The State of Your Baby
Casey:
Everything is amiss in my world right now.
Casey:
Well, not amiss, different.
Casey:
Just your world?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So, first of all, Aaron is having an outdoor, socially distant book club meeting right now, so there's a very slim chance I might need to run away during the recording.
Marco:
But more pertinently... To go give your thoughts on the book?
Casey:
Yeah, exactly right.
Casey:
No, in case one of the kids wakes up, which is extremely rare for them, but you never know what could happen.
Marco:
What did you think was the theme of the book?
Casey:
I don't even remember what book it was she was reading, but nevertheless.
Marco:
I don't remember what themes mean.
Casey:
More pertinently, as Marco, better than anyone, knows, I have had very sporadic problems with my genuinely beloved USB Pre 2.0.
Casey:
And every great once in a while, it will – I can't figure out a more descriptive technical term than glitch out, which is neither descriptive nor technical.
Casey:
But every great once in a while, it will glitch out to the point that the only way to get it to work properly is to unplug it and then plug it back in.
Casey:
Like take out the USB connector and plug it back in.
Casey:
Which in of itself, from my perspective, is not a big deal because it takes all but a moment for everything to right itself and everything's good to go.
Casey:
But from Marco's perspective, it is a very, very different discussion because everything becomes two to three to four to five times harder.
Casey:
And so we've been talking about this, Marco and I, on and off over God knows how long.
Casey:
And somebody, I don't think it was Marco, but somebody had said, you know, I had this.
Casey:
Somebody says I had a bunch of XLR cables and the USB cable kind of all intertwined with each other.
Casey:
And perhaps some sort of interference has caused that issue or caused a similar issue.
Casey:
And I don't think that's actually the problem.
Casey:
In fact, I'm pretty sure it's not the problem.
Casey:
But in an effort to make Marco's life ever so slightly easier, those handful of times each year that this happens, I have taken my microphone and shifted it from the right side of the desk to the left, which is like sleeping on the wrong side of the bed.
Casey:
Everything is backwards now.
Casey:
I don't know what to do with it.
Casey:
the usb comes in on the right hand side the xlr cables come in the left hand side and so my thought was i will move all the xlr stuff to the left hand side of the desk it had previously been on the right leave the usb stuff on the right hand side of the desk which is to say it's like a three foot usb c to usb whatever cable and never the two shall meet and i don't know if it's going to make a darn bit of difference smart money says it won't but i'm trying
Marco:
Yeah, I'm going to guess no on that, which is funny.
Marco:
I actually – today was desk reconstruction day for me.
Casey:
Oh, interesting.
Casey:
So both of us then.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Mine was for a different reason.
Marco:
I'm at the beach, had to get a desk, and I got like – basically, I made the wrong choice on –
Marco:
certain type of frame and it was the kind of frame that like it it frames the desk on on the front and back underneath with metal framing so that way your leg hits the front like your knee hits the metal framing because it isn't only like in the midsection or back the way they usually do it with like the little u-shaped legs
Marco:
Because my thinking was, I don't like how most desks that have the T or kind of offset T or C-shaped legs, if you tap the front lip of the desk, the whole thing kind of rocks a little bit.
Marco:
And your screen might even vibrate or shake with every tap that you make.
Marco:
And I thought, this is not ideal.
Marco:
I had some inexpensive Ikea desk before that did this.
Marco:
So I thought, let me get a four-legged desk.
Marco:
That should ideally solve this problem instead of just having like the two C shaped or T shaped ones.
Marco:
If you just have four legs, then it should make it much more stable.
Marco:
And it turns out it did.
Marco:
It worked in that sense that it was indeed way more stable and it was basically like a rock.
Marco:
You could tap it and like your screen wouldn't shake at all.
Marco:
downside was that had it had that like rectangular fully rectangular frame that my legs would hit constantly and literally every single time i like approached and tucked under the desk every single time i hit my knee on that thing observant listeners might say why don't you just raise the desk good question in fact it was a standing desk so i could raise it to whatever height i wanted the problem is if you raise the desk like an extra two inches the keyboard's too tall and it's bad for ergonomics
Marco:
so because ideally what you want is a zero thickness desk like i know it's not you know realistic but you want the thinnest possible desk that way you can have enough space under it for your legs and maybe a bent knee or two but you don't want the keyboard to be higher than it needs to be you basically want to be like you want the desk to be as thin as possible so that you can achieve that ergonomic and comfort ideal and
Marco:
Keyboard tray.
Marco:
Lisa needs braces.
Marco:
Keyboard tray.
Marco:
How does a keyboard tray not make this problem mostly worse?
John:
I mean, it gives you a specific plane just for your keyboard that is lower than your desk.
John:
So you can get the desk up out of the way and still have the keyboard at maximum, like, lowness to your legs, essentially.
John:
without you hitting whatever i don't i'm trying to visualize what the structure of your of your desk looks like but if it's just like a bar that sticks out from the bottom of your desk a couple of inches this would get it out of your way because you would raise the desk so that the bar is clearing but the keyboard tray is you know it's like two or three inches down lots of keyboard trays are adjustable in height so that it can be any number of inches away from the bottom surface of your desk and then you'd sort of arrange those two things independently
John:
Yeah, I guess I see what you mean.
John:
But the key feature of the keyboard tray is it gives you a big spot on your desk to put stuff.
John:
And that is the main reason.
John:
I mean obviously I do it for ergonomics because I bought my desk before.
John:
Standing desks were really popular and my desk does not adjust at all, right?
John:
But I would never be able to give up having just empty desk space in front of me where I can put things.
Marco:
Well, how deep of a desk do you run?
Marco:
Because there's basically the 24-inch class and the 30-inch class of depths that tend to be widely available.
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
I'm at 36.
Marco:
I can't even reach the back of my desk.
Marco:
Deep?
Marco:
Yeah, it's very deep.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
Yeah, I tried the 24s in previous beach arrangements.
Marco:
I'll get something small because it's just vacation.
Marco:
And I was never happy with 24s.
Marco:
Even in previous apartments where I didn't have a lot of space, I would occasionally have a 24-inch desk.
Marco:
It was never enough depth for me.
Marco:
And so I've been 30 for a while now and I have no regrets.
Marco:
But anyway, so I didn't think of keyboard tray.
Marco:
I still don't think that's my style.
Marco:
I do like a very clean, basic look, minimalist kind of arrangement here.
Marco:
So anyway, I had to switch from the four-legged desk, which is now being repurposed as a workbench in a different location,
Marco:
And now I have a two-legged desk once again, and the wobbliness is back, but it is less severe than the inexpensive Ikea desk.
Marco:
And anyway, I had to redo everything.
Marco:
And so to get back to how I brought this up in a very random way, sorry, Casey.
Marco:
I too, during my desk rearrangement, I had an issue with my audio interface.
Marco:
I was getting electrical noise in my recordings.
Marco:
And I did all sorts of stuff.
Marco:
I plugged in different things, tried different cables, tried different arrangements, different settings.
Marco:
I even eventually tried a whole different interface to the microphone.
Marco:
And I was still getting this electrical noise in my recordings.
Marco:
And I eventually traced it back.
Marco:
It took me almost a whole day to figure out the problem.
Marco:
I eventually traced it to one of the cables I was using was running... It had some excess...
Marco:
And I had coiled up the excess.
Marco:
So there was like a small bundle of XLR cable.
Marco:
And I had tucked it in a spot on the underside of the desk that ran next to a network cable.
Marco:
And apparently it was getting interference from the network cable running past a bundle of XLR cable.
Marco:
Because when you bundle it up, it basically passes the same cable five or six times at least.
Marco:
So any interference potential is probably amplified.
Marco:
And XLR cables are inherently balanced, and they actually do a really good job of rejecting lots of noise, but apparently not the kind of noise that running a perpendicular network cable past it generates.
Marco:
And literally, this whole day I was spending trying to get my interface to not have noise on it, and
Marco:
i literally had to just move this bundle of cable like four inches away from where it was and the problem disappeared completely analog electronics suck indeed that's the reason we invented digital
John:
Just tell me if it's a one or a zero.
John:
Lots of leeway there.
John:
Analog is a go.
John:
Every little thing that changes my signal.
John:
Well, and it was going to the box that does that, but it has to be analog at some point.
John:
Oh, I know.
John:
You want to be, I feel like in the computer world, at least in my computer world, I want the analog stuff to be analog.
John:
as short as possible right stay digital as long as you can stay gold pony boy stay digital signal and then yes it's inevitably at some point it needs to become analog for human brains to hear it and for human mouths to influence it but then get right back into digital as fast as you can and you had analog stuff just swirling in circles underneath your desk underneath the network cable
Marco:
Yeah, that was a big mistake, it turns out.
Marco:
But I have rectified the issue, and with my new desk setup, I not only have my knee not hitting the frame, because it's the right kind of frame now, again, but I also did a total organizational change where I actually am very happy with this new desk, the one that's not four-legged.
Marco:
I will pimp the company.
Marco:
It's an uplift desk.
Marco:
I'm very happy with their cable management stuff that's under the desk.
Marco:
I got a surge strip that mounts under the desk.
Marco:
And it mounts so that the plugs don't face down, they face back.
Marco:
So they don't intrude in the foot space.
Marco:
Because I'm also like, I'm a subwoofer foot rest person now.
Marco:
So I don't want a lot of stuff hanging down from the desk because then when I lean back and put my feet on the subwoofer, my feet will hit the cords and possibly pull them out.
John:
Is that because your feet don't reach the ground?
John:
So anyway... No, it's just an adorable image I have in my head of your little swing and your feeties while you program.
Marco:
No, part of the reason that I have a standing desk is not necessarily because I frequently raise and lower it.
Marco:
It's because I can set a standing desk to a lower height than most fixed leg desks.
Marco:
Almost all fixed leg desks are... Either they are like...
Marco:
Some of the IKEA adjustable ones, which, again, I've been using those for years, but I wanted something a little more sturdy, a little more heavy-duty.
Marco:
But almost everything that's not IKEA is a fixed height, and it makes the desk roughly 29 inches tall.
Marco:
And that is too tall for me.
Marco:
My preferred setting on the Uplift desk is 27.4.
Marco:
It's like an inch and a half lower than almost all regular desks have as their fixed height.
Marco:
And that because what I want is for my feet to be resting on the ground at regular sitting height.
Marco:
So like you could just jack the chair up, be it be at full height and have your feet dangling at the bottom.
Marco:
Or you can get a desk that you can set at the right height so your feet can be on the floor and you can lower the desk to meet you.
Marco:
So that's that's the biggest reason I have a standing desk is to have easy, precise control over the actual desktop height and occasionally to raise it to stand it up.
Marco:
And it's also really nice if you are going under it to like wire something.
Marco:
It's really nice to lift it up first and go under it while it's in the high position.
Marco:
So much easier to do stuff under there.
Marco:
Anyway, I've been very impressed with Uplift and this desk and all the cable management stuff.
Marco:
I did something similar to Casey where I have all the analog stuff is now on one side of the desk.
Marco:
And on the other side of the desk, I actually had previously had another issue with analog interference with one of those big mid-cable power supply things where you have the three-prong cable to the blob and then blob to a DC cable to the device.
Marco:
Those big bricks or even the wall warts that go directly on the outlets, those are frequently the source of interference if you run analog cables near them because they're usually pieces of crap.
Marco:
And they have lots of interference components in them.
Marco:
And so what I have now is...
Marco:
The left side of the underside of my desk has a giant mounted surg strip on the underside of the desk.
Marco:
There's a big cable management rectangle blob thing that can hold up a bunch of stuff.
Marco:
So I put all the power adapters for everything in there.
Marco:
And that's all on the left side.
Marco:
And then all the audio cables, all the analog stuff is on the right side of the desk.
Marco:
And they have these cool magnetic channel things that you can stick to the legs and run the cables down them.
Marco:
It's so great.
Marco:
Anyway, I'm a big fan of the Uplift desk, and in particular their cable management stuff.
Marco:
And honestly, this is the nicest standard desk I've ever used, like with the control panel and everything.
Marco:
I haven't used that many.
Marco:
I've used, I think, four now?
Yeah.
Marco:
But it's a very nice one.
Marco:
So I can hardly recommend Uplift.
Marco:
They're not a sponsor.
Marco:
I'm just recommending them.
Marco:
And yeah.
Marco:
Anyway, but don't get the four-legged one.
Marco:
The four-legged one is not at all the right idea for leg comfort.
Marco:
Sturdy as it was, not the right idea for leg comfort.
Marco:
Get the C-leg.
Marco:
yeah they have a four-legged standing desk that's what i'm looking at it has a glass top too so maybe casey would like or is it a glass top or is that just showing me a transparent top where you can pick your material there is a frame only option but don't get the four-legged one if you care about the knee comfort thing like i do it was incredibly strong but i'm going to be uh yeah that's that's being repurposed as a standing workstation like in like the garage area where we can like you know use it at the workbench
John:
My one complaint about the now traditional standing desk, because over the past few years, my work back when we went into the office, everything was converted to these standing desks.
John:
It looked a lot like these.
John:
I guess they all kind of look the same, but similar design.
