The Right Side of the Mouse Pad
Casey:
John, what do you even know about vinyl?
John:
Come on, man.
John:
I used vinyl in a non-ironic way when it was all we had.
John:
That's what I know about vinyl.
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
I see how it is.
Casey:
Did you use your record player in your car?
Casey:
What was that?
Casey:
Like a Cadillac or something?
Casey:
Had some sort of vinyl set up inside one of their cars?
Casey:
It was the most preposterous thing I've ever seen.
John:
Really great anti-skip protection.
Casey:
Right.
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
You balance it on the back of a turtle.
John:
I think I saw it on the Flintstones.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
Oh, my goodness.
Marco:
I don't have any nostalgia for technologies that we had to use when we were young, just because that's all there was.
Marco:
Old video game consoles, I like that.
Marco:
That's different.
Marco:
I have no nostalgia for floppy disks or cassettes or VHS tapes.
Marco:
Those all sucked.
Marco:
They were terrible.
Casey:
And the same thing with vinyl.
Casey:
My favorite is when, and we've spoken about this several times on the show, but when you would have your Discman or equivalent, and you had to choose, do you want to listen to music for an impossibly short amount of time, but have it not skip?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Or do you want to listen to your music for a regularly short amount of time, but every time you even glance at your portable CD player, it skips?
Casey:
And this is the choice that us olds had to make at the time, because, you know, you would have a portable CD player and it would either have a rechargeable battery or perhaps, you know, several double A's would have you.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
It was such a fragile experience that if you jostled it in the littlest way, it would skip.
Casey:
And so what CD players ended up doing is they had anti-skip protection.
Casey:
And jump in when you're ready, boys, but my understanding is it would run the CD at faster than 1x and have a little bit of buffer in memory.
Casey:
So if it detected a skip, it would empty the buffer.
Casey:
And hopefully by the time the buffer was emptied, the CD was playing and picking up where it left off.
Casey:
But because of that, because it was running even faster than normal, it would absolutely murder your battery.
Casey:
And it was loud.
Casey:
It was like carrying a fan in your hands.
Casey:
I'm sure you loved this, John.
Casey:
It was your favorite thing in the whole wide world.
Casey:
But it was such a crummy choice.
Casey:
Do you want to listen to uninterrupted music for, I don't know, maybe the length of one CD?
Casey:
Or do you want to maybe get two?
Casey:
cd lord cd's worth of listen listening time and every other every other every other second you looked it would skip and it was the most annoying thing in the world oh to me having owned two disc men one before that transition and one after oh yeah
Marco:
It's no contest.
Marco:
You want the skip protection at any cost.
Marco:
The first time when I first got a Discman, I soon afterwards got my first car in college and it didn't have a CD player.
Marco:
But it did have one of those like double high gaps under the radio.
Marco:
It was like a double din height, but there wasn't anything installed there.
Marco:
So it was just one of those like big black like empty cubbies there.
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
And a Discman could fit in that double din empty cubby with a bunch of felt around it.
Marco:
So my solution...
Marco:
was to actually just like i had like this big felt pocket that i made with black felt that you know i mean again that if you're picturing something like sewn or anything no go rougher than that just like maybe a yard of black felt folded up a bunch of times into an approximate pocket shape shoved into this din socket so that my disc wind could be nestled inside of it and that actually did help quite a lot um
Marco:
It wasn't perfect, you know, because I still lived in the east.
Marco:
And so we had, you know, weather and weathered roads.
Marco:
And so, you know, the roads are terrible, full of bumps.
Marco:
And it wasn't always good.
Marco:
But that did buy me a little bit of time with my non-anti-skip Discmen.
Marco:
And you're exactly right about how they work.
Marco:
They just had a read-ahead buffer, basically.
Marco:
The original ones were like two or three seconds.
Marco:
And eventually by the end of Discmen's useful lifetime, it was like 60-second buffers.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
that it was so much better even though like yeah it would rev it would you know murder the battery faster because it was doing much more work and it was you know you would hear like when it skipped you would hear it kind of re-seeking like realign you'd hear like realign the laser and going back and spinning down spinning up like you would hear all that going on but all of that was way better than having your music actually skip in the middle of it every time you had a bump so that was that was worth it for sure let's take a moment to uh
John:
recognize the casual sexism of walkman and discman and be glad that steve jobs i think it was steve jobs didn't get his way to call the imac the mac man oh yeah oh that's right i've forgotten about that that story it's like that's what do you want yeah i mean someone did get away with macbook which is not great but at least it doesn't have sexist overtones um anyway i think you two your priorities were different than mine uh when it came to portable music uh
John:
Yeah, I had what I thought was a reasonably fancy, I think it was Panasonic, portable CD player.
John:
And I'm not sure I ever used it on the go.
John:
It's like, well, what's the point of having a portable CD player?
John:
The point of it for me was like it was literally the only thing I owned that could play CDs.
John:
So there's a big point to it.
John:
So then I could buy CDs and listen to them.
John:
But it wasn't so much for the portableness.
John:
I think it was probably just because it was like the cheapest thing I could buy because I didn't have like a stereo to connect a quote unquote real CD player from.
John:
But if you buy just this one thing, you can hook headphones up to it.
John:
But every portable application, I was still heavily wed to cassettes, mostly because I'd made so many cassettes of different mixes.
John:
Like I was really, I really wanted to essentially have my playlists, right?
John:
And you couldn't do that with CDs or I couldn't do that with CDs, at least not at that point.
John:
I don't think CD burners had been invented yet.
John:
So all I had was, you know, my choice was, well, you can bring this thing and a bunch of felt, I guess, into your car.
John:
Uh, and, and deal with skipping.
John:
And by the way, I don't think mine had any skip protection to speak of, or I had like a literal zippered nylon, uh, you know, cases filled with mixed cassettes of all my music and all my quote unquote playlists.
John:
And that's what I played in the car and cassettes didn't skip.
Casey:
Well, that's fair.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
But you also had to rewind them and seeking or excuse me, skipping was impossible.
Casey:
Seeking, I guess, was fine other than.
John:
I mean, that's part of the skill you develop as a child of the 70s to know how far to fast forward and rewind on various devices to exactly nail the end of the song.
Casey:
Well, and that's the thing, is that at least with a record, you can visually see the difference.
John:
While you're driving?
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Well, no, of course not while you're driving, but when you're at home, you can see the difference.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Man, we're all so old.
Casey:
See, kids, see, this is what you don't have to worry about.
Casey:
Like, I remember, and I think we were just talking about this a few weeks back, that I had a...
Casey:
Shoot, it was a Toshiba Pocket PC that I got a one gigabyte micro drive for.
Casey:
So it was, you know, compact flash, but it had a spinning hard disk within it.
Casey:
Same thing that ended up in the iPod.
Casey:
And I had a one gig micro drive in it.
Casey:
And I had, you know, a couple of hundred songs, you know, MP3s on there.
Casey:
And I effectively had the world's crappiest iPod.
Casey:
And I thought I was the coolest kid in the world.
Marco:
It's way better than my carputer that I controlled Winamp from a gamepad.
Casey:
Oh, that's right.
Casey:
I had forgotten you had a carputer.
Casey:
Which car was this in?
John:
He has one now, too.
John:
Sometimes it reboots.
Marco:
Nice.
Marco:
This was that same car, and this was the one where I had all my old parts for my Pentium 2 after I'd upgraded to a Pentium 3, and I had everything except a case to make a new computer.
Marco:
And I wasn't about to just go buy a new case for all these old parts.
Marco:
And that would be a waste of money.
Marco:
I did have a Rubbermaid tub and a Dremel.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
That's right.
Marco:
So, yes.
Marco:
So, I made a whole, like, Windows PC with my Pentium 2 slotted processor.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
Install Winamp and ran it headless in my car because, you know, you didn't have like displays or anything that were cheap and available and it wasn't enough of a hacker to make like a little LCD thing.
Marco:
So I just had it like auto boot Windows setting Winamp as the shell in Windows so it would automatically launch it.
Marco:
And I had a gamepad and I had some kind of software running that would map gamepad buttons to Winamp's keyboard shortcuts.
Marco:
And it worked okay with a couple of downsides.
Marco:
The biggest being that I had to like boot the computer up so I'd get into the car and then like, you know, two and a half minutes later I'd be able to play music.
John:
You were living in the future because when cars first started to get their own sort of entertainment systems, that was a typical boot time.
Casey:
Oh, you know, I adore Aaron's car.
Casey:
I really, really do.
Casey:
It's a 2017 Volvo XC90, and it has two critical faults.
Casey:
Number one, the windows, the power windows are so slow, I think I could roll them up with a crank better.
Casey:
Kids, if you don't know what I'm talking about, ask your parents.
Casey:
And secondly, the boot time for the infotainment can be measured in calendar years.
Casey:
It is atrocious how long it takes to boot.
Casey:
Now, the good news is I never have to reboot it as I'm driving down the road, so I've got one on you, Marco.
Casey:
But nonetheless, it takes forever to boot, and it drives me bananas.
Marco:
Yeah, well, at least it doesn't have the other two problems that mine had, which is that sometimes...
Marco:
Something would happen in the Windows installation.
Marco:
Maybe something was showing a dialog box.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
But it would just stop working, like, in the middle of driving.
Casey:
Oh, cool.
Marco:
So I would have to, like, you know, unplug it, plug it back in.
Marco:
And then the final problem was that a Rubbermaid tub is not super well made as a rugged computer enclosure.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Neither is whatever consumer level motherboard I had for my Pentium 2 or the Pentium 2 itself because it's a giant slot sitting on a very thin board and the slot has the whole CPU in that big slot case plus the giant heatsink hanging off the back of it.
Marco:
So one time I hit a speed bump and the CPU fell out of the slot and never worked again.
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, it was on, of course.
Marco:
So I'm sure that didn't help things.
John:
Should have got the hot plug CPU.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
Just yank that CPU out, put a new one in.
John:
No problem.
Casey:
I feel like this really is just your future as a Tesla owner coming for you 20 years ago.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So coincidentally, I was at my alma mater this past weekend, which is the first time I've been to Virginia Tech in probably a decade plus.
Casey:
And I don't know if you guys ever go to your old stomping grounds.
Casey:
I would assume of the three of us, it's most likely that John would, because I think you're geographically closest to it.
Casey:
But
Casey:
It is a eerie experience going to your former college or university and seeing after 10 to 20 years how much it has changed.
Casey:
And a lot of it looked very much as I remember, but holy cow, quite a bit of it looked quite a bit different.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
If you'll permit me to tell you the most embarrassing old man story in the world.
Casey:
So we were there for my brother-in-law's bachelor party.
Casey:
And it was a handful of us.
Casey:
And we decided on Saturday night to go to a bar in Blacksburg that has a kind of patio-y area.
Casey:
And we were going to go and have a few drinks and then move on with our night.
Casey:
And so I obviously have two kids.
Casey:
One of the other guys there has two kids.
Casey:
And, you know, my brother-in-law doesn't have any, but he tends to go to bed early, like as though he has kids.
Casey:
And so we go out impossibly late and go to go to this bar.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And we arrive at the bar at this ungodly late hour.
Casey:
And there was a waitress because the bar has, you know, like a restaurant beneath it.
Casey:
And the waitress sees us trying to go up to the upstairs of this bar.
Casey:
And she says, oh, no, no, no, no, no.
Casey:
It doesn't open until eight.
Casey:
I have never felt older in my entire goddamn life than being turned away from opening the college bar at 730 at night on a Saturday night.
Casey:
Because here it is, I'm thinking, it's not even registering to me that this stupid bar wouldn't be open.
Casey:
And yeah, it turns out it won't even open until late.
Casey:
And I felt so old.
John:
I was going to say, oh, you're looking for your children?
Casey:
Wouldn't surprise me.
Casey:
But yeah, I've never felt older in my entire life.
Casey:
And I told Erin this story, and I think she's still laughing three days later.
Marco:
Well, and to me, like, you know, because we've certainly crossed this age threshold as well, because we've reached the point where, like, not only do we shamelessly eat early,
Marco:
Uh, but I don't even want to stay out late.
Marco:
Like, even if it was an option to me, I wouldn't take it.
Marco:
I, I actually would actively avoid any place that opens at eight or 10 or one in the morning or whatever.
Marco:
Like, and part of this is because I'd like, I'd never been in the club scene.
Marco:
I know that's like a big thing in clubbing that the clubs don't even open till like one in the morning or whatever.
Marco:
i couldn't possibly think of anything i want to do less than go to something like that i am perfectly happy to be the old boring dad even though i'm not even that old but still like just to be the boring dad to want to go out to dinner at six o'clock at night and to want to be home before eight yep oh god it's so bad
Casey:
I wish I was young.
Casey:
I don't know if I was ever interesting, but I kind of wish I was young again.
Casey:
But yet, at the same token, I don't miss those days in a lot of ways.
Casey:
And it's nice to have more than $5 to scrape together.
Casey:
There are advantages to not being 21 anymore, but I've never felt older in my life.
