Hot-Spare Price is Right
Marco:
we now have purchased as a family our first apple tv channel you remember that this was even a thing i do not vaguely so is this where you like sign up for like nbc or something through apple tv or something like that yeah so in this case so um our kid was um home uh sick today with a stomach ache and uh
Marco:
And we said, OK, well, you know, if you're going to stay home, you're not going to just, you know, play video games all day because, you know, you want to make sure that it's like a real thing, you know.
Marco:
So, you know, when just like, you know, it's oh, my stomach hurts.
Marco:
That could be a lot of things or it could be nothing.
Marco:
And so you're like, well, you know, you're not going to just use as an excuse to play video games all day.
Marco:
But if you want, you can stay home and you can sit on the couch and you can watch The Price is Right.
Casey:
That is the requisite thing to do when you are sick and home from school.
John:
Why would you pass on this suffering to a new generation?
Casey:
What?
Casey:
What do you mean suffering?
Casey:
Explain yourself.
John:
You know, I used to be so angry at daytime TV.
John:
And yes, Price is Right in particular.
John:
It's like just, there was no internet.
John:
This is all you had was you turn on the TV and it was this or soap operas and just boy.
Casey:
Yeah, but the Price is Right is delightful.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Explain why it's not delightful.
Casey:
I mean, admittedly, it is an hour-long commercial, but explain why it's not delightful.
John:
It's just not, I mean, it's not what I prefer as a 10-year-old staying home from school, I'll tell you that.
John:
That's the best reason to stay home from school.
John:
No, no.
Casey:
If I'm sick at 40 years old, I'm watching The Price is Right.
Casey:
In fact, this is not a lie.
Casey:
This is not a lie.
Casey:
I use the prior sponsor and absolutely lovely app called Channels, which I believe is GetChannels.com.
Casey:
I have it record that day's Price is Right every single day and just overwrite the prior days.
Casey:
So that this way, no, listen, hear me out.
Casey:
So that this way, if one of the kids is homesick, or me, is homesick, then we have at least one Price is Right available and waiting at all times.
John:
That's your hot spare Price is Right.
Casey:
That's right, yes.
John:
Ready to go at a moment's notice.
John:
That's exactly right.
John:
I mean, can't you just watch it on YouTube?
John:
I'm assuming there's whole episodes of Price is Right available on demand anywhere.
John:
You don't need to keep wearing a spot in your SSD re-recording Price is Right over and over again.
Casey:
It's on the Synology.
Casey:
It's fine.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
I was going to say, where's...
Casey:
I dropped that on you.
Casey:
You weren't prepared.
Casey:
So other than the fact that you're a monster who does not enjoy The Price is Right.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So Adam is staying home to watch The Price is Right as he should.
John:
Here's the question.
John:
When you said that, does Adam know what The Price is Right is?
Marco:
He didn't until today.
Marco:
And did he love it?
Marco:
Well, first, we explained to him, like, first of all, you know, Mommy and I used to watch this whenever we were homesick as a kid.
Marco:
But, you know, we would only get one episode of it available to us in that day.
Marco:
It would go from, like, what was it, like 11 to 12, I believe.
Marco:
Yep, that's right.
Marco:
And, you know, you'd have to sit through whatever, you know, morning news crap shows were on before it.
Marco:
And afterwards, you'd just have to watch soap operas or whatever.
Marco:
You know, there was not much else that was on.
Marco:
so you'd only get one it was full of commercials between the giant commercial that is the show and so you know telling them how great this is anyway so but you know we try to find it on apple tea we do the usual dance of like all right so first use the series search to try to find the price is right
Marco:
Find out that you can only get it through paid services.
Marco:
Check Netflix.
Marco:
Go to their search.
Marco:
Hold down the Siri thing on the remote to ask the prices right there.
Marco:
See it's not there.
Marco:
Then go back to the Apple Siri global search to then go back and give up and go pay for it.
Marco:
But it ends up it's on whatever Paramount Plus means.
Marco:
It's on that.
Marco:
There's a bunch of shows on that.
John:
You can watch Halo.
John:
You can watch the Star Trek Strange New Worlds.
John:
You can watch Star Trek Picard.
John:
What else can you do?
Marco:
You're really selling it there, John.
John:
The Halo one is worth watching just to watch someone else try to make a show out of a video game.
Marco:
Anyway, so for those of you who don't remember, which is almost everybody, when Apple launched Apple TV+,
Marco:
In the same event, they also announced something called Apple TV channels or just Apple channels or just TV channels or just plus channels.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Whatever the heck it's called.
Marco:
It's called something channels.
