The Anti-Fireplace Lobby
Casey:
Oh, oh, oh, oh, one last thing.
Casey:
I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
Casey:
If you are a tweetbot or Twitterific person, we should have put this on the show.
Casey:
I didn't even think about this.
John:
Oh, that's too late, yeah.
John:
I'm sure you talked about it on the talk show.
Casey:
No, we didn't.
Casey:
Well, either way.
John:
No, you should have.
Casey:
Either way.
John:
Well, it wasn't, I don't think it was out yet.
Casey:
It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter.
Casey:
All right, the point is, if you are a tweetbot or Twitterific person who had a subscription,
Casey:
Go and re-download the app.
Casey:
Not kidding.
Casey:
Go to the App Store, re-download the app, and then it'll ask you, do you want a prorated refund in the case of TweetBot?
Casey:
Do you want to push that over to Ivory?
Casey:
Or do you want to say, eh, I'm good, don't worry about it?
Casey:
For all of us, I reckon we can afford to say, eh, I'm good.
Casey:
You could, I think, do the ivory thing.
Casey:
But you know what?
Casey:
I already subscribed to ivory.
Casey:
And I still said, eh, I'm good.
Casey:
Because it's a few bucks of my money.
Casey:
It's not that much money for me.
Casey:
But in aggregate, that's a metric shit load for tap bots.
Casey:
And same thing for Icon Factory.
Casey:
So if you have even just a handful of dollars that you can spare, why don't you say no refund, please?
Casey:
It would really mean a lot to them.
Marco:
yeah because here's the thing like if you don't go reinstall tweetbot and twitterific and opt out of the refund the default will be that they're going to have this money taken out of their like bank accounts that can be taken by them and refunded to customers for whatever time was left in their subscriptions because like twitter you know blew up so this is like this is potentially a huge negative pull of money out of these companies like this i mean
Marco:
This could bankrupt people.
Marco:
This is not a good scene.
Marco:
And so if you can opt out of getting this refund, please do so.
Marco:
So go install TweetBot or Twitterific again.
Marco:
You might have deleted it already.
Marco:
Go install it again.
Marco:
Each one of them opens up to a similar screen that just says, hey, here's the deal.
Marco:
What do you want to do?
Marco:
If you do nothing, you will get a prorated refund for any unused time on that subscription.
Marco:
That will come from the developers.
Marco:
If you opt out, they will lose less money.
Marco:
So please go install these apps again and opt out of those refunds if you can.
John:
I never uninstalled it.
John:
I actually put Twitter into my phone's dock, which is an area that I don't use.
John:
So it's just a little museum.
John:
How do you not use like it?
John:
I know.
John:
I don't find it an easy place to reach.
John:
It's the easiest place to reach.
John:
I don't think so.
John:
The way I hold my phone, I find that incredibly awkward.
John:
I've never put anything that I used in the dock, which is, you know, whatever.
John:
Kind of a shame.
John:
It's always visible, but I just I can't reach there easily.
John:
are you like a center grip person not like a lower grip person i guess so i mean but i i find it now i can't reach that i guess my grip is just up too high anyway i put twitter if i can there because i just wanted to you know it's a place of honor and i just wanted to continue to see the icon right i replaced it with ivory on my actual it is a really nice icon
John:
on my home screen i have a set to a different a slightly different than you know it's a customizable anyway um but then when they came out this thing like oh i'm gonna go do it and say i don't need a refund and then i realized i don't have a subscription because i'm on the beta and the beta is just like perpetually subscribed you know what i mean but that didn't feel too bad because i think i paid like 150 for twitter for mac so when they had the kickstarter so i'm good and i subscribed doc and factory's patreon which you should do as well
Casey:
Let me ask you, John, what you doing in your living room these days?
John:
Yeah, I had to find something to occupy my time while I was trapped in a room with COVID.
John:
I'm happy to say that today was the first day since becoming infected that I tested negative.
John:
Hooray!
John:
very very barely positive for like three days in a row today it was absolutely 100 negative i'm zooming in on that picture i'm like is there anything there i'm yep nope i'm 100 negative i always like shine my phone flashlight on it like different angles like can i see it at all yeah so it's uh i'm well and truly negative so that's great um hopefully i'll be negative tomorrow i'm still testing a little bit because you gotta have multiple anyway
John:
watching for that whole rebound thing we'll see how it goes but i needed something to do with my time uh and i did watch a bunch of movies and a little bit of tv and a lot of youtube but i needed something to to do that was interesting and i was already in the midst of i don't know uh thinking about this project i don't know how it happened i'm anyway this project went into high gear because nothing else to do and this project is to upgrade my sound system i know we've been talking about that
John:
uh on the show a lot and that's probably why it's been in the front of my mind i recently got a fancy new tv and with that i got a fancy new receiver to connect to the tv and i got a fancy new blu-ray player but one thing i didn't upgrade was my 5.1 speaker system which
John:
It was cheap and old, but well-reviewed when I got it.
John:
I didn't even know if I wanted a 5.1, so I'm like, I'm not going to spend a ton of money.
John:
Let me just get the best-reviewed, tiny, inexpensive thing.
John:
This was many, many, many years ago.
John:
I've had that, and it's fine, but I have upgraded the rest of my system, and now that part of it definitely looks like the weak link.
John:
I've been looking for months now into...
John:
what could I possibly upgrade to that is nicer than this?
John:
So that's what I did during my COVID time.
John:
And it's trapped in my room for days and days on end as I just looked on YouTube and read articles and waded through audiophile forums.
John:
Those are always fun, right?
John:
Just the whole nine yards, just going everywhere, trying to figure out for my weird test case.
John:
I'll put a link in the show notes too.
John:
I even talked about it on Mastodon to see if anyone had any particular advice or suggestions about my weird situation.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Unlike my television shopping, I feel like my speaker shopping is not applicable to most people because it's so specific to my room, my house, my scenario, my limitations.
John:
Whereas my TV is just like, other than a size that fits in my thing, it's just a big flat panel.
John:
It's a good TV for everybody.
John:
Speakers that I ended up getting, probably not the best choice for everybody.
John:
I don't even know if they're the right choice for me, but things are on my way.
John:
And so in a future episode of the show, once everything has arrived and I've set it up,
John:
I'll give the details and go through my whole process.
John:
But for now, I just wanted to chime in and say I'm COVID negative.
John:
Yay.
John:
And I spent all my time reading speaker reviews.
Casey:
That sounds fun.
John:
I mean, whatever makes you happy, man.
John:
But it did.
John:
It was it was surprisingly fun, although also incredibly frustrating.
John:
And again, half of that's on me.
John:
See the Mastodon thread to see what I'm dealing with here.
Marco:
I feel like reading about speaker reviews, I don't know.
Marco:
It's not easy.
John:
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
John:
And it's so much worse than TVs, let me tell you.
John:
Because TVs, it's like almost everybody agrees on what the objective measures are.
John:
There are international standards.
John:
There's equipment that will test compliance with the standards.
John:
Whereas speakers, boy, it's rough out there.
John:
On the one end, you have people who are writing poetry.
John:
It's like, okay, this does not help me.
John:
And the other end, you have people who are like...
John:
Taking objective measures, but there's no sort of standardization on what tools you're using and does the thing that you're measuring matter at all to the experience of having the speaker?
John:
It's rough.
John:
But more on that when I get this all set up.
John:
Because then I'll be able to tell you if all that BS that I read ended up being helpful or not helpful at all.
Yeah.
Casey:
I'm not trying to be funny.
Casey:
I'm genuinely asking, are you looking to stick with 5.1?
Casey:
Are you trying to go full Atmos?
Casey:
Is that really something?
John:
Did you see the thread on Mastodon?
Casey:
I saw that.
John:
Do you think I have room for more speakers?
John:
The challenge I put to people says, where do you think 5.1 speakers should go in this room?
John:
And nobody even ventured to guess like maybe one or two people because it's grim.
John:
No, I do not have room for more speakers.
John:
I have thought about where I could fit one or two more, whether those be quote unquote height speakers or whether I would do side channels.
John:
But for now, the problem was 5.1.
John:
Replace an existing 5.1 with a better sounding 5.1.
John:
So that's what I've gone with.
John:
I have the capacity for more at any time, but for now, that's what I'm sticking with.
John:
i don't think this is really on the table for reasons beyond your control but are you willing to rearrange the room and like the the furniture within the room no that's i mean i didn't want to go into that a mastodon but like room rearrangement we went through all the permutations room rearrangement like 20 years ago when we moved in this this is it this is the room and and honestly i don't think many rearrangements make things better except for the one where you block the fireplace with the couch that's not going to happen
John:
well alternatively you could put the tv over the fireplace yeah as you know that's not gonna happen as well do you use the fireplace no have you thought about removing it people said that like that's that's insane no i'm not gonna you know like i guess the anti-fireplace lobby is big so i guess the fireplace
John:
I'm like, the fireplace is like literally the best feature of my crappy house.
John:
I'm not getting, quote unquote, get rid of the fire.
John:
It's a nice looking thing.
John:
It's a centerpiece.
John:
If I would destroy the value of my home, if I get rid of it, then I like it.
John:
I like it being there.
John:
I like looking at it.
John:
Yeah, no, I don't really light a fire in it.
Marco:
First of all, you have an old home in a nice neighborhood in New England.
Marco:
Nothing will destroy the value of that home.
John:
It would reduce the value.
John:
And ours is a good fireplace.
John:
It's not like one of those ones where the people painted over the brick.
John:
Have you seen those?
John:
Like at some point someone got a hangover in the 60s and they painted over the brick.
John:
So bad.
John:
No, this is a good fireplace.
John:
I have...
John:
All of our family's pictures are over it, if you remember when you were here, right?
John:
There's the big mantle, which needs to be repainted like everything else in my house.
John:
But anyway, it's a very nice mantle.
John:
It's got all our family pictures on the wall above it, and it's a nice fireplace.
John:
And that's going to be a big house seller when it comes time to sell it.
John:
And in the meantime, I like it looking like that.
John:
So no, I'm not getting rid of the fireplace.
John:
No, I'm not putting my TV over the fireplace.
John:
No, I'm not putting one of those giant mechanical mounts where you put the TV over the fireplace and it lowers down.
Casey:
That was my next question.
John:
Right, yep.
John:
Because then that would be in the way of the pictures and there'd be this big ugly mount.
John:
All of those are out.
John:
Luckily, people, you know, didn't, mostly took me at my word and said, here's the room.
John:
No, this is what we've got to deal with.
John:
But none of those things are happening.
John:
So it's just a matter of working stuff.
John:
And honestly, I wouldn't want them to because it's not a home theater room.
John:
This is like the main living room of our house.
John:
It needs to function first and foremost as a room where people can exist and, you know,
John:
have nice places to sit and just you know hang out and either just looking at their phones or playing with the dog or reading or yes watching tv but it is not a home theater room so it's not like let's rearrange the entire room and brick over the fireplace and you know take all your family photos off the wall and put on a giant mechanical arm to put the tv no that's not happening that's not what this room is for uh and that's why it's a challenge to come up with something that is
Marco:
acceptable to everyone involved within the draconian constraints of a 1930s house you should just just move yeah just just remove the fireplace it's not hard to remove fireplaces right there you can just remove them i would say just in general it might be healthy to think about the house that you are spending the majority of your adult life in not as something you have to preserve for whoever's buying it next but instead something that you should optimize for the way you actually want to live in it
John:
Like I said, I like the fireplace too.
John:
I like looking at it.
John:
I like how decorative it is.
John:
It feels cozy, the whole room.
John:
I even like the cruddy wallpaper that everyone in my family hates in that room because I think it is cozy and comfy and it is a comfortable room to be in.
John:
I don't want it to, I don't want that part of the room to change.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
Hey, man, it's your house.
Casey:
It's your rules.
Casey:
I totally hear you.
Casey:
I'm going to give you a hard time about it forever because that's what we do here.
Casey:
But your house, your rules.
John:
And it presents an interesting challenge, whether it's to the fancy Sony HT9, which we're going to talk about in a second, or for a plain old 5.1 system with a fancy room correction on the receiver to come up with something that works OK in that environment.
John:
Not impossible.
John:
But tricky.
Casey:
Tricky indeed.
Casey:
But that HTA 9, baby, I'm sure that'll fix your problems.
John:
I just wanted one more bit of feedback from MCG, another owner of the system.
John:
They say, I have the HTA 9 with the big sub and can confirm this.
John:
Absolutely fantastic for movies.
John:
and no complaints won't use it for tv shows it is at its weakest for stereo music but tracks and apple music with atmos are great as far as the complaints around drop ads i had some initially but the firmware updates have improved things i don't remember the last time it happened and i have an era router right next to it highly recommend these so that's the magic of software powered hardware there's always the hope that a quote-unquote firmware update will fix your problems and apparently at least in the case of mcg uh this happened so that's kind of
John:
the three three stories and three individual people one saying you got to warn people off from this one saying i've got it and sometimes it drops out but mostly it's okay and one saying i got it and it was bad but now it's updated i don't know what the truth is but uh there you have it uh all of them the good thing is that all of them say for its intended purpose of movies and tv with uh you know fake surround sound with speakers all over your room it seems to work really well when it's working
Casey:
when it's working uh we have a very deep cut and i promise i'm going somewhere with this uh way in the beginning of the show if you remember i don't i don't recall which came first to be honest with you but we had the jonathan mann theme song that you still hear and we also had um the who the hell is casey song who the hell is casey who the hell
Casey:
which was written by an actual real-life friend of mine whose name is Larry King.
Casey:
Not the one you're thinking of, a different Larry King.
Casey:
Well, this is relevant to you because his band, he is in a blues band just for funsies.
Casey:
These people all have real jobs and so on and so forth.
Casey:
Not that being in a band isn't a real job.
Casey:
You know what I'm saying?
Casey:
Oh, my gosh.
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
We're podcasters for a living.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
Of anyone who should be throwing stones on not having a real job, I am the last one on that list.
Casey:
But anyway, he and his band did a parody of, I forget the name of the original song, but it's some kind of...
Casey:
almost honky-tonky kind of song, bluesy kind of song.
Casey:
It was funny.
Casey:
The original was fine.
Casey:
But they did it in the parodies Hot Rod Rivian.
Casey:
And so the entire band did their music video for this song playing in a field somewhere with all of the equipment
Casey:
being powered by an R1T.
Casey:
You know, just plugged into the back of the R1T into the AC outlets.
Casey:
So my buddy Larry King writes, our sax player has a Rivian.
Casey:
We recorded this all while plugged into the Rivian.
Casey:
About three hours of playing took about 3% of the battery.
Casey:
His tuba fits in the frunk.
Casey:
The video is cheesy.
Casey:
I had nothing to do with the editing, but I did engineer all the audio.
Casey:
This is worth, even if it's just a few seconds of your time, it is worth it because I thought it was very well done.
Casey:
And it gave me quite a good laugh.
Casey:
And my friend Larry King, who is the guitarist, is the one standing on the gear tunnel door, which I thought was also quite funny.
Casey:
So it is absolutely not required viewing, but it made me laugh.
Casey:
And like I said, this is a deep, deep cut back to who the hell is Casey from way back when.
Casey:
We'll link all of these things.
Casey:
in the show notes.
Marco:
I would also point out that if you're picturing a tuba, you are probably actually picturing a sousaphone.
Marco:
If you're picturing the giant thing with the giant bell that goes over the person's head as they stand and walk with it, that is a sousaphone, not a tuba.
Marco:
That would not fit in a Rivian Frunk.
Marco:
An actual tuba that was played in orchestras is a very differently shaped instrument.
Marco:
And it's good to hear that it fits in the trunk, but that is less surprising than you might be thinking if you don't know the difference between a tuba and a sousaphone.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
This has been Marching Band Trivia.
Casey:
You took my joke.
Casey:
I was just going to say, tell me you were in Marching Band without telling me you were in Marching Band.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I would like to briefly defend my honor, or at least attempt to.
Casey:
The whole of the internet has written to me to explain to me that because I don't want yellow, I am part of the problem, and that fun colors can be fun.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Fun colors can be fun, but there are fun colors and then there is yellow.
Casey:
There are other fun colors.
Casey:
Orange can work.
Casey:
Purple, when done properly, can work on a car.
Casey:
Yellow cannot.
Casey:
And that is the rules.
Casey:
I don't make the rules.
Casey:
It's just the way it is.
Casey:
But my point is just that just because I don't like yellow, well, first of all, doesn't mean that you can't as much as I joke.
Casey:
But secondly, there are plenty of other colorful things.
Casey:
My car is now blue.
Casey:
Let's not forget.