Marco:
I do still miss being able to eat a cheesesteak at 10 o'clock at night and not have serious ramifications.
Casey:
Amen to that.
Casey:
Golly.
Casey:
So my freshman year, I wasn't old enough to drink and I didn't drink.
Casey:
And I was a nerd and I had nerdy friends.
Casey:
We didn't have much to do.
Casey:
So it was not unusual on a Saturday night to leave the dorms at like midnight and get in one of our cars and
Casey:
and drive 45 minutes to Roanoke, Virginia, which was like the nearest thing that vaguely resembled a city, and get Krispy Kreme donuts at midnight, one o'clock in the morning, and then drive back because we could and because we had nothing better to do.
Casey:
So I would eat like two or three Krispy Kremes at like one in the morning and then pass out for eight hours.
Casey:
I'm stone sober, mind you, and then pass out for eight hours, wake up right as rain.
Casey:
If I had two or three Krispy Kremes at one o'clock in the morning now, I would still be paying for it three days later.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, me too.
Casey:
All right, let's move on.
Casey:
Tell me, John, you know how I know you're old?
Casey:
Because you want a reload button on your Safari toolbar.
John:
This is an important feature.
John:
Apparently, Apple agrees.
John:
Again, we're talking about Safari on the Mac here.
John:
In the Monterey beta 2, well, I don't know the public beta.
John:
Public beta just came out, but this is the developer beta number 2.
John:
When you go to customize toolbar, there is now an option to drag a reload button up onto your toolbar, as there always should have been.
John:
couple of caveats number one a reload button is backwards apple's reload button it goes counterclockwise kind of like the one on ios has for a while i think instead of clockwise as it should properly go on a mac and in any right thinking person's uh conception of a reload button why
John:
There was quite a spirited, let's say, debate on Twitter amongst people who are not me about this, but just to let everybody know.
John:
The reason it goes clockwise, I mean, surprisingly, no one wanted to debate this premise.
John:
Everyone accepted this premise and debated other things.
John:
But I feel like the way to win this argument in the incorrect way is to
John:
chip at the premise that clockwise means forward in time but we just all accept that because we're like oh clocks clocks go forward clockwise means forward in time everyone accepted that as a premise and then just spent the time arguing about whether reloading the page is properly represented by an arrow going forward in time or backwards in time the obvious answer is yes forward in time is the correct direction that's why the reload button should be a clockwise pointing circle
John:
Why does Apple make it go backwards?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Who knows why Apple does the things they do.
John:
The other thing about this reload button that Apple added is that it is smaller than most people would have expected.
John:
Smaller than I expected.
John:
It's smaller than my reload button.
John:
It's so small, in fact, that the line weight doesn't even match the forward and back, you know, Chevron.
Casey:
Oh, that's true.
John:
Things.
John:
It's very odd.
John:
Very.
John:
And it's also not particularly well aligned.
John:
But anyway, this is just beta to like this thing.
John:
This little glyph could change, I'm sure, to be thicker, bigger, pointing the right direction.
John:
Who knows?
John:
Either way, I'm glad it's there.
John:
And the final thing is one of the things that I dealt with with my reload button extension, which you think would have no actual features because it literally does one thing.
John:
I've struggled with Apple's clamping down of security on extensions combined with their limited extension API because properly what a reload button should do is be dimmed or grayed out or disabled when there is no page to reload.
John:
Let's say you open a new tab on like an empty page or whatever, if that's your settings, the reload button shouldn't be active.
John:
There's nothing to reload, right?
John:
But the only API Apple has ever offered for Safari extensions to do that
John:
was to sort of check the content of the page in some way.
John:
Like you have to basically have access to the page content.
John:
I didn't want access to the page content.
John:
I don't want to know what page you're on.
John:
All I want to know is the answer to this question.
John:
Is a page loaded in this tab?
John:
Yes or no?
John:
I just needed a Boolean, but Apple did not provide that API.
John:
Instead, Apple provided an API to say, okay, well, if you want to know if there's a page loaded, you have to request access to the page.
John:
So for a while, my reload button was like, this extension will see all the web pages you visit, which is super creepy.
John:
And eventually I just gave up on that and said, okay, look, I can't
John:
I can't do the disabled state because it's too creepy to ask, you know, quote unquote, ask to see everyone's pages.
John:
Like, again, I'm not doing anything with information.
John:
I'm literally treating it as a Boolean in the code just to know whether the thing should be disabled.
John:
So for years now, my reload button has not dimmed when there is nothing to reload.
John:
Apple adds a reload button to the actual native Safari, doesn't dim when there's no page loaded.
John:
like you're in the actual code you have the source code to safari apple please uh so next beta aside from uh i would say that the important thing to do is to make this glyph bigger i don't really care that much about the direction it'll be fine again no one notices that it's been backwards on ios for ages like it's really not that big of a deal um but not having it be disabled that seems not good but anyway this is beta 2 i give them a few more betas to work out the safari reload button clearly the most important feature in monterey
Marco:
See, I'm actually, I'm very heartened.
Marco:
Did we figure out if heartened is a word, the opposite of just heartened?
Marco:
It is actually a word.
Marco:
Okay, good.
Marco:
I'm very heartened to see their sloppy, rushed attempt to get a reload button in here.
Marco:
Because what this means, even though, yeah, it's, you know, the limelight doesn't match and it's backwards and everything.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm sure they will get to that.
Marco:
What this means is that I'm not the only person who hates the new Safari UI.
Yeah.
Marco:
what this means if they made like a a like visible ui change in beta 2 i think this means they're feeling a bit of heat on the safari ui redesign which was i think quite radical on both the mac and ios and iphone especially um in different ways but
Marco:
both of which I despise.
Marco:
But I'm glad that they're adjusting things because this shows that they have gotten that feedback and that they are willing to change the UI.
Marco:
Now, this is a small change, but maybe they'll be willing to make bigger changes throughout the summer as the beta cycle progresses.
Marco:
So I'm happy to see that other people...
Marco:
have similar opinions maybe as i do and on this and that apple is receiving apparently enough of that feedback so much so that they are kind of rushing these changes to the beta so what i'm hoping is that by the time we get to you know september october whenever monterey is released and i guess whenever ios 15 is released i hope that a better overall design can be reached
John:
I see this as some kind of like mild concession of like, well, we're not going to change the fundamental nature of this UI, but I know some people want a reload button.
John:
So here, everything's fixed now.
John:
Honestly, the reload button is not the problem with the new Safari UI on the Mac.
John:
I still don't quite know what their appetite is for...
John:
the bigger problem which is you know how tabs are handled and everything related but yeah you know i'm glad to see some change there as well and by the way i just looked on ios 14 the reload button is turning the right direction maybe i was thinking of 15 where it was backwards or only on the ipad i don't recall i'm sorry my recollection for a reload button direction probably because i have reload button blindness because i don't like to even look at that one that's in the address bar because this is in the wrong place but on ios you don't really have a toolbar so what can you do i can confirm that reload on the on ios 15 beta 2 points forward okay clockwise
Casey:
It's funny you bring up the betas because I have only barely used it on iOS because I have it on a test device that I'm not using that much.
Casey:
But I am using it quite a bit on my iPad, which is running the beta as well.
Casey:
And I kind of like the idea of the whole tab group thing, whatever they call it, where you can have different work sessions, if you will, with different groups of tabs.
Casey:
And I don't mind the sidebar that manages that.
Casey:
However, the general day-to-day tab interface, if you will, in the dancing of the URL bar, do not like.
Casey:
I don't mind it on iOS, but again, I've barely used it there.
Casey:
But on iPadOS, do not want, and I can only imagine I would feel even more angry about it on macOS.
Casey:
I am not digging it in either of those places.
Marco:
Honestly, I think it's worse on the iPhone because, first of all, it's a bigger change than the iPhone.
Marco:
I think of all of these, I think the iPhone UI is the one that is the worst.
Marco:
Well, maybe.
Marco:
Seriously, I would have installed the beta on my phone already, but I'm still using a second phone, just toying around with it, mostly because of Safari.
Marco:
I really need to start testing some 15 features on my main phone, so I really do need to install it probably this week or next week.
Marco:
But I don't want to because iPhone Safari is so bad.
Marco:
It's like, oh, that UI is such a mess.
Marco:
I hate looking at it.
Marco:
I hate using it.
Marco:
It's so clunky.
Marco:
And every time I use my phone now that still has 14 on it and I use Safari, I'm just like, ah, it just works.
Marco:
It's normal.
Marco:
It's like, please, I don't want to get rid of it.
Marco:
I don't want to give it up.
Casey:
Well, it's funny you say that because, again, I've only used it briefly, and maybe if I used it more, I would change my tune.
Casey:
But sitting here now, I liked it on the iPhone because I like having the address bar down low, although it dancing about, I also didn't tremendously care for.
Casey:
And I did really like the...
Casey:
The affordance for swapping between tabs and like the whole tab management setup.
Casey:
I liked all of that quite a bit.
Casey:
And that's why I think I give it a pass on iOS.
Casey:
But none of that is critical on iPad or Mac.
Casey:
And so all you're doing on iPad and Mac is making the user interface less predictable, less consistent and less intuitive.
Casey:
None of which I consider good things.
John:
Speaking of Safari and the Mac, I spent way too long fighting with its handling of the various tiny icons that represent your websites.
John:
Some people will call them fave icons, but it's way more complicated than that because Apple.
John:
And as far as I can tell, after banging my head against it for a while,
John:
Safari on Monterey does some kind of smart quote unquote smart choice when it displays the little icon for your website in the various tabs in certain scenarios because I was like doing an A-B comparison between my website and dpreview.com which I just happened to have opened another tab.
John:
I'm like how are they getting
John:
you know, transparency in their icon in this scenario, and I can't.
John:
And I think it's like it decides that the icon is either predominantly light or predominantly dark and puts it on a background in certain scenarios, which for a while before this occurred to me, I'm like, what is going on?
John:
Because I was literally copying like the file format size and everything from DP review, you know, and clearing all my caches, which is very difficult to do, to delete like all the icon caches in Safari and, you know, doing all the things you could do to actually make it reflect your changes.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And I just I made my, you know, local incarnation of a website exactly match DP review.
John:
The only difference was like the content of the picture and there is displayed in the way I wanted with the transparent background in mind.
John:
They insisted putting it on like a white background in a round rack or something.
John:
So.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I kind of give up on that.
John:
I really wish Apple would update their guidance on how to get your little icons to display in a reasonable way.
John:
But I have a feeling, based on the design of Safari for Monterey, that being able to control how your website is represented in the UI of Safari is not really a thing that web developers are ever going to have complete control over again because Apple kind of decides.
John:
You can give hints.
John:
You can suggest things.
John:
But in the end, we'll decide how best to display stuff because we have this challenge that
John:
this challenging ui where your thing may not be legible based on the ever-changing background and you know all that other stuff so that's kind of disappointing but anyway i did update i did end up updating my fav icons on my website in an absurd way where now there's like every possible format and size that i think is reasonable is available and still it doesn't display correctly but oh so you feel like an ios developer then yeah so i eventually just gave up for now
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Casey:
All right, we should probably move to the second item of follow-up, the HTTP strict transport security.
Casey:
So is this what we were talking about with like the whitelist last week?
Casey:
Where is this coming from?
John:
Yeah, so this is everybody's guess, and I agree with them, although I don't actually have this confirmed from any Apple source, but I didn't see any contradiction.
John:
Uh, the question last week was, you know, is some Apple copy on an Apple webpage is like, uh, Safari will automatically redirect to HTTPS for sites that are known to support it.
John:
Remember that?
John:
Because people were reporting, Hey, the new Safari always redirects to HTTPS.
John:
That's awesome.
John:
But then I tried it and it didn't redirect on my site.
John:
And so we found that copy that said it redirects for known sites.
John:
Like what do they mean by known sites?
John:
Surely every site is known to someone.
John:
Right.
John:
Known to support HTTPS.
John:
Right.
John:
Uh,
John:
And it didn't even occur to me to think of its abbreviated HSTS, which is a thing that I knew about long ago, but had long since forgotten.
John:
But anyway, I'm pretty sure that's what it is.
John:
And so what it is, we'll link to the Wikipedia page.
John:
But basically, it's a way for your web server website to tell web browsers, hey, next time you talk to this website, it's safe to just talk HTTPS with us from the start.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And it's communicated through an HTTP header that tells the clients, an HTTP header on an HTTPS request that tells them, you can safely just talk to this server with HTTPS for the next insert amount of time.
John:
And there's also a bunch of other requirements that go along with that.
John:
What is the website?
John:
HSTSpreload.org is a website that will describe to you what you need to do to sort of comply with all this stuff.
John:
And if you comply to it, comply with all this stuff, you can apparently get on a preload list, which my vague understanding is that web browsers and other things in the world will now, you will be on this known list, like this list of sites that are known to support HTTPS.
John:
Um, I,
John:
I guess it either ships with web browsers and look it up.
John:
But anyway, that's how you get on the list.
