This Week’s Gasp
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Because it's very, like, the first thing I do when, like, so, after we record the show, first thing I do, it, like, usually I upload the bootleg while we are still talking off the air.
Marco:
If we're doing, like, you know, scheduling discussions or whatever, like, because I want to get the bootleg up as fast as possible for the members.
Marco:
So, normally, I will upload the bootleg, like, in the browser with the drag-and-drop thing while we're still talking.
Marco:
And I think it's the right file.
Marco:
Because, you know, like, I have a system that has made it the right file every time.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Because I haven't actually listened to it yet, I want to make sure, like, before I go to bed that night, because, you know, we record at night, usually I go to bed right afterwards, basically.
Marco:
I'm in Casey's sleepy shirt.
Marco:
Nice.
Marco:
Anyway, normally I have to, you know, my final task for the night after I, you know, close up the studio, you know, leave, turn the lights off, my final task for the night is to empty the dog.
Marco:
before bed and so i bring him outside and while i'm doing that i open up my overcast app on my phone and i look for the bootleg that was released 10 minutes earlier whatever it was and i hit play and just make sure that it's the right episode but because all of them begin with hi everybody we're live
Marco:
it's hard for me to really know whether it's the right one or not until like at least a few seconds in so i was trying to save myself a few seconds of uncertainty and and time later tonight uh by beginning this one with something else
Casey:
I see.
Casey:
Well, you know, it's funny you say that because I don't know if the two of you have noticed, and I promised myself I wouldn't call attention to it, but here we are.
Casey:
I have been trying for the last several weeks to have some sort of like, I don't want to say icebreaker because that has all the terrible connotations of like awkward corporate gatherings, but like some sort of fun question sort.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
In the last two weeks, I've been dedicated to doing it at some point, but I've been doing it semi-randomly in the middle of the pre-show or as the transition from pre-show to follow-up.
Casey:
And I've been trying so hard not to call attention to it so it would be more natural and take you guys off guard.
Casey:
But now you have ruined yet another one of my attempts.
Casey:
And I think last time, in your defense, last time was my fault because I made a clubhouse joke and then everything went off the rails.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
But you have ruined yet another attempt of mine, because I do have a question for you all, to have some sort of icebreaker in the beginning.
Casey:
And it seems like this is a futile attempt to add a new feature to the show.
John:
You both are overthinking this.
John:
Marco's overthinking his, like, oh, I've got to change what I would naturally say.
John:
You're overthinking.
John:
The thing that you're doing, Casey, it happens naturally.
John:
You don't need to plan to do it.
John:
We just got to go with the flow.
John:
I don't know why seven or eight years in, it's all of a sudden you're trying to do this thing.
John:
Just go.
John:
It'll be fine.
Casey:
Well, so here, actually, since you've asked, now we're really going off in the weeds.
Casey:
I worry a lot.
Casey:
Worry is maybe too strong a word.
Casey:
I think a lot and I'm somewhat worried that one day we're going to wake up and we're going to realize that we haven't really changed with the times.
Casey:
And we're going to talk about that a little bit.
Casey:
No, just hear me out for a second before you jump all over me.
Marco:
Casey, I have news for you.
Marco:
We already aren't changing with the times, and it's fine.
Casey:
No, no, and that's fair, and that's fair, and that's fair.
Casey:
But I think that there are some things that we can do while not destroying the spirit of the show.
Casey:
And Ask ATP is an excellent example of that, which we totally didn't steal from Upgrade, not one did.
John:
It's the new feature of the show that we added five and a half years ago.
Casey:
Well, still.
Casey:
Um, but no, I think that there are things that I, I just don't want to look around in five or 10 years, God willing, and be like, wow, we really haven't done anything different in a long, long time.
Casey:
And I don't think we're really guilty of that yet.
Casey:
You know, I think a membership almost a year ago now, uh, I think that was a great development and I really am pleased with how that's going.
Casey:
And, and actually I was thinking earlier today, it's been a while since we've thanked everyone like properly, uh,
Casey:
And thank you, everyone.
Casey:
It really means a lot to all three of us.
Casey:
I think membership is a nice change like that, but I don't want to be in a situation where all of a sudden I realize the world has moved on and us three old dudes are sitting here just talking to each other, which, for the record, I would still be doing even if no one was listening.
Casey:
If there's something that we can be doing differently or some little spice that we can add to the show from time to time, I want to do that.
Casey:
And I'm scared that I'm going to get complacent, and I'll just speak for myself now, that I'm going to get complacent and just be like, oh, I'm sure everything's great.
Casey:
And then we become ever more irrelevant with each passing day, which is probably happening anyway.
John:
You're getting a head start in your midlife crisis here or something.
John:
You should relax, Casey, because if you're wondering if we're falling behind the times, just watch to see on all of the Mac websites whatever topic we've been talking about for the past month suddenly appear, and you will know that we are not behind the times.
John:
We are, as always, slightly ahead.
Casey:
There's some amount of truth to that, and I hope that remains true.
Marco:
I think a lot about making sure our show is good.
Marco:
I care a lot about that, as I know you both do.
Marco:
And I think the key to a lot of this stuff is to know who you are and to know who your audience slash customers are.
Marco:
And to do what keeps you comfortably making something that's good for you and for them without trying to be something you're not also.
Marco:
This is something like – you look around the tech business.
Marco:
You've got places like Twitter that is famous for not knowing who they are, always trying to be somebody else to varying degrees of failure.
Yeah.
Marco:
They never succeed.
Marco:
They just, like, fail in different ways.
Marco:
You know, like, Twitter's always trying to be mostly Facebook and oftentimes other things mixed in.
Marco:
How's your reels?
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
I don't even know what that is.
Marco:
I'm so glad.
Casey:
Isn't that the Instagram stories?
Marco:
Oh, that's Instagram TikTok, I think, isn't it?
Casey:
I don't even know anymore.
Marco:
Or is it Twitter, TikTok, Instagram?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Anyway.
Yeah.
Marco:
If you try to be something you're not, then that doesn't usually work.
Marco:
Everyone can tell and it doesn't go well.
Marco:
But I think if your customers have a certain thing they want and you can keep giving it to them in a good, high-quality way that doesn't feel stale –
Marco:
It just feels like consistent.
Marco:
There's nothing wrong with that, as long as it's still good.
Marco:
Like usually when things start feeling stale is when they start getting like super repetitive and they kind of like run out of things to talk about.
Marco:
And, you know, you're kind of just like fishing for topics every week like that.
Marco:
That happens to podcasts after a while, especially those that are not particularly news based.
Marco:
But that hasn't happened to us because we are so news-based.
Marco:
And I think we also have a healthy amount of diversion every episode that keeps people interested.
John:
Maybe too much diversion.
Marco:
Possibly, yeah.
Marco:
And we've actually had ebbs and flows of the amount of diversion that we allow into the show.
Marco:
versus some kind of topic or structure you know the amount of follow-up we allow in the amount of questions like that's that that fluctuates over time but i think as long as we keep putting out a show that our listeners like that we don't really have to necessarily care about what everyone else is doing as long as what we are doing is working for our customers which so far it seems to be um and and there's lots i mean
Marco:
the good thing like the tech business is so big like there's so much i love that we can go through entire episodes not covering some massive story that everyone else that we listen to has covered on their shows and it doesn't matter no one complains to us like why didn't you talk about this big like you know court drama or android phone it's like well that's just not you know we we ran out of time we talk about other stuff more yeah
Marco:
you know and that's i'm fine with that to keep making our show for our listeners who seem to be fine with it and you know whatever everyone else does that's up to them but as long as like we know who we are and we know what we do and we keep doing that for our customers who keep wanting it i think we're fine john thoughts don't worry casey be happy
Casey:
Marco, we got way derailed from you apparently have some Amazon tubes that are in or out of your house.
Marco:
Well, the tubes that we haven't even got for some time, we're now in the balls phase.
Marco:
That's all they make now.
Marco:
They just make a series of balls.
Marco:
But the recent Amazon Echo balls, I talked about them when they first came out a few months back.
Marco:
It seemed like a really good buy because they were something like 70 bucks or 100 bucks, something like that.
Marco:
And they were kind of between the HomePod Mini and the big HomePod, and they sound pretty decent, especially for their price.
Marco:
And the Alexa ecosystem has historically been just much more reliable for us.
Marco:
It's been faster to respond to voice queries.
Marco:
It had way more features, things like it had named multiple timers many years ago now.
Marco:
I regret to inform you all that tonight we unplugged the last Echo in our house, and
Marco:
And we've gone all HomePod slash HomePod Mini because a combination of two factors.
Marco:
The HomePod Siri has gotten better enough and more reliable enough that the gap has narrowed.
Marco:
The Alexa ecosystem is still significantly faster and more consistent to respond.
Marco:
But the HomePod got close in many ways.
Marco:
And it got close enough now that we're willing to tolerate the difference most of the time in that regard.
Marco:
But where the Echoes have a problem is that the new Echo Ball series, the hardware is terrible.
Marco:
It's very buggy.
Marco:
And we own two of them.
Marco:
We've had multiple issues with both of them.
Marco:
And right now...
Marco:
I don't think I can recommend anybody buy this generation of echoes.
Marco:
They're terrible.
Marco:
We have issues where the tweeter will fail.
Marco:
There's two drivers in there, I'm pretty sure.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure there's a tweeter and a woofer.
Marco:
And the tweeter, which does the whole high range of sound frequencies, will frequently fail until a power cycle.
Marco:
And the way this manifests is the sound sounds really muffled as though all the music and stuff is playing through a pillow because the high frequency sound is just dying.
Marco:
It's just not being there.
Marco:
And that will persist until a reboot.
Marco:
And I thought it was a hardware issue.
Marco:
We did a return and a repurchase of one of them.
Marco:
and they both both the the returned one the one that replaced it and the second one we have in the house all have this problem so i think it's just a problem with this whole generation and we also have software issues like with them like the the echo service has been really buggy on these and i don't know if that's if that's like just a thing recently with echo service with all echoes because these are the only ones we've used recently but we are all in on home pods now and uh so far it's fine
Casey:
John, are you still running like 44 different voice assistants in the house?
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
When you're talking about this, I was just thinking about the fact that I have a Google Home Mini still unopened, sealed in the box because the last free one that we got as part of whatever Google stuff we're paying for, just no one in the house wanted.
John:
So we have, yeah.
John:
I've got all of them.
John:
I talk to most of them at least once a week probably.
John:
Talk to my big Siri ball, the full-size Siri the most because it controls my lights, but
John:
Yeah, I got a lot of these things in the house.
John:
I don't know what I'm going to do with that completely sealed Google Home Mini.
John:
It's pretty good as far as, like, it's better than the Amazon Dot, I feel like, because we've got one of those, too.
John:
Like, it's better in terms of the speaker is slightly better.
John:
It's nicer looking.
John:
And the Google Assistant is actually pretty smart and good at answering questions.
John:
It's just that we don't have that many rooms in the house.
John:
And in general, I don't bring these things up into the second floor where the bedrooms are.
John:
So it's all just first floor stuff.
John:
So I don't know.
John:
I'll just give it away to a listener or something.
Marco:
I feel like there's no way I would run the Google one in my house.
Marco:
Just because privacy, trust, and everything.
Marco:
I mean, granted, Google and Amazon are both creepy companies, but I feel like Google is creepier in certain ways.
Marco:
But
Marco:
The Amazon one, I was willing to run it all this time because it was so much better than the alternatives.
Marco:
First, it was the only one for a while that was really defining its category.
Marco:
And then when the alternatives came out, it was just so much better.
Marco:
And it remained so much better for quite some time.
Marco:
And so when something is that much better...
Marco:
it becomes worthwhile to a lot of people to to overlook or tolerate the downsides of having that company stuff in your house for the upside it's providing but when that gap became smaller when the home pods have slowly gotten better and when the echo got way worse that was no longer worth overcoming so now it's like while the echo is still better at certain things i'd rather not run them in my house if they're not going to be massively better than the home pods and they're not anymore
Casey:
All right, so I need my icebreaker.
Casey:
It's required now.
Casey:
That's the way the show works, despite what you guys think.
John:
You think you're going to do an icebreaker?
John:
You have, like, too many topics, and now you think you still need to throw in an icebreaker?
Casey:
Yeah, I'm trying to get it in every episode, man.
Casey:
It still works.
John:
Too much.
John:
If you're going to do that, see, Marco's got his thing that he does before a follow-up, and then you've got your thing you do before a follow-up, and then sometimes Marco has two things they do.
John:
You're just building a whole separate show before we begin the show, you realize.
Casey:
Well, you know what?
Casey:
That's bonus content.
Casey:
You're welcome, everyone.
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
All right, so I would ask this question of John, and I probably will try because I'm a fool, but Marco, since you can deal with hypotheticals that are not completely and perfectly fleshed out in every measurable way, you are given the keys to either a boat, and that can be a speedboat, a sailboat, it doesn't matter, a yacht, whatever—
Casey:
Or an airplane.
Casey:
And let's assume something, you know, more in the direction of Cessna and probably with a boat, less in the direction of yacht, more in the direction of like speedboat or sailboat.
Casey:
You're given the keys to something like a personal-ish sized, you know, seating maybe four to ten people, plane or boat.
Casey:
All of the expenses are paid for.
Casey:
You are magically...
Casey:
through the magic of the Matrix, able to pilot whatever it is that you choose, what kind of vehicle are you choosing?
Marco:
Boat, no question.
Marco:
I'll tell you why.
Marco:
I don't particularly love boats, honestly, but two things.
Marco:
Number one, you said I have the skill to drive them.
Marco:
However, I still think I'd be more comfortable driving a boat because I'd be way less likely to die while doing it.
Marco:
So that's number one.
Marco:
Number two,
Marco:
again while this is not something i actually plan to ever indulge myself in in real life uh having a boat would provide some utility for my actual life in the sense that we frequently have to travel across a body of water and and you know having your own boat does make that better in certain ways whereas i don't really have any problems that having a small plane would solve for me like i'm not frequently traveling you know moderate distances across the country i don't
Marco:
particularly have any like drive to to to fly to get in the sky and fly my own plane like i'm not like super driven to do that so they wouldn't have a lot of utility for me whereas the boat would have utility and i'd be way less likely to die doing it
Casey:
You know, I didn't want you to visit me anyway, then.
Casey:
Fine.
Casey:
Now, all kidding aside, if you had a motorboat and, you know, define that however you want, I'm not necessarily saying a cigarette boat, but, you know, let's say you had some sort of motorized boat that moved with some amount of quickness.
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
I presume there is a place where you are right now that you could dock it probably for $11 gazillion.
Casey:
And then there is a place on the other side of the sound that you could also dock it temporarily when you're trying to go to the mainland.
Casey:
Is that fair?
