Dangerously Close to Being on a Phone Call
Marco:
it's a party here once again on a wednesday night join us in our clubhouse have either one of you done that i just installed it tonight and i just i did one dog walk with it and just listening i'm not i'm not gonna say anything for a while uh just listening and um i have not yet seen why people like it but that doesn't mean it's not there it just you know i need more time with it
John:
Before you tell me anything about it, I'm going to tell you what I think it is based on nothing other than third-degree tweets about tweets about tweets about Clubhouse.
John:
Okay.
John:
My impression, like multi-degree separated, is...
John:
that it's a thing where people are either lurking like you or are on audio speaking.
John:
And it's like, imagine if you had a Skype call, but instead of there just being the three of us on the Skype call, there were 50 of us on the Skype call.
John:
And probably there's some way to determine who is allowed to speak at various times and who is ever going to be allowed to speak or whatever.
John:
But in general, like a bunch of people in a big audio chat room, and the draw is that sometimes famous people come in and say things in real time that are really dumb that aren't recorded for posterity because people don't know how to record audio on their devices yet.
John:
um and and it's exciting to hear famous people talk just kind of like the same way it was exciting on twitter to see a famous person type something like that they wrote themselves presumably it brought you closer to famous celebrities than going through their publicist back in the day now you can hear them on audio presumably the next step is chat roulette where we get to see random people on video and then just you know how that ends that's my impression how close am i to what clubhouse actually is
Marco:
uh i again based on one evening of listening to it uh that seems about right but again i this i don't want to be one of those people who like makes broad proclamations about this thing and then like two months later i'm proven grossly wrong and everyone's using my clip and they're worth 10 billion dollars and everyone's like oh look at this podcaster who didn't get it because it attacked podcasting like
Marco:
Honestly, I have absolutely zero interest in it.
Marco:
The only reason that I asked a friend for an invitation is because everyone's saying this is going to like disrupt podcast.
Marco:
And I figured, well, I'm in the podcast business.
Marco:
I should probably know about this.
Marco:
I should probably have some knowledge of this thing that has the risk of disrupting my business or at least changing what my business needs to be.
Marco:
And I think the risk of that is actually pretty low, honestly, like based on my listening to it for, again, one afternoon.
Marco:
It seems like it's a very different kind of thing.
Marco:
And as a podcast listener, I mean, we've all, dear podcast listeners out there who listen to this show, you all like podcasts.
Marco:
But we've seen over the years many businesses and apps and startups and things like that that seem to be designed by people who hate podcasts to try to make it easier for them to somehow get value out of podcasts while hating them.
Marco:
This seems like it might be in that ballpark.
Marco:
And so for people who actually really love podcasts, I don't think this is going to be for you in the same way that it hasn't really caught on for me yet.
Marco:
Because the whole time I'm listening to it, I'm thinking of all the things about podcasts that I miss.
Marco:
Now, this could, again, this take could age poorly.
Marco:
When new things come out, people often just complain that they're not enough like the old things they're used to.
Marco:
So I'm aware that this could be a bad take.
Marco:
This could take off and be huge, and I could be totally wrong, and I could be cringing listening 10 years from now at this take I'm having right now.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
So far, when I listen to Clubhouse, I guess when I'm on there, I don't know what the verb is.
Marco:
When I'm listening to a Clubhouse club room, I just miss podcast luxuries.
Marco:
I miss things like pausing and speed control.
Marco:
And people who have some kind of production value and audio quality in their show.
Marco:
And people who perform editing for content.
Marco:
I miss all the things that make podcasting really good.
Marco:
And in some ways, when we moved from old media to new media in many ways.
Marco:
Think about when we moved from magazine articles to blog posts.
Marco:
It's like here's this thing that this old need was being served this way.
Marco:
In this new way, you aren't limited to the bounds of a magazine or what one publisher selected or what 10 authors wrote.
Marco:
You can read something from anybody, and it can be any length it needs to be, and it can be published as often as it needs to be published, and you can index it and search it.
Marco:
All these luxuries you got via technology.
Marco:
I feel like if what you're looking for is podcast-like entertainment or information or conversation or amusement, Clubhouse is like the opposite.
Marco:
It's like going a step backwards.
Marco:
It's like going back in time to like AM talk radio shows.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
By amateurs.
Marco:
Now, people said a lot of this exact same stuff about podcasts when they were new.
Marco:
Lots of radio people said podcasts were crappy productions of people who were boring and yammering on forever.
Marco:
So I get...
Marco:
why i should probably not be saying all this stuff but it's so far it's the best the best analogy i can give is like i've never been one of the people and i think this makes me weird not them but i've never been one of the one of the people who sits down and just turns on the tv and watches quote what's on
Marco:
When I want to watch something, I sit down, I seek out a particular thing I want to watch, or I browse for, like, you know, what's available right now, what's new, and I pick a show and I watch that show.
Marco:
I don't just turn on, like, a channel and see what's on.
Marco:
I recognize that makes me the weirdo, because it seems like almost everyone else is the opposite.
Marco:
But podcasting, to me, is like the radio or audio version of selecting a specific thing you want to hear because you care, and you will seek out those things, and you will listen to them, and you will listen straight through, and you don't want to miss a few minutes when you're pausing and having to talk to somebody in the street or getting out of your car for a few minutes or whatever.
Marco:
You want to pay attention.
Marco:
To me, Clubhouse is the just sit back and watch whatever's on of audio.
Marco:
And that's fine.
Marco:
There's a huge market for that probably, but I'm not in it.
John:
Yeah, the chat room is all talking about introverts and extroverts, which is exactly what I was thinking when you're describing it, because a lot of the I feel like a lot of the sort of foundational technologies of the Internet, if you squint at them, kind of look like things made to fit within a stereotypical introverts lifestyle and worldview.
John:
Um, and the example I was thinking of for Clubhouse is the opposite of that, which is, uh, it's getting dangerous close to being on a phone call.
John:
So is it because a bunch of introverts made the internet?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I mean, that's probably not true, but like, it's true that sending an email is less pressure than being on a real time phone call, you know?
John:
It's true that asynchronous communication is less pressure than synchronous communication in whatever form it's in, right?
John:
It's true that being in your house in your pajamas is more comfortable than having to get dressed up and go to an office.
John:
Like all that stuff, like technology and lots of foundational internet communication mediums and protocols are ideally suited to people who don't want to interact with people all that much.
John:
And that probably means that the portion of the population that doesn't like that is ill-served by those technologies.
John:
And so as technology improves and we can better serve the desires and needs of people who do want to socialize, I think that's probably a good thing.
John:
for technology and in the podcast analogy a podcast is like they don't know you're listening to them and you can listen to them at your leisure how you want where you want with no pressure and feel like you have this relationship with these people who are in your ears but never have to actually meet them or talk to them and you know just like watching a tv show or a movie or reading books that is an ideal relationship with creations and creators for a lot of people but for other people it isn't and they want to talk to people and have an exchange and you know socialize essentially only over the computer
John:
and podcasts don't fill that need and email doesn't fill that need and text messaging even doesn't fill that need when it's you know minutes or hours between messages but real-time audio communication fills the need it's like well don't we already have real-time audio communication isn't that just a phone call yes but what if it could be like a party line what do you remember those from the 80s where they pick a party line telephone where everyone would call up and then there'd be a bunch of people talking on the phone at the same time someone who has
John:
Better knowledge of 80s party line history can probably point to some cool web page going deep on what those were like.
John:
And that was more of a free-for-all, I'm sure, clubhouses.
John:
More refined than that.
John:
But I think services, protocols, or as they say in the chat room, features.
John:
If this is not a product, then maybe it's a feature that will quickly be, you know, stolen by all the big wigs.
John:
So eventually Instagram will have clubhouses and Facebook will have clubhouses and all that other stuff.
John:
That serve needs other than the needs of introverts to hide in their house in their pajamas and absorb entertainment in a pressure free way.
John:
I think it's probably good for those things to exist.
John:
All that said, as an introvert, it's probably not for me.
John:
Like even though I sit here and talk into a microphone all week.
John:
I'm not really raring to go when it comes to the idea of essentially having a real time phone call with strangers.
John:
Just not into that.
John:
But it doesn't mean this is not a useful and necessary and potentially wildly popular idea and be going to be very successful, whether it's through Clubhouse or, you know, someone else who takes this ball and runs with it.
Casey:
So I've had a Clubhouse account for a couple of weeks, but I have never remembered to listen in on any of the chats at a time when it was convenient to do so.
Casey:
And so I'll be sitting there and think to myself as I'm trying to watch a TV show, oh, I should listen to a Clubhouse.
Casey:
Well, I can't do that right now.
Casey:
I'm in the middle of watching a TV show.
Casey:
Or, oh, the kids are around.
Casey:
Don't want to do that.
Casey:
And so I haven't even done as much as Marco has, even though I've had my account for a couple of weeks.
Casey:
But my understanding of it, even though everything you guys said, I think, is accurate and I agree with, including that my take might be terrible.
Casey:
One of the things that I think is worth noting is my limited understanding is that you can have someone in the quote unquote audience come up and join the chat.
Casey:
So, for example, if we were on Clubhouse right now.
Casey:
And we found that somebody had a particularly interesting thing to say in the IRC chat room.
Casey:
Well, if this was Clubhouse, we could say to that person in the chat room, we could bless them with the ability to talk on our show.
Casey:
And I think that's a very interesting and novel idea, having never experienced it yet.
Casey:
And I like the idea that...
Casey:
you can have a regular Joe Schmo join in on a chat with a celebrity of any size, you know, a celebrity the size of us, which is to say not really a celebrity at all, or an honest-to-goodness celebrity, you know.
Casey:
And I think that that's super neat and novel because it is very much like, I forget which one of you guys said it, but very much like Twitter, where you're watching these celebrities, but even more so, you can talk to these celebrities.
Casey:
And with Twitter, you're talking via your keyboard.
Casey:
With Clubhouse, you're talking with your voice.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And that I think is clever and novel and interesting, whether or not it's my cup of tea.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Again, I haven't really properly tried it yet, but it doesn't strike me as the kind of thing I would like.
Casey:
But I definitely do want to give it an honest shake before I make up my mind.
John:
It's a perfect opportunity for Melinda to do his pre-taped call-in gag from... Was it from Mr. Show?
John:
Where, you know, if you wanted to call in about the pets or the elderly, you should have called in last week.
John:
Because, anyway, it's a complicated joke for me to explain, and I can't do it.
John:
Sorry.
Casey:
Give me the bullet points, John.
John:
I can't even do the bullet points.
John:
But, yeah, it's like a call-in show.
John:
I mean, we've all seen call-in... You know, AM talk radio is like that.
John:
Hello, call.
John:
You're on the line.
John:
What do you have to say?
John:
And they're pre-screened and all this stuff.
John:
But now this is the...
John:
uh disintermediated version where you're just plucked from the audience and allowed to talk i thought it was even more of a free for all than that and maybe it can be but uh but yeah if you have people picking people to come in and then you know then you get it's just a new venue for people to say baba booey i guess right like or worse or much worse
John:
because once you bless them to talk now they have the microphone and everyone can hear them and yeah chat roulette let's never forget but anyway i don't i don't mean to say that it's not a good thing and i definitely want to try it mostly the reason i want to try it is because i want my damn username do they have usernames
Casey:
Yes.
John:
I probably already don't have my username.
John:
You should cut this part out of the show.
John:
Someone's going to go and steal my username because I don't have an invite.
John:
Do you want me to give you one?
John:
Yes, please do.
Casey:
Well, that's the other thing.
Casey:
Very quickly, I have like five invites, please don't ask me, but I can't use them because the only way to use them is to let Clubhouse have access to slurp up all of your contacts.
Casey:
I would absolutely send you an invite right now.
Marco:
Nope.
Marco:
Sorry, John.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
So I would send you an invite right now, John, if it wasn't for the fact that the only way to do an invite is to bless contacts access to the app where you know they're going to slurp up all of your data and do probably something terrible with it.
John:
You probably have a spare device that you can turn off contacts from iCloud and delete all your contacts and send me the invite code, right?
Casey:
Do I really like you that much?
John:
I mean, don't you have spare devices hanging around?
Casey:
Don't you have things you test on?
John:
So easy just to log out of iCloud and turn off your contacts.
Marco:
All right, so I have a quick hot take on that, actually.
Marco:
Why is the address book API still a thing?
John:
yeah my opinion is that apple needs to deprecate and remove the contact access api the address book api i i strongly disagree but no it should it should be like photos do you want this app to have access to one photo that you select to all your content like and there's so many ways to do the exact same features with no loss of functionality without actually giving the app access to your contacts you know what i mean
Marco:
I don't want the ability for people with one or two taps to be able to share their entire address book, even with their permission, to some new app.
Marco:
Because here's why.
Marco:
The reason why this is kind of a special case is that when you grant access to your address book to some app...
Marco:
That app not only has access to your personal information, but to the personal information of potentially hundreds of other people who didn't consent to that.
Marco:
And so it's different when you're sharing your photo library, you're sharing your information.
Marco:
You are choosing and saying, I'm going to share my information with this app.
Marco:
When you share your contact list, you're sharing a bunch of information from people who did not consent to that and can't consent to that.
John:
It's basically the same thing.
John:
Because when you share your photo library, you're sharing photos of people who may not have consented for you to share their photo with this company, but you have pictures of them.
John:
Oh, it's a very different thing.
John:
No, because actually it's not even... Contacts is actually better because presumably someone gave you that contact info, whereas you took that picture of that person.
John:
They may not have consented to that photo, but they were in public, so they have no choice, and now their photo, you're giving it to somebody else.
John:
It's the same deal.
John:
Implicitly, when someone gives you information...
John:
or when you get information through some means that is deemed acceptable, like taking a photo in public, there's an understanding that you can then take that information and do something else with it that they don't control.
John:
That's the price of giving it to you.
John:
So if you give someone your contact information,
John:
you understand that they could share that kind of information with whoever they want.
John:
Now, you can get mad at them about it, and you can say, I wish they wouldn't share with these app vendors, and you can be mad at an API saying they didn't mean to share it or they don't understand what it means to share it.
John:
But in the end, it's the same thing.
John:
Once you give the information to someone else, it's under their control.
John:
Who knows what could happen to it from there?
John:
And I feel like photos are very similar.
John:
I mean, you're thinking of like, ah, someone's in the background of a picture.
John:
That's not a big deal.
John:
But what if it's like a photo of a personal nature, let's say?
John:
And that's why we have laws against, you know, revenge porn and all sorts of stuff like that.
John:
But even if it's just an embarrassing picture of you looking goofy and you really wish that person hadn't uploaded it to some thing that put it online for everyone to see and find forever.
John:
You know, I think in both cases, I'm with you that I think there should be much more control over what's shared and it should be much harder to indiscriminately share.
John:
But...
John:
I think that both situations are similar in that once you give information that you care about to somebody else, you are at their mercy somewhat.
John:
You're at the mercy of their decisions to some degree.
Marco:
Yeah, but I think there's a huge difference in degree and in actionable uses between leaking of other people's data through photo access and through contact access.
Marco:
I mean, through photos, what are you going to do?
Marco:
Like, upload photos?
Marco:
two terabytes of photos to your service but that's somebody noticing like that's that's kind of a big deal and then once you have those photos what do you like are you going to like analyze every single one of them to try to match faces whereas like a contact book the entire contact book is uploaded within what a few hundred kilobytes then you have all the data in seconds and then every single bit of that data is instantly cross-referenceable to to get you know emails phone numbers from all these people and
Marco:
And so the degree of leaking other people's personal data and the ease with which it is leaked through the address book API is so much higher and easier for bad actors to use.
Marco:
You can instantly spam them because now you know how to contact them.
Marco:
So you can instantly spam these people.
Marco:
You can send emails.