John:
So first of all, you can comply with this without being on the preload list.
John:
You can just comply with it on your website, send the header and compliant browsers, which is most of them will, when they talk HTTPS to your website, even once they will see the header and say, Oh, this site is telling me for the next year.
John:
Anytime I talk to, you know, example.com, it's just safe for me to just do HTTPS from the get go.
John:
Right.
John:
Um,
John:
And I thought this was interesting.
John:
I have for the longest time stubbornly refused to redirect everyone to HTTPS and just supported both protocols, much to the consternation of many, many, many, many, many, many, many people who constantly tell me on Twitter, your site doesn't support HTTPS.
John:
It's insecure.
John:
Anyway.
John:
Your pasta recipe is going to hack everyone's bank accounts.
John:
Right.
John:
Like, my site's insecure.
John:
All right.
John:
Anyway.
John:
But I was so curious about this standard and how it worked that I decided I'm going to try to do it on my website.
John:
And, of course, it involved way more than you think it does because the requirements are like, oh, and by the way, your cert needs to also cover triple W dot your domain name.
John:
Like, triple W, what decade is this?
John:
Because I hadn't put triple W dot hypercritical.co in my SSL cert because why would I?
John:
Like, again, what decade?
John:
Why wouldn't you?
Marco:
because come on triple w yes why don't i just spell out world wide web it's it's terrible no i just like my url to be hypercritical.co with no triple w on the front anyway but you should you should accept so okay even on my sites where i don't use the triple w i still accept those requests and i simply redirect them to the correct address and
John:
it's that's that's i don't that's not i don't do that that's not what i want my domain name to be it's not but anyway hsts requires it i mean it resolved and it would work and it would redirect you but but i didn't have the ssl cert for it because no one should ever be typing triple w right but that means that it can't redirect you with https right well then you know so anyway i had to add it to my cert so i did that you know i had to reissue get a new cert reissue it didn't cost any money it's just a ssl hassle um
John:
And then it set the headers and, you know, get everything all configured correctly.
John:
And then finally the site was satisfied and I submitted it.
John:
And I guess now I'm signed up for at least a year of having an HTTPS only site.
John:
I just want to see if I actually get on the preload list.
John:
Part of the standard is that if you stop complying with the standard, like say if I, you know, stopped supporting the triple W, if you stop complying with the list of requirements at any point, then you're off the list.
John:
Like the browsers will just say, oh, I give up and I'll just go back to, you know, the old way.
John:
So I don't, it's not that much of a commitment, but basically I've signed up for a year.
Marco:
to be https only on my website that i only update once a year yeah i actually i should have piped up about this last week i i knew about hsts um and i've been using it on overcast since i think the beginning of overcast um because i've always had like pretty strict ssl stuff on overcast because like when i made the whole web thing in 2014 and 2013 like that was late enough in in history that i'm like oh well what if i'm doing this from scratch i might as well make it as secure as possible
John:
Yeah, and to be clear, that's the right choice for something with actual security.
John:
You have actual user data.
John:
If you're making an actual web application, you should absolutely do this.
John:
You should not accept plain HTTP.
John:
You should use HTTPS everywhere or whatever.
John:
But if you have a blog that you post on once a year where you just write a paragraph of text, I don't think it's super essential.
John:
Anyway, continue.
Right.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I even use content security policy also on Overcast, which basically makes it effectively impossible for any kind of user-entered content to do things like JavaScript injection and stuff like that, even if I somehow mess up my server-side filtering of that.
Marco:
But anyway, what I didn't know about was the preload list.
Marco:
So this is two different things.
Marco:
HSTS is the browser header where any website can say, only visit me over HTTPS in its response.
Marco:
And the browser keeps a local database with that age threshold.
Marco:
But I didn't know about the HSTS preload list.
Marco:
And I knew that Chrome...
Marco:
had been doing this for like known big sites like, you know, apple.com, you know, bank of America.com.
Marco:
Like I'm sure, you know, a lot of stuff like that.
Marco:
Um, but I didn't know that there was a way for anybody to just submit a site to it.
Marco:
So that's pretty cool.
Marco:
So yeah, it just has preload.org and you can do that.
Marco:
And I, I looked at it for overcast.
Marco:
Um, I, uh,
Marco:
I think I just about qualify.
Marco:
I would just have to do... I added the include subdomains thing because I hadn't ever done that before.
Marco:
And I wanted to run that for a little while just to make sure that nothing weird breaks that I had forgotten about.
Marco:
And then I'm probably going to add it to the preload after that.
John:
And just to save, I'm not going to save myself, it's probably too late, but to try to save myself a flood of feedback.
John:
And just to be clear for all listeners, if you're wondering, like, what's the danger in running a website without HTTPS?
John:
Since HTTP is just plain text, anyone can make your website look like anything because it is trivial to intercept it and totally change the content.
John:
So if you're worried about someone, you know, changing the content on your website to make it look like you're a terrible person or something, use HTTPS because it is harder to do that.
John:
Um, that's why people say that even if you have no security and you're not a web application and you don't have, you know, it doesn't, you don't have anything that you care about security doing plain HTTP basically makes it so that anyone in between you and the person trying to read your website can make it look like your website says whatever they want because it's plain text.
John:
Um, and if you read, uh, I think Dave Weiner had a big thing on this, but a lot of the sort of old school internet people say, yes, it's plain text, but that's kind of the beauty of it.
John:
Uh,
John:
that it should still be accessible through plain text, security be damned, just because it is a more accessible media without requiring SSL everywhere and so on and so forth.
John:
I'm not sure I entirely buy that argument, but what I'm saying with supporting HTTP is that I do want people without HTTPS to be able to do it.
John:
Say someone's booted into System 7 or something, or I don't know, like Netscape 1.0 where it doesn't support modern TLS standards, I still want them to be able to pull up my website because it's just got text on it.
John:
And I'm willing to, you know, suffer if someone decides to man in the middle of my website and change everything about it, because I can always say to that person that they say, hey, this website says you're a terrible person.
John:
I could say, try HTTPS.
John:
Does it still say the same thing?
John:
But so far that hasn't happened.
John:
So you can choose what you want to do on your website.
John:
But apparently what I've chosen to do on mine is for the next year to be HTTPS only.
John:
So you're welcome.
Casey:
I love the devout hatred of Triple W or WWW or what have you, and yet your insistence on supporting HTTP.
John:
Two totally different things.
John:
The Triple W is like saying, well, you can name your kid whatever you want, but we're going to put Triple W on the front.
John:
No.
John:
no i picked the domain name for my website oh my god well but everyone else wants triple w no exactly it looks ugly it's not nice my domain name is really long to begin with i don't want triple w on my website and there are many other parts of dns that make it probably not a good idea to make your top level domain your website like there are limitations there um i understand that i'm just i'm willing to deal with them to have a nicer
John:
word in the URL bar.
John:
And yes, I know half the web browsers hide the triple W anyway, so it's basically invisible.
John:
I was going to say I'm still not willing to give up on that one, but I basically just did, I guess.
John:
So anyway, don't use triple W when you link to me.
John:
I'll start sending you to random bad pages or giving you 500 errors.
Casey:
It's more symmetrical because you have to have the .co or .com in my case.
Casey:
So it's three on one side, three on the other.
John:
I've got two on one side and nothing on the other and a big bunch of everything in the middle.
Casey:
I'll do www.worldwide.hypercritical.co.
John:
Always on.
Casey:
All right, iOS 15.
Casey:
Always on worldwide.
Casey:
iOS 15 can adjust more than just text size.
Casey:
Turns out if you go into settings, accessibility, and perhaps settings, there's a whole cornucopia of things you can do in there.
John:
Yeah, and you can add apps like as an interface to say, add an app you want to customize something about.
John:
You can customize the text size, the button shapes, transparency, contrast, you know, or reduce motion even.
John:
Tons of stuff that you can do per app.
John:
So if you didn't know that was there and there's some app that you'd like to tweak something about, check it out in iOS 15.
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Casey:
Abel DeMose writes,
Casey:
Thus, a large portion of the value in Apple stock is derived from Wall Street's expectations of growth in services, which itself is mostly driven by the growth of IAP earnings.
Casey:
So that might be why.
John:
Yeah, this is to address Marco's point of like, you know, Apple is seemingly defending the small corner of their business at the cost of the rest of it.
John:
This is...
John:
A plausible theory of why that might be, because even though it is a small corner, like kind of with any sort of rent seeking thing, companies are rewarded for a situation in which it appears that a thing that is growing rapidly will always pay them.
John:
So some big percentage that they control.
John:
Right.
John:
Uh, any, anything like that, like that, you know, it looks good for your future financials.
John:
Even if the thing you're, you're taking a percentage of is tiny.
John:
Now, if it's growing year over year at a huge rate, people can just extrapolate that and say, well, Apple gets whatever percent of that.
John:
Again, the profit margins on the app store being even higher than Apple's already very high margins on its hardware.
John:
Uh,
John:
This email says 70% for the App Store margins versus 30% for hardware.
John:
I think that hardware one is actually a little low, and I'm not sure where the App Store one comes from.
John:
But either way, you can imagine the margins on the App Store are higher because they're not creating physical products and shipping them around and all that other stuff, right?
John:
And so, yeah, lots of things that don't make sense if you just look at the balance sheet amount-wise start making sense if you realize the dollar signs in people's eyes of like, if trends continue, this will be a whole jillion dollar business and Apple will get this huge profit margin on it and then your stock price gets rewarded.
John:
I think it is...
John:
I mean, it's plausible, but it is also a fairly pessimistic and cynical take on Apple's motivation to say that Apple is making decisions based on their stock price.
John:
Whatever you think about Apple, and I'm sure they are profit and revenue and growth motivated.
John:
Generally speaking, even though people will say Tim Cook gives lip service to the idea of not doing things to help the stock price, but then does things that help the stock price.
John:
Just look at the stock price under Tim Cook's tenure.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
screw your ROI or whatever when they were asking why you're doing this thing.
John:
The bloody ROI.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Because he became British to swear about that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So it's obvious that he has a set of values and he's not beholden to the stock price.
John:
The more plausible answer is that
John:
This is one of those values that Tim Cook believes in, and he's not doing it for the stock price.
John:
He's doing it because he believes that this is either the right thing for Apple to do as a company or just sort of, you know, Apple's Apple's rightful reward for its work or that it actually does make the App Store the better.
John:
But like I'm I'm not I don't think for as cynical as you want to be about Tim Cook, I don't think that he is actually massively motivated by doing what Wall Street wants with respect to the stock price.
John:
He certainly doesn't need the money himself.
John:
He is not beholden to Wall Street for what he does.
John:
But in this case, I think, you know, what Apple has been doing regarding the in-app purchase rules also coincidentally aligns with the thing that Wall Street is rewarding them for.
Marco:
I think it's probably some of both.
Marco:
In general, Apple has historically always been pretty stingy and also pretty greedy.
Marco:
And look, it works for them.
Marco:
That's how they got to be where they are in part.
Marco:
That's not the only reason they got to where they are, obviously, but...
John:
they have been stingy and greedy for a long time in many areas and they are very you know successful and big and so it's hard to argue that they should do anything else i would add to stingy and greedy i would add controlling of course like because because i feel like that it sounds bad when you say controlling but like i mean that in all the senses like stingy means don't spend money you don't have to greedy means like hey there's
John:
you know, that's your word.
John:
I probably wouldn't ascribe it to him, but I would definitely say stingy as in they have so much money, they don't seem to want to spend a lot of it.
John:
But controlling is the big one, which is if there is something that could go either way, don't leave it up to Wall Street, our customers, our developers.
John:
Let's us make a decision and control it in such a way that if someone disagrees with us, if our shareholders disagree with us, if our customers disagree, if our developers disagree, we have control over it.
John:
So controlling is the word I would use to control
John:
The value that Apple is pursuing with the App Store is that they want to be in control.
John:
Yeah, that's definitely part of it as well.
Marco:
But I think ultimately, when it comes to something that makes them a lot of money, they are not super morally principled necessarily.
Marco:
If it makes them a ton of money, they usually keep making that money.
Marco:
I can't really fault them for that because...
Marco:
They are such a big company and a public company at that.
Marco:
Suppose Tim Cook wanted to make a big stand and pull out of China really fast or something and lose a whole bunch of money by pulling out of China.
Marco:
That would, by a lot of people's measures, that would be a pretty good moral move.
Marco:
But
Marco:
the amount of instant money loss that was, quote, unnecessary, would probably, I would imagine, again, not being an expert in this area, result in possibly a shareholder lawsuit.
Marco:
Tim Cook would almost certainly be pressured to step down and possibly be forced to step down as the executives.