John:
It's the stupid control panel that sort of is on an angle on the right or left side, and it sticks down a little bit, which isn't that big a deal, and it makes sense like, well, where else would you put it?
John:
But in an office environment where very often
John:
Well, you're given – it's kind of like having cubicles but no cubicles.
John:
I think I've described this scenario before.
John:
When you had a cubicle, at least you had walls that defined your tiny little veal pen that you spend your day in.
John:
In open office plan, you don't have the walls.
John:
So if you want any space for yourself, you have to claim it somehow.
John:
And like part of that is if you have any kind of furniture like a rolling two-drawer filing cabinet where you can put stuff –
John:
you have to fit that within your little claimed area.
John:
And one way to do that is to take some piece of furniture and slide it under one side of your desk.
John:
And like you said, Marco, like being able to lower the desk down is important, especially if you don't have a keyboard tray.
John:
But if you do that, then that little, that one stupid little control panel makes it so you can't slide the filing cabinet underneath it, or you can slide it, but now it's trapped and one of the drawers hits it.
John:
And I just, I just wish those controls were flush or something or movable or whatever.
John:
They just,
John:
It always annoyed me that no matter what style of standing desk we got, the controls were always like that and always on the wrong side that you wanted them on.
John:
Like, oh, I wanted my filing cabinet left.
John:
Well, that's where the controls are.
John:
So tough luck.
John:
You got to put it on the right.
Marco:
Well, this one, you have to assemble the desk.
Marco:
And when you assemble it, you can pick either side to put the control panel on.
Marco:
You have to be in the union to assemble the desk in the working world.
John:
Sorry, you can't assemble the desk yourself.
John:
No, I would go in there in off hours.
John:
I'd bring my power drill and a bunch of stuff.
John:
When no one's in the office, I'd just be under there.
John:
I mounted my own keyboard tray on a succession of desks by drilling the holes myself when nobody was in the office.
John:
I just thought about that the other day.
John:
I wonder what my desk is like.
John:
I think I left a pair of my headphones out.
John:
I think I left a pair of headphones that you gave me as a present at one point.
John:
I think those are still in the office.
John:
I should go back and claim them.
Casey:
Speaking of what headphones are you using tonight?
John:
Still the old ones.
John:
I placed some orders for new pads.
John:
One of the orders came, not the real one, that I eventually got the right one that Marco recommended.
Marco:
I messed this up.
Marco:
This is my fault.
Marco:
So when I was speaking in the episode...
Marco:
I gave the part number for the good pads as EDT1770.
Marco:
It's actually EDT1770D.
Marco:
I gave the right one in the show notes.
Marco:
I caught this error as I was checking the show notes, and I corrected it in the show notes, but the audio, so the number I said out loud was wrong.
Marco:
So sorry anybody who ordered the wrong one.
Marco:
Me?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
John was one of those people, so I owe John like 36 euros.
John:
But anyway, I ordered the right one, and who knows what's going to come because it's out of stock.
John:
But I also ordered like a knockoff.
John:
It's like fake leather plus memory foam, and they're not really the right size for the 1770s, but they fit because, you know, these things are loosey-goosey.
John:
So I put them on today.
John:
I'm not sure if I'm going to switch over to them.
John:
I'm still wearing the old ones for now, but they're ready to go.
John:
Maybe I'll try them out next episode.
John:
We'll see.
Casey:
We should start with a final check on what the status is with the St.
Casey:
Jude fundraiser.
Casey:
And if you recall, we've been talking about this all month because September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.
Casey:
As we record, it is still, strictly speaking, September for another couple of hours.
Casey:
So, hey, if you wanted to just eke in right at the nick of time, feel free to go to stjude.org.
Casey:
But I wanted to genuinely thank everyone for having –
Casey:
sent so much money to St.
Casey:
Jude.
Casey:
It is really incredible how much money they and we raised.
Casey:
And the original goal was $315,000, which is not something to shake your stick at.
Casey:
That's a serious amount of money.
Casey:
And as of 918 in the evening tonight, which is Wednesday, the 30th of September, we're
Casey:
$445,975.03, which is ridiculous.
Casey:
I am extremely proud of the ATP and Relay communities.
Casey:
Thank you to anyone who has donated.
Casey:
It is worth noting that – do we still have the new leader on the leaderboard as far as I'm aware?
Marco:
The very large leader?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
So someone who wrote their name as for Evelyn, I am not kidding.
Casey:
As of the time we are recording anyway, we believe this to be valid, donated $50,000, which is absurd and incredible and oh my goodness.
Casey:
So if you happen to be that person and want to send me a receipt, I will send you stickers and something else.
Casey:
I don't even know what, but I'll find something and send it your way.
Marco:
And to be clear, we don't actually know if this was an ATP listener or a relay listener.
John:
Yeah, they didn't use an asterisk, which from this point forward will be the way that people indicate they're an ATP listener.
John:
No asterisk in the name makes us assume that maybe it's just a very generous person who came in through the main relay fund drive.
John:
But if by chance you are an ATP listener and you want some stickers, $50,000 will do it.
Casey:
That is the low, low cost of a handful of ATP stickers.
Marco:
Do you think maybe that might buy two handfuls?
Casey:
Maybe, yeah.
Casey:
Actually, we can probably arrange that.
Casey:
But really, thank you to everyone who donated.
Casey:
All three of us in the broader Relay community all really, really, really appreciate it.
Casey:
And it is very kind of you.
Casey:
And we will stop badgering you about this until next year.
John:
See you next year.
John:
500K next year.
John:
We're going to do it.
Casey:
We can do it.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Anonymous writes in on some thoughts with regard to Sony's digital versus plastic disc profits.
Casey:
John, take it away.
John:
This is in regards to the discussion the past couple of weeks about digital versus optical disc games and the different profits that the game makers and Sony may or may not make, depending on what the retailer cut and the different prices of the consoles and all that good stuff.
John:
This is an anonymous source who presumably would know.
John:
um this source says when developers press optical discs sony makes them use its own factories and pay for shipping paper printing etc so all the overhead gets passed on to the developers after that digital or disc sony still gets 30 this reminds me of the old cartridge days when nintendo would always make you pay for nintendo to manufacture the cartridge for you so they got some profit margin on the manufacturing of the game then they sold the game and then they got some margin on that because you have to pay nintendo's percentage of your game sales so what this is saying is that sony makes you
John:
use sony factories to make the optical discs and of course sony gets a profit on that they don't do it for you at cost um which potentially makes the disc games more profitable than digital and this person is also saying that whether it's digital or not sony still takes 30 and so i guess it's just the developer and the retailer fighting it out for the remaining 70 percent um
John:
So it's not entirely clear, at least in the case of Sony, who presumably has large factories that make optical discs, whether or not digital is actually more profitable for Sony than the plastic versions.
Marco:
It also sounds a lot like the record business, like back in the awful peak of it in the 90s, where they just... I don't know if they still do this.
Marco:
I assume they do, but it's just less relevant now.
Marco:
But all the things they would charge the bands for, like producing the CDs and everything, they really would just...
Marco:
destroy, just screw the bands over at every possible angle.
Marco:
This sounds a lot like that.
Marco:
And I don't think this is exclusive to Sony.
Marco:
I think this kind of thing has always been commonplace in the game industry, like in the game console industry.
Marco:
But yeah, it just seems like they just screwed the developer at every possible opportunity.
John:
The difference is in this case that Sony like sort of legitimately has a reason to own optical disc factories, right?
John:
Like I'm starting to like in Microsoft's case, they would say, oh, well, Microsoft has to pay someone to make optical discs and then they pass that cost on to the developer.
John:
But in this case, Sony already has factories making optical discs for its other businesses.
John:
And so it's like, look, we already own the factory.
John:
So we're going to make our profit the way we, you know, I think the person who sent this tip described it as
John:
uh sony getting its customers to pay to keep the lights on in its factories because uh if someone isn't manufacturing optical discs and those factories are not making any money and optical discs become much less popular uh the one place they're still kind of hanging on like they're pretty much out of favor in music but in video games it's kind of their last last stronghold although obviously that's slowly shifting to digital
Casey:
Moving along, Google's carbon-free plan.
John:
No, no, you got to skip back on.
John:
I figured you'd loop back, but you didn't.
John:
What?
John:
You skipped on Shorty right above the Dave Mays thing.
Casey:
Ah, fluffers.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
Fluffers?
Casey:
Oh, sorry.
Casey:
That's a listism because I couldn't see.
Casey:
I can't see.
Casey:
You get some fluffers in your sleepy shirt.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I guess I did.
Casey:
So here we go.
Casey:
The etymology, is that the word I'm looking for?
Casey:
The history of this is that I can't swear like a sailor in front of my children, even though that's my natural state of being.
Casey:
And so we, Aaron and I both, I don't know which one of us came out with this first, but we started saying fluffernutters, which I think is actually a sandwich, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
Sure is.
Casey:
It sounds vaguely like f***.
Casey:
Or at least it has that nice satisfying F in the beginning.
Casey:
And so we would say, oh, fluffernutters.
Casey:
And that would be kid-friendly.
Casey:
And then that got shortened to, oh, fluffers.
John:
Which is not as kid-friendly, but the kids don't know that.
John:
And apparently neither do you and Aaron.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
What am I walking into right now?
John:
Don't worry about it.
John:
Oh, God.
John:
Other possible alternatives that I think are more widely popular than fluffers would be frack from Battlestar Galactica, which I think you know, right?
John:
Or Fuddruckers, the restaurant.
Casey:
Actually, fun fact, Marco, I don't know if you recall, but that barbecue place we took you to with that huge ass fan in the ceiling, that actually used to be a Fuddruckers.
Marco:
It's called a big ass fan, Casey.
Marco:
That's a brand name.
Casey:
Is there a hyphen or no?
Marco:
No, there isn't a hyphen, and I think there should be.
Marco:
Is it all one word?
Marco:
No, it's big space ass space fans.
John:
Well, they just don't understand grammar, which doesn't surprise me.
Casey:
Oh, Fluffer.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Oh, right.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
I saw the Wikipedia link and when it was not pluralized, I realized the error in my ways.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Well, here we are.
Marco:
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Casey:
so we talked uh last week maybe the week before about how apple had the very curious policy of you needing to return the entire watch and band combination if you have a poorly fitting solo loop and after quite a bit of outcry which was to be expected hey guess what they changed their minds on that and so now you can actually return just the band and not the entire watch band combination
Casey:
I haven't seen anything personally about the mechanisms by which this happens, particularly via mail, but supposedly it is a thing that you can do now.
Marco:
I'm very glad they fixed this.
Marco:
It is kind of weird that it ever happened in the first place.
Marco:
I think this was the kind of thing where...
Marco:
some part of the process kind of fell down.
Marco:
It's common sense that when you sell a fixed length band as part of a non-separately returnable bundle with the watch, of course there's going to be a bunch of returns, especially in a year where it's really hard for a lot of people to go to stores.
Marco:
This was kind of an unforced error, I think.
Marco:
They should have fixed this issue in their operations chain before they launched on afterwards.
Marco:
But
Marco:
I'm very glad they fixed it.
Marco:
I don't know how easy it is to swap the bands.
Marco:
And a topic that we will get to in a little bit maybe is like, so my son's Apple Watch came, the SE that we decided to try.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
And I will talk about that in a little bit.
Marco:
But basically, of course, the band was one size too big.
Marco:
And it turns out like, you know, he actually likes wearing it loose.
Marco:
So we're wearing it that way anyway.
Marco:
And I ordered the smaller band to compare.
Marco:
But like, I think the way that sizing tool was initially guiding us to use it, I think a lot of people ordered bands that were one or two sizes too big.
Marco:
They must have been getting a ton of returns to deal with.
Marco:
And so it's good that they've made this process better.
Casey:
Moving on, Google has announced their carbon-free plans, and they say, as of today, which was a couple of days ago, we have eliminated Google's entire carbon legacy covering all our operational emissions before we became carbon neutral in 2007 through the purchase of high-quality carbon offsets.
Casey:
This means that Google's lifetime net carbon footprint is now zero.
Casey:
We are pleased to be the first major company to get this done today.
Casey:
Since 2017, we've been matching all of our annual electricity consumption with 100% renewable energy.
Casey:
Now we're going even further.
Casey:
By 2030, Google is aiming to run our business carbon-free and on carbon-free energy everywhere at all times.
Casey:
That's pretty good stuff.
Casey:
That is actually not evil.
Casey:
Who knew?
Casey:
They still do not evil things from time to time.
John:
Nice to see companies competing to be the more green, the more...
John:
yeah environmentally friendly this i thought google had an interesting because they're such a young company relatively speaking they can essentially afford to do this which is erasing their their past debt like before they were concerned about this let's let's erase all that let's look at let's estimate how much carbon we used for the entire life of the company before we started caring about this and let's get offsets for all those two apple for apple would be harder because they started in the 70s
John:
And even just calculating what their carbon usage was would be difficult.
John:
I think Apple's still going farther because they're trying to weave it through their whole supply chain, although Google itself has less of a supply chain than Apple because they don't manufacture quite as much hardware as Apple does through third parties or whatever.
John:
But yeah, I like this good stuff.
John:
I like to see it.
John:
And, you know, dueling press releases and dueling multi-decade strategies to be more environmentally friendly.