Marco:
You can send text messages.
Marco:
You can cross-reference those phone numbers with other databases and everything.
Marco:
It's such a different degree that...
Marco:
Apple should not be in the business of enabling apps to have massive, instant privacy violations for everybody you know in a way that the user might not be considering or might not even be thinking about, like, oh, maybe there's somebody in my contact list who, like, just got a new phone number for some good reason and they don't want all these services or other people to know it.
Marco:
You know, like...
Marco:
There's so many bad abuse cases where the address book mass data dumps to a service can be instantly used wrong and instantly have negative effects.
Marco:
Whereas picking a few photos for an app to see is a very, very different context.
Marco:
And I don't think there's enough...
John:
positive uses of the entire contact list API to make up for this massive negative downside that's that's not only possible but that's probably much more frequently used than any positive use case i mean you can also give access to all your photos and i feel like the protection of data volume for photos is kind of like the protection of data volume for movies like in the beginning of piracy it was difficult to even pass around mp3s and the idea that we would be passing around you know
John:
pirated movies to each other was ridiculous because who can put an entire movie you don't have a room for that on your hard drive it's just a matter of time before that stuff becomes tractable as well and i feel like it's the same deal yes contacts is obviously you know the the best case because it's a low volume of data because people don't have a hundred thousand contacts and it's text so it's real easy even if you set aside the contact images right it's also precise like a phone number and email address are precise like they specifically identify somebody with very high certainty
John:
But I mean, the photos have the potential location information.
John:
And I feel like the thing that is protecting, currently protecting photos and videos from the same problems that you're describing is the volume of the data and the precision that we are able to extract from photos.
John:
But imagine a future where it is extremely easy and there are giant databases to cross-reference locations and faces and people where you can just go to a website and
John:
of some terrible company that has aggregated all this information because they made some cool, fun thing that everyone needs to use that you have permission to access all your stuff and say, show me all the pictures of this person when they were on vacation at Disney World.
John:
And it can aggregate photos and do a 3D render of a fly through of you walking around the Disney park collected from thousands of people's phones who took pictures with you in the background.
John:
That sounds ridiculous now because like, oh, think of the data that would take and the computation and it's going to be in a freaking web page in 20 years.
John:
Right.
John:
So I, you know, I get it.
John:
I mean, the future is the future.
John:
And we're talking about the present.
John:
And yes, contact should definitely be locked down.
John:
It's the worst case scenario right now.
John:
But I think photos and videos are just as bad, if not worse.
John:
And we're just protected for them essentially by being down in the slowness, to use a reference from a cool science fiction novel I read once.
John:
uh and that sometime within our lifetime photos and videos will fall to the same thing that contacts do now and especially if we forbid contacts but still allow access to all photos if you with one tap that's where they'll go next just because who knows what you can extract how many people have ever taken a picture of their driver's license or an id card to upload to something that requires identification in a website and left that picture in their camera roll and forgot about it you might not be able to find it but the computers can right so
Marco:
you know this is a grim warning from the the future of even cheaper computation uh we should protect our photos and videos too well on an infinite time scale you're right but today address book access is instantly way more problematic than photo access 20 years not infinite time scale i'm putting a cap on this one
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So as someone who has actually worked heavily with the contacts API, may I have a chance, please?
Casey:
I think I see both of you, to be honest.
Casey:
I think for me, the rightest answer is the same style of API where you get different levels of access such that one could bless an app to have the ability to slurp up all their contacts.
Casey:
However,
Casey:
I definitely see Marco's point.
Casey:
And I think the thing that strikes me about contacts in particular is that to my eyes today, it's more actionable.
Casey:
And I think one of you said precise a second ago, but it's more actionable.
Casey:
Like when I have a photograph of Marco that's been uploaded recently,
Casey:
Yeah, I guess if it was a weird photo of Marco, like a computer could maybe figure out that it was an uncomfortable photo of Marco and like do something with it, maybe.
Casey:
But when I upload Marco's phone number, somebody could call him right then and interrupt his day right then.
Casey:
And so it is far more actionable data than I think a photograph is, at least today.
John:
Well, you can do associations with photos.
John:
Here's Marco with the founder of the Proud Boys.
John:
Not an actual thing that happened.
John:
Sure.
John:
No problem.
John:
We could do that today with machine learning and start doing graphs of associations, especially you have dates and locations to say this person ate dinner with this person at this time in this location.
John:
That's current technology.
John:
And I feel like that is probably more damning than, realistically speaking, someone's cell phone number or their email address, which honestly is pretty easy to get via other means.
John:
And it's not like most people and their contacts have
John:
everyone's mailing address listed so contacts are bad but i think photos i feel like you just need a little bit of imagination to understand exactly how bad that can be because it's not like they're going to look for the embarrassing picture of you they're going to do the same crap they do with contact information which is make graphs of associations and times and places put you into demographics guess your age and your gender figure out if you're about to have a baby
John:
Like all the things that they can do based on all your other activity, photos is a treasure trove of that crap.
John:
And if you lock down contacts or make it more difficult to retrieve or everyone uses signing with Apple and doesn't give people their email addresses, photos is a goldmine.
Casey:
I agree with you, but I still think contacts are far more problematic in today's world.
Casey:
But all of that said, I once wrote an app that slurped up all your contacts and did something I like to think novel and interesting with them.
Casey:
And I would hate for there to be a scenario wherein a user couldn't
Casey:
use my app because there was no API for it.
Casey:
Now, maybe that's the cost of doing business, but I think it's a very tough pickle for Apple to be in where they don't necessarily want to kill the vignettes of the world because I did that already.
Casey:
They don't want to kill the vignettes of the world or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
They also don't want to make it easy for the clubhouses of the world, and maybe I'm unfairly besmirching them, but, you know, the clubhouses of the world to do something nefarious with your contacts.
Casey:
So what is the happy medium?
Casey:
Well, I guess you trust the user, which is what John was saying, what I think I agree with, but...
John:
What I was saying is you could make an API that lets you do all the features that you care about.
John:
Forget about the vignettes, because honestly, a vignette should be a feature that's built into the OS, kind of like it is now.
John:
Not really, but exactly what he did is like, well, you might have other pictures and other services, so...
John:
The OS will go out and find them, right?
John:
That's really just something like another example of a third party makes a thing that Apple should really put in the OS, right?
John:
But everything else, like autocompletes or even sending to contacts, there is no reason that the app ever needs to see that data to accomplish those features, right?
John:
Like, you can have an autocomplete
John:
in a widget that runs with xpc and another process that is essentially as far as the app is concerned a fancy way for you the user to autocomplete something but the app only ever sees what you finish autocompleting and type into the text field it has no idea like what was being fed into the autocomplete that's an eminently makeable api right and same thing with like oh do you want to uh you know send this thing out to a bunch of your friends here pick a bunch of these friends from this list and
John:
Another UI comes up that the app does not control that runs in another process, lets you select contacts and is mediated by an Apple service that hides all the email addresses.
John:
Like that functionality that is a quote unquote essential part of a smooth application experience can be done without giving applications access to any of your contact information.
John:
The address book API that Marco was talking about does not do that.
John:
And so that's why, yes, that API should be canned and replaced with a better one that never actually gives your app access to anything.
John:
Because in most cases, unlike photos where the app literally does need one photo, if it's like a photo editor or something, it needs at least one photo.
John:
You need to give the app the photo, otherwise it can't edit.
John:
But you don't actually need to give the app the contact in many cases, especially given that Apple has this whole thing now where they make their own private email addresses with random names and connect it up to your room behind the scenes.
John:
So the plumbing is already there to essentially never give apps access to contacts.
Casey:
Yeah, it's an interesting, I guess what I'm saying is it's an interesting tug of war that I think Apple would have to go through.
Casey:
Like what you're describing is somewhere between a moderate to massive engineering challenge, I'd reckon.
Casey:
But it's not unreasonable, especially for a company that's as big and as everywhere as Apple is.
Casey:
But here again, I keep coming down to, you know, my initial take is, of course, let everyone have access to everything.
Casey:
And then you see the clubhouses and all the other gross things in the world.
Casey:
And then you come to Marco's point of view, you know, the
Casey:
what are the little balls, the, the Jacob's ladder, whatever it is, you know, that bonk into each other.
Casey:
I forget what that thing is called.
John:
But anyways, Jacob's ladder is the thing with the electric spark that goes up.
Casey:
Oh no, that's not what I meant.
Casey:
Sorry.
Casey:
You know what I'm talking about?
Casey:
The little desk cradle.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Newton's cradle.
Casey:
Um, anyways, so, you know, I, I start all the way on the right hand side with sure.
Casey:
Why not give everyone access to all the contacts?
Casey:
No,
Casey:
what could go wrong and then you see what goes wrong and then you know the the ball falls and it bonks into other intermediate balls and now i'm swinging the other way of oh you should only ever be allowed like anonymized contacts or whatever the case may be but but for apple i think you need to kind of ride that line and and that's a very very difficult thing to do and that's one of the things that i think i lose sight of when i criticize apple a lot is that
Casey:
It's a very different thing to have to be all things to all people.
Casey:
And it's a very different thing operating at the scale that they operate at, where a bug that hits one-tenth of one percent of all users, like, I don't know, my SMS bug, which, by the way, has mostly gone away for reasons I don't understand.
Casey:
Um, anyways, uh, for, for a bug that hits 1% of all users, that's still like a million, a hundred million, 10 million users, however many ridiculous amounts of users it is.
Casey:
And so it's just, it's hard.
Casey:
It's a hard thing because you, you don't know where the line really should be.
Casey:
But certainly if Apple's going to say, we're the privacy company, we're the privacy company, then I would say they should err on the side of what Marco was saying, which is, you know, no contacts access at all.
John:
Plus address book is like a CC++ API, isn't it?
John:
So it's just candid for that reason.
Casey:
It's gotten better, but it's not good.
Marco:
And to be clear, I'm not saying that there's no legitimate use of this API.
Marco:
I'm not saying that certain things wouldn't get worse without this API.
Marco:
What I do think, though, is that this API, the benefits that it brings are substantially less than the privacy damage it does, especially because of its nature of such...
Marco:
easily exploitable in mass data on not only the person who's saying yeah allow allow contacts but on every single person they know that like whose data they are giving away without those people's permission like that that to me is it's it's really messy and and not not good and and that that seems to be like i think a good way to look at it is like
Marco:
if apple were designing this product today like this this whole os this whole platform from scratch today would they offer that access to anybody of course not like because like today's privacy conscious apple in today's like data leaky horrible tracking analytics world would they do this if starting fresh today almost certainly not and so i think that's that's a good reason you know ignore the sunk cost here that's a pretty good reason to say that we probably shouldn't have this api today
John:
Yeah, for sure.
John:
They wouldn't do it today.
John:
And as an example of going back far enough, Unix was like that in the beginning, created in a hippy-dippy environment where we're all just computer users here and we all trust each other and everything is open for the most part, even though Unix had a permission system and everything.
John:
Even when I first arrived at college and got on my first Unix system in the early 90s,
John:
uh it was basically a free-for-all like there was no ssh telnet ftp plain text passwords everywhere world writable tty's uh and and you would think oh well that's the internet age everyone was savvy then and knew about bad things that could happen no no they didn't know we had to teach them by being terrible people on that unique system and
John:
By the time I left that school, I've told this story before, they had locked down, you know, world writable TTYs were no longer a thing.
John:
And SSH was starting to, you know, come into being.
John:
And Telnet and FTP with plain text communications and passwords were out of fashion because too many people were hacked.
John:
And, you know, being able to get the ciphertext from the password file was also out of favor.
John:
And there were alternatives to that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
You know, that's that's the way things go.
John:
And so, you know, the iPhone was made in 2007.
John:
At that point, like stuff that like what Path did, you remember Path, the company like took all your contacts and uploaded it to a server?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Apple made that API and they were still in the hippy to be Unix mindset of like, well, you know, you
John:
We're making a platform, and it's super secure, and it's sandboxed, and boy, isn't this iPhone security amazing?
John:
But they still didn't have a full grasp of the bad actors, right?
John:
It's just people can do incredibly novel things.
John:
No one's ever going to like... What good would it do to secretly take all your contacts and upload it?
John:
What value is there in having everybody's contacts all together?
John:
Because...
John:
Having millions and millions of contacts, like, that's not useful.
John:
It's just too much data.
John:
And it turns out that actually is very useful to advertising companies, and Apple didn't foresee that.
John:
So they made an API that seemed like a good idea at the time, despite the fact that this API was on a system that they were, like, locking down with the tightest security they could imagine with all, you know, the...
John:
applications can't do whatever they want and no private apis and everything's sandbox and everything is encrypted they were doing all that but at the same time they didn't understand that oh yeah there's actually value in just en masse extracting everybody's contacts and jamming them up to a server at which point they become a giant bucket of uh you know slop for the ad industry so yeah live and learn
Casey:
I have some follow-up about my question last week about where we would live if not the East Coast.
Casey:
But to ease into that and to kind of get us in the right mood, Marco, if you had to live in another country, where would you live?
Marco:
Oh, that's a good question.
Casey:
And I'll accept like, you know, a top two or three if you need, you know, whatever the case may be.
Marco:
Do I instantly magically know the language of any of another country or do I have to stick with what I know now?
Marco:
No, no, that's that's cheating.
Casey:
I like the spirit of your question, but let I concur with John for the purposes of what I'm driving at.
Casey:
Let's say no, you do not know the language.
John:
I mean, you can learn it if you want, but you don't instantly magically get to know it.
Marco:
Right, okay.
Marco:
So that's going to restrict me, not because I refuse to learn anything new, but because I'm extremely self-conscious about that, and so I would not want to live somewhere where I don't already know the language.
Marco:
So that will limit it to either English-speaking or at least, like, commonly English-familiar countries.
Marco:
Like Germany, when I've traveled to Germany, which I've liked a lot and actually might be my answer here, so many people there know English that...
Marco:
it wasn't a big problem for me to not know much, if any, German.
Marco:
I could plausibly live there and get by okay while I learn the language a little bit better.
Marco:
So that's an option.
Marco:
Ultimately, I would probably end up picking the UK.
Marco:
Is that a country?
Marco:
Wait, England?
Marco:
One of the...
Marco:
I think there's a video on that.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's a video on that.
Marco:
Yeah, because I have really enjoyed what I've seen of the UK, both London and even other cities as well.
Marco:
I've enjoyed that a lot.
Marco:
So probably, yeah, probably either Germany or England.
Casey:
John?
John:
This is tricky because I never go anywhere.
John:
The only other countries I've ever been to are the UK and Canada.
John:
That's not much to choose from based on personal experience.
John:
And both of those places I've only been to briefly.
John:
The reason I'm hesitant to pick the UK is not because I don't like it.
John:
Because I've spent a total of about, you know, a little over two weeks in the UK.
John:
And I thought it was great.
John:
I loved it.
John:
But of all the English-speaking countries in the world, theirs seem to have a government that is the second worst screwed up second to us.
John:
And that would be depressing to me to leave, like, the most screwed up English-speaking government in the world, being the U.S., for the second most.
John:
And it's like, oh, come on.
John:
There's so many better choices.
John:
You've got to go to the second worst.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Like it's just, it's all the same problems, but like with a different accent and on a smaller scale.
John:
And that would really depress me.
John:
So I end up leaning towards places that I've never been, but just seen pictures of.
John:
And the thing that comes to mind immediately, and maybe this would be a terrible mistake.
John:
I don't know because I've never actually been there, but New Zealand.
John:
yeah i thought about that it's it's beautiful that people are saying it really looks like it's probably a nice place i don't know maybe i'd go stir crazy on a little island maybe i wouldn't like the culture or something but boy in pictures it looks really good and their government is not screwed up and they speak english ish yeah there's a lot of asterisks on that but yes yeah
Marco:
Yeah, I did go there.