Marco:
Not the sound.
Marco:
The bay.
Marco:
And yes.
Casey:
I knew I probably had that wrong.
Casey:
And I was like, no, I think it is—
Marco:
Sorry.
Marco:
It's the Great South Sound.
Marco:
Anyway, it's in Long Island.
Marco:
So the issue with boats here is exactly that.
Marco:
It's like you don't just have to buy the boat, which itself is a whole thing, right?
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
All the jokes about it being a hole in the water you throw money into.
Marco:
like there's there's that but then also you have to pay for parking boat parking on both sides they don't call it that they call it like i think slips but it's you're basically buying boat parking spots and yeah you have to buy them on both sides of the body of water you can't have them year round you have to take the boat out of the water for the winter because it freezes sometimes as it recently did so you have to have boat parking on both sides which is as you mentioned limited and expensive and
Marco:
And the boat, which is very expensive and highly maintenance intensive.
Marco:
And you have to then have a place to a place and a method to lift the boat out of the water for the winter and put it somewhere and, you know, rapid and do whatever care is required to do that.
Marco:
And so it's just it's such a massive pain in the butt that I feel like it's only worth it if you really love boating as a thing.
Marco:
And I don't care about boating as a thing.
Marco:
I would appreciate the utility in transportation that it would provide me.
Marco:
But for the cost of having a boat, I could hire my own private water taxi from the ferry company every single time I cross the bay and still come out way ahead.
Casey:
Oh, that's interesting.
Casey:
I didn't think it that way.
Marco:
I hear you, though.
Marco:
Yeah, so I don't think it's ever going to be worth it.
Marco:
The only reason I indulge this is that you said all expenses were paid for magically.
Casey:
Sure, sure, sure.
Casey:
All right, John, I know you're going to tear this all apart, but let's go ahead.
Casey:
Make me earn it.
Casey:
What would you choose?
John:
You're not going to add any more constraints to this thing?
Casey:
Not yet.
Casey:
I will fill in blanks if you need me to, but let's just go with it as presented.
John:
But you can't just change it after I have my answer because you're not going to like my answer.
John:
But given what you said, my answer fits just fine.
John:
I would pick the one that has the highest resale value and I would sell it because I did not.
John:
I do not want to be on a boat, and I do not want to be on a plane.
John:
I don't like being on either one of those things.
John:
I wouldn't want to own them.
John:
I get seasick.
John:
I get airsick.
John:
I don't want to die in a plane crash.
John:
Just none of them appeal to me whatsoever.
John:
It was all about resale value.
Casey:
I do not want green eggs and ham.
Casey:
I do not like you, Sam.
Casey:
I am.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
For me, you know, in this magical world where I could just snap my fingers and know how to fly a plane and have like a Cessna or something like that, it is appealing.
Casey:
But I come back to what you had said, Marco, as much as I was giving you grief about it.
Casey:
There's not a lot of places that I could just casually fly my Cessna to.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
You know, like if I'm going to go somewhere, in all likelihood, I would be driving in.
Casey:
And if I don't drive, then I would need to, like, acquire a rental or use, like, the piece of garbage.
Casey:
Like, I forget the term for it, but, like, my understanding is general aviation has, like, the house car, so to speak, where it's some, like, beat-up caprice from 50 years ago that you can borrow to, like, make a quick errand or run a quick errand or whatever.
Casey:
And so as much as I think knowing how to fly a plane would be fun, and flying it would be incredible fun, you know, the whole flying from the sky thing notwithstanding, I think I would definitely want a boat.
Casey:
And when I was growing up, my family had a Yamaha jet boat, and it was phenomenally fun.
Casey:
We used to go on Candlewood Lake in western Connecticut, and...
Casey:
I think we even had it in the lake that Marco and I met each other at a couple of times.
Casey:
You did.
Casey:
I remember my grandfather was furious about it because he hated anything other than a rowboat in that lake, but here we are.
Casey:
And then we also brought it to Lake Walpapak in Pennsylvania, which you might know from the office because it was very near Scranton, actually.
Casey:
And my grandparents lived there and they had a pontoon boat and that was impossibly fun because, you know, you could either drive all of these boats right up on the sand on like an island or on the shore because a jet boat has an extremely small draft.
Casey:
A pontoon boat has an extremely small draft.
Casey:
You know, you didn't need a lot of depth to run them.
Casey:
Or the pontoon boat made a great like floating anchor, so to speak, where you just tie up to the pontoon boat and and it was extremely fun.
Casey:
And I miss that dearly.
Casey:
Gosh, I miss that so much.
Casey:
And in this fantasy world where I could, you know, snap my fingers and have whatever boat I wanted, I would totally get like some obnoxious, ridiculous cigarette boat with like two humongous, like supercharged V8s in it and be that jerk that's like blowing up, blowing up and down, you know, the lake at 100 miles an hour, which is probably illegal.
Casey:
It would just be impossibly fun.
Casey:
I remember when I was really young, my dad, who was a mechanic professionally for a brief window of time before he started working for IBM, I guess he was just doing this as like a side gig.
Casey:
He took a very wealthy friend of a friend's cigarette boat and was like doing something to the motor because there's a Chevy motor in it.
Casey:
I don't remember what exactly it was.
Casey:
But I remember when Dad was done, the guy who at the time I think was running a Chiquita banana distributor in Newburgh, he took us on the boat on the Hudson, which is kind of hazardous in many ways.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I remember doing like 50 or 60 on the water, maybe even more than that.
Casey:
Going under the Newburgh Beacon Bridge and thinking, well, I usually am in the car with mom and dad up there.
Casey:
And now I'm on a boat blasting under it at probably even faster than the cars are going.
Casey:
It was it was a lot of fun.
Casey:
And so I think that's what I would do.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Fastmail.
Marco:
I'm so happy to have Fastmail as a sponsor.
Marco:
I have been a Fastmail customer for longer than this show has existed.
Marco:
This is the first time I've sponsored anything.
Marco:
This is a totally objective thing.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
You can bring in all your domains, so you can email from an address that matches your name or a side hustle on one account without paying more, and you can use hundreds of email aliases that keep your main address private.
Marco:
This is what I do.
Marco:
Again, I've been using FastMail for so long.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you so much to FastMail.
Marco:
for hosting my email for, I think, over a decade, and for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Let's start with some follow up, because we haven't been talking for half an hour already.
Casey:
We have some smart tools doubts from Jeff E. And John, can you tell me about this, please?
John:
This is the topic I was alluding to in the part before, which may or may not make it into the show, where a bunch of Mac websites have picked up on the story we've been talking about for a few weeks about potential SSD wear on M1 Macs.
John:
And as we discussed on the past several shows, this is all derived from people's doubts about the output of this smart mon tools command line tool.
John:
And, you know, as we said earlier, we don't know if that tool is correct or accurate or able to give information.
John:
valid statistics we also don't know how much to compare it to because unless you've been using this tool for years maybe what you're seeing is normal maybe it's not everyone's comparing their numbers they're not sure so jeff's doubt is uh is based on the tools he says drive makers often use raw values and may obfuscate numbers in the smart fields attributes are not really required to follow any format makers can use their own attributes and they may not share how to translate them your mileage may vary by vendor so
John:
The tool to read these attributes from the drive, you know, obviously the tool is not endorsed by Apple or blessed by the drive.
John:
And also there's not even a good standard for tools to comply to to make sure that they're interpreting the values correctly.
John:
So who knows what's going on.
John:
And in case you were wondering, all the different stories and Mac websites about this have added as far as I've been able to tell zero new information.
John:
So if there was more information, we would give it to you here, but there isn't.
John:
It's just a bunch of people running that tool, looking at the numbers, and feeling afraid in varying amounts.
Casey:
Yeah, it seems like there's definitely some smoke here.
Casey:
You know, one of the things... Is there, though?
Casey:
Well, it's funny you say that.
Casey:
So one of the things that I've been...
Casey:
wrestling with of late with regard to the show is when we should, we should indulge the latest, because I feel like there's always a, that's happening in this community.
Casey:
And I don't think that's unique to us.
Casey:
And I think that's, that's what this is like the, the pearl clutching.
Casey:
Oh no.
Casey:
And I feel like all of us, I'm certainly guilty of this.
Casey:
Like I am no angel, but we all have something that we've gotten worked up about.
Casey:
Like, I don't know, maybe a SMS messages, for example, um,
Casey:
We all have this thing that we're perfectly executed.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
So we all have this thing that we're worked up about.
Casey:
And a lot of times, if you just give it a week or two, the thing will get resolved or it'll blow over.
Casey:
More information will come out or so on and so forth.
Casey:
And there's a bunch of topics in the show notes document that nobody can see but us.
Casey:
Where, you know, we, this thing was like super dramatic and then it got resolved and we never had the time to talk about it.
Casey:
And so we, I, the three of us keep arguing as to whether or not we should give it any airtime at this point.
Casey:
And, and I feel like this is one of those things that we're right on the cusp of between, yes, this is something to legitimately be worked up about, or no, this is just this week's, and I'm not sure which one it is, but we'll see over time.
Casey:
I'm quite sure.
John:
Okay.
John:
My criteria for deciding which way to go on those things is, is there something technically interesting to discuss?
John:
Because even for stories like that's why I'm the big defender of the one story you're referring to down the top is because even if the thing is over, even if the controversy is over, very often it's there is some related technical detail that is not over and is very relevant as a thing that listeners to the podcast, I think, would be well served to know about.
John:
Right.
John:
And the reason I brought up this whole SSD wear thing is entirely because I was hoping and expecting that we would get to some kind of technical explanation.
John:
Yes, in the beginning, it's all dramatic and like, oh, well, you know, something weird is going on and the M1s are new or whatever.
John:
But at this point, if you look at these stories, it's like people have it on Intel Macs.
John:
People have it on old Macs, on new Macs, on Macs with lots of RAM, on Macs with not a lot of RAM.
John:
Look at my numbers.
John:
Look at your numbers.
John:
It's all over the map.
John:
Like it's not, it's getting less clear instead of more clear.
John:
Um, so this may be one of those things that we'll have to revisit, like when, when it starts to manifest in a way that is consistent enough for someone to take action.
John:
So for example, if Apple does like a repair program where like, Oh, if you got one of these early M1 Macs,
John:
there was a problem that was causing the SSDs to wear out and we'll replace them for free, right?
John:
And then we'll know it's absolutely definitely a thing, right?
John:
But for now, it's still just a bunch of people running a command line tool that may or may not be accurate and looking at numbers that they have no comparison for except for other people who ran the same thing 10 minutes ago.
John:
Um, I, I, I hope there's some kind of reason for the variance, but the reason may very well be just like Jeff said, oh, well actually it's different vendors drives and they return bogus numbers or the tool doesn't know how to interpret them.
John:
So that's why it looks like somebody is writing a hundred terabytes an hour and the other person is writing a hundred terabytes every 10 years.
Casey:
We spoke last week about Clubhouse and we're probably going to talk about that more in a little bit and how we were all kind of grossed out to varying degrees about the contacts API in iOS and how you're allowed to basically slurp up an entire address book full of data.
Casey:
And Rick Santos wrote us to point out that there is an API to autofill email addresses without asking for contacts permission.
Casey:
And this was mentioned in WWDC 2020 sessions.
Casey:
They're called, and we'll put links in the show notes, build trust through better privacy and autofill everywhere.
Casey:
I didn't have the chance to go through these and kind of look through them, and I'm guessing that neither of you did either.
Casey:
But nevertheless, it sounds like there is at least some amount of motion in this direction.
Casey:
And
Casey:
And where was it?
Casey:
Was it on dithering that I think that there was some call, like we had said, for having a photos-esque front end from a user perspective to the contacts API?
Casey:
You know, you can bless a small series of contacts or, yeah, you can just slurp everything I have at it.
John:
Yeah, maybe I was half remembering this WWC session when I was proposing an API like this because I did watch a lot of these and I probably had in the back of my mind.
John:
So I'm glad that's a thing.
John:
The other thing that people have talked about that I think doesn't quite exist yet, but that I was also alluding to in past episodes is even for situations where you want to
John:
answer the question hey has anybody else in my contact signed up for this service so i can know to like friend them or whatever you can even answer that question without giving out your contacts if you just do one-way hashes of everything and have a standardized system for sharing those one-way hashes you can find out uh you know sort of in a secure way where all you pass over is a bunch of one-way hashes that cannot be turned into contact information and then people can match them up now obviously this is up to the
John:
the existence of these apis and also the willingness of the service to be nice about it right because you know it's currently there's if you give contact access they have access to your actual contacts so they could be nice and say oh no we only make hashes of them and compare them we don't store them but that's not what they're doing so uh you know baby steps here but the point that we tried to make last week is lots of things like this are technically possible where you can get almost all the features you have now without giving your contacts to anybody which is ideal
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
We also spoke last week about the rumor that the iPhone will get an astrophotography mode, and we were fairly clueless about it.
Casey:
And a handful of people have written in to point us in the direction of Google, who has already been doing this, which we should have known.
Casey:
And there's an excerpt from Android Authority that I'd like to read.
Casey:
The Pixel 4 combines 16...
Casey:
15-second exposures into a single four-minute mega exposure, for lack of a better term, while the Pixel 3a and the Pixel 3 combine four of these frames into a one-minute exposure.
Casey:
To actually capture astrophotography shots, you'll need a tripod or some other makeshift way of holding your phone completely still, and then you'll have to enter night shift mode for the phone to automatically enter astrophotography mode.
Casey:
If you click through to this link, it actually does have some darned impressive images.
Casey:
And I know that
Casey:
Google phone still images are, generally speaking, accepted to be really, really, really good.
Casey:
And these are no exception.
Casey:
They're very impressive and worth checking out.
Casey:
And obviously the link will be in the show notes.
John:
Yeah, whether or not Apple actually does this, the fact that there was a rumor about it and the fact that Google already does a thing like it puts strong weight towards Apple doing whatever they need to do to be competitive with what Google's doing.
John:
Or they could just not do it at all, and that rumor is totally wrong.
John:
But knowing that this feature exists on Android really pushes heavily in the direction of Apple saying, we're going to do that too, or we're going to do that same thing, but we have a better way that doesn't require a tripod or something.
John:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
Yeah, absolutely.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then we spoke, I don't remember if it was last week or the week before, but recently we've spoken about magnets and MagSafe.
Casey:
And Antisoderholm writes, regarding weak magnets and MagSafe, accessories can use magnets of their own to make the attachment stronger.
Casey:
I've got a car mount for my phone that uses MagSafe.
Casey:
It has its own magnets to make the attachment stronger.
Casey:
So that the phone doesn't come loose when you hit a bump while driving.
Casey:
I'm actually a little confused about this.
Casey:
Isn't MagSafe, doesn't that require magnets on both the receptacle and the phone itself?
