Tiny Pictures of Knobs
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We should at least briefly talk about something that all three of us intended to talk about last week.
Casey:
And because we're idiots, it just completely slipped our mind to say anything.
Casey:
And I wanted to at least briefly talk about the really, really crummy and I would argue despicable events in America of last week, specifically around the Supreme Court saying that Roe versus Wade is no longer a thing and that –
Casey:
Any of the protections that Roe v. Wade gave people, particularly women, with regard to the right to have agency over their own bodies, that is no longer a thing.
Casey:
And I don't necessarily want to go too deep into this other than to say that I think I speak for all three of us in saying that it is my slash our belief that women should have agency over their own bodies and what happens to their bodies that
Casey:
I would not find it funny if I was compelled to do things with or to my body without my permission.
Casey:
I would not find it funny if I couldn't get health care that I needed simply because some other people found it to be taboo.
Casey:
I don't think it's fair that other people can decide whether or not it's okay for, I don't know, let's say for me to get a vasectomy, for example.
Casey:
I don't think that's anyone's business but mine and Aaron's.
Casey:
And I find it really disgusting that...
Casey:
a bunch of old people seem to think that they know better for Erin, for example, than Erin does herself.
Casey:
And I really find it quite gross.
Casey:
As someone who has lived through infertility, we did not have to do in vitro fertilization, but we were very, very close to it.
Casey:
And depending on how you read the rulings and the laws of the land as they exist today—
Casey:
you could make a very strong legal argument that in vitro fertilization is now illegal.
Casey:
And I find that to be absolutely disgusting because here it is, you know, so many couples and so many families want desperately to have a child and they would do anything, including paying absolutely egregious sums of money for the privilege of having a child.
Casey:
And because this gets swept up in something that some people find taboo, it's now questionably legal.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
I find this whole thing to be disgusting.
Casey:
I really think it is inappropriate for me to specify what should happen to anyone else's body.
Casey:
And I find that, in my personal opinion, abortion is health care.
Casey:
And I think that health care really should be universal in this country, but that's neither here nor there.
Casey:
And I just wanted to make it plain and public that I think that this is the wrong way.
Casey:
I think this is disgusting and I am not in support of it.
Casey:
And I don't know if that does any good.
Casey:
But I just wanted to make it plain and public, my opinion on it.
Casey:
And I don't know if you guys have anything else to add or say or correct on that, but I'm all ears if you do.
Marco:
Oh, absolutely, I do.
Marco:
I mean, I can't believe that we've gone back in time on this.
Marco:
So, like, we've gone back, what, 50 years, whatever it's been?
Casey:
Something like that, yeah.
Marco:
You know, in the view of time, overall, things are better now than they were 50 years ago in most ways, but...
Marco:
When you take such a big regression like this, it really can feel like they're not.
Marco:
And this is a major regression in a number of different areas for a number of different reasons.
Marco:
And the fact is, you know, Casey, you said a minute ago that, quote, in your opinion, abortion is health care.
Marco:
And in reality, it's more complicated than that.
Marco:
In reality, it literally is health care for a number of conditions, right?
Marco:
And people who are anti-abortion normally have a fairly simplistic view of the issue.
Marco:
And if you're one of these people listening to the show, if we somehow still have any conservative listeners, first of all, I respect that you listen to the show knowing that we're not conservative.
Marco:
Yeah, agreed.
Marco:
And that hasn't scared you off and that you're willing to hear other opinions.
Marco:
Good on you for that.
Marco:
The view that anti-abortion people tend to have...
Marco:
is this very simplistic, almost storybook view of all abortions are killing babies, and that's it.
Marco:
And the reality is much more complicated than that.
Marco:
A thousand times more complicated than that.
Marco:
There are so many sides to this.
Marco:
There are so many conditions in which it is literally the only possible outcome to save the mother's life.
Marco:
There are many conditions where you have...
Marco:
tricky problems or literal health problems literal health care is required that is considered an abortion for various conditions or or situations that that happen in real life all the time so even if you think that women shouldn't be allowed to choose abortion for other reasons which that's a big if and and i would question that as well but even if you can set that part aside
Marco:
The reality of the issue is so much more complicated than that, and there are so many situations where it is the required medical procedure to preserve a woman's life, or at least physical and mental well-being, that to actually ban it and to actually make it illegal is literally putting women's lives in danger.
Marco:
It is literally going to result in women dying.
Marco:
That is not an exaggeration.
Marco:
It is not a frivolous thing.
Marco:
This is not a thing that should be taken lightly.
Marco:
And anybody celebrating this as a victory, I think you don't have all the facts, or you're willfully ignoring them.
Casey:
Well put.
Marco:
This is literally a step backwards into a barbaric pastime that we did have...
Marco:
where lots more people died who either couldn't afford to get the kind of you know under the table treatments or to travel somewhere where it was available or who took something more desperately available that that ended up killing them or hurting them we are now going back to that barbaric time in huge parts of our country and this is going to affect thousands of people it's going to result in more deaths more illness more problems and
Marco:
If you are still somehow on the anti-abortion side of this, I urge you to consider that the issue is more complicated than you think it is.
Marco:
And there's lots of situations.
Marco:
We personally, I mentioned this a long time ago when this happened, but my wife had to get an abortion.
Marco:
We had a failed pregnancy at five months, and we were about, I think, one week away from not being able to do it even in New York.
Marco:
It was an unviable, it was deemed unviable of a pregnancy.
Marco:
We had to terminate it to preserve her health and her ability to possibly have more kids in the future.
Marco:
We had to terminate it.
Marco:
That was the required health care move at that time.
Marco:
And this was for a pregnancy that we very much wanted.
Marco:
But it was, you know, it wasn't it wasn't going to happen.
Marco:
And and had we not been able to do that.
Marco:
we could have had some much more serious problems down the road.
Marco:
So I urge you out there, if you are on that side of the politics of this, please open your mind to the possibility that the issue is more complex than you think it is.
Marco:
And for everyone on the pro-choice side of this, like us, I urge you to just do whatever you can politically to help right this wrong.
Marco:
And frankly...
Marco:
I don't know how much we can do right now.
Marco:
I'm, like many of you, pretty jaded at America's prospects right now in lots of ways.
Marco:
I mean, this is just one issue of many large recent issues that we're having to deal with that are seemingly going the wrong direction.
Marco:
I mean, we have a legitimate chance here that our next major national election might literally be contradicted by state legislatures and possibly the Supreme Court.
Marco:
So our actual democracy is literally being threatened in very, very large ways that I don't think most Americans fully appreciate.
Marco:
So we have lots of problems right now, but this is a big one.
Marco:
And to have regressed so far in such a damaging and dangerous way is despicable.
Marco:
And as we just passed July 4th, I am super not proud of America right now.
Marco:
And we have a lot of work to do to fix the train wreck we've made for ourselves.
Casey:
Couldn't agree more.
John:
A couple things I'll add.
John:
In any kind of situation where you're trying to set some kind of policy or laws or whatever surrounding healthcare, and you're using some criteria other than what the unfortunate phrase that we have in this country, which is terrible, evidence-based medicine, which basically is just medicine.
John:
If you're using anything other than...
John:
Anything other than what is best for your health to make a health care decision, something has gone wrong.
John:
And that's exactly what this issue is.
John:
What would be the best thing to do in this situation?
John:
What does the patient want?
John:
These are the things that should be in question when determining what course of health care to pursue.
John:
Nowhere in there is, yeah, but what do a bunch of other people think about this?
John:
I don't care that it has worse outcomes.
John:
And people say like, well, if it's not going to kill you, it's fine.
John:
Let's just wait to see this already already with these with this decision.
John:
There's been situations where doctors have been afraid to do what they know is right.
John:
Health care wise, because they're afraid of getting sued or losing their license because they're in some terrible state that has terrible trigger laws that took effect as soon as the Roe v. Wade, you know, thing decision came down.
John:
Right.
John:
That's not the right decision to make for the health of the patient.
John:
And it's like, well, if they didn't die, you know, like we have to wait until they get worse because it has to be only to save the life of the mother and the mother's life isn't in threat now.
John:
So let's wait until her life is threatened.
John:
And then we're allowed to do the this is not how medicine is supposed to work.
John:
Let's wait until it gets worse because then we're allowed to do the thing.
John:
We could do something now to save her and it would be the right thing to do.
John:
But actually, something people don't like that.
John:
They're not here.
John:
They're not the patient.
John:
But we've decided that these laws have decided for us that we have to make a decision based on something other than the best outcomes of the patient.
John:
This is setting aside all the other outcomes that Marco was talking about.
John:
Women will die.
John:
There'll be worse outcomes for everybody.
John:
There'll be worse outcomes for children.
John:
There'll be worse outcomes for mothers.
John:
There'll be worse outcomes for everybody involved.
John:
This law and this decision, it runs counter to all of that.
John:
So that's terrible.
John:
Another thing someone brought up in the chat room, someone was saying like this is that the Supreme Court didn't, you know, didn't ban abortion, just made it a state's voting issue.
John:
The Supreme Court doesn't isn't supposed to set the policy for everybody.
John:
What the Supreme Court is supposed to do in theory, in practice, it's very...
John:
But in theory, is they're supposed to interpret the laws in light of the are sort of foundational, you know, things like the Constitution or whatever.
John:
And the reason that, you know, that we have a Constitution and the Supreme Court is even if the majority votes, I think we should, you know, bring back slavery and the majority votes in favor of it, which honestly in this country, sometimes I think it would pass.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The Supreme Court has to be there to say, hey, actually, we have we have existing laws and decisions on the book that say, even if everybody wants this, it's not a thing that you can do.
John:
It's like something easy.
John:
The First Amendment, you know, oh, I think I should be able to, you know, set a law that no one's ever to say anything mean about me.
John:
Sorry, we have a foundational document and that will hopefully be correctly interpreted by the Supreme Court to say, no, even if the majority of the country wants that law, it doesn't fit with our system.
John:
Abortion is no different.
John:
It's like in the Roe v. Wade decision, which was decided and then subsequently upheld, it's part of the right to privacy.
John:
The state can't come and tell you what can or can't happen to your body, right?
John:
And that's what's been overturned, and it's a terrible decision.
John:
And hopefully, it's a big step backwards.
John:
It's very easy to tell.
John:
It's like, oh, maybe from the lens of history, we can tell what was bad.
John:
No, you can always tell.
John:
If some group is fighting for rights and some group is fighting against them, the people who are fighting against them are always wrong.
Right?
John:
It never goes the other way.
John:
It's like, women want these rights, you know, and gay people want these rights or whatever.
John:
You can tell when you're there.
John:
You don't have to wait 50 years into the future.
John:
So this is obviously a bad decision.
John:
It's taking us backwards.
John:
Or you can, like, look at the rest of the world or you can look at outcomes.
John:
Anyway, it's a bad situation.
John:
We all hate it.
John:
Hopefully things will...
John:
Get better.
John:
We'll all do what we can to make that happen, you know, if we still have a democracy in the next several years.
Marco:
I will say, too, on that point, which again, that is a, you know, you might think this is hyperbolic.
Marco:
I assure you it's not.
Marco:
This is literally a risk that we have to face.
John:
Because it's not like an accidental thing that's happening to us.
John:
It's a thing that people are doing.
John:
There are groups actively lobbying that have been lobbying for decades to make this happen.
John:
You know, it's not something that happens accidentally or like, whoops, looks like Roe v. Wade went away.
John:
This has been some people's life's work.
John:
They're active agents trying to drag us backwards.
Marco:
Yeah, and there are also active agents trying to basically give state legislatures the ability to overturn election results that they deem, quote, suspicious, which – read this as code for we lost.
Marco:
So if you think there were some shenanigans with the Trump team suggesting that our whole election should be thrown out because they lost –
Marco:
You haven't seen anything yet because there's a whole bunch of stuff going on at the state levels that's very, very scary.
Marco:
And so I urge you all, vote in local and state elections, even if it is not a presidential election year.
Marco:
Because a lot of this stuff kind of flies under the radar at times during elections and at times when there's not a lot of voter turnout because it is not a presidential election.
Marco:
vote in every single election that you can every single one vote make your voice heard and if you don't follow the the you know particular politicians at that level that's fine most people don't vote however you feel is you know for the party or people or whatever it is that you think will be least evil because not a lot of people show up to vote and so if you do like on those you know non-peak elections
Marco:
It matters.
Marco:
It counts.
Marco:
And we really have to defend our democracy at all levels, local, state and federal, because I'm telling you, those are under significant attack.
Marco:
And as the upcoming elections are, you know, soon, you know, we have midterms this year, right?
Marco:
We have the presidential election in another couple of years.
Marco:
And I'm telling you, it's going to be rough.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
You thought this past election was a little bit rough with the state of our democracy.
Marco:
I'm telling you, it's going to get worse, and we have to be ready for that, and we have to start defending against that and rolling back some of these terrible things so that we can literally have a democracy.
Marco:
That's what we're fighting for, among other things.
Marco:
We have lots of other major issues.
Marco:
We have this terrible abortion thing.
Marco:
We have all the gun problems.
Marco:
We have so many issues, but the foundation of our democracy is also literally under attack right now,
Marco:
to the extent that most people don't realize.
Marco:
So please get out there and vote in every single election that you can.
John:
And if you need a voting guideline, here's your guideline.
John:
If someone who's going to be in charge of the election says no matter what the people vote for, they're going to make sure the outcome is one way, don't vote for that person.
John:
Like, their one job is like, okay, our state is going to vote, say, in a presidential election.
John:
And the rule is whoever wins more votes in the state, you know, gets the electors.
John:
And they say, I'll do that, but only if my favorite person wins.
John:
If my favorite person doesn't win, I'm going to ignore what you voted for and decide that my favorite person wins.
John:
There are literally people running on that platform and winning.
John:
They are winning their elections.
John:
They say, I want to be in charge of elections in the state.
John:
And by the way, no matter what happens with the vote...
John:
I'm going to make sure that my person is the person who gets the electors, because if my person doesn't, it's obviously the election was a scam and a fraud and, you know, whatever.
John:
Those people are winning elections.
John:
That's why we're all scared here, because they say they're going to do that.
John:
It's not a secret.
John:
They they they that's their platform.
John:
And then they get the most votes in the state and they're going to be in charge of the election.
John:
So that's why we're all a little bit scared over here.
Marco:
Yeah, it's right out there in the open.
Marco:
And I will again say and maybe go a little further.
Marco:
If you vote for a politician or a political party that cares more about winning than about votes being counted properly and actual democracy happening, you are not an American.
Marco:
You are anti-American.
Marco:
You are anti-patriotic.
Marco:
You are anti-democracy.
Marco:
If you want to be an American patriot here, we just celebrated our birthday, all the flags and everything.
