Meals at Home
Casey:
Marco, uh, skipped ATP last night, which is to say we all skipped ATP last night, uh, because he wanted to watch slash listen to the first Phish concert, as you just mentioned, that had been performed in God knows how long.
Casey:
A year and a half or more.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
And, you know, I wanted to make fun of him real bad, but truth be told, I would feel similarly if I were Marco.
Casey:
And, uh,
Casey:
And then Marco and I were chatting earlier today and I had explained to you that I had just, as you had sent me an iMessage, I had just finished splitting up a three-hour MP3 that I had recorded using Audio Hijack
Casey:
off of Chrome playing the SiriusXM website on Friday night when Dave Matthews performed their first concert in God knows how long, a year and a half, I suppose.
Casey:
And then I was using Fishin.
Casey:
This is, I guess, a de facto ad read for Rogamiba.
Casey:
But anyway, I was using Fishin to split all these tracks up.
Casey:
And I was doing all this because that's the best thing I can do to get as close as I can to a soundboard recording of Dave Matthews' band.
Casey:
Marco, what did you do to get a soundboard recording of Fish?
Marco:
well i uh just bought the season pass on livefish.com they're officially sanctioned like live recording vendor a couple hours after the concert was over i could download my mp3 is right from the native app that runs that well i think it's a java app but it's it's an app that runs on my mac that that's like the bulk downloader or you can download right you know right from the website if you want to and
Marco:
Get all these recordings for something like, I think it's about $9 a show when you buy the season pass like I do.
Marco:
And I also, through the same website, watch the show live in 4K, professionally produced.
Marco:
In 4K?
Casey:
Of course.
Casey:
Oh, God, you're killing me, Smalls.
Casey:
You're absolutely killing me.
Marco:
Yeah, the live stream, I think that cost about $20, I think, and something like that.
Marco:
And it was great because I could, you know, as I mentioned previously on the show, I thought it would be really quite a cultural moment to see, as a Phish fan, to see the very first show back since COVID shut everything down for almost two years for them.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
It really was.
Marco:
I was very happy to see it.
Marco:
And I didn't want to go as far as to actually go to Arkansas in almost August, to actually go see it in person.
Marco:
But I'm very, very glad that I watched the live stream.
Marco:
And it's funny.
Marco:
Of all the things that our Wednesday night recordings have gone up against, that we have decided to just have the show anyway...
Marco:
it's things like presidential debates like the world series like all sorts of like major events that we're like we're gonna have the show anyway but damn it when the first fish concert after two years is about to start that's when i that's where i draw the line it's too much so i i sat on my couch alone and watched this fish concert
Marco:
streamed in glorious 4k with you know soundboard everything like you know because these they have a hell of a team behind the band and they really produce things at very high quality live and and so you get an amazing you know experience of you know very multi-camera setup and the highest quality visual and audio stuff and it's it's fantastic like to be a fan of this band is so much better than i think to be a fan of any other band simply just in how well they serve the fans
John:
Well, maybe not so much better in terms of storage space.
John:
I do wonder if the band has some kind of deal with storage makers.
Marco:
Well, as I mentioned before, for all the recordings of the shows, I just download the MP3s.
Marco:
They offer FLAC.
Marco:
They offer 2496 FLAC.
Marco:
I don't download those.
Marco:
I just download the MP3s.
Marco:
I think they're...
John:
What I'm saying, like, it's just a never-ending series of downloads.
John:
Like, you buy the season pass and just, like, there's however many shows there are per year.
John:
Even in MP3, it's just megs and megs of just constant data on your hard drive.
John:
You know, like, unless I suppose if you just, like, pick and choose shows.
John:
I'm like, oh, this wasn't that good a show.
John:
Do you just download them all?
John:
I mean, you're paying for them all.
Marco:
I download them all.
Marco:
Why would I pick and choose?
John:
I'm saying, like, so this never ends.
John:
I suppose the expansion of storage, as long as the expansion of storage outpaces...
Marco:
their output you'll probably be fine because you know if you're happy with if you're happy with mp3s the files shouldn't really get any bigger from this point on i guess i mean to give you a data point here all of 2019 oh wait i missed a few hold on yeah okay now all of 2019 they played 41 shows it was a pretty busy year for them and that was a little under 15 gigs
Marco:
That's really not bad.
Casey:
Wait, 41 shows?
Casey:
41 shows is a busy year?
John:
15 gigs a year dedicated to your favorite band.
John:
It still seems hefty, but as time goes on, that will be less and less because storage will get bigger, I guess.
John:
Oh, come on.
John:
If you two play that many shows, you'd be there.
John:
I don't know.
John:
You have quite a tolerance.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
For the record, Dave Matthews banned 73 shows in 2019.
Casey:
Just throwing it out there.
Casey:
But anyway, that being said, Dave Matthews does have some forward thinking, for lack of a better term, policies.
Casey:
They let you record concerts using microphones in the audience, and they have since forever.
Casey:
Yeah, the tapers.
Casey:
Very early on.
Casey:
Yeah, tapers, exactly.
Casey:
Very early on, they would actually let you hook into the soundboard and then very quickly they said, eh, that's not such a great idea anymore.
Casey:
And then there was a brief window of time when people realized that they could grab one of the band members' IEMs, their in-ear monitors, and so they would start recording that.
Casey:
And that would be a very odd mix because it would be like super heavy on the drums because it was Carter the drummer's IEM feed or whatever.
Casey:
But then the band put the kibosh on that.
Casey:
So now we're back to just, you know, microphones in the audience.
Casey:
And you'd be surprised the fidelity of a microphone on a taper tower, you know, that's like 30 feet up in the middle of the audience.
Casey:
It is way better than you would expect, but it is still straight trash compared to what you're listening to.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And it's just so frustrating because I feel like the bands, I know you're going to be offended by this, Marco, I'm sorry, but I don't feel like the bands are that different in spirit.
Casey:
Yes, I know the fans are very different and so on and so forth, but I feel like the spirit of the band is not that different.
Marco:
And the band members and the style.
Casey:
Yes, yes, yes.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I feel like Phish gets this so very right in the Dave Matthews Band.
Casey:
I don't know if I would go so far as to say it gets it wrong, but certainly does not get it right.
Casey:
And I am very jealous.
Casey:
And I would be buying all of the shows if I were able to, just like you do.
Marco:
Fish went through a similar thing with allowing tapers, first allowing soundboard tap-ins, and then eventually they caused problems, so they stopped doing that.
Marco:
It's a great example of where there's demand, try to address it.
Marco:
If people are telling you over and over again in big ways, we want live recordings of your shows of the highest quality we can get, then if you can find a way to sell that to them with terms that everyone's happy with,
Marco:
that's great like take advantage like address the demand rather than just trying to like you know either ignore it or pretend like it's not there or try to like stamp it out you know just unaddressed like if you can address that demand that's usually a good idea and in this case yeah fish does a fantastic job with with doing that you two 15 shows in 2019
Marco:
busy bees they're getting pretty old but you won't download them because you know that might use like three gigs of your hard drive space on your very very small hard drives you two not a jam band agreed very short thoughts we can all agree on that yeah i have i have many live recordings of their songs i probably don't need any new ones
Marco:
And that's how you know they're not a jam band right there.
Casey:
That's exactly right.
Casey:
Actually, I'm surprised you and I agree on this, but yes, I completely agree.
John:
I mean, is this hard to agree on?
John:
I don't think as anyone has ever suggested that you do as a jam band.
Casey:
Well, no, I'm more talking about our longstanding different definitions of jam band, wherein I think for Marco, it's a flavor of music, whereas for me, it's about improvisation.
Casey:
We're not going to reopen that can of worms for the love of God.
Marco:
The reason I started talking to Casey this morning about the show is that – so I'm watching the live stream.
Marco:
So excited.
Marco:
I made this whole event out of this.
Marco:
Right as the band walks onto the stage for the first time, the camera pans out.
Marco:
And flanking the left and right of the stage are two giant digital billboard screens.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And during the performance, they turn those off.
Marco:
So you're not, you know, seeing like a giant Miller Lite ad on the side of, you know, at the Walmart Amphitheater here in Arkansas.
Marco:
But as the band walked out on stage, everyone starts cheering, camera pans out, and they hadn't turned the billboards off yet.
Marco:
And what were they showing?
Marco:
an ad for an upcoming performance there of Dave Matthews band.
Marco:
So flanking the stage of this amazing moment.
Marco:
Targeted advertising.
Casey:
Right?
Casey:
I'm saying.
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
So flanking the stage of this amazing moment for me, this fish fan, is two giant ads for Dave Matthews band.
John:
The system works, Marco.
John:
The system works.
John:
People listening to fish also like.
Casey:
No, that's the thing.
Casey:
They don't.
Marco:
You don't.
Marco:
Yeah, some do, but probably not the common case.
Casey:
Speaking of ordering things online, did you guys get anything or order anything shiny and yellow today?
Marco:
Sure did.
Marco:
I'm right there.
Marco:
One o'clock today.
Marco:
I was there ordering two play dates for my family.
Casey:
But there's three people.
Marco:
Yeah, well, two was the most you can order at once.
Marco:
I didn't want to try to abuse the system.
Marco:
And I know from experience that two is generally the right number for a portable system in our house.
Marco:
Actually, the reason I know that is, you know, look, this is a game system.
Marco:
I am not much of a gamer, but the other two members of my family are.
Marco:
Occasionally, I will take a risk
Marco:
on something gaming-related that is fun.
Marco:
Not because it's, like, the best system with all the specs.
Marco:
Like, I have no interest whatsoever in the PS5 or the Xbox X series, whatever.
Marco:
No interest in those things at all because those are, like, you know, the high-end systems or shooting people in high definition.
Marco:
I cannot possibly be less interested in that.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Like little fun experiments here and there or like fun systems that are kind of more, you know, casual audiences or, you know, going in a different direction.
Marco:
Things like the Nintendo Wii.
Marco:
Those I tend to have fun with, at least for a brief time, you know, before the fad wears off.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
The last time I took a risk on buying a portable system that I wasn't sure how much I would like, but I thought it might have a chance of being something fun, was actually when the Nintendo Switch came out.
Marco:
A friend of the show, Colin Donnell, who actually... You should follow Colin if you are a programmer or whatever, because he does a lot of really good stuff.
Marco:
He makes a lot of really good commentary.
Marco:
He always is starting some kind of new interesting project.
Marco:
He's doing some developer assistance projects right now.
Marco:
But he also...
Marco:
is really good about talking on Twitter about mental health issues as a developer.
Marco:
Facing mental health challenges, the challenges he's faced, helpful things if you're facing mental health challenges, especially as a programmer.
Marco:
So Colin Donald's a good follow.
Marco:
But the reason I bring him up is that the last risk I took...
Marco:
right in the middle of switch mania colin had had placed a couple of pre-orders and had like gotten one more than he needed so he offered to sell the switch to me at cost which was very generous at that time because they were selling for well above cost on the third party market and so i took a risk and just and bought the switch from him i hadn't i had no idea whether it'd be good whether the family would love it and
Marco:
It was like the greatest hit in the family that we've ever had.
Marco:
Everyone loved it.
Marco:
It was amazing.
Marco:
So much fun.
Marco:
I mean, you guys remember the early Switch days.
Marco:
So much fun.
Marco:
It's still one of the most played things in our house.
Marco:
So I decided with the play date, let me take a similar risk.
Marco:
it's not that much money it's like 180 bucks so it's it's not a huge risk and i'm pretty sure it's going to be a lot of fun knowing panic seeing the you know the the developers they have on board seeing some of the um the preview articles from the press that got hands-on time with it with some of the some of the pre-release games it look it looks really cool i trust them to make it really fun and at that price i decided to take the risk and
Marco:
Sometimes those risks pan out for me and little fun game stuff for my family, and I'm pretty sure this is going to be one of those risks, or one of those times.
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
Now, John, did you order one?
John:
So I had a reminder set up on my phone to go off to remind me to do it.
John:
The reminder went off.
John:
I took my phone to make the pre-order.
John:
I already had the page loaded in Mobile Safari, and I had no bars because I was out of my house, and that was kind of a shame.
John:
And I was too far away from any place where I could get signal, so...
John:
Yeah, I mean, I ordered it.
John:
I pre-ordered just one.
John:
It was kind of disappointing that, I mean, I kind of knew there might be a signal quality issue.
John:
I'm like, well, it might be hard, but I'll be there the second the thing opened.
John:
So surely I'll get through.
John:
Turns out, no, it didn't get through.
John:
The place I live, I don't entirely understand it.
John:
I usually just blame it on rich people not wanting cell towers in their area.
John:
I would pay so much money to put a cell tower in my backyard right now.
John:
Please, just plant it in my backyard.
John:
I don't care if it's an eyesore.
John:
I just want cell signal.
John:
But anyway, everywhere around where I am, like a whole neighborhood, cell signal is so bad.
John:
I think I've talked about this before.