Marco:
And I love New Zealand.
Marco:
It is a bit far from from North America in ways that I think would would irritate me.
Marco:
And I found that the internet connection situation in New Zealand and from what I hear, I believe this applies to Australia as well, is generally not it's it's harder to get really good fast internet connections there.
Marco:
And that could be outdated information.
Marco:
I'm sorry for everybody who lives there.
Marco:
Because otherwise, I think both Australia and New Zealand seem to be significantly better run as countries than what we have here.
John:
Australia's got a little bit of a screwed up government and it's mostly a giant desert.
John:
So I'm a little bit wary of that.
John:
i've seen maybe i've seen too many mad max movies but it also doesn't have uh bad winters so that's a feature for me and i don't want to give a canada short shrift it's just i know it's canada you're gonna feel bad it's the cold i'm sorry you're actually pretty far north i don't think i could do that sorry yeah canada is beautiful in the summer i would i cannot do more severe winters than what i have now
Casey:
For me, you know, I think if I were really and truly being honest with myself, if I really and truly had to leave America, I would go to Canada, despite the fact that the thought of a Canadian winner just chills me to the bone, much less actually being in a Canadian winner.
Casey:
But that being said, in this fantasy world where I think I could handle, you know, moving that far away from everyone I knew.
Casey:
um i think the uk would be a very strong contender i think if i could convince myself that i could learn the language i would strongly consider germany as well you know we traveled there together marco oh you went one other time with before though didn't you okay yeah so my only experience with germany is when we all went and as we've said many many times on the show i freaking loved it and i went into it thinking well i mean i'm sure it'll be fine i've been to europe a few times before and i've always liked it and it'll be okay and
Casey:
And I loved it.
Casey:
I was very surprised with how much I enjoyed it.
Casey:
And so I like to think that I would give Germany a shot.
Casey:
Every American I've ever met that has spent any time in Australia swears that they would move there if they were given the opportunity.
Casey:
And I think that the same is probably true of New Zealand.
Casey:
But I don't think in Marco, you said this a second ago, I don't think I could stand being that physically far away from everyone that I knew.
Casey:
I mean, not in a literal sense, of course, that's hyperbole.
Casey:
But you know,
Casey:
I don't think I could handle being that far away from my family, my extended family and so many of my friends and so on.
Casey:
So I think realistically, Canada would probably be my first choice because of proximity.
Casey:
And in a fantasy world where I could do whatever, I would probably try for Germany and realistically end up in the UK.
Casey:
Now, that brings us into our follow-up.
Casey:
Many people were perturbed of varying degrees, sometimes amusingly perturbed and sometimes genuinely perturbed, that we forgot about the Midwest and the Great Lakes.
Marco:
We didn't forget.
Casey:
No, we didn't forget.
Casey:
You guys, you all forget.
Casey:
I'm from the Midwest.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
You all forget that they have awful winters there.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
I'm absolutely not doing that.
Casey:
I know that the summers are gorgeous.
Casey:
I've lived in the Midwest.
Casey:
I know it.
Casey:
But winter?
Casey:
Hell no.
Casey:
Absolutely not.
Casey:
Not even possible.
Casey:
No.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, growing up in Ohio and then going to college in Pennsylvania...
Marco:
I am done with winters there.
Marco:
That was enough.
Marco:
The winters are way colder, way icier.
Marco:
In the case of northwestern Pennsylvania, way snowier because it's near the Great Lakes and that whole thing.
Marco:
And then also, the summers are also hotter.
Marco:
The further inland you are, you typically don't have the tempering effect of being closer to the ocean.
Marco:
So it's significantly less temperate.
Marco:
So you have much bigger extremes.
Marco:
You have way colder winters, way hotter summers.
Marco:
I've lived that for a long time.
Marco:
If I'm picking places to go, I'm going to try to make an improvement on that area, not make things worse.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I mean, I think it does fit the bill in a lot of ways.
Casey:
If you can live the snowbird life, you know, the Great Lakes are enormous.
Casey:
They do have plenty of beaches.
Casey:
In some ways, you could almost argue that the Great Lakes are an improvement over the ocean because, you know, they're not saltwater and there's fewer waves if you have small children, for example.
John:
This makes them worse.
John:
We've discussed the mud beach, Casey.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
I'm just saying you could make an argument, but those winners, absolutely not.
Casey:
Absolutely not.
Casey:
So thank you, all of you from Midwest.
Casey:
We hear you.
Casey:
We love you.
Casey:
But no.
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
Last week, we discussed, I believe in Ask ATP, some precious media that we all have.
Casey:
And I got a couple of people emailing me saying, in nice ways, stop being a loser and just upload that concert for Charlottesville.
Casey:
And eventually I listened.
Casey:
And so as I sit here tonight on the evening of February 17th, the concert for Charlottesville that I spoke about many times in the past, I have uploaded it to archive.org and it is still there as of right now.
Casey:
It is, I believe, 13 gigs.
Casey:
It is a 10 hour show.
Casey:
I think I said six last week, but it's actually a 10 hour video.
Casey:
And I believe that all of the chapters I put in to mark each individual artist performance did survive the upload and then a redownload from other people on the Internet.
Casey:
So if you would like to check out this concert, which I really think is a really special thing, I strongly recommend it.
Casey:
I will say that if you try to just stream it from archive.org, it does not seem to work in my experience.
Casey:
You have to download all 13 gigs and they seem to be throttling it to about a megabyte a second.
Casey:
So it'll take a while, but it is very good.
Casey:
And if you're interested, it is up and I've wrote a small blog post about it, which we will link in the show notes.
John:
I've just been ignoring this Charlottesville thing because I just assume that there are no bands that I have heard of or care about in it.
John:
But is that actually the case, Casey?
John:
No.
John:
Is this the type of thing that I should watch?
John:
Tell me something that played there that I would be interested in.
Casey:
I think that's quite possible.
Casey:
It was opened with, well, there was a small Dave Matthews by himself performance, but it's Cage the Elephant, who I'd never heard of and I found to be okay.
Casey:
It was, shoot, two guys from Coldplay, the singer-pianist whose name is Chris Martin and Johnny Greenwood is the guitarist.
Casey:
I hope I have that right.
Casey:
It doesn't matter if I don't.
Casey:
It's the guitarist and the singer from Coldplay, just the two of them.
Casey:
Their performance was good, and there were some really funny...
Casey:
honest moments in that where um chris martin says you know i want to try i think it was a beatles song um or maybe it's not i forget who it was but i want to try this cover please don't put it on youtube if it sucks because i don't want to be embarrassed about it but for the rest of my life um so uh that that i think is worth it the best performance possibly the entire show i think was the roots which are not a band that i typically like but they did a lot of like old school soul covers which i thought was um
Casey:
Really, really good.
Casey:
Oh, I'm being told real-time follow-up Johnny Greenwood is Radiohead, my bad.
Casey:
So anyways, The Roots, and then Pharrell comes out with The Roots, and that was very good.
Casey:
Chris Stapleton, who was a country singer, who I can tell is very good, but it's not really my cup of tea.
Casey:
Ariana Grande did a solo set.
Casey:
She was the only person on stage against a backing tape, if you will.
Casey:
And her performance was actually very good.
Casey:
Another great one was Justin Timberlake, who I know is really problematic right now, but if you can accept just his performance and not anything else about him, his set was extremely good.
Casey:
And then Marco's favorite band in the entire world, the Dave Matthews Band, closes it out, including a guest appearance from Stevie Wonder, which is pretty cool.
Casey:
And like I said, the whole thing is something like 10 hours.
Casey:
And I think it's worth at least listening to his background music.
Casey:
You don't necessarily need to watch it.
Casey:
But it's a really, really cool thing.
Casey:
And they have some interludes in the in-between sections talking about
Casey:
You know, what makes Charlottesville special?
Casey:
What makes this event so terrible?
Casey:
Well, not the concert, but the things leading up to the concert so terrible.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I really think it's worth watching or listening to at least once.
Casey:
But if none of those artists mean anything to you, then no, don't bother.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you to Linode for hosting all my servers and sponsoring our show.
Casey:
We have from Richard Harris some more information about watch timers.
Casey:
Another obvious thing missing in Apple Watch timers, why are timers set on my watch not synced with my phone and vice versa?
Casey:
If I start a timer on my phone, I see the countdown on my phone lock screen, but nothing appears on my Apple Watch, not even when you go and open the Watch Timer app.
Casey:
And if I start a timer on my watch, there's no corresponding countdown shown on my phone.
Casey:
Note that once the timer is set on my phone ends, the alert appears on both the phone and the watch, even though the countdown did not.
Casey:
This is a really good point.
Casey:
However, I will say that I actually like this behavior because oftentimes I want a silent timer.
Casey:
And in my experience, maybe I have this wrong, but I believe if you set a timer on your phone, it's going to beep, even if you're in silent mode or vibrate mode or whatever.
Casey:
But if you set it on your watch, and if your watch is in tap, tap, tap mode, it will just tap, tap, tap you, and that's that.
Casey:
So I understand Richard's point, but I actually kind of like it the way it is.
Casey:
But maybe I'm bananas.
Casey:
Marco, what do you think about this?
Marco:
I mean, it's a really tricky thing.
Marco:
Like, you know, you could argue that should things like timers sync across more?
Marco:
Like, what about HomePod versus phone?
Marco:
Like, should those sync?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
There's certainly utility to that.
Marco:
If HomePod, watch, and phone all sync their timers, then you could set a timer by shouting into the air.
Marco:
No matter what device picked it up, you would have it displayed on all of them, and they would, I don't know, all alert you when it was over or something?
Marco:
I'm not sure.
Marco:
But that's the problem.
Marco:
When you...
Marco:
Start figuring like, okay, what should the behavior be defined as in cases X, Y, and Z?
Marco:
It starts getting a little bit messy.
Marco:
Like the silent switch, should that be activated or not?
Marco:
If it goes off on the HomePod or if you summon it on the HomePod, then should it go off on the HomePod every time?
Marco:
Or what if the HomePod's in the next room and now you're in a different room?
Marco:
Should it go off then or should it only ring your phone?
Marco:
What if you expect it to ring on the HomePod and your phone is actually sitting on the counter somewhere and not in your pocket or not in your hand and then it buzzes just the phone, then you miss it?
Marco:
There's all sorts of weird cases that once you start syncing stuff and having it try to show up everywhere, you start running into these messy areas of how the behavior should be.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
It would be nice if there was more like unification like that in many cases, but not in all cases.
John:
I think this is an obvious thing.
John:
I agree with Richard that this is obvious and this should absolutely be a feature.
John:
But just because you have global awareness of a thing and it's synchronized doesn't mean that you have to surface that.
John:
So assuming that Apple could get the sync right, which is not a given based on how difficult it's been for them to sync like, you know, what is it, keyboard completions or whatever, autocomplete things and other tiny pieces of data that should be trivial to sync.
John:
there should be global awareness of timers, right?
John:
And the default behavior should probably be like it is now, which is everybody in the house that's signed into your Apple ID knows about the timers, but they don't do anything about them.
John:
Just the device you did it on does something about them, right?
John:
And then...
John:
if you have desires like you know like richard like you know what i would actually like whenever i set a timer on my phone and watch them to show each other or whatever you can opt into that because global awareness of the timer is kind of like having multiple timers like how hard a feature is that just have multiple timers in the air right it was like oh it's too complicated or whatever just just allow that to exist and allow there to be global awareness and allow people to opt in even if it's like hey you're in the room with the home pod
John:
The HomePod knows about your timer.
John:
It's not going to ring you because you said it on your phone, right?
John:
But you could ask the HomePod, hey, how's that, you know, what do you call it?
John:
Potato timer doing.
John:
And the HomePod won't be like, I don't know what the hell you're talking about, potato timer.
John:
It'll be like, oh, I know about that because behind the scenes, we've all been talking to each other and synchronizing through iCloud because it's just a timer and it's really easy to sync.
John:
It's got like a string and like the start time and the, you know, it's like, it's not a lot of data.
John:
That's exactly what you're looking for from the Apple ecosystem.
John:
Global awareness, not necessarily global cacophony of alarms going off or whatever.
John:
So I think starting from a baseline of trivial data should be synced everywhere.
John:
And do not leap from that to, oh, it should automatically display everywhere, automatically go off anywhere.
John:
And don't even try to do like, oh, well, proximity, like because Apple has all these proximity APIs where it tries to figure out what you're near to.
John:
Don't even try to do that if you can't nail it.
John:
Just by default, you set the timer on your phone, it goes off in your phone.
John:
But if you happen to be somewhere else, you can ask the HomePod to do it.
John:
And if you really want it to always show up on your watch, you can ask it.
John:
Just like now, like the whole reason that Richard said that this shows up on, the alert shows up, is because there is a single option that says, hey, do you want me to, your phone to mirror the alerts, your watch to mirror the alerts on your phone or not?
John:
And that's it.
John:
That's the only option.
John:
And it's the same type of thing could be with like timers.
John:
Hey, do you want your watch to mirror the timers on your phone or not?
John:
And that would be like opting into, oh, I just always want it to display in both cases.
John:
That alone would be a big upgrade, being able to ask any Apple device and being able to opt into phone and watch synchronization, because that makes sense because they're both sort of like personal devices that you probably have on or near you, as opposed to HomePods and who knows what else, which could be anywhere.
John:
So I like this idea.
John:
Apple should do it.
John:
I really wish Apple could.
John:
I really wish we had faith to say that this task of synchronizing tiny pieces of trivial information, trivial ephemeral information that we don't even care about, it can just go away after it's done.
John:
I wish it was just a given that Apple would be able to instantly sync that everywhere.
John:
But unfortunately, we can't just assume that based on how well Apple has done with syncing trivial things in the past.
Casey:
Chris Harbour writes in with some more information on MDM, which is mobile device management.
Casey:
This comes out of Ask ATP last week about would you let your personal life seep into your corporate devices?
Casey:
Chris writes, I manage about 350 Apple devices using Jamf Pro, who I believe are past sponsor.
Casey:
Most of these are iPads, but some are iPhones, and there are a few iPod Touches in the mix.
Casey:
What I've learned since we started device management in 2015 is that all the mobile device management platforms have pretty much the same capabilities on Apple devices.
Casey:
These platforms all operate differently, but the commands they are sending to the devices are all the same.
Casey:
They are limited by what Apple allows.
Casey:
There's a good support article from Apple, which we'll link in the show notes, that explains the Apple MDM in detail, as well as the differences between what is available for restrictions, policies for supervised and non-supervised devices.
Casey:
So quick aside from me, from Apple, they're quoting Apple, "...supervision generally denotes that the device is owned by the organization, which provides additional control over its configuration and restrictions."
Casey:
So now back to Chris.
Casey:
I was going to make a long list of things that you can and can't do with MDM, but then I found this helpful PDF linked in the show notes that explains it well.
Casey:
In particular, take a look at page 10.
Casey:
So let me read from that PDF.
Casey:
MDM can see device name, phone number, serial number, model name and number, capacity and space available, iOS version number, and installed apps.
Casey:
MDM cannot see personal data such as personal or work email, calendars, contacts, SMS or iMessages, Safari browser history, which is something that I did not know.
Casey:
I assumed it could.
Casey:
FaceTime or phone call logs, personal reminders, notes, frequency of app use and device location.
Casey:
So back to Chris.
Casey:
Basically, the IT MDM admin can see some basic info about the device itself, but nothing that is really personal.
Casey:
And more appropriately, they can't really see anything that they don't already have access to in other ways.
Casey:
Things like the content in email, Teams, your file server, Slack, etc.
Casey:
Those all exist in other server environments with their own ways of monitoring employees for whatever reasons they may have.
Casey:
So that's a bunch of words to say that it's not as scary as I had thought even.
