Umbrella Hammer Toadstool
John:
Oh, hang on.
John:
I forgot.
John:
Hang on a second.
John:
I'll be back in a moment.
John:
Where are you going?
John:
We just started.
John:
I know.
John:
I have to turn off the air conditioner.
John:
I'm looking at my levels.
John:
I'm like, why is there?
John:
Why is there a little thing?
Casey:
That's why Marco has iZotope.
John:
It's fine.
John:
I'm going to go turn it off.
John:
I always turn it off.
John:
I'll be back in a second.
Marco:
I know exactly how the air conditioner looks in the frequency graph because it has this low, you know, whenever the compressor is running.
Marco:
And you can see there's this bright orange line right like at 60 hertz.
Marco:
Mmm.
Marco:
And then you see it cycle on for a while, and then it's off for a while, and then it cycles back on.
Casey:
I'm back.
Casey:
My brother-in-law and sister-in-law, their air conditioner in their townhouse...
Casey:
figuratively exploded the other day and um they were lent a uh in window what do you call it ac unit like john has everywhere and they were saying in the defense of john syracuse and your ridiculous air conditioning setup that you know the modern uh in in window units aside from the fact that it's put in the window via duct tape and like cardboard leaving that aside they actually throw a whole lot of very very cold air
Marco:
oh they're very strong like they're they're not you know they're super you know big and ugly and oftentimes loud um and nowhere near as efficient often as although actually the new ones are actually pretty efficient but um yeah they are uh they they do actually function as air conditioners considerably well if you're willing to let them
John:
Well, I have to warn you, I've bought many in-window air conditioners.
John:
There are definitely good ones and bad ones.
John:
It's hard to tell.
John:
It's definitely not weight-based, I can tell you that, because I have some very heavy ones that are just not great.
John:
If I could look, the one that's in our room now is, I think it was like a wire cutter pick or whatever, and it is by far the most powerful.
John:
But we have like, for example, the one in my son's room.
John:
I got them like one of those quiet ones, and it's quiet, but it's like one-third as good as the non-quiet one in terms of cooling.
John:
So I guess it depends on what your priorities are.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I still think, as we mentioned, I don't know, it was a couple months ago, I think, that we went around with John about this.
Casey:
But I still maintain mini splits all the way, John.
Marco:
Yeah, frankly, that is the best option.
Marco:
And you want to destroy your house, sure.
Casey:
They're professionals.
Casey:
They do this for a living.
Casey:
They're not going to destroy your house.
John:
Little people around here have them, and you can see all the houses.
John:
They look like something like an Aliens movie with all the tubing going around for the little refrigerant lines.
John:
And then inside the house, you've got a bunch of giant things on your wall.
John:
And there's no place for them on the inside of my walls, and I don't want all the tubes on the outside.
John:
And also, on top of that, on my stupid property, there's not even any place for the fan thingy.
Marco:
You know, there's also holes in your house and stuff on your walls for electricity, right?
John:
No, there's one hole in my house for electricity.
John:
And there's outlets on the wall that are very small.
John:
And in my house, they're very sparse.
Marco:
I guess that's true.
Marco:
You don't have that many.
Marco:
And, you know, there's things like we've decided that it's nice to have water and plumbing in the house.
Marco:
And so we make a hole inside of the house to allow pipes in.
Marco:
We also have all these things in the house that emit water.
John:
And my water and my gas come in underground.
John:
So those are holes in the basement.
John:
They're still holes.
John:
But the mini splits, you've got to have a refrigerant line going to wherever you have one.
John:
I see them on people's houses.
John:
They look so bad.
John:
Even when you try to paint them, it just looks like a bunch of bulging veins all over people's houses.
Yeah.
Marco:
i'm just saying the the point you know we we are willing to make exceptions to the aesthetic purity of our houses in order to achieve essential services so if you feel that cooling is an essential service amen brother i'm i'm doing that with window units and i think it is a less of a less of a permanent damaging of the house uh and it does just fine oh my god
Casey:
All right, let's start with some follow-up.
Casey:
Let's talk about the M2 MacBook Air, which, surprise, surprise, thermal throttles.
Casey:
But it's still better than the M1 MacBook Air, which is pretty exciting.
Casey:
So there's been reviews.
Casey:
Actually, the first shipments happened yesterday as we record.
Casey:
We are recording on the evening of Saturday the 16th.
Casey:
And some people were lucky enough to receive some of theirs, although I haven't personally seen too much of that.
Casey:
But the reviews are up.
Casey:
Jason Snell, I'm sorry, just Jason, at Six Colors put up a great review.
Casey:
There's a great review at The Verge.
Casey:
I read Gruber's review, which I thought was very, very good as well, just earlier today.
Casey:
So yeah, apparently it's pretty freaking great, all things considered.
John:
not as great as the m1 macbook air though i mean this is the thing we talked about with the m2 the m2 macbook pro with all its weirdness being in the old case and having the touch bar and not having mag safe and then we got on talking about the single chip ssd that's half the speed of when you have two chips and that's a problem and of course the potential for thermal throttling there which still seems fuzzy to me but anyway macbook air is out now and in the reviews
John:
it seems pretty clear that it throttles everybody who's done even the most casual tests.
John:
And what they're testing it against, by the way, is they're testing it against the M2 MacBook Pro.
John:
So it's basically like the same chip, but with a fan and without a fan.
John:
And the one with a fan does better than the one without a fan on the same tests.
John:
And thermal throttling is the obvious thing to blame.
John:
And it makes sense.
John:
You know, one of them has a fan, one of them doesn't.
John:
There was a teardown of the M2 MacBook Air.
John:
And there's not much going on in there cooling for cooling other than like thermal pads and stuff.
John:
I just want to say, like, there's no magic inside there.
John:
There's not some exotic cooling solution.
John:
There's no liquid metal cooling like in the PlayStation 5.
John:
It's just thermal pads and stuff.
John:
And so, yeah, it's a tougher thermal environment.
John:
This is not what I think is an issue with the M2 MacBook Air, because...
John:
if you're going to have a machine that's going to sacrifice you know thermals for having for being fanless make it this one because most people are never going to thermal throttle because they're not buying an m2 macbook air so they can you know export 8k video on it right not what the machine is made for um so i think this is exactly the right choice i would definitely prefer to have no fan and have it thermal throttle on their max load than the reverse because there's the whole point of the the real macbook pro line not the not the m2 macbook pro with
John:
The whole point of that is those are the ones that are bigger and thicker and have fans and are high performance and blah, blah, blah.
John:
And these ones, even though they're very powerful, not intended for that purpose.
John:
They're supposed to be slim and light, and fanlessness is an incredibly valuable feature to me, and I think most people like it.
John:
And even if they don't even know about it, even if they don't care that it's fanless, it's just one less thing to go wrong.
John:
Less cat hair, less bugs, less everything that's being sucked through that case all the time.
John:
So I think that's great.
John:
But...
John:
the the base storage is slow right so it's only got the one chip and so it's got the same gotcha as the m2 macbook pro and the m2 macbook pro has all sorts of reasons to avoid it the m2 macbook air would be nice if it didn't but it does don't buy the base model m2 macbook air because it has very slow ssd as compared to the one that has two chips which is a shame
Marco:
Well, I mean, I would clarify that.
Marco:
Don't buy the base model storage because it's not enough space.
Marco:
It isn't like this is going to feel like a hard drive.
Marco:
It's not.
Marco:
It's still one SSD and it's going to be very, very fast and you're not going to really notice unless you're doing some very specific things.
Marco:
And if you are doing those specific things, you probably need more space.
Marco:
256 is very very small it is likely to irritate you if unless you know exactly that you really don't need more than that like if you if you are currently on a computer that has 256 and you are not slamming against it then fine maybe you can have it but i would say for literally anybody else get 512 and in fact
Marco:
I was listening to the Six Colors member special live stream where Jason and Dan Morin were going through different questions.
Marco:
And I totally agree with what their conclusion was.
Marco:
First of all, you should become a Six Colors member so you can hear this as well, as well as other great content.
Marco:
And I love their subscriber podcast.
Marco:
But anyway, if you can't afford to update the storage to 5.12 on that low-end MacBook Air,
Marco:
maybe get the m1 macbook air instead and use the savings to get 512 on that that's how important that is and how much of a pain in the butt that is likely to be for you in the future because you can't ever upgrade the storage you should get what you can now because you don't really have a choice later and 512 is what almost everybody should get at least
John:
So related to this, I guess this is related to both the M2 MacBook Pro and the M2 MacBook Air, because they both have the one chip and they both suffer from the slow speeds because of it.
John:
If you get the one chip model, the 256 gig SSD, and you also get the base RAM, eight gigs of RAM,
John:
When you do anything that pushes these machines into swap, the slow SSD punishes the swapping, much more so in other computers.
John:
So in a lot of the tests that I saw in the MaxTech YouTube channel, they would do the M.2 MacBook Pro or M.2 MacBook Air.
John:
versus another computer with similar specs with the bigger SSD.
John:
And they were very similar until you push one of them into swap, and they were doing it by just opening Chrome tabs, as most people would do.
John:
And it didn't take much to push it into swap.
John:
They'd say, okay, here it is without Chrome running, and they're about the same speed, and here it is with Chrome up and with 10 tabs, which I don't think is unreasonable, but, you know, that's me.
John:
Well, you wouldn't, yeah.
John:
But still, I feel like you could find yourself pretty quickly in a situation where you have Chrome with 10 tabs open and it just destroys performance because as soon as you get close to swap, now your performance is dependent on that SSD speed and the SSD is slower.
John:
On top of that, Ars Technica review, did I put the link in there?
John:
I should put it in.
John:
Anyway, the Ars Technica review of the M2 MacBook Air shows that even if you get the one terabyte model,
John:
The SSD is slower in some circumstances than the one in the M1 MacBook Air.
John:
Why?
John:
I don't know.
John:
But you can look at their tests, right?
John:
It's slower in read, but it was faster in write.
John:
And that doesn't make sense because there's two chips in both of them.
John:
Maybe they went to a different vendor.
John:
Maybe there's something else we don't know.
John:
So the M1 MacBook Air, like we were praising that machine to high heaven ages ago because it basically didn't have any downsides.
John:
Now, with the advent of the M2 MacBook Air, the downside that it has is there's an alternative with MagSafe, right?
John:
So it has dimmed the shining light of the M1 MacBook Air a tiny bit.
John:
But beyond that, the M1 MacBook Air is still a phenomenal machine.
John:
So if you want to save money, get that one.
John:
oh and speaking of the ssds so here's the official spokesperson so this is from the verge and the verge has a policy now of naming that they put the name of the person who speaks to them do you remember when the verge posted their thing like we have a new policy no more on background yeah yeah no more just saying apple says that's honestly that's a good policy i like that
John:
Yeah, but anyway, get to people that know people's names now.
John:
So here it is.
John:
Apple spokesperson Michelle DiRio provided the following statement on the SSD speed of the base model MacBook Air.
John:
So this is Apple's spin on the fact that they've got one chip in there, and it's slower.
John:
Thanks to the performance increases of M2, the new MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro are incredibly fast, even compared to Mac laptops with the powerful M1 chip.
John:
These new systems use a higher-density NAND that delivers 256-gigabyte storage using a single chip.
John:
While benchmarks of the 256 gigabyte SSD may show a difference compared to the previous generation, the performance of these M2-based systems for real-world activities are even faster.
Marco:
So what they're saying is... I love that those two things don't follow from each other.
John:
Well, they're saying it's smaller.
John:
Look, it's higher density.
John:
It's like, yep, it's one chip.
John:
No, we get it, right?
John:
Right.
John:
But they're basically saying it's slower if you benchmark just the storage, but if you do a real-world task, it's faster.
John:
And that's borne out by most of the benchmarks.
John:
If you compare the M2 MacBook Air versus the M1 MacBook Air, if you don't push it to swap, even if the M2 MacBook Air throttles, it still usually tends to beat the M1 MacBook Air.
John:
But the swap factor is the, you know, the big thing.
John:
Like, if you're not doing a disk benchmark, like, I don't care, I just don't care about real-world tasks.
John:
But you might be doing a real-world task while having literally anything else open, or like you're waiting for a job to finish and you're browsing the web and it's slaughtering your performance, making it significantly slower than the M1 model.
John:
Something to think about.
John:
So...
John:
Again, I don't think this is that big of a deal because most people won't notice this.
John:
If you only ever use it for email and web browsing and sending people messages and stuff, you're probably fine no matter what.
John:
So don't freak out about this.
John:
But for those in the know, do not get the base model of the M2 MacBook Air.
John:
Do not get the base model of the M2 MacBook Pro or probably any model of the M2 MacBook Pro.
John:
Unless you're really interested in battery life.
John:
That's another thing that came up.
John:
The M2 MacBook Pro does have bigger batteries.
John:
Again, at the sacrifice of MagSafe and you have a touch bar and yada yada.
John:
And we'll talk a little bit more about Touch Bar later, believe it or not.
Marco:
It's Touch Bar news somehow.
Marco:
I think, you know, it's important, I think, to put all this in context, though.
Marco:
These machines like, you know, this is Apple's cheapest series of laptops.
Marco:
You know, I guess I know they're still selling the old ones.
Marco:
That's why I'm saying series, you know, the MacBook Air series.
Marco:
This is their cheapest series of laptops.
Marco:
And to get significantly higher pro-level stuff, it does cost significantly more money.
Marco:
So you're looking at something that's in the $1,200 to $1,500 price range in most configurations people are going to be buying.
Marco:
And when you compare that to the differences between the low-end and high-end products 10 years ago, or maybe even five years ago...
Marco:
There were vast differences, and you'd buy the low-end product, and it would actually feel slow right from day one.