Marco:
You know what that flag means?
Marco:
That means democracy.
Marco:
That means votes counting.
Marco:
And so if you support any politician or party that tries to interfere with votes counting, you are anti-American and you might as well be committing treason as far as I'm concerned.
Marco:
On that note, let's start our tech show.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I talked... We spoke last week about how I'm now using an M1 Mac Mini as my Plex server.
Casey:
And a handful of people wrote to say, is that working?
Casey:
Because nobody apparently... Not many people apparently are trying to do this right now.
Casey:
And so people wanted some feedback.
Casey:
It is a bit early to tell, I think.
Casey:
But I will say...
Casey:
that uh i was watching or i was attempting to watch something that was a a 4k video in plex but it was encoded in web m which is i think what is that google yeah you know kodak or whatever um
Casey:
The video was encoded in WebM, and it did not want to play on my Apple TV, and Plex got very upset about the fact that the Mac Mini wasn't transcoding quick enough for it.
Casey:
That being said, what I did was, because I'm me, I used Don Melton's incredible other video transcoding scripts—I'll put a link in the show notes—
Casey:
in order to, which is basically like a front end for FFmpeg.
Casey:
And I converted from WebM to HEVC or H.265, depending on, I think they're one in the same, or at least in this context, they're one in the same.
Casey:
And anyways, once I did that, I tried again and everything was good to go.
Casey:
So if you have, I don't want to make any like broad statements.
Casey:
You know, I don't know if all WebM is bad.
Casey:
I don't know if just 4K WebM is bad.
Casey:
I haven't really done enough testing on all this.
Casey:
but certainly 4K WebM did not go well for me against the most recent Apple TV that exists, which is, what, 17 years old now?
Casey:
So if you're like me and you tend to store things in H.264 and H.265, I think you'd probably be fine.
Casey:
But if you are a little bit more omnivorous and don't really care what things are encoded as and just try to throw it at Plex, which is one of Plex's advantages,
Casey:
then you might be in for a little bit of pain.
Casey:
So just something to think about.
Casey:
I'll report in again if I have any other discoveries of any sort, but it's worth thinking about.
Casey:
And speaking of M1 things, and in this case, actually M2, we have gotten a date just earlier today, actually.
Casey:
We got a
Casey:
feverishly mashing the keys on his old and busted Intel Mac Pro.
Casey:
John, what are you going to be doing Friday at 8 a.m.
Casey:
in the One True Time Zone?
John:
Yeah, I'll be ordering my M2 MacBook Air then, although...
John:
you know with availability things especially like oh you have to be ready at 8 a.m eastern time i'm there i'm ready to order i'm ready to click the button does that mean it will be available on the educational discount store at 8 a.m or is that going to be later but anyway i'm still just determined to order this through the education store i did the math to see what the actual discount is and it's not great like i said it's not like it used to be where you get like a thousand dollars off or something it's it's going to be like 160 saving on the config i'm getting which for people who are curious
John:
M2, MacBook Air, Space Gray, 24 gigs of RAM, one terabyte hard drive, and probably the two hard drive SSD, whatever.
John:
And the power adapter with the two USB-C plugs, the 35 watt two-port adapter.
John:
That's probably what I get.
John:
And I'm also going to get AppleCare probably.
John:
Yeah, so that's my plan.
John:
I'll be there at 8 a.m.
John:
trying to order this thing.
John:
I'll let you know how it goes.
Casey:
Good luck.
Casey:
Godspeed.
Casey:
I really think these things are going to fly off the shelves, if you will, because I know a fair number of people that are, you know, queuing everything up ready to rock in order to grab one of these.
Casey:
And they certainly, from everything I've read and seen, they certainly seem like they're damn fine computers.
Casey:
And Marco, I mean, you're the one who actually handled one briefly, so you know better than either of us.
Casey:
But they seem like they're going to be great machines.
Marco:
Oh, I'm still trying to figure out, like, do I have a use for this thing somewhere in my house?
Marco:
Because I just want one.
Marco:
I'm sure I do.
Marco:
Because there's so... I'm telling you, it feels so good when you pick it up.
Marco:
It's so nice.
Marco:
I just want one.
Casey:
I don't blame you.
Casey:
I kind of want one, too.
Marco:
I actually might.
Marco:
I kind of do have some uses for it, so we'll see.
Marco:
We'll see.
Marco:
Here we go.
Marco:
I do wish I liked more of the colors better.
Marco:
If I get one, it would probably be the silver one, but I'm tempted to go with the midnight just because it's different, but I know in practice it'll just be too dark for me because I know I saw it.
Marco:
It was very dark and it was covered in fingerprints, so I think in practice I wouldn't like it as much, but it's at least new and interesting and different.
Marco:
It has that going for it.
Marco:
So honestly, I think if you're buying the MacBook Air, you can't go wrong with any of the colors it comes with, except space gray.
Casey:
Yeah, I think really, folks, the problem is that I am the one who has most recently bought a computer, and this is not computing in Marco's world.
Casey:
And so he needs some reason to be the one with the newest machine of the three of us.
Casey:
That's what it boils down to.
Marco:
No, I do actually have some uses for it, potentially.
Marco:
But I've got to figure out if this is actually the right move for me or not.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
A quick piehole tip from Todd Whitesell.
Casey:
It's never not funny.
Casey:
This is probably relevant to four of us, but there might even be dozens of us.
Casey:
I noticed a while ago that when I was using Safari, and Safari specifically, often, but not, well, maybe not often, but occasionally, it would start to load a page and then just kind of sit.
Casey:
and sit and sit and i'm on a gigabit internet connection and it would sit and sit and i have you tried going to the um the uh microwave tower thing for verizon ultra fast 5g wireless network and uh have you tried going at two gigabits was it faster no i i have not tried wave for this because i think todd solved my problem and so todd writes a couple of ios releases ago and for what it's worth i've seen this on mac os
Casey:
I noticed Safari would just stop loading pages after a few ticks on the blue progress bar.
Casey:
This wasn't affecting other browsers.
Casey:
I recently discovered that turning off hide my IP address in the Safari settings fixed this.
Casey:
My guess, writes Todd, is that Safari was looking up trackers in DNS, getting an address for my pie hole, and then Apple's relay servers were trying to connect to that private address and timing out.
Casey:
I have no idea if that theory is right.
Casey:
But if you go into Safari preferences on the Mac anyway, it is in the privacy tab.
Casey:
There is hide IP address from trackers.
Casey:
And by turning that off, which I wouldn't generally recommend, but it did seem to fix the problem for me.
Casey:
So if you are one of the dozens of people afflicted by this issue, give that a whirl.
Casey:
See if it helps.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by WorkCheck, a new original podcast from Atlassian, makers of teamwork software like Jira, Confluence, and Trello.
Marco:
You know, our workplaces today are changing quickly, but which of these changes are actually going to serve us best?
Marco:
WorkCheck takes workplace practices, things like agile at scale, off-sites, dogfooding, and they separate the hype from the helpful.
Marco:
In each episode, two Atlassians debate how the practice should be applied, if at all.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
WorkCheck takes your most pressing questions about the ways that we work together and hashes out the best arguments on either side.
Marco:
Hosted by Christine De La Rosa, the ways of working brand lead at Atlassian.
Marco:
And, you know, it's never been more important to think about this stuff.
Marco:
You know, a lot of us are staying remote.
Marco:
A lot of us are heading back to the office.
Marco:
So this season, they're debating some wonderful questions.
Marco:
One episode they've done is about wearing pajamas on a Zoom call.
Marco:
What about what do you wear on the bottom half?
Marco:
It's out of the frame.
Marco:
Let's debate that a little bit, see how it might be affecting your performance at work and what the history of dress codes can tell us about where workwear is going next.
Marco:
In another episode, they tackle the four-day workweek.
Marco:
So if you fantasize on Friday afternoons about the luxury of a three-day weekend, they actually debate this and dig into the potentials and pitfalls of this four-day workweek schedule that's been generating buzz around the world.
Marco:
And they ask, is the grass really greener?
Marco:
So it's a wonderful podcast.
Marco:
Check this out.
Marco:
Go to whatever your podcast app is and look for WorkCheck.
Marco:
That's what it's called, WorkCheck.
Marco:
It's an Apple podcast, Overcast, all the different apps that you might get your podcasts in, WorkCheck.
Marco:
We will also include a link in the show notes so you can find it yourself there.
Marco:
But once again, it's called WorkCheck by Atlassian.
Marco:
It's a great new podcast examining these really cool questions about the future and present of work.
Marco:
Thank you so much to WorkCheck for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Buy now, pay later, Rob Sayer writes.
Casey:
Without getting into the details of BNPL and credit cards, the basic game Apple seems to be playing is that they have much less fraud risk.
Casey:
That's why the rewards are higher for phone-authenticated purchases.
Casey:
It's a side effect of having good authentication functions, aside from all the reasons the podcast already mentioned.
Casey:
There's also a more basic insurance or financial technology game here where you poach the lowest-risk customers in exchange for marginally better service, and iPhone is a good proxy for that.
John:
Yep, that's the advantage Apple has.
John:
The same thing with CarPlay of like, you know, whatever it was, 79% of customers saying they wouldn't buy a car without CarPlay.
John:
It's like, how is that possible?
John:
79% of the public doesn't have iPhones.
John:
Why would they care about CarPlay?
John:
Ah, but 79% of new car buyers apparently do.
John:
So yeah, Apple's got customers with money and it's got a fairly good way to authenticate them with all of its biometrics and Apple ID and security and everything so they can afford to skim a little bit more off the top for their financial transactions.
Casey:
And then a little bit more on bitcode deprecation.
Casey:
Augie Fackler writes,
Casey:
to keep forward compatibility tests complete since LLVM 8 or 9, which is several releases ago.
Casey:
I believe 14 is the current release, with three releases a year.
Casey:
I wouldn't be surprised if the seeming lack of community interest on the LLVM side forced some hands at Apple to drop the use of bitcode to ease LLVM upgrades going forward.
John:
Yeah, that's one of those things I forgot to talk about, that LLVM is actually an open source project.
John:
And it's not just Apple that gets to decide how things go with the bitcode thing because it's a whole compiler infrastructure that's under it.
John:
Now, you can't tell whether this is, you know, which is the leading indicator and trailing indicator.
John:
It could be that there is less activity on the LLVM side because Apple lost interest in it and they were the major ones doing the contributions to this open source project.
John:
And once Apple sort of put that project in the back burner...
John:
They just let it rot.
John:
On the other hand, it could be that Apple had been relying on the community to keep this up and the community doesn't care about it.
John:
And Apple did.
John:
And you got this disconnect and Apple wasn't willing to invest what was required to keep up to date with all these tests.
John:
And either way, it's gone by the wayside.
John:
But it's just to show that if you one of the.
John:
One of the things that comes with using open source is if you're not doing 100% of the development of the features you care about and the community decides that some feature you care about is not as important to them, you have a decision to make.
John:
You either let go of that feature and take it out of your product or you decide that you're going to fully fund the development of it.
John:
And in this case, Apple has chosen to let it go by the wayside.
Casey:
One of you put, probably John, in the show notes a link from friend of the show, Glenn Fleischman, Why Passkeys Will Be Simpler and More Secure Than Passwords.
Casey:
And I read that earlier today, and it's a really good overview of exactly that.
Casey:
So I don't know if you had more things to add, John, but this article is a pretty good summary if you were looking for one.
John:
Yeah, Glenn has a good way of explaining complicated topics.
John:
It's a long article or whatever, but if you want to know more about it and you still don't quite understand it, give Glenn's article a try.
Casey:
And speaking of past keys, there are some questions from Janice Puchert.
Casey:
Apple appears to be very slow in adopting their own sign-in with Apple solutions.
Casey:
Past keys appear to be the same.
Casey:
The dev portal looks like it's stuck in the year 2000 authentication-wise.
Casey:
Especially in the dev portal, you might think Apple would be willing to roll out these features to its more technologically adept users.
Casey:
Why do you think Apple is so weird about using their own stuff?
John:
The reason Apple is crappy about this is the same reason any big company is.
John:
There's always dark corners of the company that don't get updated with the flagship features.
John:
And I think we've all experienced this, especially wandering around what used to be called iTunes Connect, what is now App Store Connect and the developer side and the documentation system.
John:
You'll stumble upon these corners of Apple's web presence that are so clearly haven't been updated in years and years.
John:
And they do get updated eventually, just not as quickly as the more high profile part.
John:
So maybe iCloud.com is likely to look fancy and get new features or whatever, but...
John:
app store connect uh less so let's say so and why is uh you know why is apple slow about this because any big company is slow about this it's very difficult to have entire companies have like sort of the same priority of like we're going to roll this new feature and it's going to roll out everywhere across every single thing that we have on the web at the same time that's just not feasible in a company the size of apple um obviously we wish they did a little bit better but uh i think it pretty much scales with like
John:
How many people use this webpage?
John:
I bet a lot of people use apple.com and icloud.com.
John:
And very few people compared to that use App Store Connect.
John:
And anyway, I guess developers are more important than the average person.
John:
But whatever.
John:
It doesn't surprise me this is the case.
John:
That said, I haven't...
John:
I mean, the OS that fully supports passkeys, the various OSs are still in beta, right?
John:
So I wouldn't expect Apple to be converting any of its products or services to use passkeys until, you know, Ventura is out, iOS 16 is out, iPod, until those things all release.
John:
And even then, maybe I'm just pessimistic, but I wasn't expecting that like on the day of release, suddenly I'll be able to log into the developer port or any Apple property using passkeys.
John:
I don't know who's going to go first.
John:
Maybe Apple will be first, but I don't think it's going to be on the day of release.
John:
So I'm still watching for, you know, if and when passkeys start to come into my life.
John:
If we look at how long it took USB-C to finally become a thing that we could have some confidence in, maybe a little while for passkeys.
Casey:
Too soon, John.
Casey:
Janice continues, the documents I read mention that most services will provide a password and passkey authentication feature.
Casey:
Password is there as a fallback.
Casey:
Doesn't that kind of negate all of the benefits of passkeys?
Casey:
We still have to generate and manage all the passwords.
John:
There's some discussion of this on Twitter.
John:
The upshot is like,
John:
individual services and sites can decide what they want to do nothing about pass keys dictates that they must be the only way to sign in or that you have to choose one or the other or you could have multiple right so it's it's not there's no technological answer to this it is a policy decision i don't know what the most common policy is going to be i don't even know what the best policy is going to be in some ways especially during the transition it may be better to have pass keys as a sort of
John:
convenient type thing and then sort of have passwords as a backup but sort of lock those passwords down real hard like so that you never really need to use them or send them and they can just be you know because if you're if you have some passwords in a password manager even in icloud keychain or whatever and they're never actually extracted and sent across the internet that's still more secure but it is kind of good to be there as a backup if there are bugs involving passkeys or if people don't know how to use them yet or some issues we haven't discovered um
John:
Or if some site wants to be forward-looking, they can decide when you quote-unquote convert to passkey, we get rid of your password login and you just use a passkey.