Casey:
So like there's going to be quote unquote magnets of their own regardless, right?
Casey:
I think I'm just confused.
John:
I think this is just the idea that, like, so there's probably some standard for MagSafe where you're supposed to make these many magnets in these positions of these strengths.
John:
Yeah, there is.
John:
But there's nothing saying that you can't put much, much stronger magnets on the accessory side to try to help out.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
So this is the theory.
John:
We got a lot of feedback from people saying, I have a bunch of MagSafe accessories for my car, and they're just plain old MagSafe with no super strong magnets, just like the same ones you'd get from a puck.
John:
And my phone doesn't fall off when I go over bumps.
John:
So apparently it's good enough to work for a lot of people.
John:
The other factor that we talked about, I forget what Marco called it.
John:
What did you call the force that... Sandwich closing force.
John:
Anyway, to be a little bit more precise about that, the magnets are pushing the two surfaces together.
Marco:
More precise than sandwich closing force.
John:
The magnets are pushing the two surfaces together, but the thing you care about in a car mount is the...
John:
the the friction between the two surfaces and apple's puck has terrible friction because it's hard metal it's like a ring of heart you see what it looks like it's like a little silver ring of metal and then a slightly indented reason that that metal region is the is the surface that is pressing against your phone if you have nothing on your phone then it's a ring of smooth metal against smooth or matte finish glass
John:
That's there's not a lot of friction between those surfaces.
John:
If you have leather case, then it's a ring of smooth metal against leather.
John:
What you really want is tacky rubber against tacky rubber.
John:
And given the same magnetic force, if you have tacky rubber against tacky rubber with that same sandwich closing force, as Marco calls it, that's actually pretty strong.
John:
That said, it really depends on the size of the potholes in your area.
John:
I can't imagine any mag safe thing surviving some of the things that I've hit that have been to my actual wheels.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Then we had a little bit more on supervised iPhones from Mark Wickens.
Casey:
If you recall, this is an iPhone that is owned by your employer and thus they can do a lot with it.
Casey:
And we were talking about how, well, there's not actually that much they can do with it from Apple's perspective in terms of snooping what you're doing and like your web browsing and whatnot.
Casey:
And Mark wrote in a good point that I had considered, but I don't think I mentioned on the show and certainly glossed over if I did.
Casey:
And Mark writes, regarding managed devices and privacy, something I don't think you mentioned is that it's possible for an employer to enforce an always-on VPN via a configuration profile.
Casey:
You should know about it if your employer's done this, but just in case anyone thought based on your recent follow-up that everything was guaranteed to be private, if the device is sending all internet traffic via your employer's VPN, then they can monitor a lot more
Casey:
You'll see earlier episodes when we mentioned a Facebook VPN app that got banned.
Casey:
There's a page that has instructions to find out if this is the case, and we'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
And that's a really excellent point.
Casey:
So basically, your employer could hypothetically force all of your internet traffic to funnel through them.
Casey:
And if they're going to be effectively your ISP, then yeah, they can look at whatever they want.
Casey:
And that's worth considering.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
John, you have some Clubhouse thoughts.
Casey:
Tell me about it.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I've used Clubhouse a lot more since last episode.
John:
And, you know, at all, I mean.
John:
More than zero.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I was sad to learn that my username was already taken.
John:
In fact, it had already been taken when we were discussing it.
John:
But it was taken by someone who I think is actually Italian.
John:
So I guess that's fine.
John:
But I rarely wish I'd gotten that first.
John:
There's a lot of people with my last name in the world.
John:
Not all of them are in Italy.
John:
Anyway, a few points to note before I talk about my experiences on there.
John:
The sign up for Clubhouse is that you sign up with your phone number.
John:
You don't sign up with your email address, although you can enter an email address and everything, but you sign up with your phone number.
John:
And that's interesting for a couple of reasons having to do with the social network.
John:
But before we get to that, there's an aspect that Marco will love, which is they don't have passwords.
John:
They use the Marco login system.
John:
So every time you want to sign in, it's like the things that Marco makes that drive me up a wall where you go to sign in and it says, hey, do you want to sign in?
John:
Enter your identifier here.
John:
And then it says, okay, great.
John:
We'll email you a link.
John:
And they email you a link and you click the link and you log in.
John:
That's it.
John:
That's the only way.
John:
I mean, for now.
John:
I mean, maybe they'll change it, but I thought that was interesting.
John:
i know i don't like having to go i'm at the login page i want to log in i don't want to be at the login page and have to go back to my email client but that's what they do um apparently if you're going to invite somebody uh we were talking last time oh i don't want to share my contacts because it forces you to share your contacts was like oh casey just get another phone and empty out all your contacts and turn off icloud and then uh and then do it and then invite me apparently the app only lets you invite somebody who's in your contacts
John:
So if you were to empty out your contacts and then say, OK, here you go.
John:
Here's my contacts.
John:
There's nothing there.
John:
Now, please let me invite somebody.
John:
When you went to invite me, it wouldn't work.
John:
So you'd have to add me specifically to your contacts and then invite me, which is silly.
John:
Again, this is a young service.
John:
Things change a lot.
John:
So who's to say how this will be?
John:
They're all this to say is they're very adamant about getting your contacts because really there's no reason they need your contacts for you to invite people.
John:
And then even if you try to work around it, it's like, you know, forcing you to at least add the people you want to invite to your contacts.
John:
And the phone number thing and the contacts thing brings to mind a topic that is near and dear to any new social networks heart, which is how do you bootstrap any kind of social network?
John:
How do you start building the web of people who are friends or followers or whatever terminology you use to make your social graph in your network?
John:
How do you get that going?
John:
A while back, various social networks used to allow you to essentially hijack their social network by saying, please tell me all the relationships between this person and any other person that they have as friends or followers or whatever.
John:
And that turned out to be a bad idea as far as those companies were concerned.
John:
And they started locking it down.
John:
So it used to be like, for example, that if you went on a social network, you could give your Twitter a handle and then it could crawl your Twitter relationship graphs and just say, oh, we know all these people.
John:
Looks like that, you know, and we'll invite them and you can invite them here, you know, or.
Marco:
That honestly, I'm pretty sure that is what made Instagram take off.
Marco:
Like Instagram took off massively because they were sucking in the Twitter graph and then Twitter cut it off like about a few months into that once they realized like, oh, this is probably strategically not a great thing to do.
John:
Yeah, and it's in some ways it's a little bit of a cat and mouse game because you can get this.
John:
It's not, you know, the information is available to a human with a web page clicking with a mouse.
John:
It's supposedly not available through APIs.
John:
It depends on how devious you want to be and how much you anticipate being sued or whatever.
John:
But anyway, it's a problem every social network faces.
John:
People don't want to go in and have to be like, oh, I'm on this thing and I don't have any friends or followers or people who I follow.
John:
How do I find people to follow?
John:
Why can't you just tell me if any of my friends are on here so I can follow them?
John:
Or better yet, why don't you just make me automatically follow everybody who I already follow on Twitter or who I already am friends with on Facebook?
John:
And...
John:
While that's good for users, it's bad for Twitter and Facebook.
John:
So that's why they can't do it.
John:
So the phone number thing as the way to build a social network is interesting because, well, for a couple of reasons.
John:
One, as was discussed on Dithering recently, most people only have one or maybe two phone numbers.
John:
So it's more of a...
John:
It's a slightly more reliable identifier for a person, whereas things like email addresses or usernames, you can make an unlimited number of those.
John:
Bots can make them really quickly.
John:
Any individual human probably already has many email addresses and it's really easy to make new ones.
John:
And so it's hard to say what the actual social graph is if people can just make up usernames.
John:
I have multiple Twitter accounts.
John:
They're all me.
John:
But there's no real way for Twitter to know that unless they're doing some kind of IP tracking.
John:
And even then, that can be unreliable.
John:
But if you have phone numbers...
John:
It's harder to make bots.
John:
And I say this and knowing full well that next episode, someone's going to send us follow up saying, well, you don't understand how easy it is to grind out new phone numbers for these giant spam farms.
John:
So I'm saying it's harder, not impossible, right?
John:
But it's harder to make bots.
John:
And it ties your identity for regular people who don't easily have access to get new phone numbers constantly, or it's just a big hassle.
John:
It ties your identity and reputation more closely to the thing that you are signing in with.
John:
And then for your social network, although you might not have like knowing all the Facebook names and Twitter handles of everybody in your context, the most likely thing you are to have is either an email address or a phone number.
John:
And if it's on your phone, maybe, you know, and especially if you're not, if everyone, you know, doesn't use iMessage or whatever, you probably have their phone numbers, which is their identifier as far as you're concerned for text messaging and other things that you do from your phone.
John:
So if you can't get access to the Twitter graph and you can't get access to the Facebook graph or the Instagram graph or whatever, your best bet for building that network is to go with telephone numbers from people's cell phones that are more reliably uniquely identified people and that are likely to be in their contacts database.
John:
And you can ask that for access for it.
John:
So it makes perfect sense why Clubhouse is...
John:
very enthusiastic let's say about getting your contacts because it wants to build its network and it wants to build its network in a reliable way that's not that's harder to spam or pollute or you know fill with garbage um part of this identity based you know
John:
more reliable identity-based system where you can't easily make a million in throwaway counts is that when you get on to Clubhouse, I don't know how long this is going to be there, but when I was invited on and I go to my profile page, at the bottom of my profile page, it says nominated by and then the person who invited me.
John:
And I don't know how long that's going to stay there.
John:
Is that going to stay there forever?
John:
And so it's like, if you invite someone to clubhouse forever, you are responsible for any garbage thing they do.
John:
Cause everything is go to their profile and say, this person was nominated by so-and-so.
John:
Why did so-and-so invite this guy on?
John:
He's a jerk.
John:
Uh, I don't know how long it's going to last, but I thought it was interesting, especially given how hard it would be to sort of, you know, again, make throwaway counts or disassociate yourself from your number.
John:
It's a hassle to change your phone number.
John:
It's really easy to make a new Twitter handle.
John:
So yeah,
John:
I will continue to be nominated by the nice person who gave me an invite.
John:
When you've shared your contacts and someone in your contacts comes on to Clubhouse, I don't know if they do this all the time, but many people have been reporting that they get a notification that says, hey, welcome your friend Joe Schmo to Clubhouse, like an iOS notification on your phone.
John:
Which is, A, kind of creepy because it's like they're rubbing it in your face that they have all your contacts.
John:
Wait, how did you know that I know, oh, I gave you all my contacts.
John:
I thought you weren't going to look at those.
John:
Like, that's the thing.
John:
When people give access to their contacts, they're like, okay, well, this is probably just for something that makes it easier to do in the program or whatever.
John:
But it's like, no, they actually look at those and use them.
John:
And so every time they say, we noticed something that happened and then you're like, oh, it's depressing.
John:
But the second aspect of this that's
John:
creepy and disconcerting and has already caught me is if you tap that notification that says hey your friend joe schmo uh joined clubhouse why don't you welcome them if you tap that notification it launches you directly into a live real-time two-way audio conversation with that person oh god
John:
with no intervening like it makes a room in clubhouse like it just throws you right in there like not even like a like because there's nothing in the welcome message that makes you think that's going to happen because you're like well i can tap this and it'll probably like show me their profile page or at the very least prompt me hey do you want to talk to so and so nope i'm making a room here you are they're invited in and you could be in a suddenly in a real-time audio conversation you had no expectation would happen so oh my god that seems like that seems like so many ways
John:
A part of the app the Clubhouse folks might want to reconsider because that is going from zero to 60 awful fast.
John:
I get a creepy notification, I tap it, and now they can hear what I'm saying and I can hear what they're saying.
Marco:
No, that's not good.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, because, I mean, geez, if you think about every possible scenario that you could be in, who could they be?
Marco:
Like, you know, people you have in your contacts.
Marco:
I don't know a lot of people who frequently go through and delete people out of their contacts.
Marco:
Like, most people have contacts in their phone, and the number just always increases.
Marco:
They never go through and filter them out, because there's usually not much reason to go, like, delete contacts.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Like I just, I went through mine when I had that sync issue a few months back with Big Sur.
Marco:
I went through that and that was the first time I deleted contacts in probably 12 years.
Marco:
Like I was going through deleting people who like I literally haven't talked to since 2006.
Marco:
And like I had their constant info from back then, but there was no reason to ever go through.
Marco:
So imagine, you know, like, like ex-boyfriends could be in there, ex-bosses, like, oh God, that could, that could go very badly.
John:
Yeah, those are two things brought up by a lot of our listeners, like all these social networks.
John:
They're just trying to make edges, you know, make lines between nodes, but they don't have the knowledge based on, oh, we got all your contacts.
John:
is this your abusive ex-boyfriend or girlfriend right is this is this the boss that you hate is this your ex-wife who you're currently not speaking to you know is this uh like just someone who you just don't want to be talking to like it doesn't know that it just knows well here's some contact information it's not like people annotate them with the desirability of suddenly being in a real-time conversation with them so
John:
This seems like not the correct default for anyone.
John:
I mean, in many ways, it's similar to the problem, you know, that Facebook and everything had forever where they'll try to bring up memories from your past, but they have no idea if they're good memories or bad memories.
John:
Even if it's something like, oh, look, it's a picture of your dog and your dog just died.
John:
It's it's they're trying to be helpful, but they don't know what they don't know.
John:
And it's a dangerous thing to do at scale, so I would suggest that Clubhouse reconsider this.
John:
I have heard a lot of reports of people who are on Clubhouse way earlier, because Clubhouse has been around for a while.
John:
I've been seeing Twitter discussions of it forever, and I could not for the life of me figure out what it was.
John:
Like, for whatever, however many months people have been talking about it.
John:
Maybe they're talking about two different things, because I think there might be two things called Clubhouse.
John:
Anyway...
John:
i've heard that the app has changed a lot in the short time that it has existed so and you know it's still in closed beta invite only so these are some suggestions that clubhouse might want to change now as for experiences i intentionally tried to once i got on the thing and finished mourning about not getting my username
John:
um i wanted to you're stolen over that no i'm just really upsetting now as many people said sort of facetiously but not really facetiously now i'm rooting for the service to fail because if i can't get my username it just needs to be burned down that's it it's over yeah well i mean they'll just get bought by you know facebook or whatever the heck happens to uh actual social media i bet they're bought within six months
John:
Or they just get Instagram storied.
Marco:
Oh, to be fair, I think both will happen.
Marco:
I think they're going to be bought by somebody within six months and also they're going to get Instagram storied.
John:
Yep.
John:
I tried to get into a bunch of rooms to try to use this thing.
John:
That was tricky for me because I haven't given it my contacts, so I don't have much of a social graph on the network.