Marco:
These machines are not like that.
Marco:
The gap between how these feel and how they perform in almost every task that almost everybody does, between the base models of the cheapest MacBook Air you can get, even the base model M1 version, even that,
Marco:
Or heck, let's hobble the SSD.
Marco:
The base model M2 version.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
The cheapest model of that.
Marco:
Compare that to the top of the line Mac Studio.
Marco:
And in almost every kind of task that most people do, you won't even feel a difference between those two products.
Marco:
Except, you know, one has a loud fan.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And the other one has a very small screen.
Marco:
But otherwise, the difference between the low end and the high end is pretty much not noticeable anymore for a vast quantity of tasks.
Marco:
And you can't just say, oh, well, now I'm a developer, so I will notice everything.
Marco:
I must have the absolute highest everything, maxed out everything, just so I can do my development work.
Marco:
Nope, don't need it.
Marco:
I mean, it helps.
Marco:
It might make certain things a little bit faster.
Marco:
But the difference, like if you haven't used one of these M1 or M2 based machines yet, you might be overthinking how much these upgrades will matter for you.
Marco:
And in reality, these are so fast at almost everything, you don't even know what you're in for.
Marco:
If you're really stressing about not being able to afford or justify certain spec improvements...
Marco:
don't get them you probably don't need them like you know storage space is one thing because that's something that you kind of can't you know mess around too much with um ram is a little tricky because the the ssd and bus subsystems on these are so fast that if you do have to swap here and there it's a lot less of a hit than it used to be in terms of noticeability and performance in most workloads and
Marco:
And you only really need like the really high core count pro and max chips or the really high core count GPUs if you're doing workloads that really do stress those things.
Marco:
And most workloads don't.
Marco:
Even things that we used to call pro.
Marco:
Like if you're doing photo editing, development work, even a lot of types of video editing, like, you know, the more like maybe more casual style video editing.
Marco:
most of that you're you're not going to notice much of a difference between the cheapest laptop they sell and the most expensive desktop they sell these days like that's how that's how great all these are so if you need to make a tough decision about what specs or what model to get you kind of can't go wrong with any of these except the m2 macbook pro don't get that
Marco:
But with the exception of pretty much everything else, they're all great.
Marco:
They're all amazing machines.
Marco:
They're all good dogs, Brent.
Marco:
Even the very cheapest one of these laptops is going to be significantly better than you think it is.
John:
Although I would say that the thing that some regular people do, like if you're doing anything else like a batch job, like where you set it to do something and it shows a progress where and you go have dinner.
John:
Like if you literally do anything like that ever, depend if you get one of the ones with the single chip and eight gigs of RAM.
John:
it can end up being like twice as slow as an M2 MacBook Air was with the two chips because it's like a disk bound task or it pushes into swap, but like very easily.
John:
Now, if you don't have anything to compare that to, are you comparing it to an Intel thing?
John:
Yeah, it'll still be fast, but it is a shame to know that you buy this fancy new machine, especially if you're like upgrading from an M1 model or something and you expect it to be faster and it goes half the speed because you're swapping and the SSD kills it.
John:
So I would still keep that in mind.
John:
If you ever do anything that has a progress bar that you're impatiently waiting for that takes more than like, you know,
John:
10 minutes or whatever and it's not that hard to do that you won't notice the difference while you're editing the video you're in iMovie you're moving things around everything's fine it's when you do like export or you know send it to youtube or whatever that type of thing that takes a while to run you don't want that to run at half the speed of an m1 macbook air and you could find yourself in that situation
John:
If you're not careful with the base config.
John:
So I'll throw that in there on you.
John:
Since you mentioned the Mac studio and the fans, I just want to give you an update on that.
John:
Uh, for people who haven't heard past episodes, I got the Mac studio.
John:
I don't like fan noise.
John:
I put it on the desk.
John:
I decided I can still hear the fan.
John:
So I bought this, uh, 3d printed plastic cage from Etsy that exactly fits the Mac studio.
John:
And I stuck it to the underside of my desk.
John:
This is not my desk.
John:
My wife does stuck into the underside of her desk.
John:
Uh,
John:
And I have to say, that solution, it is 100% silent.
John:
Like, even if I try really hard to hear the fan, I can't.
John:
If I'm sitting at the desk and literally everything else in the entire neighborhood is quiet, not just everything in my house is quiet, but I need things in the neighborhood to be quiet, I can maybe pick it up.
John:
So...
John:
And as we know, the Mac Studio, no matter what you do to it, the Mac Studio with the M1 Max chip in it, no matter what you do to it, the fans never get any faster.
John:
So it is effectively silent.
John:
So now it is not only silent, but also invisible because it's not on my wife's desk anymore.
John:
She just has the Apple Studio display with cables that go down the back and a keyboard and a mouse.
John:
That's her whole computer.
John:
It's like an iMac without the iMac inside it, you know.
John:
Stuck to the bottom of her desk is this little thing, but it's completely out of sight and out of mind.
John:
So I'm pretty happy with the solution.
John:
I was nervous about the 3D printed cage, you know, getting stress fractures or cracking because I don't know how strong this 3D printed plastic is.
John:
So I did actually get some safety straps.
John:
for the thing sent by i would have yeah sent by a listener to adp especially since that's a place where my dog goes she stays under there a lot like under that desk and just kind of snoozes down there i don't want a mac studio falling on her right that's a heavy thing two feet away but yeah it's i wouldn't anyway
John:
So I got some safety straps.
John:
I'll put a link in the show notes.
John:
These things that a listener to the show sent me, they're like perfect for this application.
John:
I was wondering what I was going to buy for this and I got these things and they're absolutely perfect.
John:
They're overkill.
John:
They're metal cables with metal eyelets at the end.
John:
But yeah, I just put a bunch of those across and screwed them in.
John:
So now I've got belt and suspenders for that Mac Studio.
John:
all right so to go back to the m2 macbook air you teased a little bit about a teardown so what was going on in max tech's tear down they tore it down and i what they do on that channel always fascinates me because yeah so they're going to crack the machine open you know it's a thing you do like they're a lot of they a lot of these things are not easy to take apart or you take it apart once and that's it but they tore it apart before they did their thermal testing
John:
It's like, do the thermal testing first.
John:
You're invalidating all of your work.
John:
Why?
John:
Because now all you're doing is testing how well you put the thing back together.
John:
And let me tell you, when you take this thing apart and strip it down to like so you can see the M2 chip on there, it's never going back to the way it was.
John:
If you look at how it is, like the motherboard is covered with this, covered on like both sides with a full length like thermal pad sticker with thicker thermal pads in different places plus, you know, thermal paste on top of the M2.
John:
it's a mess in there but anyway you should watch the tear down video if you want to see what it's like and why you should never do what they did it's just you know but like i said it's not it's not exotic it's thermal pads have you ever seen the little pads that they use them in the consoles a lot right it's it's fairly cheap it's just some material that spreads the heat and it spreads it to these little metal plates that are inside there there may be like a very thin vapor chamber thing but according to their test when you look at it with like one of those ir cameras
John:
the heat spreader is not spreading the heat much.
John:
The hot spot on the thermal camera is the M2, and it spreads a little bit or whatever.
John:
But that seems to be adequate for it to do okay thermal throttling on the extreme conditions, and I think that's fine for their lowest-end laptop, and I definitely appreciate it not having a fan.
John:
Oh, and then one more thing they found in the teardown is they found what they say.
John:
I haven't confirmed this or anything, but they found what they think is an ultra-wideband chip in the M2 MacBook Air.
John:
And I think that would be the first ultra-wideband chip in a Mac.
John:
Do you recall?
Marco:
I thought all of the Apple Silicon series models had one, but I could be misremembering.
John:
Well, anyway, I don't think there's any application for ultra-wideband in the Mac yet.
John:
Airdrop.
John:
Unlike the phones where they have the thing where you could be close to somebody and the airdrop and stuff, like whatever they made up before the AirTags were out.
John:
Yeah, so...
John:
This makes me think of the previous rumor about AirPods, you know, going away from Bluetooth and moving to ultra-wideband for audio for a bunch of reasons.
John:
It'll be, you know, better, more efficient, lower power, better bandwidth for lossless audio, and, you know, hopefully better in all the ways that Bluetooth is bad.
John:
So we'll see.
John:
We'll see if anything comes of that.
John:
But just sort of throw that out there.
John:
We'll probably follow up in the coming months whether that really is an ultra-wideband chip.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
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Casey:
Tell me about what happens when somebody changes their phone number.
Casey:
This was based on an Ask ATP from last week, if I'm not mistaken.
John:
Yeah, that was my frustration at having lots of contact info for people.
John:
But then when I initiate a form of contact, say, for example, I want to share a funny thing that I see on the web with the share.
John:
You know, I'm on my phone and I want to use a little share icon, the box with the arrow pointing up.
John:
and i go share and if the person i want to share to isn't in the recent ones like the little thing that shows their face and like messages or whatever i have to hit the messages icon and then you have to type their name so i want to share it with my son and he's not visible in the recent so i hit messages i type the first few letters of his name and it auto completes to his name and next to his name is his phone number and i never want to send him messages to his phone number i always want to send them to his apple id and
John:
And no matter how many times I go over to that line and click the little chevron and go pick the Apple ID and then send the message to his app, no matter how many times I override the default that it's sending to me, next time I do it, I type his first few letters, his name, shows his phone number.
John:
So people had some theories about how to fix that.
John:
So first, here's an Apple document that...
John:
explains it tries to explain something it sounds like what it is but it's not so uh this document which put a link in the show notes it says to change the default phone number or email address for a contact method touch and hold the button for that method below the contact's name then tap the select a selection in the list this is in the contact card like if you're in the contacts app or any place that shows the contacts card you see the person and their name and then you see these little icons messages call facetime mail pay with a little you know
John:
Right.
John:
If you tap and hold on those, like if you tap and hold on messages, you see all the ways you can message them.
John:
You can message them at their Apple ID, you can message them at their phone number, whatever.
John:
Right.
John:
And they say, oh, pick one of those and that will set the default.
John:
But all it actually does is set the default for the next time you're on this specific screen and you tap messages without holding it.
John:
That doesn't help me.
John:
I'm not on this screen, right?
John:
I'm, you know, I hit share messages, then type the first few letters of their name and see that it is autocompleted to my son and his phone number.
John:
So that's frustrating.
John:
Jan Gobble had another theory.
John:
According to a friend at Apple, iMessage picks the way you contact people via each person's iMessage prep.
John:
If you have your phone number in this and I have your phone number and email and my contact card for you, then iMessage will address it to the phone number.
John:
So this is the thing where if you go on the Mac version of messages and you go to the preferences, it says start new conversations from.
John:
Right.
John:
And you can pick where do you want to start new conversations from.
John:
But that does not.
John:
I mean, this may be true, but it doesn't make a lot of sense.
John:
And B, it doesn't really help me.
John:
Right.
John:
So it doesn't make a lot of sense because what you're saying with that preference is when I message other people.
John:
Who do they see the message coming from?
John:
You can pick whenever I message somebody, I want it to be sent through my phone number so that what they will see is a message from my phone number.
John:
Or you can say, I want to start new conversations from my Apple ID.
John:
And so when they see the message coming in, they'll see it coming from my Apple ID.
John:
That's for me sending outgoing messages, right?
John:
That's who it appears to be coming from.
John:
But what I want to control is how I send it to the person.
John:
And this theory is that the only way to get it to work is I'd have to go to my son's phone and change his preference to say, start new conversations from your Apple ID instead of from your phone number.
John:
And that seems weird to me that on my phone, when I hit share and I hit messages and I type my son's name,
John:
that the only way for me to tell my phone to pick his Apple ID is to go to his phone and tell him to change it to his Apple ID when he sends to me.
John:
So I really hope that's not true.
John:
I suppose I'll try it, and if it fixes the problem, then oh well, because my son probably doesn't care what he sends.
John:
his conversations from but this is all very confusing and it gets back to the larger issue which is contacts you can have many things in each category many email addresses many phone numbers someone and so forth and there's apparently no way in contacts to tell it these are the this is the priority order order these are old ones these are new ones
John:
it's just a completely unordered stew.
John:
Sometimes I don't know if we've done this thing, but like I delete all of them and re add them in the order that I want them to be just crossing my fingers at the order that they display in the contact card has some meaning, but it probably doesn't.
Casey:
Let's be honest.
Casey:
So to back up way to the beginning and perhaps I missed something, I'm sorry, but why is it such a travesty to send something to Alex's phone number?
Casey:
Because you can send something to my phone number or my Apple ID email address and they both end up in the same spot as far as I'm concerned.
Casey:
Like, well,
John:
they don't always end up in the same spot so the reason you want to send to an apple id that's a good question though the reason why i want to send to an apple id instead of a phone number is not everybody has their macs set up to receive messages sent to their phone number and even if you do have it set up to do that i think your phone needs to be nearby for it to work is that correct no no no you're thinking of sms like the sms relay thing that was introduced many many years ago so
Casey:
If you receive an SMS from an Android person or from your bank, it's like two factor, that does need to be set up explicitly.
Casey:
And I always forget how to do it.
Casey:
I wrote actually a blog post about it way, way, way back when this was new.
Casey:
But that your phone does need to be nearby, I think.
Casey:
And that actually might have changed since the feature was new.
John:
Right.
John:
But anyway, there's still settings in Mac messages that says, hey, where do you want to receive messages from on this Mac?
John:
And not everybody has their phone number checked off.
John:
So they might just have their Apple ID.
John:
You always have your Apple ID checked off because when you sign in with your Apple ID and create an account on your Mac, I think that there's no way to stop that.