Casey:
And I assumed it wasn't quite as bad as I thought, but it's actually considerably less scary than I thought.
Casey:
And Apple really doesn't let your employer see that much.
Casey:
That being said, your employer can still read all the emails sent via your employment email address.
Casey:
They can read all your Slack messages and so on.
Casey:
So it doesn't mean you're out of the woodwork, but it's not as bad as I thought.
John:
Is that list of see and can't see stuff from the supervised device or the non-supervised one?
Casey:
You know, that's a good question.
Casey:
I don't know, to be honest with you.
Casey:
I just clipped it out of the PDF and put it in the show notes.
Casey:
We'd have to look back in that PDF.
Casey:
But that's a very fair question.
John:
I have to say the other reason that I don't think we touched on about MDM on devices and why I was wary of it is kind of the same reason that I moan and complain about stuff on my laptops.
John:
Setting aside the privacy stuff...
John:
That software sometimes affects both the performance and the sort of reliability of the thing that's running on.
John:
Certainly in the case of the Mac, where it's obviously a much more of a free-for-all situation than on a phone.
John:
But I've always imagined that some kind of MDM stuff happening on my phone could also cause problems that otherwise wouldn't happen.
John:
Right or wrong, because I've never actually had...
John:
a phone enrolled in mtm but just the idea of you know work running software installing stuff you know doing whatever it is to do sending commands to my phone when i don't know they're doing it they could potentially do things that you know slow down or screw up my phone just doesn't seem appealing to me jonathan deets writes in with some information on ssdware and ram can you tell us about this john
John:
This was a point we didn't bring up when we were fretting about whether the SSD usage on M1 Max was going to wear them out prematurely.
John:
Jonathan says, NAND flash memory endurance is based on the finite number of program slash erase or PE cycles of the individual memory cells.
John:
Given equal workloads, an SSD with twice the capacity, having twice the number of cells will last twice as long.
John:
Unless the additional page outs from having only 8 gigs of RAM rather than 16 gigs of RAM result in more than doubling your total lifetime rights to the SSD, there's no way that spending 200 bucks on 60 gigs of RAM instead of the 512 gigabyte storage option will be better for extending the lifespan of your SSD.
John:
So this is obvious but worth saying.
John:
If you have the same amount of RAM, right, if the use is this, or not RAM, the same amount of stuff that you're storing, but you get an SSD that's twice as big,
John:
you've got more sort of green field that hasn't been worn out by your activity.
John:
Like the more cells you have to wear out, and if you use them the same amount, which is the real tricky part about this assumption, then yeah, it will last twice as long.
John:
Now, in reality, it's kind of like getting a bigger house.
John:
if you get a bigger ssd you're gonna fill it with stuff like no one gets a bigger ssd and says wow i've got all this free space now my ssd will last longer no you fill it with stuff so i think realistically i'm not sure how much this saves people because it's inevitable that you will put stuff in it but in general more ssd to wear out is better right
John:
Now, on this thread, you know, on Twitter, there's been ongoing threads of people posting their numbers from the smart tools thing about their data being written.
John:
And I don't, you know, it keeps going on and people still keep getting staggered by the numbers.
John:
When we did comparisons last week, Casey and I were in the same ballpark and it didn't seem that ridiculous to me.
John:
But some numbers that these people are putting up seem a little bit ridiculous.
John:
And I don't know, it's just like...
John:
Because people use their computers for different things.
John:
Is this a very strange scenario?
John:
Is this something going on with their particular computer?
John:
Is there a bug in the tools that is reporting incorrect numbers?
John:
I don't know, but I pulled out one.
John:
We'll link to the tweet.
John:
This is from David.
John:
He's got a 16-gig M1 MacBook Pro.
John:
By the way, most of these are 16 gigs.
John:
This is a bunch of computer nerds, and they all bought the one with more RAM.
John:
So I think the only thing we can conclusively say is that 8 versus 16 gigs of RAM is not...
John:
is not a factor because almost all these ridiculous numbers are from people with 16 gigs of ram like it's not the swap that's doing this or if it is it means these people need way more than 16 gigs of ram and they can't get it because that's all the m1s come with but anyway power on hours 432 that's a small number of hours very small right data units written 150 terabytes wow so if we do the math on that that's 347 gigabytes per hour written that doesn't seem right
John:
That seems much bigger than the numbers that Casey and I had.
John:
Weren't we like 200 to 300 gigs per day or month or something?
John:
I already forgot.
Casey:
Yeah, I know.
John:
Anyway, I don't remember our exact numbers.
John:
Refer to last week's show.
John:
But in this thread of people just posting their numbers, this was the one that I was like, okay, this seems like it might be a problem.
John:
Because 350 gigs per hour...
John:
something's going on here so i again it's trivially easy to do that amount of io just get something that just constantly writes big files use dd in a for loop like you can absolutely do this like there's there's no problem doing this the question and the question is like are these people using their computers in a normal way and this is some kind of systemic problem i don't understand how it could be like what is it what are they you know this is one of those sort of
John:
vague slow motion computer panics where we're like, something is going on, but no one will ever say, okay, what?
John:
What's going on?
John:
Computers are knowable.
John:
This is the thing we should be able to know.
John:
You can't just say, but something's going on with these M1s.
John:
They're wearing out those STs.
John:
Are they?
John:
How are they wearing out those STs?
John:
It's not the type of thing you can't just leave it there and say,
John:
They're wearing out their SSDs.
John:
Look at these numbers.
John:
Okay, what's doing that?
John:
Run FS usage.
John:
Figure it out.
John:
So I don't know what the problem is, and it's frustratingly vague, and I don't like vague technical problems.
John:
But all I know is if you want to follow us on Twitter, feel free to look at the spread and watch people slowly, vaguely panic about high numbers without ever actually figuring out what the problem is.
Casey:
Oh, man.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Last week, we talked about more safe programming.
Casey:
I think this was with relation to the Apple car.
Casey:
That may or may not ever happen.
Marco:
And Tesla's crazy ambitions that might not match their quality levels of software.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
And so I brought up ADA, which was a programming language that I had thought was used kind of a lot in the defense industry.
Casey:
And an anonymous person wrote in to say,
Casey:
Well, yes.
Casey:
Actually, several anonymous people wrote in.
Casey:
Several of them said, yes, ADA is a thing in the defense industry.
Casey:
Then a different anonymous person said that most of this kind of development is actually now done using MISRA-C, where MISRA is an acronym, of course, which is Motor Industry Software Reliability Association.
Casey:
And pulling from Wikipedia, apparently MISRA-C's aim is to facilitate code safety, security, portability, and reliability in the context of embedded systems, which is about what a car is, you know, or wants to be.
Casey:
A car would like safe code that's secure and portable and reliable, and it's going to be run on an embedded system.
Casey:
So, yep, checks out.
John:
I got to make my joke about this now.
John:
So MISRA-C is like C, but with limitations.
John:
There's a bunch of stuff that you aren't allowed to do because they're unsafe, so on and so forth.
John:
And so it has fewer features than C. Like, you know, for example, I think you can't do function pointers or whatever.
John:
Like, it's more provably correct.
John:
It's easier to understand.
John:
And so I can imagine if you're a C program working in it, it will make you MISRA-ble.
John:
Not to be able to use all those features.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
Oh, my gosh.
John:
It's right there.
John:
Miseracy.
John:
Who's naming your thing Miseracy?
John:
Don't name your thing Miseracy when it's going to make CD programmers miserable.
John:
It's right there.
John:
Dad jokes.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
As punishment for that dad joke, we all now have to live through even more of this stupid T568A versus T568B.
Casey:
Your dad joke is now getting all of us punished.
Casey:
So I'm not even helping you on this.
Casey:
This is all you, John.
John:
Yeah, no.
John:
So I...
John:
Last week, we had a follow-up item that was cut from the show because it turned out to be follow-up for another one of my podcasts.
John:
But it paired well with this one because it was about urban myths or sort of anecdotal stories that people make a leap from a personal experience to a generalized theory, right?
John:
That is definitely the case in our past discussions of T568A versus B where various people think there's a super important difference because they did this one thing one time and they changed from A to B and that made all the difference.
John:
Therefore,
John:
B is better than A or A is better than B or whatever the case may be, right?
Marco:
And for context, these are the two different ways you can wire Ethernet jacks or wires with which color pair you split between the terminals where you split the pair.
John:
Right.
John:
And the, you know, we were misled by articles that said that they were different, but then everyone said, no, they're electrically identical.
John:
The only difference is the colors of the insulation and electrons can't see colors.
John:
So they're electrically identical.
John:
Right.
John:
And yet people will continue to insist, Hey, I did a thing.
John:
And one time when we changed to B and made everything better, therefore B is better.
John:
Right.
John:
And I always ask these people, okay, but like, what's the mechanism?
John:
Like, why is it better?
John:
There should be a reason, not just, Hey, we did a thing and it was better.
John:
Therefore B is better.
John:
Right.
John:
And John B. wrote in with at least a theory, a hypothesis that could be tested.
John:
Right.
John:
And the hypothesis, you know, based on fact.
John:
Right.
John:
So here's John B. I've learned the hard way.
John:
Oh, anecdote.
John:
It begins.
John:
The pairs are, in fact, different.
John:
The number of twists per inch is different for different pairs.
John:
And that's why the B style is commonly used for high-speed links.
John:
It puts the pairs with more twists in the right place.
John:
Now, I tried to look this up and say, is that true?
John:
That each pair of wires has a different number of twists?
John:
And as far as I can tell, yes, that actually is true.
John:
Just a part of Ethernet.
John:
I mentioned the twisted pairs are two pairs of cables that are twisted around each other.
John:
And they vary the number of twists per inch.
John:
So one pair is twisted like, I don't know, like...
John:
two twists every inch and the other one is two twists every five inches or whatever because varying the number of twists minimizes crosstalk or something this seems like a type of thing that would be trivial to confirm by just simply cutting open ethernet wire and looking at the twist and saying are any of them twisted more closely more tightly together than other pairs but i just did internet searching and it seemed like i could confirm that yes this is true but the real question is okay they're twisted different amounts to avoid crosstalk
John:
This last bit.
John:
It puts the pairs with more twists in the right place.
John:
What does that mean?
John:
Is more twists better than fewer twists?
John:
What is the right place?
John:
there's no further analysis of this, you know, like, like it is, are, are they twisted different amounts?
John:
Is one pair always, is like the green and green and white one always twisted more than the red and red and white one?
John:
Or is it just arbitrary?
John:
I don't know.
John:
But here's the, here's the story.
John:
It's trying to be story.
John:
Cause we got to include the story.
John:
I was once called to a castle.
John:
Yes.
John:
Really?
John:
He says for an ether network that couldn't get out of its own way.
John:
One contract did the patch panel on type B and one did plates, the wall plates in type a, uh,
John:
amazingly the nicks managed to figure it out but it was slow as anything so for the fun of it we fixed half the castle to type a and half to type b the b's were faster we redid the a's to b and they got as fast it's real so there's there's your castle castle based anecdote we changed to b and it fixed everything i don't doubt that that happened okay that happened and then the reasoning behind it it puts the right the pairs with more twists in the right place
John:
I'm still going with they're electrically identical, but at least John B. came up with a hypothesis as to what might be causing a difference because apparently there is a physical difference in number of twists for each of the pairs.
Marco:
I love that this story is continuing, that we've been talking about this for...
John:
five episodes again it seems like a thing that's knowable like obviously none of us care enough about it to cut open one of our ethernet cables or to do any kind of testing but it just seems like the type of thing that look i think probably if it is real it is so minor that no one cares about it because if people cared about it like someone with actual you know equipment would like test it like an electrical engineer would go through and test and just the answer would be on the internet
John:
But apparently, if there is any there, it's so small that no one even cares enough to test it, so it's left entirely to the realm of people with stories about castles.
Marco:
That's why I would expect, if this were true, that it had to be this certain way because of these reasons, that these would be so well documented.
Marco:
Because Ethernet is so widespread and so well-known and so old that you would think that this would be documented like crazy.
Marco:
And it just seems like no one has any, it's all based on like myths and hearsay, which is, you know, ridiculous for something that should be eminently knowable.
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Casey:
All right.
Casey:
You want to talk about iPhone rumors?
Casey:
Sure.
Casey:
Why not?
Casey:
iPhone 13 rumored to include always on display with 120 hertz promotion, astrophotography capabilities, stronger MagSafe and more.
Casey:
I did not pay too much attention to this because I assumed it was a bunch of BS that nobody really knows yet, but maybe it's not.
Casey:
Who really knows?
Casey:
So what are the highlights on this?
Casey:
Did either of you really dig into this?
John:
I mean, it's early in rumor season, right?
John:
But I think, you know, it's early, it's late enough that there could be some nuggets thrown out there, right?
John:
What I wanted to start with, we can just go in the order of this headline, always on display for phones.
John:
Right.
John:
So Apple Watch is in its second generation of always-on display, now with a brighter display.
John:
It's obviously a much smaller screen, but it's also got a much smaller battery.
John:
Lots of Android phones have always-on displays to varying degrees.
John:
It's an obvious feature for Apple to adopt.
John:
They've been a little bit late to this game.
John:
It seems plausible to me, whether it comes this year or next year or the year after.
John:
I mostly wanted to talk about it in the context of what kind of value, if any, do you think you personally would get from a phone with an always-on display?
Casey:
I mean, I've seen it on Android phones plenty, and it doesn't seem like a bad feature.
Casey:
Like, I don't think it's a bad idea by any stretch of the imagination.
Casey:
Typically on Android phones that I've seen, it's the current time and little to nothing else, which I don't think is all that terribly useful, especially since on an iPhone, you can just tap the screen and it'll wake right up.
Casey:
That being said, some of the renders on here include like the current temperature and weather conditions and like how far you are through your music that you're listening to and how your rings are doing.
Casey:
And that's sort of like ambient information.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I guess sort of kind of in the spirit of what was the Windows phones, like live tiles or whatever, although not nearly as visually busy.
Casey:
I think that is pretty cool and could be very, very interesting.
Casey:
But it's so hard to say without having seen any of this, if this is useful.
Casey:
But it's certainly not the sort of thing that I would thumb my nose at.
Casey:
Marco, how do you feel?
Marco:
I think I'm with you.
Marco:
I don't immediately get super excited about this, but I think it really depends on how you use your phone physically.
Marco:
Where do you hold it?
Marco:
Where does it sit when you're doing things?
Marco:
For me personally, I'm not a phone out on the table kind of person.
Marco:
A long time ago,
Marco:
I think it was Scott Simpson who said, probably in a tweet like years ago, something along the lines of like, I know you're a cool person if when we're out to dinner, I never see your phone ever, ever, ever.
Marco:
And that that I kind of internalize that.
Marco:
And I am never I try to never be the person who has my phone out unnecessarily.
Marco:
And I'm not the kind of person who like when I sit down somewhere, I like empty my pockets onto the table in front of me.
Marco:
And so because I don't do those things, my phone is always either in my hand being operated, in which case the screen is on or it's in my pocket.
Marco:
And so this feature, I don't think I would get significant value out of, but there are so many people for whom that entire list of qualifications and use patterns is not true, where so many people are just like, their phone is like out on the desk face up all the time.
Marco:
And so for those people, it could then have similar value as it was on screen on the Apple Watch.
Marco:
So I'm not super excited about this, honestly, but I think it would be a pretty big deal to a lot of people.
John:
I thought this feature was interesting kind of in the same way that all features that are gated by technology are interesting, right?
John:
It's like, why didn't the phone always have an always-on display?
John:
Well, battery, right?
John:
We know why, right?
John:
Screen would take up too much battery.
John:
Having it all the time when people aren't looking at it is a waste of battery.
John:
It would kill your battery life.
John:
Nobody wanted it, right?
John:
So OLED screens, which have been in iPhones for several generations now, don't have that problem because you only kind of pay for the pixels you're lighting up.