Marco:
And this is something that Amazon's been offering for, I think, a couple of years before that.
Marco:
And it's just like a very basic like reseller thing where you can subscribe to some service that doesn't have its own app or at least doesn't need to use its own app.
Marco:
And so it's displayed in the native Apple TV interfaces, but it's someone else's content.
Marco:
Um, so that's what this is.
Marco:
And so, you know, it's free trial and then, you know, 10 bucks a month whenever I forget to cancel it in a week or a day or whatever the interval is.
Marco:
Um, and there's a whole bunch of these and they launched it at that event a couple of years back and we never heard about it again.
Yeah.
Marco:
that's so true but it turns out it's still there and it still seemed to work and with a few clicks we got a free trial to watch as much prices right as we want and it's not the same as the bob barker era but they've and the only the
Marco:
things that were weird about it you know like you know i i was never watching it during the drew carry era and i never really knew drew carry stuff before anyway so he's like a nothing to me but he seemed to do an okay job of it um i noticed that hit that the microphone like he tries you know bob barker always had a little skinny stick microphone he would hold on his hand but it was a cabled microphone he would have this giant long mic cable that would drag around the stage with him and and
Marco:
As a result, the microphone could be very, very slim and very small itself.
Marco:
Whereas Drew Carey is holding a big wireless mic pack stuck on the bottom of a stick mic.
Marco:
And it's really clunky looking.
Marco:
It does not look good.
Marco:
And it's just much more bulbous and clunky.
Marco:
But anyway, biggest thing I noticed is that the products that they would have on there, it was all just kind of like that random Amazon no-name brand stuff.
Yeah.
Marco:
it's really weird like there was there were very few brands i recognized and most of the products were like kind of weird like wannabe sharper image kind of things but from no-name brands and so it's like asking how much is this random piece of amazon garbage like i don't know that could be anywhere from eight to forty five dollars i who knows like
Marco:
so it was it was a little bit odd to see like you know the modern day version of this show that is you know definitely past its prime um but certainly um adam really enjoyed it actually he said he really liked this show i don't know how often we're going to use it i think we're going to save it only for sick days but uh and i'm probably not going to spend 10 bucks a month on it but we'll see
John:
Does he is maybe like the first like traditional game show he's seen.
John:
So it could be just the novelty of this is interesting, a television show where they play a game.
John:
Hmm.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And certainly I think the attitude of the contestants on the Price is Right is very fun.
Marco:
It's just it's like, you know, because it's so kind of like, woo.
Marco:
party like everyone's so like over the top happy to get up there and everything so it i think that part of it's fun even though like you know he doesn't know what things cost because he's a kid you know kids don't have to buy stuff in grocery stores so he doesn't know how much laundry detergent costs you know but but it's still it was still kind of a fun experience and he really enjoyed it
Casey:
So one of my crowning achievements in life, which should really explain a lot about, well, everything about me, was I was watching, I think as a young adult, I was watching Price is Right.
Casey:
And as you do, you shout out your own guesses for everything, for whatever the row of four, I forget what the term is for that.
Casey:
And particularly when they do the showcases at the end of the show.
Casey:
And by pure circumstance, I had guessed whatever, let's call it $18,143 or whatever it was.
Casey:
Did you win both showcases?
Casey:
And the contestant guessed $18,143.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
And I'll be darned.
Casey:
I'm sure it wasn't that specific, but just for the sake of discussion.
Marco:
But you had the same guess to the dollar?
Casey:
I had the same guess to the dollar.
Casey:
It was probably like $18,500 or something like that, whatever.
Casey:
The point is I had the same guess to the dollar.
Casey:
And they won both showcases.
Casey:
So I clearly won both showcases.
Casey:
That is one of my crowning achievements in life.
Casey:
It doesn't get better than that.
Marco:
So you deserve the bedroom set and the motorhome.
Casey:
And the motorhome and the trip to Paris.
Casey:
All of the above.
Casey:
If you'll permit me, if you gentlemen could open a web browser and type the following URL, which is...
Casey:
Both extremely cool and extremely clunky all at once.
Casey:
The URL is as follows.
Casey:
Try dot Apple TV app dot Apple slash channels.
Casey:
What the heck?
Casey:
Right?
Casey:
Which I think is the landing page for what you're talking about.
Casey:
Isn't that such a weird URL?
Marco:
I didn't even know dot Apple was a TLD.
Marco:
When did that start?
Marco:
Neither did I. I don't know.
Marco:
But here we are.
Marco:
Can we get dot ATP?
Casey:
Maybe.