John:
It's a thumbs up for me.
John:
yep i'm uh i'm pretty happy about this this is good good times all right so tell me john what's going on with unity's ipo filing please this is a series of follow-up items that have been in the notes for a while um they're mostly the theme of all these is uh related to the apple epic uh struggle but it's like secondary and tertiary effects setting aside apple fighting with epic and doing all their things which continues to rumble on what's going on in the rest of the industry related to this um
John:
This first one is from many weeks ago.
John:
It's about Unity.
John:
Unity is a competing 3D engine.
John:
It's like Unreal Engine, but from a different company.
John:
It's cross-platform.
John:
Many games on iOS and many other platforms are built based on Unity.
John:
And the company that makes it is filing for an IPO.
John:
I don't know the details of this, but I've seen enough IPOs.
John:
One of the things you do, not just in IPOs, but I think in general, is like...
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
whatever the laws are around this require you to like be honest.
John:
And it's like an insurance type thing, not literally, but like you never want someone later to say, Hey, I invested in your company and you didn't tell me that this bad thing could happen.
John:
Therefore I'm like suing you or whatever.
John:
So companies are like,
John:
painfully honest in these documents because they want to list everything bad that can happen a volcano could erupt you know aliens could invade like it's just so that shareholders can't come back and say you never told us this could happen right look at the document here it is aliens we told you it was a potential threat you invested anyway so tough luck right and it seems like the entire investor community and worlds has accepted yeah whenever anyone files for an ipr you know files this document of course if you look at the threats it's going to look like this company is doomed look at all these bad things that can happen to the company
John:
You know, they're so vulnerable, and it's just like they've all agreed, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
John:
We know that you're going to list all this stuff.
John:
We know you're going to, you know, but it doesn't scare me away.
John:
I'm still going to invest, which is this weird twist because every other part of business is all about making yourself seem awesome and adjusting your earnings and being optimistic or whatever.
John:
But anyway, an interesting...
John:
twist on the usual threats that they put in there from competitors and so on and so forth is this is listed in Unity's IPO and I imagine it may be soon listed in lots of other companies' IPOs, which is basically a warning that a lot of Unity's business relies on people using their product to sell applications through app stores.
John:
And in the typical sort of cold-blooded language of these documents, I thought it was a great encapsulation of the threats posed by app stores to other companies.
John:
I'll read some portions of it here.
John:
Operating system platform providers or application stores may change terms of service policies or technical requirements which could adversely impact our business.
John:
Yep, totally.
John:
If our customers were to violate or an operating system platform or application store believes that where our customers have violated its terms or policies, that operating system platform provider application store could limit or discontinue our customers access to its platform.
John:
In some cases, these requirements may not be clear or interpretation of these requirements may not align with the interpretation of the operating system platform provider application store, which could lead to inconsistent enforcement of these terms of service requirements.
John:
and policies against us or our customers and could also result in the operating system platform provider application store limiting or discontinuing access to its platform store there's lots of long sort of multi-word phrases there to say app store but like yep you pretty much nailed it like that's the environment into which everyone is trying to sell their applications like that basically the app stores control the platforms and if you are going to try to ride that bear in any possible way
John:
The bear is going to try to potentially buck you off, and it can bite you, and it might not even notice you, and you might just get, you know, I'm straining this analogy.
John:
This is from Steve Ballmer's Ride the Bear analogy from Microsoft and IBM way back in the day.
John:
Anyway, I can't imagine any company filing for an IPO these days having anything to do with an app store not having a section like this in their risk section.
John:
I think this would be a great thing to bring out in some case in the future about, like, or, you know, trying to...
John:
persuade uh you know congress to apply regulation to app stores or whatever to say here's a demonstration of how much power app stores how have now when companies try to go public all of them list the threat of app stores as a thing that could just be business ending for them because of the power that these app stores wield or whatever
Marco:
And that can't be good, like overall for, you know, humanity, business, you know, economies like that.
Marco:
To have like more massive risk factors like that can't be a good thing.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, like I said, these documents always list like everything and they always make it seem dire.
John:
But I just thought was, you know, if you tighten up the verbiage surrounding the, you know, the
John:
What is it called?
John:
Platform providers or application stores.
John:
If you squish that down to app stores or if you just squish it further down to Apple or Google, it's a very straightforward, lawyerly explanation of the reality that we all face.
Marco:
Do you think this is just like a blip in computing history?
Marco:
Do you think, I mean, obviously, whatever you can call it, a 12-year period blip, but do you think, say, in 10 years from now,
Marco:
that the dominant computing platforms will have these locked down, like single gatekeeper app store kind of situations?
Marco:
Or do you think this will be, you know, kind of partially torn down or completely torn down by then?
John:
I feel like in most industries, what you see is a sort of Cambrian explosion of activity and then consolidation.
John:
And I guess you could have a re-explosion if there's technological change.
John:
But it's tricky.
John:
I mean, the one I always think of and the one you always see charts about is the auto industry.
John:
There used to be tons of car companies.
John:
And then there were not tons of car companies because most of them went out of business and got bought or consolidated.
John:
And now sort of with the change in tech, you're like, well, electric cars, is there going to be like an explosion in new car companies?
Hmm.
John:
Not really.
John:
I mean, it just like seeing one new car company like Tesla is like, wow, I can't believe that happened.
John:
But so I think the same thing with computer companies used to be way more computer companies and way more platforms.
John:
And there was consolidation.
John:
I'm not sure if you how you get the next next explosion.
John:
in that specific type of business, right?
John:
You can have an explosion in tech companies.
John:
I think we've seen an explosion in tech companies, but platforms haven't really exploded.
John:
Even mobile, I guess you had a brief period where there was like WebOS and BlackBerry or whatever, but then again, consolidation.
John:
So, and with app stores...
John:
They were pre-consolidated because you need a platform to have an app store already, so they piggybacked on existing platforms.
John:
I think it's one of those things where regulation could help with this, but the only... I think we'll eventually see a diversification, but not a diversification of things that look exactly like the app store.
John:
Diversification in how products are sold and distributed, digital products are sold and distributed, sure, but specifically app stores...
John:
specifically for mobile devices i there's not going to be like a third one and i don't think either one of the two parties are going to give up much control without a government regulation so i think it'll just be like well i remember when we used to all buy music from itunes and now we all use streaming services right it'll be like well remember when we used to all buy apps from the app store and now we use insert thing x that i don't know what it is like you know some future unforeseen thing i think it has to be a new uh
John:
a slightly new type of thing in the same way that you know streaming services are not it's just digital music right but it's different enough that the players changed around a little bit and there was a little there's a little bit more openness there and competing streaming services versus everybody buying from iTunes you know and you know having Amazon and so on and so forth come in late in the game so yeah
Casey:
And speaking of gatekeeping and things of that nature, news publishers, including the Wall Street Journal, are joining the attack on the App Store and ask for Apple's cut to be halved.
Casey:
Surprise, surprise.
John:
Yeah, this is another older story, but it was like when another side effect of Apple versus Epic, other companies smell blood in the water.
John:
Like when Apple is weakened slash distracted,
John:
Now, if you're part of Apple News Plus, hey, we don't like our deal either.
John:
We'd like to get more money and you have less money, Apple, right?
John:
Sure.
John:
Why not?
John:
Pile on.
John:
I mean, I don't know if it'll work out for everybody, but as soon as there's any perceived weakness, it's time to perhaps try to renegotiate with Apple.
John:
Again, this was about a month ago, more than a month ago at this point, so I don't know how it turned out.
John:
Probably not well, but people are going to try.
Casey:
And sort of kind of tangentially speaking of, Apple blocked a Facebook update that called out the 30% App Store quote unquote tax.
Casey:
Apple blocked Facebook from informing users that Apple would collect 30% of in-app purchases made through a planned new feature, Facebook tells Reuters.
Casey:
Apple said the update violated an App Store rule that doesn't let developers show quote irrelevant quote information to users.
Casey:
And there's a screenshot here in the show notes, which hopefully we will put as maybe the chapter art or something.
Casey:
But it says there's a button that says purchase access for $9.99.
Casey:
And in small text beneath, Apple takes 30% of this purchase.
Casey:
Learn more.
John:
I thought this was interesting because, I mean, on the one hand, you know Facebook's doing this to be a jerk, right?
John:
Because they're sore about the 30% and they're offering a price and they want the customer to know.
John:
You don't like this price?
John:
Well, guess what?
John:
Apple's taking a 30% cut out of it.
John:
The implication being maybe it would be 30% lower if it wasn't for Apple.
John:
Who knows if it would?
John:
But anyway.
John:
But I think the interesting part of it is if you have a business model for your digital thing that you don't want...
John:
the user to know about like that you're kind of ashamed of like it's like they're calling it irrelevant there's no need for the customer that's between you and me software developer that's between apple and developer the the customer doesn't need to know about this at all but this relationship between apple and developer does affect the customer in profound ways in in small ways in terms of what is the price of this specific purchase and in big ways in terms of what kind of applications will you ever see available on this platform
John:
and apple saying apple like literally having a rule or their interpretation of rule that says don't tell users what's actually going on even if it's the truth like it's 100 truth you do an app purchase apple gets 30 that is true apple doesn't want you saying that to the user and
John:
I'm not sure that's a particularly defensible position, even though, like I said, Facebook's putting this text there to kind of be a jerk.
John:
And this is a battle of the titans, you know, between these two companies.
John:
It seems like if Apple thought it had a system that really was good, like, hey, the App Store is great.
John:
Everybody loves it.
John:
Users, Apple and developers were all doing great.
John:
Putting the terms in while it may be quote unquote irrelevant or maybe too much information or maybe people don't care, they wouldn't forbid it.
John:
It's like, yeah, you want to tell people what the deal is fine.
John:
Like the deal is the deal.
John:
What harm is there in users knowing this?
John:
And I think as any of us who have ever had an app in the App Store know, customers, most people, have no idea how the App Store works, nor should they really care.
John:
The same way they don't know what percentage of their purchase price of groceries is going to a vendor and how much people pay to be put in end caps.
John:
Customers don't need to know that.
John:
In some ways, it is irrelevant.
John:
But like I said, in this specific instance of apps on the App Store, it is actually much more relevant to customers than perhaps the fees the grocery store charges to get your item somewhere other than the bottom shelf or whatever.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, in this case, it's complicated.
Marco:
First of all, it could have been a much more complicated situation than what Facebook reported here.
Marco:
Facebook is a terrible company run by a bunch of terrible people who lie constantly.
Marco:
Facebook could be leaving out some really important information here that makes it a little bit less clear cut.
Marco:
That being said, if there is any kind of rule in Apple that does prohibit app developers from saying below the purchase button, Apple takes 30% of this purchase, that is indeed a big problem.
Marco:
I agree with John.
Marco:
That is not something that is a good look.
Marco:
And however Apple chooses to coach the language around such a rule, of course it's going to be an unwritten rule.
Marco:
But if they say it's, quote, irrelevant, that's not a meaningful term in app development.
Marco:
Apps are filled with irrelevant information.
Marco:
How do you define what that even means?
Marco:
That doesn't mean anything.
Marco:
We shouldn't argue about what is relevant or irrelevant to users.
Marco:
That's what Apple wants us to do if they're really doing this.
Marco:
But the reality is...
Marco:
Apple doesn't want developers, apparently, to show users where the money goes.
Marco:
And, again, there's a huge if here.
Marco:
If this story is true, and if this is the whole story, and if Facebook didn't leave out massive information here, those are big ifs.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I think this is a very likely thing, knowing Apple and their attitude towards this.
Marco:
And I think you could kind of see it both ways.
Marco:
To use John's store analogy, if you go to a store, the prices in a store don't say, we take 40% of the price of this milk and Verizon Farms or whatever gets 60% or whatever it is.
Marco:
The store doesn't say that and customers don't necessarily need to care.
Marco:
But I think the difference here and why customers are so in the dark about this is that when you are buying something in an app, it really seems like you are giving your money to the developer.
Marco:
It doesn't seem like you're giving your money to Apple and then they're going to give some of it to the developer.
Marco:
So if you're in a store, you know you're shopping in the store.
Marco:
You know that there is such a thing as a markup in the store.
Marco:
And you know that when you buy that gallon of Verizon milk, you know that the store is going to take some part of that.
Marco:
It's very clear to you how that system works.
Marco:
Whereas in an app on your phone, people don't have that assumption.
Marco:
They don't have that expectation.
Marco:
They expect that when they are buying this thing, that that purchase price is going to the developer.
Marco:
Whatever that price is, it's going to the developer.
John:
Or they assume it all goes to Apple.
John:
And a lot of people still think that Apple makes every app in the App Store.
Marco:
So there's that.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
But I think for the most part, I think that it is...
Marco:
totally reasonable to expect that most people assume on the whole that when they perform an in-app purchase, that money goes to the developer and whatever price they paid, that's the price the developer gets.
Marco:
You know, the system has always been more complicated than that.
Marco:
Like there's always things like credit card fees when any transaction, but I feel like it's, it's the difference in magnitude matters here.
Marco:
If they lose a few percent, like three, three to 5% for like payment processing and you know, weird like tax things.