John:
And if you don't light up a lot of pixels, then you can get away with a lot.
John:
And the variable refresh rate helps with that too, and bigger batteries and more power efficiency.
John:
And so finally, technology can give us the future that we didn't have.
John:
But we had all this time where the feature didn't exist.
John:
And all that time does a couple of things.
John:
One, it kind of cements in a lot of people's minds the idea that, well, I haven't had it before, and it's not immediately obvious to me why I would get any value from it, then I don't need it.
John:
It's not a big deal, right?
John:
And the flip side of that is, you know, oh, now we can always on display.
John:
I can think of all these cool things I can do with it.
John:
I can show the weather.
John:
I can give indications of what kind of things may be available.
John:
Like, obviously, you can't or you probably don't want to show actual messages and other notifications, but you can put little red dots or badges or, you know, information that you don't mind that isn't a privacy violation.
John:
that you would like to see on your phone and being able to have your phone on your bedside to be kind of like your alarm clock with the time always visible.
John:
Like there's tons of applications.
John:
Your mind goes wild.
John:
It's like, now if I can have an always on display, I have so many great ideas of cool things I could do with that.
John:
Uh, and I think both of those positions, like, uh,
John:
have a little bit of a lack of imagination obviously the ones of saying well i never needed before therefore i can't think of any use for it there's a little bit of a lack of imagination there because if you have this feature who knows how you might use it who knows what value you might drive for it even marco might find a reason not to have his phone in his pocket who knows what it might be right but the other side and i think people recognize that like oh you're an old fuddy-duddy you just like things the old way embrace the new but the other side is also true
John:
that your mind spins with all these ideas of amazing things you could do in a Loison display.
John:
But it's very easy to lose sight of the fact that having a display that is off when you're not using it also has benefits.
John:
Now we got those benefits for free by accident because we couldn't afford battery life-wise to keep the screen on, but having the screen not be on is absolutely a feature.
John:
If it's in a dark room, if you don't want to be disturbed by your phone, right?
John:
Because it's been the default, we take those benefits for granted.
John:
But if you were, for example, to put out a phone with an always-on display that you couldn't switch to not do this, that you couldn't say, oh, just when I'm not using the phone, be entirely black, that would be worse than the current phones in many ways that people would find annoying, right?
John:
so and i'm not saying apple's gonna do this i assume they will give the option like they do on the watch to not have the always on display but i think it's important to recognize when the technology comes along to finally give us a thing even when it's a thing that's an obvious thing like on the watch that you know well you know it's who wants to do a weird motion with your hand to get the watch visible everyone wants it always to be on apple's smart enough to say you know what that's probably true and this is a no-brainer for a watch
John:
But sometimes people wanna make a different trade-off, you know, with battery life.
John:
So you can turn that feature off.
John:
And I'm sure there are some people say, you know what, when I'm not looking at my watch, I want it to be entirely black because I work in sound behind the stage where all the lights are off and I don't want something bright flashing.
John:
Who knows, everyone has reasons and even more so on a phone.
John:
Not having anything visible on your phone when you're not using it is actually a feature.
John:
So I hope and expect that if an iPhone comes with an always-on display, that it is merely an option on by default.
John:
Sure, because it's cool and everything, right?
John:
But that you can turn it off.
John:
Now, as for me personally getting value out of this, there are occasions where I will have my phone face up on like the end table next to the sofa while I'm watching a TV show or something and
John:
And occasionally I will glance at it to see if someone replied to a message that I sent a half an hour ago or that email finally came in or even just like wonder what the weather is going to be like or whatever, where I will tap the screen to get that information to see the lock screen or where I'll actually wake it up.
John:
Right.
John:
But if I could get that information passively in a well-lit room where my phone is on the end table next to the sofa without having me to go over and say, hey, phone, wake up.
John:
Hey, phone, wake up.
John:
And tapping it like that, because I do do that.
John:
I appreciate being able to tap to wake for this very reason.
John:
Before I had tap to wake, I don't think I use my phone like this.
John:
Once tap to wake became available, I'm like, it's not that much effort to just reach over the table and tap the phone because I usually have it face up, right?
John:
If I didn't have to tap it, that's benefit to me.
John:
And I think I would use this provided I could configure the screen to have the type of information that I would be interested in.
John:
The time probably doesn't interest me as much because I got clocks around the house, but you know, I would take it.
John:
So I am cautiously optimistic about the always on display.
Casey:
All right, moving right along.
Casey:
120 hertz ProMotion in the iPhone because it is in the iPad.
Casey:
It has been for like two or three years now.
Marco:
Oh, more than that.
Marco:
Has it been more than that?
Marco:
120 hertz has been in the iPad since the 10.5-inch iPad Pro.
Casey:
Oh, well, however long it's been, it's been a while.
Casey:
Because I remember sitting in, what was that beloved coffee shop that just folded a couple of years ago at San Jose?
Marco:
Oh, the slow service but nice setting.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Shoot.
Casey:
social distancing yeah social policy social distancing social policy uh anyways i remember sitting outside there and uh someone who maybe should remain nameless walked up with one of them and let us all play with it and i remember thinking oh that's really cool um but to be honest with you even though i use my ipad a lot to this day i i can't say i ever really noticed the difference or or maybe maybe i turned it off for some reason although i don't know why i would have but
Casey:
I don't notice it day to day.
Casey:
And apparently Mike really does.
Casey:
And that's fine.
Casey:
So I don't again, like, I'm sure this would be nice.
Casey:
I'm sure it would be cool.
Casey:
But it's not something I feel like I'm yearning for.
Casey:
But ask me again, if I have it.
Casey:
And I tell you, you know, it's the best feature in the world.
Casey:
Who knows?
Marco:
I mean, when the 10.5 launched, I remember the event you're talking about where we were shown one at social policy.
Marco:
I remember very clearly because when you first see 120 hertz on an iPad, it blows your mind.
Marco:
Like when you're used to 60 hertz,
Marco:
And then you see 120, it seems almost unnaturally smooth.
Marco:
I know some people even have a problem with it, and that's why there's actually an accessibility option to turn it off to go back to 60 hertz, because some people are a little bit weird about the motion with it.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
It's striking when you see the difference.
Marco:
That being said, I thought when I first saw that and then when I soon afterwards got my own 10.5 iPad Pro, I thought, oh no, this is going to ruin my phone and my computers and all other displays that I use that are only 6Hz.
Marco:
But that didn't happen.
Marco:
Instead, I love the way it looks and feels on the iPad, but as I switch between the iPad and the iPhone that doesn't have it,
Marco:
I don't notice that.
Marco:
So I'm sure it would be great if they could do it on the phone.
Marco:
I'm not saying they shouldn't.
Marco:
But I'm not super excited about it the way everyone else seems to be because now that I have devices with both, I see like, wow, this is really cool when I have it.
Marco:
But when I don't have it, I don't notice.
Casey:
Yeah, I think that's well put.
John:
Speaking of, this is kind of like the Ethernet thing where there's lots of myths and legends surrounding this with a little bit more science.
John:
So the realm I'm thinking of when looking at these rumors is video games.
John:
There's been debates about video game frame rates forever.
John:
In the beginning, it was simple.
John:
Higher frame rates are better.
John:
Eventually, technology advanced to the point where we could get very, very high frame rates, and then the debate began
John:
What is the point of diminishing returns?
John:
Can you tell the difference between 30 frames per second and 60?
John:
Everyone pretty much agrees.
John:
Yes, anyone can tell.
John:
Can you tell the difference between 60 and 120, between 120 and 240?
John:
At what point is it not possible for you personally or people in general to actually notice the difference?
John:
What is the point of diminishing returns?
Right.
John:
And you would think this is an open and shut case that could be measured and tested.
John:
It is extensively measured and tested, and yet gamers are going to be gamers, and they still argue with each other about it because there are many nuances involved here.
John:
Plus, there's also latency and response time and a bunch of other stuff that's mostly not related to this.
John:
But in the context of the iPhone, I think this is very much like the other...
John:
Other technologies that deal with human perception, right?
John:
And in general, we've talked about this in the past with music.
John:
We've talked about it with displays.
John:
Technology is going to advance to the point where further advancement is wasted on our senses, right?
John:
So retina displays, they may not be at the limit, but they're close, right?
John:
The whole point of retina is like, oh, you can't discern the individual pixels.
John:
Well, if you have really good eyesight, you can still kind of see them.
John:
And if your phone is real close to your face, you can still kind of see them.
John:
But we're definitely near the knee in that curve of like, you know, another doubling or tripling of dots per inch on our phones is really diminishing returns at this point.
John:
Right.
John:
Like people won't be able to see that difference.
John:
Arguably for the distances most people have their TVs, 8K could be near the knee in that curve.
John:
Maybe even, you know, 16K, put it this way, 16K televisions and video for typical television sizes that we have today and distance we sit from them is the point of diminishing returns.
John:
Right.
John:
And I think it's the same deal with frame rate.
John:
obviously technical limitations keep us from having really high frame rates plus there's also a battery life issue but as those dominoes fall and what becomes possible to have higher frame rates the question becomes at what point do we not bother any adding any more frames for a second because nobody can tell the difference 30 60
John:
We can all tell.
John:
I've yet to meet someone who can't tell a difference between 30 frames per second and 60, just to give a round number, right?
John:
60 and 120, I think you will start to find people who can't tell between 60 and 120.
John:
Even though Marco could definitely tell, some people are less sensitive than others.
John:
120 to 200, 120 to 240, you will find way more people who cannot tell the difference between these two things.
John:
Again, potentially, like, you know, the the sampling rate of input is not necessarily tied to the frame rate.
John:
So the Apple Pencil is sampled at 240 hertz, but the display is 120.
John:
Right.
John:
So there are certain applications where, you know, the various things that have to do with how often is the input read and how soon is that input reflected on the screen.
John:
That's actually somewhat independent of the frame rate.
John:
Apple Pencil could definitely get way more responsive.
John:
And there's a video that I linked to on my blog way back when of a demo display showing latencies between input and the reflection of that input going from, you know, 100 milliseconds to 10 milliseconds to one millisecond.
John:
and it is startling and we still we're not close to the point of diminishing returns for for example tracking the tip of your apple pencil but that is mostly independent of how often does the screen update as if the input was read and correctly tracked by the computer
John:
with one millisecond of latency even if the display only updated 120 times a second it would eventually update to reflect the line that you expected to be there as opposed to now where it eventually updates to reflect a line that lags a little bit behind where you thought you brought the pencil right so those are all mostly independent but for things like scrolling
John:
I think 120 hertz will put us over the line in terms of smoothness for most people, the majority of people.
John:
Going to 200 frames per second or 240, at least more than half the population will not notice a difference from 120 to that new thing.
John:
But I think 60 is a little bit under people's perception limits.
John:
So...
John:
i think we will spend a long time at 120 and i think that is a reasonable place to hang out for a while and then we can concentrate on input lag latency latency of reading you know your touches and the apple pencil and all that other stuff while maintaining 120 uh hertz and also remember with variable refresh part of the reason we can do this without killing the battery is variable refresh allows us not to just repeatedly update the same image 120 times a second and burn your battery when the image isn't changing
John:
So that technology, I mean, again, it's from the iPad and it's, you know, it's widespread everywhere is what makes this possible.
John:
And I think is the real important feature for all these high frame rate things.
John:
So I am, I endorse 120 Hertz like Marco, like my wife has an iPad that has it, right?
John:
I see it there.
John:
I appreciate it.
John:
I don't miss it.
John:
I play video games at 60 frames per second now in Destiny, where it used to be 30, and that is wonderful.
John:
I would like 120 even more.
John:
So, you know, obviously using your iPhone and scrolling with your thumb is not the same thing as playing a first-person shooter in a video game, but I can tell you just, you know, the difference of the application.
John:
I would love 120 hertz in Destiny.
John:
I would like it on my phone.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
All right, moving right along.
Casey:
Astrophotography capabilities.
Casey:
So I honestly don't know.
Casey:
I'm assuming this means taking pictures of the night sky, and that's going to get better?
Marco:
Yeah, do we have any other information on what that... Because typically, the needs of astrophotography are typically about...
Marco:
taking long exposures so that you can capture useful images at night, but not so long or somehow compensating that it becomes a problem that the stars are moving fairly quickly in the context of a long exposure.
Marco:
So if you take a long exposure, if you take a minute, two minutes long exposure, if you're at high enough resolution,
Marco:
the stars that you're shooting will have moved enough that it might cause a very small streak on each star during that exposure time or whatever the times are.
Marco:
So typically that's what you would need for astrophotography is like some way to compensate for that.
Marco:
So maybe just making really short exposures that somehow get enough light to make it work.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
So I'm curious what this is referring to.
Casey:
Well, we don't have much, but it says in this MacRumors article, the mode will allow the phone to detect different artifacts such as the moon and stars and adjust settings such as exposure accordingly, which doesn't necessarily fix what you're talking about.
Marco:
Yeah, that sounds like it's just like, you know, better photo processing for a certain subject matter, which is fine.
Marco:
Like that's a huge part of what makes the cameras on the iPhone so good.
Marco:
But that's it's certainly not a headlining feature.
Yeah.
John:
i mean i feel like it's it's probably making up for a weak area like it sounds to me like basic machine learning the camera recognizes that what you're taking a picture of is the night sky and it recognizes that through machine learning and then applies a custom set of image processing that understands hey i know image processor you might see these little pinpricks of light don't freak out it's not noise like those are stars you know what a star looks like enhance and double down on the stars instead of treating it as noise and trying to smooth it over and
John:
You know, so recognize that that is the moon and recognize that you're going to do an HDR exposure and what the moon is supposed to look.
John:
It's like machine learning of like understanding that you are taking a picture of the night sky because the night sky is not that varied.
John:
There's the moon, there's stars, maybe there's clouds and that's about it, right?
John:
So you know what's going to be there and you can make lots of custom machine learning stuff.
John:
I don't think this is what Marco was talking about, which is like leave the shutter open for three hours and get a cool swirly pattern of the stars.
John:
I don't think that's what this is about.
John:
third-party apps could surely do that and probably do that now uh it's probably just about one more thing that your camera kind of understands what you're taking a picture of and can do a decent job of it because i can imagine night sky pictures are probably the type of things that people with iphones take because they're out at night and they see a pretty sky i want to take a picture of it and then they're disappointed with the results because all the phones sort of default image processing work against the idea of a completely dark background with pinpricks of light
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right, continuing on.
Casey:
Stronger MagSafe.
Casey:
I have yet to use any MagSafe anything, so I don't really know how strong or not strong it is now.
Casey:
I've heard it's not as strong as people expected, but I don't know.
Casey:
Do you guys have more input on this?
Marco:
Yeah, I use MagSafe all the time because our bedside cable solution is MagSafe.
Marco:
And I must admit, even though the iPhone 12 series is still fairly new, but I am quite disappointed in how little MagSafe stuff there is so far.
Marco:
I assume there's a good reason.
Marco:
Maybe this is the reason.
Marco:
Maybe the reason is like a lot of stuff was just it was too hard to make it and to make it good with the existing MagSafe magnet strength.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But just using like Apple stuff, which is like my solution.
Marco:
It's very low tech is I just have the MagSafe cable and I have the Apple watch cable and
Marco:
and I have stuck to the bottom that adhesive that's like the micro suction cups.
Marco:
You know what I'm talking about?
Marco:
Some things have those.
Marco:
I bought a sheet of that on Amazon, and so I cut out little disks of it to stick on the bottom.
Marco:
So I have the Apple Watch charger, and then a few inches away, I have the phone MagSafe charger.
Marco:
And those are just suction cups stuck to the desk with that special tape.
Marco:
So they just sit flat on the nightstand.
Marco:
So I've basically made my own unmovable Apple dock.