Casey:
I'm sure if we paid a billion dollars.
Casey:
So ATP dot FM slash join.
Marco:
Remember the dot sucks TLD?
Marco:
Did that ever go anywhere?
Marco:
I don't know.
Casey:
Can you imagine if we had HTTP colon slash slash join dot ATP?
Casey:
That would be pretty cool.
Casey:
I would like that.
John:
Don't confuse people with different URLs, Casey.
John:
All the wood behind one arrow here.
John:
Well, ATP FM slash join.
John:
See, I said I hadn't remembered this channel's things, but I subscribe to a whole bunch of these little circles that are on this page.
John:
I just never look at them.
John:
I never look at them through the TV app.
John:
I use their individual apps, which are of varying quality, but at least each time it's like, you know, rolling the dice, you might get lucky and one of them might have a good interface.
John:
Apple TV, it's kind of a known quantity that still makes me scroll through an extremely long list of languages every time I want to turn subtitles on and off.
Marco:
That is annoying.
Marco:
Not that you're upset.
Marco:
So angry.
John:
I'm watching shows, especially I'm watching Slow Horses now, which is like a British show, people doing British accents and everything.
John:
And sometimes you can't understand them because their accent's real thick.
John:
And I don't want the subtitles on all the time because I'm not that type of person.
John:
I find it distracting.
John:
But when somebody says something, I'm like...
John:
And, you know, why don't you just use the remote and say, what do you say?
John:
Well, I'm watching on my iPad and there's no remote and I can't talk to Siri when I'm in bed next to my wife.
John:
She's trying to sleep.
John:
So I got to hit pause, go to the menu, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, English, not English CC and not auto recommended, but English and then tap outside the thing to dismiss the menu.
John:
Then back five seconds, then play.
John:
All right.
John:
Subtitle, subtitle.
John:
Okay.
John:
That's what he said.
John:
Pause, subtitle, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll off.
John:
It's so bad.
John:
I just, I don't understand.
John:
and meanwhile i'm looking at a giant ipad screen with so much empty space on it for a million controls and that's how i have to turn subtitles on and off anyway that's see previous episodes for that rant well try channels it's actually pretty decent like as you mentioned it does put it all in the okay apple tv interface but at least it's the okay interface you know that is i'm saying slow horse is an apple tv plus show that is in the apple tv oh yeah
John:
Well, yeah.
John:
So that's why I tried the other apps.
John:
I think maybe some of them are, you know, have a chance of being better.
John:
Yeah, but I mean, how good are those chances?
John:
A lot of them do actually have either a subtitle button or at the very least they, you know, they sort English to the top of the subtitle menu or like, I mean, there's so many things they could do here.
John:
Maybe the last language I picked is the one I'm likely to pick again when I enable and disable subtitles.
John:
Imagine that.
John:
Or maybe the language of the OS is the language I'm likely to pick.
John:
But no, how about an alphabetical list of every language in the world?
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
Sorry, everyone.
Marco:
I set him off.
Marco:
Well, I'm sorry, and you're welcome.
Casey:
We had a little bit of feedback from Matthias Kornen, who wrote with regard to what I called Medusa cables, or I think the official term is power over Ethernet splitters.
Casey:
Mattias writes, improper use can apparently lead to damaged equipment.
Casey:
The important takeaway is that most PoE splitters are intended to be used with devices like security cameras that don't have any other gear plugged into them.
Casey:
This is due to the lack of galvanic, whatever, isolation for the DC output.
Casey:
To be safe, it's best to only buy PoE splitters from reputable companies that are explicitly advertised as being isolated.
Casey:
Personally, I went for a splitter from the German brand Digitus, but I'm not sure if those are available in the U.S.,
Casey:
I'm sure you'll be amused to learn that Digitus is owned by the wonderfully named Assman Group.
Marco:
I was very amused to learn this, for the record.
Casey:
And I was very amused to learn this, because I'm a child.
Marco:
Butts are always funny.
Casey:
We need to move into the pro-fiber propaganda section of the program.
Casey:
Adam Papamarcos writes, I ran fiber for two main reasons, faster speeds and less interference.
Casey:
Oh, that kind of fiber.
Marco:
Sorry.
John:
It was right after the joke.
John:
Come on.
John:
I mean, to keep you regular, just ask the ass man.
Casey:
Oh my gosh.
Casey:
I've just been railroaded right out of here.
Casey:
Let me try this again.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So Adam, one million shot doc.
Casey:
We're a mess.
Casey:
We're an absolute mess.
Casey:
I ran fiber for two main reasons.