John:
i mean i'm doing it the old-fashioned way which is follow one person that you know is there like the person who invited me and then look at who they follow and then follow all the people you know who they follow and then you know just keep iterating and look at those people and then look who they follow and then look who they follow so i'm bootstrapping my social network by digging down the tree of people i know and just scrolling through all their contacts until i don't recognize anybody you know what i mean that is so much better than how i did it
Marco:
So I decided normally my problem usually with new services is I usually wait.
Marco:
Usually anything that comes out that everyone's talking about, I'm too skeptical of or I'm too slow to it.
Marco:
So I'll be like, Twitter's going to be a passing fad.
Marco:
I don't need to sign up on Twitter.
Marco:
But usually that resulted in me missing some huge activity there, and then I get there late, and I regret having missed the earlier stuff.
Marco:
And so this time I thought, let me do it right, even though I know it's, again, as you said, it's been around for a while.
Marco:
But let me do it right.
Marco:
I'm going to go into this all optimistic.
Marco:
And so I went in and I actually did the thing where you fill out your interests up front, which are hilarious, by the way.
Marco:
Like one of the interests you could pick was podcasts.
Marco:
Period.
Marco:
Just podcasts.
Marco:
Like, okay, that's a bit broad, but okay.
John:
They all find TV and movies, but I was baffled by those lists, too, because they were so short.
John:
There was like a list of seven things.
John:
And it's like, is that the world of entertainment?
John:
Those seven things?
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And so I went through that.
Marco:
I actually look honestly like, well, yes, I do like podcasts.
Marco:
So I picked that.
Marco:
I picked probably five or six other things on the list of poorly chosen blobs.
Marco:
And then it shows this list of people you might like to follow.
Marco:
And it was all just like...
Marco:
investor dicks.
Marco:
It was nobody I want to follow.
Marco:
It was just a whole bunch of trendy futurists and all those people who I just have no tolerance for.
Marco:
And I accepted every single recommendation.
Marco:
I followed all of them.
Marco:
I want to know what people are at.
Marco:
How this service is actually being...
Marco:
I'm experienced by the people who are saying how great it is.
Marco:
I want to see why it's so great.
Marco:
And so I followed every single person they recommended.
Marco:
And it's all these people who I would never in a million years choose to follow on any other service.
Marco:
But I thought, hey, I want to get a good picture of this thing.
Marco:
And so, yeah, the list of channels that I was exposed to during my time trying it, oh, man, I did not find anything good.
John:
I don't know why you would do that.
John:
I mean, I get your idea of, like, I want to see what other people are seeing, but you know you don't want to see what other people are.
Casey:
It's funny because I think I did something in between you guys.
Casey:
I definitely and honestly filled out that interest, like, questionnaire isn't the right word for it, but, you know, like, what do you like?
Casey:
You know, do you like this?
Casey:
Do you like that?
Casey:
And I filled that out honestly.
Casey:
And then I, you know, saw or I tried to look up a handful of people that I thought were already there that I know or enjoy their work and I started following them.
Casey:
But I feel like the suggestions that I get 99% of the time or at least the
Casey:
the suggestions from people that I'm not following.
Casey:
So, so it's one thing if like, I think it's, um, this coming Friday, uh, Matt Bischoff is doing some sort of thing on clubhouse that sounded reasonably interesting, but for like just random things, like I'm getting, Oh God, I keep tapping into these rooms like an idiot.
Casey:
Um, I'm getting housing around, uh, which is a bunch of people I don't recognize.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
Welcome to Clubhouse.
Casey:
In convo with Mike Judge.
Casey:
I don't know if that's the Mike Judge or not.
Casey:
I like Mike Judge.
Casey:
Yeah, that would be kind of cool if that's the case.
Marco:
I would love to listen to that some other time when I can.
Casey:
Exactly.
Marco:
A feature of most modern media.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
State of Crypto Policy and Houston Lives or Lives Benefit Concert.
Casey:
And that's the things that are offered to me on like the main screen.
Casey:
And I'm not particularly interested in any of that.
Casey:
And every time I open up Clubhouse, which I keep doing to just see like, okay, what is there that people are talking about right now that may or may not be interesting to me?
Casey:
And it's just never interesting to me, which isn't by necessity a failing of Clubhouse.
Casey:
Like that could be a failing on my part because I just don't like the sorts of things that Clubhouse seems to like.
Casey:
It could be a failing on my part because I don't follow the right people.
Casey:
And so it's not bubbling up the right stuff.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
There was a lot of talk about this on Upgrade this week.
Casey:
And I really, really thought it was an excellent, excellent discussion.
Casey:
And a lot of it was around, and this is what I was kind of referring to earlier in our show,
Casey:
You know, are we getting passed by, says Mike and Jason, you know, because we're not particularly interested in this.
Casey:
You know, I don't.
Casey:
And I think Jason in particular said, I don't want to approach any new thing and be like, oh, that sucks.
Casey:
You know, I want to at least invest.
Casey:
And you were saying this also.
Casey:
Both of you were.
Marco:
Yeah, I've done that in the past.
Marco:
I regretted doing that in the past.
Marco:
And I'm trying to get better at not doing that, you know, to new things now.
Casey:
Same, same.
Casey:
Completely agree.
Casey:
And I don't know.
Casey:
The impression I had before having gotten an invite was that it seemed very like Silicon Valley bro-y, which I have a deep repulsion to.
Casey:
I just find all of that just repulsive in so many ways.
Marco:
Agreed.
Casey:
I do think Clubhouse is more than that.
Casey:
But it also seems pretty clear to me that that's where the, like, bread and butter is still right now.
Casey:
Like, you know, growth hacking and influencing and doing all that stuff that, like, it's just, I don't know, I find it icky.
Casey:
And that's not to say that it will always be that way.
Casey:
I think, obviously, it started that way because that's the people who made it, you know, or VC people, and they showed it to their VC friends, and they're all having VC fantasy lives in their VC, you know, fake world.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I haven't seen anything yet that makes me say, oh, that's totally sweet.
Casey:
And I can envision ways that it might be totally sweet.
Casey:
And if the two of you wanted to sometime get on and do a show or whatever it's called, whatever the vernacular is, and do something for a few minutes just for funsies, I'd totally try it.
Casey:
But I don't know, nothing about it has really grabbed me in the way that it like only took a few minutes or maybe, I don't know, a day for Twitter to really land once I gave it an honest shake.
Casey:
Because I had the same impression as you did, Marco.
Casey:
Like, who cares?
Casey:
Like, no, I don't want this in my life.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
And then once you give Twitter an honest shake, at least back in 2008 before it was truly toxic, it was pretty obvious pretty quick that it was good stuff.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And Instagram, holy crap, Instagram, it was like four seconds before you realized, oh, this is delightful.
Casey:
And I haven't yet gotten that from Clubhouse.
Casey:
And maybe this is just reason 7,455,002 that I'm an old man.
Casey:
But I don't know, it just hasn't stuck with me quite yet.
John:
I feel like these communities are influenced by the sort of founding members and whether or not it's because they're a VC backed company that it seems VC brewery or whether that's just like the first people who are there.
John:
I think things like Twitter benefited from the fact that the sort of the founding settlers, the first people who had Twitter accounts were in our circle of friends.
John:
So, of course, it's going to feel welcoming and normal to us.
John:
And.
John:
As I was trying to say last time about introverts versus extroverts, it could be that there is a community of people that is ill-served by the current services, and those are exactly the people who are sort of the founding members of this one.
John:
So when they show up here, it's all their people doing things that they want to do, and so it may be awesome for them.
John:
The reason we're looking at it at all is because it has some amount of buzz.
John:
That said, it's a young service and young application, and there's lots of complexities.
John:
The whole thing of, again, bootstrapping your social network,
John:
that thing where it asks you your interests is an attempt to do that because okay if you wouldn't give us your contacts we can't help you there but even if you did give them we can't really make heads or tails of most of it because again we don't know which person in this context is the type of person you'd like to talk to on clubhouse and which is the type of person you'd never want to talk to again and they just happen to still be in your contacts so the interest thing which you know music services of course do this for recommendation engines and you know anything
John:
pick from this big giant cloud of stuff and tell us what you're into.
John:
And then we'll try to give you some kind of intelligent suggestion.
John:
Obviously that is undercut.
John:
If what you pick as your interest, no one is talking about that in clubhouse because it's still invite only.
John:
It's a small group of people.
John:
And those people are of a particular type or a particular circle of friends or whatever.
John:
Cause remember people get onto clubhouse by being invited by other people.
John:
So it's kind of, you know, it's growing from whatever that original core was.
John:
If there's no one discussing your thing, you can pick it as an interest, but you're not going to see it.
John:
But as I was mentioning before about the interest thing when I was filling them out, I was shocked at how bad the interest interface was just because there are things I'm interested in that I couldn't select and they weren't super weird.
John:
So Marco picked podcasts.
John:
I picked television and gaming or whatever.
John:
This one really drives it home.
John:
This one should really drive it home for everybody.
John:
They have a category for sports.
John:
Here are the sports that you can select.
Yeah.
John:
As far as Clubhouse is concerned, this is the entire world of sports.
John:
The whole world of sports.
John:
Yep.
John:
Football, soccer, MMA, cycling, baseball, cricket, tennis, Formula One, basketball, golf.
John:
That's it.
John:
There are no other sports.
John:
Nothing else exists in the world of sports except for those 10 things.
John:
I'm pretty sure I come up with a better list than that.
John:
I'm pretty sure.
John:
Like, that's not even like, even if you wanted to be charitable and say, oh, it's a very US-centric list, it's not.
John:
They're trying to cover the literal world of sports, the entire globe, and they come up with 10 things.
John:
Sports is a little bit, and I'm pretty sure sports is not an obscure topic that they wouldn't have lots of detail on.
John:
you know now maybe these these categories are fed by people creating rooms maybe i don't understand how they're coming in here but if you can't get a good social graph and recommendations for your contacts because say you didn't share them or they're they're just not anything go for and people try to diligently fill out their interests like casey was doing i'm gonna say what i'm interested in and then they go back to your main screen and they're trying to like say show me something i want to do this thing
John:
uh i filled out my interests i gave you my contacts i don't know what to do next you you know clubhouse needs to find a way to throw up something that you can tap on and get into and understand it now the one thing they have that does work a little bit better than these two things is what worked for me is uh if you enable notifications which i never do for any app but pretty quickly i learned with clubhouse you
John:
i'm never going to i'm going to be like casey where you launch the app you look at it and go nah and you turn it off and i did that for like a couple days in a row i'm like i'm not using clubhouse i'm just launching the app and then saying no nothing interested me in leaving yep so i've got i've got to do something else and what i did was i enabled notifications which is very rare for me i named notifications almost nothing on my phone and the reason i enabled them is because uh i understood that
John:
if you follow people i did do the thing that i was describing where i would go through i would follow someone and then go through the list of everybody they follow and follow those people and so on so i'd built a little graph for myself of a bunch of people who i follow if one of the people you follow starts a room subject to whatever algorithm they're using they will they may or may not send you notifications as hey your friend joe schmoe just made a room on clubhouse do you want to join and again if you tap that if you tap that notification you're in that room instantly um
John:
Although you're not you probably won't be have the ability to speak anyway.
John:
So that's what I did.
John:
And I was lucky enough of the small handful of people that I was following.
John:
One of them was actually experimenting with Clubhouse.
John:
by creating rooms and doing stuff and that was paul hudson of uh what's his website hacking with swift i think um he was just trying the thing out and the way he was trying it out is as a bit more of an extrovert than i am he was making rooms and inviting people in and you know saying okay we're gonna have a room one of the one of the first ones i was in he was like let's do ios interview questions
John:
where he was going to pull people from the audience and give them a question that they might receive if they were interviewing for a job as an iOS developer.
John:
And the person from the audience would try to answer it and then they would talk about it.
John:
That was it.
John:
That was the whole room.
John:
And he did that for like hours.
Casey:
And I just listened to it.
John:
I listened to it ambiently like you would listen to a podcast.
John:
It's the type of, you know, it's it's kind of like a call in show.
John:
But, you know, here's me bringing my own interest to Clubhouse.
John:
It's basically like a tech podcast, right?
John:
Like talk radio and people calling in to tell you that, you know, what their coach or their favorite sports team should have been doing or political talk radio or stuff like that.
John:
That would work in this format as well, but I'm not interested in any of those things.
John:
Same deal with growth hacking and, you know, how to get press for your startup or Bitcoin or all sorts of other things that I'm not interested in and that they have rooms that where people are talking about.
John:
But what I'm interested in is tech nerdy stuff.
John:
And people who run websites to tell you how to program in Swift, right?
John:
And so when he made a room and started doing these interview questions, it was like a nerdy version of talk radio where instead of the people coming on the line and yelling about their favorite sports team,
John:
they would politely answer questions about iOS.
John:
And so I got two things from it.
John:
One, I actually learned a lot about iOS and Swift, right?
John:
Because how can you not?
John:
Like it was just question after question after question, most of which I didn't know the answer to until they were answered and then they discussed the answer.
John:
So that was fun.
John:
And two, it's the same entertainment value as a call-in show where there's a host who's doing a good job and Paul does a really good job of being a host.
John:
He's cheating by being British, but whatever.
John:
It sounds very, you know, very proper and correct and official and important to our American ears.
John:
And he's also super smart and knows everything.
John:
And then you're the participants who were unfailingly, you know...
John:
polite and conscientious and uh humble and smart and just all the things that you would expect nobody yelled baba booey no one was being a jerk right it was just a bunch of programmers answering programmer questions so i felt like i was in my element for that type of thing he did a bunch of other rooms and every time he started one i would join it and just listen to it i forget what his other ones were some general discussions of things like q a type stuff
John:
Um, and then the final one I did was, uh, this is the first big wiggy thing that I've been at.
John:
It was a room.
John:
I don't know how I got invited.
John:
It was probably someone I follow, but it was some, some famous person that I follow, uh, famous in Apple circles.
John:
And it was Steve jobs stories.
John:
I think people were mentioning this on Twitter.
John:
So maybe people might've joined it from just seeing tweets about it.
John:
It was a bunch of people who knew Steve jobs when he was alive and who worked with him in various capacities.
John:
Um,
John:
telling stories about steve jobs granted most of which i'd heard already but you know like it's if you read every single book that comes out about steve jobs and fallen for your whole life you probably know a lot of these stories but some of them you won't know in fact some of the even some of the people who are telling the stories you won't know because they worked with steve in a very obscure capacity obscure enough that they haven't been in seven forbes profiles you know telling their stories or whatever
John:
And this was this entire room.
John:
I don't even know which of the famous people was hosting it, but a bunch of people were in there from the original Mac team and old ex-Apple people.
John:
And they would just get invited on stage, and they would tell their story.