John:
But there's nothing inherent in any of these technologies or two-factor or YubiKeys or anything that dictates that you have to use one or the other.
John:
Just like you have websites now where you can log in with lots of different methods, I think that will continue to be the case.
John:
And each website will just have to decide what the policy they want to use is.
Casey:
I recently noticed the option to generate app-specific passwords on appleid.apple.com.
Casey:
The Apple document about this, we'll put a link in the show notes, mentions as an example use case, quote, so that the app can access information like mail contacts and calendars that you store in iCloud, quote.
Casey:
Why would one want to do such a thing?
Casey:
The Apple ID is basically the key to anything.
Casey:
That seems super risky for the benefit it provides.
Casey:
That being said, it appears one cannot log into appleid.apple.com with an app-specific password, so maybe it's not blanket access.
John:
This is yet one more authentication method when you're listing all the different ways you can authenticate and log in and do stuff.
John:
And this one's kind of here for legacy support.
John:
If you have some kind of service that needs to be able to, let's say you're using Gmail and you want it to be able to check your iCloud email.
John:
Back in the day, what you could do is you could just tell Gmail your iCloud email address and password and it would connect to the authenticated mail server and
John:
and authenticate using the password you told it and pull your mail down.
John:
That's obviously not great because now Google and Gmail have your password somewhere stored, hopefully securely.
John:
But when Apple, you know, rolled out two-factor stuff, remember when they had two-step and two-factor?
John:
That wasn't confusing.
John:
Anyway,
John:
when apple rolled out two-factor uh google didn't change its system and google's thing had no idea about two-factor so all of a sudden google couldn't check your mail anymore because it just had your username and your password but it would try to log in with them and then it would get bounced off the two-factor prompt and you would never see that because it's all happening behind the scenes right and it didn't know how to handle that um there are all standards built around avoiding this issue like oh author whatever but another way that you can deal with this if you have some kind of service that doesn't
John:
have a fancier more modern authentication method it only accepts username and password is you can make what's what apple calls an app specific password which is a special password that they show you one time and they say here it is take it and write it down somewhere or copy it or whatever we're never going to show it to you again and then it disappears forever and you just give that password to gmail and it is not your your password to your account it is just a password you would hope that just lets gmail get your email and doesn't let it do anything else
John:
GitHub has similar things where you can choose the various roles and permissions you want it to have.
John:
So it's a special purpose password that you give a name like, this is so Gmail can check my iCloud mail.
John:
And the only thing in the entire internet that has that password is Gmail.
John:
And the only things hopefully it lets you do are very limited things that you want Gmail to be able to do.
John:
And if it is ever compromised or Gmail ever goes rogue, you can revoke that one password and stop Gmail from using it anymore.
John:
This is different than if Gmail had your real password or if you had done some sort of authentication where it goes through the two-factor thing.
John:
because then it would have access to your entire account and there'd be no way to revoke it without changing your whole password, which could mess up a bunch of other stuff.
John:
So that's why app-specific passwords exist.
John:
They are useful, they have a function in this weird password world we live in, especially in the age where most good systems require more than just a username and a password to log in, but there are lots of old things around that only understand how to use a username and a password.
John:
So to let them continue to work and to try to limit them to not have as many permissions as you want and to be able to individually revoke them,
John:
That's why app-specific passwords work.
John:
We'll put a link in the show notes to the Knowledge Base article from Apple that tries to explain them.
Casey:
Moving on, stateful hardware controls versus software controls.
Casey:
So where did this come up?
Casey:
This started with the conversation about the Rivian, and I think it was the wipers.
Casey:
We talked about a bunch of other things that have this kind of disconnection between what does the software think the state of the world is and what is the hardware showing the state of the world is.
Casey:
So we had several different pieces of feedback about this.
Casey:
Jordan McEwen writes, I thoroughly enjoyed your discussion about how knobs no longer inform state and cars.
Casey:
This has been an idea that has been explored thoroughly in the live music soundboard arena for many years.
Casey:
The high-end solution is motorized faders.
Casey:
As you can see in the video that we'll link in the show notes, you can do very sophisticated programming of the faders or just mess around.
Casey:
And so there's a link where you see these faders doing like dances and the wave and things like that.
Casey:
So it's like a bunch of vertical dials on a soundboard that are doing all sorts of silly things.
Casey:
And it's kind of fun.
Casey:
So we'll put that link in the show notes.
John:
Have you ever seen a video of like an old style soundboard in a recording studio?
John:
It's got all these sliders, like a giant dashboard with just dozens and dozens of sliders, all physical controls.
John:
You slide them up and down, right?
John:
And the way they dealt with it is sort of the way that we were talking about that, whatever that was, Buick or whatever dealt with it is.
John:
Now that there's software control, they just motorize the fader.
John:
So if you change a value in software, the fader literally moves, like the physical control literally moves.
John:
So very often you'll see these videos of the faders all going up together or down together or going in a sine wave when you turn the system on or doing neat stuff like that.
John:
So that is one solution.
John:
And if you have a lot of money, you want to have physical controls and software control at the same time, just keep them in sync.
John:
No problem.
Casey:
no worries you just need a whole bunch of motors all right and then uh samuel cohen writes i thought you might find it interesting to see how the same challenges are manifesting in the slowly modernizing world of guitar amplifiers i have two digital modeling amps with radically different approaches to their ui and uh they were kind enough to include a video where they walk through this exact thing and we'll put a link in the show notes and at about uh what is what is that a little over two minutes in
Casey:
uh there's an example two and a quarter minutes in there's an example of a screen on one of the amps clearly just violently disagreeing with one of the knobs on the same amp and that's kind of funny to say the great thing is what they put on the screen are tiny pictures of knobs with indicators where the knobs are but then right next to the screen with the picture of knobs are the actual knobs
John:
Right, right.
John:
with indicators on them.
John:
They're not just knobs that spin together.
John:
They're knobs with indicators.
John:
They have a beginning and an end, right?
John:
And the way they dealt with this, one of the amps had like lights on them to sort of use a different method, sort of like software-controlled knobs.
John:
But the second one, the way they dealt with it is just plain old physical-controlled knobs and a screen that can conflict.
John:
But if they conflict, if you touch one of the knobs and move it anywhere in either direction, the software immediately switches to match the knob, right?
John:
So you can change it in software and the knobs don't move.
John:
And then the software is sort of in control.
John:
But the second you touch one of the physical knobs...
John:
that immediately tells the software, forget what you had before, now take the knob thing.
John:
And that's a reasonable compromise if you're trying to save money because the worst thing you want to happen is you're playing music and you need to make an adjustment real quick.
John:
It's much easier to just grab a knob and twist it, right?
John:
And you want that knob to say, look, if I turn this knob, I don't care what the software says, I'm turning the knob.
John:
The knob should win.
John:
But if you did some careful setup in software, you want that to win as well until you touch the knob.
John:
So not an ideal solution, but it's a way to...
John:
It's a way to have both systems without breaking the bank on motorized knobs that, let's face it, someone would probably break anyway.
Casey:
Dave Roenhorst writes, one contributing factor to the crash of Air France Flight 447 was the lack of physical indication of the control stick on the Airbus A330 cockpit, which acts like the Rivian stalk switch, which, you know, snapping back to the center after an input is given.
Casey:
thus the other pilots were not aware that the co-pilot was continuing to put in the wrong input he was pitching the nose up while the position of the stick indicated a neutral input had the stick stayed in the pitched up position or location it would have been clear what the input was being given furthermore if both the co-pilots and the pilot's stick represented the current state of input it would have been more obvious to everyone involved
Casey:
And this was a really, really terrible accident that happened just a couple of years back or probably a few years at this point.
Casey:
And I remember this being a thing.
Casey:
And I remember everyone had a fit about the way Airbus cockpits work on account of this.
Casey:
And I don't know if any real changes were made.
Casey:
I would assume some sort of change was made.
Casey:
But I still think the Airbus cockpits are largely the same.
Casey:
I don't know if either of you know.
Marco:
Sorry, I don't know.
Casey:
That's fine.
Casey:
And then somebody else brought up something I should have brought up myself.
Casey:
Anton Yelchin's death back in 2016.
Casey:
So this is the young guy who played Chekhov in the Star Trek reboot.
Casey:
And reading from an NBC News article, the actor was pinned against a gate by what sources told NBC News was one of the Jeeps involved in the safety recall.
Casey:
The vehicle was a 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee, an SUV recently recalled because of problems with its electronic shifter.
Casey:
Fiat Chrysler Automobiles recalled three different models and a total of 1.1 million vehicles in April following an investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Casey:
The agency found the shifter could confuse motors by not giving clear feedback as to what gear the automatic transmission was in.
Casey:
If I recall correctly, and I might have this wrong, this was one of the first, like, dial transmissions, and so...
John:
No, it was like a knob, kind of like the yoke on the Airbus thing, where it would just return to middle.
John:
There are ones like this.
John:
They're more like little switchy things, but it looked a lot like a PRNDL move the thing.
John:
But the thing is, this one, you would press it, and when you let go, it would just spring back to middle, just like the Rivian stock and just like the controls on the Airbus.
John:
And in that case, if you look at it, there's no clear indication whether the car is in drive, reverse, or whatever, because it's always just vertical, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
So yeah, this, it, it is, it is an anti pattern with like, I don't want to say that, you know, having, having wiper controls that spring back to middle is going to kill somebody.
John:
Right.
John:
But like this, this whole thing about having a hardware that is not stateful anymore when previously it used to be can actually have life and death consequences in big ways and small.
John:
So it is something worth considering when designing car interiors because cars are very big, heavy things that can actually kill people.
Casey:
I didn't realize it was one of the stock ones.
Casey:
And as soon as you described it, what you're basically describing is every BMW automatic that I've seen for the last several years.
Casey:
And almost all of them use the ZF8 speed, which is a transmission that I actually really like, despite being a pure blood automatic.
Casey:
And sure enough, the Jeep Grand Cherokee from the 2014 through 2022 model years used a ZF8 speed.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
I don't have a picture in the show or in the Wikipedia entry that I put in the show notes.
Casey:
I don't have a picture of the gear shift that I typically see.
Casey:
But the gear shift that I saw on BMWs was almost identical to the one that the Alfa Romeos I tested had.
Casey:
I mean, maybe it was lightly different, but it looked almost identical.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's not the transmission, to be clear.
John:
It's not the transmission's fault because it's electronically controlled transmission.
John:
It's fine.
John:
It's the controls that you hook up to the wires that tell the transmission what gear to be in because you can do those controls in lots of different ways.
John:
And I think in this particular case with the car thing, the worst combination is a control that looks like a mechanical thing but isn't.
John:
I think more of the modern ones don't look anything like old transmissions.
John:
Like there's no expectation that you can look at them and see like a lever shoved in one position or another to give you some reassurance about what gear it's in.
John:
If you make it look like the old kind where you could see where the lever is and know what gear it's in, people are going to assume that's how it worked.
John:
But if you make it look totally different,
John:
No one will look into, you know, the console or dashboard of your car and expect to be able to tell what it's in.
John:
Very often, you can't tell what it's in because they just have a bunch of buttons.
John:
And unless the car is on and something lights up and says a D or an R, there's no expectation that you know what gear it's in.
John:
So you're not lulled into a false sense of confidence.
John:
I think that is the problem in particular with these first set of electronically controlled transmissions where the thing that you touch with your hand looked just like the old style, but they worked nothing like it.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Instabug.
Marco:
Building and maintaining mobile apps is not simple.
Marco:
Bugs, crashes, and performance issues can be a nightmare for developers like me.
Marco:
What if you could not only detect and dissect these issues, but also get a holistic understanding of your app's performance?
Marco:
With Instabug, you can.
Marco:
Through comprehensive bug and crash reports, performance monitoring, and real-time user feedback, 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.
Marco:
It only takes a minute to integrate Instabug's SDK into your app, and it fits right into your workflow with integration support for tools like Jira, Slack, Trello, GitHub, Zendesk, and many more.
Marco:
So stop flying blind on your mobile app issues.
Marco:
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:
Thank you so much to Instabug for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Breaking news.
Casey:
Lockdown mode is a thing that is coming in iOS 16.
Casey:
Apple put up a newsroom release today.
Casey:
We had not heard about this previously, right?
Casey:
We had heard about the, like, I don't want this person to know anything about me.
Casey:
What was that?
John:
Safety check, I believe.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
But Lockdown Mode, I believe, is brand new.
Casey:
So reading from their press release, Apple's previewing a groundbreaking security capability that offers specialized additional protection to users who may be at risk of highly targeted cyber attacks from private companies developing state-sponsored mercenary spyware.
Casey:
Apple's also providing details of its $10 million grant to bolster research exposing such threats.
Casey:
At launch, Lockdown Mode includes the following protections.
Casey:
For messages, most message attachment types other than images are blocked.
Casey:
Some features like link previews are disabled.
Casey:
For web browsing, certain complex web technologies like just-in-time JavaScript compilation are disabled unless the user excludes a trusted site from lockdown mode.
Casey:
Apple services, incoming invitations and service requests including FaceTime calls are blocked if the user has not previously sent the initiator a call or request.
Casey:
wired connections with a computer or accessory are blocked when the iPhone is locked.
Casey:
I actually thought that was true already, to be honest with you, but I guess not.
Casey:
Configuration profiles cannot be installed and the device cannot enroll in mobile device management while lockdown mode is turned on.
Casey:
And it says Apple will continue to strengthen lockdown mode and add new protections to it over time.
Casey:
We don't have it in the show notes, so I'm going to have to stall as I dig up the quote.
Casey:
But I also noticed that they said that Apple is also making a $10 million grant in addition to any damages awarded from the lawsuit filed against NSO Group to support organizations that investigate, expose, and prevent highly targeted cyber attacks, including those created by private companies developing state-sponsored mercenary spyware.
Casey:
So they're saying if they win their lawsuit against NSO Group, all the money that NSO Group is going to pay them is going into this fund as pretty much a big you back to NSO Group.
Casey:
So I thought that was quite funny and not a bad idea.
Marco:
Yeah, that's delightful.
Casey:
It's kind of juvenile, but I'm here for it.
Casey:
But anyways, this lockdown thing, they say in the post, like, this is not for normal people.
Casey:
It's an extreme, this is reading from it, an extreme optional protection for the very small number of users who face grave targeted threats to their digital security.