Casey:
That Adam faster speeds, less interference that I wanted this setup to be future proof.
Casey:
So I only need to open the walls once.
Casey:
Interference was less of a factor, but having tight groups of cable runs or running gear near electrical lines inside walls can cause interference.
Casey:
I like the idea that pulses of light running through fiber optics is not susceptible to EMI.
Casey:
In some ways, running the fiber was actually easier than Ethernet.
Casey:
Cat6A, even the unshielded riser stuff that I got, is pretty thick.
Casey:
By contrast, the fiber is quite small and flexible, isn't very expensive, and seems to be fairly robust.
Casey:
Later on, Adam added, after a couple emails back and forth, the OM4 fiber cable that I used is advertised as, quote, bend insensitive, quote, and specifies that a minimum bend radius of seven and a half millimeters or three tenths of an inch.
Casey:
There's also specs for 20D or diameter for dynamic or under tension, as in while it's being pulled, and 10D for static or after installation.
Casey:
So even using the worst case of 20D for this two millimeter diameter cable, that's only 40 millimeters or an inch and a half or 20 millimeters,
Casey:
or a little under an inch of bend after installation.
Casey:
So I think that's pretty reasonable for a 90-degree bend, and I didn't really worry about it at all.
Casey:
So in other words, you can bend fiber a lot more than even I thought you could, as it turns out, which was surprising.
John:
Can I just interject here for a moment based on the section in the follow-up I hear?
John:
This is the pro-fiber propaganda section.
John:
We've got a few more items to have.
John:
i noticed i don't see an anti-fiber propaganda segment but i i mean i didn't maybe i didn't read all the feedback about this but i read a lot of it and i have to say there was a definitely a category of feedback about this topic from people who had lots of experience installing fiber optics that basically said no way would i ever do this in a house and i noticed that is not represented in the follow-up which like to comment on that casey
Casey:
So moving right along, Eli.
Casey:
No, all kidding.
Casey:
So here's the thing.
Casey:
All jokes and snark aside, I really don't know what I'm going to end up doing and what I'd like to do and what I have started doing.
Casey:
And unfortunately, I've just had a really busy week, so I haven't had the time to finish this homework assignment.
Casey:
But what I'm going to do, and I don't think I brought this up last week, is I'm going to build basically a bill of materials or best case guess of literally what do I need to buy to do a full fiber installation where I'm running fiber all the way to a room?
Casey:
What do I need to buy for a hybrid installation where I'm running fiber into the crawl space and into the attic and then maybe cat six or something after that?
Casey:
And then what do I need to buy in order to do just a plain vanilla Cat 6 installation, no fiber whatsoever?
Casey:
And I've started down this path with the full fiber, like 10 gigabit where I can, absolutely absurd, Marco-style installation.
Casey:
And it's already getting way more expensive than I'm comfortable with.
Casey:
But I want to come up with an actual number because as much as I'm waving my arms in the air saying, oh, it's not going to be that expensive, sure.
Casey:
And you guys are saying, oh, it's going to be a fortune.
Casey:
You're ridiculous.
Casey:
The only way to figure out which one of us is right is to actually do the homework.
Casey:
And I am working on it, but I haven't finished it yet.
Casey:
And so hopefully once WWDC stuff settles down in a month, I'll have finally found the time.
Casey:
A month if you're lucky.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
I'll find, oh God, help me if there's a Mac Pro.
Casey:
And so in a month, if there's no Mac Pro, in 12 months, if there is a Mac Pro, then I really will probably put on Google Sheets, like, here's what I think is my bill of materials for, you know, full 10 gig fiber for one gig fiber, where I'm simply future-proofing and I'm not trying to get anything fancy today.
Casey:
And then, you know, what if I do just cat six?
Casey:
And I do plan to disclose what
Casey:
Even if the answer is that fiber's 8X, I think that's useful to know.
Casey:
It's useful for me to know, and it's useful for the listeners to know.
Casey:
So I will come back.
Casey:
I think so.
Casey:
I mean, maybe it's just me.
Casey:
But even if I quote-unquote lose, I don't care.
Casey:
Then I know.
Casey:
At least I know the answer.
Casey:
And I'll talk about it on the show when the time comes, and I'll share the spreadsheets when I'm ready.
Casey:
But I'm nowhere near that point.
Casey:
uh so yeah so moving right along eli block writes take my word for it as someone who runs a network on a 200 acre property totally what i'm doing on my one-third of an acre who is doing exactly what you're proposing with fiber backbone go for the fiber wherever possible copper 10 gigabit is a abomination let's just leave it at that when it comes to heat and power consumption you want to use copper absolutely nowhere once you see how much power it consumes and how much heat it throws off
Casey:
And then back to Adam from before, Adam writes, I was very much in your shoes.
