concentrate, concentrate.
Marco:
Anyway, so Apple's putting a lot of effort into SwiftUI and supporting it very well.
Marco:
The community is picking it up, and lots of people are using it just fine.
Marco:
So I think SwiftUI has probably crossed the threshold where its future is pretty safe.
Marco:
I think it clearly has a strong future.
Marco:
It might even be pretty safe to say that it will be where everything is going.
Marco:
It's certainly on the way to that.
Marco:
And I think at this point you can start making that call.
Marco:
And so at this point, it's very important for Apple platform developers to start familiarizing ourselves with SwiftUI.
Marco:
Maybe not jumping 100% into it yet if you're not ready for that.
Marco:
But again, going back to the earlier question from Abel DeMaz about writing a brand new podcast or Twitter app.
Marco:
If you're writing a brand new app from scratch today, you should definitely do it in SwiftUI.
Marco:
No question.
Marco:
Definitely use SwiftUI from scratch.
Marco:
The only reason not to is if you've run into some weird edge case that it doesn't support and you have to like wrap a UIKit control or something.
Marco:
But even that, that should be done very sparingly.
Marco:
So the only question is whether those of us who haven't used SwiftUI yet, who have existing code bases, when and whether we should start adopting it ourselves and starting to replace our UI kit code with SwiftUI.
Marco:
And that's a separate question.
Marco:
There's, again, separate factors that go into that.
Marco:
But it's definitely the correct language to choose when you have that choice today.
Marco:
And sometimes in tech, we have the luxury of picking the safe old thing.
Marco:
Again, on the server side, we have so many great options for safe old boring languages and tools and databases and stuff like that.
Marco:
Tons of great options for that on the server side because the server doesn't change that much over time.
John:
And it's also the platform that nobody owns, though.
John:
Like that's the web is the platform nobody owns, right?
John:
So the reason we can do that on the web, on the server side is there is no like dominant.
John:
Imagine if Microsoft owned the server and it's like, well, Microsoft decided this year that the new extension to IIS, whatever, is how we're going to do web development.
John:
We'd have to be chasing the platform owner, but there is no platform owner on the server side.
John:
It's basically Linux as close as you can get and they're pretty agnostic.
John:
And so you can stick with PHP forever because no one's going to stop you and no one's going to move on and say, oh, every line of PHP you write, that's legacy code because pretty soon PHP is not going to run anymore.
John:
No, what's going to stop it?
John:
As long as people still are using PHP and they keep developing it, it will be supported.
John:
But that's not true of developing an iOS app.
John:
What Apple says is what's going to happen.
Marco:
Yeah, I guess that's true.
Marco:
I mean, it's the same reason why, you know, email doesn't change that much over time because there kind of is no platform owner for email, although Google's getting close.
Marco:
But anyway, there's yeah.
Marco:
So, you know, different conditions, different factors that play into it.
Marco:
But on the client side, you have to follow your your platform vendor when there is one.
Marco:
And you have to follow what Apple's doing on the client side in order to to be competitive.
Marco:
And as for like, you know, why don't I learn some cross platform thing?
Marco:
Again, in the games market, this makes way more sense.
Marco:
In the app market, as Casey was saying earlier, those have so far proven to be pretty painful for people who use them.
Marco:
I have yet to hear anything positive enough about a cross-platform app framework that makes me want to use it.
Marco:
They also seem to change very frequently.
Marco:
People say, oh, well, why don't you learn this new thing?
Marco:
Well, because if I learn Swift UI and Swift, that knowledge is probably going to last me 10 years.
Marco:
Whereas if I learn React Native, is that really going to still be the dominant thing in that market in 10 years?
Marco:
Probably not, if I had to guess.
Marco:
That's very unlikely because stuff like that tends to change much more often in those areas.
Marco:
And then finally, the whole idea of this would be like, then I can capture
Marco:
People on Android.
Marco:
You know what?
Marco:
I don't want people on Android.
Marco:
Like, I really don't.