Marco:
Fine.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
I would even say if it was up to 10% for like weird – maybe like some kind of weird tax or currency conversion issues in addition, fine.
Marco:
But I don't think people would assume if there's an in-app purchase button and they want to give their money to somebody offering some cool thing in their app or – I don't think people assume that Apple is taking a third of it.
Marco:
That's why I think this kind of language, if an app chooses to put this here, should be allowed.
Marco:
And if there is indeed a rule written or not within Apple that says that you can't do this, that's a terrible rule and they should revoke that.
Casey:
The thing that strikes me about this is, and granted, I'm only looking at the image of the picture and the caption beneath, but this plays to me as though Facebook thinks that somebody's going to feel bad for Facebook that Apple's taking 30% of this purchase.
Casey:
Who is going to feel bad for Facebook in this?
Casey:
Like, there must be.
Casey:
I would assume there are people that are like Facebook super fans in the same way that you could argue the three of us are super fans of Apple.
Casey:
But who are they?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
And even the people that enjoy the social interaction that Facebook can provide, you know, friends and family who really enjoy that sort of thing.
Casey:
I wouldn't say any of them are really overly enthusiastic about Facebook themselves.
Casey:
So, like, I sort of get the play here.
Casey:
Like, oh, man, Apple's screwing us.
Casey:
They're taking 30% of this.
Casey:
But, like, you're Facebook.
Casey:
Grow up.
Casey:
Like, who cares?
John:
cares if it was you marco or me or underscore john like okay that's different but it's freaking facebook like they print money like who cares y'all get a grip well they're trying to turn they're trying to turn customer sentiment against apple because that's part seems i mean assuming this is a thing that is it is as described it's to facebook's advantage for people to be mad about the purchase price and to be mad at apple like to think that oh if apple didn't take
John:
that cut this would be lower and now facebook is fomenting anti-apple sentiment which is why it's kind of a jerky thing to do and why you can imagine apple not particularly liking it but i still say if the deal really is fair and would seem fair to anyone you described it to you wouldn't be ashamed of explaining it and it would be like okay well you can it's kind of like if you when you went to the grocery store they had a little sign next to the mastercard thing that said mastercard takes
John:
1% of this transaction, right?
John:
Or something.
John:
Every time you use a credit card, we have to pay, you know, X percent or X amount to MasterCard.
John:
Like Marco said, if they had that sign there in small prints underneath the little MasterCard symbol on the register, people might read it and go, huh.
John:
But because it's a fraction of a percent or one or two percent or whatever it is, people would just say, oh, that's interesting.
John:
I didn't know that.
John:
But anyway, not a big deal.
John:
But 30 percent is very different.
John:
And that would probably make people notice, especially if they didn't think about that before.
John:
They're like, really?
John:
30 percent?
John:
Of course, on the other hand, if people knew just how much the retailer takes for certain products, they'd also be amazed because they would.
John:
I think most people think the majority of the purchase price of their thing goes towards, you know,
John:
Nabisco or the dairy farm that sells the milk where very often that is not the case and the majority of the money goes to the retailer.
John:
But who knows what people think about how the world works.
John:
I mean it's not something that people should need to know.
John:
It's just sometimes we're just collateral damage in this war between titans.
John:
But I still feel like –
John:
If you had a deal that seems reasonable, like the credit card fee thing, people would be like, oh, well, I don't care.
John:
It's irrelevant to me, but it doesn't seem crazy.
John:
You know, like if you told someone how credit card fees work, they might be surprised that retailers just have to eat that.
John:
And it might make them feel bad for using a credit card instead of cash.
John:
But that ship has long since sailed.
John:
And I think the entire economy has learned it's worth it for the convenience.
John:
We will pay those fees because we know more people will shop at our store if we don't insist that everyone pay with cash because it's more convenient.
John:
That's why the credit card industry is – well, one of the reasons the credit card industry is as big as it is.
John:
And so I think everyone's willing to make that tradeoff.
John:
It seems reasonable if you explain it.
John:
But so few people know about the app store deals.
John:
This is setting aside the stuff I said before, the big macro level stuff of like – and by the way, they also control the type of apps you're ever going to see because they decide what is allowed on the store.
John:
More on that later possibly.
John:
Yeah.
John:
That I think people would be wouldn't just go, huh, they'd be like, wow.
John:
And maybe they would take a note of that.
John:
And maybe if and when this comes up in the legislature for just considering regulation, they remember seeing that little sign about, you know, Apple taking a 30 percent.
John:
Or maybe they wouldn't care.
John:
Who knows?
John:
We're in such a a developer centric world and worldview here that I honestly don't know how regular people would.
John:
uh you know handicap these parties because i think they're you know casey you mentioned facebook super fans or whatever but i think in general outside of the tech sphere people like facebook because you don't pay for facebook it's free and it's a thing that has positive connotations to a lot of people they use it all the time if you took it away from they'd be sad and they never have to pay any money for it so thumbs up and i think people in general like apple but i think
John:
People in general either don't think about developers or if you were to describe what a developer was, wouldn't like them because they'd be saying, oh, these people getting rich sound fart apps, right?
John:
Or whatever their notion is of what a developer is.
John:
Their view of it is probably not accurate.
John:
And unlike Apple and Facebook, there is no sort of friendly public face that says developer that makes people have good feelings about it.
Casey:
This reminds me of the times, and I can't think of anywhere it has happened recently except maybe a gas station when there will be, and you've alluded to this, a cash price and a credit card price.
Casey:
And the credit card price is like five tenths of a cent per gallon more or something like that.
Casey:
I forget exactly what it was.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, you do see that from time to time.
Casey:
And yeah, I agree with what you said, that convenience definitely trumps pretty much everything else.
Casey:
And so, God, I should really find a better turn of phrase for that.
Casey:
Convenience is more important to most people than anything else.
Casey:
And so, yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
It's just crummy.
Casey:
And I think...
Casey:
Like you said, we're so developer-centric because the three of us are developers and make at least some small portion of our living in the App Store.
Casey:
And so we are very, very biased when it comes to this.
Casey:
But yeah, it feels like 10 plus years on, 30% might be a little bit preposterous.
Marco:
To save us from a bit of follow-up here, if you want to run a store that accepts credit cards, the deal that you have to make with the credit card companies, I think almost always, this could be out-of-date information, but at least it used to be this way, almost always prevents you from requiring credit card minimums or charging a different price for credit cards than for other customers.
Marco:
Almost always the merchants demand that from the terms.
Marco:
Now, that being said...
Marco:
Many smaller stores just ignore that, and they can usually get away with it because I don't think enforcement on little mom-and-pop places is very strong.
Marco:
But that's why the big chains – that's why you can go to Starbucks and charge a $1.50 cup of terrible coffee.
Marco:
Starbucks knows the deal they make with Visa, MasterCard, American Express, whatever, precludes them from charging different prices to credit card customers.
Marco:
Maybe the big gas chains might negotiate things differently because gas is such a weird thing with weird margins and everything, but for the most part, most...
Marco:
aren't actually allowed to charge different rates.
Marco:
So that's worth knowing in that argument and in its analogy.
Marco:
I would also say once you know how this kind of stuff works, your behavior might change.
Marco:
Once I learned how much worse it is, for instance, for the waitstaff at restaurants to have credit card tips versus cash tips,
Marco:
And once you learn how much their income depends on tips as well, I started doing cash tips whenever I can.
Marco:
If I'm at a restaurant, if I have enough cash to pay the tip in cash, I will try to do that.
Marco:
And I started carrying cash to restaurants for that purpose if I have enough.
Marco:
Because it's a small difference for me.
Marco:
Oh no, I'm not going to get the 1% reward on my card for that portion of the bill.
Marco:
But it's a huge difference for them.
Marco:
And so when you learn that kind of thing, you might change your behavior.
Marco:
So I don't think it's unreasonable for an Apple like Facebook to attempt to tell people, as evil as Facebook is, to attempt to tell people Apple's taking 30% of this purchase.
Marco:
That being said, there is another side of this.
Marco:
I know we're going long on this, sorry.
Marco:
But there is another side of this of like,
Marco:
what do you expect users to do when there is no other choice?
Marco:
You know, like, okay, Apple takes 30% of this purchase, but there's not a button right below it that says purchase it through us, you know, so we don't have this problem because they, because there can't be because Apple prohibits that.
Marco:
So like when there's no alternative, when there's no way for people to change their behavior, um,
Marco:
I can kind of see why Apple would say, well, it's irrelevant then.
Marco:
That's not a good reason.
John:
Like I said, they're trying to change sentiment.
John:
And it's kind of the same example as you giving the cash chip.
John:
So you have an alternative, which is I can change my individual behavior in a way that mitigates this somewhat, which is exactly what you just described.
John:
But there is another alternative.
John:
In the case of Apple, there is no individual thing that you can do.
John:
But there is a collective thing in both cases that can be done.
John:
The collective thing in your case would be to vote for people who are going to vote for a much higher untipped minimum wage or no distinction between tip versus untipped minimum wage to get rid of or change the terrible system we have in the United States.
John:
We have terrible systems for a lot of things, by the way.
John:
Hi, people who are not in the U.S.
John:
One of them is tipped workers and that whole scam where you can pay them ridiculously low wage and expect them to make it up in tips, which is, you know.
John:
Anyway, collective action.
John:
All of us can vote for people who will make laws to change that such that
John:
These people don't have to rely so heavily on tips such that, you know, like the individual action of you typically in cash is good, but the collective action of us changing the laws surrounding that is better.
John:
And so what I think Facebook is hoping for is, well, there's no individual action you can do, but we want to move your sentiment so that the collective action that somehow we will all get behind is, oh, these app stores, they need to be regulated.
John:
Let's make laws that change what they're allowed to do.
Marco:
Yeah, that's fair.
Marco:
And I would say, just in general, to wrap this up, it's a really dirty, scummy thing.
Marco:
I think any time Apple has a rule about the App Store that precludes app developers from telling the user what's going on, why things are the way they are, or why they can't do something.
Marco:
That's one of the reasons why the rule about in-app purchases, I think, is so sinister.
Marco:
The part that
Marco:
you can't even tell people why they can't sign up in your app.
Marco:
That, to me, is incredibly problematic and just a sleazy thing to do that is beneath the ethics that a company like Apple purports to have in other areas.
Marco:
Anything where they're literally restricting what you can tell your users about material things that matter in the context of an app, those kind of rules should not stand.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Like, any kind of rule that says, like, you can't say mean things about Apple, that seems kind of bad, because you're like, oh, really?
John:
I can't say mean things about you?
John:
It's like, well, okay.
John:
Well, not even mean things.
John:
You can't say facts about Apple.
John:
Like, that's the crazy thing.
John:
Right.
John:
Well, I'm dividing into two things.
John:
I'm saying, like, if they said you can't say mean things about Apple, all right, well, you know.
John:
It's it's their store and of all the things that you have to comply with, that's fine.
John:
But the next level is you can't say the truth in a neutral way.
John:
You can't literally explain what's going on in many aspects.
John:
You just mentioned you can't mention you can't explain to people why they can't sign up.
John:
It's the truth.
John:
You could explain it like, what if I explained it dispassionately and without saying Apple is a meanie?
John:
But it's like you could.
John:
But they're like, no, you can't tell people what's going on at any time.
John:
Like it's bad enough when someone says you can't criticize.
John:
But again, they're not the government.
John:
So this is not a free speech issue.
John:
But it makes you feel bad about it.
John:
It makes you feel like, OK, well, they're they really got me under their thumb.
John:
I can't say anything mean about them.
John:
But then saying also, you can't tell people the truth.
John:
even if you do it in a way that is entirely neutral, even if you do it in a way that it's glowing.
John:
It says, we love Apple.
John:
We love giving them 30%.
John:
Nope.
John:
Apple says, just don't, please don't tell people what's going on.
John:
It's irrelevant to them.
Casey:
So I think a way to perhaps understand Apple and other companies, and this was written to us with regard to Apple and Epic, but I think it's true of pretty much every company.
Casey:
And I try to remind myself of this regularly, particularly when it comes to Apple specifically,
Casey:
But I often forget it.
Casey:
And Paul Rippey wrote in and had what I thought was a really clear distillation of motivations of businesses.
Casey:
And so Paul wrote, both companies are doing what they owe it to their shareholders to do, trying to maximize profits.
Casey:
Apple has me, says Paul, personally locked in, even though my handcuffs chafe sometimes.
Casey:
But Epic is the same sort of sticky and just as good as extracting money, just as good at extracting money.
Casey:
At least in some middle schools, kids who play the free version of Fortnite without buying costumes are teased and called defaults.
Casey:
Ew, gross, Tommy's a default.
Casey:
Like they're wearing the wrong kind of shoes or something.
Casey:
Apple and Epic aren't bad any more than a lion who kills an antelope is bad.
Casey:
They're just doing what their nature has them do.
Casey:
Which is obvious for sure, but I think it's something that I at least could use a reminder of from time to time.
John:
Sorry, Paul, I hate this whole thing.
Casey:
Oh, I love it.
John:
Get out of here.
John:
So I'll explain why.
John:
Well, first, the epic and the defaults or whatever, listen, kids since time immemorial have been making fun of other kids for not having the things that the rich kids have.