Casey:
It didn't happen to me this time.
Casey:
The white didn't happen to me this time.
John:
Your car is not a fun blue, though.
John:
Oh, pish posh.
John:
It's a fine blue.
John:
I don't dislike it, but no one would look at that color blue and say, boy, that's a fun blue.
John:
They would just say, oh, it's blue.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Fun blues have to be lighter.
John:
Yeah.
John:
All right.
John:
All right.
John:
I'll allow it.
John:
I'll allow it.
John:
Or like fun in some other way, like, you know, pearlescent sparkly or, you know, turn purple in different angles of light.
John:
There's lots of things you can do that are fun.
John:
All right.
John:
Your blue is just blue.
John:
It's a very nice blue.
John:
It's a handsome blue.
Casey:
Well, all right.
Casey:
I will allow it.
Casey:
But my point is just that, please, Internet, just because I don't like yellow doesn't mean I don't like fun colors.
John:
Yellow is one of the most fun colors, though.
John:
Yeah, objectively.
John:
There are other fun colors that you like, but it's almost like you dislike the funnest, to use Apple's parlance.
John:
You dislike the funnest of fun colors.
Marco:
what maybe purple what's more fun than yellow maybe purple i don't know uh you have mispronounced ugly many many times you're pronouncing it as fun but it's actually pronounced ugly american market cars i don't know the world i think it's probably the same but american market cars are all available in black white silver gray dark gray light gray metallic gray differently gray slightly bluish gray slightly greenish gray slightly reddish gray like
Marco:
There's a million different grays, whites, and blacks.
Marco:
So true.
Marco:
And then you're lucky if maybe there's, like, a red or a blue.
Marco:
And then that's it.
Marco:
Almost every car is available in that selection.
Marco:
A whole bunch of grays, whites, and blacks, and maybe red and or blue.
Marco:
And that's it.
John:
If you're willing to pay $200,000 or more for a car, you can get really cool colors.
Marco:
Each of which is a $10,000 extra.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
But the point is, like...
Marco:
i i have the opportunity here to get a fun color and most cars don't offer that opportunity even even my land rover is i have the the um tasman blue color which is i think the only remotely fun color land rover offers it's really conservative though it's a very it's it's very close to like a a gray blue if there was such a thing it's like
Marco:
it's a very restrained blue and it's a very nice color i think it's by far the nicest color that the defender is available in but it is very restrained rivian yellow by all accounts and by all the videos i'm trying to watch about how it looks in real life actually looks fun and the rivian blue is pretty fun too i think the yellow is more fun um and then rivian is also available in all those boring colors and
Marco:
I don't want to be boring.
Marco:
How often in life do you buy cars?
Marco:
It's not that often.
John:
Well, I mean, if you're you, it seems like pretty often.
Marco:
Well, yeah.
Marco:
But for the most part, this is a relatively infrequent big purchase.
Marco:
I like to mix it up sometimes.
Marco:
I like to have more color in my life recently, and this is a way to do it.
Casey:
And as I said to you in the post-show, and I think the bootleg might have still been running, I don't recall, but it was certainly not in the release show.
Casey:
I did feel a little guilty for pooping all over your yellow idea.
Casey:
Just because it doesn't work for me doesn't mean it doesn't work for others.
Casey:
It is very much not my thing.
Casey:
But you know what?
Casey:
If it's your thing, that's okay.
Casey:
So you do you.
John:
I still feel like Rivian should be sued for their picture on their website, which looks nothing like any of the photos of this thing in real life.
John:
Almost still to the point that I have trouble believing they're trying to say it's the same color that all those owners' pictures are.
John:
But boy, those pictures on the website are worse than Apple because sometimes Apple's photos of their subtly brown or subtly rose-colored things are different than in real life.
John:
Yeah.
John:
That car picture is nothing like the car in the photos that people take.
John:
So I feel like if anyone buys based on the website picture and then their car shows up and it's like big bird yellow and they thought it was going to look like the website, I feel bad for them.
John:
They can sell their car to Marco.
Marco:
It's also worth pointing out that yellow is Rivian's accent color.
Marco:
So no matter what color you get a Rivian in, there's little yellow bits all over the place.
Marco:
And so it makes sense to go with a color that works really well with that.
Marco:
Ugh.
Casey:
That is an annoyingly good argument.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And I think the second best color they have overall is the blue.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
But I don't think the blue works as well with the yellow as I would like.
Marco:
It works okay.
Marco:
I think the green looks better than the blue because it's very foresty.
Marco:
Honestly, I think the one that looks the nicest second to the yellow is one of the grays.
Marco:
They have one of the grays that I saw in a review video that actually looked very nice with the yellow accents, but it was too boring for me.
Marco:
So I'm going yellow.
Right.
Casey:
Adam One has some feedback and clarifications on iMazing, which I believe we were talking about with regard to backing up iMessage stuff.
Casey:
Adam writes, iMazing doesn't jailbreak the phone.
Casey:
It uses a backup file made saved to the local file system of a Mac to extract the data to export.
Casey:
The software lives entirely on a Mac.
Casey:
There are no hooks into the iPhone itself.
Casey:
Amazing is super handy for local backups, too, if you don't want to use iCloud.
Casey:
It works over Wi-Fi and USB.
Casey:
You can also customer store phones to only have some of the data from a backup file.
Casey:
It was handy when I wanted to customer store to my new iPhone and pull over all my iMessage history, which is not synced via iCloud, to my, you know, Adams isn't, to my new phone while leaving all the cruft from my old phone.
Casey:
That allowed me to have the best of both worlds, a fresh install, and the benefit of specific long-term data that I cared about.
Casey:
I think that's actually a really clever idea, to be honest with you, because I'm still carrying my original 3GS build, if memory serves, from way back when.
Casey:
And most of the reason I haven't started afresh is because I didn't want to lose all that iMessage history, because I also have not turned on iMessage in the cloud or whatever they're calling it.
Casey:
So that's a very clever idea.
Casey:
Anyway, Adam continues, when extracting messages from the backup, you can export them out as text files or PDFs.
Casey:
That can be super handy for legal cases and business needs.
Casey:
That said, it's pretty buggy and sometimes doesn't work, so you have to restart the Mac and phone periodically to get things working again.
Casey:
Overall, it has been worth having the tool to help me manage my data without using iCloud.
Casey:
So there you go.
Casey:
John, tell me about your Apple TV remote with touch enabled.
Casey:
We're disabled, enabled.
Casey:
Tell me about it one way or the other.
John:
Yeah, so I had disabled it because I was sick of thinking that I was accidentally moving my thumb a millimeter and causing the Apple TV to freak out and it really just wanted to eliminate it as a factor.
John:
So now when I hit the center button on the Apple TV remote and it does something ridiculous, I can say, well, it's not because of the touchpad because I turned that off.
John:
It's a setting and, you know, Apple TV setting things where you can make it so it just does clicks.
John:
Uh, and I had it that way for a little bit and I was using it and I was, you know, of course swiping on the pad and realizing it doesn't work and then going to use the little D pad thing.
John:
Uh, but there is a fatal flaw with this arrange, at least a fatal flaw when I was trapped in my room with COVID.
John:
Uh, you know, when I'm trapped in my room, you learned, uh, how much my family needs my help to use the equipment in the house because they just rely on me to do everything.
John:
So they're FaceTiming me and texting me and yelling up at me, Oh, I can't do this thing on TV.
John:
How do you do that?
John:
Or whatever.
Uh,
John:
Uh, and here's a place where I tried to help them remotely and I couldn't.
John:
And so I had to have them re-enabled touch.
John:
Uh, what do you think it was?
Casey:
Oh, I have no idea.
Casey:
Do they do the scrubbing thing?
John:
No, that uses the... So much more fundamental than that.
John:
Think, think really, think about how bad Apple TV is.
John:
Scrolling?
John:
No.
John:
Okay, here we go.
John:
So they, they were trying to use an app on the Apple TV and of course it doesn't work.
John:
Uh, and what happened was the app was so hosed that it was just plain frozen.
John:
And you could go back to the home screen and then you could go back to the app.
John:
And I think they know how to do that.
John:
But it didn't matter because when you come back to the app, it just wouldn't do anything.
John:
It was just absolutely 100 percent locked up frozen.
John:
No button did anything right.
John:
You could not play.
John:
You couldn't go back.
John:
You couldn't go forward.
John:
You couldn't do anything.
John:
They needed to force quit that app.
John:
And they said, how do we force quit?
John:
Force quitting isn't working, and I realized I had a disabled touch.
John:
Normally, you go to the multitasking switcher by hitting the little TV-looking button twice, and then you pick the app you want, and you swipe up.
John:
Did they know that?
John:
Because no one knows that.
John:
Oh, they know that because we have Apple TV and they see me do it all the time because it's not the first time an app is locked up on the Apple TV, let me tell you.
John:
Or sometimes it just gets into a wonky mode and you need to force quit it.
John:
This is force quitting the correct way, which is when the app you're trying to use no longer works, force quit that sucker and try to get it to work.
John:
And there may be a way to force quit without using the touchpad.
John:
In fact, there has to be.
John:
There has to be a way.
John:
But when I'm trapped up in my room with COVID and my family's yelling at me, I just said, just re-enable touch.
Marco:
I'm going to guess, by the way, it's probably I bet when you're in the multitasking switcher and you're over the app instead of swiping up, I bet if you like press or hold one of the buttons, maybe like the play pause button.
Marco:
I have them do that.
John:
I mean, I made I made a couple of good guesses.
John:
Yeah, I mean, I tried holding up.
John:
I tried having them hold the main button down.
John:
I had them try to do a whole bunch of stuff.
John:
That's what I would have done if I was there.
John:
Whatever it is, after one or two guesses of me trying to say, let's try this, like the thing you just suggested and a few others, those didn't work.
John:
And so I had to just give up and say, just re-enable the touch.
John:
I didn't bother Googling to find out the answer.
John:
I'm sure if there's a way to force quit without touch enabled, someone will tell us and we'll put it in a follow-up next week.
John:
But there you go.
John:
An essential feature of the Apple TV remote that you need touch to be able to do unless you know how to do it without touch, which I don't.
John:
Fun.
John:
Force quit.
John:
The most important feature on the Apple TV.
John:
Oh, I'm an Apple TV apologist.
John:
I feel bad.
John:
How many times have you had your family trying to watch TV and the app freezes solid?
Casey:
Well, all right.
Casey:
I'm going to answer your question by saying I know for a fact that Declan knows how to do this very dance.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
I mean, he is eight now.
John:
He needs to force quit everything because he's a youngster.
John:
they just need to go through and just by matter of course it's like their idle animation you put a new device in their hand and then they're bored they just go quote unquote force quitting those photos of applications last launched a year ago but it's really important to swipe those upwards
John:
my my parents do it and they and they'd say i know these aren't running apps i know they're just pictures i just like to not have the pictures there which as i said in the past not having the pictures there is a legit user need that is not being met by apple but uh that is combined not having the pictures there and forced quitting applications are both the same thing as far as the ui is concerned some of them you're forced quitting but most of them you're removing pictures
Marco:
Do people know, by the way, the Apple Watch version of force quitting?
Marco:
Do people know that?
Casey:
I bet you do.
Casey:
It's funny you bring that up because I just tried to do this the other day.
Casey:
What was it?
Casey:
I don't remember.
Casey:
But I thought, and you're going to correct me, I thought it was hold down on the bigger of the two buttons.
Casey:
I forget what that's called.
Marco:
Hold down the big button until you get the lock screen.
Marco:
Then I'll hold in the crown for a couple seconds and it kills the app.
Casey:
That's what I thought.
Casey:
Maybe I was doing something wrong.
Casey:
Maybe I was holding it wrong.
Casey:
Who knows?
Casey:
But at the time, it was not working.
Marco:
You can go into the app switcher by hitting the side button and then just swipe to the left so it gets a little card out of the way.
Casey:
That's a faster way to do it.
Casey:
I don't think I knew that one, actually.
Casey:
That's interesting.
Casey:
Huh.
Casey:
Well, now I've learned something.
John:
Real-time follow-up from the chat room.
John:
Apparently, force quit without touch enabled is double tap up.
John:
Like on the D-pad.
John:
Tap, tap.
John:
Instead of swiping upwards, instead of holding upwards, double tap up quickly.
John:
Haven't tried this, haven't confirmed, but that is what the chat room says.
Casey:
I mean, I would believe it, but yeah, that's still crummy.
Casey:
By the way, did anyone else in the house come down with COVID?
John:
Nope.
John:
So far, no.
John:
And since I'm negative, I think we're probably in the clear.
John:
So my isolation and constant reading of speaker reviews seems to have worked.
Casey:
You have done the family a service.
Casey:
I see how it is.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Some more information about the Apple TV.
Casey:
I don't want to read this because I like the Apple TV.
Casey:
Darn it.
Casey:
David Bokey writes,
John:
This is another fun thing of like, you know, should an application be able to play when it's not showing anything on the screen?
John:
Seems like something that shouldn't happen.
John:
Seems like a pretty baseline level of competence.
John:
Like the app that is not filling the screen with image should not be playing.
John:
But apparently it was.
Marco:
We are brought to you this episode by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online.
Marco:
Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything.
Marco:
Your products, your content, even your time.
Marco:
Whatever you want to do with your business site, Squarespace supports it.
Marco:
So of course, they have great support for online stores.
Marco:
First and foremost, whether you sell physical or digital products, Squarespace has all the tools you need to sell your products online.
Marco:
And of course, now they go beyond that, too, because there's all kinds of businesses that you might have.
Marco:
So, for instance, maybe you have member areas.
Marco:
You can monetize your content and expertise in whatever way fits your brand.
Marco:
You can unlock new revenue streams for your business and free uptime on your schedule by selling member access to content like videos, online courses, or newsletters.
Marco:
And whether you're sending those kind of newsletters or other emails, they have amazing Squarespace email campaign features.
Marco:
You can collect email subscribers, convert them into loyal customers, starting with the email template and customizing it by your brand ingredients, things like your site colors, your logo, all that's backed by powerful analytics to measure the impact of every email sent.
Marco:
And of course, other analytics are available too for your business.
Marco:
You can learn where your site visits are coming from, where sales come from, what are the most effective channels, and you can improve your website and build a marketing strategy based on whatever channels are working best.
Marco:
And all this is backed by amazing support, and it's just super easy to use Squarespace.
Marco:
Whatever kind of site you're making, business or otherwise, it's a great platform to use and to build a site on.
Marco:
And there's so much that you don't have to handle.
Marco:
No coding, no server maintenance, no patches, nothing like that.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
Go to squarespace.com slash ATP to start a free trial.
Marco:
No credit card required.
Marco:
Build it.
Marco:
See how you like it.
Marco:
When you're ready to launch, use offer code ATP to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.
Marco:
Once again, squarespace.com slash ATP to start that free trial.
Marco:
Code ATP at purchase to save 10%.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
So we have a little bit more about the diabetes and blood glucose monitoring.
Casey:
Jenga writes, because I work in tech, I was able to pay out of my own pocket for a continuous glucose monitor, in my case, the Dexcom G6, which cost me about £170 per month, or about $205, or approximately £2,000, or roughly $2,400 a year, every year, forever.
Casey:
Yikes.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So the cost of an Apple Watch that could theoretically do this would be peanuts compared to the existing ones on the market.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, definitely.
Casey:
Scott Jen writes, the Freestyle Libre continuous glucose monitor costs on the order of $300 and lasts for two weeks and needs to be completely replaced.
Casey:
And it gives you a glucose reading every 15 minutes and has a buffer of something like six hours.
Casey:
So as long as you copy the data to your phone every few hours, you don't miss anything.
Casey:
And it uses NFC.
Casey:
You just tap your phone on it and it copies the data.
Casey:
They're also prescription only in the U.S., so you may have to pay for a doctor visit as well.
Casey:
The priceable watch is absolutely worth it to save pricking your finger, get continuous data, or not needing to bother a doctor every two weeks.
Casey:
For all three, if Apple can pull it off, it's a no-brainer.
John:
Yeah, the price of a lot of these continuous glucose monitors are really expensive for multiple reasons.
John:
One, they're a quote-unquote prescription product that has a market that has tons of regulation in it, so there's not a lot of competitors.
John:
And two, all those regulations that they have to comply with do end up making the product cost more money because it's very difficult.
John:
It's become slightly less difficult, I think, over time, but very difficult to actually comply to be a certified medical device that could kill people if it malfunctions.
John:
And so you pay for that privilege.
John:
And then also a bunch of the other ones, they have consumables, like the little patch you put on those patches don't last forever.
John:
They last like 10 days or whatever.