John:
but you might not have your phone number checked.
John:
So I don't want to be in a situation where I send a message where he's on his Mac and he doesn't see it.
John:
It shows up on his phone, but his phone is over on the bed and he hasn't looked at it.
John:
He doesn't see it on his Mac.
John:
So if I send to the Apple ID, I know no matter where he is, it's going to show up.
Casey:
I mean, I,
John:
guess but i can't think of anyone i know who has that situation and i have very frequently found when i go to my preferences that it is not set and i don't remember unsetting it so it must be i don't know if it's something to do with upgrading os's or like who knows what makes that become unset who can know but like you know i'm always on you know you don't have to do anything to be on your apple id your apple id is your apple id and it is everywhere that you were assigned into your apple id and that makes perfect sense but your phone number is tied to your phone and your mac is not a phone at least not yet
Casey:
Yeah, I get that.
Casey:
I think this is one of those cases, and I should not be throwing stones on this, but it's one of those cases where I think you're fretting about something that's not really an issue.
John:
No, it's happened.
John:
It's actually happened.
John:
That's why I'm obsessed with this.
John:
It's because it's like I'm sending you a message.
John:
Why aren't you responding?
John:
It's like, oh, I didn't see them.
John:
They're just on my phone.
John:
I'm like, but you're on your Mac.
John:
Why aren't you?
John:
It's like, yeah, but I didn't see them there.
John:
And then you find out why not, and you go, and it says it doesn't have the – anyway.
Casey:
If it's only happened with people that at least for the next month or so are living in your house, may I suggest an easier solution, which would be to march up to his MacBook Air and just fix it for him.
Casey:
I know.
John:
I do that on my own.
John:
I do that on my own, Max.
John:
I'm going to go look right now.
John:
Everybody launch messages.
John:
All right.
John:
And go to see in preferences where it says that you're set to receive messages from.
John:
All right.
John:
It is checked online, although one of my Apple IDs is not checked.
John:
Do you have three Apple IDs listed for each one of your Apple IDs?
John:
At Mac, at me, and at iCloud?
Casey:
At iCloud, I have at me.
Casey:
I have my third-party email that is basically my Apple ID.
Casey:
And then I also have my phone number.
Casey:
So I have my phone number, iCloud, me, and my domain.
Marco:
Yeah, I also have all of those things.
John:
You don't have at Mac?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
My Apple idea, I think, was created after .Mac, because I joined during the MobileMe era.
Marco:
That's interesting.
Casey:
But yeah, but I mean, I have never had, in all of the Macs I've owned, and granted, it's been a
Casey:
quite a bit fewer than you.
Casey:
But in all the Macs I've owned, I've never, to my recollection, had that setting just magically uncheck itself.
Casey:
So far be it for me to argue with your experience, but this is not a problem that I have seen in my personal day-to-day.
John:
And the other thing now that I'm looking at this thing is, oh, well, you don't have to worry about that because even if they just get it on their phone, if you have iMessages in the cloud side, it'll show up on their Mac anyway.
John:
It's like, yeah, maybe eventually.
John:
I have to say that iMessages in the cloud, it is, has not up to the standards of, let's say, iCloud Photo Library in terms of reliably and, uh,
John:
you know, quickly syncing changes.
John:
That's, I mean, to the message's credit is, is the only application that I'm aware from Apple that has a sync now button.
John:
But I can also tell you from experience that when you click that sync now button, boy, you're in for a wait and there's no progress bar.
John:
Of course.
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then finally, for follow-up, tell me about IPsec and whether or not it's required for IPv6, please.
John:
This is from Brian Peterson, who pointed to some information, but I just pulled from Wikipedia because it says succinctly, IPsec was a mandatory part of all IPv6 protocol implementations, and the Internet Key Exchange was recommended, but with RFC 6434.
John:
The inclusion of IPSec and IPv6 implementations was downgraded to a recommendation because it was considered impractical to require full IPSec implementation for all types of devices that may use IPv6.
John:
And Squozen on Twitter, you know, says it in a slightly different way.
John:
IPSec is quote-unquote mandatory in IPv6 in the sense that everything running IPv6 must be capable of supporting it, but that doesn't mean all IPv6 traffic automatically uses IPSec.
John:
It must still be explicitly configured between two hosts.
John:
so it seems like this is a thing they wanted to do and they had it in the original rfc but then backed off because probably people complained like oh even for my whatever you know smart home toaster i gotta use ipsec we're using tls or everything why do we need to use ipsec seems overkill so now it is not mandatory everywhere as of like what now as of like 2011 or something it's not mandatory it is just you have to support it but doesn't mean that you have to use it for all of your communications and
John:
Everyone cited like TLS basically, you know, HTTPS that you see on your URLs as the predominant way that information is encrypted in transit and having IPvSAC on top of that just probably seems like overkill and it requires too much of the people implementing their smart toasters, I suppose.
Yeah.
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Casey:
So apparently if you have a touch bar Mac, which in and of itself, I'm sorry, if you put an airplay button on your touch bar, you can expect that your networking will just kind of pause periodically.
Casey:
Always.
Casey:
What is going on here?
John:
This is a good article of someone debugging a problem they were having and tracking it down to this thing that's in the touch bar that periodically checks for stuff on the network.
John:
I'm not a network expert.
John:
My question with all these things is like, all right, so this kills this person's network.
John:
Will it kill everybody's network?
John:
And when I say kill, I mean make everything slower than it would otherwise be.
John:
seems like what it's doing yeah it's being wasteful and it's constantly checking for a thing um it's it's like the airplay button and it's like looking for other for things that can airplay to any kind of thing where you have polling where something is saying what's around here that i can airplay to what's around here that i can airplay to what's around here that i can airplay to that's polling right that's not good it's inefficient and it's inefficient for for the thing that is asking the question constantly and it's inefficient for your network because there's constantly you know a pulse going out messages going out saying hey who's out there who's out there that i can airplay to right and
John:
But it doesn't seem like that should make your network performance so incredibly awful that you notice it.
John:
So maybe there's something else bad with the network.
John:
But I just thought this was an interesting story just because the touch bar, everybody's favorite thing, is still out there causing problems for people who probably just want to use it as a row of function keys.
John:
And I just wanted to, you know...
John:
bring this to people's attention because it's the type of problem that most people would never figure out like it takes a fairly heroic level you can look at the the article here it takes a fairly heroic level of debugging to track it down to something in your touch bar because that's not what you're thinking when you're like why is my network slow and you're checking everything you can think of you're not looking at what buttons are in my touch bar right now but uh yeah the solution is just to not have that airplane thing in your touch bar and then it solves this problem but i thought this was
John:
funny and also hey if you have a touch bar and you're having network difficulties or put it this way if you have a touch bar and you never use that airplay button remove it just in case it's a good thing they're not making any more oh wait well don't worry they they're constantly updating touch bar and improving it so
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Apple, in the last couple of weeks, apparently patented a dual Pro Stand for Studio Display and Pro Display XDR users.
Casey:
And in a way, this is like kind of exactly for me, because if you recall, I had my...
Casey:
semi-beloved lg 5k that i hate yet love i love hate anyway um i had that then i got the studio display and i currently have the studio display sitting directly in front of me and then off to my right with the screen angled at about a 45 degree angle i have the lg 5k and it is on it is sitting on a single stand that is just sitting on top of the desk and
Casey:
Because I still have my glass desk, which eventually I will replace.
Casey:
But one way or another, I didn't really trust a clamp onto glass.
Casey:
I just didn't think that was a good idea.
Casey:
So I have this kind of meh freestanding stand, which I will put a link in the show notes if you're interested.
Casey:
Again, it is meh.
Casey:
It is very much the LG 5K of stands.
Casey:
But one way or another.
Casey:
It's ultra fine.
Casey:
It is extremely, extremely fine.
Casey:
Um, but anyway, but this pro stand, excuse me, dual pro stand that Apple seems to have patented looks like a kind of similar thing, but with mine, there's a single stand and a post that comes up and then off of that single post or two arms that hold up the screens.
Casey:
This is kind of the opposite, actually.
Casey:
It's two posts, one at each end, and then a connecting rod, if you will, between them.
Casey:
But what's very interesting is because if you look at the MacRumors post, well, I'm saying post a lot all of a sudden, but anyway, if you look at the MacRumors article, there's this straight crossbar between the two vertical posts, the two supports.
Casey:
And I thought to myself, well, that doesn't do what I want it to do because I want it, you know, kind of at an angle.
Casey:
I want the one screen directly in front of me and then, you know, perpendicular to my face.
Casey:
And then I want the other one at a 45 degree angle.
Casey:
And as you scroll down, hey, sure enough, right in the middle of the horizontal support, you can bend it.
Casey:
So if I were to get myself a second studio display, which I totally have not considered, no, of course not.
Casey:
Why would I do such a silly thing?
Casey:
I could pair it potentially with this very fancy schmancy pro stand, dual pro stand, which looks...
Casey:
Very cool, and I'm sure he's super cheap.
Marco:
With the disclaimers that patents don't often result in products, I think there is no way in heck that Casey would ever get this because the stand itself would probably cost $2,500.
Casey:
You're so right.
Casey:
You are so right.
John:
It's like only $2,000 because it's like two regular $1,000 stands.
John:
Oh, my gosh.
John:
So this looks a lot like patents that come out
John:
after they've already decided not to make it so it's like several years ago they're making the pro display xdr and they have a bunch of ideas for stands and this is one of the ideas and they just said actually we're not going to make this one we're just going to make a regular stand we'll charge a thousand dollars for it here's the xdr and that's what they decided to do but then eventually it's like but we did think about and design this double stand so eventually the patent goes out and we should still patent it because that's what companies do because patents are dumb and they have to patent everything
John:
So, uh, they patent it and it comes out, but it's like, you're, by the time you're seeing the patent, it's a product they long ago decided not to make, um, which I think was a wise decision because to Marco's point, this would cost so much money as evidenced by the single stand that costs a thousand dollars.
John:
Can't imagine what this even fancier double stand would cost.
John:
And it's kind of like the situation with my TV where, you know, Casey's ugly central stand thing.
John:
You can have your two monitors extending out pretty wide and you just got one stand in the middle.
John:
These things, it's like, you know, it's like soccer goalposts.
John:
Your desk needs to be as wide as your two displays so that the feet, because the feet are all...
John:
all the way at the edges the feet aren't in the middle of the two monitors the feet are at the far edges of the monitor the left monitor the foot is at the left edge of that monitor the right monitor the foot is at the right edge of that monitor so you need to have a desk that wide and then you need those feet those feet are like because if you do do it on an angle those feet are kind of you know towed in like they're like just look at your desk and think of where those feet would be and think of what you know maybe you have speakers there or maybe you have like they're taking up desk space the good thing about a central stand with just the one thing is
John:
Yeah, you've got a foot in front of you, but it's right in front of you and you can put stuff on top of it and you can still have stuff flanking it.
John:
I don't think this is a good design for a stand.
John:
And if you read the patent filings, the things they talk about, like what are the features of this?
John:
Why is this patentable?
John:
Or what's good about this?
John:
And they say some things that...
John:
I guess, appeal to people's sense of precision.
John:
Like, well, you can just have two stands or something like Casey's, but it's hard to get the monitors exactly even with each other.
John:
And if you adjust one and you have to adjust the other one to be exactly the same, I think the idea with this is they move as a unit, right?
John:
So that you don't have to, like, if you wanted them to be higher or lower,
John:
If you raise and lower it, they both go up and down exactly the same amount.
John:
They're both always perfectly aligned and they're never crooked and don't meet it the right way or whatever.
John:
Is that a big deal?
John:
If you have a traditional stand, you can probably just move them so they're both the way you want them and then you probably never touch them again and it's fine.
John:
But again, this is a product they didn't make and I hope they never make because...
John:
Seems like it's not a great idea, but boy, like to think that, I mean, I'm going to say they're over there.
John:
The time spent making this stand, I wish they had spent it, you know, getting the Apple Studio display out sooner or trying to source better cameras for it.
John:
You know, it's always easy to look at the things, you know, like obviously they try lots of different things, but this looks pretty detailed.
John:
for a product that didn't come out.
John:
And it's like, oh, that was kind of like a dead end where you wasted some time looking into something and decided to bail on it.
John:
I'm glad they bailed on it, but I'm kind of sad that they even spent as much time as it was required to make this patent.
Casey:
You know, you were saying a minute ago, where would the two uprights go?
Casey:
It is worth noting that the way I have my particular setup, the stand, the support,
Casey:
for my two monitors is basically in the back right corner of the desk so the lg5k it crosses the edge of my desk about halfway halfway down the lg5k so the right half the lg5k is effectively floating over nothing so in this case it didn't even occur to me until you said something but in this case i would be putting the right hand stand on thin air which would probably not work too well so
Casey:
So this is perhaps not for me, even leaving aside the fact, as Marco so astutely pointed out, that this will be a trillion dollars.
John:
Yeah, well, it would be if they made it.
John:
I don't think they're going to do it.
John:
It's just like my stupid TV stand.
John:
I don't have enough room for a wide piece of furniture for my television to go on, so the right and left edges of my television, they're floating over the ground, right?
John:
And they have a central stand.
John:
Any stand that has feet at the extremities just assumes everybody has a very, very wide piece of furniture, which...
John:
A lot of people do, but not everybody, especially if you're in New England and you have no place to put your TV except for on an angle in a corner.
John:
And it's very difficult to find pieces of furniture that are very wide and also fit in a corner.
Casey:
So we have had this thing in the show notes for ever.
Casey:
And I feel like now is as good a time as any, since we are recording from the future to talk about, uh, what, what, what went on.