John:
And then someone else would come up as a speaker, and they would tell their story.
John:
And I was at hours and hours of people telling stories about Steve Jobs.
John:
Some of the people who told stories were really good storytellers.
John:
Some of them weren't.
John:
Some of the stories you heard, some of them you hadn't.
John:
But that's what it was.
John:
And that was interesting because it was like...
John:
You know, famous people, right?
John:
So in that way, it's a lot like regular people's relationship to podcasts where it's by some, you know, I don't know.
John:
I almost said Joe Rogan.
John:
I didn't mean to say that.
John:
But I don't know, like famous NPR personalities or a podcast featuring Barack Obama, right?
John:
Like actual famous people who just happen to be appearing in the medium of podcasts.
John:
This was...
John:
You know, semi-famous and nerd circle people who are on Clubhouse.
John:
It was the type of thing that you can imagine would be more to my taste.
John:
I was going to say better, but I'm not going to say better.
John:
I'm going to say more to my taste if it had been a podcast.
John:
Because if you did a podcast, oh, here's a podcast with people telling stories about Steve Jobs.
John:
You'd get only the best stories.
John:
You'd edit them, right?
John:
You'd produce it.
John:
You'd get rid of all the dead air and the parts that didn't work.
John:
But making a podcast of people telling stories about Steve Jobs would require...
John:
Hunting down all the people who have stories, getting them to agree to be on your podcast, arranging a time for them to come and record, making sure they're set up so they can record, getting their recording, doing that 20 times, editing it all down, producing it, putting it in.
John:
It's way more work than what seemed like this was more or less ad hoc.
John:
Hey, we're doing the stories about Steve Jobs Clubhouse right now.
John:
And then people just come to you.
John:
Right.
John:
People just people come and say, oh, I see they're on the clubhouse thing and Andy Hertzfeld joins and Bill Atkinson joins and they're all.
John:
And once once they appear in the room, the moderators like bless them and say, oh, come on stage.
John:
You talk.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
And so it was ad hoc and messy and not like a produced podcast.
John:
But it is also a thing that probably just wouldn't have happened, period, unless there was someone with an established podcast willing to put in the time and energy to make a produced podcast version of this.
John:
I saw lots of people saying, like, this is what Clubhouse is great about.
John:
Like, you would never see this in a podcast.
John:
No, you could absolutely see this in a podcast.
John:
It would just be a lot harder.
John:
Like I said, the result of that would be more to my tastes.
John:
But some people may like this more freeform one.
John:
And also, of course, if you're in that room and you happen to have a story about Steve Jobs, you can raise your hand and maybe they'll let you tell your story.
John:
And you can never do that with a podcast because you're not there.
John:
You're not a participant.
John:
You're just listening, right?
John:
Both of these things, though...
John:
made me think of a few more features that clubhouse should add to the, to their platform.
John:
Um, and we've been talking mostly about like, what is it like in clubhouse and what kind of people are there?
John:
What are they talking about?
John:
But it's important not to lose sight of the fact that like Twitter or email or Facebook or Instagram, these things are essentially platforms.
John:
they it's a system that works in a certain way and that system encourages certain behaviors and discourages others but it doesn't dictate subject matter or like you know population or relationships really you could be anything that works in this way where you want to come into a room where a bunch of other people can be and you can nominate them to speak anything that fits within that platform will work on clubhouse
John:
It just so happens this is what we're getting now.
John:
And so within that platform, platform features that I think they could really use are pausing and rewinding.
John:
Now, you may think that's totally counter this.
John:
It has to be live.
John:
If you can pause and rewind, like you're going to be ruining the liveness of the experience and you're going to be behind other people and you won't be able to participate and all that other stuff.
John:
But I feel like those two features are kind of essential for the...
John:
the best functionality of their uh of the features they do have because when something is live and you're sort of listening to it the same way you like i don't know like you listen to podcasts like you're doing dishes or whatever you don't want to miss like the good part of the person who's telling the story about steve jobs you don't want to miss the good part of their story because you know you had to talk to somebody or you got distracted for a second or whatever
John:
Or like a dog was barking or you're outside taking a walk and a loud truck went by and you didn't hear that last part.
John:
It's not actually that difficult to add a little bit of a buffer to allow you to pause or rewind to figure out what somebody said or to pause for a moment.
John:
As long as you have a good UI to say, okay, well, when you're ready to catch back up to real time, do so.
John:
In fact, you could even use something like smart speed that would let you catch back up without actually skipping over anything.
John:
Um,
John:
I'm not saying the buffer should be a half an hour long, but five or 10 seconds of grace would go a long way towards making Clubhouse a more satisfying experience because I missed a bunch of things that people said because either I misheard them or there was noise or I had to pause to do something.
John:
And there's no way for me to get that back.
John:
And I'm sure the Clubhouse people would say, well, that's the beauty of Clubhouse.
John:
It's.
John:
It's here and then it's gone.
John:
It can't be recorded, or of course it can't be, but anyway.
John:
We discourage it from being recorded, and it's all about being there in the moment, and it's not about recording or rewinding.
John:
We just need you to be there in the moment, and if you miss it, that's the beauty of Clubhouse.
John:
Sometimes you just miss it because the dog barks, and I'm not down with that particular beauty.
John:
I feel like people want to...
John:
People want to go there to get the value of hearing the cool stories about Steve Jobs.
John:
And I love the fact that someone didn't have to arrange all those interviews and make it into a big podcast and everything.
John:
And anyone could just join.
John:
But I don't like the fact that if I missed what somebody said because I was distracted for a moment.
John:
that there's no way for me to get that back.
John:
Just a little tiny buffer to pause and rewind would do it.
John:
So I'm still not sure Clubhouse is for me.
John:
I didn't actually participate.
John:
I didn't raise my hand to participate in any of these things.
John:
It's not my kind of MO.
John:
I did think about types of things that ATP could do in that scenario.
John:
Just didn't seem like...
John:
For now, it just didn't seem like something that I was enthusiastic about participating in as a creator, as they say.
John:
That's not to say that will change over time, but I do think I understand some of the value people get out of it.
John:
Again, the people who want this type of experience are probably not the same people as me.
John:
I like podcasts for a reason, and I would love podcast versions of everything else that I listen to, but I just think that...
John:
There wouldn't be podcast versions of those because it's so much more work to make a podcast version of those things.
John:
It's kind of like how Twitter was the low effort version of blogging.
John:
Clubhouse in some ways can be the low effort version of doing an interview podcast.
Casey:
It's an interesting way of looking at it.
Casey:
Some semi real time follow up a long time ago.
Casey:
I think it was for a Twitter account.
Casey:
I don't remember which one.
Casey:
I needed a phone number in order to do something.
Casey:
Maybe it was do something with an API.
Casey:
And I didn't want to give them my regular phone number or I tried and I couldn't.
Casey:
And so I was trying to figure out a way to get another phone number so I could just hand it to Twitter just for the purposes of clearing this hurdle so I can do what I wanted to do.
Casey:
And I'd stumbled upon an app called burner, which makes sense.
Casey:
And at the time you could get a free like burner that would take, that would receive like a handful of text messages or only last a week or something like that.
Casey:
I don't know if that's still the case.
Casey:
I think you have to pay for everything, but it worked really well and did, uh, and it let, gave me a temporary phone number that I could use for the purposes of what I was trying to do.
Casey:
And then it just went away.
Casey:
Uh, and additionally, you know, you could use something like Google voice or whatever the case may be, but,
Casey:
Yeah, I don't negate your point earlier.
Casey:
I'm just saying that the barrier of entry for getting a new phone number is ever lower, even lower than I would have expected a while ago.
John:
Yeah, the good thing about phone numbers is that the namespace, so to speak, at least in the US of phone numbers, is fairly limited.
John:
Unlike the namespace of email addresses, which is...
John:
essentially unlimited it's not really unlimited because there are length limits but there are way more possible email addresses in the world than there are possible phone numbers so i always wondered how google voice gets away with just handing out free phone numbers i have a google voice number like just you know it's very easy to get one but it is still more of a hassle than getting an email address and most of us do not currently have seven phone numbers that are just ready and to pull out of our pocket and sign up with a service for you know another way
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let's see if we can get through like two topics today before we run out of time.
Casey:
Something flew by, flew across my desk a few days ago that I wanted to briefly call attention to.
Casey:
Apple Platform Security released, I guess, a series of pages or maybe it's a PDF.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
But
Casey:
One URL that I can give you is about memory-safe iBoot implementation.
Casey:
And I just thought that this was cool.
Casey:
And we don't necessarily need to talk about it a whole lot, but it was something that I thought was very interesting.
Casey:
And on this page, Apple writes...
Casey:
In iOS 14, iPadOS 14, Apple modified the C compiler tool chain used to build the iBoot bootloader to improve its security.
Casey:
The modified tool chain implements code to prevent memory and type safety issues that are typically encountered in C programs.
Casey:
For example, it prevents buffer overflows by ensuring that all pointers carry bounce information that is verified when accessing memory.
Casey:
It prevents heap exploitation by separating heap data from its metadata and accurately detecting error conditions such as double free errors.
Casey:
It prevents type confusion by ensuring that all pointers carry runtime type information that's verified during pointer cast operations.
Casey:
And finally, it prevents type confusion caused by the use after free errors by segregating all dynamic memory allocations by static type.
Casey:
This technology is available on iPhone with Apple A13 Bionic or later in iPad with A14 Bionic chip.
Casey:
I just think this is so cool that, hey, we want to write something in C, but C is inherently a little bit unsafe.
Casey:
So we'll modify the C compiler to make it a little more safe.
Casey:
Please and thank you.
Casey:
I just think that's super, super cool.
John:
So a bunch of discussion from some folks who do low-level programming at Apple and other places.
John:
about the general topic of C just being an unsafe language to do any new development in modern times.
John:
Every time there's some kind of bug or security exploit that comes out, it's just another nail in the coffin of C.
John:
when it comes to security like there was the sudo one recently that there's this silly bug in the linux version of sudo that also affected max by the way it was just straight up normal you know c rookie c mistake that everybody makes because it's very easy to make them um of you know i forget what it was it was uh
John:
I think it was just a straight buffer overflow.
John:
But anyway, C makes all these things eminently possible.
John:
And therefore, it's probably not wise to start some new project of something security, something that has security implications in C. And when, you know, when C was the dominant language, people say, oh, yeah, well, it's difficult, whatever, but it's the only choice.
John:
It's not the only choice anymore.
Yeah.
John:
There are so many memory-safe languages, and if your choice is, well, I need to use C because only C gives me the performance I need, if we were to tell you, okay, fine, but 10 years from now, there'll be a terrible security flaw that will infect billions of computers that you still want to use C,
John:
uh and you know when it was the only choice there was also this sort of machismo about like well i'm a good c programmer i won't make those mistakes right or or i'll use a i have a tool that will help me figure out whether i'm making those mistakes or the people who do that there's just the bad c programmers or there's too much code written by people who don't understand c and all sorts of excuses but the bottom line is history has shown if you're writing any security critical uh software in c
John:
There will be security related bugs in your code.
John:
There's no way to stop it, no matter how many eyes are on it.
John:
If it's open source and everyone's going to look at it and they'll find it.
John:
Nope, they didn't find it in whatever was the Heartbleed thing that was in there for years.
John:
The sudo one has been in there for years.
John:
C is just never going to be a tool that humans can use to make programs that don't have security flaws.
John:
And today we have things that are better in that regard.
John:
Not perfect, but better.
John:
Things like Swift or Rust that don't let you make a lot of the common errors.
John:
This memory-safe boot implementation C compiler thing is like taking C and trying to mutate it to have a little bit of the memory safety that things like Swift and Rust have, which is a great idea.
John:
But you're also kind of changing the language as you do that.
John:
And as you start to do that, you're like mutating C into...
John:
a, you know, a poorly specified half implementation of Rust or Swift, which is probably not ideal.
John:
Obviously, you don't have the option in most of these cases to say, I'm just going to rewrite everything in Swift or Rust.
John:
Because, you know, that's, you know, you've got a bunch of software in C, you've got to deal with it.
John:
The core of Darwin, BSD, Mock, all that stuff, that's C and there's tons of C++ code.
John:
Like, it's not going away anytime soon.
John:
But the Twitter discussion I found interesting was,
John:
General agreement about people who work on this type of code in C all day long at, you know, at the highest levels, all agreeing that, yeah, this is not humans will never be able to do this.
John:
So we need to just use different languages.
John:
There's nothing we can do in terms of discipline and linting and testing.
John:
that's going to save us the compiler helping here is is great but it just adds sort of another another variable right because there could be parts of this implementation of this you know safe c thing that themselves are end up being venues for exploits you really kind of have to build in this type of safety from the very beginning to have a little bit more confidence so i would say using this compiler is vastly better than not using it but
John:
If given the choice and you're writing some new code that doesn't exist that's going to be in a security critical area, I'm starting to agree with the notion that C and to a slightly lesser extent C++ are just non-starters and you should really think about using something else.
Casey:
Yeah, no argument here.
Casey:
I, you know, the first several years of my professional career were in C++, and there was a brief window of time where I thought I was an okay C++ developer, which just indicates how young I was.
Casey:
I do not miss those times really at all.
Casey:
Like, I am glad that that's how I learned, and I'm glad that that was the foundation upon which I started using other languages, but man, I just, I do not miss it.
Casey:
I really don't.
Casey:
Alright, Ming-Chi Kuo has some interesting information for us.
Casey:
New MacBook Pro models with HDMI port and SD card reader to launch later this year.
Casey:
Marco, I thought I heard your celebration from all the way down here several hundred miles below you.
Casey:
Are you okay?
Casey:
Do you need a moment?
Casey:
Do you need a beer to kind of calm you down?
Casey:
How are we doing?
John:
We know how Marco always loves to echo up his laptops to the projector so he can present to the room, right?
Marco:
No, here's why this is very good news.
Marco:
So, you know, we heard the rumors, I believe also from Ming-Ju Kuo or from Mark Ehrman or whoever was reporting it a few weeks back.
Marco:
uh talking about how the new macbook pros were rumored to have a few different improvements that were all like really pretty pretty good fan service improvements as well as uh you know quote more ports or more types of ports more connectivity whatever however they worded it but they didn't specify like well what ports like what's going to be added um besides the rumor about magsafe but you know it left the rest of it as an exercise to the reader to speculate um
Marco:
So what's nice about this is that Minshi Kuo, who is pretty well-sourced and pretty reliable with stuff like this, is saying specifically which ports are coming back, in addition to MagSafe, which, again, has many benefits, including just freeing up a USB port.
Marco:
But to have the SD card slot back and the HDMI port back...
Marco:
I will say, I don't think I will ever use the HDMI port on a laptop.