John:
And if you're lucky, they last 10 days.
John:
And then you got to peel them off and you got to put a new one in because they just wear out like the sticky stuff wears out and the thing they're not supposed to be in that long.
John:
Right.
John:
So there's consumables with things that are invasive as in they shove something under your skin.
John:
And then they're just expensive.
John:
All that stuff is expensive because it's not like a competitive consumer electronics market type thing.
John:
It's more of a medical device.
John:
It's like if you ever tried to buy good quality crutches or good quality walker or a good quality wheelchair, that stuff's really expensive too.
John:
And that is much lower bar in terms of compliance and regulation than one of these devices.
John:
The other thing is that we didn't really mention last time is the thing that Apple is trying to come up with is a thing that would monitor your glucose levels.
John:
But they're not coming up with a way to put insulin into your body without a non-invasive insulin injection system would be even more fantastical.
John:
So, you know.
John:
based on that information you will need to get insulin into yourself somehow uh and whether that's the old-fashioned shots or the fancy uh insulin pumps that go into your you know under your skin or into your body whatever and then dispense the correct amount of insulin um that's still going to be there and that's why i still say like the you know if you had a fantasy scenario uh curing diabetes would be ideal so you don't need anything shoved into your body uh but uh eliminating one half of that which is
John:
To not have to shove things into yourself somewhere to get blood glucose readings would be fantastic for a lot of people.
John:
And then the cost of these are expensive things means that even though a watch would be expensive, it would still be cheaper.
John:
My point last time about the cost of the watch is that this is a non-invasive thing in theory that Apple comes up with.
John:
And unlike the invasive ones where I feel like, not that people are happy to pay them, but I think people kind of understand that, hey, if you're getting something that shoves itself under your skin and that there's a bunch of regulations around that because it's a more invasive device than a watch versus a thing you just put on that has some sensors in it, right?
John:
That's why I feel like Apple would be experiencing price pressure because they did come up with this miraculous thing.
John:
People would expect it to be less expensive because it is less invasive, right?
John:
In the same way that the blood oxygen monitor you can buy from CVS is inexpensive because the tech in it's not complicated and it's quote unquote non-invasive.
John:
It clamps on your finger, but it's literally just a little light, right?
John:
And people are going to see the Apple Watch and say, I don't care about titanium.
John:
I don't care about the quartz crystal glass.
John:
I don't care about the fancy processor that can, you know, do all these amazing things.
John:
I just want the tiny sensor and the algorithm that you came up with.
John:
And I don't want to pay $500 for it.
John:
So that's why I feel like there would be price pressure on Apple to make that innovation available more widely, even though all those same people are still paying $500.
John:
either out of pocket or with a little bit help from insurance, way more money for the invasive system, simply because I think it is more reasonable for an invasive system to cost more because it is more fraught, let's say, more complicated.
John:
Whereas if you come up with a non-invasive solution, it seems like it should be less expensive, unless it uses like, you know, whatever, crystals from Star Trek to get the measurements.
John:
Dilithium, is that what you're saying?
John:
There you go, thank you.
Marco:
A few other things in the diabetes and glucose monitoring that we heard.
Marco:
We had a lot of feedback from a lot of people who know way more than we do about this, including many people with diabetes, people who have worked on equipment for diabetes and things like that.
Marco:
Obviously, again, our audience comes through really nicely with a lot of very deep, specialized knowledge.
Marco:
Thanks for all that.
Marco:
A few of the highlights that we didn't cover yet.
Marco:
Basically,
Marco:
There's many different ways to measure blood glucose, even with the existing sensors.
Marco:
I was wrong about something.
Marco:
I want to follow up that the continuous glucose monitors, I said they have a half inch needle sticking out that has to stay in your skin the whole time.
Marco:
Turns out it doesn't stay in your skin the whole time, that it basically inserts like a little wire into your skin and a little wire stays in your skin the whole time, but the needle just pops right out.
John:
Lots of people will send that information.
John:
It's like, I understand that that is technically correct, but it's not like people's objection is to, oh, I don't want a needle in my skin.
John:
I want a little tube.
Marco:
Well, I was happy because when my dog had to wear one of those, it was the Freestyle Libra or whatever.
Marco:
When he had to wear one of those, I felt so bad for him that he had this thing in him the whole week that it was in there.
Marco:
But he does.
Marco:
It's just not a needle.
Marco:
It's just a different thing.
John:
Right, but it's at least not as bad.
John:
I know.
John:
But the point is, all these things, the reason they're called invasive is because they shove something into your skin.
John:
And yes, a needle helps it get there and then the needle goes away maybe, right?
John:
But
John:
the thing is still in your skin.
John:
That's why it's invasive.
John:
So it's not like when you prick your finger, which is horrible for its own reason, you prick it with a needle, but then the needle goes away and then you just squeeze blood out of your finger, which sucks, right?
John:
But the things that go under your skin, whether there's a needle involved or not, something is under your skin the whole time that's there.
John:
And the whole point is that thing that's under your skin is very small, very light, not pointy, very slippery.
John:
Like it's made to be as comfortable as possible, but there's still something under your skin.
John:
So everyone was very quick to say, there's not a needle under your skin.
John:
There's something else under your skin, but forget about that.
John:
It's not a needle.
Marco:
i agree it's better than a needle but it's still quote-unquote invasive because there's something sticking into you yeah but i think one of one so there were two big themes of feedback that i found unexpected um that just i didn't know so one of them is that those continuous monitors are not measuring in the bloodstream directly they're measuring in like subcutaneous like you know skin and tissue layers and so it actually is kind of a delayed or like less precise measurement and
Marco:
And secondly, I assume once I heard that insulin pumps existed and that continuous monitors existed, I assume that what most, at least type one people with diabetes were doing was having the monitor automatically dose the insulin pump, creating what is called an artificial pancreas effectively.
Marco:
And it turns out, based on the feedback, it sounds like that's not actually that common.
Marco:
And there's actually this whole world of hacking where people are, like, hacking the monitor's radio protocols to intercept the data and, like, you know, run the pump possibly manually or at least get the data out so it's less proprietary or whatever else.
Marco:
That's a whole world that I didn't know about.
Marco:
But basically, if you think about the risk factors here, if somebody with diabetes gives themselves too much insulin, they die.
Marco:
And too little insulin, I don't know if you can die from too much blood sugar.
Marco:
You probably can at some point, but at least it has other problems.
John:
It has very terrible health effects and it will eventually kill you.
John:
I'm not sure if it kills you as fast as overdosing on insulin.
Marco:
Yeah, it has other problems at least.
Marco:
But yeah, have too much insulin and you're dead.
Marco:
And so this is something that you don't want to be left to a system that is potentially flaky or imprecise.
Marco:
And there's obviously huge high bars to clear for anything that that is approved for medical use to do automatic dosing.
Marco:
And so there's the separation of like, are you going to have monitoring?
Marco:
And if you don't want to go full artificial pancreas mode, which has those those big risks, you can have monitoring.
Marco:
But you just use that as like information to decide for yourself how much insulin to dose.
John:
This kind of reminds me of the AI copyright thing.
John:
Like I really do wonder if that really absolves anyone from any kind of responsibility.
John:
It's like, well, our insulin pump didn't kill you.
John:
You're a faulty measurement with some other device from another manufacturer.
John:
You're a lousy pinprick with your little test strips or whatever.
John:
It was your choice person to decide to dose yourself with this much insulin.
John:
So technically you made the mistake, not us.
John:
And our insulin pump isn't at fault.
John:
But then they would say, OK, but then what about whatever system I use to measure my blood glucose level?
John:
The point of that system is it's supposed to give me an accurate measure that I can take action based on and it gave me a wrong measure or a bad measure.
John:
So somebody is responsible somewhere because it's not as if the person magically knows their own blood glucose level.
John:
They're using some kind of tool or product they bought from somebody that is supposed to be for that purpose.
John:
And I kind of understand the pump people not getting went into it because they're like, hey, we're just a pump.
John:
We just do whatever you tell us.
John:
Like, if you typed in these numbers, we're going to do that.
John:
And as long as we did what you told us, we're not liable.
John:
But somebody's liable.
John:
And so whether that's the resistance to the closed loop thing or it's, you know, like, I feel like just because the person made the choice to enter that into the pump, if the company that makes the pump also makes the thing that gave them the measurement that made them type that in, putting a person in the middle doesn't like absolve anybody from responsibility.
John:
I feel like it's still just a question of
John:
who was negligent here or whose product malfunctioned.
Marco:
Well, and so that's why I think what Apple is most likely to do, if they can get this to work and therefore be able to be made into a product feature, I think that what they will probably do, at least first and possibly forever, is similar to what they've done.
Marco:
If you look at the heart monitoring features and things like that, they're not really meant for people who have chronic heart problems for the most part.
Marco:
It's not giving you high-end diagnoses.
Marco:
It isn't giving you a lot of real-time, actionable information that you need if you have special heart needs.
Marco:
It is giving you kind of an overview and warning of extreme conditions.
Marco:
And so I think what they're going to do here is actually – again, assuming this feature even ships eventually –
Marco:
Actually design it so that it is not very useful to a person with diabetes.
Marco:
Because of the inherent imprecision in what they're probably going to do compared to anything that's actually measuring your blood, and combined with the delay that it would probably have based on being probably based more like the continuous ones where you're not seeing everything exactly as it happens, I bet what they're going to do is delay the stats from it.
Marco:
The same way right now with the ovulation detection, they give you ovulation detection after the fact.
Marco:
They look at your temperature pattern over the last whatever, and they tell you after the fact, oh, by the way, it looks like you ovulated or whatever.
Marco:
Remember when they launched a feature last fall with the Watch Series 8?
Marco:
They called it something like retrospective something something.
Marco:
I bet they're going to start with that, with this feature, where they might not tell you right now your blood glucose is this, but
Marco:
But they might tell you, here's what your blood glucose was 12 hours ago or six hours ago, and then let you build data from that.
Marco:
Like, oh, OK, whatever I had for lunch, that probably was a bad idea or whatever.
Marco:
And then secondly, from that, maybe they will also warn you of extreme conditions.
Marco:
So if it's way too high or way too low, maybe they'll tap you and alert you of that.
Marco:
But I don't see them getting into the real-time glucose monitoring business in version one, if ever, just because once you realize what that involves with FDA clearance and legal liability and the risk of people's lives if it goes wrong –
Marco:
I don't think Apple's going to want to get into that that far.
Marco:
I think they're going to want to hit the more broad health benefits of extreme condition monitoring and kind of delayed glucose monitoring so that you can make different decisions about maybe your diet or your habits or whatever, but you're not using this thing to replace a medical device that you actually need if you actually have diabetes.
Casey:
Finally, I made a kind of offhanded comment, I almost said yesterday, last week with regard to Sonos stuff.
Casey:
And my impression at the time was that unless you like add the Amazon lady in the tube to your Sonos setup, then that you couldn't call out like, you know, hey, dingus, play mute math or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
and I have been corrected a couple of times.
Casey:
I think Dan Provost was actually the first person to say something.
Casey:
It turns out this is possible, and I will link to the Sonos voice control information page, like marketing page, on their website.
Casey:
I only had the chance to try this very briefly, and honestly, it was a little bit hit or miss, but...
Casey:
I had thought incorrectly that all you could do was move music or audio between rooms, say join audio here and there, or stop, volume up, volume down, etc.
Casey:
But it turns out you can actually call out a request, and it will do its best to play that request from Spotify, Apple Music, whatever the case may be.
Casey:
So that is my mistake, and you should look into this a little more if you're at all interested.
John:
My poor Google Home had a rare instance of Siri brain the other day.
John:
I said, you know, okay, Dingus lights out.
John:
And it waited a little while and it said something very Siri-like was like, lights out is not available for playing right now or something.
John:
Something as if it was looking for a song called...
John:
And there's got to be a thousand songs called lights out.
John:
So maybe it just couldn't connect to the internet or whatever, but it was like, oh man, what's going on?
John:
It's just hanging out with Siri too much.
John:
Normally it's just does what I ask immediately.
John:
And it gave me a, and so I asked Siri to do it.
John:
That's why you gotta have multiple cylinders because you never know when, when some cylinder is going to betray you.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by ourselves and in particular our ATP membership program.
Marco:
Consider becoming an ATP member.
Marco:
Here's what you get.
Marco:
First of all, an ad-free version of the show.
Marco:
I love when podcasts I listen to all the time offer ad-free versions.
Marco:
I always buy them.
Marco:
I love that as an option.
Marco:
Ours is exactly what you expect.
Marco:
It's the same great show without the ads.
Marco:
You also get access, if you want, to a bootleg feed.
Marco:
And this is after every time we record the show, like immediately after we start recording, we publish the bootleg.
Marco:
It's the unedited live recording.
Marco:
It's, you know, more rough audio quality wise, but it's totally raw.
Marco:
So there's no editing for, you know, swear word removal.
Marco:
There's no ads in that either.
Marco:
And there's, you know, little extra bits of content used with the beginning and end that didn't fit in the edited show, but they're in the bootleg.
Marco:
So you can hear everything that went on during our during our call.
Marco:
right after it's posted you get it you get the show earlier and faster or you can wait for that membership version that is fully edited and has no ads and it is just a wonderful experience for fans of the show you also get discounts on merch when that happens we also occasionally do member exclusive episodes we've done movie club where we've kind of reviewed some movies together and made fun of each other during that and that was fun we just did the the frozen dinner challenge which was a lot of fun so
Marco:
Check it out.
Marco:
It's just eight bucks a month.
Marco:
We also have annual plans and we have different currencies.
Marco:
If you are not in the US, it might be easier for you.
Marco:
ATP.fm slash join.
Marco:
Become an ATP member today.
Marco:
You not only will get those benefits, but it really helps us out too.
Marco:
You know, the membership support direct from your customers is always, it's so satisfying.
Marco:
We're very thankful to our members out there and we'd love if you joined us.
Marco:
Thank you so much.
Oh,
Casey:
So let's see here.
Casey:
There has been, speaking of betraying, there has been a big brouhaha over the last couple of days after Joanna Stern and Nicole Nguyen, I hope I pronounced that somewhat closer correctly, they wrote a bit of a bombshell article and, as always with Joanna Stern, had a genuinely stellar video associated with it.
Casey:
She is so good on video.
Casey:
It kind of makes me mad that she can be so good in print and also so good in video.
Casey:
It's not fair.
Casey:
But anyway, there's been a lot of reporting done around this, mostly by Joanna and Nicole.
Casey:
And the problem is a lot of people, particularly in bigger cities, particularly outside bars, particularly in the evening, particularly presumably after having a couple of alcoholic beverages, they're finding that their iPhones are getting stolen, which in and of itself stinks.
Casey:
But it's happening subsequent to the thief or part of the thief's crew shoulder surfing their passcode.
Casey:
So said differently, you know, I'm out at the bar.
Casey:
I type in my 12345 passcode.
Casey:
Somebody sees me do that and then later on in the evening grabs my phone knowing full well that my passcode is 12345.
Casey:
This is a big freaking problem because that means that the second they get the phone, they can change your iCloud password.
Casey:
They can turn off Find My Phone and many, many other things.
Casey:
They can send themselves money with Venmo, PayPal, or Cash App.
Casey:
They can go into your banking app, and oftentimes they can...
Casey:
Go ahead and send themselves money from there.
Casey:
You know, once you have your passcode, they have control over biometrics.
Casey:
They can change the biometrics and remove the biometrics, et cetera.
Casey:
It's really, really bad.
Casey:
So reading from the article, with only the iPhone and its passcode, an interloper can within seconds change the password associated with the iPhone owner's Apple ID.
Casey:
This would lock the victim out of their account, which includes anything stored in iCloud.
Casey:
The thief can also often loot the phone's financial app, since the passcode can unlock access to all the device's stored passwords.
Casey:
This is, as a side, this is particularly bad when you're using iCloud Keychain, which I'm not trying to say that iCloud Keychain is bad, but if you've already got the key to your iOS kingdom, then you've gotten, you know, you have access, this interloper, as I said, has access to your iCloud Keychain, and then, you know, you're off to the races.
Casey:
Continuing from the article, a similar vulnerability exists in Google's Android mobile operating system.
Casey:
However, the higher resale value of iPhones makes them a far more common target, according to law enforcement officials.
Casey:
And a lot of times there'll be a story like this, and everyone get up in arms, oh, look at this, Apple's just not even caring, not even trying.
Casey:
I don't think that's what this is at all.
Casey:
I think this is just a crummy set of circumstances.
Casey:
Like, I'm all for slagging on Apple if they are being negligent, but
Casey:
I don't personally think that's the case here at all.