John:
The thing that frustrates the most is both of my kids' schools are essentially cell signal dead zones, which is extremely frustrating because one of the major tools parents and children use these days, and especially in COVID times and all that other stuff,
John:
to communicate about meeting up to pick up and drop off because you can't like drive up to the school and pick up your kid because every other person is doing that because none of the kids are riding the bus is texting and what happens when you can't text it makes it or call it makes life more difficult anyway all this to say is i ordered but my order is not coming until 2022 apparently which is a shame but on the bright side
John:
don't cry for me too much i already used a play date in person two years ago at wwdc with the panic folks so i'm glad i've already got to touch one and try it and even you know play a little bit of one of the games and stuff like that so i feel like uh i've already got a leg up but yeah i'll be waiting a little longer for mine
John:
And honestly, I don't really play handheld systems for RSI issues, but I just bought this just because it's just so it's so cute and so interesting.
John:
And I actually am very interested in the games that they're developing just because of the constraints the game developers are under.
John:
I just want to see what they produce.
John:
And in terms of RSI, I'm assuming most of the games won't be the type of games that you have to sink 500 hours into unless you want to.
John:
So I'm hoping I can like play them and get a flavor for it.
John:
And then, you know, I suppose hand it off to my kids.
John:
I'm kind of afraid they're going to destroy it.
John:
But anyway, maybe I'll buy a second one for preservation purposes.
John:
Once they come out with that cool, once they come out with the cool pencil holder thing that goes with it.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Like the speaker dock thing.
John:
Yeah.
John:
That does look neat.
John:
It's so, I just want that to have that on my desk.
John:
Right.
John:
And I have the, the issue of edge magazine that they were on the cover of and everything.
John:
It's just, I've, I feel a vicarious sense of pride because I know the people who made it and it's really cool.
Marco:
oh they should put status board on it oh don't even the res the resurrection of status board oh that would be so amazing yeah because if they're selling this desk stand for it and panic wrote status board i don't know i don't know if they could get that approved though
Marco:
Do you think they have a strict review process there?
Marco:
That's right.
Marco:
I'm curious to see, because they have what looks to be a fairly compelling developer story ramping up there.
Marco:
I'm not saying I'm putting Overcast there or anything.
Marco:
I probably wouldn't do that just for time reasons.
Marco:
But I think that might become a really cool hobbyist platform as well.
Marco:
So I'm curious to watch it, because it looks... I, too, handled one at WDC a couple years ago for a brief time, and it looked and felt delightful, as you would expect.
Marco:
And so I expect that it's going to be a pretty fun platform.
Marco:
And, I mean, they sold out, so they had...
Marco:
It's not like a sellout situation where you just can't get one, but they said the 2021 manufacturing batch is 20,000 units.
Marco:
And it told you when you ordered whether you were one of those or not.
Marco:
And they sold out of the 2021 batch of 20,000 units in about 20 minutes.
Marco:
So that's a pretty good indicator that there's going to be a pretty well-sized community for this device out there.
Marco:
So that I think, especially also considering it's a pretty well-sized community of a lot of nerdy people, I think too.
Marco:
So that suggests there might be some fun hobbyist stuff on here as well.
Marco:
So I'm looking forward to this.
John:
yeah people who don't know every every play date is a you know what they call in the console world like a dev console or you know what do they call it dev kit there you go thank you there's a dev kit like there's no special version of this hardware you need to develop games for it every single one that you get you can develop for and the id to develop for it is free uh like it's just if you buy a play date you might not care about it and don't want to do any development but if you do there's nothing else to get so
John:
And it's, you know, it's it's monochrome.
John:
It's a small screen.
John:
It's a limited environment.
John:
If you're interested in making a game with a very simple game API, it's kind of like going back in time of like when APIs were simpler, when hardware was simpler.
John:
You can make a game with far fewer resources than would be required even to make like a PC game or you can do this type of stuff on.
John:
You can make a web game or any kind of thing, but you have to impose the limits on yourself and decide that you're not going to do everything in full color, 3D, so on and so forth.
John:
Playdate will limit all this on its own, so you will be within the constraints of the hardware and you'll get to experiment with gaming.
John:
It's actually, I would imagine, a pretty good platform to learn about.
John:
how what it means to write a game because you won't get lost in the weeds of like oh i need to do this i need to learn this shader language to make this cool shiny chrome sphere and it's like no you're just let's move some pixels around on the screen and make a fun game you didn't ask me if i ordered one did you order two
Casey:
Well, so here's the thing.
Casey:
What is going to be the heavier part of the scale?
Casey:
My unabashed, complete frugality slash cheapness or my incredible fear of missing out?
Casey:
So which do you think won?
John:
The FOMO dominates, I'm sure.
Casey:
It absolutely did.
Casey:
I, because I am a professional, will have mine in this year because I'm not a poor planner like John.
John:
I was not a poor planner.
John:
I understood that it was a risk.
John:
It's a risk I took.
John:
You plan to be out of your house.
Marco:
I am content with my trade-off.
Marco:
I had the pre-order time in my calendar as a block of time.
Marco:
This time is blocked out.
Marco:
Multiple alarms set at different intervals before.
Marco:
So I would make sure that if I was out, I could get home to be ready for it.
Marco:
it was all set man i even i woke my phone up like on my desk so the screen would be on so that the apple pay checkout i wouldn't have to wait for the screen to unlock to first show me that like that's how prepared i was oh my word anyway i did order one i have no idea if i like it or not but it looks super cool and it i don't know i i am easily swayed by fatty things like that like i there was there was a
Casey:
three week window of time when i was in what was it middle middle school or high school that i was obsessed with tamagotchi and it lasted like three weeks but man did i enjoy that thing at the time until it died but you know you can't win them all well and if you end up hating it you can scalp it to john for a nice profit that's true that's right as long as you keep it in pristine condition i'll take it
Casey:
Oh, are you kidding me?
Casey:
I would rather sell my car to like a family member or a friend than sell a play date to you, John.
Casey:
There's no chance.
Casey:
If I breathe on that thing, it will be considered good condition at best.
John:
You just put it in your back pocket when you wash your car and jump to clean the roof or something.
Casey:
That's right.
John:
That's right.
John:
It'll be all screwed up.
Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you so much to sanity.io for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
We should probably start the actual show.
Casey:
And I just wanted to make a brief plea and reminder that if you are in the United States of America and you are over 12 years old, please, please, please, please go get your vaccination if you can.
Casey:
It would be really, really helpful.
Casey:
The Delta variant is starting to really take over here, if not having already taken over.
Casey:
And it's super duper contagious.
Casey:
And I think that none of that should be controversial.
Casey:
And whether or not it's a panacea, whether or not it's a silver bullet, I can tell you that every bit of science that I've read says that the vaccines help and they certainly don't hurt.
Casey:
So if you can, on behalf of those of us who have children younger than 12, on behalf of those of us who are immunocompromised or can't take or can't get the vaccine, please, if at all possible,
Casey:
Now's a great time to get vaccinated if you're an American.
Casey:
For those of you who are not American or don't have access to these, genuinely, my heart goes out to you.
Casey:
No snark.
Casey:
It's a really tough place to be, and I hope that you have the ability to get your vaccination sooner rather than later.
Casey:
But one way or another, for those of us who are American and who are lucky enough to have an ample supply of vaccines available to us, please do your part.
Casey:
Do your part for other people, even if you don't want to do it for yourself.
Casey:
Do it for your friends.
Casey:
Do it for your friends' kids.
Casey:
Do it for relatives.
Casey:
Go get your shot.
Casey:
Get vaccinated if at all possible.
Casey:
It would make Uncle Casey really happy.
Casey:
Please and thank you.
John:
And as a reminder for people in the U S the vaccine is free, which is so rare in healthcare in this country, but it literally is free.
John:
I know some places will ask you for insurance information.
John:
You don't have to give it.
John:
The vaccine is free.
John:
No one will take any money from you for it.
John:
You can get it.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And please do, you know, the, we, we as, as Americans of our generation are so fortunate that we've never really been called to, to serve our country in a really big way in a way that was mandatory.
Marco:
You know, we, we,
Marco:
For those of us who serve in the armed forces, that's a different story and we respect them very much.
Marco:
But fortunately, most of us of our generation have not ever been drafted or been forced to serve our country in some way.
Marco:
We are lucky to be in that position.
Marco:
This is one area where
Marco:
we really need to all step up and do it.
Marco:
Because as Casey said, not everybody can.
Marco:
People who are immunocompromised or have other conditions that prevent them from getting the vaccine, they can't get it in a lot of cases.
Marco:
So every one of us who is able to get it, please, serve your duty to society.
Marco:
This is what we have to do.
Marco:
We all have to work together to get this done, to finally beat this virus, because we're not out of the woods yet at all.
Marco:
In fact, it looks like we're going to gear up for another winter where we're going to have some problems.
Marco:
And so we're not out of the woods yet.
Marco:
We need everybody.
Marco:
We need as many people as we can possibly get to please step up and serve society by getting this done.
Marco:
And anybody in your life who refuses to get it, I know that's a really hard thing.
Marco:
I have people like that in my life as well.
Marco:
It's a really hard thing to try to convince them or we have problems with a lot of rhetoric in our society right now.
Marco:
But whatever you can do to get yourself and anyone else who's able to be vaccinated, to get them vaccinated, please do it.
Marco:
Serve the world by doing this.
Marco:
It's very, very important.
Marco:
It will literally save lives.
Marco:
Please do it.
Casey:
Moving on to far less important things.
Casey:
I just can't be bothered by these Safari changes yet.
Casey:
I'll be bothered about it when the final GM lands.
Casey:
But everyone else seems to be really intrigued by the day-to-day machinations of Safari updates, you especially, John.
Casey:
So I am passing the chief summonerizer and chief baton to you for at least this segment.
Casey:
John, tell me what's going on with Safari these days.
John:
Apple keeps changing it.
John:
Like we said in the last show, they're not done with the changes.
John:
And if you look at the build date on the betas that we're looking at now, even these took place a while ago.
John:
So Apple continues to work on this design.
John:
Here's what they've done recently.
John:
Again, this is probably not the end point, but just someplace, a stop along the way.
John:
uh in mac os monterey the latest beta the reload button is gone from the choices and customized toolbar remember at first it wasn't there then it was there and it was backwards then it was there and it was forwards now it's gone again why i don't know i'm the only person who probably cares about this reload button i want i want there to be one and i want it to be facing the right direction why did it disappear now who knows but it's gone just fyi um
John:
someone on twitter pointed out that they added darker outlines around the window widgets the little red uh yellow and green circles uh all the window widgets and current even in current macOS have like a little bit of an outline but they made the outlines darker the theory is that it lets the window widgets stand out better from a similarly covered background because remember the background can color can color that toolbar in safari and they added an outline around the address bar whereas before it was just kind of like a solid
John:
thing yep anyway they continue to tweak um i didn't dig too much into the mac one because i'm just like yeah yeah yeah let's see like the most important thing is that they didn't change is you can still choose the you know to have the the tabs below the address bar right
John:
and that the tabs still don't look like tabs, which, as we mentioned in the last show, doesn't really make any sense because the whole reason they look the way they do is because they had to be those quote-unquote tabs that transform into the address bar, and the address bar is a rounded rectangle with text in it, so it made sense.
John:
But now that they're in a separate line, I don't know why they just don't go back to looking like tabs, but fingers crossed on that one.
John:
um the ipad ipad os beta 4 finally has the standalone tab bar like the mac one does uh apple more or less said they were going to do this so it it now looks much more like the mac one again it's inexplicable why these things that are supposed to be tabs look exactly like the address bar unless you know that hey they used to be up next to the address bar and they would transform into the address bar when you clicked on them but if you don't know that this design doesn't make any sense so there's ipad it is now caught up to the previous mess from the last beta um
John:
Gruber had some things to say about what they've done to iOS Safari.
John:
I still haven't installed iOS 15 on any of my devices, so I'm just looking at this from the screenshots, and I'm kind of glad.
John:
What Gruber says is, there are nine tap targets in the new toolbar in beta 4.
John:
That's nine tappable buttons or effective buttons on a single phone-width toolbar.
John:
apple's own example in the human interface guidelines of a toolbar that's too crowded has nine buttons like literally there's a screenshot from the human interface guidelines that shows a toolbar in ios app and says you know provide ample touch targets for interactive elements try to maintain a minimum tapable error of 44 by 44 points for all controls and they show green check yes look three buttons in the toolbar plenty of room to tap them red x no nine buttons in the toolbar and
John:
Apple literally has nine buttons.
John:
Now, you'd be forgiven for thinking there aren't actually nine buttons, but Gruber provides a handy diagram with arrows showing if you tap over here, it's the previous tab.
John:
Then there's the back forward navigation.
John:
Then there's the address bar.
John:
Then there's a reload button.
John:
Then there is another thing that you can tap for previous tab, I guess.
John:
Oh, no, wait.
John:
I forget what that other one is.
John:
And I can't tell what that region does.
John:
There's a share button.
John:
There is a tabs button.
John:
And then there's the next tab thing.
John:
This is all everything I just described is from the left to the right edge of your phone.
John:
So, like, it seems like they heard the complaint that it was too minimal and there weren't enough functionality and they just jammed everything they could into that.
John:
It's still floating lodgings.
John:
It's still up above the top.
John:
You know, they haven't, you know.