Marco:
There would be serious ramifications just by how big they are and that they are public and everything else.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
something like relaxing the app store rules i understand why the apple attitude which again for all for all the wonderful things that we love about this company and its products um they certainly have some some attitude issues and and one of those is arrogance and maybe arrogance is a better word than greed um but it's kind of hard to tell the difference sometimes when things are this big like when you're talking about
Marco:
six or 15 or 20 percent of some kind of revenue category or the whole company's revenue that's enough money that they'll overlook a lot and in this case it's a combination i think of they're making a ton of money and also they believe they are fully in the right thanks to their just their kind of their culture there the culture they have the way they view themselves they still view themselves as the underdog despite being the man like they like if you're like
Marco:
They are – like they became IBM slash Microsoft, whoever they were fighting against in their early days.
Marco:
Like they are now that or bigger.
Marco:
They are the monsters that they fought in the past.
Marco:
They are now those monsters to the rest of the industry.
Marco:
But they don't think so.
Marco:
They still think they're the underdog, and they spent so long –
Marco:
Having the entire media and tech world telling them all this BS about themselves that was wrong or telling them that they were wrong or that they were bad and they sucked and they were doing things wrong.
Marco:
They spent so long having that be told to them that they developed an incredibly thick skin for rejecting any outside criticism and any outside viewpoint that says anything other than Apple is right, Apple knows best, and Apple is doing what's right.
Marco:
This is one of the reasons why we see occasional things, occasional signs of this leaking out these days where, like, it seems like they have trouble reading the room sometimes.
Marco:
They put something out there that generates a certain, like, immediate negative reaction, and Apple seems genuinely surprised by that, even though to all of us on the outside it's obvious that would be a negative thing, but it seems genuinely like they are surprised by a negative reaction of things.
Marco:
I think that's because of this kind of cultural...
Marco:
I wouldn't even call it a blind spot.
Marco:
It's like a cultural character flaw they have.
Marco:
They spent so long having to defend themselves and proving themselves right over time that they have a really hard time seeing when they're not 100% in the right.
Marco:
And they have a really hard time thinking because of that underdog psychology.
Marco:
They have a really hard time thinking that they might not deserve some part of what they have now or what they can take now.
Marco:
They think they deserve all of it.
Marco:
And
Marco:
They do deserve most of it, but when you have an area like this app store shakedown business they're in, see also casino games for children, there's a lot of areas of this that are kind of gross.
Marco:
It's really hard for anyone in Apple to ever see it that way because of this culture that's deep-rooted in the company, and it goes top to bottom.
Marco:
It's not just the handful of older executives who were at the top who were there in the other days.
Marco:
This is a culture that runs deep through the whole company because they keep telling themselves the same stories over and over again.
Marco:
And so ultimately, this is not going to be an easy thing to ever break for them.
Marco:
I hope they do find a way to find a better balance in a lot of these areas.
Marco:
Now, whether they would actually relax the IAP rules and what kind of profit this would actually cost them in practice and what that would actually do to the stock price –
Marco:
and how much that would actually matter to the company and all the associated things with the stock price, I wouldn't make a lot of big assumptions on big movements in any of those areas.
Marco:
So, for example, if Apple were to relax the rule on IAP and would allow people like Netflix and Amazon or whatever to show their own payments in the apps,
Marco:
By the way, whether it is shown in a web view or whether it's kicked out to Safari for the web browser, I don't think that distinction matters at all.
Marco:
And I don't think Apple thinks the distinction matters at all because it doesn't.
Marco:
No one cares.
Marco:
All it does is make the flow more complicated.
Marco:
But if you are allowed to use like a UI text view in your app to enter a credit card versus you're required to kick out to Safari, that doesn't matter at all.
Marco:
That distinction is not a distinction with a difference.
Marco:
Anyway, assume that companies are allowed to use their own in-app purchase things and they can use Apple's if they want to.
Marco:
I don't think every app would instantly jump to dumping Apple's thing.
Marco:
Cause that's not how anything works.
Marco:
I wouldn't, I'd keep using it in overcast.
Marco:
And if apps offered both, which I think they would be pressured to by many of their customers in most examples, except for the very biggest things like, you know, Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, you know, stuff like that, where like there's so much user momentum behind that.
Marco:
The company that runs the app is able to dictate terms way more than their customers are.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
In most cases, I think most apps would continue to just use an app purchase.
Marco:
And the really big companies would have the option not to.
Marco:
And people like me, we could offer our own thing too.
Marco:
But I think many of our customers would tell us, hey, you know what?
Marco:
We're going to use an app purchase.
Marco:
And that's fine.
Marco:
Honestly, that's why I wouldn't even probably bother doing my own thing unless I wanted to do some kind of readability, revenue sharing kind of thing that would require a lower commission to make it effective.
Marco:
But otherwise, I don't think I'd go that route.
Marco:
I think most developers wouldn't.
Marco:
And so it's not that their app store revenue would go from whatever it is today to zero.
Marco:
Most of the companies that would add in-app purchase stuff, like their own in-app purchase stuff, aren't using Apple's system today.
Marco:
You already have Netflix, Amazon.
Marco:
These companies already aren't using it.
Marco:
So you wouldn't be losing their money.
Marco:
They already lost their money years ago if they ever had it in the first place.
Marco:
What they would lose is some of the App Store money.
Marco:
Now, it's hard to know how much that is.
Marco:
I think the area they're probably more worried about is the gaming market because that is, by most people's measures, a substantial portion of App Store revenue.
John:
Not substantial.
Marco:
Isn't it like 85% of App Store profit is games?
Marco:
I don't know if we have good data on that, but I think the estimates we've seen have it pretty high like that.
John:
It's not just like close to 50.
John:
It's like the vast, vast majority of income from the App Store is games in every estimate that I've ever seen.
Marco:
Yeah, me too.
Marco:
And so if they were to have some kind of exception where they would just say, all right, games still have to use an app purchase, but everyone else, now you can use your own thing if you want to.
Marco:
That would make the difference even smaller.
Marco:
But even supposing they allowed everyone to do their own app purchase, including games, this isn't going to go to zero.
Marco:
I don't even think they would lose 20% because the games would have the same market pressure that people like me do in our apps of like,
Marco:
Yeah, we can put our own credit card system in, but if we don't also support in-app purchase, tons of our customers out there either can't or won't use our purchase system.
Marco:
Apple's in-app purchase system is pretty good.
Marco:
It has a lot of limitations, but it's overall a pretty compelling option for much of the time.
Marco:
In the case of games, you have things like kids using devices that have parental controls on them.
Marco:
And you have the ability for the parent to approve a purchase one by one or to set allowances.
Marco:
You have great capabilities in the internet purchase system now that games would be heavily incentivized by just the sheer numbers of it.
Marco:
Games can afford the 30% because people will use it.
Marco:
And if they put their own system in, a lot fewer people would.
Marco:
So ultimately, I don't think a ton of this revenue, this App Store revenue, would disappear if Apple relaxed this rule.
Marco:
Some, yeah, some of it probably will.
Marco:
But I don't even know if it would be enough that we'd notice.
Marco:
The regular growth of this margin, of this revenue rather, is so nice even going up that it might even hide this dip in
Marco:
As it happens slowly over time.
Marco:
I don't even know if it would be noticeable because I think ultimately what you'd end up with is probably at least 80% of the current App Store revenue and probably even more than that.
Casey:
80% is a lot less than 100% though.
Marco:
Yeah, but I think it would be something that's happening gradually over time.
Marco:
Look, it's not the iPhone.
Marco:
Yeah, this is a lot of money.
Marco:
It's not the iPhone.
Marco:
It's not a ridiculous massive portion of Apple's money and
Marco:
Because it would happen over time, I don't think you'd even notice in the stock price.
Marco:
I think what you might notice in the stock price is if there's a threat of heavy government regulation coming in, that probably has more of an effect on the stock price than the potential that they might lose –
Marco:
I don't even think we'd be talking about 2% of their total revenue.
Marco:
I think it's so – the numbers – what the company makes is so much and so massive from all the other areas of their business.
Marco:
The App Store is also not their only services revenue.
Marco:
Granted, it's most of it, which I think is kind of gross as a concept, but I don't think they would lose that much money from this.
Marco:
And what they're risking by inviting antitrust-style regulation onto them from major world governments, I think is much bigger than this.
Marco:
And so I still maintain that it's a terrible strategy for them to stand firm on this.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I think the reason we're seeing them stand firm is a combination of what Abel here says in this comment about it is a lot of money in absolute terms, and maybe they're afraid their stock price would go down.
Marco:
But also, I think, as I was saying earlier, Apple thinks they are entitled to all of this, and they think they built this entire ecosystem, and they're entitled to a slice of every single thing that happens on it.
Marco:
I think that argument is both incredibly arrogant and also incredibly deeply flawed because lots of things contribute to this and lots of other people probably think they deserve it too.
Marco:
Like, I don't know, your ISP, your cellular carrier, your processor manufacturer, maybe Samsung for making your RAM or your display.
Marco:
Cisco for all the routers involved along the way maybe the people who lay under underground cables or undersea cables for internet connectivity everywhere I mean lots of people think they anyway I don't want to get into all that now but there's a deep rooted cultural belief in Apple that they deserve all of this and that's going to be very hard for them to ever get over and I think that's the reason we're seeing so much stubbornness on this not that they are afraid of losing 20% of their revenue because I don't think it would be anything like that
John:
two things just to circle back on to abel's point his main point was that it's not about the size of the revenue it's about percentage of growth so even though it is a small currently a small slice of the pie if you look at it as what percentage of apple's growth like all of their growth is happening in services and everything else is more or less stagnant so even though it is a tiny percentage of their revenue it could be like you know a two percent change in their revenue could be a 50 reduction in their growth so that was his point with like the why potentially wall street might
John:
You know, be afraid of that.
John:
And he was extrapolating from that to saying, and that's why that's why Apple's doing it, because they care about the stock price.
John:
And I don't really quite agree with that.
John:
And the second thing is on on Apple's, you know, on Apple's general motivation, money based motivation for making decisions.
John:
I think part of the reveal of the epic trial and seeing all the internal emails
John:
is that to my recollection, every time I saw any kind of email discussing some controversial issue within Apple, nobody was there to say, we can't do this, it will lose us too much money.
John:
In fact, all I ever saw was the opposite.
John:
Lots of emails saying, someone is super mad at us for one of our policies, but they're kind of important, what can we do to make them happy, right?
John:
Or, you know, famously the Phil Schiller one of like,
John:
Should we really be doing 30% for a long time?
John:
We're making a lot of money on this.
John:
Maybe we can lower it.
John:
At no point, high-level executive, low-level person, whatever, at no point did someone say, yeah, but if we did that, it would make us lose money.
John:
I'm sure they're in there, but the vast majority of the emails that I remember seeing that were highlighted, usually highlighted to show Apple in a poor light.
John:
So it's not like they cherry-picked to make Apple look good.
John:
These were emails that you would say, look at Apple.
John:
doing this thing that they said they never do, like it would show them to be hypocritical or disingenuous or whatever.
John:
But in general, people debating were trying to sort of do damage control inside Apple, not saying, but we can't do that because we demand to make money.
John:
So I would, you know, I don't think I don't think that's the way Apple works is worrying about the stock price or worrying about absolute values.
John:
But I do think it is a larger issue.
John:
Moral stance, business stance, like Marco was saying, that not in such a – I don't think in such a sort of craven way as Marco puts it, but in general, like, the evidence of what Apple believes it deserves is embodied by their policies, right?
John:
That's just the bottom line and the inflexibility of those policies.
John:
Like, clearly, Apple thinks this is –
John:
a reasonable arrangement, whether or not they think it's like justified or deserved.
John:
I did a blog post about this ages ago of like, it's not, you know, in any kind of economic arrangement, arguing about who deserves what or whatever.
John:
It's an interesting debate to have.
John:
But in the end, if it is a reasonably efficient market of some kind, which I would say, you know, for the most part, these things are because they're much less regulated than other areas, which is why the government's looking into it.
John:
The only question is,
John:
is this arrangement agreeable to all interested parties, right?
John:
That was, I forget what post I wrote about this, but it's like, in the end, that's all that matters.
John:
There are multiple people involved in this.
John:
There are users that are developers and there are Apple.
John:
And Apple may dictate the policies, but it has to choose policies that keep people happy enough that there's not open revolt.
John:
And Apple's got people in open revolt now.
John:
So whether or not you think Apple deserves X, Y, or Z,
John:
Um, you know, getting back to the game consoles, which was the example I use that game consoles are way worse than Apple, but somehow game consoles are able to manage that relationship so that everyone involved at least sort of grudgingly goes along with it because this is like mutually beneficial and Apple, their policies seem to have shifted off of that, you know, sort of happy medium where everyone is equally disgruntled.
John:
And I think basically everyone, everyone is an open, or at least the big powerful people are an open revolt.
John:
And as soon as the government is an open revolt, and this is a bad situation.
John:
And even if I 100% agree that Apple deserved every single penny they're collecting, which I don't, but even if I did agree, it doesn't matter who deserves what.
John:
All that matters is, is this deal working or is it not working?
John:
Right now it is not working, so something needs to happen.
John:
I don't think they believe it's not working.
John:
Well, I mean, they believe it when they have polls in front of Congress.
John:
Like that's a sign of things not working because that doesn't happen on its own.