Casey:
I mean, there's only but so much they can do if somebody has grabbed your passcode and your phone.
Casey:
And we'll talk about some mitigation strategies here in a second.
Casey:
But I don't think this is negligence on Apple's part.
Casey:
The problem is, as with all things, the more secure you make things, the less convenient they tend to be.
Casey:
And some of these fixes that we'll talk about here in a minute make some stuff less convenient.
Casey:
And Apple has to ride the fine line between making it easy enough for a power user like me, who is maybe willing to have a much harder time doing things or willing to jump through more hoops,
Casey:
versus my parents, who are not dumb by any means and are pretty tech-savvy for being nearly 70 years old.
Casey:
But nevertheless, they don't want to have to jump through 3,000 hoops in order to do a lot of the stuff that a passcode requires.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
This does not strike me as one of those things where...
Casey:
It's a brouhaha made out of nothing, but it also doesn't strike me as Apple being negligent either.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
How should we think about this?
John:
I think it's kind of like a historical hangover, don't you feel like?
John:
Because, I mean, remember when the iPhone first came out, there wasn't even a passcode.
John:
You just slide the little thing on the bottom and it unlocks.
John:
Different age, obviously, right?
John:
And then for a long time when they had the passcode feature, it was, you know, short and most people didn't use it.
John:
And we've kind of worked our way up from there.
John:
And I feel like, well, first of all, this vulnerability has existed for ages.
John:
This is not a new thing or whatever.
John:
And I think the reason it's existed is because they ended up in a situation where the passcode, this thing, you know, first there was nothing.
John:
Then there was passcode.
John:
And then passcode got bigger.
John:
And then, you know, we just built up this whole big security infrastructure.
John:
But the passcode was always there.
John:
And I think just...
John:
they just let it go you know things that were okay years and years ago like having no passcode were allowed to live too long and i think the thing that was allowed to live too long here is that the the unlock code from your phone can do just one or two too many things uh because yes it unlocks your phone or whatever but the fact that you can do stuff like change your apple id password from your phone without knowing the old apple id password as long as you know the passcode
John:
seems like a bit much and you could say oh that's actually good because people forget their apple id password and they can change it from the phone like i understand the utility of that feature but it seems like something that sort of accidentally happened because you know the keys to your icloud kingdom were your passcode was when they added icloud to phones and then you had your passcode to unlock it uh and it just seemed like why would we make them enter the password they're already on their quote-unquote trusted device and they know their passcode so we shouldn't ask them for any more right
John:
But certain things are irreplaceable.
John:
And the thing that really gets me about this is not even so much people stealing money or sending stuff.
John:
Because a lot of the times, you know, you can go through fraud.
John:
You can have a file fraud request with the bank.
John:
And, you know, if it's a credit card or whatever, you might lose some money.
John:
But in general, it's actually more difficult than you think to, like, take huge amounts of money from someone without giving them any recourse, especially in the age of credit cards and all that other stuff.
John:
Right.
John:
And even with debit cards, it's hard to transfer large amounts without firing up a flag or having your bank stop it or whatever.
John:
The thing that really kills me about these thefts is if someone gets your phone and can use your little passcode to change your Apple ID and to lock you out of your Apple ID, and often...
John:
If they lock you out and even if the thief gets caught and arrested and goes to jail, you may still never get your Apple ID back because the whole point of the security is that Apple doesn't have a magic internal key to unlock all your stuff.
John:
If they change your password or they deleted everything from your thing or whatever, you may never get that Apple ID back.
John:
And what's associated with Apple ID?
John:
Photos, your family photos.
John:
I think the person in the video was like lost their phone and they lost like 15 years worth of photos.
John:
Right.
John:
And for most people, that's the only place they have them.
John:
I know if you're listening to this show, of course, you have 17 copies of your iCloud photo library and it's on backups and it's on a time machine.
John:
It's on your Synology.
John:
It's on an external disk.
John:
You backed up the back place.
John:
But you're not like most people.
John:
Most people like it's literally just quote unquote on their phone.
John:
They think it's safe because it's like, oh, I dropped my phone in a lake a year ago and I got a new phone and all my pictures are still there.
John:
And it just gives them this amazing confidence that their pictures are safe.
John:
Well, if a thief gets your phone and they change your Apple ID password, you may never see those photos again.
John:
If you don't have those photos anywhere else,
John:
That's it.
John:
They're gone.
John:
They're still there in some, you know, S3 server somewhere, but they're protected by a password on iCloud account that you're never going to get back.
John:
And that is terrible.
John:
That is not replaceable.
John:
You can't file a fraud, you know, request or whatever with your bank to say, hey, someone stole my thing.
John:
No one can give you those pictures back.
John:
So yes, that's why you should have backups, but also that's why the sort of iCloud Apple ID takeover is something that should not be possible by shoulder surfing somebody's 1234 unlock code.
John:
Because that's a bridge too far.
John:
Yes, they can take over your phone.
John:
Yes, maybe they can get into your apps, although the good banking apps will require Face ID and won't let you use a passcode.
John:
Yes, maybe they'll get into your passwords or whatever, but they're in this type of situation where it's a race then for you to quickly change all your passwords or log everybody out of all your things or whatever.
John:
But none of those things are as they're all annoying and terrible and can really screw with your life.
John:
But none of those things are as valuable as your whole lives with the photos of all your kids.
John:
Like people who are, you know, much younger than I am.
John:
The only photos they have are digital photos.
John:
And all those photos are on their phone.
John:
And they're not making backups because who the heck make backups?
John:
Or they think the iCloud is their backup.
John:
Well, guess what?
John:
When someone owns your Apple ID and you can't get that Apple ID back ever, all those photos are gone, gone.
John:
If you're lucky, maybe you have a Mac where you have a local cache copy of them.
John:
And if you're lucky, you know how someone knows enough to how to get them back without, you know, getting locked out of your Apple ID when it tries to sync with iCloud.
John:
Like, it's grim, right?
John:
So I feel like the passcode on your phone should not allow you to be owned that hard.
John:
Particularly, you should not be able to take over an Apple ID because you know 1, 2, 3, 4.
John:
And the sort of the...
John:
authentication where they say oh it's two-factor we'll send you a thing well they're going to send it to your phone and not you know not sms apple has their own like two-factor thing like that's going to let them get through too but i feel like you should have to know your password to uh reset your password
John:
Now, I'm sure someone who works in Apple support is going to say we can't do that.
John:
If we did that, no one would ever be able to reset their password because like they forget their password and they want to use their phone to get out of it.
John:
They want, you know, there needs to be an easier way.
John:
So I feel for Apple in this situation.
John:
But and one more thing.
John:
This is why Touch ID and Face ID.
John:
are great because they let you not have to enter your unlock code uh they can't steal your face or your fingerprint as easily so far thieves haven't figured that out but shoulder surfing your one two three four is trivial right in a crowded bar you have no idea who's over your shoulder your screen's lit up or whatever and it's like why would anybody type in their passcode well what if you're wearing a mask what if what if the face id doesn't work because you're wearing a scarf or a hat or someone's like
John:
especially in the age of COVID and all these masks, even though, yes, Face ID supposedly works with a mask.
John:
Sometimes it just doesn't unlock.
John:
Sometimes you just want to check out the grocery store and it doesn't read with your mask and you just do enter passcode and you type it in, right?
John:
Being shoulder surf is more of a risk now than before.
John:
But all of those technologies, Face ID and Touch ID and improving them and making them work with masks is a mitigation against this kind of attack because it is harder for run-of-the-mill thieves to do that than it is for someone to look over your shoulder and see your passcode.
John:
So I feel like what Apple has to do here is,
John:
what they've already been doing which is keep working on methods of authentication that are not typing in a stupid code that you know that's too short or whatever because you know no one types the really long one we'll get to that in a second and then also if at all possible make it so that you cannot with solely with the phone and one two three four lock someone out of their apple id for good by changing their apple id password like
John:
That's how you lock somebody out.
John:
You change their password now.
John:
They don't know the password, but you do.
John:
They're never going to get back in again, and all their photos belong to you.
Marco:
Yeah, I think what we can do in the short term is raise awareness of this vulnerability because I was on the talk show, and I said some of this already, so forgive me if you heard both.
Marco:
What came as a huge surprise to me
Marco:
is that you can change an apple id password if you have the passcode to a logged in phone that i had no clue that was possible um and and there's a mitigation of that which we'll get to in a second um but that's that's good that we that we know that now because i think most people you know as as you're going through john's history of the universe there of like you know before we had passcodes and everything you know
Marco:
Most people don't fully realize how much is at risk if somebody takes over your entire Apple account and has one of your login devices.
Marco:
There is so much at risk now in your life if that happens that...
Marco:
I feel like we have to treat that pretty carefully.
Marco:
We have to guard that very well.
Marco:
The same way we would guard the possessions in our house.
Marco:
Like, hey, lock the door at night.
Marco:
That kind of thing.
Marco:
But most people, I don't think, treat their phone with that level of security.
Marco:
And especially their passcode.
Marco:
Because most people just think, if you know the passcode, oh, I guess you'll get to play on my phone without me knowing it, if you steal my phone also.
Marco:
But you don't also think you are going to be able to take over my entire Apple account and also lock me out of it.
Marco:
So I think it's useful.
Marco:
What I've done in response to this, of learning this, is I've gone back to an alphanumeric passcode.
Marco:
Like a password.
Marco:
because i i left it during covid because i kept having to go grocery shopping with masks and you know this was before face id with mask support and so it was a huge pain in the butt um and so i switched back to a numeric code for that but now i switched back to the password style code because you know number one it's more secure uh but number two and i think this is the bigger one it when i'm entering it
Marco:
a password into a password field, I kind of just automatically, inherently treat it like something more secure physically to the world around me.
Marco:
So I'm not going to type in a password into my phone in a way that I think other people can easily overlook, look over my shoulder and see it or see it from across the room or whatever.
Marco:
I might hold the phone closer to me.
Marco:
I might just not do it for that time and just put it back in my pocket and do it later.
Marco:
I would take...
Marco:
better physical precautions kind of automatically or habitually when something looks like a password as opposed to this you know a six digit code that you type on these giant buttons and and it's so easy to do that you do it a million times a day you know most people who who i see typing in their passcode uh you know on a routine basis usually it's people who don't routinely let face id or touch id work for them
Marco:
Either it doesn't work for them or they just instantly go to type in the passcode because it has failed them in the past and they don't trust it anymore.
Marco:
And when your passcode is really easy and it's just a couple of numbers to type in, it's easier to get into that habit.
Marco:
If your passcode is a password that's non-trivial, then you're going to be much more likely to rely more on the biometrics whenever possible.
Marco:
And if the biometrics aren't working for a long time and you're having to type in your password all the time, maybe instead of just abandoning a face ID, maybe you'll retrain face ID and reset it or something like that.
Marco:
Because...
Marco:
that's a that's a huge problem i don't know if apple's ever going to really get you know everyone to trust the biometrics but one of the best things they can do is make the biometrics work for more people and i don't just mean make it possible to work i mean make them compelling so that there are fewer and fewer people over time who refuse to use them and just type in their you know one two three four every time they open their phone
Marco:
um because if the passcode has because of the amount of power the passcode has that again most people don't realize but the the amount of power the passcode has apple needs to really try as much as i know they do but as much as they possibly can to try to make sure no one is sticking with typing in one one one one one you know a thousand times a day in all kinds of places in public every single time they take their phone out
John:
That's why the face ID with mask is so important.
John:
Like, yes, as we talked about when they did, it does decrease the security.
John:
There's less of a face that you're identifying or whatever, but it is still preferable to people typing in one, two, three, four.
John:
Right.
John:
And alphanumeric passcode like that is in our list of mitigations here.
John:
That's the first one on the list.
John:
That's a definite mitigation.
John:
It's harder to shoulder surf, whether it's because of your body posture, like Marco said, or just because of the plain fact that presumably your alphanumeric passcode is not one, two, three, four.
John:
Just making it up in America doesn't solve any problems other than giving you a tiny keyboard to type on.
John:
You actually have to make it longer and more complicated.
John:
Of course, nobody wants to do that.
John:
So this is the most difficult solution.
John:
And if you go with the Marco solution, it's like, oh, it's a perverse incentive.
John:
I hate it so much.
John:
I will avoid it whenever possible, and I'll use biometrics.
John:
As we talked about in the past, apparently old people can't use Touch ID because their fingerprints are too non-consistent, which is rough.
John:
But I think Face ID...
John:
Should work about as well for everybody, including older people.
John:
So, you know, but again, it's just a question of like, oh, it failed me once or twice and now I give up on it because it's newfangled.
John:
Because people blame themselves, especially people who are less familiar with technology.
John:
They blame themselves.
John:
They think I'm doing something wrong.
John:
It makes me feel bad when I stare at this...
John:
rectangle and it just blinks at me and gives me some kind of error that i don't understand it makes me not want to do that because i feel like i'm failing i'm failing to use the device right and that doesn't feel good and it's like well you know what i could type one two three four every single time it's i'm familiar with the touchpad button it's a technology was created in my lifetime when i went from rotary dial
John:
to, you know, touch tone dialing.
John:
I made that transition when I was 30 and now I'm comfortable with it.
John:
And so I'm not even going to bother with Face ID.
John:
And it is Apple's challenge to get those people on board.
John:
And every time they make Face ID faster for it to work on more angles, for it to work with a mask on, like,
John:
that is all an attempt to get those people on board you're not going to get everybody all the time but that's why i commend apple's efforts to try to make face id the go-to option uh despite the fact like i said i think they should uh clamp down on the uh the the power of the passcode which i feel like is just sort of an inherited advantage because in the beginning that's all there was and now there's so much more but the passcode has retained its power it's retained the keys to the kingdom and maybe it's time to think about taking them away
John:
The second mitigation here is use a different password manager.
John:
This is for the mitigation on people not getting your passwords.
John:
It doesn't help with your Apple ID because, again, the passcode is going to give you access to that, right?
John:
But if you don't want to have all the passwords to all your different websites, don't use Apple's iCloud keychain because once they get into your Apple ID, they have access to your iCloud keychain, which is where your passwords are, and they can look them all up.
John:
um i mean someone could shoulder surf your one password password as well but again that presumably that's harder depending if you you know presumably you have the long alphanumeric thing for that um that is an advantage of having you know having sort of a not putting all your eggs in one basket the disadvantage is that it's a little bit more complicated than and potentially more costly than using the apple solution so i'm glad apple builds in icloud keychain and i'm glad they continue to enhance it uh and you know support uh the the
John:
timed authentication code stuff and cloud syncing and eventually pass keys.
John:
All that's great, but if someone cracks your Apple ID, they own all that stuff too.
Casey:
Yay.
John:
And then the final thing that you can do to mitigate this, which is what I've actually done, and I think pretty much everybody listening to the show should do because there's not a lot of downsides and it directly addresses the vulnerability, is we'll get to this in the after show, I suppose, but to use this screen time feature, which is a feature to
John:
try to limit people presumably in a family uh how much time they spend in various applications you can add content restrictions it's like oh this is for kids so they're not on youtube late at night haha what kid would do that um but uh as the family organizer or whatever they call it or as even as an adult you can enable screen time on your own phone whether it's to try to train yourself not to use the
John:
Twitter too much, which we talked about in the past.
John:
It's not much of an issue anymore.
John:
Or whatever it is you want to do.
John:
You can set up screen time on your own phone and put limits on it.
John:
And it's like, well, why would I want to do that?
John:
What's the point of that?
John:
It might be a fun thing for you to do to shape your own habits.
John:
But also you can add a screen time passcode, which is mostly you would think that's mostly there.
John:
So the kids can't go to the settings and screen time and like disable their prescriptions because they don't know your screen time passcode.
John:
Well, guess what?
John:
Your screen time passcode can be different than your phone's unlock code.
John:
So what you do is you go into screen time, you enable it in setting screen time, and then you set a screen time passcode and make it different than your phone passcode.
John:
I think it's limited to four digits.
John:
so it's not great but set a screen time passcode that you will remember uh and make it different than your phone lock thing on your own phone now obviously like what's the point of that you can always unlock it because if you get annoyed by something you know setting you can just go into screen time and disable the passcode because you'll type it'll say okay you want to turn off the passcode type it in and you'll type it in and it will disable it it's not to stop you it's to stop the thief uh and then the final thing you do is in setting screen time go to enable content privacy restrictions
John:
That's like the big switch at the very top of the screen.
John:
And then after you turn that on, all the options below it in the screen will be enabled.
John:
Scroll, scroll, scroll until you see an option called account changes.