Casey:
I felt this was a good learning experience, and I knew very little about fiber going into it, and I just wanted to future-proof things.
Casey:
At least that's how I justified it to myself.
Casey:
And then finally, the piece de resistance, Greg writes, if Marco was allowed to over-specify almost every technology problem, why not you?
John:
So that's a fair point.
John:
Marco doesn't over-specify.
John:
Is he trying to say Marco buys fancier and more expensive stuff than he needs to solve all his tech problems?
John:
Is that what over-specify is trying to say?
Casey:
I'm pretty sure Marco didn't need most of the Mac Pros in your life.
Casey:
You probably don't need the XDR.
Casey:
I mean, you probably don't need two laptops.
John:
But I'm quibbling with the phrasing over-specify because the specifies...
John:
and when you spec something stands for specifications as in the attributes of the thing that you're buying right and so if the specifications of the stuff that marco buys are is excessive like there's they have their specifications are too high uh for what he needs that kind of makes sense sorry greg to pick at your wording here but over specify sounds more like marco knows precisely the every fastener and you know
Marco:
uh cable tie and cable and product down to the skew that he needs to get for a thing and i don't think that's necessarily a bad thing i would also like to point out in in the realm of you know what greg meant here um john is talking to you from a mac pro
Casey:
With an XDR.
Casey:
With an XDR.
John:
And I'm not.
John:
Ten years of, what do you call it?
John:
Ten years of equity in my previous Mac.
Casey:
Yeah, right, right.
Casey:
In the defense.
Casey:
It averages out.
John:
It's just really lumpy.
John:
Yell at me again when I replace this thing when it's three years old.
John:
Then you'll have a stronger argument.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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That's New Relic, N-E-W-R-E-L-I-C dot com slash ATP.
Marco:
New Relic dot com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thanks so much to New Relic for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Ad blockers on desktops.
Casey:
John, you had made a kind of in-passing remark that you don't run an ad blocker on your desktops because you don't seem to think it's really worth it.
Casey:
You don't need to worry about power savings, etc.
Casey:
And so we got some feedback about this from Ryan.
Casey:
I cut a lot of context, but the short short of it is that Ryan's parents were running like a 2014 Mac Mini with a spinning hard disk, which was fine until suddenly their internet speed increased and their web pages seemed to get really bloated.
Casey:
So now this is Ryan's words.
Casey:
Since then, I've been running ad blockers on all my Macs with similar system resource usage improvements, and my web experience is so much more pleasant and cooler on my i9 MacBook Pro that it's hard to describe other than to say that any time they get turned off or fail in some way, browsing the web is like being repeatedly hit in the face with a dead catfish.
Casey:
I'm not opposed to ads in principle.
Casey:
You got to pay the bills somehow.
Casey:
But as long as the implementations are such power hungry, privacy consuming beasts, I have no qualms about blocking everyone that I can.
Casey:
P.S.
Casey:
I have actually been hit in the face with a dead catfish.
Casey:
I'm from the South.
Casey:
So I know of once I speak.
John:
Probably better than being hit in the face with a live catfish.
John:
There's a little bit of extra thrash in the live catfish.
Casey:
So anyway, I think that was worth it just for the postscript.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I thought that was an interesting point.
Casey:
And also, I thought it was fascinating.
Casey:
And I don't think Ryan was trying to say this was factual.
Casey:
It was just his anecdata.
Casey:
But to say that suddenly when the internet speed went way up, so did all of the bloat in these web pages, that seems like that shouldn't be something that a web server should know.
Casey:
I mean, I haven't done real web development in a long time, so maybe they do.
Casey:
But I thought that was fascinating.
John:
You can time the download to see what the bandwidth you're getting in the connection and choose which resources to load based on that.
John:
But who knows?
John:
I mean, a 2014 Mac Mini with a spinning hard disk is a tough situation.
John:
Like I was saying, I ran an ad blocker on my phone to try to like preserve the scarce resources there.
John:
But I'm pretty sure every phone I've had for many years has been faster than a 2014 Mac Mini with a spinning hard drive.
John:
So by all means, yes, if you have limited computing and storage resources, an ad blocker is a good way to optimize the usage of those things.
Casey:
indeed uh with regard to sign in with x you know sign in with apple sign in with google whatever from brian donovan like you i choose email and password for 99 of the time however my small employer recommends that for work stuff we use sign in with google this is primarily because we're required to use 2fa with our work google accounts and that's likely a stronger protection than whatever the site we're logging into offers i thought that was a very interesting point that i hadn't considered
John:
Yeah, I mean, most people just don't want to have to think of another password or whatever.