John:
It doesn't happen because like Congress is doing this out of the goodness of its heart.
John:
Like they have powerful enemies who are making this happen.
John:
And those enemies are supposed to be their quote unquote partners in like the win-win scenario of the app store.
John:
And that relationship has just been disintegrating from Netflix, who used to be giving hundreds of millions of dollars per year to giving them zero.
John:
As you noted, that is, you know, sort of the beginning of the end.
John:
Like,
John:
Yeah, it's I agree that Apple maybe thinks like this is salvageable.
John:
We can save this.
John:
Like, it's not a big deal.
John:
Like, I think they may be in that mode.
John:
Right.
John:
But I from my perspective, the the arrangement that they have, despite the fact that they are so much nicer than game console platform owners.
John:
uh they have uh their their their powerful customers are much more angry than game consoles powerful customers which is saying something because game consoles powerful customers are generally pretty angry the fact there was a big twitter thread uh just today about someone complaining about how poorly sony treats them and how little control they have over things like again if you think the app store is bad just look at how consoles work but somehow over the decades
John:
These incredibly controlling console makers have managed to keep enough artistic people engaged and involved and rewarded to keep making games for their platforms.
John:
Otherwise, they wouldn't be here, right?
John:
I mean, a bunch of game consoles aren't here.
John:
Sorry, Sega.
John:
Womp off.
John:
Yeah, but it's not easy to do.
John:
But, you know, right now, Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are walking that line with a bunch of super angry developers who nevertheless say...
John:
But I'm still going to keep making games for your platform because it makes me a lot of money.
Casey:
All right, John, tell me about your mouse pad.
John:
This is such a weird one.
John:
I just threw this in here because this is a strange topic week.
John:
Because I'm paranoid about my simple little programs that I run 24 hours a day.
John:
For a while, I was going over, mousing over to my little Switch class palette, which is in the upper right corner of the screen.
John:
And I would notice when I got over to it, my mouse would seem like it was laggy.
John:
And I'm like, okay, I'm not using a Bluetooth mouse, so that's not what it is.
John:
It's plugged into USB.
John:
And I'm like, am I doing something in my app where I'm spiking the CPU when the mouse comes?
John:
Because I have a bunch of invisible drag readings to know when your cursor is in there for a variety.
John:
Switch class looks simple, but it's actually ridiculously complicated, the shenanigans I do to try to make the functionality work.
John:
Anyway, I'm like, maybe I'm doing something with the CPU.
John:
Is it spiking or whatever?
John:
And it was reproducible.
John:
I'm like, every time I go over there, the mouse cursor lags like my CPU cores are saturated or something or like it's a Bluetooth glitch.
John:
And I looked.
John:
I had Xcode open.
John:
I looked.
John:
I'm like, that's not actually happening.
John:
Nothing is going wrong here.
John:
It's not spiking the CPU.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And then I immediately jumped to the next thing.
John:
It's like, well, it is on the right edge of my screen.
John:
And when I mouse over to the right edge of my screen, my mouse is on the right half of my mouse pad.
John:
So maybe it's actually the right half of my mouse pad that's the problem.
John:
So I put the cursor on the left side of the screen, but then picked up my mouse and put it over on the right half of the mouse pad.
John:
Guess what?
John:
My mouse can't track very well on the right half of my mouse pad.
John:
And it's blowing my mind.
John:
Like how long have we had optical mice, right?
John:
It's not like I'm mousing on a glass table like Casey.
John:
Like this is not a challenging surface.
Casey:
I don't use a regular mouse anymore.
Casey:
Come on, man.
John:
I know when you do a glass table.
John:
It's a good joke.
John:
I have like a box stock fabric.
John:
It is black.
John:
Maybe that's not good.
John:
But a box stock black fabric mouse pad.
John:
And presumably the optical sensor in the bottom of this fairly expensive Microsoft mouse is
John:
should be able to track on a very textured, you know, woven fabric, you know, what a fabric mouse pad service is like, I'm not challenging this mouse.
John:
And yet, the right half of my mouse pad, my mouse tracks poorly on it, I can just pick up the mouse, put it over the right side, have my cursor anywhere on the screen in any app.
John:
And it like it's not it's not related to the computer.
John:
It's just literally my mouse pad and the mouse.
John:
And this is I think the first time this has ever happened to me in, you know,
John:
However many since 19, I've been using my since 1984.
John:
I've been cleaning mouse balls and rollers and I've tried every kind of optical mouse and never before have I seen a mouse that has trouble tracking on a fabric mouse pad surface.
John:
I just want to share the story with you.
John:
What am I going to do about it?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I have like sheets and sheets of this mouse pad fabric that I cut, you know, exact dimensions.
John:
Maybe I'll get a new sheet.
John:
But it is a scientific curiosity to me.
John:
What in the hell is it about the right half of my mouse pad is different than the left?
John:
Because to the naked eye, they look identical.
Casey:
That sounds delightful.
Casey:
You know, you could just switch to a trackpad.
John:
No, why would I do that?
John:
That's terrible.
Marco:
Or you could use my Teflon coated mouse pads.
John:
I did use them for a while.
John:
In fact, I have an actual Apple branded, you know, Teflon coated mouse pad from, I don't know if it's Teflon, but it's the same type of hard plastic, slippery, hard plastic stuff.
John:
It was like Apple in the like Palatino font with the ridiculous kerning from the 80s.
John:
If it's hard plastic, it's probably not Teflon.
John:
Yeah, it's probably, I mean, it's too old.
John:
It's probably too old to be Teflon.
John:
It was before, like, gaming mouse pads and things where it had to be super slippery.
John:
But it was hard plastic and slippery.
John:
But that was like, you know, we were worried about mouse ball traction back in those days.
John:
And actually, the first mousing surface that I used, at the suggestion of my grandfather, who was instrumental in convincing my parents to buy an original Mac, he, because he was a, you know, woodworker, he had made his own, like,
John:
set up for his computer and he had a big piece of glass that he put on top of his wooden desk and he would slide under the glass various things that he had printed for himself on his image writer to remind him of how a Mac works and all the different functions and everything and you could see them through the glass desktop but anyway
John:
Um, the original Mac mouse on a glass desktop was actually a pretty good service.
John:
That's what he promoted.
John:
He said, you should get a glass desktop, like actual top to your desk because the mouse ball grips well.
John:
The mouse ball was a weighted ball with grippy rubber on it.
John:
And as long as your glass wasn't wet, which hopefully it wasn't near your computer, there's actually a pretty good traction between the ball and the glass.
John:
So my first mousing service was glass with a, you know, weighted ball mouse on an original Mac.
John:
I think I only introduced the mousepad concept maybe around the time of ADB when we got our first ADB mouse.
John:
And I think maybe like the Mac came with a mousepad or something or we bought one at Egghead or something.
John:
But yeah, I've been on mousepads ever since.
Casey:
Good to know.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So we've had in the show notes for forever and a day.
Casey:
There are two cool, geeky Mac apps that you would like to bring up, John.
John:
Yeah, this is one of the great things about the Mac is there's tons and tons of different ways to do stuff.
John:
And everyone can sort of choose which way best fits their brain.
John:
And the task I'm going to describe, I'm sure if you're a Mac user, you can think of 100 ways that it could be done.
John:
And if you are a developer, you probably have whatever your favorite way to do it.
John:
And you do it that way.
John:
The example I'm going to pick is something I find myself having to do frequently at work, which is to pretty format some snippet of JSON.
John:
Right.
John:
You get some response from an API.
John:
API doesn't care about pretty printing.
John:
You just want to be able to see it with your eyes to be able to parse it.
John:
And it's, you know, a lot of crap.
John:
Uh, some people may say, oh, I just go to, you know, prettyprintjs.org or some website or whatever.
John:
And I just paste it in there and do it.
John:
And some people say, no, don't waste paste proprietary stuff into websites.
John:
You're revealing company secrets.
John:
Uh, you should have a local pretty printer or you should do it from the command line, or I have a service in the services menu that does it.
John:
And like, that's the beauty of the Mac.
John:
I use launch bar to do it like this.
John:
You know, there's a million different ways you can do this on the Mac.
John:
Uh,
John:
For whatever reason, I never was really happy with all those ways that I described and more.
John:
Like I've done many of them, right?
John:
You know, there's so many ways you can do it.
John:
You can make a little script to do it and launch that script from a command key.
John:
You can have a little thing in the menu bar.
John:
Like, again, the beauty of the Mac.
John:
And somehow I discovered this app called Boop, which is a good name, B-O-O-P.
John:
And it is basically a way to bring up a text window and you can paste some text into there and then do crap to it.
John:
And you may look at it and say, every app does that.
John:
LaunchBar does that.
John:
What is it?
John:
Not Albert.
John:
Alfred does that.
John:
You can do it with Quicksilver.
John:
You can do it in the services menu again.
John:
Like this seems like an app that has no point because I can do these things another way.
John:
But the point of it is that for a certain set of people, apparently me included, this is the sort of least friction fastest way to do this.
John:
You just bring up boop, paste in the thing, and then you do a command to like reformat it.
John:
And you have many choices besides just pretty print JSON.
John:
And of course, it is completely a pluggable system where you can, again, if you're a programmer, write very simple little plugins to manipulate whatever you paste it in any way you want.
John:
And then it goes away and no, like if you ever did it, like making a temporary BB edit document or doing it in a scratch pad and Sublime or like this, you know, I do it in a buffer and Emacs, like again, whatever fits your brand.
John:
But I just want to suggest this app because I like this class of app that is like.
John:
A thing that you can do in a million other ways, but here's one more way to do it.
John:
Oh, and by the way, it's completely pluggable by programmers where you can just write a simple shell script or Perl script or whatever.
John:
And it has like a plugin API that you don't have to like compile anything.
John:
You don't need to use Xcode.
John:
You can just extend this to your heart's content.
John:
If you like this kind of interface, if you like bring up a window, paste in text, do a thing to it, close the window and be done.
John:
Boop is pretty cool.
John:
Check it out.
Marco:
I actually might give this a shot.
Marco:
I'm normally very resistant to installing new Mac utilities.
Marco:
I don't think I have really good reason for that.
Marco:
It's just how I am.
Marco:
I don't have a good justification.
Marco:
Some people would be like, well, I want to be able to run the most stock setup possible.
Marco:
For me, it's not quite about that.
Marco:
It's more like...
Marco:
It takes a lot of utility for me to add something to my Mac setup, where I'm much more willing to try stuff on iOS.
Marco:
Say what you will about iOS and, you know, safety, app store, side-loading, all that crap.
Marco:
Stay there for another day.
Marco:
So this actually looks pretty good, though, because I will frequently, you know, open up a new TextMate window and, you know, use a bundle to maybe do something like that or something, but, like...
Marco:
A lot of this stuff, yeah, I think I'll give this a shot.
Marco:
I think this could be a lot more streamlined than a lot of the ways that I solve these needs today.
John:
And it comes with a bunch of stuff built in.
John:
Like when you press command B, it gives you like an autocomplete and you can type JSON and you'll see there's not just pretty print JSON.
John:
There's convert.
John:
Let me just do it now.
Hang on.
John:
I just had JS, evaluate JavaScript, JSON to YAML, query string to JSON, JSON to query string, format JSON, YAML to JSON, JWT decode or jot if you would like, minify JSON, CSV to JSON, JSON to CSV.
John:
Like this is just me typing JS in the autocomplete of the built-in actions.
John:
And of course, if there's some, again, if you're a programmer, this is kind of a programmery tool.
John:
If there's some action, it's like, no, I want you to do exactly this.
John:
You can write that plugin in whatever language you want, more or less, and plug it into this.
John:
And now you've got your own
John:
you know, convenient tool to do this.
John:
Again, if this particular interface appeals to you, and the only kind of way to tell whether it appeals, like I didn't think it would appeal to me until I had tried it.
John:
And then I realized, oh, pretty printing JSON that way is better than the 900 other ways that I routinely do it.
John:
It just because I can activate it quickly, and it goes away quickly.
John:
And there's no sort of cleanup.
John:
And I like their pretty printer, the default one that was built in.
John:
So yeah, check it out.
Marco:
The cleanup, I think, is a really good angle.
Marco:
The iOS app draft is one of the great wins of this philosophy of not making people manage documents when they don't need to or want to.
Marco:
I think this is one of those things... So many times, I'll do something in TextMate where I will...
Marco:
Maybe I'll do something in the terminal with, you know, I'll like copy something to the paste board or whatever.
Marco:
And then I'll do, you know, PB paste, pipe, JSON PP or whatever.
Marco:
And yeah, you can do that.
Marco:
And then I'll like, I'll pipe that then to mate for text mates.
Marco:
Then I'll have a new text mate window.
Marco:
And then, okay, now I have a new window.
Marco:
And where does that go?
Marco:
well most of the time it just sits around for a while maybe it gets hidden and minimized somewhere and then i find it like a week later and as i'm you know command tilding through all my textmate windows trying to find something and there's like 17 like single use textmate documents that i did something like this in uh that now they're just cluttering up my textmate window i gotta close them do i want to save no i don't want to save like it's just so yeah this i i can see this being being potentially useful
John:
I like their website, too.