John:
And you want to change that to don't allow.
John:
So you're using screen time to stop your quote unquote yourself from doing one specific thing, which is making changes to your account.
John:
Once you do that, then if the thief gets your phone and they unlock it with your passcode that they shoulder surfed, when they go to change your Apple ID password, it will say, uh-uh-uh, Screen Time says you're not allowed to make changes to your account.
John:
And if they go try to disable Screen Time, it'll say, please enter your Screen Time passcode, which they did not shoulder surf from you because why are you ever going to be entering your Screen Time passcode ever?
John:
Because the only restriction you put on it is account changes, right?
Yeah.
John:
now there may be ways around screen time restrictions uh clever thieves will figure it out clever thieves can will get your stuff no matter what like it's tough but like the run-of-the-mill thief will be thwarted by an additional four-digit code that they don't know uh and so until and unless it becomes well known how to get around this particular restriction of screen time you can stop someone from totally taking over your apple id by enabling screen time setting a passcode on it and then turning off account changes
John:
Oh, and by the way, when you do this, when you set the thing, it will prompt you and it will say, hey, do you want to be able to use your Apple ID to unlock screen time in case you forget the screen time passcode?
John:
It's not obvious from the UI what you have to do here, but it's like, oh, it's making me enter my Apple ID.
John:
Isn't that just going to, because once a thief has your Apple ID with your passcode, can't they just disable the screen time thing that way?
John:
What you have to do is you have to cancel when it prompts you to do that.
John:
it seems like you're saying you're canceling the whole operation but you're not you're just canceling this part when you hit cancel it prompts you and it says are you sure you want to have a screen time passcode and you don't want to have a way to get around that screen time passcode with your apple id because if you forget the screen time passcode it could be bad for you so like don't you know write it down somewhere don't put it in icloud keychain where the thief can get it because they own your apple id put it somewhere else
John:
And you just hit cancel on that and it prompts you and you have to put like skip or whatever.
John:
And so then you'll have a screen time passcode that is not in your iCloud keychain.
John:
Don't put it there.
John:
Don't put it in a secure note because they can unlock that with your passcode.
John:
Don't put it in the notes app.
John:
Put it somewhere else.
John:
And it's only four digits, but it could save your button.
Casey:
Yeah, I did all this this morning when I saw this show up in the show notes.
Casey:
I have tried to put fairly straightforward descriptions of how you do this in the show notes.
Casey:
And so in the show notes that you guys can see.
Casey:
Sorry, the one I was talking about earlier is the one only the three of us can see.
Casey:
So anyway, we have stuff in the show notes for you folks, and hopefully that will be helpful.
Casey:
I mean, again, you know, it's where, what is your threat threshold, right?
Casey:
Like, if you don't go to bars, if you're never around people, you know, then maybe you don't need to do all these mitigations.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I am not a bar-going kind of fellow, but nevertheless...
Casey:
You know, I immediately returned to using an alphanumeric passcode.
Casey:
I had been using one for a couple of years, maybe even a few years.
Casey:
And then it was in the last year or two, maybe it was during the mask thing, like Marco was talking about.
Casey:
I really honestly don't remember.
Casey:
But at some point I went to a six-digit passcode.
Casey:
Well, now I'm back in the alpha numeric, and then I did all these screen time protections as well.
Casey:
And then I'm not an iCloud keychain person.
Casey:
Again, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it, but I am a 1Password kind of person.
Casey:
So obviously that's what I'm using for all of my banking passwords and things like that.
Casey:
So I feel better protected now.
Casey:
But yeah, this is alarming.
Casey:
And it's tough because what is Apple supposed to do?
Casey:
Like, there are instances where people forget their Apple ID passwords.
Casey:
And then what are they supposed to do at that point?
Casey:
From Apple's perspective, they have a device that has been logged.
Casey:
You know, you have logged into that device, so to speak.
Casey:
You know, you've unlocked the device.
Casey:
why not let the person do that?
Casey:
Why shouldn't they let them change their own Apple ID?
Casey:
And obviously we just described why not, but it's a tough nut to crack, and I don't know what the right answer is.
John:
And if you have a Mac, by the way, basically the passcode to your Mac is the password to your Mac account.
John:
So you can still change your Apple ID password if you forget it from your Mac because it'll prompt you for your Mac password.
John:
And I think you can do it from the web through various techniques as well.
John:
You have recovery codes.
John:
There's lots of other ways around this.
John:
Even if you do this, this is just protecting your phone.
John:
So if someone shoulder surfs your Mac account password and it's an admin account, you're also kind of owned as well.
John:
That I feel like is, you know, like, again, if you're in a coffee shop on your laptop typing in your Mac's password and then someone shoulder surfs that from you and takes off with your laptop, you have a similar problem.
John:
Maybe a similar mitigation, but, you know, anyway, thieves suck.
John:
Be careful out there.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Also, I wanted to issue a small correction to what I said in the talk show.
Marco:
So I guess this is auto follow out.
Marco:
So I, you know, we were talking about this and I was saying like, you know, it normally I feel like my bank app is fairly safe because I use Face ID and because I don't store the bank password in one password.
Marco:
And so I thought that was safe.
Marco:
But then I realized, oh, no, that's not safe because if you have the phone's passcode, then you can just type that in instead of providing Face ID.
Marco:
Well, it turns out that's wrong sometimes.
Marco:
So that when the app developer is storing something in Keychain, using the Keychain APIs, we are able to set different security levels and flags on it for how much security it needs, what should certain behaviors be, does it require certain things to be unlocked, what happens when the phone locks, stuff like that.
Marco:
And apparently one of the modes that app developers can choose to use is you can require the biometric face ID or touch ID, but not offer a fallback to the pin code.
Marco:
And also, if somebody changes the registered face or fingerprints to have those not work.
John:
Yeah, that's that's what my bank does, because every time I get a new phone, I realize I can't use any of my bank apps and no enter my past like it does.
John:
There's no prompt for it.
John:
It's like, oh, face ID is totally disabled.
John:
You got to log in the long, painful way by typing in a bunch of stuff and answering a bunch of questions.
John:
And then at the very end of that process, oh, and by the way, now that you've cleared all these hurdles, do you want to use face ID?
John:
And you say yes.
John:
Every time I get a new phone, I have to do that.
John:
And yeah, there is no passcode fallback.
Marco:
And in this case, that's a very good thing, because that means that if you go through these vulnerabilities, you know, if someone steals your phone and knows your passcode, but doesn't know your bank password, and you didn't store it in iCloud Keychain, then this will prevent them from being able to get into an app like this if it's configured this way.
John:
Joke's on them, because my bank account has such low transfer limits, they'll only be able to steal a very small amount of money before they get locked out of my account.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And also, and this is why at the end of that process, when you are telling your bank account, please use Face ID, this is why it then immediately scans your face.
Marco:
Because what it's saying is not trust any registered face on this phone.
Marco:
What it's saying is trust this face.
Marco:
And it scans it and then it trusts only that face.
Marco:
Same thing for Touch ID if you have a Touch ID device.
Marco:
So that's very good to know.
Marco:
And so it's not... The attack surface is not as bad as I initially assumed.
Marco:
But it's still pretty bad.
Marco:
And so definitely...
Marco:
Start thinking of your phone PIN with the same level of security that you would treat your Apple ID password with.
Marco:
If your phone PIN is less secure than your Apple ID password, really ask yourself if that's the right move for you going forward and really consider making your phone PIN a nice password.
John:
You know, I was thinking that Apple needs to have because I was thinking about what would happen if I, you know, if this happened to my phone and they got it, you know, stolen from me, even if I had the screen time password on.
John:
Right.
John:
Kind of like on the on the phone and on the watch.
John:
Those are these various features where you hold down the side buttons and it goes into like emergency mode or the watch will like call the police if you're in a car accident and you're not conscious.
John:
And, you know, like all those things they have for like in case of emergency emergency.
John:
Here's how you initiate the it's emergency time procedure on the phone or the watch, right?
John:
But there is no such user-friendly procedure that is easy to find or know or do quickly under pressure for my Apple ID is about to be owned.
John:
Log me out of all devices, lock everything down.
John:
Us as tech nerds could eventually figure out the right things to do, but in the moment when you're panicking, it's not so easy.
John:
Where do I start?
John:
What do I go to?
John:
Should I go to the web interface?
John:
Should I open Safari?
John:
Should I go on my iPad?
John:
Should I go on my Mac?
John:
Should I call somebody who has access to...
John:
We kind of know what we'd want to do.
John:
Change all your passwords, lock everything out, go into all your things that says log me out of all devices.
John:
But do you know how to get to the log me out of all devices in your iCloud thing quickly?
John:
Or would you just go to iCloud.com and like log in and like frantically look for something, right?
John:
I feel like there should be a big red button, which is like my phone has been stolen.
John:
Like whatever Apple wants to call it, right?
John:
And no, find my iPhone is not that solution because I don't care about where my iPhone is.
John:
I care about where, you know, access to, you know, the keys to the kingdom.
John:
Lock down all my iCloud keychain stuff and don't allow anybody in if they don't know my Apple ID password.
John:
Because again, you haven't like your Apple ID has not been compromised in that they don't know your Apple ID password.
John:
You never typed that in anywhere.
John:
All you did was type one, two, three, four.
John:
That's what they shoulder surf.
John:
So I would love the big red button that says lockdown and everything.
John:
From this point on, nobody can do anything without knowing my Apple ID password.
John:
If they know your Apple ID password, you're further screwed.
John:
But, you know, there's only so much you can do.
Casey:
Well, the problem, though, is that you probably wouldn't have the time to take those actions.
Casey:
Because if you think about it, you're outside of the bar.
Casey:
These people have already shoulder surfed your password.
Casey:
So they grab your phone.
Casey:
They run around the corner or whatever.
Casey:
Or as they're running, they are going in and changing your Apple ID password.
Casey:
Meanwhile, you're saying to someone near you, oh, hey, can I use your phone right now?
Casey:
Yes, hand it to me.
Casey:
Quick, unlock it.
Casey:
Go.
John:
Go.
John:
That's why it has to be a big red button because the big red button should be press this button.
John:
It should be something as easy as pressing the side buttons on your phone or whatever.
John:
It should be really easy to do, and you should be able to do it on behalf of somebody else by typing in their Apple ID because locking down your Apple ID should be non-destructive.
John:
Anyone can do it to you accidentally or whatever.
John:
It doesn't stop anything from happening.
John:
It just raises the bar that now your passcode is no longer sufficient to do all the things that it had the power to do.
John:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
Yeah, I get that.
Casey:
But even if the three of us are out, and let's say somebody runs with my phone, and we know each other, we're friendly, even if I said to you, give me your phone right now.
John:
No, you chase them down, all that running you've been doing.
Casey:
Well, I don't run that much anymore.
Casey:
I do other workouts.
John:
It's a foot race at that point.
John:
I feel like you just don't let them escape.
Casey:
But my point is to say I wouldn't have the time.
Casey:
Seriously.
Casey:
I wouldn't have the time to grab your phone out of your hand or have you unlock it and hand it to me and do a whole login and so on and so forth.
John:
You could do it on your watch if you had an Apple Watch on or if you had a Mac laptop that was logged in.
John:
Potentially.
John:
I'm not saying it's a foolproof solution, but I'm saying it is so difficult to even know where to begin now, even if you did have access to the thing.
John:
And as for the thieves immediately doing it –
John:
Yeah, you know, you've probably got a, you know, 60 seconds to 90 seconds before they get anything done.
Casey:
Have you used Find My recently?
John:
And I know that you're not necessarily advocating Find My, but... I mean, maybe that, yeah, maybe that thieves would be worried about turning off Find My and not worried about like, you know, owning your app lighting because they don't...
John:
want the whole thing is they don't want your photos they want the phone to resell and they want to buy things with your money like that's what they want but what you can it's it's a you're taking advantage of the fact that the the cares don't overlap as much the things the thief wants the things that you want to protect are actually different you want to protect your apple id and your photos he doesn't care anything about your apple id mostly doesn't care about your photos well i would also like to protect my money
John:
Yeah, I know, but your money, you're mostly going to get back, like, you know, or at least some of it, but money is, money is replaceable and they're not going to be able to, because again, because of the limits on most of the banking system, it's not like they're going to be able to drain your life savings.
John:
Like that only happens in the movies with rich people, right?
John:
They can't get that much unless your life savings is a thousand dollars, in which case you have other problems, but.
John:
They're not going to get all your money.
John:
They're probably going to want to use credit cards, which are fraud protected, right?
John:
If they use your debit card and your Apple cash, they'll probably get most of it.
John:
But even then there are limits and the bank will eventually flag it.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like, but your photos and your Apple ID, that's what you care about because in the aftermath of this,
John:
We say, well, all those pictures that you had in your Apple ID, you're never going to see them again.
John:
And by the way, you've got to start over with a new Apple ID and know you can't transfer any of your purchases.
John:
And that, forget about the purchases or whatever, but the family photos, I feel like that is the most valuable thing on your device.
John:
And other than looking for naked pictures of you, thieves don't care about that.
Marco:
We were sponsored this week by Collide.
Marco:
And this week, Collide has some big news.
Marco:
If you're an Okta user, they can get your entire fleet to 100% compliance.
Marco:
So how do they do this?
Marco:
If a device isn't compliant, the user can't log into your cloud apps until they fix the problem.
Marco:
It's that simple.
Marco:
Collide patches one of the major holes in zero-trust architecture, device compliance.
Marco:
Without Collide, IT struggles to solve basic problems like keeping everyone's OS and browser up to date.
Marco:
Insecure devices are logging into your company's apps because there's nothing there to stop them.
Marco:
Collide is the only device trust solution that enforces compliance as part of authentication, and it's built to work seamlessly with Okta.
Marco:
The moment Collide's agent detects a problem, it alerts the user and gives them instructions to fix it.
Marco:
If they don't fix the problem within a set time, they're locked out.
Marco:
Simple as that.
Marco:
Collide's method means fewer support tickets, less frustration, and most importantly, 100% fleet compliance.
Marco:
Visit collide.com slash ATP to learn more or book a demo.
Marco:
That's Collide spelled K-O-L-I-D-E.
Marco:
K-O-L-I-D-E.
Marco:
Collide.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Collide for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
And Petar Petrovich writes, a few days ago, I saw you flexing on Mastodon about your symmetrical residential gigabit fiber connections.
Casey:
And since I'm in the process of renewing my contract with my local ISP, I wonder if it's worth it to pay extra for such a thing.
Casey:
Or should I stick to the cheaper packages with lower speeds?
Casey:
What are some of your use cases that are worth the extra monthly cost?
Casey:
How often is your link fully saturated?
Casey:
This is a great question, and I strongly implore you to consider who it is answering this question, because I cannot fathom a more nerdy group to answer this question.
Casey:
And so your needs and our needs may not mesh, and that's okay.
Casey:
But for me...
Casey:
I absolutely think that almost anyone could really benefit from half a gigabit to a gigabit downstream speeds.
Casey:
As a silly example, and I actually forgot that this was in the Ask ATP questions for this week, but I was downloading the Xcode beta, which actually...
Casey:
i think is fixed a problem with uh with my forthcoming app which i'm really excited about because something was woefully broken and i guess it was broken internal to apple stuff because then apple fixed it which is great um but anyways welcome to swift ui yeah no it's so true it's it was swift ui and you're exactly right
Casey:
Well, anyways, so I was downloading the new Xcode beta, and I had tooted, tweeted, whatever you want to call it, that, oh, look at this.
Casey:
And according to iStatMenus, you know, John's favorite app, I was downloading at 103 megabytes per second.
Casey:
Not bits.
Casey:
Excuse me, 108.
Casey:
108 megabytes per second.
Casey:
Now, I'm sure that's probably not exactly right, but...
Casey:
It was probably close, and that is really freaking fast.
Casey:
So I don't get those speeds that often.
Casey:
I typically top out at like 50-ish megabytes a second if I'm downloading something somewhat large.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I thought it was extremely cool that I was grabbing this humongous Xcode download that quickly.
Casey:
So on the downstream side, basically anytime you're downloading anything,
Casey:
anything big or you want it to be here immediately so i don't know say if you're trying to play music from apple music or spotify or something like that having a really really wide so to speak download pipe i think that's convenient to almost everyone what i don't think is as cut and dry is having in an equally large upstream pipe it's
Casey:
For me, I love having it because I'm a weirdo and I do weird stuff with my internet connection to keep it PG.
Casey:
And by that I mean I have a VPN running out of the house.
Casey:
I have WireGuard on my Raspberry Pi.