Marco:
And there's lots... This sounds slightly dismissive.
Marco:
It sounds very dismissive.
Marco:
I mean it only slightly dismissively.
Marco:
Frankly, I don't have a market on Android.
Marco:
There are podcast apps there.
Marco:
They do well.
Marco:
They can have that market.
Marco:
To serve Android, you have to be involved in Android.
Marco:
You have to have Android testing, Android test devices.
Marco:
You have to know how to make stuff good on Android.
Marco:
You have to integrate with Android stuff and Android features that Android people like to use on their Android phones.
Marco:
I'm not in that world at all.
Marco:
So I really can't make a good Android app, and the language is not what's holding me back.
Marco:
It's everything else about the platform that's holding me back.
Marco:
And frankly, a podcast app has a much better market on iOS than on Android anyway.
Marco:
Whatever Android people think their market share is, first of all, those numbers are a little bit, you know, there's a lot of asterisks on those numbers.
Marco:
But second of all, when you look at podcast listeners specifically, iPhones are way more dominant in podcast listeners overall than Android phones.
Marco:
So my market is just not very strong there, even if I knew how to address it, which I very much don't.
Marco:
And the language isn't the problem.
John:
interesting thing about games is it is often the path of least resistance to use you know unity or unreal or whatever even if you decide i'm only ever going to make this an ios app and even if you decide i'm going to make this an ios app and i'm going to do integrations with all the weird apple stuff too i'm going to do all the apples i'm going to support game center i'm going to you know have apple id logins i'm going to integrate with all apple stitches still still even if that's what you decide to do
John:
The game engines do so much for you in terms of like, you know, that is the real platform you're writing on top of.
John:
It's still worthwhile.
John:
And then if you do that, and since games, again, don't have any, you know, usually don't have many ties with the platform, you might think, hmm, let me look at this app sideways.
John:
I could probably get this thing running on a PC or on an Android phone because I did use Unity and
John:
most of this game will work fine anywhere else.
John:
I could just, those platform-specific bits I did for Apple, I could just remove them or replace them with Android equivalents or whatever.
John:
But still, there's plenty of games that we know, games that we know and love that start off on the iPhone and spend, sometimes spend years on the iPhone before they go to any other platform.
John:
Some great games never leave the iPhone.
John:
They just live their entire life on the iPhone and not go anywhere else because they're made by one developer who, you know, there's only so much a single person can do.
John:
To expect a single person to make a complicated iOS game, that's hard enough.
John:
to say also you should support multiple platforms and have this game available on every platform and like you can't ask that much of one person and not everyone wants to start a multi-person company so it is a perfectly valid choice to say i'm just going to make this an ios app and i am just going to you know do do what i want to do on a platform that i'm most comfortable that i'm familiar with and that's all that i can do as an individual developer even as a small team
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Gilherme Ales writes, on episode two of Hypercritical, John said that Time Machine was the best feature ever implemented for the Mac.
Casey:
Eleven years later, do you guys believe that Time Machine has found a worthy opponent?
Casey:
Is it still the best feature of the Mac?
Casey:
I don't even know what I would call the best feature, but John, is it still the best feature?
Marco:
Document proxy icons?
John:
I wish I could remember 11 years ago if this feature existed but now today probably what I would say is iCloud photo library just because it's I mean the bad thing about it is you basically still have to pay money for it but you know whatever you can't server resources aren't free but what do people do with their computing devices with their phones let's face it they take pictures and
John:
I mean, I guess this is kind of similar to Time Machine.
John:
Like they take pictures and before the advent of iCloud Photo Library, it was too easy for people to lose those pictures.
John:
And iCloud Photo Library basically does what it is intended to do and pretty much mostly works.
John:
And it makes it so that you can take pictures with your phone and you won't lose them if you drop your phone into a lake.
John:
And that is super important because pictures are, you know, meaningful and not particularly replaceable.
John:
And in the same way that time machine, the reason I said it was the best feature is because people had computers and they kept putting more and more stuff that is important on their computers.