Casey:
What is the September of last year, the EU proposed, and I think since, uh, accepted or, or, or, you know, ratified or whatever, uh, mandatory USB-C on all devices, including iPhones and,
Casey:
So I think it was John put some very useful excerpts, which I will now read to you from the Verge article, which we put in the show notes.
Casey:
The rules are intended to cut down on electronic waste by allowing people to reuse existing chargers and cables when they buy new electronics.
Casey:
In addition to phones, the rules will apply to other devices like tablets, headphones, portable speakers, video game consoles and cameras.
Casey:
Manufacturers will also be forced to make their fast charging standards interoperable and to provide information to customers about what charging standards their device supports.
Casey:
The proposals only cover devices using wired, not wireless chargers, EU Commissioner Terry Breton said in a press conference, adding that, quote, there's plenty of room for innovation on wireless, quote.
Casey:
A spokesperson for the commission subsequently confirmed to The Verge that a USB-C port is only mandatory for devices that charge using a cable.
Casey:
But if a device charges exclusively via wireless, like Apple's rumored portless iPhone, there would be no requirement for a USB-C charging port.
Casey:
If adopted, manufacturers will eventually have 24 months to comply with the new rules.
Casey:
So what do we think?
John:
So this first point, cut down electronic waste by allowing people to reuse existing chargers.
John:
So we'll talk a little bit about the wisdom of a single charging standard in a second.
John:
But in the short term,
John:
Requiring everybody who has a million lightning cables to throw them in the garbage and get USB-C cables does not cut down on electronic waste.
John:
And I'm going to say there's a lot of lightning cables out there in the world at this point, right?
John:
Not a small number of them.
John:
So citing specifically that this new proposal will cut down on electronic waste...
John:
does not ring true to me now i'm sure people do have usbc chargers but i don't think people buy enough usbc chargers for all the devices and then only use half of them because the other half use lightning no you buy as many chargers as you need you buy the lightning cables and chargers for your lightning devices and you buy the usbc cables and chargers for your usbc devices and you don't have a million extras of both so if this standard came out and you know if apple goes to usbc on their phones the short-term effect is
John:
is a lot of lightning cables in the landfill or recycling or whatever we do with them.
John:
So that seems a little bit silly.
Marco:
Well, but I mean, long term though, like I see what they're doing long term.
Marco:
Now that being, so this is one of those things like, you know, the arguments that we've heard so far from the tech community, I think hold water, which is, first of all, from a convenience point of view, this would be incredible to be in a world of all USBC.
Marco:
You know, if you look at how we might get there might be messy, but to be in this world of all USBC today would be great.
Marco:
That being said, you know, there's also a significant downside to the idea of a government forcing tech companies to use and, you know, keep indefinitely into the future this particular type of connector.
Marco:
Now, the USB connector type does not change as frequently as most things in our tech world do.
Marco:
I mean, my first computer with a USB-A port, I'm pretty sure was 1999, right?
Marco:
That was 23 years ago.
Marco:
And USB-A is just now getting around to slowly, painfully being replaced.
Marco:
And so if we say we're going to stick with this connector, on one hand, you can say it's probably not a good thing for governments to mandate things like this to tech companies.
Marco:
Because what if we want to change it in the future?
Marco:
It's going to be a slow and painful process.
Marco:
On the other hand, you can say, well, this actually doesn't change that frequently.
Marco:
And maybe that wouldn't be that bad because the actual lifespan of something like this, especially in the context of mobile charging and stuff, where you're almost certainly only or primarily using it for supplying power and not for rapid data transfer in most cases for this kind of device.
Marco:
So you don't have to worry that much about like, oh, well, you know, what if it won't support Thunderbolt 17?
Marco:
You know, chances are, you know, for this type of use, it's not going to matter for a very long time.
Marco:
So I think this would be a great world to get to.
Marco:
I still am hesitant to say that requiring it by government action is the way to get there.
Marco:
Because again, like...
Marco:
There is some some conservatism about letting government control something like tech that tends to move quickly is probably warranted.
John:
And if you look at past, you know, government or quasi government mandating technologies, we tend to get stuck with them for a long time.
John:
Power plugs that are in our walls, telephone cables, even things like Ethernet, which are vaguely related to telephone things.
John:
You know, a part of that is you build up a lot of infrastructure and it costs a lot of money to tear it all down and everything.
John:
Part of it is that once it's a government type of thing, everyone just gets on board with it and it assumes like the safe bet or whatever.
John:
But in the world, in the faster pace, let's say, you know, moving world of Internet related technologies like, you know, the telecom era is, you know, back in the 60s, 70s, 80s, the Internet age.
John:
Things move faster now, and there is more, you know, development.
John:
Like, as people in the chat room are talking about, micro USB, the terrible connector that we all hate, the one that is asymmetrical, but it's so small it's hard to tell.
John:
Well, it's the worst.
John:
And, you know, if...
John:
If they had standardized on that, maybe we wouldn't have USB-C, right?
John:
Or if they had standardized on something before Lightning came out, we never would have had Lightning, and Lightning was a big leap over what came before it, right?
John:
So the idea that the government should do something because left to their own devices, apparently Apple is refusing to budge on this, right?
John:
So everyone else is going to USB-C, but Apple's out there and they sell a lot of phones.
John:
It makes sense that there's apparently not enough motivation for these companies to get together on their own.
John:
But I think the mistake is not in governments requiring something, but in governments requiring something and specifically saying what it is.
John:
If, for instance, they had instead said there has to be a common charging standard, decide amongst yourself what it would be.
John:
Everyone would pick USBC.
John:
But the good thing about that is that years in the future,
John:
When there's some newer standard, like an Apple wants to use Thunderbolt 19 on their new Holo iPads or whatever, but we can't do it because everyone has to use USB-C and we don't want to put two ports.
John:
Eventually, everybody in the industry will be in a similar situation where they're like, oh, there's a new standard and it's better, or I have a new thing in mind and it's better, but we're all stuck on the stupid USB-C because we all agreed back in 2022 that we had the one standard requirement and we all agreed it would be USB-C because, duh, of course it would be, right?
John:
at that point in the future there would be enough companies that want to move on to their own particular innovation to come back together again and say okay everybody let's get together again let's all agree on a new standard because we all agree that usbc is holding back all of our products because now in the future we all have different and then we'd have they'd have to agree on like well what is the new standard let's fight over that or whatever but they would be motivated to do that because everybody would want to have newer better devices right if we had standardized on 30 pin eventually everyone would be like
John:
Well, 30-pin has served us well, but we all have something better in mind.
John:
And let's talk about what that would be because with all this being stuck on 30-pin, it sucks because we have to add a second port off to the side and it's awkward or whatever.
John:
And so you got to use a 30-pin for, you know, like there is motivation for companies to get together on standards.
John:
Just look at the matter standard, which may come to nothing, but still like those companies spent...
John:
years killing each other in the market trying to see who's going to become dominant and eventually nobody became dominant enough to just like dictate the world and they all came together and said all right now this is hurting us more than it's helping us we all have our own standards or whatever but people are every one of us has people customers who won't buy our products because their house is already set up for hue or it's already set up for google home or it's already set up for home kit or whatever and they won't buy our products because they have a different so we need to decide on a standard because that will help all of us
John:
That is the market working correctly.
John:
When everyone agrees that we have to get together on this, or just look at any other standard, Blu-ray versus, what was the competing thing of Blu-ray?
John:
HD DVD versus DivX, right?
Marco:
Oh, God.
John:
Beta VHS or whatever, like whatever the standard you end up picking, the industry does have motivation to consolidate on a standard.
John:
But historically speaking, the government is very bad at dictating the specific technology that standards should be.
John:
And when they do do so, it kind of gives people the excuse to like say, well, we're just stuck with it and we have to use this forever.
John:
Like, and I don't know, I'm not saying this is not what they're doing.
John:
I don't know the details of the EU proposal.
John:
Maybe the EU proposal has a time limit.
John:
Maybe EU proposal has a way where they can get back together and deal with this.
John:
And even if it doesn't, the EU itself in 15 years can get back together and say, okay, we all agree now that the USBC thing, the time has come and we should redo it, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
But why leave that to chance?
John:
Why not bake it into the thing?
John:
A one standard policy for something as big as the EU to say all phone manufacturers have to agree on a standard, decide amongst yourself, would have the same results and would be a better policy.
John:
Now, that's just like pie in the sky, how I think this could be different or better, and hopefully it will work out, right?
John:
Practically speaking, I'm not sure what this means.
John:
Does this mean that in two years, starting from whatever date, Apple has to switch their iPhones to USB-C or make them wireless?
No.
John:
seems like it does was apple going to do that anyway maybe i don't know uh there's the ultra wideband wildcard that we talked about for a lot of this stuff there's the wireless magsafe puck charging thing that's going to send data as well as power through everything and then there's just they'll go to usbc and it will be fine right um you know and this this proposal like
John:
You know, it's like it's the EU mandating a standard or whatever.
John:
But really, this is just an Apple ruling, right?
John:
Because everybody is already doing USB-C.
John:
No one else is out there with their own proprietary connector.
John:
It's just Apple.
John:
But Apple is so big that they have to make this law because Apple wasn't doing it on their own.
John:
So in many ways, this is another case where Apple could have made a change on their own to avoid this.
John:
Right.
John:
If Apple had just gone to USB-C like last year.
John:
They could have maybe prevented this because then there would be a situation where everybody is on USBC.
John:
The EU is happy.
John:
This thing doesn't pass because when they were trying to get votes on it, everyone would say, why are we voting on this?
John:
Everybody already uses USBC.
John:
What's the point of this law?
John:
And that would free them later to go to Thunderbolt 19 without having to wait for the EU to do something.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree with you that I think the thing I find most offensive about this is that it's the government deciding specifically USB-C is the way forward.
Casey:
Because, like you said, it's so obviously the way forward today.
Casey:
But we don't know when that's going to change.
Casey:
We don't know what the situation is.
Casey:
And it's funny because I'm not that offended that the iPhone isn't USB-C.
Casey:
I absolutely would prefer it to be, without question.
Casey:
But
Casey:
i'm not that bothered by it and and i think that's in part because i've decided to embrace either usbc or just wireless charging for everything and i i still have a trillion you know lightning cables just strewn throughout the house just like you said john but um i i'm going on a trip you know somewhat soon and i use that as an excuse to spend money hi marco
Marco:
hey i've known you too long i was just looking at chargers today because i'm like i keep that my family seems to eat usbc charging equipment and so i'm i'm out of multi-port chargers and relevant to the story um my wife is away this weekend and she she requested chargers for her trip because of course i'm in charge of wires she's in charge of soft things um and
Marco:
I look at my wire cabinet and all my multi-port chargers are gone.
Marco:
So I had to give her separate bricks with just one output each.
Marco:
And she wanted to take with her, this is not unreasonable, an iPhone, an Apple Watch, and an iPad.
Marco:
I had to give her three chargers.
Casey:
That's not a good look.
Casey:
You don't want that.
Casey:
And so this is something that I was running into.
Casey:
So many, many moons ago, I wrote a couple of different blog posts, both talking about the same thing, which was, what is what I like to call my go-pack?
Casey:
And I've preached the gospel on here many, many times before, but the short, short version is, I like to have a pack, like a small bag, for...
Casey:
full of all the cables and doodads and whatnots and wizits that I need in order to charge all my stuff when I travel.
Casey:
And that go pack, that pack of cables and whatnot, that is never touched and never pilfered through when I am not traveling.
Casey:
I never just, oh, I'll just grab this.
Casey:
Nope, nope.
Casey:
It has to be a completely untouchable thing when you're at home.
Casey:
And so
Casey:
In that GoPack, I used to have a five USB-A plug.
Casey:
So you plug into the wall once because five USB-A coming out the other end because I need two phones, two watches, and potentially one other thing.
Casey:
But I feel like that's just so many cables, especially since I typically bring a couple of USB extensions so that Erin doesn't have to hand me her phone before she goes to sleep.
Casey:
I can get the cable all the way over to her side of the bed or whatever.
Casey:
And it was just too much.
Casey:
It was just too much.
Casey:
And so...
Casey:
I did the most Marco thing possible.
Casey:
What do you think I did, Marco?
Marco:
Bought a bunch of new stuff.
Casey:
Bought new stuff to fix my problems.
Casey:
So I spent just an absolutely preposterous amount of money, and I bought two Mophie 3-in-1 travel chargers with MagSafe, which was recommended to me many moons ago in the Relay Slack.
Casey:
This is a MagSafe puck in the center, an iPhone puck on the right, and then just a Qi charger really, really, really intended for AirPods on the left.
Casey:
And it folds up, and it has a nice little canvassy bag thing.
Casey:
Each of these, and you need two if you're part of a pair, each of these is $150 and is only available at Apple.
Casey:
That is the only place you can buy them is from Apple.
Casey:
So I spent $300 friggin' dollars to get chargers that just replace a bunch of cables that already work just fine.
Casey:
But I did it.
Casey:
I did it because I've spent way too much time being Marco's friend and because it's going to make my life so much nicer that all I have to do is plug each of these in.
Casey:
And guess how they plug in, gentlemen?
Casey:
USB-C, baby.
Casey:
I plug these in either to the USB-C charger that they come with or I could repurpose my two-port USB-C charger that I'll use for my laptop and I could bring it to the bedroom at night.
Casey:
And I will plug these into some USB-C power adapter and
Casey:
And then I will get Aaron's watch and Aaron's phone, my watch and my phone and my AirPods, if I so choose, all charging using just one cable per person, as opposed to two USB-A extension cables, a lightning cable or two lightning cables, two watch cables.
Casey:
It's just this is going to be so much better.
Casey:
And I'm so excited about it.