Casey:
I also, for redundancy, run TailScale, former sponsor.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
And whenever I'm not at home, like whenever my MacBook or my devices are not at home and are on foreign, if you will, Wi-Fi, even Wi-Fi that I trust, like my parents, for example, I still automatically connect to the Raspberry Pi via WireGuard because then it's like I haven't even left the house.
Casey:
And that means all of my internet traffic, including just regular web browsing, looking at Mastodon, et cetera, that's still coming and round tripping through my house.
Casey:
And if I had a really slow upstream speed, I would feel it even remotely.
Casey:
And even leaving that aside, I am a devout Plex user.
Casey:
I won't talk too much about it, but suffice to say you can stream things from other Plex users in certain circumstances, which means if somebody wants to stream something from me, it's nice to have a large upstream pipe.
Casey:
whenever I need to upload anything like if I'm uploading the recording this evening that goes faster and it just basically when you have a big huge you know symmetric gigabit connection you wait less for everything which is great like I enjoy waiting not very much and so when I don't have to wait as much that makes me happy so that's that's my two cents I don't know let's start with Marco what did I get this right or do you do you disagree
Marco:
No, that's pretty much it.
Marco:
I mean, you know, when you hear internet speeds, keep in mind those are bits, not bytes, and so divide by eight.
Marco:
And so, like, you know, you were saying you got a little over 100 megabytes per second download.
Marco:
That's pretty close to the theoretical maximum, which is 125 megabytes for a gigabit connection.
Marco:
When you have a faster and faster internet connection...
Marco:
you you're not going to be downloading everything at that speed because you are going to be dependent on the server that you are talking to and its ability to send things to you at that speed and through all the different things that are in between you and it so many things will not be faster but many things will because increasingly in this world we are being delivered things from cdns who will have things being served to you from fairly close by relatively speaking and so
Marco:
anything served by a cdn like a very large you know xcode download you know we're not serving that from california where you know that's being served to us from somewhere closer unless you are in california in which case you are probably having it served from california but for the rest of you anyway so you know there's a lot of things like that where um you know anything served by a cdn that's close to you will usually go like maximum line speed that it can get to you
Marco:
And that's going to be pretty significantly different when you're talking about a large multi-gig download.
Marco:
I mean, these days, everything is huge.
Marco:
Every app on your phone is hundreds of megs.
Marco:
When you watch streaming TV, you're streaming hundreds of megs to gigs to watch one TV show.
Marco:
You're streaming a movie that's probably multiple gigs throughout the stream.
Marco:
You know, just sitting down watching Netflix at night, like you don't even realize you're streaming gigs of data.
Marco:
If there's more people in your house or if you're trying to do more than one thing at once, like right now we're recording a podcast.
Marco:
This is using nothing.
Marco:
This, you know, this is using, you know, hundreds of kilobytes per second.
Marco:
Probably what the fat pipe means is that I don't need to tell the other people in my house while I'm podcasting.
Marco:
Hey, don't download anything right now.
Marco:
because it's not at risk at all it's just rock solid and that's the kind of benefit you get with very fast connections things are just so rock solid you have so much headroom as Casey was saying there's so much headroom in the transfer speed that even when you're not using all of that bandwidth to download something from a CDN that's really big even when you're not using all that you are still getting benefits
Marco:
in other ways besides just you know not being like you aren't constantly downloading 125 megabytes per second but you are getting other benefits um like and and on the upstream like one thing i notice is when i am uploading a podcast which happens on a fairly regular basis it's going to happen in about 14 hours
Marco:
And when I'm uploading a podcast, I'm uploading it to a CDN.
Marco:
And and so it goes faster.
Marco:
It's simple as that.
Marco:
It doesn't go a gigabit because I'm not the CDN is not that close.
Marco:
But I notice it goes faster than when I'm in Westchester.
Marco:
And there I only have 150 megabit connection.
Marco:
which is very fast at least it was very fast when i got it installed you know 12 years ago um but you know i noticed the difference whenever i'm back there i notice when i go from a gigabit to 150 i notice it's not like it going back to dial up or anything it's still a very fast connection but there are areas certain things that that i do notice and it's again it's not like a huge deal but having a
Marco:
And it's really nice to know if something is being slow, it's probably not your fault.
Marco:
It's at least it isn't your Internet connection.
Marco:
You know, there might be other things at play there.
Marco:
And I would also point out the utility of gigabit connections is highly dependent on being wired with Ethernet.
Casey:
Yeah, that's true.
Marco:
All the new Wi-Fi standards, they always advertise these peak speeds that you can get that are either hundreds of megabits or even some of them advertise capabilities of being above a gigabit.
Marco:
In practice, the real world speeds are almost never that high.
Marco:
You have to basically be on top of the router and have no interference from anything else nearby and be under ideal atmospheric conditions.
Marco:
There's so many variables to Wi-Fi.
Marco:
If you are expecting high performance out of Wi-Fi only devices or devices that are usually connected via Wi-Fi, you might not see as much of a real world gain.
Marco:
And so maybe it might not be worth it to you.
Marco:
But for wired devices, that benefit is very much there.
Marco:
And also just make sure that you have a pretty decent modern router that has a gigabit upstream port and that has enough grunt CPU-wise and memory-wise to actually maintain all the NAT tables and all the buffers and everything to actually route and process that fast of a connection.
Marco:
and you know if your isp supports that connection usually worst case scenario you can just use the router they give you because usually that they will give you one that can handle that kind of connection if they're selling that kind of connection um but you know if you if you're stuck on like some old you know wrt 54g you know maybe this is the time to upgrade it but yeah so so make sure your other stuff can handle it but uh but if you are wired and if you have a good router you will notice differences
John:
I think the biggest sin in ISP things is the sometimes related to technology, sometimes related to finance, sometimes both of the incredibly asymmetrical connections where they give you a decent download speed and then a total garbage upload speed, not just garbage compared to the download, but just not good, period.
John:
Where, you know, you'll get, you know, 150 megabits down, two megabits up.
John:
And that's not acceptable.
John:
The cable is the worst in this regard.
John:
So I would argue strongly for symmetrical because your download speed is probably going to be okay.
John:
And if your upload speed is the same as your download speed, that's a symmetrical connection.
John:
And that's good.
John:
And the main use case for that is when you do FaceTime with people or whatever, whatever video conferencing is.
John:
uh your upload speed determines how you look to them i know because i face time with relatives who have a crap internet connection and their upload speed is terrible and they look bad uh because it will squeeze it will squeeze their video over their tiny crappy connection like their wi-fi is bad but like bottom line even if they were wired in their upload speed is like one or two megabits and you can't get like a really good high-res 4k image with sound in that size pipe apparently they look bad because their upload speed is bad
John:
So that's one thing to think about.
John:
The reverse side of that is if you are watching Netflix and you have a really slow internet connection, really slow, right?
John:
Or if there's a problem with it or your Wi-Fi is bad, like Netflix will still work.
John:
The picture will just look worse.
John:
They use adaptive algorithms to say if your bandwidth type is smaller, we will send you more heavily compressed lower resolution video.
John:
If you want to get what you're paying for, especially if you're paying more for the stupid 4K, Netflix, you know, however much that costs extra, you'll need an internet connection that can handle that.
John:
And to the point that both of you made, that can handle that even if you're in a household with a family and your kid is downloading a torrent of something and someone else is watching a different video.
John:
You need to be able to accommodate not how much it will take for you to watch 4K Netflix, but for everyone in your family to be doing whatever it is that they're doing on the internet at the same time.
John:
That is still way below a gigabit, to be clear.
John:
You do not need a gigabit for that.
John:
But it does argue for...
John:
not getting like that's lowest speed thinking well i'll just wait for downloads it won't be that big a deal it will actually impact your quality of life in the common areas people do watching streaming video and doing facetime with people because you will look worse to them and your video will look worse so at least past the minimum bar and in terms of saturating a gigabit a lot of it is impatience like oh if you i can afford to pay for it and i am impatient so yeah downloads will go faster
John:
but not as often as you would think there is very few things that you can get that will fill a gigabit pipe.
John:
Apple from a good CDN will steam.
John:
Well, most peer to peer things will, I think steam is actually peer to peer.
John:
Um, but it's a short list.
John:
Uh,
John:
But and probably not on that list is one that people don't think about that.
John:
I just had an encounter with recently game consoles.
John:
Most good modern game consoles will download something for you while you wait.
John:
But when a game is coming out like the new expansion of destiny just came out.
John:
They will not make it available for download until X number of hours before the release time.
John:
And if your internet connection is too slow to download it during that window, everyone else will be, well, let's face it, they'll be in the login queue.
John:
But anyway, let's pretend the login queue doesn't exist.
John:
Everyone else will be playing their fun new game and you're still waiting for your download to finish.
John:
While I was stuck in my room with COVID, my PS5 downloaded an 80 gigabyte Destiny 2 expansion.
John:
Goodness.
John:
Right?
John:
And because I came down, I'm like, oh, the Destiny 2 expansion is coming out tomorrow.
John:
Better start my download.
John:
I turned on my PS5, which was in rest mode, and it was already there.
John:
um nice could that have happened over a less than gigabit probably but i wouldn't want to be waiting on the download to finish because of my slow connection 80 gigabytes is big and this stuff is distributed through a cdn and it's granted it's a crappy cdn so it probably wouldn't saturate a gigabit but you know anyway
John:
The reason we complain about waiting for Xcode to unzip itself on XIP itself is because for us with gigabit connections, that takes longer than the download.
John:
That's part of that stupid complaint that we have.
John:
It's not that unzipping takes a long time, it's that our downloads are so fast.
John:
I don't think you need a gigabit for almost anything, but boy, it's nice to have.
John:
I would just argue for...
John:
Sufficient bandwidth and symmetrical bandwidth.
John:
And how much is sufficient?
John:
You can do some back of the envelope math and say, okay, with four people in this family, if they're all watching 4K Netflix, we need 20 megabits down and 20 megabits up or 15 or five or whatever, you know.
John:
The other thing about bandwidth is...
John:
Especially if you have a decent ISP and if you're offered symmetrical anything your ISP is probably better than most The cost difference between you know five megabits 20 megabits 50 150 and a gigabit They want you to pay for the more expensive one.
John:
It's not proportional The the hundred megabit service does not cost one tenth the thousand megabit usually
John:
And so they're trying to herd you up market to pay for the maximum price.
John:
So the 100 megabit will cost $20 a month and the 1,000 will cost $50 a month.
John:
And that's a good deal in terms of price per bit.
John:
And then once you can get over that hurdle of $50 a month, if you can afford it and you're not taking money away from your grocery fund, it's a nice quality of life upgrade.
John:
But in the meantime, just look for symmetrical and don't assume you can get away with a really small connection in both directions just because...
John:
I'm only ever going to watch Netflix because you'd be surprised how much the things in your house are doing while you're watching Netflix.
John:
Oh, one more.
John:
I forgot.
John:
Online backups.
John:
Oh, I want to use an online backup service, but it told me it's going to take me 17 days to upload my Mac.
John:
Yeah, it would take slightly less time.
John:
And again, most online backup services will not use it a gigabit connection.
John:
But if your upload speed is garbage because you have cable and it's like one megabit up, it's going to take forever to do your first backup of your two terabyte Mac that you just got, right?
John:
or whatever so that really helps and it's not you know you probably don't need again you don't need a gigabit but 500 megabits 200 megabits whatever your backup service is willing to take from you it can really cut down on the pain of online back it was a lot of people say i was going to get online backup but then i tried to went for a free trial and it told me my initial backup would take 30 days and i can't handle that right it you know if it takes 15 days seven days that can really help again even if it's not going to saturate your gigabit so think about it
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Max Laves writes, do you use tools like Al Dente or Battery to manually limit the charging level on desktop MacBooks?
Casey:
So I want something like this in my life very, very badly.
Casey:
And when I saw this in our internal show notes, I went and I tried Battery, which I presume John linked, and
Casey:
I got to tell you, it did not work for me.
Casey:
Like literally did not work.
Casey:
That's not the euphemism version of did not work.
Casey:
Like it literally did not work.
Casey:
Maybe I was holding it wrong.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
And uninstalling it was not really working exactly as I expected.
Casey:
It is all open source.
Casey:
I don't think anything nefarious is going on here.
Casey:
But it didn't work for me.
Casey:
And then even if it had worked for me after I installed it, I noticed that there's an issue on GitHub saying, oh, if you clamshell your Mac, it doesn't work properly.
Casey:
Super.
Casey:
I did not try al dente.
Casey:
I feel like there must be some like easier tool to do this or even do this by hand on the command line.
Casey:
It looked like battery was using SMC or something like that.
John:
But does that coconut battery thing do this?
John:
I forget.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I've never heard of that one.
Casey:
But but yeah, I want something like this because it is said I can't attest whether this is true or not.
Casey:
It is said that you should keep your battery at about 80%, generally speaking, and not charge over 80% unless you know you're really going to need it.
Casey:
We've talked in the past that there's a way.
Casey:
I should actually figure out where this is because I was just looking for this the other day, and it's buried in the most unusual spot.
Casey:
So there's a way to tell macOS, hey, don't charge above 80% unless you think you really need to.
Casey:
So if you go into settings, not preferences, mind you, but settings.
John:
I think this is on by default on new Macs, by the way.
Casey:
It might be.
Casey:
Settings, battery, and then – oh, this is so infuriating.
Casey:
So if you go into settings, follow along if you're in a position that you can.
Casey:
Settings, battery, way on the left, about maybe two-thirds the way down.
John:
I don't have a battery item, Casey.
John:
What should I have?
John:
You're the worst.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
well for those of us who can uh on the right hand pane on the right hand pane you'll see the old battery low power mode only on battery is the way i have it set whatever battery health the chart options well clearly it's going to be an options isn't it so you click on options uh put hard drives to sleep hard just to sleep impossible wake for network access optimize streaming video okay that's not it uh well where is it do you happen to know where it is marco
Marco:
Hold on.
Marco:
I'm hitting... Oh, I found it.
Casey:
I think, yeah.
Casey:
Tell me how much sense this makes.
Casey:
Go ahead.
John:
I'm going to guess, but I'm not seeing this on my screen, obviously, because I don't have a battery.
John:
Is it in control center?
John:
No, it's in the battery thing.
John:
Yeah, I'll send you a screenshot real quick.
John:
Give me two seconds.
John:
You have to click something that's not a button or doesn't look like a button.
Marco:
So first of all, when I opened up the settings app and I scroll down and clicked battery,
Marco:
the right pane did not actually change to the content of the battery pane for about three or four seconds.
Marco:
And there was no beach ball, no spinner.
Marco:
Like it just was still showing the general tab for like three or four seconds.
Marco:
Just no feedback whatsoever.
Marco:
Great app, great app settings, Pete settings team.
Marco:
This is great.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So great work.
Marco:
I'm so glad this shipped.
Marco:
You know, this, this totally was ready to ship to cut all your customers.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Good job.
Casey:
So don't, don't tell us where it is yet.
Casey:
Marco, John, can you figure out where it is on the screen?
John:
The little eye on the battery health?
John:
Yes, it is.
John:
So in battery health... I know about the secret eyes.
John:
I've spent too much time in system settings.
John:
If you see a tiny little eye in a circle, that doesn't look like a button.
John:
And there surely is nothing important stuck under there.
John:
It's probably just information, a little eye, just info.
John:
There's no settings under there, but I... How could there be a setting?
John:
It's only information.
John:
If you use system settings on macOS Ventura, you quickly learn the stupid little eyes is where whatever setting you're looking for is hiding.
John:
And don't try to use search because 50% of the time, I won't find it anyway.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So if you click on the secret eye, I really like that.
Casey:
You click on the secret eye, you can see battery condition, maximum capacity.
Casey:
Oh, there's a toggle.
Casey:
Optimized battery charging to reduce battery aging.
Casey:
Your Mac learns from your daily charging routine so it can wait to finish charging past 80% until you need it for use on battery.
John:
Can you search for battery condition now and see where the search sends you?
John:
Because I bet the search sends you to the screen you just put a screenshot of, not the one under the eye, because I don't think search can send you to this.
John:
I think search will just send you to this thing with the graph and say, look, I was helpful.
John:
See, I searched and I found it.
John:
You search for battery condition and I sent you to this page where the words battery condition do not appear.
Marco:
As far as I can tell, it is not available in search anywhere.
Marco:
I've tried searching for optimized charging, charging, battery charging.
Marco:
It's not returning any results.
Casey:
Well, but what's interesting, though, what's interesting, though, is I typed in battery condition in search.
Casey:
And the first option is battery.
Casey:
The second option is battery health with a subtitle of battery, which is it's that's the secret I that you want.