John:
Anyway, we'll see what they do next version.
John:
Just to let you know, things continue to happen.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I just...
Marco:
The iPhone version is still killing me.
Marco:
It's just this bar, this floating capsule thing.
Marco:
We've seen a number of mock-ups now from designers who are more talented than I am.
Marco:
Two toolbar-tall mock-ups.
Marco:
So there's a two-row toolbar on the bottom that slides up and then collapses into the collapse state like we have now.
Marco:
And that is so much better than what they have now.
Marco:
I think the cardinal sin of the iOS version is this floating blob state because not only does it block a whole bunch of content and it wastes a ton of space that if it was a double high status bar, you would waste about the same or less space.
Marco:
And still have more room for more controls and be more usable.
Marco:
But also, the way that it messes with web content continues to be a big problem.
Marco:
Web content assumes a rectangle viewport and they assume to be able to pin stuff to the edges of that viewport.
Marco:
Controls, content, things like that.
Marco:
And so many webpages are still broken by this.
Marco:
And so I feel like any design that relies on Apple overlaying
Marco:
critical browser controls over parts of the webpage that can't be moved out of the way easily or that just try to automatically adjust the web content and have it flow around it.
Marco:
And that, of course, keeps breaking and breaks a bunch of different things.
Marco:
Those attempts are going to fail.
Marco:
They're not going to be usable.
Marco:
They're going to break too many pages.
Marco:
And the web is not going to adopt to them uniformly and perfectly.
Marco:
Safari, as a web browser, needs to accommodate the web as it is.
Marco:
And the web as it is really expects a rectangle viewport.
Marco:
And there's nothing they can do to fix every single webpage in the world.
Marco:
So give us back a rectangular viewport.
Marco:
It's hard enough having the bar shrink and hide in iOS 14 and before.
Marco:
Having the bar shrink and show and have the content at the bottom occasionally collide with the tap target to expand the bar or whatever.
Marco:
That's bad enough.
Marco:
this makes it even worse because it tries to then render the background content behind the bar.
Marco:
And so it's, it's this whole thing that is never going to work.
Marco:
In addition to, I think looking hideous and being really cluttered and unreadable.
Marco:
Cause like any part of the page that's covered up by this floating bar or it's giant drop shadow is,
Marco:
it might as well not be visible.
Marco:
There's no utility to showing me a significantly occluded part of the page.
Marco:
I don't need to see the left few words of the paragraph that's below that or part of the sentence that's covered by a giant drop shadow, but I can't see the sentence that goes between the top of the bar and the bottom, so I can't actually read it.
Marco:
I'm getting no benefit by rendering more of the page behind these controls.
Marco:
in the same way that we get no benefit by rendering additional background color or border color up in the notch area.
Marco:
There's no benefit to that.
Marco:
We do that because the notch is a hardware thing that kind of has to be there for their current goals, and so I guess we'll work around it and try to put something up there so it doesn't look like an Android phone.
Marco:
But the bottom is not like that.
Marco:
The bottom, we can render however we like, and webpages are...
Marco:
significantly more frequently assuming the bottom is a straight line compared to the top.
Marco:
So this behavior of this floating bar going above the content with this giant drop shadow is always going to cause problems and doesn't look very good and is a usability failure.
Marco:
So I hope...
Marco:
It seems like Apple is just digging and digging and digging deeper with this design.
Marco:
It seems like they're committed.
Marco:
Oh, we're going to keep this.
Marco:
This isn't a bad design.
Marco:
We need to add a few things here and there.
Marco:
Oh, add one more thing here.
Marco:
They're just jumping through hoops trying to make this design work.
Marco:
It's not going to work.
Marco:
The sooner they realize that, the sooner they can make something better.
Marco:
But until then, they're just digging and digging and digging.
Marco:
And they're just, it seems like they got their heels in the dirt just saying, nope, we're going to stick with this.
Marco:
This is not a bad design.
Marco:
Damn it.
Marco:
This is going to work.
Marco:
We're going to make it work.
Marco:
And it's just not going to work.
John:
Yeah, like I said, this is still back in time, so who knows what they have actually changed.
John:
And as we mentioned the very first time we talked about this, the spec that allows web pages to accommodate for this isn't some Apple-specific thing.
John:
It's part of the CSS spec where you can find, like, the safe area insets, essentially, of a web page, right?
John:
The trouble is that most websites don't implement this and certainly don't implement it towards the bottom because if they implement it at the top, it's because of previous iPhones, which, as Marco pointed out, had the notch.
John:
that is you know that essentially did force web pages to do something different to accommodate apple's hardware in this case it's a little bit more excusable it's like well face id is awesome and we all love it and if there's going to be a notch it's what they've chosen to do it seems like they're making the same choice here but the difference is when you explain like um
John:
Oh, here's a bunch of stuff you web page authors have to do to accommodate our new phone with Face ID.
John:
You can say, you know, Apple, you could have not had the notch.
John:
We have this discussion in the show many times.
John:
You could have not had the notch and just made it straight across.
John:
It would have made everyone's lives easier.
John:
But I do see the benefit of Face ID.
John:
And in this case, saying, you know, Apple...
John:
You could have just had a regular toolbar on the bottom and web developers wouldn't have accommodated this.
John:
But there's no but.
John:
It's like, but I see the benefit of a lozenge with a drop shadow.
John:
No, I see more problems with that.
John:
I don't like the lozenge with a drop shadow.
John:
There's no benefit.
John:
There's no benefit on the other side of this saying, we know a web page or all this, you're going to have to change your stuff.
John:
But there's a benefit on the other side of it.
John:
Because if you just did something simpler, like a toolbar on the bottom,
John:
web page developers wouldn't have to accommodate this and i mean i personally i agree with marco i don't like how this looks and i don't see any benefit to for being a floating lozenge and it really does read like you know again what we're seeing is weeks back in time from apple so who knows what it looks like now but it really does read like someone really wants this floating lozenge and they're just going to do whatever it takes to somehow get this floating lozenge to ship and they just keep throwing more stuff at it's like hey
John:
Think about not making a floating lozenge.
John:
We all like the idea of things in the bottom.
John:
We all like swiping to get other tabs.
John:
That's all good.
John:
We like that.
John:
That's the benefit we want.
John:
The floating lozenge is nothing.
John:
There's no part of this that requires a floating lozenge and a drop shadow, right?
John:
And that is the root of the problem.
John:
And I feel like eventually, hopefully this already happened at Apple.
John:
Someone say, look, let's list the benefits of the design and let's list the downsides.
John:
And let's just say, is there a way we can change design where we keep literally all of the benefits
John:
and eliminate the things that are bad and also make it so web page authors don't have to do safe areas now you could be argued that like well this is a forcing function and really every web browser should already do safe variance that's for everything that's a nice view of the world but if you've been a web developer for a decade or two you can know that any argument that says what the web writ large quote unquote should do is probably not a winning argument and change happens slowly so i don't think apple can force the entire world to
John:
to use safe area insets in their css any more than they forced everybody to accommodate the notch you know apple centric web developers accommodated the notch but most didn't if you go to websites and look at how they handle the notch so fingers crossed for the next beta which will you know which already got baked i guess two weeks ago or whatever at apple
Casey:
Moving right along, LiveText, which is the thing where you can select text out of like an image or things that the computer doesn't know is text.
Casey:
That is coming to Intel Macs as of macOS Monterey Beta 4, which is really exciting.
Casey:
A friend of the show, Jason Snell, wrote, LiveText uses the neural engine on Apple design processors to convert text and images into text you can select and copy.
Casey:
But in the just released fourth beta of macOS Monterey, LiveText has also been enabled on Intel Macs.
John:
which is very exciting i'm very happy about that because i at the rate we're going i'm not going to have an m1 mac for quite a long time yep snell says that they're using gpu based processing because of course the intel max don't have a neural engine in them and we talked about this earlier the features that were not an intel max maybe because they weren't written for it you know if this feature was written for the neural engine and there isn't one oh well um but if there's enough demand of course apple can write a version that works without the neural engine and apparently they did because i think there was demand this is a great feature of
John:
all of apple's upcoming operating systems and i'm glad to see it on an intel max i tried it uh and it's got a little bit of the uh characteristics the case will probably describe later in the show of apple features where like hey there's nothing to do it just works and so i was on my intel mac running monterey beta 4 and i just said okay so
John:
so how do i i want to try this image text thing is do i have to do something special or and so i just went to a web page and there was an image on it with text and i'm like so do i i don't i don't see can i select the text and like nothing was happening i'm like okay maybe i need to save the image and i opened it in preview i was like no still it's like i just get the regular cursor when i when i drag my cursor and click on the image it like just drags the image i'm like it's not it's not selecting any text so i was like
John:
How is this feature supposed to?
John:
And then all of a sudden my cursor turned into an I-beam.
John:
I was like, oh, there it goes.
John:
Like there's no indication that you need to do anything at any point, but it does actually take a second.
John:
I mean, obviously I'm being an impatient person and I use the computer very quickly.
John:
I know this.
John:
Um, it's probably like less than a second, but like, I'm just like, let me try it.
John:
No, I can't select.
John:
I used to do this when I was, my relatives would come over and they would watch me use the Mac and they could not keep track of what I was doing because, you know, on the old, I've talked about this before on the old, like 68 K max.
John:
Drawing to the screen was so slow that if you use them a lot, you can anticipate where like the OK button would eventually draw itself and click before the entire dialog has even entirely drawn itself.
John:
So it was very difficult to track what I was doing.
John:
So I tend to move very quickly on the computer.
John:
All this is to say is that I think it probably takes fractions of a second on any image anywhere in the OS for you to be able to select text, but it's not actually immediate.
John:
but what but it really does as far as i can tell work everywhere anywhere there's an image like i went back to the web page where i couldn't select text and then i could select it there too and it's like everywhere like you know in preview and web browsers in any graphics it's just i don't know how it works i don't know if it's only certain image apis maybe it doesn't work in photoshop or something i don't actually know but anyway it works and it works really well and it's super cool
John:
I kind of, in some ways, I don't prefer the TechSniper technique, but I think I will continue to have TechSniper installed, I think, just because sometimes... First of all, I think TechSniper sometimes does a little bit better job.
John:
I gave it some challenging things by Googling parking signs with the blurry sign text telling you all the times you can and can't park.
John:
TechSniper sometimes does a little bit better, and also sometimes...
John:
I actually want to just sort of drag, select a region and say, do what you can to get this text out versus selecting the text or rather waiting around for the IBM cursor to appear.
John:
And that, of course, is the weakness of all these type of Apple features, which is like, is it going to work eventually or is it not going to work eventually?
John:
Because I'm assuming there's some parts of the OS where it's not going to ever actually work.
John:
And the only way you have to know that is wait a long enough period of time where you just assume, OK, if it hasn't happened by now, it's not going to happen.
John:
So that's a bit of a bummer.
John:
But anyway, it's cool, and I'm glad it exists, and I'm glad it exists on Intel Max.
Casey:
Yep, me too.
Casey:
Tell me about scorch marks on lightning cables, John.
John:
I mentioned in the last show, I was talking about the little dark marks that you get on the tiny little contacts on lightning tables sometimes.
John:
And I said, whether they're scorch marks or corrosion or whatever they are, I think we're all familiar with them.
John:
So someone named Mr. Glass wrote in to say this.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I don't have a good way to gauge the...
John:
uh reliability is information but i thought it was interesting and worth considering and presumably there is a way we could test it so here we go the discoloration on lightning cables is actually metallic plating slash corrosion due to five volt power being continuously applied to the pin when the phone is not connected it is definitely not a scorch mark due to heat etc
John:
To avoid this happening, you can unplug the cable from power whenever you're not charging your phone.
John:
Of course, nobody's going to do that.
John:
This problem has actually been silently fixed in current official Apple Lightning cables as they do get revised.
John:
The latest USB-A cables will pulse a smaller voltage of about 1.5 volts at a very low duty cycle, less than 1%, with a piece of custom silicon specifically designed to address this issue.
John:
So in theory, if you buy a brand new USB-A to Lightning cable from Apple...
John:
and you use it in some context next to an older one you should not see the corrosion on the newer one because it's not continuously applying voltage this is the first i heard of an actual like concrete cause and effect explanation for this and with the added information that apple has apparently known about this and fixed it if this is true i would love for apple to say this somewhere even if it's buried in a tech note or something
John:
to let us know, hey, if you're sick of getting these little scorch marks, maybe you should get a new... Hey, will Apple sell more of its expensive accessories?
John:
Maybe you should get a new cable.
John:
Having said that, last show, like I said, I've had these scorch marks on cables for the entire time Lightning's existed.
John:
They've never actually caused a problem.
John:
The only problem they cause is mild anxiety and me worrying that they're going to cause a problem.
John:
But for me personally, they never have actually caused a problem.
John:
So maybe...
John:
Apple silence on this issue is that we have actually improved it, but it's not important enough for us to tell you about.
John:
So just, you know, just keep buying Apple stuff and eventually you won't have scorch marks.
Casey:
Hooray.
John:
And I'll make take another opportunity to pitch the thing that I discovered only a couple of years ago.
John:
The magic of electrical contact cleaner.