Casey:
But all of this is relevant because I want to get away from lightning.
Casey:
Like, I don't have a problem with lightning, except that it's its own bespoke thing.
Casey:
I don't want lightning in my life anymore, except when I'm doing development, which is something that we've only glanced off of the outer atmosphere of.
Casey:
But for charging purposes, just give me Qi charging or MagSafe charging.
Casey:
Give it to me everywhere.
Casey:
I don't want it...
Casey:
I don't want to charge via lightning unless I absolutely have to.
Casey:
And I think that moving away from wired charging, for me anyway, I'm all in, baby.
Casey:
Like, let's just go all wireless all the time.
Casey:
Where this gets really, really squishy is what happens when I'm sitting at my desk using Xcode.
Casey:
Because if the watch tells us anything wrong,
Casey:
Oh, boy, I do not want wireless debugging for my phone.
Casey:
No, thank you.
Casey:
And I know you can do it now.
Casey:
I have done it from time to time, particularly when I was using my adorable.
Casey:
No, thank you.
Casey:
Like, I do not want any part of everything about it is worse.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I do not want any part of that.
Casey:
No, thank you at all.
Casey:
So like if Apple comes out with some, we've talked about this in the past.
Casey:
If Apple comes out with some new phone that's completely sealed and charges only wirelessly, all of the consumer side of me is ready, baby.
Casey:
Sign me up.
Casey:
But the developer side of me is going to be devastated unless they have some sort of solution that actually freaking works for doing debugging and development against a wired or some new replacement for wire device.
John:
yeah and i'm not holding my breath on that nope one thing i miss about lightning is the uh well i have one of the things we use for charging the house is kind of like i don't know what you call it like a uh dish rack bookshelf type thing you know those things like you put your devices in sideways oh yeah yeah yeah right and you can you can put ipads in there it's got like a bunch of little uh slats um and i'm trying to think of what analogous thing it's like a comb
John:
Or like where you put your dishes in the dishwasher, right?
John:
Anyway, but the point is that the devices are sideways.
John:
And it's nice because no matter what size of the device you have, it fits.
John:
It's big, small, short, tall, doesn't matter.
John:
And so it connects to the power and everything.
John:
And it has a whole bunch of ports along one side of it.
John:
and i got these very stubby little uh like rubberized connectors on one end there's usb a because this is a really old thing and that plugs into the the base and the other end is lightning connectors right and they're long enough to reach an ipad right but they're not they're you know they're like four inches long like they're just long enough to curl around and when they're not plugged in they're just kind of like waving their like little tentacles right it's cute right and it's great the whole family puts their devices there they charge you know it's a great place in the house to be able to charge anything you want and
John:
And they're all lightning, right?
John:
And lightning connector is curved on the sides.
John:
So when you plug something in sideways, you don't have to get the wire exactly perpendicular to the port before you put it in.
John:
You can just kind of like angle it in and it goes in.
John:
So I'll kind of miss that.
John:
I'm not saying that's a reason lightning should stay around or anything.
John:
It's just one thing that I think I'll miss.
John:
is the easy ability to plug things in on a slight angle because usbc really wants you to line it up a little bit better than that but i'm sure it'll be fine and speaking of tech details here is an older q a article about what i was talking about before of like oh you're dictating usbc but what about when something better comes along this is from the the focus when they were proposing it so here's a suggestion that this proposal encourages innovation for wired and wireless technology uh
John:
I'm sure it encourages innovation for wireless, because then you'd be exempt, and if you come up with a good wireless device, you don't have to worry about this.
John:
But anyway, the thing they say that will help is, any technological developments in wired charging will be reflected in the timely adjustment of the technical requirements slash specific standards under the radio equipment directive.
John:
This would ensure the technology is not outdated.
John:
At the same time, the implementation of any new standards and further revisions of the radio equipment directive would need to be developed in a harmonized manner, respecting the objective's full interoperability,
John:
Industry is therefore expected to continue the work already undertaken on standardized interface led by the USB-IF organization.
John:
Those are the people who, you know, make the USB standards.
John:
In a view of developing new interoperable and open non-controversial solutions, right?
John:
So they're basically saying, don't worry, we can adjust it.
John:
Like, as new things come out, we'll just revise things.
John:
Well, that's exactly what I was talking about.
John:
You don't want to have to wait for the EU to revise things.
John:
And this whole proposal, you know, led by the USB-IF, gives so much power to the USB group.
John:
The USB group didn't come up with lightning.
John:
Innovation doesn't mean just better versions of USB-C.
John:
Innovation means things like lightning that are not coming from the same people who made the old standard, but it's like, oh, we have an idea for a new plug for our devices, and it has nothing to do with USB, really.
John:
It's our own thing.
John:
It's a lightning connector.
John:
Look at it.
John:
It's pretty weird, but we like it, right?
John:
Right.
John:
That's an example of innovation.
John:
The USB-IF slowly and steadily coming out with better versions of USB and then renaming them all so we have no idea what's what, that is not an example of innovation.
John:
And waiting for the EU to revise the technical requirements of this law is also not an example of the kind of innovation we want.
John:
So again, I reiterate that I think it would have been better to...
John:
Use the government to force one standard, but not to be in such strict control over what that standard is, because I, you know, I believe in the the self-interest of, you know, big tech companies be enough to get them to standardize on something reasonable.
John:
at intervals right you know there's always chaos and then we consolidate they go on a standard you use it for a while and then then there's another round of innovation eventually that second round of innovation becomes unbearable for everyone involved and they eventually do get together you know if the government was asking them to get together and decide on a standard the government doesn't ask them to get together they kill each other until the end
John:
Someone comes up with the standard.
John:
Or they do the matter thing, which is everybody's stuff sucks so bad that they all decide we do need to come together on the standard.
John:
Remains to be seen if matter sucks any worse than the existing stuff, but at least it's a push in the right direction.
John:
I think there's a similar story.
John:
We don't have anything in the notes about this, but maybe we'll talk about it on a future show.
John:
There's another thing about the...
John:
similar type of standardization situation where like one group that comes up with the standards is given a lot of power because they are the blessed group.
John:
And that is, I don't know what the group is or whatever, but the people who come up with like HEVC and H264 and H265, whatever that group is and all the people who own the patents and all that stuff, like those sort of standardized formats for video, for compressed video over the internet, all that stuff.
John:
It's great that there's standards there.
John:
It's really important that there's no standards there.
John:
It powers our whole modern age of streaming video everywhere.
John:
Um,
John:
but they are patent encumbered in many cases and certain people are in control of it and certain people make money and so now there is a competing standard i think it's called av1 that's either less patent encumbered or not patent encumbered and more like free and open or whatever and the people who are in control of the previous standards do not like that because they're like hey you're taking away our money and power we just want there to be one standard but we also like the idea that we have lots of money and power related to that one standard and a new open standard violates that and
John:
It just goes to show that the motivations of like once you give a group like the USBIF this kind of power to say, oh, you are the new standard.
John:
And by the way, you're in charge of future innovation.
John:
That goes bad really quickly.
John:
So I would prefer the more chaotic approach of demanding there be a standard, but allowing that standard to arise semi organically at regular intervals every decade or two.
Casey:
You know, I was thinking more about my whole travel setup because it's so relevant to me coming up soon.
Casey:
And of the things that I could potentially travel with, my drone, my Nintendo Switch, my Playdate, my laptop, my iPad, all of those things charge via USB-C.
Casey:
The only things that don't that I'm likely to... Oh, the GoPro.
Casey:
I didn't even think about that.
Casey:
The GoPro would.
Casey:
The only thing I can think of, the only things I can think of that wouldn't are my iPhone, potentially.
Casey:
Now, again, I've resolved this by throwing money at the problem.
Casey:
My watch, same story.
Casey:
And my Kindle, which is not particularly new.
Casey:
I don't know what the new ones are using.
Casey:
And it uses that god-awful micro USB connector.
John:
The only thing is the Kindle charge lasts forever, so you can probably just charge it before you leave.
Marco:
Yeah, you don't need to bring Kindle chargers on trips.
Casey:
Yeah, I charged it yesterday and it'll last me until the end of the month.
Casey:
So basically the only stuff that doesn't charge via USB-C are my phone and my watch.
Casey:
Basically everything else I can charge via USB-C and I don't need to bring a bespoke charger for any of this stuff.
Casey:
Like I could just plug the switch into my computer if I really wanted to and charge it that way.
Casey:
Same with like the drone batteries.
Casey:
You know, I could show the battery pack that charges three batteries at once.
Casey:
That's USB-C.
Casey:
And so all of this stuff I can just charge by using my computer as a hub.
Casey:
And since I have a MacBook Pro, I have ports for days, kind of, sort of.
Casey:
But I have at least a few options for ports.
Casey:
So, yeah, it's that inconsistency in that the phone and, to some degree, the watch are like the lone devices standing off saying, no.
John:
i need my own special cable like it's just no just come on can we just either go all wireless or just jump on board with usbc i know it's not as good in a handful of ways but can we just do it anyway and the watch is the next uh the next downside here like another place where apple's gonna spoil it for everybody right because the watch it makes sense like you don't plug anything into it because it's so tiny you probably wouldn't want to plug in the cable like that makes perfect sense
John:
But what Apple chose to do for their, quote-unquote, wireless charging for the watch is not what anybody else is doing.
John:
It's a watch charger, right?
John:
And I think you can put watches on Qi chargers and maybe you can get them to charge.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
I don't think so.
Marco:
People have occasionally gotten them to work that way, but it's not reliable.
Marco:
I've tried so many times.
John:
And so we're rapidly approaching another situation with the watches where there's a wireless standard for charging.
John:
I mean, Qi is pretty widespread at this point, but there's a wireless standard for charging.
John:
You know, if you use all wireless stuff, you just have to get Qi chargers and you'll be fine.
John:
And Qi 2 came out and Qi 3 is even better and so on and so forth.
John:
And everyone's on the same page.
John:
And so when you travel, you just need to bring one charger.
John:
It's a Qi wireless charger and also your Apple Watch charger.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It's a big pain in the butt.
Marco:
Yep, yep, yep.
Marco:
But, you know, ultimately, this is something that, like, this whole... The move to USB-C, I think, is... It'll be a great thing if it happens.
Marco:
And I think if you look at, like... If you kind of read the tea leaves a little bit, you know, Apple...
Marco:
Apple is no fan of having governments tell them what to do.
Marco:
And I think they will take many opportunities to just say no and to fight them and to pay fines or whatever it is.
Marco:
However, if you read the tea leaves, I think they're actually about to do a big USBC move.
Marco:
The latest rumors were that the base model iPad, when it gets its next update, is going to go USB-C.
Marco:
That would make it the last iPad.
Marco:
It's the last iPad on Lightning.
Marco:
So the entire iPad lineup is almost all USB-C.
Marco:
By the way, that change happened over the last few years, and the world didn't end.
Marco:
They used to all be Lightning.
Marco:
Now they're almost all and about to be probably all USB-C, and everybody was all right.
Marco:
So it's a good data point.
Marco:
So obviously it's not as big as the iPhone and people tend to not have as many iPad chargers as they have iPhone chargers.
Marco:
So, you know, it's a different situation, but it's at least a data point.
Marco:
So that, you know, iPad is almost all USB-C.
Marco:
MacBook, all USB-C.
Marco:
The whole Mac, everything, all USB-C.
Marco:
There have been rumors for quite some time that the iPhone 14 coming out in a couple of months is not going to be USB-C, but that it might be the last lightning iPhone, that the one after the 14 is, depending on which rumor you read, either USB-C or no ports at all.
John:
I really hope it's USB-C.
John:
But yeah, the one after the 14 is also supposed to have the Periscope cameras.
John:
The one after the 14 is the one we all want.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
It sounds like that's probably going to be the next case design revision, which would be the time to switch to USB-C.
Marco:
And this is something that they seem like they've been planning for some time, as iPhones tend to be.
Marco:
So I think what we'll really be telling is watching what...
Marco:
Other hardware gets released from Apple that currently has a Lightning port that maybe gains a USB-C port instead.
Marco:
So things to look out for would be things like the next AirPods case, peripherals, mice, keyboards, like Apple TV remote.
John:
I was going to say, you were listing all of the MacBooks have USB-C.
John:
Well, the desktop Macs sure don't because my keyboard is connected with Lightning on both of these Macs.
John:
right but you know apple doesn't update the peripherals very frequently just but it's a brand new keyboard with the full-size touch bar you know like it boggles my mind why it's lightning it's not as if there's any kind of inertia for lightning on the mac and they were making a brand new keyboard with the full-size touch id key for the brand new mac studio and it connects with a cable if people want to know one end of it is usbc that plugs into your computer and the other end that plugs into the keyboard is lightning
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
Well, in all fairness, like these keyboards, they seem very, very similar in overall build and engineering and guts to the ones that we've had for a long time before them.
John:
Yeah, I suppose it's just disappointing.
John:
And I know this seems weird to people like, oh, it's just like an iPhone.
John:
You're just supposed to charge it with that cable.
John:
Yeah, you can.
John:
But for people who don't know, if you plug it in with that cable, it becomes a wired USB keyboard.
John:
And that's how I use it.
Marco:
I never told you I actually have one.
Marco:
I did the thing where you stick it under your desk so you can have Touch ID on a desktop.
Marco:
It's actually really great.
Marco:
It's the small one that has the Touch ID in the corner.
Marco:
You Velcro it to the desk upside down.
Marco:
I just reach under this one spot on my desk and poke and it's Touch ID.
Marco:
It's awesome because otherwise my laptop is in clamshell mode so I can't reach that sensor and I don't use an Apple keyboard to type on so that doesn't have one.