Marco:
Which is great.
Marco:
I like it better than any other dock I've ever used.
Marco:
Because both things, they stay fixed in place.
Marco:
You can pick up each device with one hand because the things are sucked onto the table.
Marco:
So it's great.
Marco:
But that being said, the issue with MagSafe that I have is that even with the Mini, which I think is the easiest phone to align on MagSafe because the MagSafe disk itself is not that much narrower than the Mini,
Marco:
So like you have less kind of slop in one direction to deal with.
Marco:
But even with MagSafe, it's kind of hard to align the phone correctly because the magnets don't pull it so hard to the correct alignment as you'd expect it to.
Marco:
it is kind of difficult.
Marco:
Like I have to kind of wiggle it around sometimes.
Marco:
And sometimes I have it in a way that it does feel like it's stuck on, but it's like, it's like an off by one error with the magnet alignment or something.
Marco:
It's like, it's slightly off.
Marco:
And so it's, so it doesn't charge and I have to like move it over until it makes a little like thunk ding sound when it, when it's charging.
Marco:
Current MagSafe.
Marco:
I love the concept.
Marco:
The execution has been a little, I don't know, a little disappointing, I think.
Marco:
I still like it better than like unmagnetized Qi charging.
Marco:
Cause it does solve the alignment most of the time, much of the time.
Marco:
Whereas, you know, unmodified Qi chargers solve the alignment problem, none of the time.
Marco:
So it's nicer than that, but it,
Marco:
it could be made better and i think one of the ways it could be made better would be stronger magnets i think that would also greatly improve things like car mounts where right now the current magsafe is not i don't think not strong and i haven't actually tried this although i've thought about it not quite strong enough that you could just like stick a magsafe disc to some part of your car and stick your phone in it and expect it to stay there but if the magnets were made stronger that might be possible so i could see this being plausible and welcome
Casey:
John, any thoughts?
John:
Yeah, I have a MagSafe puck.
John:
The only thing I use it for is to charge my AirPods, which don't magnetically align to it really in any way intentionally.
Casey:
This is the most John thing I've ever heard.
John:
So they kind of like, I don't know if you've tried this, but I have the second generation AirPods and the non-pro ones.
John:
AirPods do have little magnets in them to pull the AirPods in, and there is some interaction between those magnets and the puck, but it's not like it's an intentional interaction.
John:
I don't think my AirPod case was designed with that puck in mind because it predates it by so many years, but they do kind of align.
John:
But anyway, my phone has MagSafe, and when I first got it, I got the puck with it, and I tried it.
John:
and i didn't like it um i didn't like it for a bunch of reasons that have little to do with the feature being bad i think it's great for you know like marco said it's better than not magnets because then you got to align the thing yourself and you're worried about everything charged right and there's some complaints about the pucks which marco solved by sticking it to the surface or whatever but anyway like in general a good idea but
John:
In my context, my fuddy-duddy context, I have readily available cables to plug in.
John:
And if given the choice, the extra convenience of putting it on the MagSafe thing didn't outweigh my own weird paranoia about...
John:
slower charging, extra heat buildup, all that stuff.
John:
And also, to be honest, this is probably the biggest one, marks in the back of my case, right?
John:
Little circular marks and indentations.
John:
You know, it's whatever.
John:
That's just me, right?
John:
It doesn't mean it's a bad feature, right?
John:
But the real thing that makes me worry about MagSafe, and especially these rumors of stronger magnets, is the fact that my phone has magnets in the back of it now.
John:
Now, I have a case on it.
John:
That is not a quote unquote MagSafe case that somehow conveys the magnetic strength through either by having their own magnets, you know, aligned the same way as the regular magnets or whatever.
John:
Like my case is just has no magnets in it whatsoever.
John:
So it provides a gap between the magnets that are inside my phone and the outside world.
John:
It's kind of also one of the reasons why I didn't want one of the Apple cases because they do have the little magnet rings thing whose sole purpose is to make it so that the strength of your magnet is not as diminished by the fact that you have a case on it.
John:
But I put, as we've discussed in past shows, I put my phone in my right pocket of my jacket with my wallet that's filled with credit cards that have mag stripes.
John:
Now, I know mag stripes are prehistoric and everyone has the tap cards now and everyone has the chip cards now.
John:
And who cares about the mag stripe?
John:
But again, me worrying about the marks on the back of my phone.
John:
I'm also kind of worried about even stronger magnets in the back of my phone being next to my wallet in my pocket.
John:
There's probably enough gap there with the case and the leather of my wallet and all the other stuff that it's not a big deal.
John:
And yeah, who knows whenever I'm going to use my mag stripes.
John:
But having powerful magnets on the back of your phone is not the type of thing that you can get rid of because they're embedded in the phone.
John:
You can't turn them off.
John:
They're not electromagnets.
John:
They're like permanent magnets, right?
John:
And, you know, there were some articles going around about how Apple recommends that you not put, like, your phone in your breast pocket if you have a pacemaker, right?
John:
Now, to some degree, people with pacemakers and other medical devices that are sensitive to magnetic fields have to be aware that there are many products in the world that could potentially have powerful magnets in them that are a danger to them.
John:
So it's not like Apple is doing anything necessarily wrong by doing this and putting magnets in them for the convenience of most people because the people who have, you know, medical devices that are sensitive to magnets just have to be aware of that.
John:
But I think a non-optional, increasingly powerful permanent magnet in the back of my phone is not something that I think pays for its convenience, right?
John:
So I get that there's an alignment issue with wireless charging.
John:
I would prefer a solution that...
John:
either mechanical alignment which is the thing that you can do you can have things aligned by having a little notch or a nubbin or other sorts of things right that's i know it's not as elegant but it can be done right or a you know a non-fire inducing air power type thing which is like hey but just don't worry about it just chuck your phone on the thing and however it's aligned we will magically figure it out under the covers to make sure we charge it in as fast as possible way given the alignment and so on and so forth
John:
We don't have any one of those things, so magnets may be the best bet, right?
John:
But due to the unique nature of the phone, or not unique, but the special nature of the phone, it is unlike, for example, MagSafe on a laptop, because most people are not holding the magnetic parts of either part of their laptop or the charger up to their body.
John:
But phones go in your pockets right next to your body all the time, next to other things in your pockets, unlike things like MagSafe.
John:
your airpods case your laptop all the other the scenarios in real life like my faucet has like a little thing that you pull out of it to you know that you can just pull the end of the faucet out and it's got the long hose so you can spray in different places that goes back in with a little magnet there are many applications where magnets for alignment is a great idea but for a rectangular thing that i stick in the pockets of all of my clothes i'm not super enthusiastic about them making those magnets more powerful now i agree that the current set of magnets are a little bit wimpy and seem not to give all the benefits you'd want them to have
John:
but i don't know if the solution is stronger magnets so i'm kind of hoping this rumor is bogus or if they're stronger they'll be stronger by such a small degree that no one will even notice but not looking forward to this all right uh anything else a finer mat finish on the back that sounds good no that's that could be huge i mean well i'll believe it when i see it
Marco:
We talk a lot on podcasts every year about the details of the iPhone surface treatments, both visually and how grippy they are, how easy they are to hold and everything.
Marco:
And this is largely an academic discussion because –
Marco:
effectively nobody doesn't use a case like i so i i haven't been using a case in my mini and it's it's almost weird that i don't and whenever anybody learns this fact they're like what i say are you an apple executive like and when i look around in the world and i i try to take notice how many phones i see without a case
Marco:
granted you know i haven't been seeing as many people as you would in a normal year but it's basically zero it's as close as you can get to zero like especially because i haven't seen john gruber yet this year so that that would at least make it one but you know it's basically zero people uh that that don't have a case except me and so this kind of thing probably doesn't matter
Marco:
However, the current line of pro phones, I think, made gripability significantly worse.
Marco:
We all thought that the new flat-sided design and everything would be a huge improvement for hand-holdability.
Marco:
And I think on the pro line, it largely hasn't been.
Marco:
Now, on the non-Pro line, because the aluminum is textured instead of like that polished steel, and because the glass has, it's like a kind of a flat glass back, so it's kind of tacky, as opposed to the like kind of sandblasted glass back that the Pros have.
Marco:
The Pros actually, again, I think they got less hand-holdable this generation.
Marco:
And so if you care about nice hand-holdability, the non-Pro phones this year are the way to go.
Marco:
And I think it must bother Apple that anything about the non-pro phones is significantly better than the pro phones.
Marco:
Like, I think they want it to be a pretty clear distinction.
Marco:
The pro phones should be better in every way.
Marco:
So to have something go the other direction would probably irritate them.
Marco:
In addition, some of the people who I've seen not use cases are Apple executives, as you said.
Marco:
So, like...
Marco:
You know, probably they want to correct this.
Marco:
They probably want to, they probably want the pro phones to both look the best, feel the best and be the best.
Marco:
And so I would expect for feeling the best, that kind of matte texture on the back would be, or some kind of change to the texture on the back would,
Marco:
would have a chance of being a very good thing.
Marco:
And I would also hope that they get rid of this super highly polished stainless steel case band design on the pros because that does not look the best once anybody has touched it.
Marco:
That being said, again, all of this is academic because most people put cases on their phones and so most people never even see or touch the actual raw sides or back of their phones.
John:
I like the steel, the shiny steel.
John:
I know people complain about fingerprints, but like you're going to touch it.
John:
It's going to have fingerprints even with fingerprints.
John:
I think it looks nicer.
John:
And more importantly, it feels nicer.
John:
Like I use my phone without a case for what a whole day or two before or whatever.
John:
I tried to use it for a while without the case and it feels like a really nice object.
John:
but i agree with marco and everybody else that the non-pro phone actually has better grip ability and it's interesting because the non-pro phone's back grip ability is because it is it's perceived as being grippier because it actually is glossy on the back right the matte one feels slipperier in the vein of what was the slipperiest one the iphone 6 that was like yeah the one that was made of teflon soap yeah you know so like that when you have very glossy glass
John:
It's very grippy right up to the point where you have a dollop of moisture and then it becomes slick as anything.
John:
So I think we perceive the non-pro phone as being grippier because we're gripping it with essentially dry hands.
John:
But in real life, maybe if you got a little bit of water on your hand and tried to grab your phone with a slick glass back, maybe it would be different.
John:
But either way, this rumor is...
John:
that they're changing the back the matte back with a grippier more comfortable feeling so it sounds like they're sticking with matte like the current pro has a matte glass back as in it's like it looks like frosted glass right and that feels slipperier to us because it's very finely textured frosted glass and it's kind of like the back of like the iphone 6 was where it was like a matte kind of aluminum thing it feels slippery because it's not like the glossy glass that is grippy you know
John:
where you get that squeaky sound where it's like, oh, I can really grip on this, right?
John:
But it's also not fuzzy like a leather case where you actually get real grip on it.
John:
It's the worst of both worlds.
John:
So this rumor is that they have improved the mat back to be grippier than it was.
John:
I don't know what that means.
John:
I don't know how you can make it matte, but even grippier.
John:
Does that mean make the texture less fine?
John:
So if you looked at it under a microscope, the, you know, the matteness would be higher hills and valleys.
John:
Does it mean they would actually... Here's the thing.
John:
Naked robotic core is my whole deal.
John:
I've been talking about it for years, right?
John:
Apple continues to not do...
John:
the obvious other solution which is make your naked robotic core really grippy by not making it out of quote-unquote premium materials by putting wear surfaces on the naked robotic core they've never done that they've stuck with the naked robotic core which is here is as small as we can make this phone all the surfaces are hard put a soft case on it express yourself make it grippy do whatever you want but if we actually put essentially wear surfaces on the outside of the phone
John:
People might like it, but then they will wear them out.
John:
And that's your actual phone.
John:
You can't remove it.
John:
When someone destroys their case or wears it out, they take it off and they get a new case, right?
John:
If the back of the phone, like my stupid Microsoft mouse, was made of soft touch rubber, once you destroyed the back of your soft touch rubber phone, it would be like, oh, my phone is all gross now.
John:
And I can't take it off because it's part of the phone, right?
John:
So I don't fault Apple for not taking this approach.
John:
They are very committed to Naked Robotic Core.
John:
I think it's the right approach because like Marco said, the vast majority of people just put a case on it, in which case they are benefiting from Naked Robotic Core, which is make the phone as small and beautiful as you can get it.
John:
And then you have the option to put whatever cases on you want.
John:
And if you're a weirdo like Gruber or an Apple executive or Marco now and you want to use without a case, guess what?
John:
You got the smallest phone possible with really premium surfaces that don't wear out like my stupid Microsoft mouse and everyone's happy, right?
John:
But I continue to think about...
John:
maybe one model of phone that is a little bit chunkier, that has actual, I'm calling them wear surfaces in a derogatory way of saying they eventually wear down, but that has surfaces on them that are not hard, durable materials, but instead are designed to be grippy.
John:
And it's weird because I think that phone would get the reputation as the grippy phone, which makes no sense because every phone is the grippy phone.
John:
If you just buy one and put a super grippy case on it, you've got a grippy phone.
John:
But it's like, yeah, but you buy this one, whatever model this is, the
John:
the iphone 15 you know pro rugged edition i don't know someone can come on the fly with some sort of branding name for this or whatever that the actual phone itself is like like a makita power tool that has like plastic and rubber all over it and like it is just a grippy thing or whatever you know maybe not go that low end but like something a premium feeling actual grippy material that the phone is made out of
Marco:
What about the iPhone 5C plastic?
Marco:
That felt great.
Marco:
The iPhone 3G and 3GS, also plastic, also felt great.
John:
Very shiny plastic.
John:
I'm thinking more of devices.
John:
I think of power tools because very often they are made to have positive grip and to also be durable.
John:
You don't want the handle of your power drill to wear out, but you also don't want it to be made of glossy plastic.
Marco:
Yeah, fair enough.
Marco:
But like, yeah, I mean, one of the huge benefit to this is that compared to the phone that has metal and glass on it that you're putting plastic on top of the phone that actually is made of plastic to begin with would be significantly smaller and lighter weight because metal and glass are heavy.
Marco:
And, you know, you would be replacing some of that frame.
Marco:
I mean, there would have to be some kind of structural, you know, probably interior metal frame for some part of it for support or rigidity or whatever.
Marco:
But, you know, you would result, the resulting product would be significantly smaller and lighter and simpler than a metal and glass phone with a plastic case added to it aftermarket.
John:
Yeah, the tricky part is the screen still because, I mean, OLED screens are flexible.
John:
You can roll them up, right?
John:
But the glass surface of the phones is part of the experience of using an iPhone.
John:
Like, it's part of the reason the original iPhone, they ditched the plastic one or more with glass because running your finger across a plastic screen is not great.
John:
No matter what kind of plastic they make out of, glass just feels better.
John:
And glass, unfortunately, is not super enthusiastic about bending a lot.
John:
So...
John:
plastic i think is a great idea for a phone you mentioned having a metal frame for rigidity part of the reason it needs that rigidity is the glass part of the reason of course is the printed circuit board which also kind of doesn't like to be bent but yeah plastic could go a lot setting aside the grippiness plastic could go a long way towards reducing weight and increasing durability of phones but apple feels shy about that because people didn't like the iphone 5c i thought it was great i still think the iphone 5c is a great phone but it didn't sell well and i think apple may have taken the wrong lesson from that
John:
uh that like oh we shouldn't make a plastic phone in reality just the price and features of the 5c given the line that was around it was not right um so i think there's there's two separate things one make a phone out of materials that are not aluminum steel or glass but it still is essentially a premium phone it still would be the naked robotic core and two make a ruggedized phone that comes out of the box as a beefier bigger battery more grippy with what i keep calling wear surfaces all over the thing
John:
But those are extremely diversified models.
John:
I feel like Apple's iPhone line is now perhaps as diversified as it's ever going to get.