Marco:
However, as I said back when we talked about this a few weeks ago, if you look at what every single dongle has, I don't know anybody who has a MacBook of any kind from 2016 forward, so the USB-C only generation.
Marco:
who doesn't have some kind of multi-port dongle.
Marco:
And you look at what ports are on those as kind of an indication of what ports do most people need from their laptops that maybe should be on the laptop if possible, as this is evidence of that.
Marco:
And they all have the same ports.
Marco:
Ethernet, which, okay, it doesn't really fit anymore.
Marco:
Fine.
Marco:
USB-A, HDMI, and SD card slot.
Marco:
all of them have those things because clearly those are very common needs and we can we can look at both you know just generally the way apple does things and also the physical side profile these laptops and we can say okay usba might be a stretch like i don't think many of us are expecting that even though i still would like it if it could fit i would like to have one usba port because you just still frequently need that but okay i can understand arguments against that
Marco:
It is easy enough to get USB-C cables and USB-C peripherals much of the time now.
Marco:
So, okay, maybe we can go without that one.
Marco:
Again, Ethernet, many people don't need it anymore and it doesn't fit on the side.
Marco:
So, okay, I can go without that one.
Marco:
But HDMI is so commonly needed that I think it should be there.
Marco:
Even though I don't use it, I think it should be there because so many people need it.
Marco:
And that's an area where...
Marco:
the need for it doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon because it's so often used for at for like projectors and stuff like that in workplaces and stuff like that so you know that's that's a common thing but also the hdmi ports on dongles are historically very unreliable it's really hard to find a good one that is something that needs to be rock solid for like nobody is presenting their presentation on a projector who can tolerate that being flaky
Marco:
No one is watching a movie on their hotel TV from their laptop who really wants it to be flaky.
Marco:
That really needs to be solid, and it's a tricky thing to get right from dongles, apparently, as we have learned from practice, I guess.
Casey:
It's so true.
Casey:
It's so true.
Casey:
I had bought...
Casey:
I don't know, three or four knockoff versions of the Apple USB-C in, HDMI out, USB-A in out, dongles.
Casey:
I forget the official name.
Casey:
USB-C multi-port adapter or something like that is the official name.
Casey:
And I bought a few knockoffs because the official one is literally like $70 or something like that.
Casey:
It's absurdly expensive.
Marco:
Oh, I have one.
Marco:
It sucks.
Casey:
Oh, I have one.
Casey:
And it's fine.
Casey:
But I can tell you that all of the knockoffs that I've tried, and maybe it's just the particular devices I'm using.
Casey:
Who knows?
Casey:
Maybe I like stepped on one or something that I don't remember.
Casey:
But every single one of these knockoffs, it's exactly what you described, Marco, that sometimes if I plug it in the wrong way, the TV will be showing nothing but static.
Casey:
Sometimes if I plug it in the wrong way, it's showing things, but the colors are wrong.
Casey:
It is unbelievable to me that this completely digital transport mechanism can fail in so many different ways.
Casey:
Not completely fail, mind you, just mostly fail.
Casey:
And I don't understand why this is so difficult.
Casey:
It seems like it should be fairly straightforward, but I guess it ain't.
Casey:
And because of that, the only dongle that I ever use, even though I have literally like have the official and three or four knockoffs, the only one I ever use is the Apple one because the only one that reliably works for me.
Casey:
It's ridiculous.
Marco:
If you can reduce the need for most people to need a dongle at all, that's a huge advantage.
Marco:
And if most people need a dongle, then I think that's a product design failure.
Marco:
It isn't like a case where people put cases on their phones.
Marco:
I mean, that's partially a design failure in that the phones are too breakable.
Marco:
But people also have lots of different preferences for which cases they want and everything else.
Marco:
But a dongle for a laptop means...
Marco:
I have a pretty significant need for some kind of ports that a lot of it doesn't have.
Marco:
And if everyone bought different kinds of dongles, then you could argue, well, it's good to offer people flexibility because then they can pick what they need.
Marco:
If everyone is using these same three ports on their dongles, that needs to be built in if possible.
Marco:
when things are built in, they are inherently more reliable because you're not... Everyone's not using some weird $10 no-name chip that all these manufacturers on Amazon that have Markov generator brand names with the same plastic enclosure around it with different things printed on it.
Marco:
And you're like, okay, well, that's...
Marco:
That might not be very reliable.
Marco:
And compared to the built-in port on the laptop, that is usually 100% reliable.
Marco:
To make a large portion of your customer base rely on dongles is not a great thing.
Marco:
So if everyone is requesting the same three ports and you can just build them in, that's great.
Marco:
And you should.
Marco:
And so again, USB-A, I see why, you know, that one's easier to go without.
Marco:
HDMI is, for the people who need it, like, they need it, period.
Marco:
And you can, if you can build that in, great.
Marco:
That resolves a huge problem that a lot of people have.
Marco:
And SD card slots.
Marco:
This is, again, I've made this argument before.
Marco:
I'll be quick.
Marco:
People who don't use SD cards always think, oh, those are in the past now.
Marco:
You can just use Wi-Fi or whatever.
Marco:
Everyone always thinks SD cards are not useful anymore if they don't use them.
Marco:
But to the people who use them, we know, oh no, we still need that if you use SD cards in your workflow.
Marco:
chances are nothing can or will replace that except at best a future removable card standard like that that just you know has bigger faster cards whatever but like right now sd is still like the most mainstream widely used one it's supported by the most devices i know some of the higher end ones are having these like you know cfast and like other like faster things but for the most part that is still like if you're going to pick one slot to build and that's the one to build in
Marco:
And nothing replaces that over time.
Marco:
It's not like all the cameras now go to Wi-Fi.
Marco:
There's no sound recorders that record to Wi-Fi.
Marco:
That never materialized for lots of good reasons.
Marco:
But basically SD cards still work really well and are still used in massive numbers of devices and peripherals and specialty workflows that people still need.
Marco:
And that need has not gone away in the last five, four and a half years that we've had the USB-C world.
Marco:
So, again, build that back in if you can.
Marco:
SD card slots are really small.
Marco:
They can be really thin.
Marco:
So, there's no reason that can't fit on a redesigned laptop.
Marco:
So, this is great news.
Marco:
I'm so happy to hear this from such a reliable leaker as Ming-Chi Kuo because...
Marco:
This is a 100% guarantee that's going to happen, but it's a pretty strong signal.
Marco:
So if these laptops are roughly what is rumored, which is some kind of faster M-series chip or bigger GPU or whatever it is, somehow expanded M-series chip, it probably expanded RAM ceiling for people who need more than 16.
Marco:
Great.
Marco:
Possibly bigger screens, possibly redesigned enclosure, but the return of MagSafe and HDMI and SD, while hopefully not ruining anything else.
Marco:
No new keyboards, please.
Marco:
Don't mess with too much.
Marco:
Oh, and the alleged departure of the touch bar.
Marco:
This is all great news.
Marco:
I'm looking forward to this.
Marco:
Even if only half of this stuff comes true, this is going to be a great series of products in all likelihood.
Marco:
So I'm really very much looking forward to this year of products.
John:
We've been talking about this for a couple of weeks just because of the way these rumors have been rolling out.
John:
Like Marco said, it started off as like, oh, they're going to have new things with new ports.
John:
Well, which new ports?
John:
And then it's like, oh, one of them is going to be an SD card.
John:
And then we talked about that.
John:
And this week it was like, oh, and the other one is going to be HDMI.
John:
And I feel like they're really, we talked about this before, like really straining the limits of my, of how much I'm willing to believe these rumors because it's just in many ways too good to be true.
John:
The selection of ports is interesting because
John:
So USB-A, lots of people have wanted that for a while, but as Marco said, we do actually have USB.
John:
It's just the little connector, and that little connector slowly but surely is making inroads.
John:
I know A is still very, very common, I understand, but unlike some of the other things, the replacement exists and is making steady progress, and USB-A is actually pretty big, right?
John:
HDMI...
John:
Like, obviously, I haven't been in the office in forever.
John:
When I was in the office, everyone had one of these stupid dongles to connect up to HDMI, and they're just as reliable as you said.
John:
HDMI is interesting because it ties into the form factor rumors.
John:
HDMI is too big to fit on the edge of current Apple laptops, but that's only because they have the curve that lets you get your fingers underneath it.
John:
If they have flat sides and then rubber feet to bring them off the ground so you can actually pick them up...
John:
the flat side is probably going to be there to give it enough room for hdmi unless it's mini hdmi which everybody hates and won't actually solve the problem because now everyone's going to have mini hdmi to regular hdmi adapters right this hdmi rumor is really pushing against no i'm just like not that i don't think they should have it i'm like but hdmi that's big and that just seems like complete wish fulfillment of like
John:
remember what you complained about in 2016 well we're fixing all of those things and you know and i granted like i said this is this is what we've all been wanting fix the keyboard bring the ports back do all the things it'll be awesome when it happens but in some respects i'm like all you're doing is catching back up to where you were in 2015 in some respects obviously the computer's gonna be way faster the screens are better they're lighter you know the battery life is better like it's not exactly the same but in terms of like
John:
the the product features and benefits oh it's a laptop uh it has a big screen it has a keyboard a trackpad and has ports on it
John:
Setting aside the march of technology that allows everything inside there to get better, you're not really making that much progress.
John:
You're more or less going back to the last good idea you had, which you should.
John:
Don't keep going with the idea that we don't like.
John:
Good.
John:
But it's a little bit depressing when I think about the time that we wasted.
John:
Forget about the time we wasted on the butterfly keyboard.
John:
Just the time that we wasted.
John:
I'll never forget.
John:
Dealing with the insistence on just having Thunderbolt slash USB-C ports for everything.
John:
right and if these rumors turn out to be true and apple finally does consent to have useful ports on the side of its laptops whatever they may be and that they are as welcomed uh by the customers as we all expect them to be it's just going to be like so depressing to think about you know because during all those years because during all those years it was like well maybe this is the future and we just have to get used to it or whatever and it just we're waiting so long for even for just usbc to come around to replace a
John:
And although that is still slowly happening, all the other ports, there's nothing for them.
John:
Like, it's just, you know, it's dongles or nothing.
John:
And so while we still have the ability to fit any of them on there, because SD will fit because it's skinny.
John:
Ethernet won't.
John:
HDMI might fit if you make that side a lot flatter and bigger.
John:
And maybe, you know, on the wedge-shaped computer, you could have the fat side of it or whatever.
John:
but I don't know how long, like some of these connectors, I'm not sure how long they're going to last.
John:
SD card, I guess it will last for a while, or if they replace it with the one that also reads the, the, whatever the new compact flash standard is, it looks like an SD card that could last for a little while too.
John:
And presumably these things would just be on the high end ones that are made for like pros or whatever, because, uh,
John:
uh you know who needs this stuff on a lower end laptop and on something as skinny as a replacement for the macbook adorable there's no way you're even getting an sd card slot on the side of that thing so forget about that but i don't know like at this rate it's been like every week there's a new rumor next week is the rumor that they're adding an ethernet port like i don't know what comes next like are they gonna add the giant chunky you know back to it is it micro ethernet does such a thing exist i don't even know
John:
So hopefully this is the last of the features of the new MacBooks rumors.
John:
And the next time we talk about this, it will be about an actual product.
John:
But we'll see.
Casey:
You know, I'd like to enter old man corner, if I may.
Casey:
That's our entire show.
Casey:
Yeah, well, touche.
Casey:
When Marco and I were in school, in college, it was unusual, possible but unusual, to find a laptop with built-in wireless devices.
Casey:
And in fact, particularly at the beginning of college, it was very unusual to find a laptop with built-in Ethernet.
Casey:
You would always find a laptop with a built-in modem, but it was very unusual to find a laptop with built-in Ethernet.
Casey:
And what you often had to do was add, well, especially for us PC users, you would have to add a PCMCIA card.
Casey:
And it was like an expansion card specifically for laptops.
Casey:
And I think cable cards and cable boxes use the same form factor, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
But at the time, you would slide this card into the laptop, and then you would often have a little mini dongle coming out of it in order to plug in like your phone jack or your Ethernet cable.
Casey:
And then the magic of X-Jack appeared.
Casey:
And what they ended up doing was there was a little pop-out, like, not a door necessarily, but a little pop-out thing, receptacle, I guess, wherein you could just plug the phone cable or the Ethernet cable directly into this little receptacle that popped right out of the cord.
Casey:
No dongles required.
Yeah.
Casey:
Guys, kids, it was amazing.
Casey:
And I think I've told this story at least once or twice, and I apologize for repeating it, but it was so unbelievably cool.
Casey:
See also when you had Wi-Fi PCMCA cards where it had the antenna hanging out the side of the computer, which was often like a solid inch wide.
Casey:
It was so bad.
Casey:
And then I remember I got, I know I've told this story, I got a, some ThinkPad, I can't remember which one it was, that had a port on the bottom of it where you could slot in a Cisco Wi-Fi card.
Casey:
So it was internal and it already had the antennas and like the display that I think you had to like hook up or something like that.
Casey:
But I didn't have, I could get on the internet using my laptop without having this thing sticking, this wart sticking outside the side of my laptop.
Casey:
Oh, my word, kids.
Casey:
It was like a whole new world.
Casey:
It was amazing.
Casey:
So anyway, I'm ready for an X-Jack Mac Pro is what I'm saying.
Casey:
Please don't do that.
Casey:
Come on, man.
Casey:
It'd be awesome.
John:
Was that the thing that looked like a little square basketball hoop that looked like it was ready to break at any second?
John:
Yes.
Marco:
It looks incredibly perilous.
Marco:
I don't know how sturdy they actually were in practice, but it looks like you would just look at it wrong and break it.
John:
No, it's the opposite of MagSafe, where MagSafe, if someone jumps over the cord, your laptop will be okay.
John:
If someone sneezes on the cord, it's going to snap that thing off.
Marco:
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Casey:
Let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
John Hovland writes, I have a 2009 iMac running High Sierra, and I've recently learned that Apple plans to discontinue security updates as of the end of January 2021.
Casey:
Sorry, we're not the most timely.
Casey:
My question is, how dangerous is it to continue to operate a Mac under these circumstances while old the iMac is meeting my needs?
Casey:
And I would prefer to delay a replacement until an Apple Silicon iMac is available.
Casey:
It's a tough spot that John's in.
Casey:
I mean...
John:
i would say if it were me i'd probably still continue to use it and just try not to visit the dark corners of the internet but uh i don't know what do you think john yeah this you know there are security flaws in this already like just the sudo thing that i mentioned is probably in this high sierra thing and it's never going to be patched right um but if that's the latest os your mac can run
John:
You know, it's okay to just ride that out for a little while.
John:
Like, you should be planning to eventually replace this computer, but in the grand scheme of things, just because you're vulnerable, you have security vulnerabilities, doesn't mean they'll be exploited.