John:
Computers became a bigger and bigger part of people's lives, especially with the advent of the internet, that the stuff on people's computers had tremendous value and asking people to protect that stuff from
John:
you know using third-party tools or through their own devices was just too much to ask nobody did it right so you had to you had to build it into the operating system and it had to be easy enough that regular people could do it and time machine did that and i feel like iCloud photo library is a more narrow version of that maybe in 10 years time i'll be able to say oh you know iCloud backups for everything because apple does it for phones hey you can back up your whole phone to iCloud right they'll take care of everything you obviously your photos is a separate thing or whatever but like
John:
For Macs, we've still got Time Machine, but there is no iCloud backup for Macs.
John:
Frequent-sponsored backplayers probably wouldn't like that, but honestly, this is a thing that Apple should create.
John:
It's been a third-party opportunity long enough.
John:
We've got Time Machine, which predates most of the cloud stuff, and we've got all of our iOS devices being updated, backed up in iCloud.
John:
iCloud backup for your Mac would be...
John:
probably the new winner maybe that supersedes all previous ones time machine icloud photo library and then eventually icloud backup for mac so there's my you know my top three features two of which exist and one of which hopefully will someday i mean i would say that the photo backup was even better than time machine in the sense that
Marco:
way more people have internet connections and three bucks a month or whatever it is for the you know the basic uh one then who have external drives that they plug their stuff into regularly yeah and and you know the idea time machine made way more sense when computing was more stationary you know when when you had desktops or you would always use your laptop like on one desk and that was it and you'd plug into everything and basically use your laptop like a
Marco:
And I don't think that's true of today's world anymore.
Marco:
And we have the whole multi-device world today.
Marco:
So you can take a photo on any of your Apple devices that have cameras, and they show up on every other Apple device, including the ones that don't have cameras.
Marco:
Like, they...
Marco:
It not only does it back up things from one device, but it merges all your data and keeps everything in sync across all of your devices.
Marco:
And that is such a more modern, useful thing.
Marco:
And it doesn't require people to have expensive hardware that they have to manage and don't forget to eject.
Marco:
So Time Machine was great for its time, but the photo library model of doing things is so much more modern and has so much more broad and accessible utility.
John:
That's what iCloud Drive was supposed to do, by the way.
John:
But iCloud Drive is like, so iCloud Photo Library is so clearly narrowly focused.
John:
It is literally the photos application.
John:
Like it doesn't care about any pictures anywhere else on your disk.
John:
It's just the photos application, right?
John:
And that's fine.
John:
That's where all the photos go.
John:
Your camera takes them, they go there, they're in Photoshop, it makes sense, right?
John:
time machine is everything on your machine and then when they did a cloud version they didn't do cloud version of time machine they didn't do iCloud backup for your mac and so they said oh iCloud drive and documents can save their you know applications save their files into iCloud and also your documents folder and your desktop will be in iCloud or whatever but two things one iCloud drive and that whole thing in my experience is way less reliable than iCloud photos and two that's not your whole mac
John:
you can put things in other places, right?
John:
So still that gap remains.
John:
And so, you know, and again, Time Machine is from an era when the idea that people would have the upload bandwidth to backup their entire Mac across the internet was not a safe assumption.
John:
But now I think we're probably crossed that threshold or at least getting close to it.
John:
So I really hope someday we get, you know, iCloud backup for Mac.
John:
And I, I don't know what they're going to do with like, well, then how do you deal with, uh, you know, documents and desktop in the cloud or in iCloud drive?
John:
How do you deal with that?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Figure it out.
John:
But they've never been, I've never had a lot of confidence in them.
John:
So I hope they, I hope they give it to whatever team did, uh, you know, I, I photo, uh, iCloud photo library.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Mark Voss, who we mentioned earlier, writes, I have an LG 77-inch OLED CX TV.
Casey:
The LG firmware automatically dims scenes that aren't dynamic and relatively static in nature.
Casey:
Despite it still being a moving talking scene, it's more that the camera doesn't pan, it's in a fixed position for a long period of time, etc.