John:
It's got a nice demo of the app.
John:
If you're like, you're wondering what the app is, just go to the website.
John:
The top thing is an animation showing to you.
John:
But their their main bullet points that the top one really shows like how I guess how most people who, you know, started their careers on the web do things.
John:
The main selling point is stop pasting company secrets into random websites, because honestly, of all the ways that I just ascribed to do this, I think people essentially going to Google and
John:
asking Google to do it or finding or bookmarking.
John:
And I don't think these bookmarks are just like typing JSON pretty print into Google, going to the first website and pasting their, their company's proprietary API into the thing without thinking.
John:
That's how most people do it.
Casey:
So, yeah, I also love the company or the group or whatever that, that built this is called okay at best.
Casey:
I like that.
Casey:
It's like neutral.
Casey:
We're not setting expectations too high here.
Marco:
I like how a user in the chat, Adj Larson, says, it's like paper plates, but for JSON.
Casey:
That's perfect.
Casey:
That is perfect.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then I've had Boop installed, but I keep forgetting about it, and so I haven't used it that much.
Casey:
But obviously, I liked it enough to install it.
Casey:
And then I discovered this next thing, and I have opinions about it.
Casey:
Would you like me to introduce it, John, or would you like to?
John:
Yeah, go for it.
John:
Like, this has been in here so long that there's actually some history now attached to the item.
John:
When it was first put in there, it was a new interesting thing, and it has had a journey.
Casey:
Yeah, so this is a thing that I think Jason and Dan at Six Colors brought to my attention called BitBar.
John:
It was in the show notes before that, just FYI.
Casey:
Oh my God, we're talking about this now?
Marco:
Welcome to like three years ago.
John:
I had it in the show notes so early and then everyone starts blogging about it and now it looks like I'm following them and then it just got old and then there was, anyway, go on.
Casey:
You were there before it was cool, don't worry.
John:
I was totally into BitBar before it was cool.
Casey:
So anyway, so BitBar is an app that lets you put the output of like shell scripts into your menu bar.
Casey:
So as an example, although I don't use BitBar anymore, and we'll get to that in a second, as an example, I have the current ATP membership count in my menu bar.
Casey:
I have my garage door status because why wouldn't I?
Casey:
And we've talked about this recently, but why wouldn't I?
Casey:
And actually thanks to a friend of the show, Mark Edwards.
Casey:
I have bespoke garage door icons now, which is a development since we last spoke about this on the show.
Casey:
And then I feel like there was one other thing I have up there, but I don't see anything else right now.
Casey:
So anyways...
Casey:
Um, it, it lets you put the output of shell scripts on your, on your menu bar, which is super cool.
Casey:
And you can use for any number of things.
Casey:
I think Jason Snell has like his actual house's temperature, you know, exterior temperature, cause he has a weather station in his house, uh, that he put up there and there's all sorts of different stuff you can do.
Casey:
I actually use a reboot called, or not a reboot, I'm sorry, an alternative, I guess, or a revival called Swift bar.
Casey:
So a quick history bit bar was a thing and then it kind of fell into disrepair.
Casey:
A person whose name escapes me decided to reboot it as a Swift app and rewrite it from Objective-C to Swift.
Casey:
And that's what I've been using, a Swift bar, and I've actually contributed extremely minor things to it.
Casey:
So you could say I have in part written Swift bar, except not really.
Casey:
um so anyways uh swift bar is excellent it is rewritten in swift it works with all the bit bar plugins that you can find generally speaking uh and it works out really well and meanwhile the original author of bit bar has decided you know what i want to do when i want to make a native mac app i want to write that and go
Marco:
What?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So there is a BitBar reboot now, written in Go, if that's your thing.
Marco:
Oh, my.
Casey:
So, yeah.
Casey:
All of these are free.
Casey:
They are excellent.
Casey:
Again, I'm throwing my weight behind SwiftBar, but you can do what you like.
Casey:
But they're very, very, very cool, and it's fascinating to...
Casey:
that you can put darn near anything in your menu bar if you really, really want to.
Casey:
And it'll obviously automatically refresh itself if you so desire.
Casey:
These are very, very cool apps, and I really enjoy them.
Casey:
John, what are you using BitBar or SwiftBar or whatever for?
John:
I'm not actually using that one that much.
John:
I just thought it was neat because it's the same philosophy of tool, which probably doesn't have particularly wide appeal, which is maybe why these are not huge commercial successes or commercial at all.
John:
but it's a gooey mac app but it lets you extend it by writing you know you said shell scripts it really is just like literally any kind of command line executable you want because like in the case of bitbar like you essentially emit text to standard out in a format that bitbar understands in a sort of a little ascii format and with it you describe hey i want to have a menu i want there to be five items i want this to be the first item the second item then a separator then like
John:
It's not just like, oh, put this text in the menu bar, although you can do that and it's super easy to do that.
John:
Again, it's like the simplicity.
John:
It's like Unix tools, right?
John:
Oh, so, you know, like in the classic Mac days, it would be like, oh, I have a pluggable menu bar utility and you got to write like code resources and, you know, use Apple's IDE or Code Warrior or something to compile these little things.
John:
And this is like, no, the Unix way is,
John:
You just write a thing and emit text on standard out and our app will parse it and do what you say.
John:
And the simple case is simple.
John:
You just want to put some text in the menu bar, emit that text more or less from, you know, again, from any way you want, from an executable that we can run that writes the standard out.
John:
And that is an interface that appeals to developers and Unix nerds.
John:
And it is just so low friction.
John:
Like if you just want to do that thing, like putting, you know, putting the number in the menu bar takes you two seconds.
John:
You're done.
John:
And it's the same thing with Boop, that it is extensible, but extensible in a way that is accessible to developers who don't really want to buy into your whole system.
John:
They don't want to fire up Xcode.
John:
They just want to do a quick thing.
John:
Again, another thing I love about the Macs, marrying...
John:
a really nice GUI with Unix underpinnings.
John:
And when they meet, it's so rare that like there is an app that is like half Mac and half Unix and is good in both haps that they really stand out to me.
John:
So that's why I thought this was a nice pair.
Casey:
Real-time follow-up, Alex Mazinov is the Swift Bar person.
Casey:
And really, really, really good people.
Casey:
So I apologize, I completely blanked on your name.
Casey:
But I've been using Swift Bar for quite a while, and it is really, really great.
Casey:
And it doesn't mean the others are bad, but I favor Swift Bar, and I really like it.
John:
And I think this is another example of, like, it shows that this is a good idea.
John:
One of the early ones was things that come up when you hit command space.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Kind of pioneered by Quicksilver, popularized by Quicksilver, but LaunchBar predates it, I believe.
John:
But anyway, that was such a good idea that there are a bunch of apps that are like that, whether you call them launchers or whatever, like the idea that you would make a GUI, you know, the GUI idea of like it pops up, you do stuff with it and it disappears and, you know, pops up on command space or whatever until Apple tried to steal that back.
John:
But I totally always switch it back to be my launcher thing.
John:
But then it's like, oh, you can do anything for that prompt.
John:
You can type text.
John:
You can do this.
John:
And, you know, a bunch of apps sprung up.
John:
The fact that, like, BitBar, I don't know if BitBar was the first one, but that, like, now there's SwiftBar and the reboot of BitBar.
John:
Like, it's a good enough idea that this is, like, I feel like a category of app now.
John:
uh that yeah lots of people can take different runs at implementing it uh but i think what they've just hit on is a good idea i think boop is also a good idea it overlaps a lot with the quote-unquote launchers because a lot of them including quicksilver have a way where you can bring up the interface and type some text and manipulate it but boop is a much cleaner interface that is really purpose-built for just this one thing and you don't have to muck up your launcher with it
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Oh.
Casey:
let's do some ask atp and john strand writes what do you make of apple's relationship to matter or chip or as i like to call it choyp uh are there competitive dynamics between apple and the other players amazon google samsung others that might affect or limit development of the standard how nice will apple play with others in the area
Casey:
And could they be a positive influence on the issues of privacy?
Casey:
So to back up a step, what was once known as connected home over IP, which I abbreviated CHOIP, some people called CHIP, has now been renamed Matter.
Casey:
And the idea is it's a bunch of these companies, again, Amazon, Google, Apple, Samsung, etc.,
Casey:
that are coming together to say, let's come up with one particular API or interface or what have you for smart home things.
Casey:
So you don't have to have things that only the Amazon Tube can talk to and that only HomeKit can talk to and so on and so forth.
Casey:
Maybe I'm naive, but I don't see why this is anything but a good thing, having all of these people together and trying to reach some sort of...
Casey:
Having all of these people together and trying to reach some sort of collective conclusion on things, I don't really see why this is bad or why there would be competitive dynamics other than let's just try to find the best solution.
Casey:
But maybe I'm childish and naive.
Casey:
So, John, what am I missing?
John:
I don't follow this space too closely, but to me, as a casual observer, it looks like what happens in a lot of industries like this.
John:
After the initial sort of burst of innovation and attempts to gain supremacy, if no one party gains sufficient supremacy to dictate terms of the entire industry, it eventually becomes in everyone's collective interest.
John:
in these types of markets to agree on some kind of standard because basically they all agree, look, we all hate each other and we're all competing, but we will all collectively sell more smart home crap if it all works with each other.
John:
And because none of us could get enough share to basically box out everyone else and say, I don't care about your standards, like we are dominant.
John:
That apparently didn't happen enough in this industry.
John:
So they just say, okay, well, we tried, we all tried to dominate, we failed.
John:
Let's all do this thing
John:
Let's all somehow agree on some standard that we can live with, because after that, now competition is freer.
John:
They all they all believe that they this this deal will allow them to get an edge because now we will be able to get our devices into homes that have your device in them, whereas before we couldn't.
John:
But they all think that.
John:
Right.
John:
They're all like so I think this is a good move for consumers.
John:
I think.
John:
The internet has shown when there is some kind of common standard for interoperability of tech products, especially network tech products, that's a good thing for literally everyone involved.
John:
If America Online had taken over instead of the internet, it would be worse for everybody, including America Online.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Maybe not including America Online because they kind of got the wrong run out of the deal.
John:
But anyway, for stuff like this, you know, TCPIP, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, it is good that there are industry standards for that.
John:
Home stuff, it will be, I think, good that there are industry standards for that.
John:
Now, as for whether Apple being part of this will improve privacy...
John:
You know, as as they said in the episode of The Simpsons, I haven't listened to the top four episode, Marco, but do you do you know this reference I'm about to make for some of the members of this consortium?
John:
This may be, you know, much less privacy.
John:
Like what I'm saying is I think matter probably isn't up to the privacy standards that Apple may dictate if it had full control of it.
John:
But for other members of this consortium, it will mean much, much more security, right?
John:
In other words, without this consortium, they would just do whatever the hell they wanted.
John:
Who cares about security because all they cared about was getting devices out, right?
John:
I'm sure people who know more about smart home can name individual brands that behave in this way.
John:
But I'm sure that the bar has been raised to comply with matter or whatever.
John:
A lot of these companies have to have much more security.
John:
In the Simpsons reference I was trying to make,
John:
Kudos to anybody who got it through that giant thing.
John:
I will give you your internet points if you honestly tell me that you got the reference before I explained it.
John:
It was the comic book guy talking about Ponfar, the Vulcan breeding event, saying where they breed every seven years.
John:
And he said, for some of you, this will mean much less breeding.
John:
For others of us, it will mean much, much more.
Yeah.
Marco:
and to answer your question I did not get the reference don't spoil it for me I haven't listened yet anyway I think the actual I haven't been following the actual details of matter slash chip to know exactly what the spec is I do know that generally speaking HomeKit has significantly higher security and privacy requirements than the Amazon Alexa stuff or the Google stuff
Marco:
But just as John was just saying, having what's basically a format war going on in a hardware area is never great for consumers.
Marco:
And you do eventually just want it to kind of settle out into, okay, just one thing that's unified slash universal.
Marco:
Either it encompasses everything or everything else died except this thing.
Marco:
And then consumers can just buy that kind of gear and not have a whole bunch of garbage tech that's useless in a couple years like my DVD plus RW drive.
Marco:
I think in this case, you know, I mean, home stuff in general, like all the connected home, smart home devices, they're pretty crappy.
Marco:
And I still use a few of them.
Marco:
I've been reducing my reliance on them over time.
Marco:
They're pretty bad.
Marco:
Any help they can get to become good.
Marco:
I hope they can get that help.
Marco:
I recently went all in on HomePods here in our house.
Marco:
Stopped using the Amazon stuff almost entirely.
Marco:
Although if anybody has a solution to operate a HomePod outdoors, I'm curious to see what my options are.
Marco:
Just put it under your deck.
Marco:
It'll be fine.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
But otherwise, for the most part, we're operating just HomePods.
Marco:
Therefore, we've also switched to just HomeKit as the voice slash, you know, smart controlling API for things in the house.