Marco:
So it's great.
Marco:
I have full touch ID and it works fantastically.
Marco:
But I did notice if the computer has been idle and I walk up to it and try to unlock it, it unlocks much faster when I have it wired.
Marco:
My theory is that if you touch it and it's Bluetooth mode, maybe it takes like a split second to connect back to the computer before it starts the authentication process.
Marco:
You know, whereas when I have it wired, it works 100% of the time instantly.
Marco:
So it's fantastic.
John:
Yeah, that's another thing that I missed for years on the Mac from like the super old classic Mac days, the Apple desktop bus connected keyboards used to have a power button on them that you would power the computer on from the keyboard.
John:
And also obviously wake it from sleep and do a lot of this stuff.
John:
And this kind of reminds me of that.
John:
So with the Mac studio, with the touch ID, you can walk up to a computer that is locked and running the screenshot or whatever.
John:
And all you do is you don't do anything else.
John:
You just put your finger on touch ID and it wakes the computer and unlocks it.
John:
It's so fast.
John:
And it's so much nicer than like, oh, hit the space bar to wake it up and then type in your password or anything like that.
John:
You don't have to wait.
John:
What I'm saying is you don't have to wake it up before you put your finger on the touch ID.
John:
You just put your finger on the touch ID and it does everything for you.
John:
It's great.
John:
Face ID would be better, but, you know.
John:
Oh, and so related to your discussion of the lightning cable and how, you know, they changed the iPads and no one freaked out about it.
John:
Because the iPhone is such a, you know, looms larger in pop culture.
John:
And practically speaking, there are literally billions more of those devices than there are iPads.
John:
people are going to complain but that is not a complaint that is founded in any kind of facts i mean it's it's difficult when any kind of transition takes place people didn't like changing from dvd to blu-ray if people even did that people didn't like changing from cassette to cd like everyone always complains i gotta replace my connection i gotta buy all new things or whatever when you know lightning replaced 30 pin i had to throw away all my cables and blah blah blah right but it's been a decade people like lightning has been here for 10 years right and
John:
It's okay once a decade to improve the connector, right?
John:
And then on top of that, you know, with Apple seemingly not complaining or pushing back against this, my understanding is that Apple was heavily involved in the creation of USB-C, which is why it doesn't suck.
John:
yeah and so it's not like they're like oh they're forcing me to use this weird connector it's a connector that they had a hand in creating that they apparently like a lot and put on a lot of their products so it's not like apple is anti-usbc and there is no perfect time to do this right uh you know and so when this happens and there's you know it's going to be some story for iphone 15 like oh i have to throw out all my cables or whatever it's like give it a rest you know the apple's constantly changing the cable constantly every decade it's okay like it'll be fine i promise you know
John:
the idea that there'll be one technical standard and you never have to change it like that was true of the telephone system maybe but even then like they never changed the telephone connector it's still whatever what's the small telephone on rj rj 11 11 yeah they never changed the rj 11 connector but you know what it stayed around for so long that it became obsoleted by you know people don't have landline phones anymore so like if you did have landline
John:
line phone it's got rj11 but guess what it's not a thing in your life anymore because everyone just uses their cell phones right that's we don't want that to happen we want better faster innovation than that and apple voluntarily choosing to change the connector for all their peripherals once every decade is perfectly fine cadence
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
It's not like a special coffee maker or a special grinder or even a special process.
Marco:
If you want to make great coffee at home, start with great freshly roasted beans.
Marco:
And everything else matters a lot less.
Marco:
And that's what Trade helps you do.
Marco:
So Trade has these experts who taste coffee.
Marco:
They profile it.
Marco:
They select only the best coffee.
Marco:
And so what you do is you go to their website and you tell them in their quiz what kinds of things you're looking for in coffee.
Marco:
How light, how dark, certain flavor preferences.
Marco:
You can have it ground or whole bean, whatever you need there.
Marco:
And then they will mail you from all these great craft roasters around the country.
Marco:
They'll mail you selections that fit your taste.
Marco:
And in fact, they actually have a first match guarantee.
Marco:
They're so confident they're going to match your taste that if you don't like your first batch, they'll take your feedback and an actual human will work with you to send you a brand new bag for free that you'll like even more.
Marco:
And I got to say, I've used trade before and I often go back to them whenever I want like a bunch of variety because there's so many coffee roachers they have there.
Marco:
So many flavors, so many types.
Marco:
They even have decaf if you need that.
Marco:
Like it's just great being a trade customer.
Marco:
Right now, Trade is offering new subscribers a total of $30 off your first order, plus free shipping when you go to drinktrade.com slash ATP.
Marco:
That's more than 40 cups of coffee for free.
Marco:
Get started by taking that quiz at drinktrade.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Let Trade find you a coffee you will love.
Marco:
That's drinktrade.com slash ATP for $30 off.
Marco:
Thanks to Trade for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
Michael Chan writes, how do you guys manage mail notifications on your various devices?
Casey:
What mail apps do you use and how do you categorize and control what emails you consider worth getting notifications for and what emails you consider best looked at on your own time?
Casey:
Do you use Priority Inbox or something like Outlook's Focus Inbox?
Casey:
First step is don't have a real job, and you don't have to worry about this near as much.
Casey:
But for me, I think I established this when I was at my jobby job.
Casey:
I have my family, like Aaron and my parents, like a couple of my brothers, in marked as favorites, I think it is, in contacts or VIPs, whatever it is in contacts, and marked them as basically whatever that is, the first tier.
Casey:
And I have notifications for them and for nothing else.
Casey:
And I just use the mail app pretty much everywhere.
Casey:
I personally don't understand how any person can use the web as their primary email app.
Casey:
I'm looking both at my wife and at John.
Casey:
um i it is just not for me and so i just use mail app everywhere i did really like uh what was it mime stream which is a very not great name but uh i used that when i before i had moved to fast mail and that was really good and there's oh shoot i can't think of the name of the app but somebody's writing a a similar style app but specifically for like fast mail and jmap uh servers if i remember i'll put it in the show notes but um
Casey:
I just use mail app and I just let VIPs come through in terms of notifications.
Casey:
That's what I do.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't even have that because nobody I would have as a VIP ever really emails me.
Marco:
So I just don't have mail notifications.
Marco:
I let it badge the icon only on the Mac, not even on my phone, and that's it.
Marco:
And so I look at mail.
Marco:
If I have time, I look at it when I see that little badge up there.
Marco:
I will say one thing, too.
Marco:
This is not at all related.
Marco:
Well, it's very loosely related to this question.
Marco:
So I've been using the iOS 16 beta for, I don't know, a few weeks now.
Marco:
And I really like it.
Marco:
Old joke.
Marco:
And one thing I've noticed is that with the new lock screen redesign, notifications are now relegated to a much smaller part of the lock screen.
Marco:
They basically have been pushed down and they kind of stack up much more than they did in iOS 15 and prior.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
it actually it's making me miss notifications now because they are there they stack up and i just i never like dig down and so one thing i'm having to do so first of all i think this is very interesting and you know for a lot of reasons not least of which is that to app developers your notifications are now worth less than they were in previous versions of the app and they will be noticed less um and and as a user um
Marco:
It's going to make me be even more strict about which notifications I allow to be shown on the lock screen and therefore be noticed at all.
Marco:
Something like main notifications that are fairly unimportant for most people most of the time or at least unimportant, but at least not time sensitive.
Marco:
that kind of stuff, you're going to start having to make tough decisions.
Marco:
Unless this is some weird fluke about the way iOS 16 is working on just my phone, but I don't think it is.
Marco:
I think this is just the new design.
Marco:
And so if you want to actually see your notifications reliably, you're going to have to start being much more strict about deciding what is time-sensitive and what's not.
Marco:
And most things are going to be not.
Marco:
And therefore, most notifications aren't going to be necessary or prominent.
Casey:
John?
John:
I was hoping all of our answer on mail notifications would be the same.
John:
It seems like we're close, but I don't, it's not for me.
John:
It's not because like, Oh, you don't have real jobs.
John:
You don't have to worry about this.
John:
I had a real job for most of the vast majority of my adult life.
John:
Um, my policy has always been like a day phone, night phone guy, always on offense, never on defense.
John:
Right.
John:
I do not have mail notifications on.
John:
I have never had mail notifications on.
John:
The idea of doing that seems like madness to me.
John:
Maybe it's because I get too much email.
John:
Like, oh, you can just send it to VIP.
John:
It's like, no, I never get notifications.
John:
I don't have badges on for mail on any of my devices.
John:
Email is not a thing that comes and gets me.
John:
So I'm on defense.
John:
I go to email when I want to, quote, check email.
John:
And maybe that's an old person thing, although the young person thing is never checking email.
John:
So I would say the whole thing is better.
John:
I am not notified of emails.
John:
And I don't badge the icons.
John:
When I want to go read email, I will go read email.
John:
If I'm expecting an email, I will check my email.
John:
Check my email, meaning going to the tab that is always open in the very first tab in the upper left Chrome window on my computer at all times is mail.
John:
Gmail is on my home screen.
John:
But
John:
notifications no same deal with twitter zero notifications on twitter or whatever i would everyone's life is different if you if you're the type of person who will forget to check mail if you don't have notifications or a badge then do what you have to do but i don't have i i won't forget to check mail but i never want to be notified about mail i never want to know how many mail messages are waking me because that number would just be terrifying the way the way i deal with email is i have a huge number of filters that sort of
John:
Stuff comes in and gets sorted into bins.
John:
Right.
John:
And the main view I use in Gmail, I kind of wish it was like the default, but not really matters because I don't ever close the tab is the all mail view.
John:
It shows me a it's kind of like my unified view on Twitter.
John:
It is a linear chronological list of all conversations.
John:
I use conversation view of all conversations and all my email.
John:
And what I see in that list is, you know, things that are unread or bold.
John:
And then along the sidebar and all the different categories are all the bins they got chucked in.
John:
So I can just look at that sidebar and say, OK, I've got, you know, 15 messages from this mailing list, 12 messages related to the app store, five messages related to ATP, two messages from my family.
John:
Like just by looking at the sidebar and seeing, you know, what things are in bold and what numbers are after them, because it'll give you the numbers that at a glance tells me what the email situation is.
John:
And then the all mail view shows me all those messages.
John:
uh interspersed with all the messages that i have read because that's the way i prefer to do it you know it's like my unified timeline in twitter like i said that i use twitterific to get um so i don't use any like i i always forget like how many of these things gmail has when i set up some gmail for my kids or whatever i don't use any of this like focus mode prioritize sorted into social media like gmail tries to do all this stuff for you i
John:
I'm not sure if people find that useful or not.
John:
I bet people aren't going to do what I did, which is have, you know, 200 different rules to automatically sort stuff.
John:
But that's the way I prefer to do it.
John:
So I don't use any smart anything.
John:
My email client is dumb, but it is.
John:
Well, it's not dumb, but it is like it's not trying to use any intelligence to organize things for me.
John:
My rules organize things.
John:
And then I'm using the features of the interface.
John:
The fact that they have categories, labels with counts on them and the all mail view to do all my reading.
Casey:
Don Clark writes, I'm a new father.
Casey:
Congratulations.
Casey:
And I found myself taking tons of 4K 60 HDR videos and photos of my child.
Casey:
I'm now very concerned with backing them up.
Casey:
Welcome to being a dad.
Casey:
I know that each of you have robust photo storage solutions.
Casey:
Are these steps documented anywhere?
Casey:
Let me answer really quickly in the middle of his question.
Casey:
Mine are not, will not, and should not be documented anywhere because it's a mess and nobody should do what I do.
Casey:
Moving on to what Don said, Don says, I use iCloud Photo Library.
Casey:
I have a Synology, but I'm not actually doing anything with it yet.
Casey:
Ideally, all of my photos and videos would be saved to my Synology alongside iCloud.
Casey:
Ideally, these locally stored photos and videos could be playable on any of my Apple TVs throughout the house, perhaps using Plex.
Casey:
It said Don, not me, don't worry.
Casey:
As I've found that they don't appear consistently enough or quickly enough in the Photos app on the Apple TV via iCloud, and AirPlay stutters with the 4K60 video content.
Casey:
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Casey:
Yeah, like I said, don't do what I do.
Casey:
That's all I've got for this.
Marco:
Marco.
Marco:
My photo stuff is all just in Apple Photos, and the backup and sync solution is iCloud Photo Library as the sync and as, I guess, a backup.
Marco:
And then because these are all just files living in the file system on my Mac, it is also backed up by my regular Mac backups, which include a local time machine and Backblaze for cloud backup.
John:
Yeah, this is another of the questions that comes up frequently, although it has a little bit of a twist here with the 4K60 stuff and trying to play it.
John:
But for the backups, yeah, the recommendation is you should, you know, if you want to do belt and suspenders, you should have two kinds of local backup, right?
John:
So that would be, you know, a single Mac in your house where all the fixtures are downloaded, like download originals, and then you backup that Mac to,
John:
with time machine and then you also like do a super duper clone or you have a local time machine and a synology time machine but basically two places in your house where there's a hard drive with every one of the bits that is in all your photos and i would back up the whole photo library because if you use icloud photo library if that's how you organize your photos don't just back up the jpegs back up the whole icloud photo library it's not that much more data um it will cause a little bit of churn on your backup because every time you do anything with icloud photo library it needs to re-backup like the databases and stuff but it'll be fine it's
John:
Not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things.
John:
So pick what those two are.
John:
Do you like time machine?
John:
You can just do two time machine backups, a local time machine to a disk that's connected to your desktop Mac, if you're cool and have a desktop Mac, and then a remote time machine to your Synology, right?
John:
Or you could do a super duper clone and a time machine backup, or you could use whatever, right?