John:
Whether it's Reebok shoes or skins in Fortnite, that will never end.
John:
That's terrible.
John:
It's not a thing that we should accept as a status quo, as I hope.
John:
We haven't accepted many things that were normal for us as kids as a status quo.
John:
In the same way,
John:
sort of abdicating responsibility by saying corporations owe it to their shareholders to do this therefore they must that's not a that's not true that is a thing that you can choose to accept as a form of fatalism but companies are just made up of people and there is no privilege that shareholders have to get profit in a specific way first of all and second of all i don't even accept the premise that doing things that seem bad or mean or greedy are
John:
are actually the way to increase shareholder value.
John:
Again, Apple itself has made this argument many times.
John:
They've made it in words and they made it in deeds.
John:
How do you become Apple?
John:
Do you do it by doing the most greedy thing possible all the time?
John:
That's not how Apple found its success.
John:
So it's a small-minded view to think, oh, well, they're doing this thing that seems mean, but, well, they owe it to shareholders.
John:
I don't think, like, you're assuming that this thing that they're doing that you don't like actually does benefit shareholders more than doing something that would be nicer.
John:
I don't think that's true.
John:
And second of all, even if it was true, companies are not this abstract entity that acts without thinking.
John:
They are not a law of the universe.
John:
They are not a scorpion on top of a frog.
John:
They are groups of people.
John:
There is nothing stopping them from choosing to do something that is the right thing to do because it's the right thing to do.
John:
Again, as embodied by Apple in many instances, if not necessarily the ones that we're talking about.
John:
So I reject this whole thing.
John:
I hate it when people say, oh, companies have to do it.
John:
They have to make profit.
John:
They have to extract value.
John:
They have to enslave us in these work camps.
John:
It's just what companies have to do.
John:
Oh, I guess you're right.
John:
They do have to do that.
John:
You can't blame them for doing it.
John:
They're just companies.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Nope, nope.
John:
I absolutely can blame them.
John:
That's not what they have to do.
John:
And also on top of all that, it's probably not even what they should do if they want to make the most money.
Casey:
I understand what you're saying, but I mean, at some point...
Casey:
The buck always has to stop somewhere.
Casey:
And what you're saying to me is that the buck does not stop with the shareholder.
Casey:
And I don't know.
Casey:
I don't think any companies operate that way.
Casey:
Any reasonably large companies operate that way.
Casey:
It's just I mean, I don't want it to be that way.
John:
I mean, what you're what you're offering is a criticism of, you know, unbridled capitalism that if.
John:
If left to their own devices, these companies will destroy the earth and externalize all losses and internalize all gains to benefit a tiny minority if not constrained by the laws that we collectively as a people impose upon them.
John:
And that is probably true, but it is not something that I accept and excuse and say, yep, sure, totally.
John:
That's how the way the world has to work.
John:
No, no, it's not the way the world has to work.
John:
And it's not the way the world should work.
John:
And I don't, and like I said, I don't think it's a Pollyanna-ish assumption because I think you can make more money by doing the right thing and making good products and not being super greedy.
John:
And I think Apple has actually shown that in many instances to get it to the point where it is because it has done many things that seem from a bean counter micro perspective to be the wrong move.
John:
And at every stage that it has done that, it has gotten more successful, not less.
Casey:
But if that were the case, then Elon, the savior of all mankind, should be doing so much more to give Tesla technology to other companies, right?
Casey:
Because if he is really as benevolent as everyone seems to think he is, then he would be giving all of this information away, and he's not.
Casey:
Right.
John:
I mean, it's not saying that you have to just be entirely selfless and give away everything.
John:
That is obviously not the greatest strategy.
John:
We're just choosing between the greediest possible thing you can do and something that is slightly more magnanimous.
John:
And people are arguing with such a cynical argument to say, well, they could do the ever so slightly more magnanimous thing, but they owe it to their shareholders to be assholes.
John:
And they don't.
John:
there's nothing there's nothing making that so they could they are choosing to do it and we can rightly call them assholes for choosing to do it but there is no force of nature demanding that they do it it's such a cynical view to think that's just you know they're just going to do what they're going to do and there's nothing we can do about it and you know we should accept it as the way things are no that's the reason we make laws regulating companies so that the worst you know the the
John:
the worst angels, the devils, you know, the worst aspects of humanity are not allowed to, you know, have free reign over our entire society.
John:
That's why we make these laws.
John:
And in the best cases, in the most successful companies, they are able to, you know,
John:
sort of restrain themselves from doing the worst possible thing that has the most short-term gain for them specifically.
John:
In general, we demonize companies that do that, at least over the long arc of history, that say, well, this company did the sleaziest things possible and filled the water with mercury and made all this money briefly so one big fat cat rich white guy could retire a gazillionaire and then die.
John:
but they poisoned an entire town.
John:
In general, we frowned upon that, even though in the short term, well, they had to do that to maximize profits.
John:
There was no law against putting mercury in that stream.
John:
Nope, don't accept it.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by ExpressVPN.
Marco:
Now, ExpressVPN is a wonderful service.
Marco:
If you need a VPN, there's lots of different reasons you might need one.
Marco:
One of the big ones that people use these for is that it lets you access the internet as if you're in a different country than where you actually are.
Marco:
So for instance, you can have video streaming services like Netflix, for instance, like they have different shows and movies available depending on where you are.
Marco:
This is actually one of the most recent times I've used ExpressVPN was when I was traveling back when that was a thing.
Marco:
And I was able to view my U.S.
Marco:
Netflix account while I was traveling in Mexico because it's a different country.
Marco:
They have different things.
Marco:
And we weren't able to watch the show we were watching.
Marco:
We were in the middle of watching Frasier and we weren't able to get to it when we were there because we were out of our country.
Marco:
But we were able to use ExpressVPN to kind of teleport ourselves back into our country as far as they were concerned and watch the same series we were watching at home even when we were out of the country.
Marco:
You can do all sorts of things with VPNs, and there's hundreds of them out there.
Marco:
But ExpressVPN is great.
Marco:
It is ridiculously fast.
Marco:
You can stream video over it in HD quality with zero delay, no extra buffering.
Marco:
I was shocked how well this worked, honestly.
Marco:
You couldn't even tell that we were bouncing our traffic through the US.
Marco:
I was shocked it worked as well as it did.
Marco:
There was literally no perceivable difference on my laptop.
Marco:
You can use ExpressVPN on lots of different devices.
Marco:
They have phones, laptop, tablets, even your TV.
Marco:
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Marco:
I mentioned Netflix.
Marco:
They also tested against Amazon Prime, BBC iPlayer, YouTube, and many more.
Marco:
You can choose from almost 100 different countries, and it's super easy to use.
Marco:
You just launch the ExpressVPN app, change your location, hit connect, and then refresh whatever you're watching, and it just works.
Marco:
So it's so simple.
Marco:
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Marco:
So once again, expressvpn.com slash ATP for an extra three months for free.
Marco:
Thank you so much to ExpressVPN for sponsoring our show.
Marco:
So one of the new things from the Apple Watch event from a couple weeks back is Apple announced family setup.
Marco:
And the idea here is that until now, every Apple Watch was required to be paired with an iPhone, not an iPad, an iPhone.
Marco:
And now you can set up an Apple Watch for someone else in your family who does not have their own iPhone and
Marco:
And it has to be cellular.
Marco:
And once you do this, it gets its own phone number, similar to the other cellular Apple Watches with the whole number sync system thing.
Marco:
But it's its own phone number.
Marco:
You can call it directly.
Marco:
It doesn't ring with yours.
Marco:
So it's kind of its own independent cellular device, but without having a phone.
Marco:
And then you can use it as any other family device.
Marco:
So you can see the person's location if they share it with you.
Marco:
You can enforce screen time limits.
Marco:
There's a new feature called school time that basically locks down all the distracting features of the watch during the hours you set if they want to wear it to school.
Marco:
We've actually been kind of on the edge of wanting to get our son some kind of cellular device so that we could see where he is.
Marco:
Because in our current situation, he's doing a lot of going to the playground by himself and stuff like that.
Marco:
Or maybe going to a friend's house after school.
Marco:
And so we wanted to...
Marco:
give him some kind of way that we could see his location if we need to, and that he could call us or we could call him or something in an emergency or to see what was going on.
Marco:
And he's still a little small and a little young, we thought, for a phone.
Marco:
We didn't really want to get him a phone.
Marco:
Some of the kids in his class actually already have phones, but we didn't want to go there yet.
Marco:
I don't know or care what everyone else's thoughts are about what's too young for phones.
Marco:
This is... Sorry for everyone who has different opinions.
Marco:
This is just, you know, our needs here and our thoughts here.
Marco:
Anyway, so this seemed like a perfect arrangement where, you know, an Apple Watch...
Marco:
that that is like you know an inexpensive model hence the new se um or even like an old used uh one of the old ones if we had it but unfortunately we didn't have any aluminum ones that had cellular so we went with an se you know the nice base base model se one uh but with cellular and uh funnily enough now my son wears the same size watch as i do the 40 millimeter
Marco:
Got him a size two of the new rubber strap thing, although size one is probably going to be the more appropriate size.
Marco:
I'm waiting for that to arrive in a few weeks.
Marco:
But two is loose, but it works.
Marco:
He wore it.
Marco:
Today was the first day of wearing it fully, like for the whole day, including going to school with it.
Marco:
Then after school, sure enough, we were able to send him off to the playground by himself, and he was able to come back.
Marco:
And for anybody who thinks that we're monsters, it's a different situation where we live.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
Everyone here does this.
Marco:
Anyway, so the overall experience of it was surprisingly good.
Marco:
You would expect something like this from Apple that's like a brand new feature that involves coordinating multiple services, multiple devices, different iCloud accounts, the carrier accounts.
Marco:
you would expect a lot of rough edges and a lot of things that are broken or don't work well.
Marco:
And largely, it was great.
Marco:
So first of all, two things have gone very well for me this year with this upgrade cycle.
Marco:
Number one, I was able to successfully transfer when I got my new Series 6.
Marco:
I was able to transfer through the regular process my cellular service from my old watch to my new watch.
Marco:
That has literally never worked before.
Marco:
This year, for some reason, it worked.
Marco:
I'm very happy about that because that saved me from dealing with AT&T's weird chat assistants.
Marco:
So that was wonderful.
Marco:
And then when it came time to set up Adam's family setup watch...
Marco:
Nice.
Marco:
Nice.
Marco:
So besides that one missing localized string, everything else about it actually worked very smoothly.
Marco:
I was shocked.
Marco:
Again, I hit very few rough edges.
Marco:
The only little snags where I had trouble figuring out...
Marco:
How do I get his contacts or how to add myself to his contacts and everything?
Marco:
And then how do I get his location to show up in our Find My app as the watch's location?
Marco:
And it turned out I had to go adjust settings because he'd already had an iPad with his own iCloud account.
Marco:
He's in our family account.
Marco:
and we had screen time restrictions set up for him, including not only hours of use, but things like privacy settings.
Marco:
Everything that used to be parental controls is now under screen time.
Marco:
So we had to actually go into the screen time settings on our devices, managing his settings, to enable location services at all, and then to enable him to share his location.
Marco:
And then we could see him in our family group.
Marco:
But before he had the permission to share his location, that didn't work.
Marco:
And that was a weird thing to have to find, but I eventually found it.
Marco:
But besides that, it has worked very well.
Marco:
My only concern remains battery life.
Marco:
Oh, there's another funny feature.
Marco:
So the school time feature is interesting.
Marco:
Let me go into that for a second here.
Marco:
I actually forgotten about this, but they have this feature called school time where you can set during certain hours.
Marco:
It basically locks out the watch from doing anything that might distract the kids in school for the most part.
Marco:
So it fixes it to a certain face, and I haven't looked to see if I can edit that face at all, but it's a certain face that seems only accessible for school time.
Marco:
It's a yellow circular...
Marco:
hourly index face with analog hands, and it shows digital time below the spoke of the hands, and it shows the day and date above.
Marco:
So I guess, great, it teaches kids how to read analog time, maybe, but also has the digital time there, and has day and date.
Marco:
I was a little disappointed that it seems to force this face, instead of letting him use other faces that he might want.
Marco:
It disables complications and apps, and it puts the watch in do-not-disturb mode.
Marco:
And only the approved contacts are able to get through.
Marco:
So it's actually a very good thing for school.
Marco:
I was amused that when he came home, I was looking through the settings and I spotted it in school time.
Marco:
It tells me every single time he woke up the watch to look at it and how long he looked at it.
Marco:
So I was able to say, hey, Adam, hey, you know what?
Marco:
You looked at the watch 71 times during school.
Marco:
We have to lessen that.
John:
He just got it.
John:
It's a new thing.
John:
Of course he's going to be looking at it.
John:
It's cool.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And we had the whole conversation about this is not a thing to brag about.
Marco:
This is not a thing to show off.
Marco:
That's not a good thing.
Marco:
If people ask, you can say that your parents got it for you so they can see where you are and so you can call them.
Marco:
That's the official story to tell kids in school.
Marco:
I know he wanted to show it off.
Marco:
Of course he wanted to show it off.
Marco:
He's a kid.