John:
I'm not sure Apple has an appetite to go into the more exotic realms.
John:
I feel like that is more the domain of Android phones where there's more variability because Apple does have a brand.
John:
And I think with the current phone lineup, they're covering...
John:
so many bases.
John:
If you want a small phone that's good, they sell one.
John:
If you want a gigantic phone that's good, they sell one.
John:
If you want a quote-unquote normal-sized phone that's good, they sell a couple.
John:
They've pretty much covered the market as well as they need to, given current phone technology.
John:
So I don't expect them to do either one of these things, and I don't, you know, think... I couldn't even make a strong pitch for it, but it would certainly be cool, mostly because it's a thing they haven't tried yet.
John:
Because everyone uses the case, and Maker Robotic Core has served them so well, they haven't even looked at that other thing, and I just think it would be a fun...
John:
a fun variation now all that said this rumor about oh a matte back that's grippier i think it's going to be one of those things where if they mentioned it at all it'll be like oh and we improved the matte back so it's a little bit grippier and none of us will be able to tell yeah by the way while you're on the subject of uh the variability of the lineup all these rumors that the iphone mini is like not selling at all and they're going to discontinue it boy i hope that's wrong
Marco:
Because I love the iPhone mini still.
Marco:
I'm a big fan.
Marco:
The size feels totally normal to me now.
Marco:
Every other phone feels like a giant monster phone to me now.
Marco:
Like it's so nice and small and light and it fits nicely in my pocket.
Marco:
And I never get that feeling when like I sit down and like whenever I've like tried a plus phone here and there, like you sit down and it's like a line something wrong in your pocket and you got to like shift around or move it over.
Marco:
Like I've never had that happen with the mini.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It's just delightful.
Marco:
I'm so happy with it.
Marco:
And I really, really hope they continue to make flagship small phones.
John:
I can't remember if I said this on Twitter or here or both, but I like...
John:
the idea that apple would bail on the mini because it sells less of course it sells less you're that's what diversifying the line means you have the sort of the mainstream phones that most people buy and when you make the weirder models fewer people are going to buy them that's the whole point of diversifying your line is you want to address smaller and smaller subsets of the market you do it after you satisfy the fat part of the bell curve then you go after the edges and
John:
And, yeah, you introduce a little phone, fewer people are going to buy it.
John:
Now, it could be, oh, well, it's not that it's fewer.
John:
It's fewer than we even thought it would be.
John:
It's fewer than projections.
John:
And kind of like the stock market in business, very often you make some wild-ass guess about how many you're going to sell.
John:
And if you don't meet that expectation, it's worse than if you had sold the exact same number of phones but had predicted a lower number and exceeded it, which doesn't make any sense, but that's just human nature.
Yeah.
John:
But as with so many of these things, yeah, Apple, you're going to sell fewer of them.
John:
Stick to it.
John:
Because if you like if it's not like you didn't sell like half a percent of what you thought, just keep doing it.
John:
Because honestly, the you know, the technological investment like.
John:
What did I talk about this before?
John:
Like Disney bailing on Star Wars after they had some trouble with the franchise.
John:
Part of what makes people know and trust your brand is you not immediately running at the first sign of trouble in a product line.
John:
You know the people who love them and you really love it.
John:
You may be disappointed that there aren't more of them and that it costs you so much money to get this whole other production line up and running.
John:
But honestly, you should just eat that because having extremely loyal mini customers in your camp and having them give you...
John:
37 percent margins on their purchase instead of 38.5 percent margins just make the bean counter swallow it and keep making the mini honestly like it's not this terrible disaster where apple's losing money they got they make so much money they don't even know what to do with they can't give away their cash fast enough keep making the mini for crying out loud
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Mack Weldon, Linode, and Flatfile.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was 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.
John:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them.
Marco:
At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss.
Marco:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.
Marco:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
They did enough.
Casey:
I have been eyeballing this for a while, and finally I just decided to pull the trigger.
Casey:
I got myself a DJI Mini 2 drone.
Marco:
Oh, nice.
Marco:
Those look so fun.
Casey:
Oh, it is so much fun.
Casey:
I know not what I'm doing.
Casey:
And one of the scary things about the Mini is that it doesn't have the accident avoidance that yours does, Marco.
Casey:
Like it doesn't have forward and rear sensors to prevent it from running into things.
Casey:
Oh, man, though, it's so much fun.
Casey:
And it's so it's so weetsy.
Casey:
It's so adorable.
Casey:
It's like the it's like the drone adorable edition.
Marco:
Did you get the drone care plan that they offer so that like if you do crash into something, it's no big deal?
Casey:
I did.
Casey:
They do have like an AppleCare Plus thing and I put it off and then it was like, you have to do this within two days.
Casey:
And that was this morning.
Casey:
And so I was like, ah, fine.
Casey:
So for 50 bucks, I get like two replacements, I think, or something.
Casey:
Well, I think I still have to pay for them a little bit, just like you do with AppleCare.
Casey:
significantly cheaper replacements if i do something extremely terrible and i figure at least for the first year while i don't know what i'm doing uh it seemed like a reasonable thing to do but i got the dji mini 2 fly more combo which basically means uh it gives you some extra batteries which actually are worth discussing it gives you a controller which i guess it doesn't come with generally speaking but
Casey:
um some extra propellers and uh i forget what else but um i freaking love this thing it is completely stupid and useless and wasteful and oh my god it's so much fun that's awesome useful or it's spying on your neighbors and menacing pets or you are we gonna see some like instagram stories of uh drone footage of you flying through cool things
Casey:
uh i don't i don't know um i i don't think so uh so my intention with this was just to get something i i feel like i need something a little bit happy after the last year i don't think that's unreasonable and casey you're an adult you're a professional it's fine yeah exactly you don't have to excuse it it's a fun toy you're a tech podcaster it's fine
Casey:
So yeah, so anyway, so I wanted to give myself a little treat.
Casey:
I got myself a treat.
Casey:
But I figure on occasion, I think it will be nice to have.
Casey:
So as an example, like a listener of the show was kind enough to lend me, shoot, I forget what model it was, but I think it was an earlier version of your current drone, Marco.
Casey:
Because what do you have?
Casey:
You have the something?
Marco:
I have the Mavic 2 Pro, I think.
Marco:
It came out like two years ago, but not the one with the zoom lens, the one with the big sensor.
Casey:
So I think I had borrowed from this very kind of listener, Eric, a previous version of that.
Casey:
And it was phenomenal.
Casey:
There were definitely a couple of things about it that I miss.
Casey:
For example, the accident avoidance, because the big guys will, I guess they have like IR sensors or something or sonar or something on the front.
Casey:
wear radars such that it will try not to run into walls or trees or what have you.
Casey:
But the Mini does not.
Casey:
The advantages of the Mini, other than being cheap, are that it's quite small.
Casey:
It is stunningly small.
Casey:
And it's under the magic 250 gram limit that certainly America and I think other countries have decided that
Casey:
If a drone is under 250 grams, it's considered like a complete nutter toy rather than something that could arguably be used professionally.
Casey:
Now, naturally, there's nothing stopping me from using this professionally.
Casey:
I would need to go get my FAA certification and what have you.
Casey:
But I could.
Casey:
It's a decent enough drone that I think I could do it.
Casey:
But the point is that you don't have to register it with the FAA.
Casey:
And there's some, I think, a couple other differences.
Casey:
Check with your local jurisdictions and what have you.
Casey:
um but it's just it's portable it's super portable like eric when he lent me his drone it came in this huge backpack which because the drone is not small and so on and so forth um but the thing is so tiny like the the bag it came in is like the size of an average purse i would say um and and i've been really enjoying using it and the thing moves like when i was borrowing the whatever mavic it was i don't recall exactly the model number
Casey:
Uh, but when I was borrowing that Mavic, like I kept it on super slow mode because I was so scared I was going to break this, you know, fellow's drone and have to send him like a carcass back in the mail.
Casey:
He was kind enough to ship me this drone and say, borrow it for a couple of weeks.
Casey:
And, uh, and I didn't want to have to ship a carcass back.
Casey:
And so I was using it super slow mode.
Casey:
Well, even the mini, uh,
Casey:
when you put it in sport mode, will do 30 miles an hour, which is nuts.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
It's 250 grams, and it'll do... I mean, I think it's a little shy of 30, but it has a readout on your phone screen, and it says 28, 29 miles an hour or something like that.
Casey:
It's bananas.
Casey:
But so much of the tech is so cool, and just as...
Casey:
As someone who appreciates good engineering, and I think I speak for all three of us in saying that, it's just so cool that so much incredible technology is in this little tiny device.
Casey:
And if you've never really used a drone, in and of itself, it's exactly what you would think, right?
Casey:
You can make it go up, down.
Casey:
You can make it spin.
Casey:
You can go left or right.
Casey:
You can forward and back.
Casey:
But there's so many cool things you can do.
Casey:
And as silly as it sounds, and anyone who has flown a drone in the last 15 years knows this already, but you can fly it wherever and say, come home, please.
Casey:
And sure enough, it will ascend to whatever the stated come home altitude is to make sure it gets over trees and other obstacles.
Casey:
It will fly over you at a couple hundred feet and then descend down directly in front of you.
Casey:
And it's the coolest thing.
Casey:
Like it is so freaking cool.
Casey:
And, and when you're flying it on your phone screen, you know, so you, you, the way it works at least for DJI drones that I've used is you stick your phone in a, like holster within this controller, a controller like you would use for like an RC car.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
And you hook a cable up into the lightning port and that's your viewfinder, if you will.
Casey:
And it shows you, you know, what the drone sees, but you can also call up a map and see exactly where the drone is in relation to you and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And so much of this is so cool.
Casey:
And the DJI fly app is surprisingly good for a company that you would think would probably have a mediocre at best, at best app.
Casey:
It's it's, it lets you do like playback of the route that you took in, in, in so far as you can watch a little arrow, like dance around on the map and, and,
Casey:
And it'll even show you the messages it sends you like, oh, this is where the wind was too strong or what have you.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
This is so cool and so much fun.
Casey:
And I'm so glad I got it.
Casey:
Now, ask me again in two months.
Casey:
I'll probably be like, oh, yeah, that's right.
Casey:
I do have a drone.
Casey:
I forgot about that.
Casey:
But sitting here now three days in, sitting here now three days in, it is the coolest thing.
Casey:
And I cannot recommend it enough.
Casey:
They're not a sponsor.
Casey:
They should be.
Casey:
But the Mini 2 is so fun and so neat.
Casey:
And I did, um, I, Aaron was taking Penny on a walk in the neighborhood.
Casey:
And so I did fly, like I tracked her down and flew and was kind of flying behind her, trying to get a cinematic video.
Casey:
I'm not going to post this anywhere for several reasons, but I was trying to get like a cinematic looking video of her.
Casey:
And when she got home, she said, you know, you gotta be careful with that.
Casey:
And I was like, well, yeah.
Casey:
And thinking that maybe I flew too close to a tree and I didn't realize it or something.
Casey:
And she said, well, you know, as, as you were chasing me, which was fine, um,
Casey:
There was a guy getting out of his car at his house, and he was looking at that drone and looking at me and looking at that drone and looking at me.
Casey:
And he was like, huh.
Casey:
And definitely was like looking at me funny, says Aaron.
Casey:
And so I guess she was like, let's try to make it like less awkward.
Casey:
She says to Penny, the dog, oh, daddy's using his drone again, that silly fellow.
Casey:
You know, I forget what she said.
Casey:
You know, something like that, you know, to indicate that it's not like some freaking creepers.
Casey:
Well, I mean, arguably I was a creeper.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Are you going to get the neighborhood watch on your back or whatever?
John:
The homeowners association?
John:
Sorry, no drones in the neighborhood, Casey.
John:
New rule.
Casey:
And it's funny because my reign in the homeowners association is a month away from being done.
Casey:
So you never know.
Casey:
It very well could happen.
John:
Yeah, that rule is coming down on you hard soon.
John:
Yeah, you're under the FAA limit.
John:
But guess what?
John:
The neighborhood limit is zero grams.
Casey:
Oh, it's so true.
Casey:
And I'm just waiting for the next door post.
Casey:
Like, hey, I hear this drone buzzing my hat.
John:
Yeah, who's doing this?
John:
You know, we don't need to.
John:
The leaf blowers are bad enough.
John:
I don't need to hear a drone.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
It's so true.
John:
I don't know if it's all the post-apocalyptic literature and movies and televisions that I'm super into, but every time I see these drones, I think of how incredibly useful they are in any kind of sort of zombie apocalypse, end of the world scenario where, like, you need to have sort of
John:
you know, situational awareness and if there's some kind of threat, right, where you need to know what's around you and who's what and where and just, you know, if you had told me as a kid that you'd be able to buy something like this drone for, you know, a couple hundred bucks and, like, how amazing it is and what it does and that you could just buy one and have this, like, obviously there are military drones and all sorts of other applications that, like, the real uses, but, like, whatever, whoever does the next...
John:
End of the world story with modern technology and smartphones and everything like I can, you know, whatever the threat is, whether it's other people or zombies or who knows aliens or whatever, having ready access to drones to just grab them from a store and charge them up, assuming there's electricity in this in this end of the world story.
John:
And fly them out to, you know, see to surveil your perimeter and everything.
John:
It's just it's so science fiction.
John:
I'm so I'm so old.
John:
I just can't get over how cool it is.
John:
Like just you just go to the website, how amazing it is.
John:
You can just fly anywhere in any direction with live video.
John:
in essentially disposable hardware, disposable from the perspective of like, there's no humans in it and it's a couple hundred bucks.
John:
And in the apocalypse, there's warehouses full of these things.
John:
So just grab them and fortify your castle with drones and just have them flying constantly.
John:
Of course, the noise is something, but you know, it still beats leaf blowers.
Casey:
Yeah, totally.
Casey:
Not by much, but it does.
Casey:
it's not often that I get to look down on the roof of my house, you know, and as it turns out, we're going to be doing an addition in sometime in the next couple of months.
Casey:
And one of the things I'm excited to do is not like film it happening, but maybe at the end of each day after the crew leaves, it,
Casey:
take an overhead shot because, you know, it's an external thing that's happening, take an overhead shot of the progress, right.
Casey:
You know, and just kind of have maybe not literally a time lapse, but be able to go through the week or two weeks or month or whatever it's going to take them to build it and, and see the progress happening, you know, not in real time, but sort of, so to speak in real time.
Casey:
And I'm really looking forward to that.
Casey:
And plus, you know, the, the time that we had borrowed that drone from that extremely kind listener, uh,
Casey:
it was when we were at Cape Charles and whenever, you know, we can start vacationing properly again, I'm really looking forward to in when it's appropriate, when it's legal, et cetera, being able to take a couple of videos like that.
Casey:
It doesn't have to be 30 minutes of it.
Casey:
It can be just a few minutes, but the videos we captured at Cape Charles a few years ago when we were borrowing that drone was,
Casey:
were super cool.
Casey:
And I don't think anyone else really cared that much, but I thought they were phenomenally cool.
Casey:
And I'm really excited to be able to do that sort of thing and to be able to get just a different perspective on life and document that.
Casey:
And I've been thinking about it a lot, and I think this is a topic maybe for another day, but
Casey:
I think it's fun for me and very neat, and I'm very lucky to be able to have a kind of an arsenal or a tool chest that I can use when it comes to capturing moments.
Casey:
Because I have the GoPro, and I've used it, I think we mentioned just a week or two ago, I use the GoPro for even just silly things like sticking it on a window so I can see how and when Penny is escaping from her pen that we put her in.
Casey:
And I, the GoPro can be used to like film Declan back when, you know, swimming lessons were a thing and we weren't allergic to the indoors.