John:
But, you know, if you're going to sign in with something, Google has pretty good security on its stuff.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
With regard to the bespoke app for listening to concerts, which was in Ask ATP last week, Jonathan Deco writes, in Apple Music on the Mac, if you get info on the song or concert, there's a checkbox to remember playback position.
Casey:
This option syncs to the phone so you can play another song, such as Baby Shark, and then go back to the concert and pick up where you left off.
Casey:
I didn't try this for myself, but that's very cool.
Casey:
I did not know that.
John:
I didn't mention it on the previous episode.
John:
I thought everybody knew about this, but that's how podcasts work.
John:
Like that's why podcasts remember their position.
John:
And it's not just because they're like, you know, set to like media type podcasts or whatever.
John:
Remember play acquisition has been a bullying setting and iTunes since the, and iTunes since it was called iTunes.
John:
But I feel like this is not really a solution to the problem as posed last time, because as Marco pointed out, it doesn't help you when you sit down for work the next day and you launch the music app and it has no idea what you were doing the last time you were running the music app.
John:
So, yeah, maybe the playback position is remembered within the track you were going.
John:
But what track were you listening to in what album and what concert music doesn't know and it's not telling you.
John:
That's the problem.
John:
The problem is not like remembering playback position within a single song.
John:
It's remembering what I was doing, period, like sort of state restoration, big picture, not small picture.
John:
And the other thing I'll warn about the remember playback position, I mean, maybe if you carefully set it only on the things that are songs and albums, but...
John:
depending on how savvy the implementation of your player is you could find yourself you know skimming around or scrubbing around for things or you listen to a few seconds or something and skip to the next track then the next time it plays that previous one it's going to start from five seconds into the song because it's trying to remember playback position and that might catch you off guard like if it's a month later it will still remember that playback position and so you like you're basically like
John:
leaving a trail of state behind you as you jump through the songs whether you're doing it manually or just forgetting to hit next track in the car because you're distracted by traffic or something right that has now saved oh you're three seconds into the song so the next time that song comes up on shuffle or something it starts in three seconds in i don't think it's actually i think there is like a buffer of like it does it doesn't save the play acquisition until you've gone a certain distance in and same thing with being near the end but it really depends on the smarts of the player app you're using to implement a feature like that in a way that's not annoying
Casey:
We also got some very interesting feedback from Amber, and this was with regard to the Apple Fitness Plus behind-the-scenes videos.
Casey:
This is a little bit long, but I found this riveting, and we actually cut down quite a bit.
Casey:
And all of it was riveting, but we're giving you the riveting parts of the riveting parts.
Casey:
So here we go.
Casey:
Amber writes...
Casey:
John was curious about the white markings on a few of the control room screens.
Casey:
Yes, some of that appears to be action safe HDTV framing guides, which are closer to the edges than title safe that you'd use to contain text.
Casey:
And yes, it is kind of silly to think about that much overscan on HDTVs.
Casey:
Old habits never die.
Casey:
But the interesting one is the two gutters on the right and the left.
Casey:
To my eye, those look like pretty typical 4x3 standard definition action-safe markings.
Casey:
Why would Apple have old-school 4x3 markings on a product that is almost exclusively viewed on 16x9 screens?
Casey:
Because Apple doesn't make multi-view systems, video switchers and CG systems for live TV, so they had to buy them from somewhere else.
Casey:
That guide overlay could come from one of two places.
Casey:
Either the switcher itself, as you can see, with the little purple buttons being operated by the technical director or TD, the person in the front row on the far right at about 40 seconds of the KCAU clip, or from the multi-view system.
Casey:
In most modern video switchers, you can have the option to turn on those overscan guidelines in your preview window to make sure that the upcoming shot is well-framed and any potential graphics are safe.
Casey:
In most switchers I've encountered, they're either all or nothing.
Casey:
So if the switcher manufacturer thinks...
Casey:
we think you'll need 4x3 safe guides.
Casey:
Then you're getting 4x3 safe guides when you turn guides on.
Casey:
The other place that those overlays could come from is a multi-view system, which looks like they're using at Fitness Plus.
Casey:
And yes, you guessed it, most multi-view systems I've worked with also have a stock set of these guide overlays that you can put on any virtual screen you want.
Casey:
And despite all the customizations elsewhere in the system, you usually can't customize which specific overlay guides you want.