Casey:
So what they're basically saying is if you're like a journalist in certain countries, maybe America, not too long.
Casey:
If you're if you're perhaps a particular celebrity or a person in government, then this might be for you.
Casey:
But for the three of us, not worth it.
Marco:
Well, is it not?
Marco:
So when you look at the actual list of protections.
Marco:
I kind of like this.
Marco:
And the only thing that I think would really get in my way was that it said that you basically can't participate in shared albums and photos.
Marco:
Other than that, the rest of this stuff kind of sounds like I would actually turn this on.
John:
I think you'd be annoyed about websites going slower because the JIT is disabled in JavaScript.
John:
And I think the messages thing would be really annoying.
Marco:
How much slower could it be?
John:
So, you know, I want to bring this up again because we talked about it last time and it's just good to keep in people's minds if you're not used to thinking about this way because a lot of people have kind of, you know, very sort of binary thinking on security.
John:
Security is always a trade-off between security and convenience, right?
John:
And this is giving you a different place on that continuum.
John:
You are sacrificing some convenience in exchange for some additional security.
John:
Uh, the difficulty with any of these things where you're, where you're asking people to give up convenience is it's very easy for people to get frustrated by just one aspect of this and say, well, I tried it, but this one part of it annoyed me, right?
John:
Cause I, you know, I tried to do a thing and I realized the reason I couldn't do it cause I was in lockdown mode or I'm tired of, of tapping a second time to get through to a link to find out what it is.
John:
I liked it better when I could see them in line.
John:
People will, uh,
John:
go back on a higher security setting very quickly for the smallest inconvenience.
John:
But all security policies are a trade-off between security and convenience.
John:
And so having a mode that is farther up the line for people who really, really need it is good.
John:
But to Marco's point, you look at this and you kind of wish you could pick and choose.
John:
Well, I would like that one, but this one would annoy me.
John:
But I like that one.
John:
But, you know, there was some debate on Twitter when this came out between some people saying, shouldn't this just be for everybody?
John:
Like, why wouldn't everybody want this?
John:
And people were saying, well, but I would find it inconvenient.
John:
But what about this?
John:
And it's like, you can look at some of these things and say...
John:
like should there be two tiers of security like why isn't this why why shouldn't everybody need this because you know there's a debate of whether you know who is an extra threat right you know is it's only important when a politician gets hacked but everybody is an equal threat if some rootkit hack is out there and script kitties are running it all over the place or whatever but i think it is true that people have different assessments of like what are the consequences of
John:
of my phone getting hosed.
John:
If you are an important person in government or a journalist in a hostile environment, the consequences could be life and death.
John:
Whereas if you're just a regular citizen and someone hacks your phone, the consequences is you have to like cancel a bunch of credit cards and maybe you'll lose a little bit of money or whatever, right?
John:
And then the probability, who's targeting you?
John:
You can use the big sky theory where there's a zero day hack out there, but there's also millions of possible victims and you're just one of those millions versus you being a head of state and you know that there are entire countries focusing on you like a laser beam all the time trying to get in.
John:
So I think it is appropriate to have
John:
to give people different levels of security based on how much convenience they're willing to give up.
John:
And lockdown mode is a step in that direction.
John:
But I think we will be able to look at the list of things the lockdown mode does and says somebody should probably graduate to be the defaults
John:
But it's not clear which ones quite yet.
John:
Obviously, doing this doesn't mean Apple is ignoring security for regular users.
John:
Apple is constantly doing tons of things for security.
John:
Almost everything you see here listed, messages, web browsing, all of Apple services, they're constantly doing things to improve the security of all of that stuff.
John:
You know, what used to be possible is wired connection to your phones versus what is now.
John:
To Casey's point, he thought this was already the case because they have locked down the wired connections.
John:
This is just one step up from what is the default for everybody.
John:
So I think it's a move in the right direction.
John:
But I think I would like to see some of these things graduate to be the defaults as long as we can get the convenience security tradeoff correctly balanced for normal people.
Casey:
Out of curiosity, as just a little experiment, and this might not be very interesting, but if you guys have your phones handy, would you go into settings, general, VPN and device management, and let me know if, you don't have to be specific about what they are, but do you have configuration profiles there?
John:
Yes, I do not.
Casey:
Okay, so for me, I have CharlesProxy, which is, you know, so I can sniff network traffic, which I do very rarely, but I do from time to time.
Casey:
And FastMail offers you, and I think you can configure it manually, but it offers a way to just have everything pretty much automatically configured by way of downloading a profile.
Casey:
So that's the two that I have.
Casey:
Marco, if you're willing to share, I'd love to hear what you have there.
Casey:
If you would rather, you know, for OPSEC reasons, not share, that's totally fine.
Marco:
No, it's super boring.
Marco:
I have the FastMail one for the same reason.
Marco:
You know, I have on past phones configured them with, you know, the IMAP and SMTP passwords and everything.
Marco:
You can still do that.
Marco:
But the configuration profile is just a faster way to do that.
Marco:
And I also have the iOS 16 beta profile from Apple.
Marco:
So super boring.
Casey:
Yeah, because the reason I bring that up is because I thought there was a time that like fonts came in as configuration profiles or something like that.
Marco:
That can be done.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I don't think that has to be done that way anymore.
Marco:
But that is a way they could be done.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, I was just curious because I feel like in the past I have had more things here than simply the two that I have now.
Casey:
I might be thinking of MDM like when I had work email on my phone and maybe MDM shows up there.
Casey:
I'm talking a bit outside my comfort zone now, but I was just curious.
Marco:
I was going to say, I kind of hope not.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
You shouldn't have a lot of these things.
Marco:
I mean, the thing is a lot of people do, like, oh, God.
Marco:
So somebody else who lives in my house has a highly customized home screen.
Marco:
Oh, my.
Marco:
And the way this was achieved was in part with a configuration profile.
Marco:
What?
Marco:
And when I saw that, I was like, oh, no.
Marco:
What is going on here?
Marco:
And I listened to it, and it's fairly innocuous, but it's something that, like, shouldn't be.
John:
Okay.
John:
That's why seeing this on the list of lockdown mode doesn't allow MDM profiles.
John:
Is that a big problem or whatever?
John:
As we discussed on past shows, these MDM profiles give abilities to do things that you can't really do any other way.
John:
tons of things are constantly throwing commons at regular people to say you want this cool thing on your phone just install this profile right and it's the thing you should really talk to your kids about if anything ever asks you just install this profile or do this thing like say no now it doesn't mean they're all scams because they legitimately give you abilities to do things that you couldn't do otherwise or there would be more cumbersome to do all right that's why things are always prompting you to do them and i think it should be a signal to apple for like
John:
the legitimate uses that people are using MDM profiles for, like build clean hooks into the OS to do that so people can stop doing that.
John:
But that's why they're just blanking this out because if you're going to social engineer your way into someone's phone, right, getting them to install one of these MDM profiles, either like, you know, willingly install it by convincing them, hey, you need this to play this cool game, or getting them to accidentally install it by tapping a thing of messages and exploiting a thing or whatever, it's a very common vector.
John:
And so this, I mean...
John:
Obviously, the solution is not just banning them entirely because you actually need them for enterprise stuff or whatever.
John:
But this is this is a weak spot in iOS.
John:
And the lockdown solution is no, you just can't have any of those that you can't install them, period.
John:
Right.
John:
It doesn't say you can't have them.
John:
It just says you can't install a new one.
John:
And honestly, that's probably the correct default setting for everybody.
John:
This is one of those things that I think should be the default for everybody.
John:
By default, no one has any profiles installed.
John:
But it's really easy to encounter something on the internet that asks you to install it and that you want to do it.
John:
You want to install it because you just want to do the thing, right?
John:
And there needs to be better protections here.
John:
This is kind of an area of ongoing work, let's say, in iOS security.
Marco:
Whenever I see stuff like this, I'm always like all these very popular apps that require a configuration profile for some feature.
Marco:
And it's like, I'm always surprised that's allowed by Apple.
Marco:
It always seems like the potential for problems there is quite high.
Marco:
Now, I think Apple's argument there would be like, well, App Store can review it and see what it does and everything.
Marco:
And the problem is that I'm sure that applies in the same way that every other App Store rule applies.
Marco:
Maybe they review some of them some of the time, but a lot of stuff still can get through, or things can be changed after the fact, or a lot of stuff can just slip by a reviewer here and there, or the rules aren't applied evenly.
Marco:
AppReview is not the main security there.
Marco:
Installing a configuration profile...
Marco:
In many cases, they're allowed to bypass other security measures on the phone that you expect to be there.
Marco:
Apple does a pretty good job of keeping this reasonably under control, but that's another level of security.
Marco:
It's like an app asking you for your root password on your Mac.
Marco:
Whenever it pops up that dialogue and it's like, hey, we need your root password to install something, you're like, you should think.
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
Why do you need my root password to install something for this, like, calculator app?
Marco:
Like, this probably is not a legitimate request, right?
Marco:
You know, same thing should apply to configuration profiles on your phone.
Marco:
Like, treat it like it's your system root password.
Marco:
Like, you know, do I really need to give this app root access?
Marco:
You know, it isn't quite the same thing technically, but it should be considered in the same ballpark of suspicion and conservatism.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online.
Marco:
With Squarespace, you can stand out with a beautiful website, you can engage with your audience, and you can even sell anything, your products, your content, even your time, all with a Squarespace site.
Marco:
Squarespace sites are super easy to make.
Marco:
It is a gloriously simple platform.
Marco:
Everything is visual.
Marco:
Everything is live previewing.
Marco:
There's no coding anywhere.
Marco:
You don't have to know how to run servers or
Marco:
update security things or anything like that squarespace takes care of all of that for you and you can make all sorts of sites with squarespace especially now you can make storefront sites and this ranges from everything from physical product sales which actually my wife does and she loves it digital product sales you can even have membership you can have member content monetize your content expertise however might fit your brand you can unlock new revenue streams for your businesses free of time in your schedule you can sell access to gated content like videos online courses or newsletters
Marco:
Or you can, of course, sell products in an online store.
Marco:
Whether you sell physical or digital products, Squarespace has all the tools you need to start selling online.
Marco:
You can have email campaigns on Squarespace.
Marco:
All of this is backed up by an amazing platform.
Marco:
You don't have to worry about servers and markup and upkeep and CSS and any of that stuff.
Marco:
They have everything covered for you.
Marco:
They have great support if you need it.
Marco:
And I'm just telling you, it's so easy to make a Squarespace site.
Marco:
Anybody can do it.
Marco:
I've used it myself.
Marco:
I recommend it to as many people as I can.
Marco:
So go to squarespace.com slash ATP.
Marco:
You can start a free trial and actually build the site and see exactly for yourself how you like it in a free trial.
Marco:
No credit card required.
Marco:
When you decide to sign up and you're ready to launch your site, use offer code ATP to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.
Marco:
So once again, squarespace.com slash ATP to start that free trial and use offer code ATP when you sign up for 10% off your first purchase of website or domain.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.
Oh,
Casey:
All right, there have been a lot of kerfuffles and issues with regard to this M2 MacBook Pro, my favorite computer ever.
Casey:
But MaxTech, a YouTube channel that we've brought up several times in the past,
Casey:
They did an extreme stress test, and they exported 8K RAW to 4K HEVC, trying to max out both the CPU and the GPU.
Casey:
And they found that the M1 MacBook Pro was GPU-limited, that's the M1, mind you, and did not throttle.
Casey:
And the fans did not hit maximum RPM.
Casey:
The M2 hit 108 degrees Celsius with the fans at maximum RPM and then had to thermally throttle to get things back under control.
Casey:
So in other words, the fans weren't enough to cool the processor down and the processor couldn't be that hot because
Casey:
So the only choice it had was to choose to operate more slowly until it was able to cool itself down.
Casey:
And then it would say, oh, I'm cool now.
Casey:
Let me ramp back up and operate fast again.
Casey:
And then the fans scream and then it gets too hot and then it cools back down and, you know, it slows down, it cools back down.
Casey:
This whole thing just starts again.
Casey:
And so MaxTech found that the M2 was still 10% faster than the M1 MacBook Pro.
Casey:
And without thermal throttling, the M2 GPU can be up to 35% faster and the M2 CPU can be up to 18% faster.
Casey:
But apparently the thermals on the inside of this thing are not good.
John:
Before we get to some more opinions on that, just to lay out what was put in this video, if you watch it to see the thing, they're picking an extreme test.
John:
Like they're trying to find something that will, you know, light up every part of the system on a ship at the same time, which is hard to do in regular workloads.
John:
Right.
John:
But apparently they did find one.
John:
And, you know, you can watch it.
John:
You can watch the results.
John:
They have these tools that are measuring the clock speed.
John:
And you can watch the clock speeds just drop in half or a quarter.
John:
Like, really hard thermal throttling, again, with the fans going at max, right?
John:
But despite all of that, it's still being 10% faster.
John:
It's like, well, that's not great, but...
John:
you know, your M2 was still faster and you were trying to find an extreme workload that most normal people aren't going to have.
John:
So anyway, take that for what it's worth.
John:
But then there's some debate about this result because some people have not been able to reproduce.
John:
In particular, Gary from the Everyday Dad YouTube channel tried to do the same test with an M2 MacBook Pro rendering 8K Canon RAW footage for 15 minutes straight.
John:
And he said, no fans, no high temps, no anything.
John:
So I think the jury is still out on this.
John:
What I think about it is,
John:
if it's thermal throttling and getting super hot but it's still faster that's not ideal and a better cooling system would be better but one of the things we know about the m2 macbook pro is it's just the old computer like to the point where they where they put stickers over the boxes of the old computer right to make new boxes it's the old computer it's the old case it's the old single fan cooling solution i mean it's not exactly the same cooling solution but it's like it's not they didn't completely redesign this in that this the form factor is the same and the innards are very similar
John:
And on this particular M2 MacBook Pro that MacStack was testing, apparently that cooling solution was not adequate when everything is maxed out.
John:
And, you know, we'll see in the coming days and weeks if people can reproduce this result, if it's widespread, if it's specific to the one test that they were doing or if other people can reproduce it.
John:
But I was kind of amazed that even with massive thermal throttling and incredibly high temperatures, it was still faster.
Yeah.
John:
So it's pretty weird.
John:
We'll keep an eye on this.
John:
If you're looking for yet another reason not to buy this computer, here's one.
John:
And to Marco's point from several shows back, what about the Air?
John:
The Air doesn't even have a fan, and it's got the same chip in it.
John:
Is that going to thermal throttle, and how badly?
John:
Now, obviously, with the Air, it's less important because no one is buying the Air for maximum CPU performance.