John:
But two local backups, right?
John:
And then for cloud backup, you're like, oh, I got iCloud photo library.
John:
I'm covered.
John:
should probably have another cloud backup.
John:
Backblaze, frequent sponsor of the show, any other kind of cloud backup solution that is just essentially backing up your Mac to a cloud service.
John:
And the important part of that, like I said, is to have at least one Mac, the Mac that is having these backups done to it, have the preference set in Apple's photos that says download originals.
John:
Because if you don't, your local backups aren't backing up
John:
your whole iCloud photo library.
John:
They're backing up whatever subset of your iCloud photo library is actually on your Mac at the time, which means you got to have one Mac somewhere that's big enough to fit your whole photo library on it.
John:
So get big SSDs.
John:
yep oh and for the 4k 60 thing so you've got all this stuff and you're like i need some way to play this i agree that the the uh iCloud photo library feature on apple tv is comically bad it chokes so every once in a while every few years i check apple tv to see if it can make heads or tails in my photo library it cannot it does not know what to make of it it just shows it shows blank thumbnails and you can try to scroll and it just hangs and it's like you cannot use it for the intended purpose i cannot look at pictures on it
John:
it just can't handle it someday maybe they'll fix that but they haven't yet so what should you use instead i don't know but if you if you have these things on on you know your synology somewhere you probably have a lot of options for serving that content to your television in a way that is better than icloud photo library i know plex has a photo solution you could probably even just have plex as like a file server type thing and have some other application that reads the plex as an smb share and uses it i don't know what the options are on apple tv but i
John:
feel your pain about iCloud photo library.
John:
Apple ostensibly has a feature that lets you look at your photo library on your Apple TV, but it just basically doesn't work once your library gets to a certain size.
Casey:
Natasha Singh writes, I started wondering about the responsiveness of the M1 family under macOS.
Casey:
By all accounts, it's great right now, but I'm thinking back to the x86 transition and perhaps the PowerPC one before it, and there was always this period where things felt so fast because the hardware was just so much better than what came before that
Casey:
But then the OS and software caught up to it, and we get where we are now, saying that x86 Macs don't feel so responsive.
Casey:
Do you think that we're in a temporary era of macOS responsiveness under the M-whatever family, which will eventually be eaten away by software growth?
Casey:
Or does Apple controlling the silicon and the OS mean that things will stay this way and possibly get even better?
Casey:
This is actually a very astute question.
Casey:
I don't know, but I would think that I would be hard-pressed to see macOS just gobble up any extra, not literal bandwidth, but figurative bandwidth to the point that we feel like macOS gets super sluggish on account of hardware being the problem.
Casey:
It wouldn't surprise me if we don't get a mythical snow leopard moment for a few years and we start to wonder why things are broken and why they're not as quick as they once were.
Casey:
But to answer the question more directly, I don't think so.
Casey:
But it's a very good question.
Casey:
And maybe I'll be wrong.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
What do you think, John?
John:
I don't think that what happens is that the software like bloats to eat all the performance gains.
John:
What happens is you just get used to things because if you go back and try like one of the first round of PowerPC Max, everything on it is incredibly slow, right?
John:
Even compared to later PowerPC Max, like not compared to today, right?
John:
the the the it's like a just a psychological effect of there are these discontinuities where we go from one architecture to another and there's a big performance leap it happened with all of them i can tell you how amazed we all were playing with graphing calculator on a power pc mac just you could absolutely not do things with that kind of performance on a 68k mac it was just phenomenal right and the intel transition was similar things got faster and like they got quote unquote snappier things that
John:
You know, you weren't aware we're slow before.
John:
Something got faster.
John:
Like, you know, just I remember doing command line stuff.
John:
Compiling things from the command line on Intel Max was so much faster than compiling them from the command line on PowerPC Max.
John:
And it's like, why?
John:
Like, what's, is it just disk IO faster?
John:
Like, I don't know what's faster about it, but it's just faster, right?
John:
Things feel snappier.
John:
What happens is we just get used to those gains.
John:
Once you go through that jump in performance, that jump in snappiness, that jump in like just absolute raw horsepower, the gains become more incremental from there because you don't have a big jump.
John:
But you're still going up for the most part.
John:
right and people say oh the software comes and eats all that and it becomes slow again doesn't become slow again it just bends the the curve of improvement to maybe where it becomes flat but the level it flattens out is still way better than where it was it just you know over the years you forget that leap right so as fast as things are on these m1s five years now when we're complaining with mac os is bogging things down pick any task and benchmark it and that you know five ten year in the future and whatever mac we're
John:
will still be faster than the M1, right?
John:
It just doesn't seem faster enough because it hasn't been keeping up with innovation.
John:
And, you know, there are some places where there's regressions where you do something and it just bogs the whole system down.
John:
It used to be slower.
John:
Like, an example of that is, you know, when the Macs went color, that ate a lot of CPU and memory.
John:
And if you, you know, used an old black and white Mac, it would do things faster.
John:
But...
John:
Or things like the Aqua interface in macOS 10, just making pulling down menus slow, where pulling down menus were lightning fast on a Quadro 900, and on a massively more powerful computer, pulling down menus were slow because we just went to double buffering and composited window manager and stuff.
John:
So there are cases where software eats stuff off, but over the long trend, all that happens is we get used to the changes, and also that the changes become more incremental and not as fantastic, and we get...
John:
dissatisfied as is appropriate we we deserve you know continued improvement uh up until uh you know moore's law ends and we can't make things smaller but we're pretty far away from that so hang in there
Casey:
William Rainish writes, is there any reason why John consistently refers to Mac apps as programs as if he were a PC user?
Casey:
Ooh, sick burn.
Casey:
The term Mac program just sounds weird to me, even more so coming from John, who has been a Mac user for so long.
Casey:
That is, I think William just answered his own question with the phrase for so long.
Casey:
Am I right, John?
John:
Do I call them Mac programs?
John:
I don't think this is a thing that I do.
John:
You absolutely do.
Casey:
Well, I don't know if you say Mac programs like that phrase with the two words together, but you absolutely refer to them as programs, not irregularly.
John:
I mean, you know, if you're a programmer and you write programs, that kind of make it goes... Wait, are we supposed to be appers now?
John:
so the the distinction that i you know the old person distinction that i have is uh for a very long time especially in my writing when i was writing for arts technica i refused to use the term app unless i was talking about an ios app because app was like you know when you say app you mean like it was like a phone app it was like a term of art for that round of software innovation for that marketplace for that thing i always said mac application spelling out the word
John:
application is what i call them because i'm an old mac user i call things application i would never call mac write a mac program i would call it a mac application have i said program in the context of things running the mac i'm sure because when you're talking about programming you're in the context of running a program or whatever yeah i say program because i'm super old and remember the times before the mac when everything that ran on your computer was a program right and things that are running on your you know commodore 64 or your vic 20 yeah those were programs right you write these programs and basic run programs on your computer right
John:
So that's probably why I say program because I'm super old.
John:
But in terms of the Mac, application is where my old man-ness comes out.
John:
And then in the modern era, you know, I just basically have given in that because that's what everybody calls it everywhere now.
John:
Like the iPhone has come and swamped that term.
John:
So to give an example and re-advertise my application that I continue to fight with using SwiftUI, Switchglass, everywhere in Switchglass in the help documentation and in the help text in the app.
John:
uh i just called it app see i refer to things as the app it is the app switcher that's where all the apps appear their app icons drag an app into this i use app everywhere because that's what people expect in a modern application and you know see there you go i'm doing it that's what people expect in a modern application that everything is called an app
John:
So I consciously choose to use the modern term when I know it will be in front of people who don't care about my old school Mac roots, but I still think of them as diamond shaped icons with a hand in a tool and they are Mac applications.
Marco:
I remember this change actually happening because this happened as we were users because I think when apps started getting used was the app store on the iPhone.
Marco:
It took me a while to start saying app because it seemed like one of those things like when Steve Jobs announced the app store and he kept saying app, app, all these apps.
Marco:
It sounded like they were almost trying to belittle them like snacks.
Marco:
We just snack on this little app over here.
Marco:
Look, here's an app because they were, you know, in a sense, they were trying to commoditize apps and they succeeded.
Marco:
because they wanted their glorious phone platform to have lots of little apps you can just snack on.
Marco:
And you definitely want to spend all this money on the phone and then get all these little apps for it with no big deal to get the apps.
Marco:
So they have to be really cheap.
Marco:
And I think that was in part reflecting the way that the company, and actually I think directly that Steve looked at these things.
Marco:
I think the way he viewed...
Marco:
third-party applications for the platform is like little snacks that to me like it had that connotation of almost a like you know diminutive kind of term for for what we do and then it kind of took over as well this is what we call all software now everything is an app now um well then until later it became a service that's all the thing like we can all agree though that no one should ever call appetizers apps
Marco:
oh no and especially not appies oh no no like if somebody okay look if anybody wants to be my friend if we are ever anywhere in existence and you refer to a sandwich by any abbreviation of a sandwich that you can possibly think of sandy sando
Marco:
you're out like sando we can't be friends anymore oh goodness i haven't heard sando before that's a new one that might be a letter kenny isn't what's sandy what is the other ones you've heard i don't i can't even say them they offend me so much a witch because there's the the restaurant witch witch uh wasn't it witchcraft no that was one that was the one that was really good no no joke san francisco right yeah it was in san francisco it was really genuinely very very good and then they i think they all folded and it closed down that isn't that why we left san francisco
Marco:
Yeah, that was one.
Casey:
Yeah, that was it.
Casey:
Oh, man.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Fletcher O'Connor writes, recently there's been a lot of discussion about Casey's transition to fast mail.
Casey:
I'm keen to take up your referral code, which is in the show notes.
Marco:
Is this why we have this question today?
Casey:
I don't think I actually put it in.
Casey:
I really don't, but at least in part.
Casey:
I've been exploring adopting a custom email domain beforehand.
Casey:
As a young adult who is too young to get in on the ground floor, what would you suggest for acquiring a domain which is clean and reasonable?
Casey:
Ideally, I'd love firstnameatlastname.com or .com.uh for us down here in Australia.
Casey:
That's A-U.
Casey:
But obtaining a clean TLD like that is extremely costly nowadays.
Casey:
I don't want some weird and wacky TLD as I still want my email to present professionally.
Casey:
But I also don't want to break the bank in purchasing a domain.
Casey:
What would you suggest someone in my position do?
Casey:
If it's just for email and you're not like trying to do web or anything like that, you could do, you know, like Fletcher at O'Connor dot name if it's not already taken or something.
Casey:
So one of those like semi wacky TLDs that are still professional ish, but not.
John:
You think O'Connor dot name is available?
Yeah.
John:
There's a few O'Connors in the world.
Casey:
Well, that's why I immediately realized it would have to be some other, you know.
Marco:
I mean, one thing, you know, one thing you could do is first name at first name, last name dot something.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Which is slightly redundant, but it's still, you know, reasonably easy for people to hear and recognize it.
Marco:
It looks professional.
Marco:
So, you know, once if you do first name, last name dot TLD, you have a lot more TLD options there.
Marco:
Just don't do a hyphen.
Marco:
First name, last name, no, no, no hyphen.
Casey:
I hear what Fletcher's saying with regard to wacky TLDs.
Casey:
Like, you don't want to be Fletcher at O'Connor.pizza or something like that.
Casey:
Like, that's just weird.
Casey:
But there are some reasonable, like .family is another example.
Casey:
And again, I'm sure O'Connor.family is taken.
Marco:
Well, family doesn't sound professional to me.
Casey:
Well, okay, I could get behind that too.
Casey:
But my point is there are reasonable, I think there's like .engineer.
Casey:
There's a surprising amount of TLDs available now that you could do that are at least reasonably presenting as professional.
Casey:
I don't know, John, what's your solution?
John:
Are all the com.au's really taken?
John:
I mean, how many people are there in Australia?
John:
It seems like you should be able to find – it's like an advantage of being in Australia that you don't have to fight in the .coms, that you have the .coms that they use.
John:
I don't think anyone else wants .com.au except for people in Australia.
John:
A similar experience trying to come up with like –
John:
PlayStation names for my kids that are not embarrassing to kids, not embarrassing to parents.
Marco:
Oh, gamer stuff is the worst.
Marco:
There are so many billions of gamers you don't realize until you try to get your name on any kind of game, anything.
Marco:
Yep.
John:
You try to get any kind of reasonable thing.
John:
Well, anyway, domains, I think, is actually an easier situation.
John:
You're not going to be able to get, like...
John:
anything, you're probably not even going to be able to get Fletcher O'Connor or Fletch O'Connor or F.L.
John:
O'Connor or F. O'Connor.
John:
Those are all going to be taken, right?
John:
But you sort of get into Blue Ocean pretty quickly if you combine two or more words.
John:
And they don't have to be uncommon words, right?
John:
So you can just come up with two nice, pleasing words, maybe one or zero of which have anything to do with your name.
John:
that look professional uh and it doesn't have to mean anything and it doesn't have to prompt people to ask you questions it is hard i'm not saying it's not hard but there's a lot of domains out there because once you start combining words it's like no one has thought of those combination of words it's kind of like those passwords that they generate for you is like you know uh you know umbrella hammer you know toadstool right like it's a good password it's a weird combination of stuff now you don't want it to be too long but i'm like
John:
I know it's weird.
John:
You just have to, like, think of something.
John:
You can think of something that's meaningful to you.
John:
You can think of, like, I've always liked, you know, trees in the forest and look up different kinds of trees and come up with a name.
John:
Like, make sure it's easy to spell.
John:
It doesn't have alternate spellings.
John:
It doesn't sound like some other word that's spelled differently.