Casey:
This auto-dimming is to protect the TV from burn-in.
Casey:
LG also has an additional option where it detects a fixed logo displayed on screen, such as for sporting events or your HUD on not Halo, Destiny.
Casey:
And to auto-dim that part of the display only, the HDTV test YouTube channel has shown how to disable these two things using the service menu.
Casey:
Note, you have to buy a special remote purely meant for the official LG technicians just to get into the service menu.
Casey:
So just by entering the service menu, you can void your warranty as HDTV logs the fact that the service menu has been entered into, and also what changes were made.
Casey:
So John, if it were you, would you disable these auto-dimming features, given that they do irritate, well, in this case Mark, but I'm assuming they would irritate you too,
Casey:
And Mark says, I do notice the TV auto-dim, or would you leave them enabled for the very reason that they've been implemented?
Casey:
Another way of asking, what is the real likelihood that the TV would get burned in from watching shows and movies with those features disabled?
John:
Well, obviously the answer for me is I would wait until I could buy a television that doesn't auto dim.
John:
Like that was one of the first tests that HDTV test did on the television that I ordered.
John:
They had it next to one of the modern LG ones and they were showing like a movie or something like not some exotic, you know, test footage or whatever, just like real footage.
John:
uh and the other television would auto dim because it's basically like the average brightness level like if you have a scene where they're just like in a room and the brightness doesn't change a lot because like you know they're just showing people talking in a room and one person the other person but the overall average picture brightness stays about the same the tv you auto dim because it doesn't it you know is trying to defend against burn-in by saying it seems like you might be showing a very similar image on the screen for a long period of time and so if this room is like
John:
Bright over here and dark over here.
John:
I don't want to leave this playing for five minutes because then, you know, you might get image retention for the bright area that's up in the corner.
John:
Um,
John:
And the the new television that I got with the quantum dot OLED screen, one of the advantages of quantum dot is you could make the thing brighter.
John:
But instead of making it brighter, what they did was made it less prone to burn in by, you know, turning down the brightness like it's it's trying less hard.
John:
Right.
John:
So the you know, the W RGB OLEDs are as bright as they can possibly be.
John:
without washing out the picture.
John:
And the QD OLEDs, they have enough headroom that they can sort of run them at 70% and still have the same brightness as the other ones.
John:
And they also have a heat sink behind them to dissipate heat better.
John:
And so it doesn't need to auto-dim.
John:
It says, I can run this scene all day and I'm not afraid to burn it, right?
John:
At least that's the theory and that's...
John:
The warranty that's been behind some of the QD OLED screen seems to indicate that the manufacturers think that these screens will be less susceptible to burn it, right?
John:
So my answer to this question is, you know, if you can't, you know, get rid of your fancy new TV and get an even fancier newer one...
John:
is you should use the protection features because they're not there for the hell of it, right?
John:
If these manufacturers could get rid of the features, they would because they know they get dinged for it in reviews.
John:
And they get dinged for it for users, right?
John:
They would not enable these features if they thought they didn't need them.
John:
But you do need them.
John:
So how much do you need them, right?
John:
Well, there's the famous artings.com OLED burn-in test, and they did a multi-year burn-in test.
John:
Their test ended in 2019, so it's not relevant to modern televisions.
John:
Although the C C X or C 10, I don't know how you're supposed to pronounce it, but it is the 10 that came after the C nine.
John:
Um, uh, that is, you know, not that much newer.
John:
I think it's a 2020 or 2021 television.
John:
Um, but yeah, OLED burning is definitely a thing.
John:
And if you want to see it, go to that artings page and look at, look in horror at what can happen to your television.
John:
If you, uh,
John:
watch msnbc or something with a ticker or watch sports right and so you know you may not like that little thing that dims the the logo or that dims your entire screen but the alternative is probably worse um now all that said uh you know you want to live dangerously say guess what i've decided in two years been getting a new tv no matter what so go hop into that service menu disable the feature and then if you get burned in the end of two years oh well you're going to buy a new tv anyway that is also an option but i
John:
It's not like they're, you know, this is how they get you.