Casey:
in the multi-view hardware manufacturer if the multi-view hardware manufacturer thinks you need 4x3 in your overlays your overlays will have 4x3 also why would you have a live control room for a show that isn't even necessarily live but always just on demand because it massively cuts down on post-production staff time if they have a good clean show they can just trim the beginning and end from the output program recording feed and send it out if they need to fix a mistake they'll prob they're probably recording each camera individually so an editor can go in with sync time codes and fix a technical mistake in a matter of minutes and send it out
Casey:
The alternative would be recording all the cameras individually and spending hours in an edit room, splicing it all together with the camera cuts and the graphics and whatnot.
Casey:
That gets expensive quickly, more expensive over the long term than the initial build costs of the control room.
Casey:
I thought that was absolutely fascinating.
John:
I didn't even think of the idea that why the heck do they have a control room for a show that's not live.
John:
Obviously, it's not like Peloton where people are watching.
John:
If you don't know how Apple Fitness Plus works, it's not like you're seeing the person live.
John:
They pre-record them and then distribute them that way.
John:
But as a cost-saving way, you think it would cost more to have a room full of people saying, ready one, take one, and doing all the things and doing all the control room and have all the stuff.
John:
But apparently that's more cost-effective than...
John:
getting all the raw material and dumping on the head of a bunch of editors and having them slice things together.
John:
Because, you know, I guess it's like essentially the skill set of cutting together a live show in real time, which is a skill set that has been developed over many decades for people who do this for a living for, you know, live events, sports, awards shows, everything you possibly imagine that's live, like that skill set that a lot of people have.
John:
It's kind of like...
John:
I don't know, I can't think of an equivalent.
John:
Like, we think of everything with computers as being like offline, right?
John:
You get the materials and you use the computer to sort of munch them together.
John:
But sort of, it's like doing that as a performance.
John:
Those people in those rooms are, they are doing their own performance or they're building their performance from the raw materials in real time.
John:
And it's kind of like a, I don't know, it's like a high wire act where, yeah, we could wait until later and do it.
John:
But if we try to do it in real time, it's, you know, we have people who have been trained to know how to do that, and we can use those skills now even though this is not like a live sporting event or a live award show.
John:
The other thing I thought was funny about this is that Apple is forced to use software that doesn't have the settings that they want, right?
John:
they absolutely don't like apple fitness is never being viewed on four by three screens like it's not made for that whatsoever but it's like oh i guess you can't it would be nice if you had a setting to turn that off wouldn't apple but sorry you get the four by three gutters whether you like it or not
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John:
John, tell me about FIDO.
John:
This is a story from, I don't know, back in early May sometime, and it is actually referencing a technology that was described at WWC 2001, almost exactly a year ago as we're recording this.
John:
They don't have session numbers anymore, but the session name was from WWC 2021, and it was Move Beyond Passwords.
John:
I think we talked about it at the time.
John:
But if you're not familiar, you can still find it on developer.apple.com.
John:
I believe it is freely available to everybody.
John:
I don't think you even have to have a developer account.
John:
We'll put a link in the show notes.
John:
I do wonder if the number in the URL, is that the session number?
John:
It's developer.apple.com slash WWC21 slash 10106.
John:
I think it might be.
Casey:
Those sessions used to be three-digit numbers.
John:
I don't understand this weird new world.
John:
Anyway.
John:
It's about trying to move beyond passwords, right?
John:
Which is something that people have attempted for a long time.
John:
The presentation kind of goes through it from first principle saying, you know, well, if you make people pick passwords, they can't think of good passwords or they reuse passwords.
John:
So they can use a password manager, which helps.
John:
But now all your passwords are in one basket and you got to make sure the password manager works well.
John:
um and it's hard to recover them if you lose your one password to one password you know anyway and then we have passwords plus one-time passwords the two-factor thing um and security keys which probably most people listening don't even know what that is but it's like a literal hardware device like a little usb thingy that has some other secret on it so in addition to you being the person who knows your username and password you also have this little hardware dongle that you shove in and it does a thing
John:
And then there's the thing they're proposing here, which they called in this session, passkeys in iCloud keychain.
John:
We all know passwords suck.
John:
Like everyone, we talked about even on the show, picking username sucks, picking password sucks.
John:
So it's why we use password managers.
John:
If you're good with password hygiene, you know not to use the same password in multiple places, but it's hard to pick good passwords.
John:
And if you pick really good passwords, there's no way you're going to remember them.
John:
So now you need a password manager, but you got to be careful with that.
John:
It's a hassle and it's terrible.
John:
And there's just too many things to sign up for, too many places to use passwords.