John:
I don't know what's in it, but it is a purpose-built product, and on my old phone that I had taken to the beach many, many times, the shutter button was getting a little bit wonky, and my speakers that I have connected to my PlayStation 5 and my old PlayStation 4 have a flaw in them where the...
John:
little potentiometers get wonky and they start you know making staticky noises when you turn them electrical contact cleaner it's probably some terrible toxic substance but it does what it says if you have something that makes electrical contact then you want to clean it put this stuff on it i will clean it right up i haven't actually tried on lightning cables because again i haven't actually had any problems with the scorch marks but i imagine it would work great
Casey:
Can you remind me the context of the MagSafe soap dish?
Casey:
I do not remember what we were talking about.
John:
This is Marco trying to get his phone aligned on his bedside and sometimes having a little bit of trouble with his little suction cup MagSafe thing because he's got a line in two circles.
John:
And I mentioned having a soap dish-like thing, and maybe there was third-party ones like that.
John:
And a listener named Lacey wrote in to say, here is a, I'm assuming it's like a 3D printer CAD model of a soap dish.
John:
Looks like it.
Yeah.
John:
He says, I wanted to make something like this for a while, but I never had a name for it.
John:
Can I call it Soap Dish and sell it on Etsy?
John:
Are you going to want royalties or what?
John:
No royalties.
John:
Feel free to make this and sell it on Etsy.
John:
I think it might be a tough sell because it looks kind of nerdy.
Marco:
And a lot of people actually wrote in when I was talking about that issue with aligning my phone and the MagSafe thing.
Marco:
Because as John mentioned, my MagSafe is adhered to my nightstand with that micro suction tape.
Marco:
So it's great in the sense that it doesn't move, so you can pick the phone up with one hand, which is why I did that, because I really wanted that.
Marco:
But a lot of people wrote in to say that if you just leave the MagSafe puck floating loose, just resting on the stand and don't adhere it to the stand so that it can move...
Marco:
You can just kind of wave your phone over it by, you know, an inch or a half inch or whatever.
Marco:
And the MagSafe puck will lift itself up off the table with magnetic force and perfectly aligned to the back of the phone.
Marco:
So that's another option.
Marco:
Make tiny scratches in the back of your caseless phone too.
Casey:
This is why you're not getting my play date.
Casey:
This is why.
Casey:
This moment right here.
Casey:
This is why.
John:
This is a thing.
John:
Even if you have a case, you'll see the little circle from people who use MagSafe all the time.
John:
I'm looking now.
John:
Hold on.
Marco:
I'm looking.
Marco:
I don't see any.
John:
Glass is probably more resistant than cases, but in both cases, just like dirt can build.
Marco:
Yeah, I was going to say, I do see a couple of minor scratches on my back glass, but none of them are in the MagSafe area.
Marco:
They're all around the edges and stuff.
Marco:
There's nothing in the MagSafe area.
Marco:
That's the magic of glass.
Marco:
It's much more scratch resistant than aluminum.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then finally, from a couple episodes ago, this has been floating around in follow up.
Casey:
We were talking about I think Marco had said you wanted to potentially try to do like an elective AppleCare Plus repair.
Casey:
And then people had said, no, you can't do that.
Casey:
Well, a self-professed genius wrote in to tell me scratches were added as a part of our troubleshooting classification.
Casey:
Yes, scratches are part of our updated VMI.
Casey:
I don't know what that means.
Casey:
It wasn't advertised to us that it was a new option.
Casey:
So if you go to a store and they say no, just ask them to type in scratches and it'll pop up.
Casey:
This genius says, I only discovered it by chance a few months ago.
Casey:
It really was a quiet update.
Casey:
We used to have a lot of upset customers that wanted to get stuff fixed for cosmetic damage and would call AppleCare once we denied a repair.
Casey:
AppleCare would turn around and give them a customer satisfaction code, a CS code, and get the repair done for free for their quote-unquote bad store experience.
Casey:
I'm sure Apple got tired of that.
Marco:
So in other words, mom says no, go ask dad.
Casey:
Yeah, basically.
Casey:
Yeah, actually, that's pretty true.
John:
I'm sure you'll sound great talking to the person the applesauro and saying, just type scratches.
John:
They'll hate you so much.
Casey:
They will.
Casey:
They absolutely will.
John:
Yeah.
John:
People love when you tell them how to do their job.
John:
Right.
John:
Type this into your computer, especially because you'll hear this on a podcast and then do this in real life for years from now when everything has changed.
John:
Yeah, that's true.
Casey:
That's very true.
John:
You can ask nicely and say, you can say, I heard on Accidental Tech Podcast, a great show that everyone should listen to and you should preload on all your iPhones, that there's a possibility that you might be able to get scratches repaired.
John:
If you say it in a nice way, maybe it'll work.
John:
And also if you include an ad for the show, that might also work.
Casey:
Yeah, something like that.
Casey:
And then I have a request for solution, please.
Casey:
So we're going to talk in just a moment about me and iCloud Photos.
Casey:
But simultaneously with me switching to iCloud Photos, guess whose Google storage is exploding at the seams?
Casey:
This guy.
Casey:
So I thought to myself, well, screw it.
Casey:
I'll just... Wait, why is your Google storage exploding?
Casey:
Because I only have a terabyte and I'm using it all in Google Photos.
John:
Wait, Google?
John:
But that's not related.
John:
That's not related to your iCloud photo stuff, right?
Casey:
Well, no.
Casey:
So, all right, let me back up and try this again.
Marco:
I missed something.
Marco:
How did Google get involved in your iCloud storage library?
Marco:
Okay.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
So I have moved all of my stuff to iCloud Photos.
Casey:
Thus, Google Photos is redundant.
Casey:
And it's not, I know, John, it's not literally redundant, but I would prefer to only pay for one of these things.
Casey:
And since I'm not uploading most of my photos to Google anymore because their desktop uploader just has absolutely stank since like three years ago, it seemed as good a time as any to get rid of Google Photos, right?
Casey:
Are we with me so far?
John:
All right.
John:
Sure.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So simultaneously with this, there's an urgency behind it because I have a terabyte of storage with Google Drive or what have you.
Casey:
I don't even know the vernacular.
Casey:
And I am basically out of storage, which is fine in and of itself, except that also affects my email, which is on a legacy Google Apps for Your Domain thing.
Casey:
So because I don't have any storage, I am probably days away from never receiving email, which is probably – So you would have been days away from never receiving email even if you didn't do the iCloud photo storage.
John:
You were just getting close to the edge of Google and it just happened to be simultaneous with you.
Casey:
Correct, correct.
Casey:
So my request for solution, my RFS, which is something that does not exist, but I'm trying to make a thing.
Casey:
By the way, it's super fetch.
Casey:
So my request for solution is how in the name of Zeus's hindquarters do I clear out my Google storage?
Casey:
Because I have literally gone into Google Apps, like the admin interface, and I have told it nobody on my domain can use Google Photos because I'm the only person on my domain.
Casey:
So I turn that off.
Casey:
And then all this stuff seems to be still lingering in Google Drive.
Casey:
And I've deleted everything from Google Drive.
Casey:
And even a couple of days later, it appears that it is all still lingering, still taking up all of my space.
Casey:
And I don't know how to get rid of it.
Casey:
And it is so inscrutable to me what I'm supposed to do.
Casey:
I don't know what I'm supposed to do.
Casey:
So please help me.
John:
Do you still see it in your Google Drive?
John:
I did.
Casey:
Not anymore.
John:
So when I did this, I think I talked about it on the show.
John:
When I did this, I had to delete a bunch of stuff because I was messing with my Google Storage.
John:
Like, this was back in a time, and I'm not sure if this is still true, when, like, I was using the terrible Google backup thing.
John:
And it would put things into basically a folder in Google Drive.
John:
And it was a huge folder that had all the photos in it.
John:
And I, like, deleted that folder in Google Drive.
John:
But then it went to the Google Drive trash, essentially.
John:
Yeah.
John:
i've tried emptying the trash right and then it and do you remember but i just you probably don't you never remember these shows but anyway it was a long time ago remember i couldn't remember i couldn't empty the trash right like i had thousands and thousands of photos in the trash and i would try to empty trash and it would just give an error and so i if i selected if i selected like a hundred photos from the trash and i hit empty those hundred it would delete permanently delete those hundred but there was thousands of photos so i was faced with like do i sit here and select in batches of 50 or 100 and delete
John:
And I contacted Google about it, and they said, oh, yeah, sometimes when you've got a lot of stuff in the trash, it takes a long time for them to get cleared out.
John:
But don't worry about the error you're getting.
John:
Because when I hit the, like, just empty everything from the trash button, it says, don't worry, even though it gives you an error, we will eventually delete all this stuff from the trash.
John:
And sure enough, it was like a week later, and eventually it disappeared from the trash, and I got my space back.
John:
That said, I know Google has changed how they deal with photos and storage recently, so all this could be completely outdated information.
John:
But I would actually suggest trying to contact, like, Google support.
John:
And tell them your situation.
John:
And you may get a crappy answer like I did, which is like, oh, yeah, that's a bummer.
John:
But maybe it will eventually work.
John:
Check back in a week.
John:
But at least that's better than, you know, not having any option.
John:
Or at least you get some kind of explanation.
John:
And the other caveat, as you well know, Casey, is that what I heard from everybody who pays for the Google My Domain, whatever the hell it is, is that it's worse than the free stuff.
John:
like we're supported as more bugs yes oh see mine's still free oh you're using the free well but it's still no no i'm sorry no no i'm sorry i'm paying for extra google drive storage on top of a free google apps from my domain that was you know grandfathered from 84 years ago well i didn't know they were still free but anyway i still hear that the google for my domain is much worse than the you know if you're just a the plain old public version just because that's the one that gets all the bug fixes and everything and you people get nothing you people that's right
Casey:
Alright, so yeah, please tweet me if you have to.
Casey:
Write an email and explain to me what to do because I can't figure it out.
John:
Or just someone who works for Google just go in and empty Casey's trash right now.
Casey:
Yes, that would be acceptable too.
Marco:
I mean, an alternative solution, well, there are some aspects on this one, but you could just post three videos to YouTube with copyrighted music in them.
John:
That's true.
John:
I don't think he wants to destroy his Google.
John:
Speaking of the Google backup thing, by the way, I realized I hadn't
John:
I don't know how long ago I did this, probably months, but I realized I had disabled the Google photo uploader because it just kept grinding and grinding and never actually making any progress.
John:
And I didn't notice, remember that I disabled it.
John:
I said, huh, the updater is not running.
John:
I should launch it.
John:
Then I launched it and watched it grind the computer for like 17 hours without doing anything.
John:
And I said, oh, this is why I disabled it.
John:
So I'm kind of stuck with Google photos uploading in that I don't think I can.
John:
upload my photos to google anymore because the software that they give me to do that never like gets to the point where it updates anything because it just says oh you want me to upload your photo library well i'm gonna look through it yep i've got this file yep i've got this one and like it never actually gets to the point where it decides to upload new stuff and at this point it's months behind and i let it run for like a week straight and all it did was cause the fans on my computer to or on my wife's computer which is even worse to run constantly and
John:
and just thousands of python processes to be running and it never actually got to the point where it was doing useful work so i'm not sure what i'm going to do there i may be in the same situation as you soon case if i decide well if you can't upload anymore maybe i should delete what i have or knowing me i'll probably just leave the you know whatever half a terabyte that i have there and just say well at least this is a you know septuple backup of my library as of six months ago
Casey:
Yep, I hear you.
Casey:
And all things being equal, I would have just left it.
Casey:
But because I'm now exploding through storage, and I'd like to just get rid of that monthly fee because I don't have that much email, I don't think.
Casey:
So I'd rather not pay for extra storage.
Casey:
And that means I need to get rid of all this, but I just can't figure out how.
Casey:
So if you have an answer or if you work at Google, please feel free.
Casey:
Just clear that out for me.
Casey:
And actually, speaking of that, a quick, very, very brief topic that we don't have in the show notes, which is John's favorite moment in the show.
Casey:
I have been playing with Apple Music recently because I think I had mentioned on the show last week or two that I'm now a paying Apple One customer.
Casey:
And so I've been trying out all these services that I hadn't tried before, including Apple Arcade.
Casey:
And I'd been using Fitness Plus.
Casey:
And now I've been trying to use Apple Music for the first time since it debuted, you know, two years ago, whatever it was.
Casey:
It kind of sucks.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Like, I really, really don't want to... This is what cued me off on this topic.
Casey:
I don't want to continue to pay for Spotify since I'm going to be de facto paying for Apple Music.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
It, like, sucks.
Marco:
Well, we're going to listen to your podcasts.
Casey:
Well, I'm going to have to listen to Overcast.
Casey:
I mean, I have no choice.
Casey:
But, no, yeah, I would never listen to Spotify.
Casey:
I mean, come on.
Casey:
But here's the thing.
Casey:
I go to play a song on Apple Music, and, like, one time out of three, I get some message about how I don't have rights to it.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
Like this is Apple music.
Casey:
I pay for it.
Casey:
I have an account.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
Uh, two times out of three, it takes like an obscenely long time for playback to start, like stunningly long with Spotify.