Marco:
And that's not too hard because we mostly have HomeKit compatible stuff.
Marco:
And in fact, one of the big annoying areas that we didn't have it was our thermostats.
Marco:
We were an all Nest household.
Marco:
Nest thermostats are terrible, like everything else Nest makes.
Marco:
seemingly the least terrible option that we had among all the other terrible options um however they they became the most terrible options when they mostly stopped working with their internet service and i stopped being able to like add them to the house or do almost anything with them or work them reliably um so on the recommendation of the entire internet uh about a month or two ago um
Marco:
I switched our thermostats out for Echo Bees.
Marco:
Eco Bees?
Marco:
Echo Bees?
Marco:
I don't know whether it's Echo or Eco.
Marco:
Anyway, it's like the only home kit thermostat, basically.
Marco:
And my overall opinion of these has like a little mini topic in here that I'm going to wedge into this ATP topic.
Marco:
I'm going to sideload it in here.
Marco:
My overall opinion of the Echo Bees thermostat is that it looks worse than Nest.
Marco:
It is harder to adjust than Nest.
Marco:
The app is about as bad as Nest's app, but it works with HomeKit.
Marco:
And that makes it worth having done all that stuff.
Marco:
And it's not Nest.
Marco:
I'm so sour on Nest after all the crap they put me through that I just don't want any Nest in my life.
Marco:
And so it's not the bad thing.
Marco:
And the thermostats look okay and work okay.
Marco:
But critically, they work in HomeKit.
Marco:
And that's been really nice most of the time.
Marco:
unfortunately as with everything home kit they work about 85 of the time and so it's great that 85 of the time uh kind of sucks the rest of it though when i have to like manually go oh why why is the downstairs thermostat not responding who knows let's go into the echobee app well it works fine there
John:
I haven't heard back from your devices.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And this is not just a HomeKit thing.
Marco:
The Amazon Echo family of things and its various smart home devices that work with it aren't great either.
Marco:
One of the only things I use an automation smart home thing for anymore is we have an ice maker in our kitchen and
Marco:
And it's a little loud when it runs, and so I wanted to put a smart outlet on it to basically be a timer so that it would only run, like, basically while everybody's asleep and not anywhere near it.
Marco:
So it wouldn't, like, you know, be too loud when you're trying to watch a movie in the next room or something like that.
Marco:
And so I had this outlet set to run basically for midnight to noon every day, and that's it.
Marco:
The problem is this outlet is, it's like an under-the-counter, like,
Marco:
kind of half built-in ice maker kind of like the way a dishwasher is installed so like to get to the back of it where it plugs in you have to pull the whole thing out from under the counter so it's not something you want to be doing frequently you want to put it in there like at installation time and not mess with it after that um so i put the smart outlet back there and it's like i went on amazon and just found like whatever was really small so it would fit back there
Marco:
really small home kit and Alexa compatible smart.
Marco:
I figured make it compatible with everything.
Marco:
And it's this like smart things brand that seems really garbagey, but who knows?
Marco:
So I put it back there and it works fine.
Marco:
Most of the time, um, except that one time, like a couple of months ago, um,
Marco:
It just stopped working.
Marco:
And I'm like, okay, well, what do I do?
Marco:
I have to, like, pull the ice maker out and, like, you know, pull the whole, like, drain tube that it's attached to and everything.
Marco:
Make sure I don't mess that up.
Marco:
Like, it's a whole thing.
Marco:
Make sure I don't scratch the floor or break the ice maker in the process.
Marco:
Like, it's a whole thing.
Marco:
But I did it.
Marco:
I pulled it out.
Marco:
I reset the stupid thing.
Marco:
I put it back in.
Marco:
Smart Outlet worked again.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Today, I'm cleaning the ice maker.
Marco:
And I'm still cleaning the ice maker, which requires you to run it during parts of the cleaning process at 1130 in the morning.
Marco:
And I think, oh, this is going to turn itself off in a half hour.
Marco:
Let me log into the app, which is some weird smart things app because I never got to work with HomeKit.
Yeah.
Marco:
let me try to log in let me let me open the app and see if i can control it from there and i open the app and it's it has logged me out if i was ever logged i don't even know i try to make an i i try to sign into an account oh i don't have an account and like okay now i i don't even know what to do here
Marco:
so like all right i have no way to control this outlet unless i pull the whole ice maker out again which i didn't want to do i still don't want to do so i'm just like okay let me look at trying to replace this with like another homekit compatible outlet and i try you try to look and see what's available and it's there's almost nothing on the market except for some like weirdo like no name like you know one of those like amazon brand names yeah
Marco:
You know what I mean?
Marco:
Where it's like the Markov generator, brand name of random vowels glued together.
Marco:
It's like, okay, well, I don't know if I trust that enough to put behind a built-in appliance and to have it just work for forever indefinitely.
Marco:
So anyway, this is the kind of experience I have with almost every smart home device of any standard, whether it's HomeKit or the Alexa stuff or the Buck and Wemo, Philips Hue.
Marco:
I've tried so many of these things.
Marco:
They are all...
Marco:
almost good but they're just like a little bit unreliable or you have to occasionally like unpair it from your entire house and repair it for god knows why even the echo b thermostats like setting them up on home kit required like jumping through weird hoops with their setup to have them even show up to home kit and then like sometimes you have to like reset it all the way and then go back through the whole process again to get it re-added to home kit it's like
Marco:
None of this is good.
Marco:
None of this is good enough to be installed in someone's house behind an ice maker or whatever.
Marco:
Stuff that you install in houses, you kind of expect it to work reliably indefinitely into the future.
Marco:
And none of this stuff is good enough.
Marco:
So all this is to say that if Chip or Choyp or Matter or whatever...
Marco:
can somehow be better than what we have now.
Marco:
Whether it's through better device management with authentication and control via these various APIs and stuff, or whether it's through different radio protocols by adopting thread and stuff like that.
Marco:
However it happens, it needs to happen.
Marco:
Smart home stuff has been around now for quite a while.
Marco:
It should be good, and it's not.
Marco:
And it's not the question of like, oh, you can't buy the cheap garbage.
Marco:
If you buy the nice one, it's better.
Marco:
No, the nice ones aren't better.
Marco:
They're not more reliable.
Marco:
It isn't like if you go with the Apple product because then it'll work 100% of the time.
Marco:
Nope, it doesn't.
Marco:
Or the Amazon stuff.
Marco:
You can go with that.
Marco:
Nope, it doesn't.
Marco:
I don't have any experience with the Google stuff, but I imagine it's probably similar from what I've heard from other people.
Marco:
None of this stuff is good.
Marco:
None of it's that reliable.
Marco:
None of it's easy for most people to do.
Marco:
And most of it requires you to mess with it like every six months somehow for some reason.
Marco:
And I just want to get past that point in the technology.
Marco:
Like we can do this as a society.
Marco:
We've made technologies that can last, that can be low maintenance and reliable.
Marco:
Things like light switches, like
John:
regular ones there they last a long time they're very reliable very simple we need to get to that point for smart home stuff and we're so far from it now so i hope that matter brings us closer i was thinking of the device my parents had that we would hook up to the lamp that was in the window at the front of the house when we went on vacation and it was basically plugged into the wall and then it looked like kind of like a large version of a countertop
John:
kitchen timer like it had a big dial on it and you'd adjust these two little plastic things one would be adjusted to the on point one would be adjusted to the off point and then from it would be a power cord and it was just literally like a ticking clock type of timer that would make the lights go on at this hour and go off at this hour
John:
It was not computerized.
John:
It did not have any smartphone functionality.
John:
Wi-Fi had not been invented yet.
John:
The internet was not in anyone's home.
John:
But it could reliably turn that light on at 7 p.m.
John:
and off at 9 p.m.
John:
or whatever hours we're supposed to fool the very dumb burglars into thinking we were home and not on vacation.
John:
Um, but there was probably a technology connections video about these devices, but if there's not, uh, maybe you can ask him to make one.
John:
Unfortunately for your ice maker situation probably wouldn't help you because if you could fit one of those back behind the ice maker, it would probably work reliably for years.
John:
But in the situation where you're like, Oh no, it's 1130.
John:
You still need to get back there to the timer to make it not turn off.
John:
Uh,
John:
I'm sure there are other better solutions, but what I'm saying is that your needs are so low tech that you probably don't actually need anything smart here.
John:
You could probably get away with something a lot dumber, maybe farther down the line of the electrical system if you really need to.
John:
But your larger point about this stuff being crappy is true.
John:
And I think the main advantage that Matter would bring, like I was saying before, is that thing that you had to do where you got to do the Echobee setup, but then like do a second setup to get it onto HomeKit.
John:
I had the same thing with my smart outlets, like the native app has its thing.
John:
But then if you wanted to do a HomeKit, you're doing something separate.
John:
Not having to do two things, not having to have two systems, the like the quote unquote native one, and then also we're compatible with HomeKit.
John:
Even if they're both supported as peers, as equal peers, there's always like, well, you know, which one am I setting it up on?
John:
And maybe one is more reliable than the other.
John:
Just having one system at least let these manufacturers concentrate on them.
John:
making that one system reliable, rather than trying to support all the systems.
John:
You know, my smart outlet supports the Amazon stuff, the Google stuff, and HomeKit.
John:
It supports all three.
John:
And it's hard to support all three, I bet.
John:
If they could just support one, that would be way better.
John:
So I also look forward to unification.
Marco:
Yeah, and hopefully, like, maybe if there's some really good reason why this stuff is so hard to make it reliable today, like, with the current standards, again, whether it's, like, authentication stuff, whether it's networking challenges, whether it's physical things like Wi-Fi, radio problems, as opposed to, you know, Thread or Bluetooth or whatever, Zigbee, all those different things.
Marco:
Whatever it is, I hope the industry has...
Marco:
a good reason why things have been such crap so far, and that they've fixed that in this newest standard.
Marco:
Because they have experience now.
Marco:
They have real-world experience with all these standards out there to date.
Marco:
Hopefully now they have figured out, okay, a new standard is required for a good reason, and that good reason is we can make these things good if we had a new standard, and so here it is.
Marco:
If that's the case, I am very much looking forward to it.
Marco:
I just I hope that's the case, because the way it is now is kind of embarrassing.
Casey:
I do have to say that even though it hasn't been six months yet, the Lutron Caseta stuff that I've put on the screened in porch has so far been pretty much bulletproof.
Casey:
And that is smart switches.
Casey:
I think they have an outlet.
Casey:
I believe that to be true.
Casey:
And it's expensive stuff.
Casey:
I think each of these smart switches is like easily $50, maybe close to $75, which is a lot for what you're talking about, especially since a dumb version of this is like literally $2.
Casey:
But no, it's been working really, really well, and I have zero complaints so far.
Casey:
So you should try that.
Marco:
Thanks.
Casey:
All right, moving right along.
Casey:
Peter Waller wants to know, I was wondering if you all had seen and have any thoughts on Mighty, a service that streams Google Chrome from the cloud, similarly to Google Stadia or NVIDIA GeForce Now.
Casey:
The service is in beta and is expected to cost $30 a month.
Casey:
That seems like a complicated, crazy, expensive way to get around the, quote, Chrome is too slow, quote, problem.
Casey:
Am I missing something?
Casey:
No, that's my take, too.
Casey:
I haven't seen, I haven't tried any of this.
Casey:
I haven't dabbled in it.
Casey:
but my initial impression is the same thing.
Casey:
This is just to make Chrome not suck.
Casey:
But tell me, gentlemen, what is the actual reality here?
Casey:
Fraud and porn, maybe?
Marco:
Honestly, if you think of what are the possible applications for a web browser that's hosted by somebody else for you, it's probably leaving fake reviews on stuff.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I'm sure there are legitimate uses for this, but...
Marco:
I think there's going to be a lot of crappy uses for it as well.
Marco:
It's like just stuff that we're not thinking of that's like potential scams you can run.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Maybe I'm missing something.
John:
I mean, I think this is one of... We talked about this when we talked about streaming gaming services.
John:
It's one of those sort of eternal dreams of computer slash network architecture at various times is to think that a thing that people are doing locally that has problems, if we could do that remotely...
John:
We could solve we could solve some problems like so let's say, you know, we can have very powerful computers or we can have computers that are closer to the thing they're trying to talk to.
John:
Or we have computers that are optimized for this one task or all sorts of things that you can think about doing that you say, look, when we do it in our data centers.
John:
We can do it better than you can do it near you.
John:
And all that we need is the network connection to be, you know, to be robust enough, to be low enough latency, you know, all the sort of the qualifiers.
John:
Kind of the similar thing to gaming of like we can run the games at our data center.
John:
You don't have to have expensive video card.
John:
We can, you know, have economies of scale because we can share resources when they're not in use.
John:
They're not just idle sitting there like someone else will be using them, right?
John:
I don't know if you remember network computing.
John:
Sun was super into network computing.
John:
Like, oh, you'll have a thin client on your end, your network computer, and it won't have a lot of smarts in it.