Casey:
But when you click on that line item, it just brings you to the battery.
John:
I don't think the search can send you those things that pop up modals.
John:
There's no direct sort of deep linking way to get to them.
John:
So not only are things poorly arranged in a system setting, not only does search fail a lot of the time, but there are certain parts that search cannot reach because it cannot take you there.
John:
it like you can type it in and even if it knew about it it's like well i know about it but i'll just as this happens to me all the time i type search and it brings me to the results page and i'm like why did you bring me to this result page because i don't see what and then you'd have to like scroll through the result page and find all the little eyes and click on them and find a pie symbol in the lower left corner and click on that and it's just it's madness it is bad
Casey:
Anyway, so I don't use any of these.
Casey:
If somebody – I mean maybe battery works for everyone but me.
Casey:
But if somebody has a reliable answer, especially if it's like open source, I'd love to see it.
Casey:
So please feel free to write me.
John:
So now that we did all that searching.
John:
Why is what's built into macOS insufficient?
John:
So like I said, I think this is the default now.
John:
If you get a Mac laptop, whether it's a default or not, if you can find the setting that we just dug for, you can tell it, hey, Mac, even when you're plugged into a power cable, don't charge to 100%.
John:
When you get to 80%, just stop there.
John:
And then there's a thing in the menu bar where you can say, hey, I'm about to leave, go to 100% and over the next 30 minutes, I'll bring you up to 100% and then you can leave.
John:
But I'm pretty sure that's the default.
John:
And I think that default, only charging to 80% unless you say otherwise, is all really I'd ever want personally, not that I use laptops, out of a laptop in terms of battery health.
John:
It's what all of our phones do when you plug them in on the nightstand.
John:
They charge to 80% and then they wait like an hour before you wake up and charge the rest away or whatever.
John:
Your laptop, if it's plugged in all the time, it will never go to 100.
John:
It'll just stay at 80 unless you tell it, hey, I want you to go to 100.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
Oh, no, it does not.
Casey:
Because Apple's algorithm or whatever, in order to figure out whether or not you need to go to 100, at least in my experience, is that it errors on the side of, oh, let's go all the way to 100, baby.
Casey:
It errors to that side.
Casey:
And so I really...
Casey:
don't need to be above 80 almost ever.
Casey:
And in fact, I would vastly prefer if there was a way for me to say, just always stop at 80.
Casey:
And I will tell you when I need more, but I can't do that.
Casey:
And so right now my battery is sitting at 100% and I really, really wish it wasn't.
Marco:
Yeah, mine too.
John:
I have the same problem.
John:
I have my laptop is always plugged in.
John:
It's one of the one of the kids laptops hanging here and I never see it above 80.
John:
I mean, it's literally always plugged in, but it never goes above 80.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Maybe this is a bug.
John:
I can't tell if it's a feature or not, but I I've always felt like this 80 percent feature is too aggressive and it just literally every time I look at the laptop, it's 80.
John:
It's always 80 because it's always plugged in.
Casey:
Well, I wish I had that problem because I have the reverse where it is always 100 and I really wish it wasn't.
Casey:
What are you going to do?
Casey:
So anyway, so I guess, John, you can't help us with, you know, what do you use?
John:
I don't use one of these.
John:
I just rely on the built-in things.
John:
And before the built-in things, I just let it fry my batteries.
Casey:
Delightful.
Casey:
How about you, Marco?
Marco:
um i've never used these apps before um i like john i would just let my batteries slowly melt um before this you want on laptops long enough for the batteries to go bad the solution is buy a new laptop every six months yeah just drop it in the shredder get a new one yeah that's exactly how it works all
Casey:
All right, and in front of the show, Brian Hamilton writes, Instagram ads for scammy mobile games are annoying, but despite the horrendous UI, predatory in-app purchases, and oddly creepy character design, some of the puzzles look kind of fun.
Casey:
Drawing a shape to save the dog or dropping water onto lava to clear a level could be fun if the apps were well-designed and the monetization made sense.
Casey:
Why aren't good iOS game devs making this brand of time-wasting Instagram-friendly game?
Casey:
I don't really know, but I would guess because there's no money in it.
John:
Oh, there's so many answers to this.
John:
Okay, so the first one is advertisements are meant to be enticing.
John:
Kind of like we're on a movie or TV show.
John:
They'll show you what they think is the best or most enticing part of that movie or TV show to get you to want to see it.
John:
Same thing with games.
John:
They will show you something that looks like it's fun, perhaps the most fun part of the thing.
John:
Maybe the advertisement isn't even representative of the actual gameplay.
John:
You don't know.
John:
It's an ad.
John:
So that's answer number one.
John:
Answer number two, the companies that can afford to pay designers who know how to make fun things are the ones that are fleecing everybody with creepy app purchases, right?
Marco:
That's the one.
Marco:
That's the answer.
John:
That's where all the money is being made.
John:
That's how they can afford to make those enticing ads.
John:
Um, it doesn't mean the games are necessarily fun because they are junked up with the, you know, anti, you know, mechanics that are not friendly to people and these things that psychologically find ways to extract money from you.
John:
Right.
John:
So it doesn't necessarily mean the games are fun, but it means that they had the potential to be fun if all that cruft couldn't be removed because those companies can hire all the game designers.
John:
And by the way, that itself is a skill.
John:
knowing how to extract the max amount of money from people is a thing that people get good at and they get good at it because they are highly motivated to get good at it because there's a lot of money to be extracted and there's an efficient machine for extracting money and so the people who are good at are highly paid and it's a virtuous cycle not from our perspective but from theirs where lots of people become very good at this and get paid a lot to do it and so that skill those skills get built up um
John:
I think there are fun games that don't do this, but you don't see them with enticing ads on Instagram because the only people who do this type of things are the people whose whatever it is, you know, I forget the acronym.
John:
What is it?
John:
Like the cost per user that they acquire or the amount of money they expect to make from a person who downloads their game has to be high enough to make up for the amount it costs them to show that ad to those people.
John:
And
John:
with these type of games so i think like we have an amazingly addictive mechanic we once you we are hooks into you on average we will extract x number of dollars from you over the next six months which means most people will get zero dollars from but five people will get a thousand dollars from those are our whales and so it averages out and so that's why we can have these enticing instagram ads and that's why i can we can pay these game designers to make it an ostensibly fun game that really is just a secret puzzle box to extract money from you
John:
So my main suggestion would be don't believe everything you see in an ad.
John:
The games aren't actually that fun.
John:
And my second suggestion is that's where the money is.
John:
So that's sad.
Marco:
And it's a double-edged sword.
Marco:
So not only are the ads that you're seeing only the ones who could bid up those prices.
Marco:
And if you've never bought app install ads, they're really expensive.
Marco:
A typical installation from an app install ad, it depends heavily on the category that you're in, but usually you're above a dollar.
Marco:
Sometimes you can even be multiple dollars per installation, depending on the category and competition and everything.
Marco:
But not every installation even results in somebody ever running the app.
Marco:
Not every person who runs the app will ever run it more than once.
Marco:
Once you start multiplying out, if only so many of these installs are actually real and actually result in somebody opening the app ever, and then actually result in that person ever coming back in the future, you end up getting into many dollars per active user of the app.
Marco:
You have to have a very, very high average user value to make that worth it, to make you not just lose money constantly.
Marco:
If you can make that profitable, you have all the incentive in the world to spend infinite money on customer acquisition by buying more ads.
Marco:
Because if you have a balance there where you are making money, where you are spending less per customer than you are bringing in,
Marco:
then there's no reason for you to stop buying ads.
Marco:
You will buy as many ads as you can buy at those prices until your money runs out, which if you're doing it right, it won't.
Marco:
And because these ads are so expensive and because so many people are bidding on them who have these money-making schemes, that's all you're going to see.
Marco:
You're only going to see the people who have these big budgets so that they can spend more on ads, outbid other players or other competitors, and still make a profit.
Marco:
So you're only going to see the games that are really fleecing people for money.
Marco:
And then if you are a, quote, good developer and you're making a game that's a little more traditional and a little more respectful of people and not trying to just fleece them and play psychological tricks to, you know, get all their money, like if you're if you're trying to do things like, quote, the right way.
Marco:
It's really hard for you to find a market for your game because all of the ads are being bought and bid up by those other companies who are doing things the other way.
Marco:
So it's very hard to get noticed in the iOS game scene and to succeed making good, respectful apps.
Marco:
Because as much as we want that to not be the case, and as much as Apple always talks about how great the App Store is for all these small businesses and everything, and the discoverability is so great in the App Store, the value of all that has gone way down over time as there's just been more and more and more competition.
Marco:
So you're not going to be found in the App Store very easily if you don't spend money.
Marco:
And if you're a game developer, who you're spending money against is just so ridiculously hard to compete with unless you are also doing the same tricks they're doing to get super high valuations per active user.
Marco:
And so if you're making games like the quote good way, you just can't compete and you won't ever find an audience for your games in all likelihood.
Marco:
So people who are trying to do things that way typically go elsewhere or give up or go to the dark side.
John:
That's why game consoles are so refreshing these days.
John:
Sort of the AAA game market, which is smaller than the mobile game market in terms of dollars.
John:
But the reason we don't call those ones making all the money AAA is because we realize they're just like very often money extraction devices and less an attempt to make the best game you can make.
John:
And in the world of console and PC, among the smaller market of people who shop there...
John:
uh the exploitive mechanics are looked down upon like you know for even like destiny the game that i play lots of other sort of multiplayer online games even ones with subscriptions or whatever the thing that customers hate the most is what you know that drizzly called pay to win where if i pay you more money you'll give me a more powerful sword that i can beat people up with and users will not accept that within the top tier triple a things
John:
they will only pay for and they'll pay a lot for cosmetics things that don't affect the gameplay because they consider it unfair for someone with money to be able to play to advance in the game like to get better items to get more in-game money like they don't uh accept that as you know any money that can be used to make you more powerful in the game it's like if you had a poker game and you could pay to get like a better hand or something like nobody likes that right
John:
um and they'll gladly play for cosmetics forever but the cosmetics don't affect the gameplay and if the cosmetics even remotely affect the gameplay they will complain i think i've talked about this before there was a destiny cosmetic that made the barrel of your gun like like an inch or two longer it was a totally different skin for your gun but the point is the barrel was a little bit longer in game like two or three in-game inches right person's holding a gun the barrel's a little bit longer that affected the range of the weapon by two or three inches and people were in an uproar about it because the range was measured from the front of the model right oh my god
John:
Oh, my word.
John:
And they were in uproar.
John:
They're like, it's pay to win.
John:
It's pay to win.
John:
Those antibodies do not exist in mobile gaming.
John:
They're all pay to win.
John:
They're like, oh, get an extra life.
John:
Get a thing where if you die, you'll resurrect yourself.
John:
Buy more gems.
John:
Like, they're all pay to win.
John:
Now, granted, most of them are multiplayer or whatever, but that's how different these markets are.
John:
The quote-unquote AAA market where you got to pay 70 bucks for a game plus, you know, $80 for the fancy version and you pay that every year or you pay $15 a month to play World of Warcraft or whatever.
John:
those markets filled with people who play those games will not tolerate garbage mechanics like that.
John:
That shook out of that market.
John:
People tried all sorts of things, and they said, we do not want to play a game where other people with money can play to get a bigger sword to beat me up with.
John:
Just sell us horse armor.
John:
And so that has been the way forward in AAA, whereas in mobile, it is very different.
John:
So it makes me strangely comforted to continue to pay, again, at least $100 a year, probably more.
John:
And I don't really buy that many cosmetics for this game with millions of players that cost millions upon millions of dollars to make that I think respects me as a game as a gamer way more than, you know, the free to play application with a bunch of gems or pouring water on lava that I can get on my phone.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Collide.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Casey:
It was an accident.
Casey:
It was an accident.
Casey:
Accidentally podcasted.
Casey:
Accident.
Casey:
It was an accident.
Casey:
Accidentally podcasted.
Casey:
John Syracusa, wise old soul.
Casey:
Since then he's born, he's back, bro.
John:
Marco Arment, he's a product man.
John:
Sell him off just as fast as he can.
Casey!
Who the hell is Casey?
John:
Who the hell is Casey?
John:
Who the hell is Casey?
John:
It was an accident.
John:
It was an accident.
John:
Accidentally podcasted.
John:
Accident.
John:
It was an accident.
John:
Accidentally podcasted.
Marco:
podcasted do either of you i mean john your kids are a little older now obviously but uh but casey i'm curious do you or john did you uh ever impose time limits on your children's ipads uh for screen time or for youtube i did even though i very quickly recognized the futility of it which is i'm sure what you'll describe casey
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So, I mean, remember that Declan is eight.
Casey:
He's in second grade.
Casey:
Michaela is in her last year preschool.
Casey:
She'll be in kindergarten next year.
Casey:
She's freshly five.
Casey:
The kids have my old iPad Pro.
Casey:
They had an older iPad before that.
Casey:
And Declan has like an iPhone 10 that does not have service.
Casey:
It's, you know, it's a Wi-Fi.
Casey:
It's effectively an iPod touch.
Casey:
And, um, and yeah, I literally have screen time as in the Apple stuff that we were talking about earlier in the show.
Casey:
I have that enabled for his iPhone and, uh, he seems to respect that he isn't really into YouTube that much these days, not in the way that like, you know, I think we will be, oh no, no, I, I don't, I don't argue that this time will come, but it hasn't come yet.
Casey:
Although I did find it interesting that he was trying to draw some Pokemon recently, and he turned to YouTube videos to instruct him on how to do that, which I was actually kind of proud of him.
John:
It begins.
Casey:
Oh, no, no, totally.
Casey:
Again, I'm not sitting on any sort of high horse.
Casey:
I am not trying to be smug.
Casey:
If I am coming across that way, that's not on purpose.
Casey:
I know my time is coming.
Casey:
But all of this is to say, at this point...
Casey:
We don't let them use the devices for very long each day, and it's at typically pretty well-defined times, and that's just the way it's always been, so they understand that.
Casey:
And we haven't really restricted that much because they're just not aware yet of what there is that they could be doing.
Casey:
And I'm not even talking about naughty things, but I don't think Declan has really gotten to the point that he thought to himself, well, I'm just going to cruise YouTube and watch random junk.
Casey:
And again, that time is coming probably sooner than I'm comfortable with, but we're not at that point yet.
Casey:
So he hasn't gotten to the point of like trying to do nefarious stuff to get around any sort of limits or anything like that.
Casey:
I take it though, because Adam, you said is in fifth grade.
Casey:
Is that right?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
He's almost 11.
Casey:
He is at that point now, huh?
Marco:
Yeah, so, and with the huge disclaimer up front here, parenting stuff is always fraught.
Marco:
Everybody has different opinions of what is an appropriate amount of screen time and screen permission for children, and if your opinion is different than what I do, that's fine.
Marco:
You do what you want to do, and I'm going to do what we think is right for our family.
Marco:
You do what's right for your family.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
So our kid, he's almost 11.
Marco:
He has his own iPad.
Marco:
He's allowed mostly unmonitored YouTube watching, but within limits.
Marco:
Because, you know, look, you know your kid.
Marco:
And we've expressed to our kid numerous times, to the point where he's tired of hearing about it, the difference between good stuff and bad stuff he can see online, and what's appropriate for anybody, and what's appropriate for children versus not appropriate for children...
Marco:
We've never had any reason to not trust him to self-regulate that.
Marco:
Whenever we do watch something that he's watching with him, or at least we might overhear it from across the room if he's somewhere where we can't see it, it's always been pretty safe stuff.
Marco:
And so we don't feel the need to be very aggressive about our YouTube filtering.
Marco:
We do limit the amount of time, though.
Marco:
The overall iPad time, again, using the built-in screen time feature, we limit the iPad to only certain hours of the day so that he can't wake up at 2 in the morning and just play with his iPad all night.
Marco:
So that's obviously something you don't want to encourage.
Marco:
So we have certain hour bounds that you can't use the iPad between X and Y. And also, YouTube in particular is the only remaining thing that we actually have a limit of.
Marco:
I believe it's one hour a day that it's currently set to.
Marco:
This is not maybe the best reason in the world, but this is the reason we have.
Marco:
I felt like watching YouTube was very passive of an activity, and I would rather he play a video game where he's doing something than just watch YouTube for hours and hours and hours.
Marco:
I also didn't feel like there was enough good, high-quality content for him to watch on YouTube to consume many hours a day.
Marco:
And there are times like weekends where sometimes, you know, if it's like a rainy weekend day, he might be on his iPad for many hours that day.