John:
You know, no hyphens, just not too long.
John:
It is possible.
John:
So I would say like, take the time to, especially if you're going to like, this is going to be my domain for everything.
John:
Take the time to do it up front.
John:
I tried to do this in my life.
John:
I had a perfect domain name and I could not get it.
John:
The person who had it, let it lapse, but there's that grace period.
John:
You know, like if you let it lapse, it gets, it's still locked and you can't get it unless like the grace period goes by.
John:
They let it lapse.
John:
I'm like, no, I'm finally going to get it.
John:
That's how I found out about the whole grace period thing.
John:
And within the grace period, they regot it and it annoyed me so much.
John:
I spent years just bitterly trying to get that domain name because it would have been perfect for me, but I couldn't get it.
John:
It took 20-something years for me to settle on Hypercritical, and I couldn't even get the .com of that, although I make offers all the time, and they keep saying, do you want to pay $30,000?
John:
And I say, how about $200,000?
John:
And they say, okay, I'll talk to you next year.
John:
But anyway, Hypercritical.co is my name now, and it's fine.
John:
I kind of like the .co.
John:
And the reason I picked .co is just like .com, but shorter.
John:
That's why people pick .co.
John:
That's another example of a domain that...
John:
i don't know if it's unprofessional if you did like dot io or dot co those both sound pretty professional io sounds techie co sounds kind of like company um there is the possibility that people will be confused the dot co and dot com so maybe you don't want to do that professional like dot dot com is the thing you want to go to like people know what dot com is or dot name is probably okay as well but honestly i think in most situations you like email addresses tend to be electronic uh and people are clicking on them and not writing them in so it's not that bad but uh
John:
But yeah, don't give up.
John:
I believe there is a one or two word .com.au or even plain old .com domain name that you will be happy with that is professional, that can't be misspelled, that is easy to say over the phone, that is not too long, and that is not embarrassing.
Casey:
Real-time follow-up, o'connor.wtf is available for $31 American.
John:
Great.
John:
And you can make an offer on o'connor.name, minimum offer $200.
John:
I mean, that's not that bad.
John:
That's not that bad.
John:
.name isn't that good, though.
John:
I mean, that's not...
John:
Yeah, for domain names, like there's so many sites that sell you domain names.
John:
If you ever see a thing that says, this domain name is available, make an offer.
John:
That has no connection to anybody wanting to sell a domain name, just FYI.
John:
Everybody will say, sure, just tell me how much you're willing to pay.
John:
And they will go off and try to make that happen.
John:
But don't think because you see that, that there is some person or company that owns a domain name that is trying to sell it to you.
John:
That is almost never the case.
Casey:
So for the longest time, List.com was taken by, and it was legitimate.
Casey:
It wasn't just squatting.
Casey:
It was taken by Long Island Soda Systems.
Casey:
And I was too young when the Long Island Soda Systems, I don't know if it collapsed, if they just didn't care about the web or whatever, but it eventually got released.
Casey:
And so now I'm looking at...
Casey:
aceto cedo.com s-e-d-o.com oh yeah they're a big domain like broker for for domain transfers basically right so i'm looking at at list.com this premium domain and i guess it's premium because it's short uh is is for sale in partnership with cedo seto whatever it's called uh your offer u.s dollars make offer below the big green make offer button minimum offer two hundred thousand dollars usd
John:
Yeah, it is four letters long.
John:
Although to give to give an example of like, say, domains are available.
John:
So, you know, I recently was selling T-shirts for one of my other podcasts.
John:
It's called Reconcilable Differences.
John:
And when I made that podcast and was like, oh, we should have a Twitter account.
John:
Reconcilable Differences is a mouthful and I think it's too long for a Twitter handle.
John:
So I said, oh, let's see if Rectifs is available.
John:
I got the Rectifs Twitter handle.
John:
And when I came like that was like, you know, seven years ago.
John:
Just this past month, I said, oh, we're doing a shirt sale.
John:
I need to get a URL for the shirt sale because it's, you know, it's hosted on its own site or whatever.
John:
It just redirects to the Cotton Bureau thing when you click through.
John:
Anyway, I said, let's see.
John:
Is Rectifs.com available?
John:
Rectifs.com was available.
John:
R-E-C-D-I-F-F-S dot com.
John:
A short domain name, exactly what I would want it, matches the Twitter handle seven years after I started the podcast and
John:
And it was available.
John:
I got rectifs.com.
John:
I got rectifs.store.
John:
I got rectifs.org.
John:
That's why all these names are taken.
Marco:
Wait, if you had the .com, why did you get any others?
Marco:
Because .store is fun.
John:
I guess.
John:
They were redirected to each other.
John:
I wanted to cover all bases.
John:
If people didn't remember the .store and they just typed rectifs, you'd get to it.
John:
No one was not buying a shirt because they couldn't find the page, right?
John:
But the point is,
John:
I know that's weird, but you're like, but see, because it's a combination of two things, two things that happen to be an abbreviation.
John:
And it's exactly the domain I want.
John:
I don't even want reconcilabledifferences.com.
John:
I want rectifs because it's much easier to say.
John:
So don't give up on the idea that all the domains are taken.
John:
There are ones out there just waiting for you to find them.
Casey:
Dave Brash writes, what's the proper etiquette for retiring a Mac to the Syracuse Museum in the Sky?
Casey:
Format first or close the lid and pack it away?
Casey:
Time capsule style.
Casey:
If I do the latter, will it poison my iCloud data when I fire it up in a decade?
John:
Oh, that's interesting.
John:
iCloud.
John:
How many of my Macs have iCloud on it?
John:
do any of them have mobile meal so my my intentional strategy with that is you just close it up you don't touch anything on it because it's supposed to be like a time capsule like this is what my computing life was like you don't wipe the hard drives you don't copy them you don't remove anything stuff is exactly as it was the moment it was decommissioned right now yes in theory if you take the thing out and turn it on like oh it's going to poison my cloud but trust me it's not like they won't be able to connect they won't work correctly
John:
You probably won't even be able to get them on the Wi-Fi.
John:
Like, they won't be plugged into Ethernet.
John:
Or it'll be a 68K Mac that has no idea how to get on the Internet and you'll be, you know, launching a Mac TCP or whatever and try to open a PPP connection to somewhere.
John:
It's not as big a concern as you would think.
John:
But anyway, the reason I don't touch them is, well, one, it's less work.
John:
And two, that's what I want.
John:
I want the snapshot of exactly what things were like.
John:
I want all my icons, all my window positions back in the days when the Mac remembered them.
John:
You know, just everything the way it was.
Casey:
To go back a step, flocon.com, which is probably a mouthful, but F-L-O-C-O-N-N.com for Fletcher O'Connor.
John:
I would not pick that.
John:
It's too easy to misspell.
Casey:
Oh, fine.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I don't know how to spell that when you say that.
John:
Also, it sounds like some kind of HVAC company.
Casey:
It does, actually.
John:
Don't be tied to having it with your name.
John:
It could be anything that you think you're interested in.
John:
It could be just like...
Casey:
It's only $14, though.
Casey:
Flocon.
Casey:
Flocon.com.
John:
I feel like there's a service I could provide.
John:
You just have to sit down with somebody and say, what things do you like?
John:
What things or words or feelings or places are meaningful to you?
John:
And then just try to come up with stuff.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Trade Coffee, and Revenue Cat.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join atv.fm slash join.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental, John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental, and you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean.
Casey:
I think the Swift UI thing is actually improving.
Casey:
Oh, tell me more.
Marco:
I think I have finally figured out how to use the new navigation split view API in a way that I don't hate.
Marco:
There's a couple of bugs that I actually have to file bug reports for, like ASAP, because it's just simple stuff.
Marco:
If you change from light mode to dark mode, it doesn't regenerate some of the icons and the back buttons and the toolbars and stuff like that, and so they have the old color.
Marco:
So I've got to file stuff like that, and if they don't fix that before release, I literally can't use this, unless I can find some hack work around.
Marco:
But assuming that that kind of stuff can get fixed before release, I think I actually might have finally gotten it to a place where I can...
Marco:
use it so we're gonna see i'm gonna proceed and you know see what else i can customize about this and and see what other you know how see what how much more of my ui i can get to function in this environment to some kind of minimum spec um but i think i'm getting there i mean and and there's still certain things that are like comically obtuse and i'm still hitting walls and i'm still hitting like weird behavior where like
Marco:
For some reason, if I write it this way, it doesn't update the state when the value changes.
Marco:
But if I write it this other kind of similar way for some reason, that works.
Marco:
There's still things like that that I'm figuring out or at least plowing through over time.
Marco:
But I am actually making progress.
Marco:
I'm not hating it as much as last week.
John:
I was making huge amounts of progress in my hacking on my app with SwiftUI.
John:
Yeah.
John:
but I always want more because it's a Mac app, and I know how Mac apps are supposed to behave, and it's like, but it should do this, and it should do that, and as soon as I get something working, it's like, I fight with it, I fight with it, and I get it working, and it's like, but I also should do this other thing, and it's just compounding, and I feel like I'm getting to the point where
John:
I'm going to have to, I mean, this is silly, but like when you're doing it, something like this, or it's like a hobby project that's not going to actually make me any money, I will have to eventually break down and read all the articles that people are recommending for like, we'll put it maybe in a future show notes if I ever read it.
John:
But like lots of people recommended like, hey, you should read this so you actually know how SwiftUI works under the covers.
John:
To Marco's point last week, like understanding what it's actually doing and not just like poking at the surface, but understanding it at a deep level is the key to
John:
doing really complicated things right simple things you can get by with just sort of understanding of whatever but at a certain point you really have to know how the machinery works to understand why like i've done i've already done things that i'm like i'm not sure why this fixes it i have theories about why it fixes it and the theories seem to be borne out by my experimentations because i always have i have my project and then i have a playground right next to it where i'm making the toy examples like testing my ideas like playground is such a mess like that it stops working like so often i have like quit xcode and restart but anyway
John:
I'm always testing my theories, but I really do need to.
John:
I've been avoiding understanding it at a deep level, because it's like, ah, this is a fun thing, I don't need to get that, but I think I have to get that deep.
John:
And then the other experience I had today to contrast with my SwiftUI experience is, my app is, it's an AppKit app, but it uses SwiftUI for its one little thing that's on the screen.
John:
But other parts of it are just plain old AppKit, like dialog boxes or whatever.
John:
And in one of my dialogs, I was adding support for a bunch of features today, and I couldn't figure out how to do something.
John:
And the difference between SwiftUI, a four-year-old API, and AppKit, a, what, 30-year-old API, is that when I'm doing stuff with AppKit, and I know neither one of these things.
John:
I don't know SwiftUI and I don't know AppKit.
John:
Like, I have not an experience with any of these APIs.
John:
So it's like clean, I'm starting from a level position for both of them.
John:
But with AppKit, I know that there's a way to do it.
John:
It's just a question of me finding SwiftUI.
John:
Very often there's not.
John:
But like I was trying to get something to work in AppKit and it's like, I can't figure it out.
John:
And there's like so many APIs.
John:
There's just so many features and so many things.
John:
And it's just, it's like a giant forest.
John:
And it's like one of these things does what I want, but I can't find it.
John:
SwiftUI, there's four methods.
John:
And if they don't do what you want, that's it.
John:
Yeah, you got it.
John:
or like the one that you do what you want like they said you know oh these apis exist but if you want this one feature that is that is the basic feature uh you gotta you know increase your uh you know target uh os to mac os 12 because that feature isn't available on 11 but so you know and the good thing about app kit is i can go to the slack with all the old app kit people and say hey how do you do this and out of nowhere somebody comes and says oh it's just easy it's just do this and it's always a one-line solution in app kit it's like
John:
just type this and it's like yeah you pass negative one to this thing and it targets the whole thing instead of the individual item it's like and it's documented it's documented in the documentation i just never had gone to that documentation because there's so much documentation and so many features so um not that you know they're both frustrating like not knowing how to do something oh and the other thing is when i couldn't do it in app kit i was in swift ui mode and i'm like you know what i'll just do it myself what i was trying to do is get an entire table view to highlight instead of just an individual row because when i drag something into the table view it auto sorts so if i if i
John:
if i use the default highlighting it makes it look like you're inserting the item between items two and three or whatever but you're really not you don't have that precision as soon as you drop it i'm going to resort it right so i wanted to just highlight the whole thing i couldn't figure out how to do it i'm like hey this is app kit i'll just draw the freaking highlight myself i have total control of everything just subclass override draw a big rectangle and you know that works
John:
pretty well uh but it was like you know this is app kit i shouldn't have to do that that's a swift ui thing and sure enough i didn't delete all that code delete that entire subclass put one line into an internet method to set the thing the way i wanted and i did it so yeah 30 year old apis pretty sweet
Casey:
pretty good yeah i actually um on a lark i searched um so i had you know three different major areas of complaint last week and on a larch i on a lark i searched for uh the class uh you know i think it's photos or it's a view actually a photos picker i think it's called and i um i searched for that in swift ui either on reddit specifically or maybe i just did like a duck duck go search i don't recall exactly
Casey:
But I found a Reddit post that told me exactly what I needed to know to solve the problem.
Casey:
Now, granted, it would have been nice if I could find that in Apple's freaking documentation, but at least I found it somewhere.
Casey:
And so that one of my three issues has been resolved.
Casey:
And so all my god awful code that I was using to present a photo picker in the existing version of Masquerade, that can all go away if I'm willing to require iOS 16 right away, which I pretty much am.
Casey:
So here we are.
Casey:
And I'm pretty excited about that.
Casey:
All my other issues, though, still remain.
Casey:
Probably self-created, but who knows?