Marco:
I knew this was going to happen.
Marco:
The reason I bring this up, though, is that the battery life was not great at the end of the day.
Marco:
After school, it was down to 33%.
Marco:
As we were going home from the playground in the evening, I went to go pick him up.
Marco:
We were going home from the playground in the evening, and it was about to go into power-safe mode.
Marco:
It was down to 5% or something.
Marco:
So the way it was used today, the battery life seems pretty bad.
Marco:
But I think because it was new and because he probably was looking at it and showing it to a lot of people all the time constantly, it was probably depressed somewhat.
Marco:
I explained to him about things like the workout mode, which he of course has already tried.
Marco:
He has explored so much of the watch already.
He was like...
Marco:
Like within 20 minutes of having it, he was like doing the individual handwritten character to respond to me in a text message.
John:
Can you imagine if you got a device like this when you were that age, what you would have done with it?
John:
Like think of what we –
John:
Every nook and cranny that we explored of like our crappy, you know, personal computers that had such limited functionality.
John:
This one thing that's on his wrist all day does so much more than us writing like basic programs.
John:
And we were, you know, so it does not surprise me.
John:
Like all they've got is time and they're going to find everything that they can do with it.
Marco:
Exactly, yeah.
Marco:
He and his friend in school have already asked, are there any games on it?
Marco:
And I'm like, I actually... I know there's no one on it now.
Marco:
I don't actually know if there are any good watch games.
Marco:
Adam will tell you.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
He'll eventually know.
Marco:
I don't think that would be a great idea for the battery life reasons.
Marco:
But also on the battery front, one concern I've had with this that I've mentioned, I think David Sparks told me about it years ago, is when an Apple Watch with cellular...
Marco:
is away from its phone all day long.
Marco:
It keeps the cellular active way more than the average Apple Watch does.
Marco:
Most people with cellular watches, they're with their phone most of the day, but you just might go out maybe for a jog and have it be on cellular, but it's not going to be an all-day thing the way it is if you're going to school and you don't have a phone.
Marco:
So the cellular is actually not really designed to be on that long battery life wise.
Marco:
And so I think the battery life might just always be really crappy in this context, like the way it's being used this way.
Marco:
This is also the smaller watch, you know, the bigger, the bigger watch would have had a bigger battery, it would have looked even more ridiculous on him.
Marco:
So we didn't do that.
Marco:
But that might be a concern for anybody thinking about this, that battery life is going to be an issue.
Marco:
This is what I'm going to watch as the novelty wears off and it just becomes a thing that he has on his wrist.
Marco:
We'll see how that changes things.
Marco:
I might also change the screen to tap to turn on rather than raise to wake.
Marco:
I think that might help.
Marco:
Again, because this is the SE, it does not have the always on screen.
Marco:
In this case, I think that that was a very good decision because the battery life is going to be so constrained.
Marco:
So anyway, we'll see how that goes.
Marco:
Battery life is my primary concern.
Marco:
It at least will be just barely enough.
Marco:
Hopefully, we can get better than that with maybe different settings and novelty wearing off.
Marco:
But overall, so far, it seems really good.
Marco:
And it was amazing that, like, I mean, and part of this, you know, again, my kid, you know, he's a nerd.
Marco:
He figured it out real fast because he's made of us.
Marco:
But, like, he, like,
Marco:
he literally has had this phone for a day and he calls me from the playground.
Marco:
Like I had messaged him like, Hey, we're going to dinner, you know, meet us there or we'll come pick you up.
Marco:
And he calls me from the playground in response to my text.
Marco:
Okay, daddy.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Well, you know, we'll, I'll see you there.
Marco:
Like, I just got my first phone call from my son and it's from his wrist from a playground.
John:
Yeah.
John:
If you could have lifted your wrist on, on the playground when you were eight and, and called your parents and talk to them.
Like,
John:
you know just think of another ridiculous thing we've talked about this before about things that we did with our programmable calculators yeah which were such pieces of garbage in terms of computing ability and yet we'll find every nook and cranny of thing that we can do with them that's cool and he's living in the dick tracy future like it's just i'm very jealous of uh the kids these days they don't know how good they have it we had to play snake on a stupid calculator and we liked it
Casey:
You say all that and I agree with you by and large, but also consider that Marco and Tiff will know where Adam is always.
Casey:
And I think we talked about this last episode, maybe a couple episodes ago, but like I was a pretty straight shooter growing up.
Casey:
I really didn't do anything.
Casey:
I don't think that that was that particularly egregious.
Casey:
But nevertheless, part of being, and granted, I'm talking about being a teenager, not talking about being a grade schooler, but part of being a kid is doing crap that your parents don't want you to do.
Casey:
And so even though I agree with you that having all this technology on his frigging wrist is incredible.
Casey:
And in putting myself in mark on tissues, I would probably make the same choices.
Casey:
But I think it's worth recognizing that in some ways we're – I was going to say hindering, but that's not fair.
Casey:
We're changing the way that our kids are associating with us or treating us as compared to the way that we treated our parents, which is probably healthy and natural.
Casey:
Right.
John:
don't you worry about it like in like two weeks you will know how to disable the location and put it in like first of all teenagers absolutely will figure this out but even young kids figure out how to get around screen time limits how to not show the location where they don't want to at this point adam probably doesn't want to hide his location for his parents but when he does rest assured he will have no problem doing that oh yeah and and then the other thing is uh you have probably haven't experienced this yet because you just use it for one day and you haven't been that far away but
John:
you know my kids have apple watches finding the location via apple watch it's hit or miss depending on cell coverage depending on battery life like sometimes you just go to find my and it just it spins for a while and you just don't get to see a location and and these are not in the cases where my kids are intentionally hiding it but they're just like at school or at their practice you know
John:
sports practice or something right um sometimes you just can't get a signal from where they are and sometimes you just don't know so it's you know unreliability is a factor um my one suggestion for marco in terms of battery life is perhaps uh this is from i have this experience with my dog's thing which is a similar similar tracker my dog doesn't look at her tracker very often but anyway
John:
um same deal if it's if it's you know it's got gps in it but if it's on like sort of the cellular network or the you know communicating to gps satellites all the time it really kills the battery uh what you want for it is for it to be on wi-fi so you register the dog tracker thing with wi-fi with sort of known wi-fi networks and if it can see one of those known wi-fi networks it does all its communication over wi-fi which
John:
I think just takes less battery than trying to do the GPS slash cellular stuff.
John:
So if your school has a Wi-Fi network, can you get the watch on that Wi-Fi so that when he shows up at school, it switches cellular off or at least uses it less often and instead just speaks over Wi-Fi?
Marco:
Let me paint a picture for you.
Marco:
He's in a new school this year.
Marco:
He just got an Apple Watch.
Marco:
He's the only kid in his class with an Apple Watch.
Marco:
And this is a school that I barely know because it's a brand new school.
Marco:
There is no way I'm going to ask them for the Wi-Fi password for his Apple Watch.
John:
It's probably written on the wall on a big piece of paper.
John:
You just need to go in there.
John:
And this is the thing I always do in my local schools.
John:
All my local schools have Wi-Fi, but they don't tell the parents what the password is.
John:
And the schools are in a cell phone dead zone.
John:
So it's like you show up there for some like back to school night parent thing and you're bored out of your mind because you've had multiple kids go through the school and someone's asking someone a question that's more of a comment and you can't look at Twitter.
John:
And you know there's Wi-Fi, but you can't get on the Wi-Fi because they won't tell you the password.
John:
And the kids are on it through some, like, certificate system that, like, only their phones can get on it.
John:
Like, you can't get on it unless you know the password to the guest network.
John:
Anyway, if your school has Wi-Fi, the password is on the wall on an 8.5 by 11 piece of paper.
John:
So you should just go there, look around, and the Wi-Fi password will be, like, the name of the school, plus 123, and then just, you know, secretly just put the watch on Wi-Fi and see if that helps.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, there are complicating factors.
Marco:
For instance, I'm not sure I'm allowed in the building.
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, well, all of this is a non-COVID times discussion as I discuss my kids being at school and stuff like that.
John:
So, yeah.
Casey:
It's amazing to me, John, how often you find yourself in a cell phone dead zone.
Casey:
Are the witches and... Rich people.
John:
The answer to your answer is rich people.
John:
I live, I am a rich person.
John:
I live among rich people.
John:
Rich people do not like cell phone towers.
Casey:
Yeah, but they like having the things that make them happy, like cell service.
Marco:
No, they don't.
Marco:
It's a very much NIMBY thing.
Marco:
It's hard.
Marco:
Yes, it is.
Marco:
When you're in the richest neighborhoods, there's usually bad cell coverage.
Casey:
Well, guys, this is a problem I've never had.
John:
I mean, I'm not in the richest of rich neighbors, but the richer neighborhoods you get, the more I go towards people's houses who have actual mansions and actual backyards and land, the cell signal gets worse.
John:
If you take the Green Line through the T in Boston, through certain sections, you'll know when you're driving through the richest of rich sections because the cell signal gets worse.
John:
And it's like, I think the same thing.
John:
It's like, well, wouldn't you just want, isn't that annoying to you?
John:
Wouldn't you want to have good cell signal?
John:
Not as much as they don't want to have cell towers, I guess.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm lucky that my neighborhoods have cell towers in them.
Marco:
We're easily able to see them even.
Marco:
It's very obvious that we have great coverage.
Marco:
But yeah, if you drive a little while, go to a few towns over to the super rich one, you get no signal whatsoever for anything.
Casey:
I mean, I hear you.
Casey:
That's just – it's such – so different than my lived experience, which isn't to say you guys are lying or wrong or anything.
Casey:
It makes sense.
Casey:
It's just it's so different than my lived experience.
Casey:
It's hard to wrap my head around.
John:
I think it's a different set of – different set of values depending on where you are because in my experience –
John:
you know, small experience in the Midwest visiting my in-laws, the ritzier neighborhoods there tend to value things like having good television and internet and cell coverage more than they value not seeing cell towers, right?
John:
And just for whatever reason, maybe it's old money versus new money, or maybe it's just a different East Coast, West Coast attitude, or just a technological bent versus not, the equations don't, or maybe it's population density, availability of land, whatever, for whatever reason, I find it incredibly frustrating.
John:
in the specific area that I am up here in New England.
John:
the you know the old money rich people houses don't have cell tower and maybe it's because all the land is already all bought up and already all developed so there's no like there's no available place to put the cell tower that's not it literally in someone's backyard and no one wants it in their backyard they would love it if it was in someone's backyard five blocks away but then that person doesn't want it it's total nimbyism yeah also like hills are a huge problem like so if you have any kind of terrain um yeah that like you need a lot more cell towers than you would think and it makes it even harder then
Casey:
marco i don't think you ever get to this neck of the woods but there was somewhere i want to say it was maybe 684 i'm not confident i'm right about that though there was a couple of cell towers where they put like fake um like needles like like um oh yeah the cell trees yeah yeah the cell trees yeah like like whenever i'm on the like whenever i'm on a long highway drive you see those pretty frequently
Casey:
Yeah, because I believe it was the stretch of 684 that I would take away from my parents when they lived in Connecticut, and I would take it down toward the George Washington Bridge and all that.
Casey:
And I vividly remember there were a couple of, yeah, the cell trees.
Casey:
There are these things that, like, if you only glance, the top of them looks like a very, very thin, like, Charlie Brown-style, like, you know, needle-based tree, if you only glance at it.
Casey:
But it's, like, 800 feet taller than every other thing around it.
Marco:
they're way taller than actual trees it's the most preposterous thing i've ever seen oh my gosh it always made me laugh every time i saw it yeah it's like the world's worst toupee it's like you're fooling nobody going back for a minute um just before to close out the subject how we got into the subject uh about uh location tracking uh ethics within a family um
Marco:
Because it is kind of interesting that, like, you know, we can see our son's location at all times as long as he's wearing his Apple Watch and the battery is good and the cell signal is good and everything.
Marco:
The ethics we've established so far, which is, you know, first established between Tiff and I, is that location sharing is reciprocal.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I showed him to find my app on his watch and said, here, you can see where we are, too.
John:
Interesting note on that.
John:
I repeatedly show this to my kids because they're constantly asking when we're going to pick them up, where are you?
John:
I'm like, you always know where I am.
John:
We all share our location.
John:
Find me.
John:
And no matter how many times I remind them, I guess it's too much of a hassle for them to open up to find my app.
John:
It's not that they don't know at this point.
John:
I've resorted to taking a photo from my perspective in the car of where I am, hoping that they can see how I'm by this part of the baseball diamond and you need to just walk across and come to me because this is where I'm parked.
John:
And it's like, or you can use find my, like our location share.
John:
I thought this was, I didn't know if we set it up so long ago, but I just assume this is the way family sharing works by default all the time is that everyone shares the location already.
John:
But yeah, we totally do that.
John:
Even though it only ever seems to work one way where we're constantly trying to find the kids and they don't care where we are.
Yeah.
Marco:
and the other rule that we follow is um so you know the sharing is reciprocal so if i can see you you can see me and also that we don't make a habit of idly checking it that we only check it if we need to know for a good reason and it doesn't need to be like emergencies only it can be like hey i wonder if tiff is on her way home from the thing she was at so i know it is like start cooking dinner you know it could be something like that but like it isn't the thing that we like idly just check for no reason at all because that feels like a little too invasive
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And it is very convenient for the record.