Casey:
It's almost instant.
Casey:
And with Apple music, it's like one to two seconds.
Casey:
I'm not playing over airplay or anything like that.
Casey:
Like just on my phone to play a song.
Casey:
It takes, there's a noticeable latency.
Casey:
Like it's Spotify.
Casey:
It's fricking instant.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
I mean, the thing I was expecting to hate about Apple Music is not having my Discover Weekly.
Casey:
Well, actually, Discover Weekly, that playlist has been utterly ruined because it's nothing but like kids' music now.
Casey:
But in the before times, both in a figurative and literal sense, before my kids started requesting Disney music all the time, that was a really good playlist that would just say, hey, based on what you've already listened to, here's other things you would like.
Casey:
And perhaps I'm wrong, and I would love to be wrong, but as far as I know, there's no direct equivalent to that in Apple Music or even that much of a spiritual equivalent.
Casey:
And then Release Radar, which thankfully has not yet been ruined by my children, that's new stuff that is based on the things you've already played.
Casey:
So the Discover Weekly could be older than Dirt, but Release Radar is all new things.
Casey:
And I don't think there's any equivalence to that in Apple Music.
Casey:
If there are, please send me a tweet, genuinely.
Casey:
I would love to see it.
Casey:
But I figured I would miss that from Spotify.
Casey:
But what I miss is an app that fricking works and is understandable.
Casey:
Like, I don't know.
Casey:
I guess it's just because I have so much momentum with Spotify, but I feel like the music app is okay.
Casey:
Like it's pretty, but functionally it's okay.
Casey:
Sometimes it's got like this full screen, like playback cue, which I almost never want to see.
Casey:
And it takes me a second to realize, oh, I got to swipe that down to go back to like the regular interface that I was expecting to look at.
Casey:
And the latency and, you know, you don't have rights thing is really driving me bananas.
Casey:
Like I don't,
Casey:
I don't dig it.
Casey:
And so here it is.
Casey:
We're talking about $10 a month for Spotify, which is in and of itself not that much money.
Casey:
But over time, it starts to add up, and I would like to get rid of it if I can, but golly, Apple Music is...
Casey:
The service may be okay, but the interface, man, the app is just not great.
Casey:
You guys don't really use Apple Music, do you?
Casey:
Well, I do.
Casey:
Okay, so tell me I'm wrong.
Marco:
So the way I use it, though, is like an old man.
Casey:
That's what I thought I was doing, though.
Marco:
So for some context here, while I have Spotify, I hardly ever use it.
Marco:
I have it basically for research purposes, and occasionally I'll be referring to a song maybe on top four or something, and I want to get Spotify links, so I'll open it up there and copy the link and make a playlist or whatever.
Marco:
So I use Spotify, but only rarely.
Marco:
It's not my regular listening.
Marco:
Apple Music, first of all, some of the problems that you're seeing with just weird load times and stuff, I see those not all the time, but regularly.
Marco:
And it seems like... It almost feels like Apple Music is hosted by Siri.
Marco:
Like, whatever is hosting Siri...
Marco:
I think it's also listening to Apple Music.
Casey:
It's so true.
Marco:
In the sense that when people will hear this, you're going to hear two completely different sets of responses.
Marco:
You're going to hear a lot of people saying, what are you talking about?
Marco:
It's fast and works every time for me.
Marco:
And you're also going to hear a lot of people who say the same thing that I'm saying, which is like, yeah, it breaks for me in all those same ways all the time too.
Marco:
It seems like there might be regional differences, maybe based on certain CDN nodes or like different data centers that you're hitting or just different internet weather affecting different people at different times.
Marco:
But the same inconsistent performance problems that I see with Siri, I also see with Apple Music and with Apple TV hosted stuff.
Marco:
So it does seem like there's some kind of, and this is not recent.
Marco:
This has been for years.
Marco:
This is like for the last decade and in two different houses on two different internet connections.
Marco:
So I know that it's not like my router or something.
Marco:
Like it's not something weird like that.
Marco:
It's whatever infrastructure is running a lot of these services has some consistency problems just in certain areas or at certain times.
Marco:
And it just doesn't work the same way for everybody.
Marco:
And so maybe the people at Apple actually think like maybe it works great at ADQ's house.
Marco:
right like maybe maybe they don't see these problems but but certainly many of us do so that's part of it that you just you you just have bad luck with whatever servers are serving this to you whatever infrastructure and that's just and you're just out of luck on that and that sucks well yeah and i'm on a symmetric gigabit connection as are you i thought or certainly fast enough so i mean if anyone is supposed to be having these problems theoretically it's not the two of us right because we have super fast connections to the internet
Marco:
yeah that's why it doesn't feel like our local setup it feels like a like a regional cdn node or something like that being wonky here and there now as for the actual apps spotify feels confusing and weird to me because i'm not i'm not accustomed to it because i hardly ever use it but that being said when i use it there's a lot of stuff about that i notice instantly number one i notice how incredibly fast everything loads
Marco:
exactly it's like instant like it still feels like a garbage web app and and so does you know okay apple's music app is also a garbage web app it's just it's just you know differently built but it's still a garbage web app um but you know in typical apple web services uh style um
Marco:
The Apple version of the Garbage Web app is really inconsistent and relatively slow, whereas the Spotify Garbage Web app is fast and relatively consistent.
Marco:
So I do find it is refreshing whenever I use Spotify's app that I just see how fast it is to just navigate around, to search for stuff, to find stuff.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It is full of garbage as well.
Marco:
I mean, they have their own problems, but the speed and the responsiveness of everything is just so much better.
Marco:
Night and day difference.
Marco:
See, also, I mean, look, this is exactly the same difference between Siri and Alexa for me.
Marco:
It's exactly the same thing.
Marco:
As much as I don't like the Alexa ecosystem, and I'm almost totally out of it now,
Marco:
when i do occasionally use it it's just remarkable how fast it is i just wish i could get that kind of speed from siri and i just never do but my my main complaint here with these services is that music listening used to be a much more diverse ecosystem it used to be first first it was like a hardware and physical media based ecosystem where the
Marco:
Everybody had different record players and tape players and CD players.
Marco:
And there were all sorts of ways to do that.
Marco:
So then in the computer age, you could rip everything to MP3s or you could buy MP3s legally or get them off of Napster or whatever.
Marco:
So everyone had these common files, most of which were DRM-free.
Marco:
And so you could open them up in whatever music app you wanted and play them however you wanted, whatever interface you wanted.
Marco:
And there was this wonderful dynamic ecosystem of everything.
Marco:
Now in the era of streaming,
Marco:
You have this very small number, basically two services that have enough scale to matter and to last.
Marco:
And so everything is being defined by the really crappy apps from these two services and the way everyone experiences music.
Marco:
or practically everyone, experiences music these days, is through one of two crappy sets of apps.
Marco:
And that, to me, is kind of a weird and sad and dangerous place to be.
Marco:
I wish there was more diversity in these client apps.
Marco:
Now, that being said, both of these services offer APIs to various degrees.
Marco:
I could write an app for iOS that plays from Apple Music.
Marco:
And there are people who do that.
Marco:
There are lots of apps out there.
Marco:
I've never found anything particularly compelling, but they're out there.
Marco:
So maybe that's an area where this can be improved over time, but I don't know.
Marco:
It doesn't seem like there's much of a market for it.
Marco:
It seems like most of the market just tolerates either Apple Music or Spotify or occasionally both, which I'll get to in a moment.
Marco:
The result is that...
Marco:
the apps we use to listen to music have gone from all the different hardware in the world down to all the different software in the world, now down to two crappy apps.
Marco:
And I don't like where that has left us, and I hope that doesn't have horrible effects over time.
Marco:
So going back to your services question, do you keep subscribing to both?
Marco:
Yes, in the grand scheme of things, we're very fortunate.
Marco:
You can lose $10 a month and it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
Marco:
But I do get how, on principle, you don't want to be having redundant services that seem wasteful.
Marco:
The way I look at this, first of all, you're not paying for Apple Music.
Marco:
You're paying for Apple One for other reasons.
Marco:
So Apple Music is something that you're getting, quote, for free or at least for no additional charge.
Marco:
It's already part of something you're paying for.
Marco:
That doesn't mean that you now have no reason to ever have another music service.
Marco:
I pay for Amazon Prime because of the shipping.
Marco:
I also pay for Netflix because I don't care about Prime Video very much.
Marco:
There's much more stuff I want to watch on other services.
Marco:
And I know it's not a perfect analogy because there's catalog differences there, whereas between the streaming services, there really aren't meaningful catalog differences.
Marco:
So you could say Spotify is giving you, quote, the same thing as Apple Music and be largely correct.
John:
Although for Prime Video, I just noticed this last night, there are sometimes pricing differences, surprising prices.
John:
We wanted to watch a movie.
John:
I went to Just Watch to find out where it is.
John:
I subscribed to all the services, and it was available for rent and purchase in many, many different places.
John:
And the rental price for Apple was $3.99 for the movie.
John:
the purchase price on amazon was 450 oh apple's purchase price was 14 so you know it's i don't think this applies to casey but if you pay for a service in the case of apple music but if you pay for a service and you have it and you never use it fine you don't need like i agree with marco like use the one that you like and pay for the one that you like and don't worry about the one but just knowing that you have it is occasionally handy because i would never choose to watch a movie on uh
John:
amazon but when i'm in that situation where it's like oh we want to watch a movie tonight but it's probably not a movie we actually want to own should i just rent it should i buy it at 450 versus four dollars for renting yeah i'll buy it so we did so yeah don't don't forget that you actually do quote unquote pay for album music because like say you're looking for a song like marco was saying with catalog difference say you're looking for a song and you don't find that on spotify remember that you have album music and say hey maybe it's there and and check it out
Marco:
yeah so I think psychologically you can think of it as like you know you're paying for you know one service by itself with that Spotify Apple Music you're kind of paying for it but you know very indirectly and kind of not really and so it's not super redundant but you could also say you know what
Marco:
You're paying for Spotify because that's what you like.
Marco:
You bought Apple One for other reasons.
Marco:
So you don't even have to make this decision.
Marco:
Like, Apple One is worth it to you even without Apple Music.
Marco:
So you don't have to rationalize it this way.
Marco:
Now, I also consider the purchase of Apple Music through whatever means, whether it's through Apple One or by itself, I consider it kind of, I know this is going to sound bad.
Marco:
I don't mean it quite this bad, although it's not that far off.
Marco:
It's kind of like paying the mob to stop harassing you.
Ha ha ha!
Casey:
Wait, no, that's why I got on iCloud Photo Library, so you jackasses would leave me alone.
Marco:
Apple, with their glorious push towards ever-increasing services revenue, they are continually further and further degrading the user experience for people who don't buy all their services.
Marco:
For people who don't use Apple Music...
Marco:
using apple's devices is increasingly sucking and that's only going to keep being the case apple's only going to keep tightening those screws to further and further drive services revenue they will happily throw every bit of integrity of the user experience out the window to increase services revenue they already are doing that and they will continue to do that to an ever-increasing degree over time so
Marco:
It's becoming kind of hard and annoying to use Apple's built-in music app especially without being an Apple Music subscriber.
Marco:
They're going to keep harassing you.
Marco:
They're going to keep putting up full-screen interstitial ads.
Marco:
They're going to just keep being jerks about it.
Marco:
And as much as it sucks to just pay them off and to have that be the solution –
Marco:
That is a solution.
Marco:
So you can largely look at, like, Apple Music membership is something that, as a user of Apple devices, who, if you want to use their music app at all for anything, or use Siri to play music or anything, your life is going to be made easier if you're an Apple Music subscriber.
Marco:
this is not a good reason why you should be an Apple Music subscriber, but it is a reason and it is a real effect that you can consider like, okay, I'm going to pay their extortion money so they stop bothering me so much.
Marco:
Again, I don't love how this makes me feel to say this, but that is a value that they're giving you.
Marco:
So you can justify having Apple Music even if you're not actually using it to listen to music most of the time.
Marco:
There is still a value it is providing to you in that terrible way, but that is legitimately a way.
Casey:
Yeah, I think you're right.
Casey:
And what I plan to do is continue to mess with it and try it because it may be that it's as simple as me having, you know, gosh, it must be like 10 years of momentum with Spotify.
Casey:
And basically, once I really embraced Spotify, which was very early on when it was available here in the States, which was several years after it was available elsewhere.
Casey:
Once I really embraced Spotify, I rarely used, at the time, iTunes and then eventually Apple Music anywhere.
Casey:
I was all Spotify all the time.
Casey:
Occasionally, I would bust out Apple Music or iTunes at the time if I wanted to listen to some Dave Matthews recording I had or some other esoteric recording I had that wasn't on any of these services.
Casey:
I've basically been all in on Spotify for easily a decade plus, I would imagine at this point.
Casey:
And so I do have a lot of momentum and maybe maybe I just need to give it more time to sink in.
Casey:
But I don't think that any amount of time of me using it is going to change the fact that I find it slow.
Casey:
It's not going to change the fact that search kind of sucks.
Casey:
There's, you know.