John:
You want it to be thin and lightweight and silent and hopefully cool.
John:
and maybe that's not the best machine for you to run your 8k raw renders on all the time right maybe get you know an actual macbook pro for those purposes but uh if you know if this modified five nanometer slightly bigger slightly hotter m2 does have thermal limits even with a fan on it what is it going to be like with no fan i guess we'll all find out when we get our macbook airs and you know i'm still ordering mine day one because
John:
My son is going to be, you know, using it as a glorified, you know, terminal emulator or running, running Google Docs in Chrome or like not doing not rendering AK raw footage.
John:
Right.
John:
So I think for normal uses, it will continue to be difficult to make these things hot and make them make any noise just because it's a very cool system on a chip.
John:
We kind of know the power draw that it pulls and it's around 20, 25, 30 watts.
John:
Which is within a reasonable envelope for fanless cooling.
John:
Is it?
John:
And it's going to be much lower than that in day-to-day usage.
John:
Actually, I should find this link for the notes.
John:
There was a hardware unboxed review that also did a comprehensive review comparing the M2 MacBook Pro to Intel laptops.
John:
And this is a very Windows-centric channel, so keep that in mind.
John:
They're showing the student audience that, in fact, they had a segment that said, but what about macOS?
John:
Well, survey of our listeners shows that 80% want to use Windows.
John:
Like, all right, well, you're a Windows, that makes perfect sense, right?
John:
If you want a Windows laptop, the person was actually kind of disappointed that there wasn't a better way to run Windows on it.
John:
So I feel that, right?
John:
But the important spec for where this is concerned is they were showing how little power the M2 uses when you're doing single core tasks
John:
it's so incredibly energy efficient when you just are using one core, like, you know, for non-parallelizable workloads.
John:
And most of the time when you're just putting around your computer scrolling a web page or typing in Microsoft Word, you're not going to be lighting up all the cores or all the GPUs doing anything.
John:
And a single core blipping on for a second to handle what you're doing is mostly what it's doing.
John:
And you compare that to the power usage of the competitive spec-wise Intel things, and they're using, like...
John:
20 30 watts when a single core is going and the m2 is using eight watts right so it you know the the m2 still has a huge lead when it comes to uh efficiency performance uh performance per watt um and in particular performance when it is not plugged into the wall because a lot of these intel laptops to get the maximum performance to even be competitive with the m2 they need to be plugged in as soon as you unplug them they all ramp down in speed right so i still think the m2 soc is pretty good and
John:
Even in the M2 MacBook Pro, it's still head and shoulders above the competition.
John:
It's just that case is old, there's no mag safe, it's got a touch bar, and the cooling solution may or may not be inadequate.
Marco:
What I'm mostly curious to see here, first of all, was this just a fluke?
Marco:
You mentioned people have trouble reproducing it.
Marco:
That's, in my opinion, a good sign.
Marco:
That means maybe this is just a fluke.
Marco:
But what we need to see when we get the new reviews of the MacBook Air, and
Marco:
Honestly, if pre-orders are opening up in two days, we should get the reviews tomorrow.
Marco:
And as this episode is released today, Thursday morning, as I'm editing this episode, chances are the press reviews will probably drop if there were press reviews on the regular schedule for this product.
Marco:
So we'll see.
Marco:
I don't know if any of the press will do this kind of testing.
Marco:
Who got review units?
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
But what we need to see when we actually get these things in people's hands with the air is...
Marco:
Is it actually pulling 30 watts total package power and trying to cool that passively?
Marco:
Because that's quite a large thermal load, I think, to try to cool passively.
Marco:
When you compare the total package power to previous fanless laptops, I think that's significantly more than them.
Marco:
So we'll see.
Marco:
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think that seems like a lot.
Marco:
There's also the potential that maybe the M2 in the MacBook Air will be clocked lower or will have different thermal maximums before it throttles its speed down compared to the models with fans.
Marco:
We don't know.
Marco:
Until now, all the M1 products, as far as I know, seem to be all clocked the same or at least very, very close to the same.
John:
And apparently they also have the same fan curves from the testing on the studio.
John:
You would think they'd be tuned differently for the bigger cooling solution, but no matter what you did do it, the fans would stay at the same RPM in the Mac studio.
John:
It seemed like, at least on the initial reviews, that the fan curves of all these things, that the clocks were the same and the fan curves were the same.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And so you could assume that M1 meant M1 and it meant the same thing everywhere.
Marco:
It had the same performance everywhere.
Marco:
It had the same rough thermal characteristics everywhere.
Marco:
We don't know if that's always going to be the case with Apple's M-series chips.
Marco:
They could theoretically clock the air lower if they had to for cooling.
Marco:
Something else to consider is that the M2 is based on the TSMC 5 nanometer process still.
Marco:
So they made the whole chip bigger.
Marco:
It's a larger die and made on the same process.
Marco:
So it's...
John:
probably going to run hotter than the m1 it's not it's not the exact same process it's the modified process that does give a slight performance per watt savings over that's what i'm saying like percentage wise it got like x percent bigger and the new process is y percent more energy efficient and i think the percentages are close to each other it got like maybe 10 or 15 percent bigger and maybe it's like nine or 10 percent lower power like that's true it it's not outside the bounds but you know
John:
The expectation is that this would use more power and be hotter because it is bigger and I think it is bigger more than the slightly modified five nanometer process makes up for it.
John:
But the thing to remember with this and the reason that people have trouble reproducing this is it's not just a CPU, it's a system on a chip.
John:
And to make every part of that SOC do work at the same time is actually pretty challenging.
John:
You can't, if you're like, I'm going to do a handbrake render.
John:
You're not lighting up the whole chip.
John:
Well, I'm going to play a game.
John:
You're probably not lighting up the whole chip.
John:
It's actually difficult to do that because you've got to get all the GPU cars and all the CPU cars.
John:
And there are a bunch of ancillary units like that.
John:
You could probably try to do stuff with the neural engine where it's difficult to actually make all that happen at once.
John:
So although the maximum possible sort of heat generating potential is always there,
John:
It's not an artificial workload, but you're not going to stumble into doing it.
John:
You're not going to stumble into doing it by browsing the web.
John:
Unless you're using Chrome.
Marco:
Yeah, I learned there was one time where as part of an experiment, I trained a large ML model on my 16-inch MacBook Pro.
Marco:
And running this huge core ML training thing on this huge data set
Marco:
was the only time I have ever heard the fan on the 16-inch spin-off.
Marco:
I do all my heavy developer stuff.
Marco:
I do all my hobbyist photo and video stuff here and there.
Marco:
I have never heard the fan any other time except...
Marco:
after at least a half hour of maxing out who knows what different kinds of units on this chip doing ml training um which was you know all the cpu cores probably all the gpu cores possibly the neural engine god knows what it was doing it was it was a lot and i barely heard the fans then um so yeah it i think that's a good point to take john that you know chances are in regular workloads you won't see this but what remains to be seen once we get the m2 macbook air in people's hands is uh
Marco:
are the thermals weirder or worse or more limited in some way than the outgoing model this is going to be the first one that was designed from the start to be fanless with the exception of the old 12 inch sorry casey um but you know the the previous the m1 macbook air previously um was you know it's one of these like you know kind of half-assed uh changes to the case uh in the sense there was there was no physical change like they just kind of
Marco:
swapped the intel guts for the for the m1 guts so there was probably not much of a of a thermal consideration there to run this thing fanless whereas now the new m2 macbook air is the first macbook air physical case design that was designed from the start presumably to be fanless so we'll see what it can do and and how it behaves you know there we we learned um at the last one somebody wrote in i forget how this how we learned this but
Marco:
You can't just use the entire metal bottom of the laptop as the heat sink because there are certain standards for how hot a laptop can get in certain countries and everything for like safety and health and stuff.
Marco:
And so the bottom of a laptop can't be like super, super hot.
Marco:
And so you can't just like bond the chip to the case and call it a day.
Marco:
We'll see what they actually did.
Marco:
I'm very curious to see the teardown to this thing and see how it works and then see the benchmarking and see the limitations of it.
Marco:
And honestly, part of the reason I want to play with one is just to figure this out myself to see what is it like to use it because I use the M1 Air so much and I loved it so much
Marco:
And I want to know, how hot does it get in use?
Marco:
Do I ever see it throttle?
Marco:
Can I make it throttle by doing something that's, for example, only stressing the CPU cores, but not the GPU cores?
Marco:
Stuff like that.
Marco:
That's the kind of stuff I want to find out.
Marco:
What I suspect, based on that 29-watt thermal peak that this test video had, what I suspect is that you actually can make the M2 throttle because it seems like Apple is allowing it to run hotter at peak performance.
Marco:
Whereas the M1, it seemed like nothing you could do would make a throttle with the fan models.
Marco:
The non-fan models, you could get a throttle a little bit more easily, but it was hard still.
Marco:
But if the M2, if they're allowing it to have a higher thermal limit in terms of wattage used before they start capping it, then you will have these things in extreme cases.
Marco:
But I think...
Marco:
I hope still that the common case is still going to be very, very cool and reasonable and time will tell.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And letting it sort of go get real hot and go real fast is actually usually a good move in laptops because, you know, you don't always have sustained loads.
John:
You want to be able to go real fast for a second or two, even a minute or two so it can get the thing done and go back to being idle.
John:
Um, but if you need to be able to do a sustained workload, then throttling and clocking down is not great.
John:
But even in the tests, even in the max techs test, it was still faster.
John:
It was constantly bouncing up against the limiter going, Oh, I'm too hot.
John:
It would clock down.
John:
I'm cool.
John:
Now I'm too hot.
John:
You know, it goes up and down and up and down that you don't want it to operate that way.
John:
You want it to be steady.
John:
Um,
John:
But the bottom line is if the job gets done faster, you know, then that's still better.
John:
You know, but as MacSec pointed out, if it didn't throttle, it would be even faster.
John:
You know, the GPU would be 35% faster and the CPU would be 18% faster.
John:
Instead of just the 10% faster, it got bouncing off the heat limiter.
John:
I would imagine that you'll be able to throttle the heat throttle the MacBook Air as well.
John:
But the slim fanless computer, yeah, that's the one I feel like throttling is the most excusable.
John:
The M2 MacBook Pro that's supposed to offer sustained performance, it feels like it should have a better cooling system, especially since it's not like, you know, a 96 watt, you know,
John:
system in there it's only going to a max of 30 watts you should be able to cool 30 watts in a laptop i mean just look at some of the past intel laptops you know you just need a better cooling solution so that it can run sustained on this workload of this 8k raw export for 30 minutes at a time without thralling i think that is a reasonable thing for something in the macbook pro line and i think that's something they achieved with most of the m1 macbook pro models with the m1 pro and m1 max and obviously with the m1 ultra in the uh
John:
mac studio with its noisy but apparently good at cooling fans uh so we'll see um i i'm not sure what kind of stress tests i'll do on my son's uh m2 macbook air because i don't think he's ever going to do anything but i guess maybe i'll run xcode and see if i can at least get the cpu cores to
John:
uh crank up a little bit but i honestly i don't even know what i would use other than like trying to run geek geek bench or you know using uh cinema 4d or whatever the i have a bunch of those benchmark apps or whatever but most of those do not actually stress all the things at once they usually focus either mostly on gpu or mostly on cpu it's actually hard to do useful work stressing all the parts at once
Casey:
All right, John, take me on a tour of system settings in Ventura Beta 3, please and thank you.
John:
Beta 3 just came out today.
John:
I was quickly able to install it and look at some stuff.
John:
Of course, I dove into system settings to see how that's going.
John:
It seems slightly less buggy than before.
John:
I didn't get any items duplicated in the sidebar.
John:
I did still get a little red badge that I couldn't make disappear.
John:
This time I had no idea where it was.
John:
Like if you look at the screenshot in our notes here, you'll see where it has a red badge with a number one in it next to general.
John:
If you click on general, there's nothing in there with a badge.
John:
You can never make it away.
John:
Anyway.
John:
Nice.
John:
Whatever.
John:
Beta 3.
John:
But I also went over to the trackpad thing, which is something that Craig Frateri talked about on the talk show live, saying, oh, the old one had those cool videos and the new one is boring.
John:
So we have something else in mind here.
John:
Well, this is what's in Beta 3.
John:
I don't know if this is what he was talking about or a step along the way, but what they have now are when you click on each one of the things that you can do, like, you know, zooming in or out or, you know, scrolling or smart zoom or rotate.
John:
It has two boxes above that.
John:
Uh, one of them shows a little, uh, you know, diagram of a track pad with two dots on it.
John:
If you ever use the simulator, the Iowa simulator, kind of the same way you see those two dots that are supposed to represent basically the contact patches of your finger.
John:
That's an animation.
John:
It shows the two dots and it shows them like for pinch to zoom.
John:
It shows the two dots close to each other and it shows the two dots spreading apart on the track pad.
John:
And then to the right of that is a sort of stylized abstract representation of a screen.
John:
Like it's got a little dock at the bottom, but instead of app icons, it's just got colored dots and it's got a stylized window with some blank tiles.
John:
It looks kind of like preview with like,
John:
little squares in the sidebar or whatever, and the image it's showing is two circles.
John:
And as those two dots that represent your fingers on a trackpad spread apart, the two circles in the window zoom in, right?
John:
So it's basically doing the same thing as the old thing where before I used to show you a video of a human's actual hands swiping around on the touchpad.
John:
This is showing you the touchpad over here and a, you know, sort of a road sign abstraction of the screen over there saying when you do this in the trackpad, this happens in the app.
John:
I think it's a pretty clever solution, avoiding the having to put videos in there and everything.
John:
But I do wonder if people are going to look at that and have any idea what it is that they're looking at.
John:
Like, I know what it is because I know what it's supposed to be.
John:
I already know how it works.
John:
I already know the answer.
John:
So, oh, that's a trackpad and that's where your fingers are touching.
John:
That's not obvious.
John:
If someone else sees this, they're like...
John:
There's these two balls floating in a box and then there's something else happening.
John:
I'm not sure it is better at communicating the ideas that it's trying to communicate than seeing a human's hand on the trackpad because people recognize human hands pretty well and they recognize, oh, those human hands are touching something that looks like the trackpad that's on the laptop that I'm sitting in front of right now.
John:
I recognize that.
John:
And then seeing what's going on on the screen, having to use like an abstraction.
John:
And then finally, both these things are pretty small.
John:
Like the little area showing the trackpad is pretty small.
John:
Because it's like they're side by side in this very narrow window that you still can't make any wider.
John:
Some people are asking, like, why would you ever want the system settings window to be wider?
John:
There's lots of cases.
John:
Here's one.
John:
You can make those animations a little bit bigger than they are, right?
John:
Sometimes the labels are really long.