John:
They put the auto dimming in and you have to know the secret code to get in.
John:
No, they're trying to protect your television.
John:
So it's like, you know, what kind of content do you watch?
John:
And do you care about burning?
John:
And then you can decide based on that.
John:
But don't think that, you know, that you can enable this feature and not face any consequences.
John:
There will be consequences.
John:
They just may be acceptable consequences.
John:
Just decide that ahead of time.
Casey:
And Brian Lazars writes, has John decided on a backup strategy for a dorm environment?
Casey:
My daughter is heading off to college in the fall.
Casey:
It's not like I can send her to school with a Synology.
Casey:
Why not?
Casey:
And I'm not sure she's going to be diligent about backing up to an external drive.
John:
Yeah, I mean, the strategy for dorms is the same strategy we should be for everyone where possible.
John:
It's just do everything in the cloud, right?
John:
The internet connections are fast enough these days, especially for someone who's in a dorm where you can't have any expectation of having any kind of redundant local storage.
John:
Like, you're just trying to get the kid to not break their laptop or lose it or whatever, right?
John:
Cloud storage for everything.
John:
And from what I've seen from my kids' education, having been forced to use the Google type, been forced, been
John:
been uh allowed to use the google technologies for all their education does everything in the cloud anyway they don't have any concept of saving or my daughter like got this uh screenplay writing application i forget which one it might have been highline or i don't remember but there's some mac native screenplay writing application i had to show her how to save it's just so used to like oh you just go to google docs and you just type and you don't ever have to worry about saving right and you where is it saved oh it's in google docs where is google docs i don't know it's everywhere right it's on my chromebook it's on my mac like you know
John:
cloud saves that is the way it is literally the only way that most young people can keep track of anything is it is just in this place and this place that exists this place is not on my phone this place is not on my ipad this place is not on my chromebook this place is not on my laptop this place is somewhere else it's in the cloud that's where everybody's stuff should be that is the only viable quote-unquote backup strategy for a college environment i feel like
John:
obviously in college you may get into a situation where you have large data files that you're doing in some lab in a class or whatever and then you will have to deal with file storage and you know there's no avoiding it because it can't fit in the cloud but even even then they probably have like a google drive for the for the class that has tons of storage that you can put the stuff in right
John:
Don't try to put a Synology in a dorm room.
John:
Don't even bother with external.
John:
Don't even bother with external time machine drives.
John:
It's just not going to work out.
John:
They're just going to spill a drink on it.
John:
They're going to unplug it when it's mounted.
John:
And it's just, yeah, cloud storage.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Linode, Instabug, and businesscards.io.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, 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, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-
Casey:
I went on vacation last week and I had the strangest HomeKit experience, which is weird because I was on vacation and not at home.
Casey:
So I have to set the stage and I am already regretting bringing this up and you haven't even figured out what I'm going to say.
Marco:
But a while ago... I'm wondering how you had a HomeKit problem when you weren't in your home.
Casey:
Well, yes.
Casey:
So it starts with me deciding that it would be convenient to have one of our Apple TVs in the vacation place with us because we're going to be there for a week and...
Casey:
It would be nice to be able to watch some TV in the evening and not have to hook up a computer or an iPad or anything like that.
Casey:
I have the 1080 Apple TV that I use in the bedroom every great once in a while, very rarely, but it's there.
Casey:
So I can easily unplug that and bring it.
Casey:
And that's what we did.
Casey:
And I noticed, I don't remember exactly when it started during the week that we were gone, but I noticed that I was periodically getting the notification that I get when I leave the house saying, yes, the garage door is indeed closed.
Casey:
So what am I talking about?
Casey:
So I set up an automation in HomeKit that will...
Casey:
by a very convoluted series of steps, will send me a push notification and say, either the garage door's closed, you're good, or oh my God, turn around, the garage door's open.