Casey:
Who's surprised that an Apple's product doesn't have great search?
Casey:
No way.
Casey:
And we're going to talk about that more in just a minute with Apple Photos.
Casey:
But search sucks.
Casey:
Apparently, there may be some sort of automated playlist.
Casey:
I'm getting tips from the chat from Eric WVGG has pointed out that there's a playlist.
Casey:
It already flew off the screen, but there's some sort of playlist that a new music mix.
Casey:
There we go.
Casey:
That seems like it might be similar to one of my
Casey:
Spotify playlists.
Casey:
Although that being said, I have hand curated a handful of Spotify playlists and I'm sure that they're like third party services that will let me integrate those into Apple music.
Casey:
And if there's a good one, please let me know on Twitter.
Casey:
But why doesn't Apple music do that?
Casey:
Like, let me give Apple my Spotify credentials, which is the sort of thing I would never normally do for any service ever, but I trust Apple in this regard.
Casey:
Give, let me give them my Spotify credentials and let them just suck in all my playlists.
Casey:
Like, why is that not a thing?
Casey:
Um, so I don't know.
Casey:
Apple music so far, eh, I might end up just sticking with Spotify and double dipping, so to speak, in terms of payment.
Casey:
You know, I might pay Spotify and, and implicitly pay for Apple music, but I think you're right that I should probably, you know, give it a fair shake.
Casey:
And then if just stick with what I like more.
Marco:
No, I'm even saying don't even give it a fair shake.
Marco:
Just stick with what you like and don't worry about it.
Marco:
Because honestly, I consider Spotify – when I look at alternatives, I'm pretty heavily in most parts of the Apple ecosystem.
Marco:
And Spotify is one of the only areas where I kind of feel like maybe I made the wrong choice.
Marco:
Unfortunately, because of various details of my music listening and equipment setup and everything, I'm pretty much bound to Apple Music.
Marco:
Our smart speakers around the house are all HomePods now except for one.
Marco:
And so –
Marco:
Again, this is all very Apple anti-competitive stuff, but Spotify still sucks trying to use it from a HomePod.
Marco:
So we're going to use Apple Music for that.
Marco:
Also, just in a legitimate feature difference that is not based on antitrust stuff or Apple's bad things, it's actually a very good thing.
Marco:
As I mentioned before, Apple treats my own files that I upload and manage properly.
Marco:
way better than anybody else does.
Marco:
I know Spotify has a feature where you can do that, but from all accounts, it sucks.
Marco:
I tried it a while ago.
Marco:
It sucked then.
Marco:
Having my own files, like the aforementioned 41 Phish concerts per year, that's a huge part of what I listen to, and that stuff is not available in streaming catalogs.
Marco:
At least most of it isn't.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I need a way to listen to that for my preferences, and there's just not a good way to do that with anything but Apple Music.
Marco:
By using iTunes Match with Apple Music, I have that available on all my devices.
Marco:
Like last night's Fish show, I imported it this morning onto my computer, and it's already on my phone.
Marco:
I haven't checked yet, but I know it's there.
Marco:
As I'm out walking the dog, I know I can play that show.
Marco:
It's going to be right there in my recently added list in Apple Music because it'll sync over.
Marco:
I bought these files on my own, downloaded them, imported them into what used to be called iTunes, and it just worked.
Marco:
That's great, and that's not an experience that anybody else offers, at least not in a good way or even a remotely usable way.
Marco:
I'm kind of stuck in Apple's ecosystem, but...
Marco:
But I kind of am jealous of Spotify people.
Marco:
Most alternatives... I use Windows here and there for gaming stuff.
Marco:
I'm not tempted at all by Windows.
Marco:
I really never use Android, and I'm not tempted at all by that.
Marco:
Most alternatives to Apple stuff, I'm not tempted at all by.
Marco:
I'm not jealous at all of, and I couldn't be less interested in.
Marco:
Spotify is one exception where I am envious of...
Marco:
how much people love Spotify, how good it is at certain things, and how it's not part of my life, and I don't know anything about it, and I'm not used to it, and I'm not built into it and everything.
Marco:
But for me to get into Spotify would require not only for me to just not listen to all of my Phish shows there, so I'd have to maintain still two different apps and everything, but also I'd have to figure out the smart speaker situation in my house, and also I would have to get used to their app on the desktop, because I do a lot of my music listening on the desktop,
Marco:
And I think their Mac app is just utter garbage.
Marco:
Better than Apple Music in the streaming part, but in just the library playback part, I think it's pretty garbagey.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Casey:
Yeah, see, that's the thing.
Casey:
I can't speak for library playback.
Casey:
And I was going to say, before you get, well, actually, last I looked, I haven't looked in a while, you can, at least on the desktop, you can have the Spotify client suck in all of your local media stuff.
Casey:
I think you are correct either if there is an option to do it such that you could listen on your phone as well to like your Phish concerts, for example.
Casey:
I don't expect it would work very well at all.
Casey:
I've not tried it, but I would expect it would be garbage.
Casey:
But, you know, their desktop app, it's like Slack, which is not a compliment.
Casey:
Like, it does work.
Casey:
It works.
Casey:
It's fine.
Casey:
I wouldn't say it's good.
Casey:
I personally wouldn't say it's straight garbage.
Casey:
It's fine.
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:
Anyway, we should move along.
Casey:
Let's talk about iCloud Photos.
Casey:
So if you recall, I think last we left Art Hero, I was still uploading everything on my iMac.
Casey:
And that took, I don't remember how long, but I want to say it was about a week to upload about a terabyte worth of stuff.
Casey:
And there was a nice little progress bar right on the bottom that showed me approximately where it was and how it was going, which was great.
Casey:
On my laptop, it just said, updating.
Casey:
That's all I get.
Casey:
Do you want a progress bar?
Casey:
Too bad.
Casey:
Want to know if it's actually working or not?
Casey:
Tough noogies.
Casey:
Just updating.
Marco:
Just come back.
Marco:
I mean, that is more than you usually get from Apple sync services.
Marco:
That is true.
Casey:
That is true.
Casey:
Now, in the defense of Apple, I did have my laptop with me at the beach and the connection there was not stupendous.
Casey:
And that was only part of the time that the laptop was updating.
Casey:
But certainly some portion, last like two or three days, I think,
Casey:
that it was downloading or doing whatever magic it was doing in the background that was part of that time while I was at the beach.
Casey:
But nevertheless, any sort of indication that it was going to take more than a day would have been nice.
Casey:
As a nerd, I can expect that, oh yeah, it's got a terabyte of data to churn through or download or God knows what.
Casey:
Of course, it's going to take a while.
Casey:
But I honestly expected it would be a day or two, particularly when I'm at home on this symmetric gigabit connection.
Casey:
And in fact, I had left the laptop wired via Ethernet for a lot of that time just to try to speed things up.
Casey:
But I had no indication whatsoever.
Casey:
And it didn't say, should this take a week, a month, a year?
Casey:
It just said, updating.
Casey:
That's super annoying.
Casey:
Super, super crummy first-run experience.
Casey:
Yes, I understand that most of you came to this with like four photos and then built them up over time, but...
Casey:
Some of us come with 70,000 photos, okay?
Casey:
And I don't think that's that out of the ordinary.
Casey:
So I really think that Apple should look at their user experience and provide some sort of idea as to whether or not this is working.
Casey:
Thank God for iStat Benus, right, Marco?
Casey:
So I could see what kind of bandwidth is being used by Photoshop, just saying.
Casey:
Moving right along, uh, having your photos everywhere and basically available instantly.
Casey:
I mean, maybe not instantly, but pretty quick, you know, in the same way that I was lamenting that Apple music is very, very slow.
Casey:
I haven't for the most part had that experience with iCloud photos and having your photos basically everywhere, basically instantly.
Casey:
Hey, turns out that's pretty cool.
Yeah.
Casey:
Who knew?
Casey:
That's actually real nice.
Casey:
I'm glad you're enjoying it.
Casey:
So in that sense, that's really good.
Casey:
It isn't always as reliable is too strong a word, not the word I'm looking for.
Casey:
There are times that I'll take a picture on my phone and then immediately look over at my iPad and it's not there yet, which is a little bit frustrating.
Casey:
But I think that part of that is me having unfair expectations.
Casey:
And if I wait like a minute or two, typically it does show up.
Casey:
But still, even that said, as I'm doing all of these things, including in a couple of cases where I would shrink down a video and cut off the beginning or the end or what have you, having all of that available, including your edits, pretty much everywhere...
Casey:
Turns out it's pretty nice.
Casey:
So I wish you guys had said something.
Casey:
I really would have jumped on this.
Marco:
Welcome to nine years ago.
Casey:
I've had, I mean, I've used photo stream, you know, the thing where the most recent thousand pictures or whatever is duplicated across all your devices, but I hadn't been using, you know, a proper, you know, iCloud photo library.
Casey:
All right, so here's the thing.
Casey:
Here's where everything takes a turn, and it's actually a turn for the better, which I did not expect to say.
Casey:
I started glancing at their different, I don't know what the term is for them, but they're, you know, like auto-generated albums, right?
Casey:
So, you know, here's Day at the Beach or what have you, things like that, right?
Casey:
And one of the first ones I noticed was Mom's 62nd Birthday, right?
Casey:
I thought, wow, that's really cool.
Casey:
Because sure enough, we had seen my mom on what I believe was the day of her 62nd birthday.
Casey:
And, you know, there's pictures of my mom, which I think I had identified as, you know, my mom's name.
Casey:
And so, and I think in my contact card for my mom, it says, you know, this is my mother, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
So, like, I can understand how this happened.
Marco:
I was going to say, this could be a real creepy episode.
Marco:
Otherwise, it's like, wait a minute.
Casey:
Well, but hold on.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
We're getting there.
Casey:
So it's in my contact card because I'm me.
Casey:
I have my mom's exact birth date.
Casey:
They could cross-reference the day these photos were taken with the date and look at the contact card because it's my mom.
Casey:
And I could see how they could put together, well, this is indeed her 62nd birthday.
Casey:
Very cool stuff.
Casey:
I'm not trying to say that this is not extremely cool and very well executed.
Casey:
But I can trace, as someone who kind of wonders if he's an idiot developer, I can trace how you could make this happen, right?
Casey:
So far, so good.
Casey:
A couple of days later, go team, University of Virginia.
Casey:
Whoa.
Casey:
This was an automated album of us at a University of Virginia football game.
Casey:
Now, the only way I can imagine they were able to put this together was by like OCRing some of the text, like recognizing we were in a football stadium and OCRing some of the text in that stadium and somehow or another being able to decide with reasonable confidence that we were at a UVA game.
John:
It had the geotag, the geotags, right?
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh, no, you're right.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
I did not consider that.
Casey:
You're right.
Casey:
This is why you geotag things, John.
Casey:
You're exactly right.
Casey:
The geotag was in there.
Casey:
But still, this is slightly less impressive now that I thought about that.
Casey:
But I still think it's cool.
Casey:
I still think it's cool that it put together.
Casey:
This is a football game.
Casey:
We're at a football stadium, et cetera.
Casey:
The two that really, really blew my mind, and I don't think this is geotags, but maybe it is, or maybe I'm not thinking outside the box enough.
Casey:
there was one i should have shared this with you marco dave matthews band 15 december 2018 how how do they know that like yes it's geotagged i think that was the john paul jones arena at uva it was geotagged but how did they know maybe i don't i didn't look close enough so maybe there's a video that had a little bit of audio that maybe they ran through shazam that would be something
Casey:
But not only that, not only that, the backing music was not one of my favorite, but a Dave Matthews song.
Casey:
It was the space between.
Casey:
Now, granted, if you've ascertained that it's a Dave Matthews concert, like, yeah, of course they would go to Apple Music and put in a Dave Matthews song.
Casey:
But like that kind of integration is super cool.
Casey:
I still, for the life of me, don't know how they concluded that it was a Dave Matthews concert.
Casey:
Maybe there's something obvious that I'm not realizing, like Geotags, for example.
Casey:
But for the life of me, I don't know how they pick that out.
Casey:
And I think that is crazy, super cool.
Marco:
So then it gets even better.
Marco:
There's so many jokes to make here.
Casey:
So then it gets even better.
Casey:
There was a different concert.
Casey:
I went to what was up until they broke up, my favorite band, Mute Math.
Casey:
There was a concert we went to wherein we had like paid for early access and we got to watch like the sound check and so on and so forth.
Casey:
I don't have any idea how they figured out that it was a mute math concert.
Casey:
Like none, zero zilch.
Casey:
How, how the is that possible?
Casey:
How is that possible?
Casey:
Like this blows my mind.
Casey:
I want someone to explain to me how this works.
Casey:
And the nice thing about it being Apple is that I with, it has never occurred to me that they've done something nefarious with my data or anything like that.
Casey:
there's no doubt in my mind that they are somehow some way deducing via what they're seeing in these photos and geotags and metadata and so and so on figuring out what these what these concerts are the best answer i can come up with and again maybe this is the case i didn't look to see if there were videos there maybe they record i recorded a song which at a concert if anyone has been to a concert recently uh you know when you record even with an iphone even with a brand new iphone
Casey:
The audio fidelity is straight garbage.