John:
Anyway.
John:
So we're making progress.
John:
I didn't go through every single one of the things, but they look slightly better than they did before.
John:
It's still dark, dingy, dark gray and gray.
John:
The switches are still too small.
John:
It's still not particularly readable or nice looking, but it definitely looks better than it did in the last beta.
John:
I mean, it's a low bar.
Casey:
It is a very, very low bar.
John:
It's true, it is.
John:
But you know what?
John:
Betas march along, and this is one thing that they said they were going to change, and so here you go.
John:
Trackpad is not as dire as it was, but I am not convinced that this is an upgrade over what came before.
Marco:
The whole panel looks like... Have you ever come across having children during the digital age?
Marco:
Have you ever come across these YouTube videos that are made for kids that seem procedurally generated with really simple animated shapes and stuff?
Marco:
Have you seen these?
Marco:
The system settings look in Ventura...
Marco:
It looks like it was designed by those people slash algorithms.
Marco:
It makes web apps and electron apps look like great design by comparison.
John:
I do see a little bit of a human touch in the left-hand bar.
John:
The way they organize things and system preference has always been scattershot, and now they're adopting the iOS model, which is it's clear that a human arranged these, but what the human was thinking, not entirely clear.
John:
You know when you scroll through, people are more familiar with their phones.
John:
You go to settings on your iPhone, right?
John:
And they kind of put important stuff up top, but I can never remember like, is the app that I'm trying to find settings for, is it one of those apps that Apple thinks is so important that it doesn't belong mingling with the other apps?
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like phone or camera or Safari versus mail versus stocks, right?
John:
There's a hierarchy in apps of what Apple thinks is important enough to be a regular app versus like, oh, this is kind of part of your phone, right?
John:
and it's it's confusing like there's these weird little sections sometimes you see like app store and wallet together you're like oh that's like money stuff right but then you know there's this whole section above which is like hardware things and then you get to like passwords mail contacts what and then there's a new section music tv photos i guess this is the media section but then there's a separate section for the tv provider and then you get to all the third-party apps which are of course at the bottom right so it's clear that a human did arrange them but every time i look at it it's not like i know right what
John:
what section to go to immediately i know where safari is it's right in this section no i don't know i scroll until i see the safari symbol so it's not a successful organization but a human did it right sidebar and system settings in ventura beta 3 there are sections it's clear that they're broken up in a similar way to ios and i also like the fact that they gave a lot of things names they didn't have before that will hopefully let it make it easier for people to find things like
John:
There's a section that says lock screen, login password and users and groups.
John:
Lock screen is not was not a top level item, has never been a top level item, but is definitely a top level item in people's heads of like the phrase lock screen and the concept of a lock screen.
John:
If you've ever had to use a computer at work and had a lock screen policy mandated, that's, of course, always been a feature in Mac OS for as long as lock screens have exist.
John:
but there was nothing called lock screen.
John:
So I think that's an improvement that some humans said, hey, I want the top level items in the sidebar to be named after things that are in people's heads.
John:
And there's a search bar that actually works pretty well to find stuff as well, right?
John:
And then sometimes you go to a section where it's like keyboard, mouse, and trackpad.
John:
Okay, it makes sense that there's grouped together.
John:
But then you get like passwords, internet accounts, and Game Center.
John:
That's a group of three items, but it's separate from lock screen, log and password, and users and groups.
John:
But where is the privacy and security?
John:
One whole, you know, scale
John:
a section it's up much higher next to spotlight and control center anyway i think most people will just use the search but i but to marco's point about this being like algorithmically generated it almost looks like you know it looks more like to me like it's data driven like you can just spec out this thing and it just spits out this app right
John:
without much of a human touch but then you go into trackpad and it's clear that this is a very custom situation where when you you know you can't tell from the screenshot but when you click on or mouse over one of these rows it changes the animation and then it plays it this is all customized with a little bit of a human touch and the sidebar has a little bit of a human touch but a lot of it does kind of look like you know a very straightforward hierarchy that was just sort of data driven by a plist somewhere and then you just run it through and it produces this app
Marco:
What's with the capitalization of the titles of the options?
Marco:
Natural scrolling, the S in scrolling is capitalized.
Marco:
Smart zoom, the Z in zoom is not.
John:
I mean, is that any different than it is today?
John:
Go look at it on your laptops if you're in front of one.
John:
I don't know if it's any different.
John:
Inconsistent capitalization is not a new thing.
John:
Maybe natural scrolling is a little TM symbol next to it.
Marco:
uh it's no it's still wrong it's that it's still wrong no i just i i hope you know we'll see what happens when when what actually ships here again i i have low confidence in apple's software design team these days um and their ability to ship stuff that that they think is cleaner even though it's worse um because you look at this and it's it still looks like the css failed to load like
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
To me, it looks cheap and sloppy.
Marco:
That's what it really is.
Marco:
It looks cheap and sloppy, and it doesn't look like something that you would expect a company like Apple to make with their reputation.
John:
It doesn't look polished and doesn't look high gloss.
John:
Right.
John:
Mac OS used to look not just like literally high glosses and having specular highlights drawn onto things, but high gloss in terms of someone... If you think of what looks like high gloss, very often the homepage of Apple.com looks high gloss.
John:
Apple's product pages often look high gloss.
John:
They're supposed to look fancy and like...
John:
you know, sophisticated and like someone split it over all the details and then it is made to look attractive.
John:
Now, that's not the most important thing about a UI.
John:
It'd be better for it to be readable, usable, accessible, so on and so forth.
John:
But once you've fulfilled those basics, it's also nice if it looks, you know, attractive and, you know, expressing your brand in some way.
John:
And Apple's brand is very often sort of, you know, sophisticated, minimalist, polished, beautiful looking, right?
John:
And system settings is not yet beautiful.
Marco:
No, I mean, you know, we make fun so much when an app switches to Electron.
Marco:
And we say, oh, my God, they're going to ruin the experience.
Marco:
They're throwing away all this native code, native design.
Marco:
They don't care about the platform, et cetera.
Marco:
You know, I just open up 1Password, and I open up its settings screen.
Marco:
And this is now an Electron app, you know, but you open up its settings screen, and it's a nice, regular Mac-looking preferences screen.
Marco:
You know, it's a couple of custom things in there, but for the most part, it looks like a Mac settings screen.
Marco:
It looks nice.
Marco:
It looks put together and polished and thought through.
Marco:
And you look at the Ventura System Settings app,
Marco:
And it is none of those things.
Marco:
Like it, this is the kind of thing that if an app, like if some popular app that we used switched their setting to look like this, we would make fun of them relentlessly and say they, they've abandoned their customers.
Marco:
They've abandoned the Mac.
Marco:
Like, and so I don't know.
Marco:
It just seems like, I don't know anybody who's going to, who's going to upgrade their Mac or get a new Mac down the road, opens up, opens up for the first time who was ever seen the previous versions and look at this and say, Oh, what a nice upgrade.
Marco:
it looks like a downgrade.
Marco:
And it's going to feel like a downgrade to anybody who is used to the previous one because it's different to begin with.
Marco:
But if you're going to go through the user disruption of moving things around a lot and making them different, it might as well at least be nicer once you get used to it.
Marco:
And I don't know if we've achieved that here.
Marco:
It doesn't look nicer at first glance, that's for sure.
Marco:
And I think a lot of people are not going to feel that this is much of an upgrade the first time they see it.
John:
Yeah, one of the things that's really going to annoy people, we were talking about this just after we recorded last week's episode in one of the slacks that we're in that I think I forgot to mention in the show.
John:
So some of the items on the sidebar, when you click on them, there's a second level.
John:
I think general is like that.
John:
So you click on general on the sidebar and then the right hand detail pane shows more choices.
John:
Right.
John:
I forget what they are because I'm not inventory right now.
John:
But you click on general and then you click on like, I don't know, about this Mac or something or storage.
John:
I don't know what the options are.
John:
Right.
John:
But you click on a second one.
John:
And then when you click on the second one, the detail pane slides over and you get into whatever item you're in.
John:
And system settings remembers what you were in.
John:
It remembers that you went general and then about.
John:
And so what you see on the screen in this state is the general is highlighted in the sidebar, because that's the one you're on.
John:
And in the detail pane to the right of it, you see about this Mac or whatever you picked before.
John:
And if you look in the upper left, there's a left-facing chevron saying, oh, you can go back, like the iOS-style back button or whatever.
John:
Let's say you just close system settings.
John:
Next time you launch system settings and you click on general, it's just going to show you the about thing.
John:
It's not going to show you all the other choices.
John:
Like, there's a two-level hierarchy, and it's really easy to forget.
John:
Like, you're going to be guiding someone over the phone.
John:
It's like, go to system settings, go to general.
John:
Okay, now click, you know, whatever, you know, storage in general.
John:
Like, I don't see storage.
John:
No, did you click in general?
John:
Yeah, I don't see storage.
John:
Well, tell me what you see.
John:
I see, it tells me how much RAM I have.
John:
Okay, you must be on about.
John:
Go back.
John:
So what do you mean back?
John:
Mm-hmm.
John:
Look up at the top of the detail pane.
John:
Do you see a left-facing, like, less than sign, like a sideways V pointing to the left?
John:
Yeah, click that.
John:
And then this is the point where they say, how was I supposed to figure that out?
John:
And you say, I don't know.
John:
It's not, like, being stateful is good, but when you have a UI that is that non-obvious, on the phone it's more obvious.
John:
On the phone we're kind of used to, there's going to be, like, a back left-facing, you know, chevron in the upper left corner to go back.
John:
Like, I think we're used to doing that on the phone.
John:
But on the Mac, when you have all the screen space,
John:
especially when it remembers between launches that when you click on general on the sidebar you don't see the list of all the things under general you see whatever detail plane you were previously in good from like a power user perspective that i don't constantly have to dig back into that if i was in that but from a regular user perspective bad so i think they haven't really sorted out the
John:
Like they try to use this UI to be more scalable.
John:
And I agree, you have all these settings and you want to be able to scroll.
John:
That's great.
John:
I think they should make the window more resizable.
John:
I think we can handle that.
John:
We don't have to have fixed size windows in the Mac.
John:
We can handle windows that resize and the UI tries to be appropriate for the size of the window.
John:
And I think this two level thing under general,
John:
i don't think it's working yet so i don't you know especially since the sidebar scrolls right so how many items are in general like nine put those into the groups on the left hand side make it a flat hierarchy at least then people won't get won't have to guess how many of these items on the left have multiple things underneath them and how many don't because you can't tell by looking at them you just have to know it's a bit of a mess isn't it a bit
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So let me ask you, hopefully this is not a mess.
Casey:
Tell me about shared photo libraries, which I'm super excited.
Casey:
I really honestly am super excited about this.
Casey:
So tell me, is it even close to ready?
John:
I'm excited about it too.
John:
These are the first set of betas, the ones that just came out today-ish, that have support for iCloud shared photo library.
John:
I just tried it on macOS, but I think it's in the iOS betas and the iPadOS betas and all that other stuff, right?
Yeah.
John:
obviously this is a feature that's being added to the existing photos app, which is not great and continues to be not great and really weird.
John:
Uh, but the, the feature they added this specific feature went pretty smoothly for me.
John:
I'm doing a test Apple ID.
John:
Uh, the only hiccup I had is, and this always happens to me is I, you know, I have a test Apple ID and I wanted to make another test Apple ID to be in a family group with this test Apple ID.
Um,
John:
An Apple today on July 6th just would not let me make an Apple ID.
John:
No matter what I did, go to the web, try to do it through the various Mac app system settings.
John:
There's so many different ways you can create an Apple ID.
John:
create a child Apple ID, create an adult Apple ID, create an iCloud.com Apple ID, create an Apple ID for, you know, a Gmail address.
John:
Apple just said no.
John:
I tried for about an hour today to create an Apple ID.
John:
And the farthest I got was a, you know, it was on the final screen of making it happen.
John:
I think I was doing the web and the error message I got was, you cannot create an Apple ID at this time.
John:
Try again later.
John:
And if you Google for that, you see lots of people saying, oh, sometimes Apple servers are weird or whatever.
John:
I'm like, really?
John:
Are there whole days where you can't create an Apple ID?
John:
Anyway, I couldn't create an Apple ID, so I could not actually share my shared photo library with anybody, but it still lets you go through the feature and see how it works just by your lonesome.
John:
So when you launch photos and you go to its settings, it's so weird for me.
John:
I go in there looking for the preferences item and my eyes like skim right over settings like,
John:
where the hell is preferences oh it's called settings anyway if you go to the photos menu you go to settings you used to just have general and iCloud I think now there's a third top level item called shared library and it has a little thing that says you know iCloud share photo library explains what it is and you hit start setup and you go through this little setup process that's pretty simple and it constantly prompts you to add people to your family or do all this stuff or whatever and I had to sort of
John:
cancel out of that and say no i don't have i have a family but i'm the only person in it no i can't create it prompts you at that point to create an apple id would you like to create a child apple id that doesn't work either like you know again on july 6th there was no way to create that very often it would i'd go through the whole process there would say prove you're an adult and it would make you verify your credit card branching the cvv value or whatever right and then it would
John:
ask the person's name and give them an email address and ask for their birthday and do all this stuff and they make you go through many this is again this is on mac native ui inside the photos app it's prompting you to do all this stuff to like create a child account for your family and you'll get to the very last screen and it will show an indeterminate little spinner after you click the like you know do it button uh and it will just spin forever and it will never actually create an app later so i hope that gets fixed eventually maybe it's a ventura beta thing again i tried doing it through safari in ventura as well and it still also wasn't working but anyway
John:
Me and my lonesome test Apple ID as the only person in my family was able to make a iCloud shared photo library.
John:
Once you do that, the settings pane shows the following items.
John:
It says here are the participants and you can add participants.
John:
And I think...
John:
You can add participants that are not in your family.
John:
I didn't know because I'm actually obviously not going to add anybody, any real Apple IDs to this because I'm not, I don't yet trust that it is all working and everything.
John:
And I wouldn't want to, you know, make a shared photo library with like a member of my actual family.
John:
And somehow later I can't add them to my real shared photo library.
John:
So I didn't do that, but.
John:
You can add participants.
John:
There's a checkbox for shared library suggestions that says when enabled, you will periodically receive suggestions for photos and videos that you may want to add to the shared library.
John:
That's another thing I forgot to mention during setup.
John:
It says, hey, we made you a shared photo library.
John:
What do you want to add to it?
John:
And you can pick add all my photos to it or not add to it.
John:
What do you want to move to it?
John:
Move all my photos to it, move photos based on a date, or I'll manually move stuff myself.
John:
And it's not like this is a one-time choice.