John:
It'll just have enough to talk on the network, and the real computing will happen somewhere else, and that's great for us because we make servers.
John:
Yeah.
John:
all sorts of models like this.
John:
And every time they've been tried so far, even when the balance of tech seems to make sense on paper, like finally the bandwidth is enough, or for certain genres of games, latency is acceptable, they still haven't really caught on.
John:
And I think in the case of this specific scenario of like what people's browsers do bog down and people's computers aren't super powerful and have tons of RAM.
John:
And if you open a lot of tabs in Chrome, it does, you know, chug, right?
John:
Or to kill your battery.
John:
Like there's so many like there's lots of technical reasons why this thing would make sense.
John:
But the enemy of this approach is just how fast everyone's computers keep getting.
John:
I mean, phones, phones are so phenomenally fast at web browsing now that it's really hard to make the argument that if we do this in our data centers, we can browse, you know, better than you can.
John:
Like, it's probably true.
John:
Like, their computers...
John:
can be optimized for this task and will have more RAM and can actually be faster, but not faster enough, enough of the time to pay certainly $30 a month for the privilege, right?
John:
There's also isolation and security, like all this stuff's happening on our servers, not on your device or whatever.
John:
Um,
John:
And there's still the old bugbear of bandwidth and latency.
John:
Can you tell that it's not running locally?
John:
Maybe it's probably easier to fake it out in a web browser as opposed to a game.
John:
But what about games you play in the web browser?
John:
What is it?
John:
Microsoft's xCloud thing is finally allowed, quote-unquote, on Apple devices through their web interface.
John:
Like...
John:
There's lots of reasons why I don't think this deal at $30 a month makes sense for most people and that's why it's probably doomed.
John:
But people keep trying for this one because on paper there are a lot of advantages and in individual scenarios it can make sense.
John:
But as a thing that sort of
John:
you know, has a place in the market, like that maybe it's not for everybody, but it's a firmly established market.
John:
So far, no one has been able to crack this nut, whether in gaming or certainly in web browsers or in general computing.
John:
Sun's network computer didn't work out.
John:
You know, the rumors of the original iMac were, is it going to be a set-top box called Columbus that would kind of be like a lightweight network computer, the one on your TV?
John:
That's not what it turned out to be, the iMac.
John:
But lots of companies have had this dream over the years of
John:
a small, thin device on your end that connects to our big, powerful server somewhere else, and it'll be great for us because you'll buy the cheap device and we'll charge you per month or whatever.
John:
Keep trying, everybody.
John:
It will probably work out eventually because it is a good idea, but I don't think this is it.
Casey:
Stop trying to make fetch happen.
John:
No, they need to keep trying to make it happen because it is a good idea.
John:
But this, you know, again, $30 a month so you can have a web browser running elsewhere when our phones run JavaScript at speeds, you know, unforeseen.
John:
Like if you brought an iPhone back in time, even just a couple of decades and said, like, I'm going to benchmark this little magical thing against your most powerful computer, people would be blown away.
John:
Like the web is really fast, on iPhones anyway, the web is insanely fast on iPhones.
John:
still not a lot of ram like there's still advantages to this and there's always the distance thing like how close is your iphone to the server we have a you know a 30 gig ethernet connection to the trunk of the internet and you're on stupid wi-fi so instead of you sending the entire multi-megabyte content on the stupid web page across you know 4g or whatever we'll do all that over our wired connection and just send you the picture of the page that renders as a result like there are advantages but 30 a month nope
Casey:
An argument here.
Casey:
And then finally, friend of the show, Brian Hamilton writes, do you think Apple would ever make an M1 card for Intel Mac Pros to enable some of these M1-only Monterey features?
Casey:
I personally don't see that happening, but I don't know.
Casey:
Marco, when you inevitably get your Mac Pro, will it be with an M1 card?
Marco:
Not a chance in hell that you would have to do this.
Marco:
I think Apple, as I mentioned in the past, I don't think Apple is looking backward at all on this transition.
Marco:
I think they've moved on.
Marco:
Anything else they do for Intel in the future, if anything, is going to be really half...
Marco:
budded and only the bare minimum that they need to do i think they're like we've seen these rumors of like possible component updates to the existing mac pro like new cpu and gpu update because they appear to be supported in software that might happen even then i'd kind of be surprised if it happened honestly
Marco:
Because I think Apple's head is no longer in the Intel world.
Marco:
So to put any unnecessary engineering effort into extending the life of Intel machines with a hardware product that would add an M1 to them, no, no chance.
John:
Just to give some historical context for times that this is either Apple has done this or it has happened to Apple.
John:
The original Mac had a thing.
John:
What was it called?
John:
It had a great ad where it was like it was a third party thing where you basically it was like an IBM PC that you would slap onto the side of your Mac so it could run IBM PC software.
Casey:
Yep.
John:
I mean.
John:
what was that called mac charlie maybe um i remember the ads for it very vividly from back in the day uh max had apple 2 cards in them which made sense for education there was basically like a little an entire apple 2 on a card that you could add into a mac for schools that needed to run apple 2 software at the same time uh there were a series of uh basically more modern intel uh computers on a card like a 486 that you could put inside your you know
John:
mac uh they they were called like dos compatible right because it basically had a tiny 486 pc on a card inside your mac um i think that's why people even think of this because apple has you know because it has been a thing so many times for various reasons and obviously all the all the times has happened like how many people do you know who'd ever actually even used one of these let alone even knew they existed right um
John:
In the case of M1, the only scenario I can see Apple doing this is if something very disastrous happened with the ARM-based system on a chip for the Mac Pro.
John:
Like, you know, I don't know, the yields were bad or there was a fatal flaw in the design.
John:
Something that just really terrible happened.
John:
And Apple's like, oh, what are we going to do?
John:
It's going to take us, you know, an extra two years to come up with an ARM chip for this Mac Pro.
John:
Because the ARM system on a chips are so cheap compared to Xeons, for example, if Apple was in this dire situation, I can imagine them saying, we'll just keep shipping Intel Mac Pros and we'll put an M2 or M1X or whatever on a little card and shove it in there so that people can
John:
use it for the functions that it's faster for or something like that.
John:
But that would, to be clear, this would be a colossal failure.
John:
It would not be a plan that Apple's subscribing to.
John:
It would be like, something terrible has happened, what can we do?
John:
And because the Mac Pro is so horrendously expensive, you can absorb the cost of literally an entire M1-based Mac or M2-based Mac on a card.
John:
It's nothing compared to the cost of an overall cost of a Mac Pro.
John:
So they could do that, but
John:
I haven't heard that they've had any disasters in my great pipeline that I have into the chips that Apple is working on.
John:
So yeah, I don't think this is going to happen.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, HelloFresh, and Linode.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
And that'll work whether you go to HTTP or HTTPS because it'll redirect you.
Marco:
And thanks everybody.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A
Casey:
On a completely random note, we took Penny to do day boarding.
Casey:
Not puppy play date, but day boarding today.
Casey:
Because not this coming weekend, but the weekend following, we're going to need to have somebody, not us, take care of her for a couple of days as we do wedding stuff for my brother-in-law.
Casey:
And we took her we were trying to ease her way into things because she and I presume this is not unusual for any dog, but for her particularly, she really doesn't like new stuff at first.
Casey:
And so we took her in day boarded her today and dropped her off at like nine thirty, picked her up at like five thirty.
Casey:
And, you know, it was, I think a little challenging for the people at the day border.
Casey:
Like she wasn't mean, but I think she was like very resistant to them and so on and so forth.
Casey:
Um, but seeing a dog who I think genuinely thought you wouldn't, you know, I think she thought we would, she would never see us again, even though it was a total of eight hours.
Casey:
Uh, and then we come and pick her up and I've never seen a creature more happy in my entire life than she was when we picked her up today.
Casey:
Um,
John:
uh so funny do you guys you guys never ever board your dogs do you i do oh you do okay so we try to find places in general that take dogs but that's not easy like so this you know we're going uh down to long island at some point this summer and we look for uh you know rental places that would take dogs but as you can imagine that it's not
John:
common uh and so yeah but we but we that's it's good what you're doing like trial running that or sort of like finding a place that you trust or people that you trust to watch your dog is important and getting your dog used to the idea um the person we board with now is also the person where daisy goes on her doggy play dates right so it's
John:
It's a familiar place where she goes frequently and she's been boarded there multiple times.
John:
Still, as you noted, you kind of get the suspicion that the dog doesn't understand and think, this is it, I'm never going to see it again, like literally every time.
John:
Because you can't explain.
Marco:
I mean, in all fairness, I think Hopps has that impression every time we leave the house.
John:
Every time you leave the house, right.
John:
Every time you leave the room.
John:
yeah yeah it's like that's i think part of the reason why dogs are so like over the top happy to see you when you get back is that they thought you were gone forever every time you leave yeah yeah i wonder about that on the doggy play dates which you know she's been going on for her entire life it's not a mystery like there is some something to be said for routine like they understand that this will come and go but the boarding must be like wait a second this play date's lasting a really long time right exactly right
John:
But, you know, it's having somebody you trust and especially since this person boards dogs and has the play dates like it's, you know, it's her friend group, so to speak, right, that she's familiar with smells and places that she's familiar with.
John:
So it's the best you can do.
John:
It's not as good as being home and with your people all the time, but sometimes that can't always happen.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And it's funny as I was digging into this, you know, because we got a recommendation from some really good friends of ours that have a couple of Westies.
Casey:
But, you know, as I'm digging into this, just kind of seeing what's available, you know, there's everything from like a place nearby, not the place we went, but a place nearby has like different levels.
Casey:
So many of these borders or kennels, whatever you call them, have, you know, different levels.
Casey:
And there's the like, you know,
Casey:
the steerage plan all the way through in this one particular place near us has the presidential suites where they have chandeliers and elevated beds and things of that nature that's awesome well it's awesome but it's like so before i became a dog owner this is like you know before i became a parent same story right before i became a dog owner i swear i would not be that dog owner that is like frou-frou will only have the best of the best you know
Casey:
Fru-fru will always have an elevated bed and chandeliers in her, in her kennel.
Casey:
Like it's a fricking dog guys.
Casey:
Like, come on.
Casey:
Um, and so I don't, I don't absolutely love the place we took her because it's basically a cement box that she was in.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
Um, but, but I, it's going to have to suffice for the next, you know, for what we're going to do an overnight next week, a single overnight next week.
Casey:
And then next weekend is, you know, I think it's two or three nights that she's going to be gone and then we'll see if we stick with it or not.
Casey:
But, um, the people there are super nice and she seemed no worse for wear when we picked her up.
Casey:
Um, but it's just, it's funny the, the level that, that these, these places will go and, and how over the top and preposterous it is for an animal that I think really just does not know any better.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, I mean, it's complicated.
Marco:
So for one thing, they do know to a degree.
Marco:
That's part of it.
Marco:
But also, they pick up so much on the human's reactions and emotions about things.
Marco:
Like, if the human is dropping them off and has the clear emotions like...
Marco:
This is a good thing.
Marco:
This is going to be great.
Marco:
It will put the dog more at ease.
Marco:
Once the dog figures out that they're being left behind, they're not going to be happy about it.
Marco:
But it's better to be left behind at a slightly more positive emotional state from the human.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
than the human being super upset and nervous about it, because then the dog will pick up on that.
Marco:
But also, I'm a sucker for this.
Marco:
I was the same kind of person.
Marco:
I'm not going to be one of those over-the-top dog parents, but of course, I mostly am, because I love my dog.
Marco:
One thing, I've heard this from a couple places.
Marco:
I forget the origin, but two things to know.
Marco:
Number one is the perspective of...
Marco:
your dog is part of your world you are your your dog's entire world like it's an asymmetric relationship you go off to work well if any of us had jobs but you know like you go off to work and you know like you you go out you have a whole world around you your dog is one part of your world but like yeah but to your dog like you are the entire world like they they're it's just all about you
Marco:
So that's one thing to be conscious of.
Marco:
And the other thing that I – I forget where I heard this as well.
Marco:
It was so good.
Marco:
But something along the lines of like somebody was like filling up their dog's water bowl and they were using the filtered water.
Marco:
And someone else asked, why do you use filtered water?
Marco:
Because the dog doesn't care or doesn't know.
Marco:
And the guy said, because he would do the same for me.
Casey:
That's adorable.
Marco:
To your dog, you're God.
Marco:
Your dog loves you so much.
Marco:
I feel like the combination of those two things, it makes you want to do nice things for your dog.
Marco:
Even if it probably doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.
Marco:
Even if dogs theoretically shouldn't or can't know or care about the difference between the crappy option and the good option.
Marco:
You just want to do good stuff for your dog because your dog is so awesome to you.
John:
Your dog would eat you, though.
John:
So there's that.
John:
My dog?
John:
Really?
John:
You died in your house and your dog is there and no one's feeding it.
John:
You're eventually going to eat it.
John:
I mean, the dog might be sad while it's eating you, but your dog will eat you.
Casey:
Oh, my God.