Casey:
It's terrible.
Casey:
So to be able to take a live performance of a song and run it through Shazam, which is usually not good at altered versions of songs it does know, maybe that's how they did it.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
But this is blowing my mind, and I find this extremely freaking cool.
John:
I was just looking through the memories.
John:
I usually don't look too much into them, but every once in a while I'll see them in a widget or something.
John:
I just put in our Slack one of the ones that often comes up for me, or variations on this.
John:
Because if you have Apple phones for a long time, you start to see themes or trends.
John:
Do you see it in the Slack channel?
John:
four-legged friends and it's pictures of my dog it's like yeah you're right apple i do take a lot of pictures of my dog so if you're gonna do that i mean it's it's mostly for one of the eight friend but this i get this stuff like this a lot too check out the next one i just put oh that's magnificent
Casey:
Okay, so let me paint a word picture for you.
Casey:
So this is memories, and there's a lovely rectangular photo of underscore David Smith.
Casey:
And then the text written on this memory, so the title of this memory is, in all caps, UNDERSCORE, subtitle, over the years.
John:
I guess it's because I have underscore written in his nickname and his contact card.
John:
And I do have pictures of him over the years, right?
John:
That's so good.
John:
And the thing is, I don't think I have more pictures of underscore than other people.
John:
Certainly, I don't have more pictures of him than people in my family.
John:
But this is what it chooses to make.
John:
We have to use the chapter art.
Casey:
Oh, it's so good.
Casey:
Feel free.
Casey:
You've got to.
Casey:
You've got to.
John:
a lot of people find those things impressive and it's nice when like just to see a little thing it's kind of like the photo widget like it's very similar to the photo widget the photo widget the reason a lot of people like the photo widget is it will pull photos out based on whatever you know sort of simple machine learning algorithm that says there's a bunch of people who you have lots of pictures of who are facing the camera and smiling right like you can do things like that it's like this looks like a good picture right as opposed to a blurry one or somewhere where you can't see any people or whatever and
John:
And it just it pulls them out of your giant library of pictures.
John:
You say, oh, I haven't seen that picture in years or I haven't thought about that thing in years.
John:
And it gives you a good feeling.
John:
And that's why people like the photo widget, because we have a lot of photos and most people don't do what I do and meticulously go through and arrange them.
John:
People don't have time for that or they're not interested in it.
John:
And so they can do that for you.
John:
And these, the memories are the same thing, but instead of just finding one picture and throwing it up there, it'll, you know, do like with Casey saying, they'll make a little slideshow.
John:
It'll come up with a fun name, four legged friends, you know, fluffy pets, or I was going through this bunch of ones, Disney world, obviously, you know, you don't, it doesn't take much to identify Disney world, like especially things where lots of people have been, or if there's a geotag and they know you're in Disney world or whatever, they can make albums and,
John:
In a way that is convenient.
John:
It's not the same as what a human would do because he would look through some of the pictures like, oh, I wouldn't have picked this one.
John:
And, you know, this is not the way I would have done it.
John:
But you're getting this essentially for free.
John:
And like Casey said, you have the confidence that it's like they're doing it on device and it's not like...
John:
They're not transmitting it back to Walt Disney Company or selling access to Walt Disney to let them know how many people have been in Walt Disney World.
John:
That's not Apple's business model, right?
John:
So you have some confidence that that's not happening, and you get to experience these fun little things.
John:
I don't spend too much time looking at them, but I do look at them just because it's fun to see what the computer came up with, you know?
John:
Fun to...
John:
to see and sometimes critique uh the selection of backing music and the pictures and the animations and sometimes it'll incorporate video into them or you know like in casey's case they figure out dave matthews band and what song do they expect to put behind it it's pretty neat and i can imagine this just getting better and better because i think it's it's not just a thing that we have technology for i think it's a thing that people respond to like that that they find appealing like
John:
I also think it's one of those features that you often see in a keynote, and it's hard to tell whether it's going to be like digital touch, where it's a feature that Apple is super excited about, but no one cares about.
John:
But they present these type of features the same way of like, oh, isn't this great?
John:
And sometimes it really is.
John:
Like I said, the photo widget, a rounded rectangle that shows you pictures selected by a computer from your collection does not sound like a killer feature, but people love it.
Marco:
yeah that i've never i would never have imagined how much i love the photo widget like that's the kind of feature that would be like installed by default and the first thing i would do when i updated that version of the os is just delete that like but for some reason i like didn't delete it i guess i was lazy that day and like it just starts picking this amazing stuff like oh okay well i'll delete that some other day and then you know days go by and it keeps picking amazing stuff like oh that's wow that's
Marco:
this is working pretty well i'll delete it next week and then eventually i'm just like no this is actually i'm going to admit to myself this is actually a really good feature and i'm not going to delete it i'm just i'm just going to have my photo widget on my screen and it's it's fantastic i put one more in the slack oh yeah fluffy friends i've seen the fluffy friends but i put more on this like obviously i have a pretty boring life so the the memories thing is really trying hard to come up with something
John:
uh based based on my location and things i take pictures of it came up with a memory called meals at home and it has a picture of my plate from thanksgiving 2020 you're right you're right apple i do often eat food in my house
John:
that's delightful meals at home that's that's almost like sad it's like lonely meals at home i mean i didn't eat that alone it was a family thing yeah and that's a and i have to say that's a good looking uh thanksgiving plate if i do say so myself that's exactly what i want on thanksgiving it's all featured on that plate
John:
It is pretty good.
Casey:
And I also am paging through now.
Casey:
I see one for Aaron and I's 10th anniversary, which sure enough was on our 10th anniversary.
Casey:
And that one, things like that, they're still impressive, but they're less impressive.
Casey:
Because knowing me, I probably have my anniversary and my contact card, even though I do remember it offhand.
Casey:
But it looks at the card.
Casey:
It looks at the date the picture was taken.
Casey:
It says, oh, okay, sure enough.
Casey:
That's the 10th anniversary.
Casey:
That one, I still think it's cool, but it doesn't blow my mind.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
freaking figuring out mute math and dave matthews band i don't understand how that happened and and i kind of wish i did uh the only thing that does kind of stink about this is i forget what it was i was trying to send but i think it put together like a montage a video montage from our beach trip i was trying to send it i think to aaron and it had some sort of completely arbitrary but you know reasonably catchy music associated with it and then i went to share it and it said something to the effect of well you can't share with that music picture pick different music
Marco:
Wait, was this before you were an Apple Music subscriber?
Casey:
No, this was literally earlier today.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Casey:
So I guess because it's baking the audio into the video, I guess they didn't have rights for that particular song.
Casey:
But if that's the case, then don't freaking use that song.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
So that was a little bit of a letdown.
Marco:
Well, but it makes sense if the most common case is that you simply enjoy this on your phone yourself.
Marco:
Sure.
Casey:
But no, all in all, I really shouldn't say this publicly because I'm ashamed by everyone, but I am glad that I listened to literally the entire Internet and have finally joined iCloud Photo Library.
Casey:
This so far has been going really well.
Casey:
The search is not nearly as good as Google Photos, which is a bummer.
Casey:
I forget exactly what I was looking for, but I think I was looking for...
Casey:
Oh, it was a picture of me, which you spoke about on the show many years ago, I think, a picture of me when I was a kid at that Lamborghini dealer.
Casey:
And I think I searched for like Lamborghini, it didn't work.
Casey:
I think I searched for like exotic cars, something like that.
Casey:
And I came up with, I shouldn't say it didn't work.
Casey:
I came up with Lamborghinis, if I remember correctly, I came up with exotic cars, but I didn't come up with the specific picture I wanted.
Casey:
And then I went into Google Photos, searched for Lamborghinis, and scrolled all the way back to, you know, the beginning of time.
Casey:
And sure enough, there was that photo immediately.
Casey:
So in that sense, it was a little bit of a bummer.
Casey:
Like, I wish their search was better.
Casey:
But I am still overall extremely pleased with this experience, you know, updating, notwithstanding.
Casey:
And now I'm, like, riveted by their, for you, you know, galleries or montages or whatever you call them.
Casey:
They're super cool.
John:
I had a search experience with photos just earlier today.
John:
We mentioned in one of the slacks that we're all in, what were we talking about?
John:
Oh, I mentioned a local celebrity sighting.
John:
I said my wife had a celebrity sighting a couple years ago, and she also got to sit next to Bill Murray on a plane flight.
John:
And I was like, oh, I have a picture of that too.
John:
I should go find that picture.
John:
And so I go to my photo library or my wife's photo library because she's, there's Apple misunderstand families.
John:
I'm like, where is that picture of my wife sitting on a plane next to Bill Murray?
John:
I can't search for my wife because there's a lot of pictures of her and that's not going to narrow it down.
John:
And so I go to the search and I'm like, all right, I guess like airplane, I guess.
John:
Like, is it just going to show me pictures of the outside of airplanes?
John:
I know Apple search does okay.
John:
It shows me lots of pictures of like,
John:
out the window of an airplane or interior space of airplanes but not the picture i want like is it a favorite let me search for favorites doesn't like you know i have a lot of favorites i scroll for a while and unlike casey i can't remember when the hell anything happened i can't even get the year
John:
Right because I'm old.
John:
I don't I don't know when this happened All right, and so I like maybe it's got to be an iPhone picture, right?
John:
Because no one's gonna it must have been it was just my wife and traveling by herself and so for business And so if probably she just gave someone her iPhone to take a picture of the two of them together, right?
John:
So it's got to be an iPhone picture So I search for I make a smart album for all photos by iPhones But let me tell you that's a lot of pictures too I'm scrolling and scrolling and I guess they don't go past 2007 but still
John:
I'm not coming up with anything.
John:
And so now I'm like, now I'm like in, you know, in desperation programmer mode.
John:
I'm like, okay, I go to Google images.
John:
I search for pictures of Bill Murray.
John:
I add them to the photo library.
John:
I identify the faces, Bill Murray, add Bill Murray to my people.
John:
And I say, find other faces like this.
John:
Right.
John:
And I'm like, first I'm like, it's like the, the text selection.
John:
I just talked about finding texts in the photos.
John:
I put pictures of Bill Murray in, I import three pictures of Bill Murray looking roughly the age that I think he was.
John:
Right.
John:
Right.
John:
At the time.
John:
And then I'm waiting for Apple Photos to do the thing where it identifies a face.
John:
I don't know if Casey's experience is yet, but it puts little circles around.
John:
Oh, yeah, yeah.
John:
It puts little circles around it, and then you can type underneath the circles, this is whatever part.
John:
That's how you do it.
John:
And I'm waiting and it never does that.
John:
I'm like, OK, if I quit the app and relaunch, if I if I go edit the picture, there is a way you can do the info panel and do add face where you can place that circle yourself.
John:
So eventually I just give up waiting for photos to identify.
John:
And these are all head on headshot, high resolution pictures of Bill Murray.
John:
These are not challenging.
John:
Like I can't find a face in this picture.
John:
Right.
John:
It's right there.
John:
Right.
John:
But it never does it.
John:
And of course, there's no way in photos for you to press a button that says, hey, photos.
John:
right now use cpu and memory to find faces in this one picture that i'm looking at because of course that would be too convenient and they have it just does what you mean you don't have to ever do that it'll do it automatically eventually maybe who knows good luck anyway so i made the little circles i said add face this photo i tried to place the circle over his face which is weird because it like repositions itself and i'm like are you finding the face if you could do that why don't you just do that all the time anyway i make the pictures i type in bill murray and then
John:
I go to the Bill Murray people thing, and I say, find more pictures of Bill Murray.
John:
And it shows a spinner, at least for once, and says, searching for more pictures of Bill Murray, blah, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Sorry, couldn't find any other pictures of Bill Murray.
Casey:
Oh, cool.
John:
So at that point, I'm defeated, and I have to fall back to the ultimate technique, which is to ask my wife.
LAUGHTER
John:
She wasn't home at the time, to be fair.
John:
But as soon as she came home, I said, hey, when were you on that flight with Bill Murray?
John:
And she narrowed it down to the month and year.
John:
And I found the picture.
John:
And guess what?
John:
It was a PNG image.
John:
It had no metadata about what it was.
John:
I don't know where it came from.
John:
It had no metadata about... Screenshot, maybe?
Yeah.
John:
maybe i don't know where the hell it came from but it was it didn't have any metadata about anything it wasn't taken on iphone there was no lens information there was nothing and it wasn't a favorite so anyway i made it a favorite i changed the title of the image to bill murray so i'm hoping like you know instead of like image one two three four five i changed that to bill murray i didn't add a bill murray keyword because i felt like i would be going too far but i did identify that's too far
John:
I did identify Bill Murray's face.
John:
So the fixture is called Bill Murray.
John:
Bill Murray's face is identified in it and it's a fave.
John:
And so next time I want to find that Bill Murray picture, I damn well better be able to type Bill Murray into the search field and photos and find it out.
John:
I didn't actually test that.
John:
I should have actually, I would test it right now, but I'd have to switch to my wife's account because again, Apple families, um,
John:
But, yeah, I agree with Casey.
John:
Google search is better.