John:
There's more risk than if you had an up-to-date patched version of the OS, but how much more risk?
John:
Because even in a patched version of the OS, there are flaws that aren't yet patched or that Apple doesn't yet know about.
John:
So it's not as if you're going from... The wrong way to think about this is...
John:
previously I had a secure OS and now I have an insecure one.
John:
You've always had an insecure OS.
John:
Just a question of how many vulnerabilities are there.
John:
And as time progresses, High Sierra will gather more vulnerabilities probably, up to a limit because eventually no one cares about exploiting it anymore.
John:
But
John:
I wouldn't characterize it as a sort of binary black and white.
John:
I was supported and now I'm not.
John:
It's more of this long gradient.
John:
And you know you've been sort of abandoned at the back end of this gradient and things are just going to slowly get worse for you.
John:
So start planning on a new Mac.
John:
But as someone who has run Macs that could no longer be upgraded to newer versions of operating systems for literal years...
John:
It's mostly okay, right?
John:
Like I said, don't think about it as running an insecure OS.
John:
Thinking about it as running an OS that is not getting any better.
Casey:
Marco, any other thoughts?
Marco:
Yeah, I would just add that this is probably going to be for a reasonably short time because John says they prefer to just delay replacement until an Apple Silicon iMac is available.
Marco:
That's probably going to be within a few months.
Marco:
So I think it would be...
Marco:
It's not that big of a time that you're in this state.
Marco:
And I would just say, you know, John's right, but I'd just say, you know, once you are no longer being security patched, just be a little extra careful.
Marco:
And I know that's hard to say.
Marco:
You know, just be a little bit careful with, like...
Marco:
weird websites you might visit like dark corners of the web try to use a web browser that is more up to date than whatever version of safari will be in that so maybe use like firefox or chrome or you know something else that is like if you can get some other browser that is still being updated for that os um i believe firefox goes back pretty far so that could be something just because you know your your most likely attack vectors are going to be like weird network stuff which i'll get to in a second or you know weird web exploits
Marco:
So if you can just reduce your attack vector there by using a more up-to-date browser than the built-in Safari, that's probably a good idea.
Marco:
And then for the network side, just make sure that you're not directly connected to the internet.
Marco:
But these days, no one is.
Marco:
These days, everyone's going through a router of some kind.
Marco:
So the basic security inherent in being behind a NAT router is going to be
Marco:
largely protecting you from like you know weird like network port scanning kind of threats so you're you're mostly okay on that um but yeah just the web browser i think is your biggest uh attack surface so try to get better than the built-in stuff for the web browser um and then you know when the new mx come out jump on them reasonably quickly but again i think that's probably going to be within a few months
John:
And maybe like don't install lots of new software, don't download a lot of attachments and double click them to launch them.
John:
The way to think about it is whatever was on your computer when it stopped getting patches, just use it in that mode.
John:
The desire to say, oh, there's a cool new program, I should try it out.
John:
That's where you get yourself into trouble.
John:
That's what sort of being slightly more cautious means.
John:
But like I said, I ran my 2008 Mac Pro with an OS that was multiple years old.
John:
And mostly, you know, I mean, I have a certain level of caution I'm always operating with, but it wasn't, it's not the end of the world.
John:
And so, you know, we don't know when new iMacs are coming out.
John:
We're hoping they're going to be this year, but you're not going to be spending three years using this computer.
John:
So I wouldn't worry too much about it.
Casey:
And to put things in perspective, I actually meant to talk about this earlier.
Casey:
Somebody I know who shall remain nameless, they were running Big Sur on their MacBook Pro.
Casey:
I think it's roughly the same vintage as mine.
Casey:
And they noticed that when they were going to do a search in their web browser, and this was true of both Chrome and Safari, which is where the story starts to get alarming, they would do a Google search but end up on Yahoo.
Casey:
Like the browser settings are for Google, and I verified this myself, but they ended up on Yahoo.
Casey:
And some spelunking later, I realized they had both HTTP and HTTPS proxies.
Casey:
in their networking settings that they absolutely did not turn on themselves and so suffice to say that computer has been burnt down and rebuilt from the ground up with no migration assistant and things are looking better now but that was on that was on big sir and uh for the life of me i have no idea how this individual ended up getting this particular like virus or malware or whatever it was
Casey:
not a clue they're not the kind of person i don't think that would be on the darkest of dark corners of the internet or even the particularly gray corners of the internet so i don't know what happened there but it can happen to anyone even on big sir when you click on an ad banner download a thing say okay to a bunch of dialogues you don't understand it can happen
John:
And like I said, one of the things that's protecting your older computer is that it is it becomes less interesting as an exploit target.
John:
Right.
John:
As the installed base, how many people are still running high Sierra as that installed base shrinks, you become a less interesting target, even though your thing is not getting any more secure.
John:
Maybe Big Sur is where all the new action is happening or all those those hot new M1 malware software things.
John:
All right.
Casey:
Colin Minney writes, do you store your parents' contacts under their real names or are they under mom and dad or similar?
Casey:
It's worth noting that there's a nickname field in contacts.
Casey:
When you use it, it seems to take over in all Apple UIs as the one true version of that contact's name.
Casey:
So, for example, if you use mom as your nickname for your mother, then...
Casey:
In messages and I'm trying to think of other places, but in I think the phone or in the phone app and all the places that Apple controls, you won't see Janelle Liss, you'll see mom and and that's fine, but it does kind of take everything over.
Casey:
Uh, also there is a way, and I forget exactly how to do it other than apparently you can tell Siri, but there's a way to establish relationships, I think through your own contact or perhaps through other contacts where you can say, oh, this person is related to this other person because this is their mother or this is their sister or brother or what have you.
Casey:
Um, so for me, I do have nicknames for my parents.
Casey:
Um, and I think I do have relationships for my immediate family in terms of both Aaron and the immediate family that I grew up with.
John:
uh i think if this started as an email thread that maybe john and i both participated in so john do you have more thoughts about this yeah my general advice is use the people's real names put their first name in the first name field put their last name in the last name field but then use the nickname field that's exactly what it's there for uh at various times apple software has had like some of it some of it has sometimes had a preference to say should i show the nickname should i show their first name should i show long name but apple being apple
John:
uh those options are few and far between and i think have been disappearing over time but that's that's what i recommend people do um if you don't see the nickname field in your contacts if you go edit contact you don't see a nickname you have to like scroll down and there's like a thing at the bottom that says add new fields or something and then you can pick from the fields that you can add you can pick nickname and it will appear like it's there you might have to dig for it a little bit but it's like an officially supported field that apple will honor
John:
There's a bunch of other fields that you can also fill in for relationship stuff, but I don't even know what those things are because the way I've mostly done it is the way that Casey just described.
John:
You can have a conversation with Siri about this, and it has all the benefits and drawbacks of having a conversation with Siri, right?
John:
So you can just say, you know, hey, dingus, Jane Doe is my mother and James Doe is my father-in-law.
John:
And it will essentially make those relationships for you and your contacts.
John:
I think it will just fill in the fields that you could fill in manually, but if you don't know what they are, you can just talk.
John:
The downsides of conversations with Siri is that if it misunderstands you or you say the wrong thing, you don't know what Siri just did to establish that relationship.
John:
If you didn't know about these secret fields at the bottom of contacts or you don't know how to show them in the editor or whatever, you're like, uh...
John:
How do I fix that?
John:
Hey, Dingus, James Doe is not my father.
John:
He's my father-in-law.
John:
And it's like, I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're doing.
John:
It's like, oh, no.
John:
Siri's not a human.
John:
It's like a text adventure.
John:
It knows how to understand who is my mom and my dad.
John:
But now when I want to say...
John:
The thing you just did is not quite right.
John:
Can you just undo that and do something different?
John:
And it doesn't know.
John:
So I'm not sure what the best way to do the relationship stuff is.
John:
The way I've had the most success is sort of the demand-paged approach where...
John:
I ask Siri to do a thing for me and it says, I don't know who your father is.
John:
Can you tell me who they are?
John:
And like sort of that type of thing where I try to do a thing expecting it to know who my wife is, but it doesn't yet know.
John:
And it asks me and I answer.
John:
And if that works out and I answer correctly from that point on, it's all set.
John:
Um, I think this entire, um,
John:
realm of features deserves a better interface than what it has than you know obscure fields at the bottom of contacts that you don't even see unless you add them because uh and i bet apple would say well that's what siri's for we don't want people messing with those fields it's too fidgety we just want them to talk with siri but siri's not up to the task a lot of the time especially if you get it wrong um
John:
But anyway, I recommend using real names everywhere and then just somehow try to get into the system, the various relationships, because once all those relationships are in, you can pretty reliably say, hey, dingus, call my wife at work and it will figure out what to do.
John:
I mean, even even my ancient Honda Accord can do that, that type of thing where I can yell into the air and specify someone by their relationship and specify a location and it will just do it.
John:
So we are at that level of technology that a 2014 Honda can do it.
John:
I think Apple can do it as well.
Casey:
And then Hargis Manga writes, you know, fun fact, when Declan was really little, his word for grandma was manga.
Casey:
And so when one of the moms showed up, it was manga, manga.
Casey:
Anyway, Hargis writes, I'm irrationally annoyed by the non-permanent apps in my dock that stick around after I close all the windows.
Casey:
I don't necessarily want to quit those apps.
Casey:
I don't care if they keep running, but I don't want them cluttering up my dock.
Casey:
I really don't need to be aware that text edit is running three days after the one time I open a random file with it.
Casey:
Is there a way to auto hide apps from the doc that have no open windows?
Casey:
Now, I'm not entirely sure that I understand what is being asked here because there's like several different things that this could mean.
Casey:
First of all, in Big Sur, and it might have been even in Catalina before it, there will be, I think, up to three recently used apps that will show up on your dock next to the trash, which you can turn off in System Preferences.
Casey:
There's a checkbox, Show Recent Applications in Dock.
Casey:
And those apps may or may not be running at any given point.
Casey:
And so maybe that's what it's being referred to.
Casey:
Also worth noting, although I don't think this is the question, there used to be little like dots or lights next to apps that were actively running.
Casey:
And then those lights or dots would go away if the app is not actively running right now.
Casey:
This is one of those things that I always turn back on, even though I try to stick to as vanilla in installation in terms of like preferences and things like that as I can.
Casey:
Um, that's show indicators for open applications again in doc and menu bar and system preferences.
Casey:
Um, but I think what's actually being asked is if you open an app and then I guess like, I guess like it was said, close all the windows, but the app hasn't been terminated.
Casey:
It does still sit in the dock for a while.
Casey:
And I guess to me, like if that's a problem, just quit the darn app.
Casey:
And obviously that's not the actual solution.
Casey:
That's not fair of me to say, but that's what I do.
Casey:
Like if I have text text headed open and I close the last window, I'll just command Q and then the problem and the icon goes away.
Casey:
But I'm guessing one of you, maybe John has more or better thoughts about this.
Casey:
So what, what should be done?
John:
Are those dots really off by default?
John:
This is what happens if you never redo a clean install.
John:
I have no idea what the defaults are anymore.
Casey:
I am not 100% sure, but I'm close.
Casey:
I think they're on by default.
John:
Okay, maybe I'm wrong.
John:
All right, so this... The general complaint here seems like it's...
John:
It sounds like the common Windows user complaint, because in Windows, the sort of hierarchy that exists on the Mac doesn't exist in the same way.
John:
On the Mac, you have applications, and there is an application that is the front application, and that owns the menu bar.
John:
And within that application, you can have multiple windows.
John:
And the original Mac model and the Mac model that more or less has stayed since day one, subject to the caveats that I'll get to in a moment,
John:
is that an application can be open and running independent of how many windows it has on the screen and you can tell that it's running because you look at the menu bar in modern mac os you can see the name of the app there right it's the front most application it owns the menu bar it's running it doesn't matter if there are any windows open whereas in windows the windows themselves more or less are the application and if you close all the windows by hitting the little x button
John:
And they're all gone?
John:
Well, the app's not running anymore.
John:
Because how could the app be running if there are no windows open?
John:
Because on Windows, there is no menu bar at the top of the screen.
John:
So if you've literally closed all the windows, how would you access the UI of the application?
John:
It is not running anymore, right?
John:
And that's what Windows users expect.
John:
Now, on the Mac, there's always been exceptions like desk accessories, which no one knows what those are unless you're super old, or other applications like Calculator, for example, where you close that window and it's like, oh, well, when I close the Calculator desk accessory,
John:
the calculator is not running anymore and desk accessories didn't own the menu bar anyway so some at some point during i think it was probably in the early days of mac os 10 apple made it more or less an officially supported thing that hey if you have a little application like calculator you can make it so that when you close the last window your application quits now you've always been able to do that on the mac it's just a program you can make your app do anything but it hasn't been in the culture like especially in classic mac os the culture was
John:
If you have an application and it's launched and someone closes the last window, like if you have like a text editor open in this example, and someone closes the last open text editor window, you would never quit text edit.
John:
Of course, you would leave the application running because maybe the person closed it and the next thing you want to do is make a new text edit document.
John:
So they hit command N. And if text edit quit after you close the last window, how can you hit command N?
John:
You have to go relaunch it, right?
John:
So, and that's the way I'm used to.
John:
That's the way Mac culture tends to work.
John:
And so this complaint is the opposite of saying, once I close that last text edit window, it annoys me that text edit sits there still being open, waiting to see if I want to make a new text edit window or open a new document and text edit.
John:
Why doesn't it just quit?
John:
I don't have any windows open.
John:
Um, in fact, text edit specifically is the one app that, that end preview, but text edit, these apps drive me up a wall because in, uh, let me see what version of it.
John:
I think in Lion, uh, Mac OS 10, 10.7 from 2011, Apple added a feature called automatic termination.
John:
Um,
John:
And the way that works is you can opt into it.
John:
The way it works is if you close all the windows belonging to an application, an application may decide to automatically terminate because it thinks you're not using it anymore after a short period of time.
John:
If you use the dock without that recent applications thing, which is a new thing, it didn't exist in Lion anyway.
John:
What you'll see then is you'll close the last window for text edit.
John:
And let's say, let's pick preview.
John:
You open a bunch of pictures in preview.
John:
I'm looking at the pictures.
John:
All right, no, I don't like that one.
John:
I like that one.
John:
So I close the window.
John:
I close the window.
John:
I've got no windows open in preview.
John:
Then I go back to the finder to find the next image I want to open.
John:
While I'm in the finder looking for the next image, preview quits out from under me and disappears from the dock.
John:
And I was like, well, wait, I was just about to go back to you.
John:
So now you have to reopen preview or double click the image and reopen preview.