Casey:
And it does this when the last person leaves the house.
Casey:
So if I leave and Aaron's here, doesn't do anything.
Casey:
If Aaron leaves and I'm here, doesn't do anything.
Casey:
But if both of us leave, even if we don't leave at the same time, it will say, you know, here's the status of the garage door.
Casey:
And I'm getting these notifications while I'm at the beach, a couple hours away from my house.
Casey:
And I'm getting them every great once in a while.
Casey:
And I come to find out or I mostly think that it started happening when I left the beach house.
Casey:
So somehow HomeKit has decided that home is not where the heart is.
Casey:
It is not where my home is.
Casey:
It is instead where the Apple TV that I happen to bring with me is.
Yeah.
John:
I had a similar situation on my vacation because every time I left the house that I was staying at, it would say, oh my God, did you realize you left your AirPods behind?
John:
Oh my God, did you realize you left your iPad behind?
John:
Because I'm leaving a place that is not my home without my devices.
John:
And I was thinking, I wish I did the opposite of what Casey's having.
John:
Casey's saying, why do you think this is my new home?
John:
I was thinking, I wish I could tell...
John:
HomeKit or whatever.
John:
This is not my new home, but for the week, this is my home.
John:
So every time I leave, don't tell me I've left my AirPods behind because it's fine.
Casey:
I could not agree with you more.
Casey:
I had the same thought.
Casey:
But it took me quite a while to figure out what is going on.
Casey:
And I think what happened is...
Casey:
The Apple TV in the bedroom, despite being an older Apple TV, because we have a 4K Apple TV downstairs.
Casey:
And remember, we don't have any HomePods in the house.
Casey:
So the Apple TVs are our HomeKit hubs.
Casey:
I think that the primary HomeKit hub was the bedroom Apple TV that was with us in Cape Charles.
Casey:
And so it suddenly decided that home, again, is not my actual address, but rather wherever that Apple TV is.
Casey:
This was sort of kind of confirmed to me, I think, because when I got back home, you remember that I have, you know, the little dongle that gives me wireless CarPlay.
Casey:
So I'm basically always on CarPlay in my car.
Casey:
And what's cool, one of the cool things about CarPlay is when you approach your house, if you have a garage door set up in HomeKit,
Casey:
on that multi-tiled version of the CarPlay screen, it will pop up a little button that says, oh, your garage door's closed, so you can tap on it, and it'll open the garage door for you.
Casey:
Well, that just stopped appearing.
Casey:
And I thought to myself, I wonder if it's because my home is still in Cape Charles, despite the fact that the Apple TV is back at my actual freaking house.
Yeah.
Casey:
I think my home might be Cape Charles.
Casey:
So what do I do about this?
Casey:
So what I decided to do... Move to the beach full-time?
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
Not all of us have that luxury, Marco.
Casey:
Not all of us have that luxury.
Casey:
So I decided, okay, here's what I'm going to do.
Casey:
I'm going to turn off the HomeKit features or hub or whatever in the Apple TV in the bedroom, which I did.
Casey:
And then it appeared that the Apple TV that has always been in the family room just didn't feel like taking over.
Casey:
So, okay.
Casey:
So I tried disconnecting it from the home and reconnecting it.
Casey:
That didn't seem to work.
Casey:
So what do you think it took to get the downstairs Apple TV to wake up and reconnect to the house appropriately?
Casey:
What is the one way you fix all Apple problems these days?
Marco:
Unplug it and plug it back in?
Casey:
I rebooted it, yeah.
Casey:
So I went to settings and rebooted it.
Casey:
And then it seemed to come back to life.
Casey:
And I'll give you one guess which showed up in CarPlay as soon as I did that.
Casey:
My garage door is back in CarPlay now.
Casey:
So I don't know what I was supposed to do about this.
Casey:
I don't even know if I'm upset about this because I understand, I think, why this happened, but I don't want this to happen.
Casey:
What I want is to be able to bring an Apple TV somewhere else, have it understand that my home is not there.