Casey:
Like it is a really neat feature if you're if you're trying to do something like that, like get dinner on or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
But yeah, it definitely comes across as a little stalkery on the other end for sure.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
So so Adam seems to definitely like it.
Casey:
How do the two adults feel about it, Marco?
Marco:
I mean, so far, so good.
Marco:
It's only been one day.
Marco:
So maybe I'll do some follow-up on this in the future after it's been a little while so we can kind of see how it works in more practice.
Marco:
But, you know, so far, so good.
Casey:
You know, I got to say, I am deeply concerned about battery life on that device.
Casey:
Because as I've mentioned numerous times, the battery life on my small Apple Watch Series 5 has never been stellar and is getting considerably worse now that it's about a year old.
Casey:
I still haven't ordered a replacement because I just can't be bothered by the god-awful website.
Casey:
I'm still allergic to the inside and I don't want to go to the Apple store.
Casey:
So I might never order one.
Casey:
Who knows?
Casey:
But nevertheless, I am really concerned about what it would be like to run my watch on cellular all day long.
Casey:
And perhaps...
Casey:
there's some sort of low-power version that the SE uses or some sort of hardware that's maybe different on the SE.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
But I would presume and assume that it's going to be a real rough battle, and Adam's probably going to have to top that thing up at least once daily.
Marco:
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Casey:
All right, so let's return to Ask ATP for the first time in a couple of weeks.
Casey:
Mike Lee Williams says, I want snapshots of my Mac.
Casey:
I have a network attached storage that supports BTRFS.
Casey:
Is that butter?
Casey:
What is the correct colloquial?
John:
Some people say butterFS.
John:
I always just say BTRFS.
John:
Who knows how you're supposed to?
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Should I use Time Machine or should I just clone using something like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper and then take a BTRFS snapshot?
Casey:
I ask because a network Time Machine backup seems like it has the half-life of like three months max.
John:
john i know a lot of people have problems with network time machine backup and maybe i'm just a network time machine unicorn uh but i don't like a lot this is a major complaint for people who have especially if it's a third party uh time machine network backup they're like oh it works fine but then like so frequently it says your backup could not be verified it must be recreated and some people say that happens every week some people say it happens every month
John:
I've had that happen to me, but like two times in seven years.
John:
So it's a whole different scale.
John:
And so as far as I'm concerned, network time machine backups are just problem free.
John:
And that's what I would totally recommend.
John:
Now, what Mike is describing is like, oh, I'm going to do something clever.
John:
I'm just going to do a clone, but I'm going to use file system features to snapshot that clone.
John:
I think that would probably work, assuming, assuming BTRFS either has all the features you need to preserve the metadata you care about or assuming you're using a sparse bundle disk image or something else that is built on top of the file system.
John:
And what you're actually doing is snapshotting the disk image, snapshotting the sparse bundle directory for the disk image like that can be made to work.
John:
But in general, my recommendation is and remains.
John:
use Time Machine because that is Apple's most supported snapshots of my Mac over time system.
John:
You can recover from it.
John:
You can pick a point in time to recover.
John:
In theory, it should be the best supported.
John:
I know people don't have a lot of luck with it, but I don't think there's anything...
John:
My experience tells me that it's not impossible to have a good experience with it.
John:
So I'd say try Time Machine.
John:
If it's constantly corrupting itself and there's nothing you can do to fix it, maybe try rolling your own system with BTRFS and sparse bundles or whatever you're going to do.
John:
But I think that's going to be much harder to deal with.
John:
And when you need to recover because your whole disk dies and you boot it up, it's much nicer to be able to say, you know, connect to a time machine thing and pull the snapshot you want to go.
John:
You can do it the other way.
John:
It will eventually work if you know what you're doing, but it's trickier.
Marco:
I would also add I've had really good luck with my Synology network backup over time.
Marco:
The thing where Time Machine basically fails and makes you clear it out and rebuild the entire thing, usually because it thinks it's out of space when it isn't or whatever, that happened to me all the time with almost every previous Time Machine setup I had ever used until I did the Synology's hosted network Time Machine thing.
Marco:
And that works perfectly for me.
Marco:
And one thing that might make a difference here is that the way I set that up is with disk quotas per user using it.
Marco:
And Apple's – whatever the time machine client is on Macs, it will read disk quota information for network shares and will obey it.
Marco:
And for whatever reason, that worked way better, and I never had this kind of failure happen.
Marco:
Whereas, yeah, with previous Time Machine backups, I had that happen, yeah, about every three months.
Marco:
That's about right.
John:
I'm also using Synology, but I never went the extra step to do the per-user quota.
John:
I have multiple users just sharing a volume with no quotas on it, and still no problems.
John:
Great.
John:
Like I said, I think it has corrupted itself maybe three times in seven years, but it's so beneath my radar that I just tend not to think about it.
John:
So it could just be a credit to Synology's implementation of the time machine hosting.
John:
It could just be dumb luck, but it's not impossible is what I'm saying.
Casey:
Now, you have to consider that the youngest child of the three of us is just shy of three years old now.
Casey:
So this information is a bit out of date.
Casey:
I think I might have heard it from Marco and Tiff, but I heard from somewhere that you really, really, really, really do not want an app-based thing.
Marco:
Yep, that was us.
Casey:
Okay, and as soon as you guys described why, which I will give you a chance to do in just a moment, it made perfect sense.
Casey:
Now, again, this is information that, you know, in the case of the Armands is what, eight?
Casey:
How old did you say Adam was?
Casey:
Eight, nine?
Casey:
Yeah, eight.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So it's eight years out of date.
Casey:
And for me, it's three years out of date.
Casey:
But I am looking at my at right now in my hands is our infant optics monitor.
Casey:
I think that's right.
Casey:
I'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
It is a device that you carry around with you.
Casey:
And it shows video and audio or shows video and plays audio of your kid or kids rooms.
Casey:
Uh, I really love this one in particular because the model that I have has a standard USB plug to power the handheld receiver thing.
Casey:
I don't know if that's still the case today though.
Casey:
So double check my work on that.
Casey:
But when I bought it, it was one of those, you know, the, the things you would use for like headphones and like a Kindle, whatever that size is.
Casey:
I don't care what it's called.
Casey:
It's one of those standard ones, which is great because you can plug it into a computer.
Casey:
You can plug it into a wall wart.
Casey:
You can plug it into darn near anything.
Casey:
I'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
Marco, can you tell me why it is you don't want a Wi-Fi slash app-based thing?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
So this is a common trap that nerds like us fall into when we have to buy a baby monitor for the first time.
Marco:
is one of two things either a let me get the coolest technological one that is almost always some kind of like service based one where you know it's it's ip based and so there's like some kind of cool apple looking camera and then you can either use their their monitor or it just uses your phone and you can
Marco:
you can check it from the cloud and you can, you can even have it.
Marco:
So you can check it when you're at your friend's house or whatever, down the street, who knows?
Marco:
You can, for some reason, if you left your baby at home and it isn't something that requires you to go to jail, then, you know, great.
Marco:
You can check it from, from there.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
And, or,
Marco:
you know pitfall b is you see how expensive baby monitors are and you're like these are just cameras i can get a cheap ip camera for x dollars instead i'll just use an ip camera it'll be better and cheaper and i'll view it from all these different ip camera based viewing apps on on my phone so the problem with the former the fancy camera is
Marco:
is that whenever you are sending something out to the internet and back, you will introduce significant latency and unreliability.
Marco:
And there will be a strong incentive for the service that you are using to compress the crap out of the video to save on bandwidth costs and to make it more responsive.
Marco:
And so you end up basically with a latent, unreliable, crappy video stream.
Marco:
The problem with the IP camera is that, first of all, it's just more crap to set up at a time in your life when that's the last thing you need.
Marco:
The last thing you need is to have technical burdens to deal with and to be tech support for them when they break and anything that's fragile or complicated at all.
Marco:
You don't need that right now.
Marco:
The other problem with IP camera stuff is that you're still using some kind of phone to view them.
Marco:
You're limited by the network.
Marco:
You're limited by any kind of whatever the Wi-Fi coverage in the various relevant rooms might be or whatever your connectivity setup is.
Marco:
IP camera viewing apps tend to be terrible as well.
Marco:
I never found a good one when I briefly had some IP cameras.
Marco:
So it's not a good world to get into.
Marco:
It's not as nice as you think it is if you haven't tried it.
Marco:
And it's not great.
Marco:
The last thing you want out of a baby monitor is latency or unreliability because that literally ruins the entire point.
Marco:
Not only do you need to trust, you know, if you're using a monitor, using it for a reason, you want to see the state of your baby, but,
Marco:
or hear the state of your baby, which they will usually make clear to you.
Marco:
If it freezes or the video is delayed or whatever, it dramatically reduces the utility of this device.
Marco:
And it calls into question why you're using one at all if you're going to have one that has significant delays or is unreliable at all.
Marco:
And my experience eight years ago was that the IP-based solutions, including the fancy cameras and everything, were unreliable and full of latency and had dropouts and
Marco:
Like the picture would just freeze for like 30 seconds or a minute or more.
Marco:
And it's like, okay, well then you're, you're telling me this is the state of my baby, but it's actually out of date and I can't, I have no way to tell that.
Marco:
That's the last thing you want.
Marco:
It's also just really annoying when it's not live, when there's any latency at all.
Marco:
you're going to hear the cry and scream, like the quieter version from the next floor up when you're downstairs.
Marco:
And then three seconds later, you hear the echo, the louder version out of the monitor.
Marco:
And that latency is really annoying and can create some interesting feedback loops.
Marco:
And so the last thing you want is for...
Marco:
your babies cry to be made more grating on your ears and more annoying.
Marco:
This is not the time of your life when you need that kind of thing.
Marco:
You, this is the kind of, this is the time in your life when you need very simple solutions that work every time that ask very little of you.
Marco:
The regular old style where you just have a camera microphone thing on one end, you have a portable monitor of some kind on the other end, and they talk over RF directly in your house with no networking involved.
Marco:
That is the best kind.
Marco:
Because it is instant, there's no latency, it's reliable, way more reliable than anything IP-based or network or internet-based.
Marco:
Usually it's also cheaper.
Marco:
Again, all these solutions that use your phone as a monitor, that might have made some sense in a world where screens are expensive.
Marco:
But screens haven't been expensive for a long time now.
Marco:
The regular old setup where you just have a camera and a screen with a battery behind it that you can plug into USB or whatever, that's a great setup.
Marco:
And none of those components are expensive.
Marco:
Those are all very cheap things these days.
Marco:
So the actual cost savings for anything else would be minimal, I think.
Marco:
Maybe even negative.
Marco:
So just get the old kind that just has a camera and a dedicated little handheld monitor thing.
Marco:
And you don't need to involve your phone.
Marco:
You don't need to involve the internet.
Marco:
You don't need to involve any kind of weird like cloud service or local networking weirdness or latency or anything like that.
Marco:
This is one of the things where the old way is actually better.
Casey:
there's a classic story in my mom's side of the family.
Casey:
And I don't know if it's true or not, but they apparently when my mom was growing up, their family was really, really close with the family like across the street or maybe like around the corner or something like that.
Casey:
And, you know, my mom is like 65 years old now.
Casey:
So this was, you know, the mid to late 50s, early 60s.
Casey:
And the story that I've been told numerous times
Casey:
is that what they would do is they would call from the house that housed the baby to the house where the parents were hanging out and leave the phone off the hook in the baby's room.
Casey:
And then they would leave the phone off the hook at the house where they were partying where –
Casey:
And hopefully they would hear if the baby was screaming and then one of them would run back to my mom's house and help her or one of her younger brothers if necessary.
Casey:
I don't know if that story is real, but it always made me laugh that that was how they handled it in the 60s was, oh, we'll just call each other because local calls are free even back then.
Casey:
And so that was what they did.
Casey:
John, before I move on, any thoughts from you?
John:
Well, if you don't mind everyone telling you that you're a terrible parent and you're going to kill your children, there's always the option of attachment parenting and co-sleeping and other situations where you don't actually need remote monitoring for your kids because they're sleeping with you all the time, or some of the time anyway.
John:
My kids are so old that I just have the audio-only monitors.
John:
So that was a different world.
John:
In today's world, obviously, this is speculative.
John:
I don't know what things are, but I do now have cameras in my house.
John:
And in my opinion, the cameras I have, I have just a bunch of Nest cameras like the current models.
John:
The reliability of them is fantastic, and the latency I find perfectly acceptable for monitoring children online.
John:
I'm not using it to monitor children.
John:
I'm just using it to monitor my house and occasionally my dog, but it's very similar.
John:
I think they're dead simple, reliable, and I think the convenience of being able to just look at it on your phone is super convenient.
John:
That said, I don't have a baby.
John:
I don't know what it's like.
John:
I don't know what I would choose.
John:
All I can think of is what I'm used to, which was...
John:
pure analog RF audio-only monitors, which we got for our first child and we just kept using for our second.
John:
I still have a little bit of PTSD hearing the sort of staticky, you know, amplified cries.