John:
Like at any point in the future, you can do any of these things.
John:
But this checkbox is...
John:
photos or something in the os will suggest to you uh when it thinks you should move some photos to the shared library based on i don't know like when that's stuff they talked about in the keynote like when you're in proximity to people or at an event with a bunch of people and taking pictures of them or recognize their faces you know all sorts of suggestions whatever so you can do that or not
John:
um and then the final item is delete notifications we talked about this earlier of like oh anyone you add to the shared photo library can do edits and deletes isn't that bad well if you're afraid of your sullen teenager deleting pictures of themselves they don't like at the very least you can get a notification when they delete a picture and then you can go into recent items and rescue it and i think you can protect recent like recently deleted items with a password so they can't like permanently delete them so that's better than nothing in terms of like making sure someone doesn't like go rogue on your shared library and
John:
hose everything because if you can get a notification and you can password lock the recent deletes that'll help a lot but once you've done that photos launches and it just looks like photos but now at the top there's a new item a new pop-up menu where it has three options you can see your personal library which is just the only thing you would ever see in the previous version of photos is just your photo library right
John:
You can see your shared library or you can see both libraries where it shows you the union of all the photos of your personal and shared.
John:
And that is great.
John:
I was afraid it wouldn't have this feature and you constantly have to switch back and forth.
John:
But no, it will show you the union of them and you can it'll put a tiny little badge on the photos indicating which ones are in the shared library and which ones are not.
John:
This is this is where you start to get into the limitations of the Mac photos app Like the Mac photos app is so stingy about what information it will put on the main sort of photo thumbnail screen It's got this giant canvas with all these little thumbnails And the most it will do is put these tiny little monochrome icons in the upper right hand corner of the photos It's like can you just show me the keywords underneath the photos like you used to know if you say show keywords I think it'll show a little little icon that indicates this photo has keywords or
John:
We're not going to tell you which one.
John:
We don't have room on this screen to put text, but yeah, it's got keywords.
John:
It's got location data.
John:
It will put the file name of all things that it wants to put.
John:
It will put the file name.
John:
Like I want to see the file name of like IMG 0057 dot, you know, geek or whatever.
John:
Like I don't need to see the file name.
John:
Show me the keyword.
John:
Anyway.
John:
all that is to say that it will show you which ones are in the shared library if you squint and you turn that thing on and it will show the the union of both of them and you don't have any limitations you can just use it use that union view all you want you can move things if you right click on a photo you can move that photo into the shared library you can move it out of the shared library the right click menus continue to be really limited some features are in the right click menu some features are only in the menu some features are i mean the menu bar some features are in both places
John:
And when you do move things to shared library, you can do more than one at once.
John:
You just do any kind of selection and right click and do move to the shared library.
John:
It'll show you a little message that says moving these photos to the shared library will allow shared library participants to view, edit, or delete this content at any time.
John:
Just warning you that, you know, hey, when you put it into a shared place, it's no longer just yours.
John:
And it all worked.
John:
Like, I mean, obviously I'm doing a shared library with, I'm just sharing it with myself, but I can take my photos and move them to and from the shared library.
John:
It's even integrated into the import process.
John:
So when you import photos into photos, you can choose if you want to import them into your library or if you want to import them into the shared library.
John:
uh very little surface area for this feature a few pop-up menus one extra item in settings a few items in menus but it does what it's supposed to do like the the limitations of the photos app that make it annoying continue to be there but the addition of this feature does not make them any worse and the addition of this feature i think was done in a way that is pretty obvious i mean it was obvious to me so i'm looking for it but like
John:
there's not there's not a lot to stumble over be confused about there's a couple of new pop-up menus a couple of new little settings and they all are clearly explained and work the way you'd want them to and i am actually very excited about upgrading to aventura now for this feature alone because it's
John:
seems like it seems like it's gonna work and it seems like it does pretty much everything that i want to do the in particular delete notifications is all the peace of mind i need to know that i'm not accidentally messing you know we don't someone doesn't accidentally do something foolish and deletes things that if i get a notification i can just undo that i'll be fine um
John:
um and the fact that i can sort of manually move photos on as i gain confidence like i'll just you know chuck a bunch of photos in i'll just use i'll put the new photos into the shared library or whatever just sort of like i can move to it at my own pace instead of just saying hey we're going to convert your whole library to shared or you have to pick up front which ones do you want to convert that i can do it manually one at a time it still boggles my mind the sort of non-uniformity of ui in photos where um
John:
The right-click menus seem to be made by an entirely different team than the menu bar, and they don't talk to each other.
John:
The copy edits and paste edits thing, it's just so inconsistent.
John:
The keywords, the location stuff, it just does not work like a normal Mac app.
John:
But the functionality is there if you know where to find it and are willing to fight the UI to get it.
John:
But overall, I'm pretty happy with the Mac incarnation of this feature.
John:
I'm using it in a test photo library with a dozen photos instead of a real photo library, which has 145,000.
John:
So we'll see how it goes.
John:
But I give this a cautious thumbs up.
John:
And like I said, using this has made me anxious now to upgrade to Ventura, knowing full well that I can't actually upgrade to Ventura until it's out for real, because there's no way I'm going to subject my real photo library to a beta.
John:
But I'm actually kind of looking forward to it.
Casey:
That's really good news.
Casey:
I'm super stoked about that.
Casey:
That should be really great.
Marco:
Yeah, this is one of those things that, assuming that they get it to work well, it sounds like they're on their path, this is one of those things that we didn't have for years and we're constantly yelling about it.
Marco:
we're going to get it and we're going to instantly forget about it and it's just going to be one of those things that like oh we just have this now like this problem that we've had for so long is hopefully just going to be solved and that'll be it and it'll just you know we apple will have put in all these years of effort turning this to work for about a minute of thanks for the public and then
Marco:
And we're all going to then just take it all for granted and just assume instantly, of course this problem is solved.
Marco:
What are you talking about?
Marco:
Hopefully we're just not going to think about it anymore.
Marco:
Largely, that's how iCloud Photo Library is for individuals with the syncing and everything like that.
Marco:
It largely works very, very well
Marco:
And for the most part, you just don't have to think about it.
Marco:
Most people, you just take a picture on your phone, and a few minutes later, it's on your Mac, and that's it.
Marco:
You can make edits in one place, and it goes to the other one eventually, or quickly.
Marco:
It depends on conditions.
Marco:
It's a pretty good, solid system.
Marco:
You don't hear a lot of stories of people having problems with the iCloud photo library.
Marco:
It's a pretty great, solid system.
Marco:
And so if they went into this with similar care and a similar platform and similar skill, which it sounds like they did, I expect this is just going to pretty much work and we're going to all instantly forget about it, which is great.
John:
Yeah.
John:
One of the things we talked about when we would discuss this feature in the past and you get a lot of pushback, you'd say, oh, that's so complicated.
John:
How are you going to figure out like which photo goes where or what you're looking at?
John:
And there's so many different ways you could do this.
John:
And you want to give individual people control and who has permissions.
John:
And like it is a large, complicated problem space.
John:
And the way Apple has tackled this when they're successful in features like this is they they choose a subset of features that they think is that they can implement and that is understandable to people.
John:
And they make sure that subset is big enough to cover most use cases, but small enough that they can present a UI to it in a way that doesn't overwhelm.
John:
Right.
John:
To give an example of where they may have misfired and it's like focus modes, focus modes overwhelms a little bit.
John:
Like if you try to set that up on a phone and it's asking you all these questions, you have to make all these decisions and it's a little bit overwhelming and it's really kind of a power user feature, right?
John:
And it is very complicated and it's not very clear what's going on.
John:
And shared photo libraries, people are always saying there's no way Apple can do this.
John:
It's too complicated.
John:
People won't understand it.
John:
The way they've chosen to do it is so simple with so few decisions to make and so little new UI to learn.
John:
And the UI that is there,
John:
It's just incredibly straightforward.
John:
Doesn't really require much of an explanation.
John:
It's like you get it and that's it.
John:
And it just becomes, it fades back into the background.
John:
It's not a thing that you think about anymore.
John:
It doesn't have all the features that you can imagine for a shared photo library.
John:
I would like more granular permissions for what people can do.
John:
I would like view only.
John:
So all sorts of stuff you can think of that you could add to this.
John:
But this is a baseline version one to get the thing working.
John:
I don't know if they'll ever expand on it, which is the downside of Mac development at Apple these days.
John:
But I think the subset of features they've chosen is good enough to cover most people's needs, probably also include my own, and is so simple, so not like...
John:
there's no wizard you're going to go through that's going to ask you 8 000 questions there's no really complicated ui i think the ui they previously and probably still have for shared uh photo libraries is more complicated and confusing and worse than this ui and that's a simpler feature so kudos to figuring out the right subset of things to make and again this is just mac photos i don't know what it looks like on the phone
John:
The right subset of features to make this simple for users while still accomplishing the goal, which is I don't want to have to log into my wife's account to deal with the family photos.
Casey:
Yeah, this will be really great because we have the opposite arrangement in our family where I am the keeper of the family photo album.
Casey:
And Erin basically doesn't have squats.
Casey:
She has the last month of her own pictures on her phone and then that's it.
Casey:
And so for her to have access to all of our family pictures going back 15, well, 17 years at the beginning of our relationship, I think that'll be really great for her.
Casey:
And I'm really, really looking forward to this.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Instabug, and WorkCheck.
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 because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, 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, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Tech podcast so long.
Marco:
Oh, I've been doing SwiftUI.
Casey:
Oh, yes.
Casey:
How's that going, my friend?
Casey:
I saw you complaining about that on Twitter.
Marco:
Oh, I had a good talk with Underscore today on Under the Radar.
Marco:
So you should go listen to that.
Marco:
But I've basically resigned myself to the fact that I...
Marco:
if i'm going to continue to be a professional ios programmer like if this is going to continue to be my career i have to jump into swift ui i feel like the equivalent now of having a really big carbon app in like 2008 so it's like you know i can see the writing on the wall for most of the code i have and for most and more importantly for most of the knowledge i have
Marco:
I know Objective-C and UIKit really, really well.
Marco:
And that's not helping me right now.
Marco:
If you were to start writing a brand new app today, if you wrote the whole thing in Objective-C, people would think you're weird and you're going to miss out on a lot of the advantages from tooling and a lot of the newest APIs and things like that.
Marco:
You're making it harder on yourself needlessly.
Marco:
And so no question Swift is the language you should be using for any new iOS or Mac app.
Marco:
But the UI framework thing is a different question.
Marco:
Swift UI is still very early.
Marco:
However, every time I write UIKit code, I get that same feeling as if I'm writing new Objective-C code.
Marco:
Like, I shouldn't be doing this.
Marco:
It's been made a little more complicated by the recent developments in UIKit feel like, if I could borrow a term from Joel Spolsky forever ago, it feels like the UIKit team has been taken over by architecture astronauts.
Marco:
And the amount of abstraction and layers and nitpicky configuration and stuff that's going into the latest changes over the last few years in UIKit...
Marco:
Like where they're going, I don't want to follow them.
Casey:
Can you think of an example offhand where this is getting ugly to you in UIKit?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So all the new button configuration stuff, table cell configuration stuff, collection view, like a lot of this stuff, the old way of doing things was more primitive.
Marco:
But another way to say that is simpler.
Marco:
And they've created these new levels and levels of abstractions and management classes and configuration classes and different things above it that you're now expected to use.
Marco:
And many of the old methods are now being deprecated.
Marco:
Where they're going, like I tried playing with a lot of the new UI kit stuff when I was doing my redesign last fall and winter.
Marco:
And it was just a lot more code to do the same things for me.
Marco:
And it seems like they're optimizing for needs and preferences that are different from mine.
Marco:
I have many similar complaints with Swift itself.
Marco:
I mean, Swift, the language is, I mean, they're in space at this point.
Marco:
I don't know what they're doing in certain areas of the language, but at least most of those mostly don't get in my way.
Marco:
But there are certain things like to fix an iOS 15 deprecation warning, I had to start using async.
Marco:
for one of my cloud kit calls from on the overcast login screen it queries cloud kit for um for the list of accounts that are associated with you with your apple id that way i don't have to get like you know usernames and passwords i can just you know pull from cloud kit here's here's a list of account tokens that i know exist from your apple id and so it's a very very basic cloud kit thing and i had to switch over to an async call they've already deprecated the previous query method for some reason
Marco:
So I had to, you know, edit this totally fine working code that I'd never touch, and adding this, I had to add so many more things everywhere.
Marco:
It's like, in an effort to make this simpler, they've made it even more complex, and in certain cases, like...
Marco:
They went so far over the top.
Marco:
It's just like a simple CloudKit fetch query, like fetch records matching this query.
Marco:
It returns this complicated result object with two different layers of generics, and it's less than, greater than symbols.
Marco:
You auto-complete the closure completion for dealing with these records, and the type it gives you is full of generic gobbledygook,
Marco:
You have no way to know what you're supposed to type into this box to actually like, what type is this variable?
Marco:
If you just let it autocomplete, it errors out and give you an even more complicated error message that you can't understand.
John:
Well, just look at the code examples and documentation, right?
John:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
Got him.
Marco:
So eventually, I had to start looking up Google blog posts about how the heck do you use this stuff.
Marco:
And the answer is, as far as I can tell, is actually it's some kind of complicated result result.
Marco:
And you have to...
Marco:
Say, like, you know, result.zero.result or something.
Marco:
And that's actually in your shipping code that you have to have that.
Marco:
Result.zero.
Marco:
Like, who is designing these things?
Marco:
And I'm sure they have their reasons.
Marco:
They have very smart people there.
Marco:
But whatever they're doing in certain areas...
Marco:
is drifting apart from any way I think of coding and any way I want to be coding.
Marco:
And UIKit itself is, in many ways, going in that direction.
Marco:
And so heading back a few levels in the stack here, SwiftUI, I think, is what I need.
Marco:
If I'm going to keep making iOS apps for my career, and that's my intention, then SwiftUI is what I have to learn.
Marco:
I've resigned myself to that.
Marco:
I don't necessarily have to have everything in the app be SwiftUI.
Marco:
That, I think, is probably still too early for that in terms of the framework's development.
Marco:
But I have to start using a lot of SwiftUI and really getting good with it and using it by default and only bailing out of it when I really have to as opposed to bailing out of it for comfort reasons or for familiarity.
Marco:
So that's where I am now.
Marco:
And I was, I've, I've been working on it all day, trying to like replicate some of the basic structure of Overcast in SwiftUI just to see like, is this even possible?
Marco:
I'm slowly getting there.
Marco:
It is, it is a slog, but I'm like, I'm, I'm finally in like the very, very slight upswing part of it where like, I'm starting to finally get some traction and some progress.