Casey:
I mean, I do have...
Casey:
A contact card.
Casey:
That is me.
Casey:
I've marked it as me.
Casey:
It has a home address in it.
Casey:
And I got to assume via like, you know, IP geolocation, if nothing else, the Apple TV realized it was no longer at home.
Casey:
Certainly wasn't on the same network as the rest of my darn home kit devices.
Casey:
So it should have, I think, been smart enough to figure out that it was in some sort of satellite mode.
Casey:
And I wish I could have told it.
Casey:
And what I've done is just disabled HomeKit Hub features on it entirely.
Casey:
But I wish there was a way for it to be smart enough to figure out, oh, I should not be a hub right now.
Casey:
And I concur with what John said.
Casey:
I kept getting notifications.
Casey:
Oh, your AirTag that's in your laptop bag.
Casey:
You left it.
Casey:
You left it.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
You left it.
Casey:
And I wish there was a way for me to say...
Casey:
People just for a week, not a year, not a month, just for a few days.
Casey:
Or imagine this.
Casey:
Imagine I had the option to pick when I wanted this thing to end.
Casey:
But for some duration of time, don't alarm me.
Casey:
Don't alert me if I have left the house without my stuff just for a few days.
Casey:
That would be very nice, please.
Casey:
And thank you.
Casey:
Anyway, I bring all this up just because it was such a weird scenario that I never would have expected.
Casey:
And last year, when I think I had all of this notification BS set up, I don't remember any of this happening last year.
Casey:
So I don't know why it didn't, but I feel like I think I had both Apple TVs at the time, I think.
Casey:
And I don't recall any of this being a problem.
Casey:
So it was very weird.
Casey:
And if you've lived through this and have tips, please write me some way, somehow.
Marco:
Well, I will say that the Find My alerts, you can set a location and say, don't remind me about leaving things at this location.
Casey:
Agreed, but I didn't want that forever.
Casey:
Where is that feature?
Marco:
It's in the Find My app.
Marco:
It's in one of those drawers from the bottom.
Marco:
You've got to pull it up somewhere in there.
Casey:
I thought you could do that on the notification itself, too, I think.
Marco:
thought i might be wrong about that or like customize it or something like that when the notification comes up you might have to do it per item like i think i think you have to do it per thing in find my but if you go to find my and you go to like the things tab there is an option on there to say like don't remind me about this location basically
Casey:
Yeah, I'm not seeing... I know what you're thinking of, and I have done that for my house, but for the life of me, I don't know where it is off the top of my head.
Casey:
But yes, I know there is a way to do that.
Casey:
I just don't know what it is.
Marco:
I mean, the rest of it, you know, things with, like, home detection and home hub selection and failover...
Marco:
That is mostly a mystery to me because it's one of those areas where Apple tries to be just smart and do the right thing.
Marco:
And what that means is it works fine in the common case for most people most of the time.
Marco:
But when it doesn't work, you have no idea, no recourse, nothing you can really do except these random incantations that may or may not result in the problem eventually gradually in some weird way being fixed.
John:
you just want a screen where you can see apple devices what do you think is the deal show me show me i think my home is here and i think this is it like just you know part of it might be just the data model we talked about this before about like what is a decent data model for music which is you know a surprisingly complex subject what is the data model for home kit like does it incorporate the idea that people might be at some place other than their home for extended periods of time
John:
you know how many homes can you have what is the concept of a home is there what is it is there a concept of a location uh you know that when you leave there it's okay for you to leave your devices behind because that's you know like i don't i don't know what kind of vocabulary they have to describe that um but either way whatever the vocabulary is there should be something you can go to and says here's how we think the world exists right now even if you can't edit it at least that would help but then ideally what you'd see there is you know
John:
How many homes do you have?
John:
Or like in context, if you have multiple homes, what order are they in?
John:
Are you at them for a certain duration or whatever?
John:
Like, it seems like their data model should support this.
John:
And once their data model supports it, they shouldn't just try to do like, we'll use machine learning and prediction to do the right thing.