John:
Just anything associated with, you know...
John:
raising infants into toddlerhood is going to probably depending on your kid be somewhat traumatic for you as a parent.
John:
So choose wisely.
John:
I maybe, maybe that's a reason not to use your phone because now you might start associating your phone with this, you know, anyway, there's raising kids is hard.
John:
Um, and I'm not sure what the best solution is, but I think if what, if the experience you want is the ability to look to view and hear your child at any time in the most convenient way, um,
John:
Based on my experience with the Nest indoor home cameras, if that had existed when my kids were infants, I think that would have fulfilled my needs perfectly and I wouldn't have minded all the things Marco talked about in terms of latency and so on.
Marco:
I have Nest cameras.
Marco:
They're not good for this.
Marco:
There's too much latency.
John:
Too much latency for you.
John:
I have them in my house.
John:
They're fine.
John:
Every time I look at my thing, you're right.
John:
There is lag, but it's sufficient.
John:
It's never 30 seconds or a minute.
John:
It's like 1.5 seconds.
John:
Even when I'm in a different state, I can just look at the inside of my house in essentially real time.
John:
The image comes up quickly.
John:
It's high resolution.
John:
It's reliable of the internet.
John:
It helps that I have a very fast network upload connection from my house.
John:
Right?
Casey:
that's it's fine for for my needs i don't need it to be super duper real time um but again i didn't use it with baby so i don't know how well it works in that scenario finally uh john metcalf wants to know hey is marco watching the possible tesla competition like the polestar for future lease shopping the polestar 2 is smaller than the s but it seems like it could be a
Casey:
Interested to see where the line goes.
Casey:
And I would agree with that wholeheartedly.
Casey:
I'd also like to call out, since this Ask ATP was asked 14 years ago, MKBHD has done another episode of, what is it, Autofocus?
Casey:
Is that the name of his car series?
Casey:
I believe that's right.
Casey:
And he did an episode on the Porsche Taycan, Taycan, I don't know how to pronounce it.
John:
He doesn't know how to pronounce it either.
John:
It's fine.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
And in fact, when he was tweeting about it during the editing process or filming process, he tweeted, boy, am I glad I started this car video series.
Casey:
This Porsche Taycan is actually a very different car than any Tesla.
Casey:
And just a few lucky people have experienced both and get to articulate that.
Casey:
It should be a fun video.
Casey:
And we'll at least put a link to the video in the show notes.
Casey:
I'll also try to dig up a video from Rory Reed, formerly of Top Gear,
Casey:
who did a test of the Model 3 versus the Polestar 2, which is worth watching.
Casey:
Both of these videos are like 10, maybe 15 minutes each.
Casey:
But to answer the question, Marco, are you keeping your eye on anything?
Casey:
Are you Elon or nothing?
Marco:
I am very, very happy with the Model S as a car.
Marco:
I'm less happy with Tesla as a company and Elon as a person, but I am very happy with the Model S as a car.
Marco:
It is an incredible car.
Marco:
There's no other car that I want right now, even with all these new options.
Marco:
One of the things I like so much about the Model S is I love that it's a car-shaped car and that it has an absolutely massive cargo capacity because it is a large car-shaped car with a giant lift-back trunk.
Marco:
That is something that I think only the Taycan even come... Taycan?
Marco:
How do you say it, John?
Marco:
It's almost the right way?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I always forget.
John:
I'm pretty sure it's, it's like tie in your shoe and con like a con man.
John:
But I don't remember.
John:
All I know is that it's not the, any of the obvious five ways that occurred to you to say it.
John:
I'm pretty sure it's, maybe it's, I think it's Tycon.
John:
Anyway, we talked about it on this very show when Portia, when Portia officially told us how it was, but none of us remembered it.
John:
And now we just do whatever the first thing comes into our head.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, I think Porsche should be used to Americans mispronouncing all their names.
Marco:
Anyway, so that, I think, is what comes closest to what I'm looking for.
Marco:
But it is worse at being a car-shaped car with a massive cargo capacity than the Model S is.
Marco:
I know it's better in other ways, according to some of the reviews, but it's worse in that way.
Marco:
And so I actually still am very into the Model S for what it is, the size and shape and cargo abilities that it has.
Marco:
Because of that, I'm not really shopping around still.
Marco:
But I still have another couple of years before this lease runs out.
Marco:
So I'll see what happens then.
John:
And by the way, we talked about many of the alternatives to this in an extended bootleg version of the thing that some people are upset that they didn't get to hear that.
John:
Oh, I have to become an ATB member to hear that.
John:
That is absolutely the type of thing that we have always cut from the show.
John:
You've always been missing that.
John:
whether you knew it or not we always talk about crap that does not make it into the episode way after the real episode ends right after the after show ends you've always been missing that but now if you become an ATV member you have the option to get a recording of the live stream and you can actually go back and listen to that if you care about it so you shouldn't feel like there's suddenly something behind a paywall this wasn't even behind a paywall before it was invisible to you unless you were there at the live recording or you had someone who recorded the live stream
John:
so anyway i would hopefully casey we can find that for the show notes if you want to hear an extended discussion of what was it the uh i can't remember the name of it what the hell's the name of that company the lucid air yeah the lucid air if you want to hear a discussion of that and a long extended discussion of marco saying how he still likes tesla
John:
no no i still like the model s as a car very different from i like tesla the company or elon musk the person yeah yeah shorthand we were talking about like all the advantages disadvantages of the drivability and the charging network and this promised car that is not yet shipping and what it supposedly has and since then tesla has had an event about their advances in battery technology that could change the equation again because the lucid air was
John:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Customer.io, and ExpressVPN, and we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
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.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
They did it.
Casey:
So long.
Casey:
I want to understand how USB-C works, and I don't mean like the ones and zeros way, but let me try to explain.
Casey:
I have a USB-C to USB-C cable coming out of the back of my iMac Pro, and it stays connected to my iMac Pro always.
Casey:
And approximately half the time I plug in my iPad with like the Magic Keyboard, directly into the Magic Keyboard, sometimes the iPad itself, about half the time the iPad will charge, and about half the time it just sits there.
Casey:
I have always left the one end of the USB-C cable plugged into the iMac Pro.
Casey:
Always.
Casey:
And only about half the time will it actually charge the iPad.
Casey:
But every single time, if I disconnect the iMac Pro side, so it's already connected to the iPad, and I say, oh, crap, it's not charging again.
Casey:
I disconnect the iMac Pro side and connect it again.
Casey:
Immediately, the iPad starts charging.
Casey:
I know very little about this, but I know enough to know that there's some amount of implied priority based on what's getting plugged into what first.
Casey:
But I can't for the life of me understand why this only works sometimes.
Casey:
So can one of you please explain to me, how does USB-C work?
Casey:
Because apparently I don't get it.
John:
Does anybody know how USB-C works?
John:
Touche.
John:
I don't think you need to know how quote-unquote USB-C works here, but the main thing you have to know is that on both sides of this, but especially on the iOS slash iPadOS side, there is software...
John:
Involved in the successful completion of the task that you're expecting to happen, which is what you want to see happen is you want to see a little lighting bolt appear over your little battery icon and you want to see charging begin.
John:
That is not, strictly speaking, just a thing that is defined in the USB spec charge.
John:
Straight ahead, there's the software on both ends.
John:
Now, we know how reliable the USB stack is on macOS these days, right?
John:
And then on the flip side of that, even on iOS devices, I very frequently get into situations where I'll plug, say, my phone into a computer with the lightning cable in this case.
John:
And you'll be like, why is my phone not charging?
John:
And then eventually, 37 seconds later, oh, boop, boop, and now it's charging.
Yeah.
John:
The software part of it is what I would blame for all of this.
John:
It's a combination of the USB spec and power delivery, but also mediated by software control overcharging, specifically on the iOS side, combined with the software bugs in the USB stack on the Mac.
John:
I think that totally explains this problem entirely, like that because there's software on both ends and because we know there's weird bugs on both of those things, you know, you have that.
John:
And the thing that annoys me, speaking of connecting iOS devices to Macs, is
John:
One of the reasons I'm frequently connecting my phone or my iPad in rare cases to my Macs is to get photos off of them because Apple doesn't understand how families work and I have to do the whole photo library thing, right?
John:
And so what I want to happen is I want to plug in my phone and you plug it in and I have the thing turned off where I never want to plug in my device and have it automatically launch photos or music or whatever because I hate that.
John:
So that's all turned off.
John:
So I have photos already launched.
John:
It's in the foreground.
John:
I plug in my phone.
John:
And photos reacts.
John:
And if I click on the device in the sidebar, it says, please unlock your iPhone or please unlock your whatever.
John:
By the time I see that screen, most of the time, my phone is already unlocked.
John:
And it will continue to say, please unlock your phone for like 67 seconds.
John:
It will just sit there and it will just say, please unlock your phone.
John:
It took me so long to figure out that I shouldn't keep disconnecting and reconnecting my phone and unlocking and doing all this stuff.
John:
Instead, I should just sit there and wait.
John:
Because even though it says, I can't do anything until you unlock your phone, please unlock your phone, it's lying.
John:
It's totally lying.
John:
You just let it sit there and eventually it says, oh.
John:
I guess your phone's unlocked.
John:
Here are your photos.
John:
It takes forever because I have a ton of photos, but the UI absolutely lies to you.
John:
And if you take it seriously and try to solve the problem by unplugging various ends and putting it back in, trying to launch the Photos app on your phone before you unlock it, forget it.
John:
It's all filled with lies.
John:
And I think that's the same type of thing where it's like...
John:
I made the hardware connection.
John:
Why is the software thing not happening?
John:
It's because on both ends there's some kind of software mediation of the hardware connection, and to get all the dots to connect and the stuff to flow takes a little while.
John:
I think Photos really isn't aware that my phone has been unlocked because the phone hasn't told it through whatever software-mediated protocol that exists between Photos itself specifically and my phone.
Yeah.
John:
And I can't imagine how regular people deal with this because if they're staring at a screen for a minute that says, please unlock your phone and their phone is already unlocked, they're going to do the same thing I used to do, which is like, I guess I'll unplug it and try to replug it.
John:
And you'll never make it that way.
John:
You have to just unlock, plug it in, unlock it and put it on your desk and walk away.
John:
And then come back later and be like, oh, there's my photos.
Casey:
Yeah, it's just frustrating.
Casey:
That being said, even though USB-C does have its problems, and Marco, you've been banging this drum for a while.
Casey:
I am very ready for the all USB-C lifestyle.
Casey:
Bring on the iPhone 12 with USB-C.
Casey:
I'm ready.
Marco:
Oh, that would be amazing.
Marco:
Honestly, it's not going to happen.
John:
I don't think so either.
John:
They're just taking away all the cables.
John:
Isn't that the predominant rumor that the iPhone will never go USB-C?
John:
It'll go right from lightning to nothing?
Marco:
That was one of the rumors.
Marco:
I haven't heard about that recently, but I'll tell you one thing.
Marco:
If that is the plan, I'm not excited about it.
John:
I don't think there was a rumor for this year, but I think it was like, nope, that's the future.
John:
It's going to be lightning, lightning, lightning, iPhone 12, and then all of a sudden nothing.
Marco:
yeah i mean you know apple changes their minds sometimes on things and sometimes these rumors are wrong and and so who knows what will happen but i i think the most likely scenario of for this year's iphones are lightning like i don't think they're going to change that i i wish they would i wish they would go usbc but i i just i don't have high hopes yeah i think that the iphone 12 case already leaked didn't it like i tried to save a link to it um
John:
So I always like to save the link to those leaks just so when the phone does come out, I can look back at them and say, was this leak right or not?
John:
But the cases have leaked for most of the iPhones for the past many years, like the actual literal part.
John:
And if you look at it and then the phone comes out and you look at that part's leak, you're like, yep, that was it.
John:
You look at the iFixit tear down and you can tell the inside little flanges are all exactly the same, like totally leaked.
John:
But I don't recall in that leak, if that leaked case had had USB-C, it would have been a big to-do, and there was no big to-do.
John:
I think it was just like, yep, flat sides, here it is, iPhone 12.
Casey:
I am all in on the flat sides too, though.
Casey:
Yeah, that's true.
John:
I'm kind of dreading the flat sides.
John:
I know we haven't talked about this too much, but I've been talking about it in the context of the iPad.
John:
I always have cases on my phones, and flat sides make for fatter cases, right?
John:
The slim, you know what I mean?
John:
That's why I mentioned on Twitter, I was thinking what it would be like to have an iPhone 12 bumper.
John:
Because flat sides, hey, you can put a bumper on a flat side thing and that gives you some protection with a little bit slimmer of a case.
John:
But it does make it fat.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'm probably not going to use – this is my year, by the way, which is why I care about this.
John:
I'm getting the iPhone 12 or whatever when it comes out.
John:
Congratulations in advance.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
So I don't know what I'm going to do.
John:
I don't know how.
John:
And the thing is I won't be able to just go to a store and feel how they feel in the cases.
John:
It's just I'm going to be buying this thing blind and crossing my fingers.
Casey:
That's what we all do usually.
Casey:
We're not patient.
Casey:
Not most of us anyway.