John:
Surprise.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
And then one more Apple Memories for You album I just put in the Slack.
John:
Christmas Eve 2020, can you guess what picture is chosen to put on that album?
John:
Are those garlic knots?
John:
Those are garlic knots.
John:
I mean, I guess.
John:
Sure.
John:
Like, yeah, we did have garlic knots on Christmas Eve 2020.
John:
We always have pizza.
John:
The traditional Christmas Eve garlic knots.
John:
We always have pizza on Christmas Eve.
John:
I don't know when this Christmas started, but we've done it for years and years.
John:
We'd always have pizza.
John:
Usually have friends over and have pizza.
John:
And I guess this is one of the years that we decided to also add garlic knots to it.
John:
So yeah, Christmas Eve 2020.
John:
As you know, Christmas means garlic knots.
Casey:
I want garlic knots on Christmas.
Casey:
These look awesome.
John:
Yeah, they do.
John:
They're good.
Casey:
I want it.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So anything else on photos?
Casey:
All in all, I'm really impressed.
Casey:
Like, it's not flawless.
Casey:
But in the same way that I'm like, in the same way I feel like Apple Music is, eh, I guess it's okay.
Casey:
You know, I'm like a step away from it's no good.
Casey:
With Google, or I almost said Google Photos, with iCloud Photo Library, I'm a step away from this is amazing.
Casey:
Like, if search was better, I think I would be a million percent in on iCloud Photos.
John:
We will talk more about this in the future because I think it's time to start having you do things with your photo library.
John:
I know it's nice that Apple is doing things with your photo library for you, which is cool, but there are things that you can do.
John:
So we'll get into that in future episodes.
Casey:
Yeah, there's things that you could do too, John.
Casey:
You could geotag your photos.
Casey:
That's something you could do.
John:
Most of them are geotag.
John:
I think my geotag thing is actually working, like my Bluetooth pairing with my new camera.
John:
I'm pretty sure it's actually working.
John:
I should go check, but I think all my photos are now geotagged.
Casey:
look at you all right uh we are running long so i will try to make this brief let's talk magsafe battery pack uh my two jerk co-hosts didn't volunteer to spend a hundred dollars on the magsafe battery pack so somehow marco ballon who are you kidding did you no i haven't oh look at you that seems inconceivable it does seem inconceivable
Marco:
I'm not going anywhere.
Marco:
Like most of the time I'm spending, I mean, my battery life is not great because I spend a lot of time like playing podcasts through the phone speaker and everything.
Marco:
So my battery life is certainly not good.
Marco:
But most of the time I'm in my house enough of the day that, you know, if the afternoon has come and I see my phone's down to like 60%, I'll just plug it in on my desk as I'm working.
Marco:
Like it's not a big deal.
Marco:
So if I was traveling, that would be a different story.
Marco:
Traveling, no question, I would bring a battery pack.
Marco:
And in fact, the other day I was running some errands on the mainland and I brought just, you know, a little USB battery, like, you know, like a regular standalone battery for that.
Marco:
And I was thinking, like, it would be kind of nice to have the MagSafe battery pack right now, but not so nice that I'm going to, like, drive to an Apple store right now in the middle of this errand trip and buy one for $100 because this little, like, $15 battery in my backpack is working fine for the once I've used it.
John:
I was going to tell you, since your wife is not here, that we don't say on the mainland.
John:
Please don't do that.
John:
Excuse me.
John:
You aren't on Fire Island.
John:
You don't know.
John:
I'm speaking for everyone on Long Island.
John:
That's different.
John:
They give me that authority.
John:
I'm not sure who are they.
John:
It's like the key to the city.
John:
They just pass it to me and say, you, John, speak for every person on Long Island.
John:
I'm just saying, please, please don't say on the mainland.
Marco:
I mean, actually, the more common phrase is off-island.
Marco:
Like, I'm going off-island.
Marco:
But it seems weird to say I'm going off-island to go onto a different island.
John:
I know, but so you decided to make up your own phrase like you live in Hawaii and you're going back to California, but that's not what it's like.
Marco:
No, they also... I mean, you hear people call it the mainland also, but can we go back to John's cranberry sauce for a moment on this Meals at Home picture?
Marco:
Oh, are you complaining about the kind from a can?
Marco:
I think the ratio is questionable.
Marco:
That seems like... You think that's too much or not enough?
Marco:
That's a very large amount of cranberry sauce for not that much meat.
Casey:
Any amount of cranberry sauce is too much.
John:
The meat, the problem, I think the meat, you're misapprehending how much meat there is there.
John:
There's a lot of stacking involved.
John:
But I do agree that I like a lot of cranberry sauce.
Casey:
No, no cranberry sauce and gravy only once in a while.
Casey:
You monsters.
John:
You don't even like gravy?
John:
I've got gravy on the turkey as well, in addition to the cranberry sauce.
Okay.
Casey:
yuck all right so let's talk about the battery pack again uh i have never had uh magsafe anything before uh the magsafe battery pack the tldr version is it's good it's fine uh the long version is the long version is uh let me ask you is it impossibly easy to twist a magsafe connected thing because
Casey:
I, I'm looking at this like magnifying glass looking, you know, top of the MagSafe battery pack where you've got the circle of that, that seems to be the area that the Qi chargers within.
Casey:
And then you got that like little stump coming off of it.
Casey:
And I don't know what the situation is, but that stump is nowhere near strong enough because if I look at this thing sideways, I can twist the MagSafe battery pack.
Casey:
It is preposterously easy to
Casey:
to twist like pretty much anytime i pick up the phone off the desk and i didn't that time so maybe i'm exaggerating a little bit but many times when i pick the phone up off the desk or wherever it may be sitting i will twist the magsafe battery pack now it's not so egregious that it stops it from charging but it's enough that it's off kilter and it's really freaking frustrating uh is this a thing that you guys experience john you don't have any magsafe stuff right
John:
I have the little charger that I charge my AirPods on, but none of us have a battery.
John:
I think the key is this is a battery pack where you're expecting to pick up the both of them, right, at the same time, and that's where you're getting the twisting, and I think you're the only one who's experiencing that because neither one of us have accessory that we expect to pick up with the phone on it, right?
Marco:
Well, also, critically, like, all of my MagSafe usage is just my phone against the puck.
Marco:
Now, if you notice, like, you know, the MagSafe cases and full-size MagSafe things have not only the circle of magnets, but they have a little line of magnets below it.
Casey:
That's what I'm talking about.
Marco:
Yeah, the point of that line is to help stuff, you know, to prevent stuff from twisting, basically.
Marco:
So it's possible maybe it's just not super strong.
Marco:
It is only a relatively small number of magnets compared to the entire circle that form, well, most of the circle that forms the ring part of it.
Marco:
So it could just be that it's not enough magnets there to counteract the massive amount of force that you are somehow unknowingly twisting the battery pack with.
Casey:
Marco, I work out every day, man.
Casey:
You don't even know.
John:
Speaking of that, Quinn Nelson posted a video of a similar situation where he's got the phone and the mags.
John:
He's demonstrating a problem here.
John:
Obviously, this is not like a real scenario, but saying he's got the phone with the battery pack on his hand.
John:
And he's saying if you do this and you don't think about it and you go to press, like let's say you press the power button twice to do Apple Pay or whatever –
John:
If you press the power button on the right side of the phone and your fingers that are curled under the phone are merely gripping the battery case, you will succeed in just pushing the phone right off the battery case.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
John:
Because you're not counteracting.
John:
Like normally when you press the side button, your fingers are on the other side of the phone, which allows you to press the side button while bracing the other side of the phone.
John:
But if your fingers are just on the battery pack, you'll shoot that phone right off.
John:
Now, I don't think that's a big problem because...
John:
Maybe you do that once and break your phone and learn, oh, hey, when I press the side button, I have to make sure my hand grips all the way around the battery pack and the other side of the phone.
John:
But it's another demonstration of what Casey was saying.
John:
It's not too hard to twist these suckers off of there.
John:
And there's probably not much they can do about that besides cranking up the magnet strength, which has its own problems, both in terms of weight and
John:
And also in terms of the number of things they can screw up with these very strong, tiny little rare earth magnets inside there.
John:
Because the underside of the battery thing, in case you can tell me if it is as it looks, seems to be like grippy rubber.
John:
So they're trying to do as much as they can with a sandwich closing force and make a friction surface so it doesn't slide.
John:
But like how tacky is that surface, Casey?
Casey:
not that tacky it's considerably less tacky than the like um what is it the plastic official apple like plasticky iphone cases you don't talk about what's the siliconos yes thank you uh those are way tackier than this it feels vaguely similar but but not nearly as tacky and then the the exterior portion is even less tacky still um yeah so that that's a
Casey:
coincidentally when i first got it i had not done the compulsory update to my iphone and so it when when i plugged it all right i shouldn't say plugged it in when i stuck it to the back of my iphone uh it did show up as like a second thing in the better you know whatever an additional thing the battery widget but comically it didn't show up as the magsafe battery pack the iconography was a lightning connector
Casey:
And I was like, wow, that's really weird.
Casey:
I thought it showed MagSafe there.
Casey:
And then I did the software update on my phone and sure enough, it worked as expected.
Casey:
But I found that very funny that that was what it fell back to.
Casey:
Um, in terms of like in the pocket, it's fine.
Casey:
I mean, I have dude pockets, so it's, you know, they're, they're much more spacious than your, than your average, average, uh, women's cut clothing.
Casey:
Uh, I don't have a big problem with it.
Casey:
The weight, like it's, it's not insignificant, but it's not terrible.
Casey:
Um, I,
Casey:
I think I had it on my phone for day-to-day use for the last few days just to kind of get used to it and have something to talk about tonight.
Casey:
I don't see myself using this really very often at all if I'm not traveling.
Casey:
I haven't yet tried using this as a bedside Qi charger, which is something that I use.
Casey:
I use a standard Qi charger at home, not MagSafe, but a standard Qi charger on my bedside table at home.
Casey:
But when I travel, I use one of those, I think it's an anchor, like, you know, five USB-A port dinguses where, you know, I have a bunch of lightning and Apple Watch cables hanging off of it.
Casey:
And I don't love that.
Casey:
And so if I connected this to my anchor dingus and then just set my phone on there to charge overnight, I might like that.
Casey:
However, and I haven't had the chance to confirm how the behavior is when it's plugged in, but
Casey:
when the phone or excuse me, when the MagSafe charger is just free ball and it's not plugged into the wall, it says that it will not charge the phone past 80% or excuse me, 90%.
Casey:
And I'm curious if, if I use this as like a de facto bedside charger, uh,
Casey:
would it go to the full 100% or would it still cap itself at 90?
Casey:
And I'll have to follow up next week on that.
Casey:
But assuming it will charge to 100%, you know, when it's plugged into the wall and so on and so forth, then I guess it's being really useful for travel for sure.
Casey:
It definitely depletes, you know, the MagSafe battery depletes faster than I would have expected.
Casey:
But all in all, I do like it.
Casey:
I don't know that I would generally have spent $100 on this thing, but...
Casey:
In the future world, maybe one day, eventually, when we can travel again.
Casey:
Have I mentioned?
Casey:
Get your vaccine, please, and thank you.
Casey:
When we can all travel again, I can see this being super nice.
Casey:
But until that point, it's fine.
Marco:
Thank you to our sponsors this week, Fastmail and Sanity.io.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can support us by going to atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thanks, everybody.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
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, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental, they didn't mean to.
Casey:
Accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
Tech Podcast.
John:
So long.
John:
Speaking of batteries and only charging to 80%, I read an interesting article in Car and Driver about GM's new battery tech.
John:
The pitch is that, you know, they found a way to make batteries cheap enough that they can try to make electric vehicles profitable at lower prices, yada, yada.
John:
Typical GM approach, like they're not going for the Tesla model of making premium vehicles.
John:
They want something cheaper.
John:
And the battery pack that they come up with, you can see how it would be cheaper to build because it uses fewer cells that are bigger and all this other stuff.
John:
But one thing they say about it is that they're, unlike pretty much every other car maker, they're not going to recommend that you avoid charging it to 100%.
John:
Like most cars, like most Macs now, do the battery optimization thing where they say...
John:
It's better if you don't charge your battery to like full, full capacity.
John:
And it's also better if you don't like discharge it all the way to zero, like try to stay in that middle band for better battery life.
John:
And GM says, we don't have that problem with our batteries.
John:
You can charge them to 100% all the time and it will be fine.
John:
And, you know, and it'll go 250,000 miles or something like that.
John:
This could be Bluster.
John:
These things don't exist in the real world yet.
John:
I think the first vehicle they're out is the new giant 5 bajillion pound electric hummer that they're coming out with.
John:
But it certainly is interesting.
John:
I would love for that to be on my laptop because now that I have laptops in the house that do that, I leave it turned on because this will extend battery life.
John:
But I feel kind of bad about it knowing that my laptops are only at 80% battery.
John:
It just feels like...
John:
I don't know.
John:
I wish they would just lie to me like some cars do and tell you it's at 100% and really it's at 80% just to sort of preserve battery life that way.
John:
It doesn't feel good.
John:
So I hope battery technology gets better soon.