John:
All right, fine.
John:
Maybe do that, but also still have a screen where you can actually say, I will be at this address for the next week.
John:
I think that's all you need to tell it.
John:
And it just needs to be a UI, someplace in the interface that we can find.
John:
I just looked and find mine.
John:
I couldn't find it in two seconds.
Casey:
Yeah, I couldn't either, but I know it's there somewhere.
John:
It should be more prominent.
John:
I should be able to say, for any HomeKit type things, where do you think my house is, HomeKit?
Marco:
what device are you using as a hub well that you can see you can see so in if you go to the if you go to home settings which is buried but it's like under the house icon in the home app you go to the home screen then go to the house icon in the top then there's a home settings thing and there's under there you can see home hubs and bridges
Marco:
And in my case, I have eight.
Marco:
Now, I love this screen so much because it purports to be useful but isn't.
Marco:
So, Home Hubs and Bridges.
Marco:
Right now, I have various HomePods and something called Living Room Apple TV and then something called Downstairs Downstairs.
Marco:
Nice.
Marco:
I assume that's the Apple TV that I renamed the AirPlay target to Downstairs.
Marco:
But it's called Downstairs Downstairs.
Marco:
And that says Connected.
Marco:
And all the other ones say Standby.
Marco:
So you would think maybe on this list of home hubs and bridges that tells me which one is connected.
Marco:
You could tap on them, surely, right?
Marco:
Maybe you could select one to be the one that's connected.
Marco:
Or maybe you could delete one.
Marco:
You can do neither.
Marco:
This is simply a passive list.
Marco:
All you can do is look at it and smile.
Marco:
So I would love, for instance, to say, like, prioritize the two Apple TVs because they are hardwired to Ethernet and
Marco:
they're ac powered they are guaranteed to always be online and ready to go home pods are flaky pieces of crap and and i don't want my entire home automation strategy to be resting on the reliability of a home pod when it has when i have these perfectly good apple tvs that can do the same job slightly more reliably probably and
Marco:
And I would love to be able to say, hey, this thing, make this thing the preferred home hub.
Marco:
Nope, can't do it.
Marco:
All I can do is look at this list and wonder why I can't do the things that seem so obvious on it.
John:
Maybe you could add home, like that's in the home app.
John:
But that seems wrong in terms of data model, like adding, I'm going to be in this vacation house for a week, so I'll add it as my home.
John:
But that seems too heavyweight.
John:
It's not your home.
John:
You're just at a place where you're at a hotel.
John:
This hotel is now my home for a week.
John:
I mean, kind of, but it seems too much.
John:
I feel like this use case is...
John:
Something they should work on because, I mean, I know we have doing a lot of travel with the pandemic and everything, but like, what about business travelers?
John:
Like when they go somewhere and they leave their iPad and their AirPods in the hotel room when they go out to eat, they don't need seven notifications telling them, oh, you left your stuff behind.
John:
It's like, yeah, it's in my hotel room.
Marco:
I mean, in all fairness, though, I do think that the main weirdness of this was probably a result of Casey bringing one of his home hubs to a hotel room outside of his home and connecting to it.
Marco:
And that's probably a situation that Apple has not really designed for, that they probably assumed, what kind of weird nerd would bring an Apple TV to it?
Casey:
Which is fair.
John:
I do it.
John:
Casey does it.
John:
When I went on vacation, I'm missing other family members.
John:
My brother brought his Apple TV with him for the same reason I brought mine.
John:
Although we passed the milestone this year, the television in the rental place already supports airplay.
John:
so it's like when we were an airplay to it you could say airplay to the apple tv that's connected to it or airplay just to the television right so maybe we're getting close to a point where we won't have to bring apple tv pucks with us so we can just assume that the television is there will just like they all support netflix now and have a giant netflix button on their remotes that they'll also have an apple tv plus button that you'll somehow be able to sign into to see all your kids shows i don't know how it's gonna work but at least you get airplayed to the tv so there's some progress