Marco:
And so we didn't want to, you know, it was important to me to limit YouTube to help promote more active or more creative activities like games or drawing or whatever.
John:
Do you ever think about what it'd be like when you were a kid if your parents tried to limit you to one hour of TV a day?
John:
And I'm speaking as someone whose parents did try to do that.
John:
And boy, it was like there was no technology to do that.
John:
But I'm saying parenting wise, it seemed like really kind of, you know, swimming upstream.
John:
All of my parents' draconian TV limits, they lasted for a little while, but eventually they gave in because kids whined just too much.
Marco:
I mean, I think what it came down to back then is there was really not a good way for our parents to easily limit that.
Marco:
As you said, here we can do it pretty easily with screen time.
Marco:
Can we?
Marco:
Oh, no.
Marco:
Now, screen time, it has a bunch of weird little gaps.
Marco:
As far as I know, there's not many totally egregious ones.
Marco:
Although there is one that I wish they would have an option to turn off.
Marco:
There is this concept of one more minute.
Marco:
If you're past your time limit on an app or on the iPad in general, if you try to launch an app, it'll show this big white, you know, screen time, you know, you're out of time screen.
Marco:
And there's a button at the bottom to like, you know, enter the screen time passcode if you want to extend or you can ask for more time, which sends your parents a notification and you can approve it remotely.
Marco:
But there's also this button that says one more minute.
Marco:
every limit you have exceeded, you're allowed to hit the one more minute button to get one more minute of that particular app for that interval.
Marco:
Suppose we are trying to watch a movie, you know, me and Tiff, we're trying to watch a movie right after, you know, we want to start like right after he goes to bed.
Marco:
Sometimes in order to facilitate this, we will offer him 15 minutes of YouTube time on his iPad in bed and then we'll go, you know, pick it up at that, you know, after that point and usually he'll be asleep.
Marco:
But if we don't set a timer, but we think, okay, well, he's past the limit.
Marco:
It'll only be 15 minutes.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
The one more minute hack works individually with every app.
Marco:
And he might have like 30 apps or more.
Marco:
So what he'll do is he'll do the one more minute, YouTube or whatever first.
Marco:
And then when that runs out, he'll go do one minute or something else.
Marco:
Then when that runs out, he'll go do one minute or something else.
Marco:
And he'll go through.
Marco:
Oh, my word.
Marco:
And so you can easily have like a half hour of extended iPad time beyond what your parents thought you were able to do because you just keep hitting one more minute.
Marco:
So that's that's one issue.
Marco:
But anyway, so as far as I know, I don't think there's any other giant holes.
Marco:
If you say YouTube... Oh, no, there is.
Marco:
Well, please don't tell him.
Marco:
But anyway, so... He'll find them on YouTube.
Marco:
Don't worry.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
So the other day, and he's a very honest kid.
Marco:
He doesn't lie and hide stuff.
Marco:
So the other day, he said, I found a way around my YouTube time limit.
Marco:
It doesn't work very well, and it's slow.
Marco:
Do you want me to tell you about it?
Marco:
Now, what would you say if your kid says, first of all, the honesty of this kid is awesome.
Marco:
He doesn't just sneak around and do it.
Marco:
He's so excited that he found a way around it that he wants to share the information.
Casey:
but we're obviously obviously you know a nerd family here everything's open source right but so what so what yeah what would you do if your kid asks i found a way around this do you want me to tell you about it yeah unquestionably yes i would like you to tell me but first and more importantly i really really really appreciate the fact that you were honest about it and you're not hiding this from me you know that that's really really important you're putting that idea into that you mean i could have hidden it oh gosh yeah well it's hard
Casey:
Parenting is hard.
Casey:
But no, I mean, I think that's, I would say yes, please.
Casey:
But, you know, it's really important to me that you understand that I appreciate the fact that you were honest about it.
Marco:
I, of course, had to ask him a clarifying question.
Marco:
Because I said, I'm like, all right, well, hold on a second.
Marco:
If you're using a way around the limit, there's two things you could be doing here, one of which is bad.
Marco:
I don't want you going around limits in order to see something you shouldn't be seeing.
Marco:
That's bad.
Marco:
But if you're cheating the system to just get more time, that's fine.
Marco:
And I said, no, don't tell me because I'm like, I'm like my job as as your parent is to try to impose reasonable limits.
Marco:
And your job as a tech savvy kid is to try to find ways around them.
Marco:
And if I figure out what you're doing and I close the loophole, then that's too bad for you.
Marco:
But I'm like, I actually don't want to know yet.
Marco:
okay that was a few weeks ago meanwhile i was like what's he doing like i'm like i was like i locked down i took off safari figuring like if there's some website that's like re-hosting youtube videos on their own domain maybe he's watching it because normally you know the youtube.com domain is protected via the associated app domains thing so that's protected already and i'm like and web views are protected and i'm like okay so what what could he possibly be doing um so i we took safari off and and i was trying to figure out like what's he doing how's he getting around this
Marco:
you know some other app maybe like is he watching stuff like somehow like is netflix on his ipad i don't even know i don't i don't think so you know like i was trying to figure out what this was the other day i see him watching a video and he has this big smile on his face he's looking at me he's like do you want to know how i'm doing
Marco:
I will tell you, it is not anything to do with watching on a different domain or watching in Safari or watching in a web view.
Marco:
What's your guess?
Casey:
So I had heard, I think a couple of years ago now, that kids would iMessage each other and they would use the little postage stamp player within iMessage, you know, the rich preview, if you will.
Casey:
in order to watch the video there, which sounds freaking terrible.
Casey:
But, you know, if you're a kid, you don't really care.
John:
That's amazing.
John:
Yeah, that was the main exploit.
John:
Here's the reason it was a great exploit.
John:
It's because for kids who had phones, very often and sensibly, the parents would make iMessage
John:
one of the apps that's enabled 24 hours in case you could need to text you and you can lock it down to say hey they can only text family members but they would text themselves and from within mess because they're in the family and from within the message they texted themselves oh yeah there it is you could get you could get actually a full-size player eventually i think they might have closed that one but that was one of the most popular ones was texting yourself links to youtube videos you wanted to see after everything locked down you could do that even after downtime lockdown everything like the whole like
John:
Everything on the phone is off except for a specifically set allow list of people that you can send messages to.
John:
And that is limited to only your family.
John:
Boy, this phone is so locked down.
John:
I'm sure there's no way they can get.
John:
No, they would just message themselves because they're part of the family.
John:
That's awesome.
John:
The second one that the chat room is talking about is.
John:
tons of very often not particularly great applications uh have ways for you to get to youtube from within the application someone in the chat room said it was a periodic table application like a chemistry class you could get to youtube from within you're like oh yeah you can use the periodic table application as much as you want no time limits on that and then you can get to youtube from that and lots of apps had a way to do that basically by having you know an embedded web view and
John:
that is using an older technology that's not stopped by screen time that was the other common exploit is you can stop the youtube app and you can stop the youtube domain in safari but you don't know what other apps are doing especially older cruddy education apps that may be part of their school the word gets around hey if you you know in the school's periodic table app you can watch youtube forever
John:
That's also not what he was doing.
John:
Don't tell him about those because they're probably still open.
John:
That's the thing that I learned when I was learning about all these things.
John:
These are exploits.
John:
You can't do anything about them as a parent, like technologically speaking.
John:
And Apple's probably not going to close them because they're not that big a deal.
John:
That's kind of my meta position on this entire thing is technology can help you do stuff like this, but in the end...
John:
enforcement of parental limits is exactly the same as it has ever been, which is it's a fantasy, you know, not a fantasy.
John:
It's a it's a sort of a contract between true people.
John:
And yes, there are tools that can help with it, like clocks and doors and houses and, you know, screen time limits.
John:
But in the end, it is a sort of
John:
a relationship negotiation between parent and child.
John:
And it doesn't really matter how many tools are in the mix there.
John:
And so rather than framing it as a technological chicken egg race, which is a fun thing to do or whatever, like in the end, the actual limits you're dealing with are the same limits that you say, like, you know, a curfew.
John:
curfew doesn't cause a giant metal claw to come and grab your kid at 11 30 p.m.
John:
and bring them back to your house curfew is just a thing that you tell your kid and no technology is going to change whether they you know come in on their curfew or not you can see where their location is and find my friends or whatever that does not make them come home any faster what makes them come home is the relationship of trust you've hopefully built with your kid and an agreement that 11 30 p.m.
John:
is a reasonable time when we all agree that that's when you're going to come home
Casey:
Yeah, I'm trying to think of what Adam could be using to do this.
Marco:
Yeah, so I remember how he described it was it doesn't work very well and it's slow.
John:
He needs to get better exploits because the ones I just described didn't have that problem.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
I was thinking, like, it's slow.
Marco:
Is he, like, somehow transcoding the video from some other?
Casey:
Yeah, I was going to say, has he got, like, ISH and is YouTube downloading it or something?
Marco:
Yeah, is he, like, running shortcuts to, like, pull the video with a shortcut and then convert?
Marco:
I'd, like,
John:
He's doing share play from a different machine.
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
That would probably also work, by the way, Adam.
John:
Don't tell him.
Marco:
Good thing he doesn't listen.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I don't know what he was doing.
Marco:
So this is so adorable.
Marco:
He was screen recording them as they play, making his own copies to save in his photo roll.
Casey:
So he was transcoding them.
Marco:
And he says, then I just watch them again after I haven't seen it in like a month.
Marco:
So I forget what happens.
Hmm.
John:
oh my word this is an efficient use of resources i mean don't you pay for the youtube premium where he can just download them in the youtube app yes i mean it might be harder to get them out of the youtube app so but screen recording like that's given that that's a tool that kids surprising the number of kids know about like i can't remember if i have ever screen recorded my ios device but once i think word gets around among kids that this is a thing that you can do for a
John:
And that becomes a tool they use to do everything.
John:
Like, for example, my daughter does not know about saving images.
John:
Anytime she sees an image that she wants on her screen on her iPhone, she screenshots it.
John:
And I keep telling her, that's not full resolution, but she doesn't care.
John:
She doesn't care.
John:
It's got all the Chrome.
John:
It's got your status bar.
John:
You know, she doesn't care.
John:
I'm like, you know, you can just hold your finger on it and hit save image.
John:
It's like, nope, screenshot.
John:
So I feel like screen recording YouTube is right in that same alley of like, hey, I know about screenshots.
John:
I know about screen recording.
John:
And if there's something that I see on my screen that I want, if it's stationary, screenshot.
John:
And if it's not stationary, screen capture or screen recording.
Marco:
Home taping is ruining YouTube.
Casey:
That's very clever.
Casey:
I have to give him credit.
Casey:
That is very, very clever.
Casey:
Not fast, but very clever.
Marco:
And it's it's such like the perfect kid solution.
Marco:
The problem is it's like it's something that, you know, I was thinking way too technically and way too sophisticated.
Marco:
And it's like, no, this is actually an ingenious thing that I would I would never have thought to look for this or I would never have considered this possibility because like I have adult brain.
Marco:
I'm thinking of like adult ways to do it that are totally different.
Marco:
You know, he's like, no, you just do this.
Marco:
And I just watch it again later.
John:
It's like a VCR for your whole iPad.
John:
Anything you see on your screen, you can just record it.
John:
life streams life streams no that's it and the thing is like i don't know how many resources it's taking obviously he's got like hand-me-down ipads ipads that probably have lots of storage in them but then in terms of it being slow it's like is the frame rate the same it's recompressing it it's like well and he has icloud photo library he's on the he's on the family icloud plan so like the storage space doesn't matter yeah yeah he's on the family plan slowly filling it's like it seems like adam's using a lot of data lately what are all these things that's
John:
Adam's photo library is a terabyte.
John:
You should see if he's like naming them, like putting metadata on them.
John:
Or is it just a question of you look at the thumbnails and find it because the thumbnails won't.
John:
I guess that YouTube, the practice is putting text in the thumbnail.
John:
So he's probably you don't need anything except for just to be able to see the, you know, the little video thumbnail.
Marco:
Well, and also, and like, I don't, like, I thought, you know, after he told me he was so proud and I'm so proud of him for figuring that out.
Marco:
And I'm like, I don't think I have a problem with that.
Marco:
I talked to Tiff.
Marco:
I'm like, I think that's okay because he's like, he's just making better use of the YouTube time he already has.
Marco:
He's not getting more new video time.
Marco:
So I'm like, I don't think this is actually even a problem that I need to do anything about.
Marco:
Like, I'm just going to let him keep doing it.
John:
And obviously YouTube, on the topic of YouTube time limits, YouTube,
John:
is obviously way more scary than television was when we were kids.
John:
But it is very analogous in that there is actually tons of value to be had on television or on YouTube, just as there was on TV.
John:
There's also way, way more garbage and scary things as well.
John:
And that's what comes down to a question of your kid.
John:
It's like, well, I'd rather I'm doing something creative like playing a game.
John:
But what if he was watching a video learning how to do math, which obviously is a ridiculously fantasy scenario like, oh, my kid is going to choose to watch videos about math.
John:
You'd be surprised what kids get up to.
John:
I am always surprised when my kids tell me, hey, I learned about X, Y, and Z because of a video I watched.
John:
Now, granted, it was between 100 other videos that are just junk food for your brain and hopefully not a bunch of Nazis preaching to them.
John:
right so it's scary and i'm not saying don't monitor i'm not saying like don't you know be careful about it but there is tons of value to be had way more i was i had to watch pbs and there was like three shows that i liked and they were on like once a week and if it was a crappy episode of frontline i was just gonna skip it and they are
John:
uphill both ways in the snow right yeah educationally youtube has so i still watch them i watch when i went down the sr 71 rabbit hole and i'm watching all those uh real engineering videos where the irish guy tells me about uh fusion and stuff like there's so much i would have killed for this as a kid right and you know they're a varying quality but a lot of them are entertaining engaging to kids that's why you get kids who are like oh yeah no i know all about the war of 1812 because i saw an animated youtube video about it
John:
Like you voluntarily watch an hour and a half video on the war of 1812.
John:
It's like, yeah, it's stick figures.
John:
And it was funny that does happen.
John:
Yeah.
John:
That's part of what he's watching.
John:
Yeah.
John:
As I'm saying.
John:
So like, I do feel like, uh, one hour of YouTube is probably insufficient.
John:
And also I would say mindlessly playing an infinite runner or like plants versus zombies is less stimulating than watching the video about the war of 1812, uh,
John:
But better than watching the video about, you know, becoming a Nazi or white supremacist or whatever.
John:
Right.
John:
So it's dangerous.
John:
But I feel like YouTube is basically television for these kids.
John:
And it is a television that has higher highs, lower lows, obviously, but also higher highs than our TV did.
John:
Like we just have to watch reruns of Happy Days, which was not intellectually stimulating.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm trying to think, like, you know, when I was a kid, like, I was mostly, when I was watching TV, I was mostly watching, like, you know, Saturday morning cartoons, you know, a lot of, like, you know, Ninja Turtles and, you know, Animaniacs and that kind of stuff.
Marco:
And it's like, I don't know how much value that has.
John:
Did either one of you watch the Computer Chronicles?
John:
Because I think that's a great example.
John:
Yes.
John:
No.
John:
I think I did.
John:
or or motor week casey must have watched that right i still watch it are you kidding i watch it every week there you go all right so here's two shows they were obscure they were on pbs stations but it was like do you mean there's something on tv about computers you bet your butt i would watch computer chronicles i would record computer chronicles on my vcr by programming it to record if i wasn't going to be home for it because it was literally the only time there would ever be anything on television that was about a thing that i was interested in computers and
John:
youtube has everything anyone is interested in you're interested in model trains you're interested in doing makeups you're interested in in building your own canoe out of whatever you're interested in it is on youtube it is an amazing cornucopia of stuff and kids are curious about things and they have their own interests and they can find things about that on youtube and i feel like allowing kids to
John:
An age-appropriate amount of access to that, like, I think is one of the better things that you can, you know, facilitate your children to discover.
John:
You know, if they're not finding the good content, help them find it.
John:
If they're wasting their time watching things that you think aren't useful, give them the time that they need to do that to just be kids the same way we watch garbage stuff or whatever.
John:
But...
John:
uh if you're if you're viewing youtube as a universal evil i think that's the wrong way to look at it tiktok maybe jury style but even on tiktok there'll be some person who's up on screen giving you a musical rant about the war of 1812 like it could happen but i think tiktok is a little bit more garbagey and by the way uh kids discovering youtube the next much worse stage is them discovering tiktok so watch for that oh marco's on tiktok he knows all about it yeah and i i get a lot of information on tiktok and some of it's even true yeah sometimes