John:
Or if the image is owned by Photoshop, manually open preview and then drag it on to preview because you don't want the thing to open in Photoshop when you double click it, which is a whole other ball of wax.
John:
I don't like the application quitting behind my back because it thinks I'm done using it based solely on the signal of whether or not it has any windows open.
John:
So we have the opposite complaint here, right?
John:
That he wants these apps to quit as soon as they have no windows open and I can't stand when they do that.
John:
The other feature that Apple added related to this again around the same time is called sudden termination.
John:
And I'm pretty sure both of these two things still exist.
John:
They're both things that you can opt into.
John:
Sudden termination is a way for your application to essentially set a flag or signal to the OS that not only is it okay to terminate me,
John:
But you can terminate me with prejudice.
John:
You can send me sig kill.
John:
You don't have to politely send me an Apple event asking me to quit.
John:
You can just literally just kill me.
John:
I don't have any cleanup work to do.
John:
I don't have any open files.
John:
I don't need to write any preference files.
John:
I am ready to be terminated suddenly.
John:
And this feature was added, I think, in Snow Leopard, actually, to make it so when you log out or shut down,
John:
That it doesn't have to essentially send a quit Apple event to every single application, have that application swap back in, have it respond to the quit Apple event, have it to run all the handlers that you can run.
John:
And, you know, AppKit has handlers for it and Classic Mac has handlers for it.
John:
And, you know, you know, like there's things you can do on quit.
John:
clean stuff up like close your indexes whatever like there's all sorts of crap apps can do on quit and that would make logout slower or shutdown slower or restart slower because you'd have to wait patiently for every application to be done doing what it's doing it was especially true on the days of spinning hard disks and not a lot of ram when these things would have to swap back in from disk just to get to the point to say okay you finally swapped back in now process this quit event up now you're exiting and
John:
And it would just be, you know, torture to wait for the thing to come off the disk into RAM just so it could quit itself.
John:
Whereas if you allowed the OS, if you had previously signaled, I'm not actually doing anything here.
John:
You can kill me.
John:
Then macOS would just send, I think it would actually literally send sig kill, kill minus nine, to just kill that process off.
John:
Like, I don't, no, no chance to do anything.
John:
You don't get to swap back in.
John:
You don't get to run again.
John:
You're just dead.
John:
And automatic termination is the thing where it says, oh, when no windows are open and you haven't used me in a while, I'm just going to exit.
John:
um and both of those you could use them in any combination right and then finally this was in my line review it's a good thing i go back through my old reviews and learn things that i had long since forgotten i'm not sure if they're still doing this but one of the things that lion did was if an application was automatically terminated it would disappear from your doc if it wasn't like permanently there or the dot would appear disappear underneath it this i do wonder how many people understand how the doc works these days like how like
John:
What makes an icon disappear from the dock when it's quit versus what makes it stay there?
John:
Right.
John:
How does the fact that I dragged an icon one space to left mean that it's forever on my dock?
John:
Right.
John:
Like the model hasn't changed in 16 years, but it is kind of a weird model anyway.
John:
Let's say this thing wasn't permanently on your dock and it was automatically terminated and disappears from your dock.
John:
and you're like, oh, that application I was using, you made it quit.
John:
The OS, as of line anyway, reserved the right to just keep that application running anyway.
John:
So you could go to activity monitor and you say, wait a second, I thought preview just quit.
John:
I saw it disappear from my dock.
John:
Why do I still see preview and activity monitor?
John:
Is there some kind of lag or something?
John:
No, the OS would terminate preview, but it wouldn't actually terminate it.
John:
It would keep it running just in case you want to launch it again.
John:
And you would click to launch it again and it would be up instantly.
John:
And this is, again, a lot easier to notice in the days before SSDs.
John:
Like when the days of spinning disk, you would really notice when you launch an app for real.
John:
So it would automatically terminate in scare quotes.
John:
preview but it didn't actually terminate it just hit it from the dock and so the next time you launch it it'll be like oh here i am i'm still running you didn't know that look i launched instantly i find this entire approach maddening right the thing that ios does which didn't help and people still love to force code all their applications but the thing that ios does which is don't you worry about whether an application is running or not that's not a thing you have to concern yourself with
John:
the os will manage all that as far as you're concerned running application not running application they all look the same in the app switcher from day one we've required the applications to be able to resume where they left off and you know have auto save and all that stuff that's the model of ios that is a fairly clean model even if it didn't account for the foibles of human nature that would result in millions of people swiping their applications upward all day long right
John:
The model on the Mac has never been like that, and attempts to make the Mac like that, like sudden termination, automatic termination, and all the other stuff they did to try to ISFI Mac OS back in the lion days, have not been particularly successful.
John:
Whereas the previous model that the Mac had, which is you launch applications when you're done with them, you quit them.
John:
Windows are owned by applications.
John:
So you have a bunch of applications, each of which own a bunch of Windows.
John:
You save explicitly.
John:
You can save to save the current thing.
John:
You can save as a save in a new name like that whole paradigm.
John:
That was also understandable.
John:
if not quite as friendly as the iOS model.
John:
And I feel like where the Mac is now is in this uncomfortable in-between place where there's a bunch of features of macOS that are trying to give you the benefits of iOS, but failing in various ways.
John:
And they're also not configurable enough to let people with differing preferences
John:
decide hey do you want me to to yank preview out from under you because you glance away from it for one second or do you want preview to always stay running now there are hidden plist keys for a lot of these things you can disable automatic termination you might be able to disable sudden termination or at least there were hidden plist keys for these back in the day but i've long since given up trying to tweak them and for all i know they disappeared in recent os releases but these should be
John:
If Apple insists on having these features, they probably need more flexibility in macOS so it behaves the way the user wants it to or expects it to behave.
John:
Because the current default behavior is like dependent on whether the app supports automatic termination.
John:
And off the top of your head, do you know which applications that you use every day support automatic termination?
John:
Or do you just have no idea?
John:
It's not a great situation.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Buzzsprout, and Fastmail.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can go to atp.fm slash join to join them.
Marco:
And we will talk to you all next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter...
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-
John:
Do you actually know which applications support automatic termination on your Mac?
John:
Do you notice this happening or is this a non-issue in your life?
Marco:
I didn't know about the sudden termination thing.
Marco:
I did know about the automatic termination thing, but I don't know.
Marco:
I mean, I'm kind of surprised that...
Marco:
I mean, like there's there's areas of Mac OS that seem like common stumbling blocks for people learning Mac OS or or like, you know, common like little sticking points that people just never really understand who aren't like super nerds.
Marco:
And I think disk image distribution of apps is definitely one of those things.
Marco:
And I think window management, there's certain things about it in application lifecycle management that a lot of people just don't get.
Marco:
It doesn't mesh well with them.
Marco:
And this thing about the difference between an app being quit versus an app having no open windows...
Marco:
I think this trips people up so often and is so counterintuitive to how most people assume their computer will work that I am kind of surprised that it hasn't been changed over time.
Marco:
Like, if you look at the kinds of things that Apple has done that make macOS worse in certain ways, but that they do in the name of trying to make it more easily understandable for novices...
Marco:
there is so much low-hanging fruit that they haven't touched, especially, like, in this area.
Marco:
I think of window management, application lifecycle management, disk images.
John:
I mean, they tried to.
John:
They touched it a lot.
John:
They just didn't do a good job.
John:
Like, it was constantly... Like, every release around this middle period of, like, the 2011, 2012, 2013, they were changing stuff...
Marco:
tons of stuff related so it was the whole auto save thing the reason we got like duplicate menu items and you had to hold down modifier keys to get save as right see and and i think that by the way that gets me every single time every time i open up an image in preview to like make it a you know chapter artwork image or something and i modify the size and i hit i want i go to save as and like oh actually i modified the original you're welcome i'm just like it that's
Marco:
See, like, again, like, I'm sure they had the best of intentions, you know, trying to bring the iOS data lifecycle to files on the Mac.
Marco:
But the problem is that when they introduced that, most of society had already been using computers.
Marco:
And most of society was already very familiar with the saving and save as workflows and meanings and behaviors on computers.
Marco:
And so by completely breaking that, I think they caused more confusion than they could have possibly resolved by having moved to that system.
John:
They didn't completely break it.
John:
If they had completely broken it, they would have been better.
John:
They partially broke it.
John:
That's what I was getting at with my question.
John:
Do you know which applications support sudden termination?
John:
Because the Mac was and continues to be this mixed environment where some apps do that, but some apps don't.
John:
Some apps support automatic termination, some apps don't.
John:
Some apps have save as, some apps don't.
John:
And you'd have to essentially keep an inventory of your head and know, well, text edit and preview work this way because there are simple Apple apps and they're trying to demonstrate good behavior.
John:
But BBEdit works the other way, but Photoshop works a different way.
John:
All the Microsoft apps work a different way.
John:
No one can keep track of that in their head.
John:
And if you tried to explain to somebody, okay, let me explain to you save and save as or duplicate it or whatever, or versions or whatever.
John:
you can explain that to them but then they say okay but this app works different how am i supposed to know how this app works and you'd have to say yeah well some apps work the other way and some apps work this way you can't even say one is the old way and one is the new way and we're in a transition period because this transition period has been like 10 years long at this point right it's just been left in this inconsistent state where a bunch of sort of flagship simple apple apps are
John:
Have one behavior.
John:
And by the way, you also have apps like calculator that have the other behavior or things like iTunes like that.
John:
There have been various sort of iLife apps that supported the when you close the main window, the app quits right for a little while.
John:
But then later on, they didn't support that because they changed in various ways.
John:
It's too hard to explain.
John:
They never landed on one thing.
John:
in the classic days there was one thing and it was not a particularly friendly thing but at least it was consistent and once you learned open new save save as quit if you learned how the window opening closing works the only exception you had to explain was desk accessories and they were so different because they didn't have a menu bar it was pretty easy but now calculator i'm pretty sure i gotta launch it to find out
John:
calculator does have a menu bar but it also quits when you close the calculator window like trying to explain this to a new mac user and believe it or not every day someone who's born has never used the mac it's impossible whereas ios has worked this particular way since day one and even though they've added multitasking added background tasks and all the other stuff and it's gotten more complicated it's way easier to explain the paradigm of ios especially on the iphone than it is to explain the stuff on the mac so
John:
If I was still writing Mac OS 10 reviews, I would probably still be complaining about this stuff, despite the fact that I complained about these exact issues 10 years ago.
John:
They haven't been solved.
John:
And so those of us who have Macs just muddle through, again, that's why I was asking, like, how do you deal with this in your daily life?
John:
Do you just have a memorized list in your head of which applications behave in which ways?
John:
Or are you surprised every time you go up to the file menu about what you see there and which modifier keys you might have to hold down to get the options you want?
Yeah.
Marco:
For me, it's one of those things where if you ask somebody what the keyboard command is for something they do all the time, it's kind of hard for them to tell you because it's just by feel.
Marco:
But I think the normal behavior of this is apps that are not document window based are
Marco:
So like calculator, for instance, like you're not supposed to open calculator and hit command N to open up a new calculator and then have multiple calculators on screen sometimes like it's just a single window app.
Marco:
So I think apps that are not document based are supposed to quit when their only window is closed.
Marco:
But apps that are document based that have the potential to have multiple document windows open at the same time are not supposed to quit when their last document is closed.
John:
but that to me like this so i'm pretty sure that's like the standard and i'm pretty sure that's what most apps do preview and text edit both quit when you close the last window eventually and it's because apple was trying to at one point say hey everybody's app should do this right like there's one part of the hig that says oh yeah if you've got a calculator app it should totally quit when you close that window it's a particular mode that you can operate and it makes sense i'm not arguing against that like if they're just the modern version of desk accessories it's a little bit confusing that menu bars but so what it makes sense
John:
But the text edit thing was like, well, we want to make it like the whole thing with the dots that Casey was getting at.
John:
The whole point of that, this is also straight out of one of my old reviews, is that they wanted to do the iOS thing where you don't know whether an application is running or not.
John:
And the best way to do that is, hey, previously for all these years, we had dots underneath and the ones with dots are running and the ones without dots aren't running.
John:
What if we just take away the dots?
John:
It's like iOS now, isn't it?
John:
And the answer is no, it's not like iOS at all, because every single app in iOS has the ability to auto-save when you leave it and pick up where it left off when you relaunch it.
John:
And pretty much no apps in macOS do that.
John:
I mean, maybe BBEdit and maybe a few other exceptional apps that are really good about state preservation, like web browsers.
John:
But in general, that's not the way macOS works.
John:
So no amount of yanking the dots out from under us or having the applications quit, but not really quit, but quit, but not...
John:
It's just so confusing that it's hard to even keep track of all the different things that different apps are doing.
John:
And over time, it has not converged.
John:
There has been no consensus.
John:
Applications continue just to do what they feel like doing to the point where, I mean, we've talked about this before, like hold down command Q to quit Chrome.
John:
Why?
John:
That's what Chrome felt like doing.
John:
People are accidentally quitting it.
John:
And it's damaging if you accidentally quit and you don't have the preference set to restore your session the way it was before, which is not the default in Chrome.
John:
And so we get a little overlay.
John:
It says hold down command Q to quit.
John:
That's just trying to explain how the Mac works to someone who hasn't been using it for a few decades is extremely difficult and frustrating.
John:
And the solution is not just let's make the Mac like iOS, but the solution is also not to just leave it in its current state because it's kind of a mess.
Casey:
You know, when I started using the Mac, which was roughly 08, it was different enough from Windows that it was very frustrating at first, but it was knowable.
Casey:
And, oh, what do you mean mail is still open when I close the last window?
Casey:
Like, that's dumb.
Casey:
Why would I want to do that?
Casey:
Well, as it turns out, you don't necessarily want to have any mail windows open when you're not actually reading your mail, but you probably still want it in the background checking for mail.
Casey:
So guess what?
Casey:
You can close the last window and it's still there, still checking.
Casey:
Oh, okay, this makes sense.
Casey:
I like it.
Casey:
But now, to y'all's point, it's not knowable.
Casey:
I mean, it is knowable, but it's not effectively knowable.
Marco:
It's not obvious, I think.
Casey:
That's a better word for it.
Casey:
It's not obvious.
Casey:
I think it is knowable, but it is certainly not obvious.
Casey:
And even early on, like, OK, well, how do I know if an app is running or not?
Casey:
Because this mail is always in my dock.
Casey:
Well, there's that little dot or that I think early on it was a light, like I said earlier.
Casey:
There's that little light.
Casey:
And if the light is on, that means mail is running.
Casey:
And if the light is gone, that means mail is not running.
Casey:
Oh, OK, that's a little wonky, but I can get behind this.
Casey:
And it was pretty straightforward.
Casey:
And now it is neither obvious nor straightforward.
Casey:
And that's really unfortunate.