Marco:
And so I'm like,
Marco:
just starting to be motivated to keep going on it so that's that's my my mood for the day my mood update i know this is my feelings podcast because i don't have one unlike you guys so this is this is where i am today i am slowly getting better at swift ui and slowly starting to think i should probably switch to it because the alternative would be like if i said yeah i'm just going to use carbon forever you know in 2008
Marco:
Well, that's going to limit your career then.
Marco:
And the usefulness of your code base.
Marco:
You're going to definitely put a cap on the age of that.
Marco:
Well, this is how I feel about... First of all, Swift obviously is a requirement at this point.
Marco:
All of my Objective-C code, I regret it all.
Marco:
I wish it was all Swift because it would make certain things a lot easier.
Marco:
But Swift UI, I think, is that now.
Marco:
I think...
Marco:
the idea like right now the the way you would feel about writing objective c code in a brand new app today i think we're going to feel that way about writing ui kit code instead of swift ui in maybe three to five years it may be sooner probably not but i'm guessing five years from now the idea of writing a brand new screen or a brand new app using ui kit instead of swift ui is going to seem very backwards and
Marco:
So I want to, for once, be slightly ahead of things and go where the puck is being thrown.
Marco:
Because I'm tired of my knowledge and my code base being out of date.
Marco:
And so I want to actually move forward at a reasonable time instead of five years too late.
John:
Well, you waited until they had a WWC where they said, hey, dummy, UIKit.
John:
Mm-mm.
John:
AppKit, no.
John:
Switch UI, yes.
John:
But yeah, as we said when we talked about the WWDC thing, that is an aspirational goal.
John:
They're not there, but they have clearly indicated directions.
John:
So yes, you're moving now.
John:
To assess your level of, not level of frustration, but level of...
John:
How far have you gotten into SwiftUI?
John:
One good indicator, I think, is have you yet implemented an if modifier as an extension on Vue in SwiftUI?
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
Because I feel like everyone who encounters this...
John:
I mean, it's you Google for it and you'll find it because when you're writing Swift UI and you're not used to declarative, you're like, can I just write a conditional?
John:
And you can write conditionals in Swift UI.
John:
Like you can do it, but it's not, but it's not like it's, it looks like a regular Swift conditional, but it's not right.
John:
And there are things you can't do from it because it's not a real conditional.
John:
So it is possible to make, you know, you can just do, you know, like dot padding, you know, dot accessibility label, dot whatever, you know, dot modify as you're dot chaining off of the various things in a Swift UI view.
John:
You can make a dot if.
John:
uh and it was like like a week into this when i said you know what f it i need something it's like dot if and you just google for it and it's like you know it's like 10 lines of code it's really easy to do and once you have it you're just you know like i feel better i mean i know you're kind of like fighting against the declarative nature but sometimes it makes things so much easier kind of like a view that fits that they added i love their naming it's like it's just this frustration of like well sometimes i want to have this view but sometimes when the thing is this size i want to have this view and
John:
I can do all this geometry reader stuff to figure out which one's going to fit and use the right one.
John:
And this is a case where I'd be like doing an if like dot, if this, then do this kind of unit, but they made a whole built in, you might not built in, but like part of situation is view that fits.
John:
And you just say, Hey, here's the two possibilities.
John:
Just pick the one that fits.
John:
Like, don't make me do the math.
John:
Don't make me figure it out.
John:
You know, view that fits.
John:
I feel like dot if is a similar type of thing where you're like, I could do this another way, but just dot if, right.
John:
I still have a place in my code where I want to do an H stack or a V stack based on some value.
John:
And I can't figure out how to do that because you can't do like dot if, you know, because I want to say, I guess I could take everything that's in the H stack and the V stack and break it out into a function.
John:
And it's like, but I don't want to do that.
John:
It's not that much stuff.
John:
So now I have like, if this H stack else V stack, and I wish I could do H stack or V stack.
John:
based on this parameter that is something you could write but i take your point no you totally can write that like that's the same thing with dot if like all it is is it's not syntactic sugar directly because there is actually it is actually doing some more stuff of like wrapping things in interview or whatever but like but it's just like i don't want to see as much stuff here so i wish i could make this more compact we'll break it out into another sub function there's no efficiency problem swifty well would have squished all back here but i don't want to break it out into another function i just want to do it here and the
John:
Then you end up doing extension view and you just start typing stuff.
John:
And so many people have done this.
John:
I bet if you search GitHub for extension view open curly brace, you would find so much stuff.
John:
Because to SwiftUI's credit, you can make all sorts of view extensions.
John:
that do really cool things and are super convenient but it's kind of like well once you have that hammer everything looks like a new view modifier you're just like i'm gonna make my own view modifiers i'm gonna call whatever i want and they're gonna do you know you can paint yourself into a corner but i feel like dot if is a flagpole of like when you get when you reach the level of frustration of not understanding how it wants you to do things you're like can i just have if and you make that if
Marco:
that's impressive i i haven't reached that level of hacks yet but one one level i've used a lot is like making a custom view modifier just to get around the lack of an if available construct for like if i'm if i want a modifier on something that's only available say on ios 15 and i'm writing for ios 14 and 15 then you have to basically make a custom view modifier that's like you know
Marco:
ios 14 compatible version of this and like you know inside of it like well if available this then modify the view like this otherwise don't modify the view and it's just it's one of those like frustrating things like you know because you can't use a real if statement in a in a dot chain then you can't use if available in a in a regular clean way but you can use it with dot if i i just put a paste bin for you it's 10 lines of code don't paste this into your code it'll be so easy and tempting to use
John:
This is amazing.
John:
That's it.
John:
It's not complicated code.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
What a ridiculous thing this is.
Casey:
This is both awesome and sad all at the same time.
Casey:
Oh, man.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I have such mixed feelings about SwiftUI.
Casey:
And I think because I'm a really crummy...
Casey:
ui designer and developer i there's a lot that i like about swift ui because i think it helps me as someone who is an amateur at best when it comes to this stuff it helps me create things that i think are aesthetically pleasing without me feeling like i'm getting bogged down in pixel perfect bs where i'm trying to get ui kit to do something that it doesn't really want to do
Casey:
and and i think that swift ui makes a lot of stuff making it makes making things pretty a lot easier for me anyway but the downside is as many people have said many many times when you hit a wall in swift ui it's one of two things it's either like a a screen on my screen in porch where you can push your way through it if you really try like you can do dot if if you will or you
Casey:
It is the Great Wall of China, and there is no getting through it, over it, around it, etc.
Casey:
You shall not pass.
Casey:
There is nothing you can do.
Casey:
And those situations are so incredibly frustrating.
Casey:
And so often, things that you think should be easy, and I wish I could think of an example of this, but things that you would think should be easy are very, very, very difficult.
Casey:
Now, the flip side of that is things that oftentimes you would expect to be difficult can be very easy.
Casey:
But when the easy stuff is super hard, it's just infuriating.
Casey:
And so I waffle in typical Casey style.
Casey:
I waffle back and forth between this is the greatest thing I've ever seen in my life.
Casey:
And this is a pile of garbage that I wish I never saw before.
John:
i was thinking of something that uh one of those type of things that if there's no way to do it you have kind of problem i'm thinking of the type of hacks that i don't know they seem natural to do in an imperative language one of the examples is i have a place in my code where i'm i'm setting i have a bunch of like enum values or something for uh that are going to appear in a pop-up menu right and i i put them in the order in the enum like in the order i want to see them in the pop-up menu just for convenience again i'm not writing a big fancy app it's simple i'm like
John:
Why not make my life easier when I put them there?
John:
But actually, what I want on the real pop-up menu is I want there to be a separator between, like, you know, the first two items, then a separator, then the rest of items, right?
John:
And there's a million ways to do that in AppKit.
John:
It's really easy to add a separator or whatever.
John:
But being a lazy programmer, you're like, I kind of like this being data-driven.
John:
I kind of like just being able to define the enum and put a comment above that says, by the way, the order of these things is important.
John:
It's the order that are going to appear in the pop-up menu.
John:
And being able to add something that will automatically make the separator appear,
John:
And Applicant doesn't have that functionality.
John:
Applicant doesn't know, hey, give me an enum, and there's no way to express a separator item in an enum, because it shouldn't be tied to the UI, right?
John:
But I have this whole data-driven structure that's saying, here's going to be the contents of my menus and everything, and the enum is part of it.
John:
And in that definition, I can put an item that's just a string that's a hyphen.
John:
And then in the code, when I'm building that pop-up menu, I can say, oh, and by the way, if the item you got is not a menu item, but it's just a hyphen, put it in a separator.
John:
And I can do that because it's an imperative language and I can hook into any phase of the process.
John:
I can hook into the thing of like, here's where I'm building this pop-up menu and here's the data I'm being driven off of to do it.
John:
And I just feed this data in and it goes into the generic system and it says if it's a menu item, put the menu item in there.
John:
And if it's an enum, use the label of the enum and have the value be the value of the enum.
John:
Like it's, you know, data-driven code.
John:
You don't want to do everything by hand, right?
John:
But what if you need a separator?
John:
I'll just throw a hyphen in there and I'll say, I'm writing the code.
John:
I'm at the point where I'm reading the thing.
John:
If I see a hyphen, just put in a separator.
John:
that type of plumbing that type of like override this method and write your imperative code here is not how swift ui works it's declarative it's not like you're going to like subclass a thing and override the methods where you want to override and do this on setup and this on teardown or whatever that's not how it works right and so there's not really a convenient place to say like i'm laying out a context menu and by the way i want it to be data driven or whatever and you can do that by you know making a view modifier that says it's
John:
dot data driven context menu and then in the dot data driven context menu view extension put all that imperative code again but you feel like you're mode switching you feel like it's not you know i shouldn't be writing a you know my own extensions to view every time i want to do something it's just a different way of thinking about it um but when you're faced with that situation as with ui you're like but then what do i do like you know do i make you know the fallback that maybe you know
John:
You can always just do a thing where you say, I'm going to fall back to AppKit, or I'm going to fall back to UIKit, or I'm going to make this whole thing driven by UIKit, but then have this subset of it be SwiftUI, do something like that.
John:
And I do wonder about, I think it mentions about shows, what would you do if there was no UIKit?
John:
What would you do if there was no AppKit?
John:
Well, you know, SwiftUI wouldn't work because half the things it's doing under the cover use UIKit and AppKit.
John:
But setting that aside...
John:
if there was no lower level to drop down to how would you do the weird imperative thing where you look for a hyphen in a data structure and when you you write some code that's when it sees that hyphen it adds a menu separator which is not a feature of any framework it's just some bs you made up yourself to make your thing more convenient so you wouldn't have to manually write a bunch of code i don't know i think about that when i'm when i'm doing hacks like that of like hey if this wasn't here what would be my alternative and i don't really know the answer
Marco:
I think it would be largely like the earlier days of the web, where a lot of times, suppose you wanted to, say, have a very custom behavior or appearance of a certain form control, and browsers would render it using some kind of UI widget from the platform, and a lot of times, certain customizations just wouldn't be possible.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
answer well what we would do is you'd make an image you'd say okay this is not going to be a you know a submit button it's going to be an image and i'm going to use javascript that when i'm going to get the mouse down on the image and i'm going to change the image to be the mouse down like you'd basically custom implement your button in fact this you know in in switch glass my little app that shows one tiny thing on the screen i was using the swift ui button capital b uh you know type for my buttons for like
John:
I don't know, more than half of the versions until I just gave up because I could not get it to do what I wanted to do.
John:
And I just had to stop using button and basically re-implement my own button the same way you would do it on the web, you know, back before CSS could style submit buttons.
John:
You'd make it an image.
John:
You'd try to grab mouse down yourself.
John:
You'd set your own mouse down state.
John:
You detect mouse up.
John:
You detect like you basically re-implement button, half-assed re-implementation of button just so you can get it to do what you want it to do.
John:
and of course it doesn't look like the native UI and of course the real solution is please let us use CSS style form controls which took many years for it to come but yeah that's the alternative is like well I can't use Button I give up I tried for six months and Button just has too many bugs and my thing by the way the bug was like
John:
If you drag something, if you pick a file off your desktop and drag it over my window, it's already weird that you can drag something over my window because it's a floating palette and the active app is Finder, not the thing, but you want it to react to your drag and you want it to detect your drag and you want it to highlight.
John:
That thing where you're already holding down the mouse button and you drag a thing over it, you could wiggle it back and forth over my palette and you could get the SwiftUI button into a state where it didn't realize you were no longer on it and the mouse over state would stay stuck.
John:
Like you'd have to wiggle it a lot, but you could do it.
John:
Like you could outrun the mouse tracking.
John:
And I just could not get rid of that bug because I don't control that.
John:
I don't control the mouse tracking.
John:
That's happening in the layer below.
John:
If I was using AppKit, I would control it because AppKit, I have access to all that mouse tracking and mouse tracking regions and all that other stuff.
John:
But I'm not using AppKit.
John:
It's SwiftUI button that's saying, oh, SwiftUI button.
John:
Don't worry.
John:
It knows when the mouse is over it.
John:
it doesn't it gets confused and then my app has a cosmetic bug because now it the highlighted state gets stuck and you know you you put the the file back down on the desktop and you look up at the thing and it's stuck so i had to give up a button and i had to implement it myself and that's that definitely felt like web ui of like oh you can't style uh form controls with css implement it yourself with an image map
Marco:
oh those were the days i'm hoping that so the discipline i'm going to try to have here is to be more flexible on my requirements and to actually give in a lot of those cases where if the you know stock behavior of some control or the achievable the easily achievable behavior of some control or appearance of some control is not exactly what i want but i can make it work
Marco:
You know, then I'll just make it work because one goal I have here, you know, I have eight years of code here.
Marco:
And so my UI kit code is even my UI kit code is not only in objective C. So it's, you know, typically more verbose than a Swift equivalent.
Marco:
But also it's like using all old UI kit methods of doing things.
Marco:
So there's, you know, a lot of kind of boilerplate going on everywhere and, you know, manually setting, you know, borders and stuff like that all over the place.
Marco:
i'm hoping and i think this is reasonable to expect that a swift ui re-implementation of a lot of this stuff should be way less code and that would i would see a lot of value in having way less code especially the ui level so i'm hoping that's achievable here and if it is i'm willing to give up some of the little details if it ends up being way less code
Casey:
I think that's a reasonable and pragmatic trade-off to make.
Casey:
And I'm dubious that Marco Arment is capable of making that trade-off just because I know how much you like things to be exactly just the way you want.
Casey:
But if you can stick with it, I think that's a perfectly, perfectly reasonable and, again, pragmatic trade-off to make.
Marco:
That's a big if.
Casey:
That is a big if.