Casey:
I can bring that in the pool with me and Declan when we're doing like a swimming lesson or free swim or whatever and film him underwater and film him, you know, and not worry about this breaking, you know, like you were saying about this disposable to some degree, John.
Casey:
And having a proper camera with a zoom lens, you know, granted it is a pain in the ass in a lot of ways, but nevertheless, it is also cool to be able to take out this camera and, and be a little bit further away from my family and taking more candid shots of them, like having all of these different tools and now a drone in my arsenal is,
Casey:
I really, really enjoy it.
Casey:
And it's really, really neat to be able to have all these different tools in your tool chest to be able to use the right tool for the job at the right time, which of course 99% of the time is just my damn phone.
Casey:
But nevertheless, when you get, when you have some about some amounts of, you know, ability to, to plan, it is really, really cool.
Casey:
So with that said, Marco, you haven't touched a drone in like two years, I assume.
Marco:
um yeah about a year but that's you know like you know like i bought it for for a purpose and we were also doing some construction and i wanted the same thing you were saying like to be able to you know take you know capture some of it going on um and and it was it was good for that and then you know it was also nice just as a novelty you know like the the the year of like having this like the first year i had like having this thing as this great novelty where like you know i would i brought it like to the family gathering at christmas and they live in a yeah
Marco:
in a rural area and so we were like you know zoomed up and showed their whole you know their property and you know zoomed down to you know someone else's house like hey here's an overhead picture of your house and you know it was just it was fun like there's a lot of novelty value to drones as long as you're in an area where you're not around a lot of other people because they are super annoying yeah
Marco:
um but we were lucky that we were in two such areas where there were not a lot of people so it was wonderful um and and it was it was it was like a great novelty to bring it around like that first year and you know then the novelty has worn off and and i it's sitting on the shelf and i'm actually i'm going through a big wave of like cleaning out and and trying to like get rid of a lot of stuff and sell some stuff and give some stuff away and i i was just thinking today like should i should i give away the drone or sell the drone like i was i was just thinking about that literally earlier today not knowing you'd done this
Marco:
Because mine is also significantly larger than yours.
Marco:
And so that means everything about it.
Marco:
The batteries, the chargers, everything about it is bigger.
Marco:
The noise level.
Marco:
Maybe.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Yeah, it is.
Casey:
I wouldn't say it's dramatically different.
Casey:
And granted, I haven't heard of Mavic in a couple of years now.
Casey:
But my vague recollection is that it is noticeably louder.
Casey:
The Mavic, the big guys, are noticeably louder than the one that I have.
Marco:
Yeah, and the one that you have, as you mentioned, it has a few limitations compared to mine, and the image quality is a little bit different because it's a much smaller design.
Marco:
But yeah, no question, if I were buying new today, I would buy the one you bought, exactly that one.
Marco:
Because...
Marco:
I was basically using it, you know, as you are, kind of as a toy.
Marco:
Like, so... Right, right, right.
Marco:
I don't have professional needs.
Marco:
I bought the one I bought at the time I bought it, which was, I mean, probably about three years ago now.
Marco:
It was a while ago.
Marco:
It was as soon as the Mavic 2 came out.
Marco:
Like, I bought it, like, that week.
Marco:
I bought the one I bought at the time because that was, like, the one that I knew would be easiest for me to operate because it had all those convenience features.
Marco:
It had, like, the, you know, the return to home thing and all the protective features to protect you from...
Marco:
being too likely to crash it into a lake or a house you know like like it would it would automatically fly it also like mine automatically flies home if it's getting to the point where it's not going to have enough battery life to make it home yep yep yep yep so that way like again it kind of saves you from from yourself
Marco:
And stuff like that.
Marco:
So there are all sorts of little convenience features, the anti-crashing-into-things sensors that make it so that this was going to be really nice for my both needs and my skill level.
Marco:
But now, the one you got, the Mini 2...
Marco:
It's so much smaller and so much like I feel like that makes it a lot more delightful in certain ways.
Marco:
It also makes it a lot smaller to fit in a bag.
Casey:
Yep, that's exactly right.
Marco:
And I would imagine because it's so much lighter weight, you probably need less battery weight and battery bulk as well to get the same amount of flight time.
Casey:
I would suspect, so this thing will do about 20 to 30 minutes, you know, depending on wind and so on and so forth.
Casey:
But yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because like I said earlier, the particular setup that Eric had lent me, it was in a fairly large backpack and, you know, there were plenty of accessories in it.
Casey:
So it could have been in a smaller container, but it was the sort of thing where it was definitely a burden or at least a conscious decision to bring the drone anywhere in the couple of weeks that he let me borrow it.
Casey:
Uh, whereas this, it's certainly still a decision, but it's a lot more casual.
Casey:
Like, eh, why not?
Casey:
You know, well, I'll just throw it in and can't hurt.
Casey:
And, and that I really like.
Casey:
I mean, it's small enough that I would consider if I was going on like an airplane, do you remember airplanes?
Casey:
I don't know if I do.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
If I was going on like an airplane vacation, I would consider bringing it because it's not, you know, tremendous.
Casey:
I'm not sure that I would and certainly depend on where I would be going, but it's small enough that it could hypothetically work.
Casey:
A couple of quick things in case you're interested in this sort of thing and potentially buying one.
Casey:
The Fly More Combo, I think I'd mentioned, comes with three batteries, but it also comes with a battery-like charger thing where you can slot all three batteries into it, and it charges via USB-C.
Casey:
And what it'll do is it'll just charge—yeah, it's USB-C.
Casey:
And it'll charge whatever battery is closest to full first, and then it will charge the next one and then the next one.
Casey:
But additionally, and this is relevant because we're supposed to get a bunch of ice overnight, it will also act as a just standard battery, you know, like charger, like the other direction.
Casey:
So it has a USB, A, B, I always get it wrong, a standard USB.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, USB out port.
Casey:
exactly now that one's usb old it's not usb c it's a but i could hook up like a standard lightning cable to this triplet of batteries and charge my phone if our battery if our power goes out overnight which is super convenient especially when if you're traveling um
Casey:
And so I really dig that.
Casey:
And apparently like getting the batteries in and out of the mini one was a real pain.
Casey:
And it's super easy on this one.
Casey:
Additionally, the controller does not have any sort of screen on it.
Casey:
Like my recollection of the Mavic that I had borrowed was that it had like some basic readouts, like what mode you're in, what height you're at.
Casey:
I think how much battery time was left.
Casey:
Does yours have some sort of like LCD on it?
Marco:
Yeah, it's very similar to that.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Okay, well, this has no screen whatsoever, which is fine, but in a perfect world, it would be neat to have that on the controller as well.
Marco:
I mean, honestly, I never use that screen.
Marco:
Like, I'm always just looking at my phone screen when I operate it.
Casey:
Oh, and also, the phone is above the controller, not below, which I don't think was the case on the Mavic that I used.
Casey:
The phone was below the controller when it was all mounted up, and this, the phone sits above the controller, which is really nice, and I much prefer that.
Casey:
Do you remember how yours is?
Marco:
I know it's been... My phone sits below.
Marco:
Mine's the old style.
Marco:
I am curious, though.
Marco:
I don't think... Are you aware of the goggles?
Marco:
Yes, actually.
Marco:
Are those compatible with the Mini yet?
Casey:
I don't think so, but I haven't looked into it.
Casey:
And Eric had a set for his... I believe it was a Mavic.
Casey:
I might be misspeaking.
Casey:
He had a set for his Mavic, which I tried like once or twice and was freaking trippy.
Casey:
Very cool.
Casey:
Super cool.
Casey:
Very weird, though.
John:
that's how that's how the drone racers uh do do the racing have you seen those you ever see the yes yes yes yes yep and it amazes me that uh i mean if you watch them doing the races like that the the drones are flying so fast that you're like how can anybody possibly be controlling that and you're like well they have these goggles let them see what the drone is seeing and then you see what they're seeing like nope doesn't help i don't understand like viewing through the lens of that thing it's like
John:
they're still going so fast how are they how are they doing this i mean i suppose it's like any other thing like racing or video games or whatever it's just practice and skill and probably a lot of crashes in the case of drones because unlike being in a race car if you crash a drone you know you don't die so but it's just it is amazing and yeah it is very i think the trippiest thing would have to be kind of like marco was talking about with the vr stuff of like
John:
if what you're seeing is a thing that is progressing through space and yet you are standing still, that's gotta be disconcerting and potentially motion sickness inducing.
John:
But, but yeah, but the speeds, these things go, the other thing is just, just plain reflexes and just, you know,
John:
Talk about flinching.
John:
When you run this thing into a wall, it's going to feel like you hit it with your own head, right?
John:
Yeah, seriously.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
But yeah, so I mean, I kind of wish I had the screen, but not a big deal.
Casey:
And the other thing I don't like is that if I wanted to on the Mavic, I could, I think you would push down and twist a little bit to pop off the propellers.
Casey:
And with this, and I believe this is the only DJI drone where this is the case, they actually are screwed in, which is a little bit of a pain and I don't love.
Casey:
But all in all,
Marco:
Why are you taking off the propellers?
Casey:
No, no, I wouldn't generally speaking, but like if I was going to leave the drone alone for a while just so I don't break them, I would occasionally take them off.
Casey:
Or like when I shipped them back to Eric, I took them off.
Casey:
So generally, not a big deal.
Casey:
And eventually it'll end up that I will break one of these propellers and hopefully not the whole drone.
Casey:
And so I will need to replace one and that'll be a little bit of a pain.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
all things being all things being equal you know with the fly more combo i think was 600 bucks if i'm not mistaken so that's the drone the case the batteries the controller you know with some extra propellers uh and and i i really am so sitting here now i'm so glad i spent the money i think it's so much fun and i think it really will be a neat and novel thing to have
Casey:
from time to time i'm sure you know in the next couple of months i'll i'll go from using it every day to like once a week to like once a month to oh yeah i have a drone yep um but nevertheless it is super neat and super cool and if you have a burning desire to you know to spend a few hundred bucks first of all atp.fm slash join and then after that uh you can go to dji or amazon or what have you and check it out i just think it's super cool
John:
This just strikes me as one of those toys that if I got it, I would just be angry at how unappreciative my children are of the amazing technology in the world.
John:
How much I would have killed for this as a kid.
John:
And they'd be like, yeah, it's a drone.
John:
So what?
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's so true.
John:
Do you understand?
John:
It's like, yeah, I don't know what the equivalent is going to be when they're old people and they're angry.
John:
The children aren't amazed by some new technology, but these drones are it.
John:
It's like just, just phenomenal.
Marco:
I can't even believe they're, they're real.
Um,
Marco:
They are so amazing.
Marco:
The drone I have, which is, again, like three years old, the pictures it takes, the video it takes, I'm like, this is better than almost any camera I've ever owned.
Marco:
And it flies.
Marco:
And it costs less than most of the fancy cameras do.
Marco:
It's ridiculous.
Marco:
You're right.
Marco:
You almost can't believe that it's real.
Marco:
This is one of those products that you use it and you're like, wow, technology is amazing.
Marco:
I can't believe that we can do this.
Marco:
And what's especially impressive, too, is just how incredibly good the gimbal is.
Marco:
And the combination of the gimbal and the actual flight control of all the rotors is such that...
Marco:
It can you can fly it up in the air and it can be, you know, a decently breezy day.
Marco:
And you look at the video afterwards and it is not moving like it is rock steady.
Marco:
And you're like, how is that possible?
Marco:
This thing is hovering 400 feet in the air on a windy day.
Marco:
And I'm like gently moving it and it's it doesn't rock back and forth at all.
Marco:
There's no shake.
Marco:
it's shocking how good like how stable it is how you know of course and you know this thing has a great sensor so it's like how how clear and sharp everything is it is it is mind-blowing how good this technology is for granted i'm not gonna i'm not gonna say it's cheap it's not you know these aren't low prices you know as you said like you know 600 bucks is a pretty good entry point for like a decent mid-range drone but
Marco:
For that price, considering that it happens to also be an amazing camera that flies, that's pretty amazing.
Marco:
Especially when you compare the quality of that to a $600 point-and-shoot camera, you're almost getting the flying for free.
Marco:
It's really unbelievable how good these are.
John:
I mean, this is kind of the aviation equivalent of computational photography.
John:
Setting aside the photography, just the flying thing, the reason all these drones exist is because computers and software advanced and shrunk to the point where we could both fit them in a device that doesn't weigh too much.
John:
So you need dye shrinks and smaller and smaller feature sets and more efficient circuits so you can have a smaller battery that doesn't weigh as much.
John:
And then software wise, the control software to be able to put essentially a bunch of dumb motors and servos in here being controlled by a very complicated computer program that is fast and responsive with all the various sensors, accelerometers and gyroscopes to be able to stay in the air.
John:
I remember as a kid watching the precursor to all of these drones, which was like university projects where they would
John:
Take some computer and connect it with an umbilical cord because they couldn't actually put it in the flying thing.
John:
Connect a flying thing with an umbilical cord to this huge array of computers.
John:
And these computers would be trying to control the flying thing with some really complicated software program that some grad student wrote to figure out, oh, when you're tipping this way, change your rotor angle that way and do, you know, to eventually essentially be a drone.
John:
and they made it look so hard right because the the drones were everything cost a bazillion dollars it was it was tethered to a giant cable to look like like a pool hose or you know it wasn't even just like an extension cord it was this huge cable connected up to a wall of the most expensive computers that they could buy and the thing would crash all over the place right and it's just we needed to just get over that hump where it's like
John:
Can we get the electronics small enough?
John:
Can we figure out this software problem?
John:
And once we got over that hump, it's like, guess what?
John:
We, you don't have to be tethered anymore.
John:
We can put the computer in there and guess what?
John:
We figured out the basic software program to more or less stay in the air.
John:
And then, then that was it.
John:
Like there's just like this discontinuity of like before this was not a thing that you could even have.
John:
And now it is well known enough.
John:
And the technology is widely available enough that it,
John:
It costs less than a good laptop, right?
John:
It really costs less than a good laptop because we crack this problem.
John:
This is what's so exciting about technology that like something that seems so hard is to almost be impossible.
John:
And then we get over the hump and it is amazing.
John:
And in case you're wondering, no, I do not file self-driving in this category because self-driving really is super duper hard.
John:
But a remote control thing that merely knows I can stay level and I can adjust when I'm mashed by the wind and you can control where I go.
John:
We did get over that hump and that is a much smaller hump.
John:
But even that one was so hard to get over that, you know, for my entire childhood, the reason this is so amazing to me is that I saw people trying and failing again and again to do this.
John:
And now it's just like...
John:
Probably anybody can make one of these because the software idea, certainly the hardware is so widely available that anybody could assemble this amount of hardware.
John:
Maybe it wouldn't be as nice as this.
John:
It wouldn't be as good as this and refined and so on and so forth.
John:
It's a hard problem, but the hardware that's in these drones is not super secret.
John:
That's why you can get one for a couple hundred bucks.
John:
And then the software seems like it's tractable enough...
John:
that any company with reasonably good engineering resources can make a drone that flies successfully and can keep itself level and move around.
John:
And then it's just a question of who are the good drone makers or who are the bad ones or whatever.
John:
But the problem of fairly inexpensive thing that flies...
John:
has more or less been solved by humanity and that's why these drones all over the place in the same way that how can you get decent pictures from a phone sensor the size of your pinky nail that computational photography stuff to be able to pull reasonable pictures out of that was solved many years ago now we're all just iterating on it so drones really are a an amazing technology success for a success story and maybe my kids should be bored with them but i will never be bored with them because they just seem like
John:
You know, they seem like such an amazing triumph and such a sci-fi thing, because that's what it's like when you read sci-fi stories.
John:
The thing that's amazing is just the everyday thing in the background of the sci-fi story.
John:
And that's how you can tell it's the future.
John:
So I guess we're living in the future.
John:
I mean, we do have a pandemic after all.