John:
So Marco is trying to use one password in iCloud Keychain at the same time.
John:
I kind of have a bit of a problem because I'm using Chrome and Safari everywhere, at least on my Macs.
John:
And of course, Safari does everything in iCloud Keychain, but Chrome has its own thing.
John:
So now I have to remember...
John:
you know at first i certainly don't know any of my passwords right so when i sign into something i have to remember did i originally sign into that in chrome or in safari so um since passwords suck what can we do that is better than passwords and a lot of people have had ideas but most of those ideas have a problem in that like they like passwords for all their faults work pretty much everywhere
John:
You're on your phone.
John:
You're on somebody else's phone.
John:
You're on your computer.
John:
You're on someone else's computer.
John:
We can put a text box on a web page.
John:
We can put a text box in an app.
John:
You can type in an email address and a password, and you can get in.
John:
And they push all the details of that under the covers of the user, right?
John:
It's like, oh, well, just type stuff in these text boxes.
John:
Problem solved.
John:
It works everywhere.
John:
It's completely cross-platform.
John:
Okay, but what do I type in the password box?
John:
oh you type your password there and it's like then we're back to where we were before picking passwords is hard and i have a good password i can't remember it and there's too many to memorize anyway so now i need a password manager so this whole like passwords work everywhere so nothing can ever displace them it's not really true because if you use them the right way passwords don't work everywhere because if you don't have access to your one password stuff if you're over someone's house and i mean i suppose if you don't have your phone with you or you know if you're in any other situation where you don't have access to your passwords it's hard to be able to log in right
John:
So if you try to just match that, like say, okay, let's not just assume that we have to be the type of thing where you can log in anywhere, because that hasn't been true in ages.
John:
Maybe that was true back when we had three accounts and we all had those three passwords memorized, but it's no longer true.
John:
If we just need to be able to log in where we have access to one of our devices, the problem gets a little bit easier.
John:
So the FIDO thing, and this passkeys in iCloud keychain, the FIDO thing is just an alliance of other companies to try to be interoperable.
John:
The idea is basically the same.
John:
If you know anything about public key encryption, it's very similar to that.
John:
So rather than you typing your password in a text box and hitting a button and it's sending that password across the internet, over a TLS connection or whatever, but still, sending that password over the internet to a server, which then you hope does something reasonable with it to see if it's the correct password,
John:
You have a situation where with these, you know, public encryption, you never have to send your secret anywhere.
John:
So your secret is safe on your local computer and you give the, you know, you send your public key over the Internet and you give the server your public key and then you sign something with your private key.
John:
And the way a private public key encryption works is you can sign something with your private key and anybody with your public key can cryptographically prove whether or not it was signed with your private key, even though none of them know your private key.
John:
That's not new technology.
John:
That's what PGP is based on ages ago or whatever.
John:
But this is sort of taking that technology that's been around for a long time and baking it into the operating system and taking advantage of all the things that our Apple devices specifically have to make this very secure, right?
John:
So if we take the system where we're not going to send passwords to anybody, right?
John:
We're just going to have a private key and it's literally never going to leave our device.
John:
How can we make that even more secure?
John:
Well, pretty much at this point, all of our devices, if you buy like a current generation Apple product, and even for several years back, have really, really secure ways to store stuff only on your device.
John:
The secure enclave, right?
John:
Where no programs can get it out.
John:
In theory, it's very secure.
John:
It's inside there.
John:
That's where all the stuff is kept for the decryption of your SSDs and iCloud keychain and all sorts of other unlocking things.
John:
Like the secure enclave is very secure.
John:
We have biometrics to get into it and we have passwords.
John:
We have all these ways, you know,
John:
Face ID, touch ID, all that stuff is tied into the secure enclave and tied into the security of our individual devices.
John:
We can use that existing security infrastructure and all the authentication methods that we decide to use for that, whether you decide to configure face ID with or without masks, with or without attention, touch ID, passcode.
John:
It's like whatever we decide is the security infrastructure.
John:
you know set up for our device that can also be the thing that logs us in everywhere and from there we'll just use public key encryption where it will the private key will be in the secure enclave protected by all those normal things that we protect our stuff with and the public key will be used to send over the internet to services which will then verify that we're allowed to log in all that stuff
John:
Never have to pick a password, never have to hopefully pick a username or anything like that.
John:
It's all just completely secure.
John:
And you may be thinking, well, when I send my password over the Internet, it's not like, you know, that ends up getting hashed anyway.
John:
It's not like they're storing my password.
John:
They're just hashing it and then comparing it to a hash they have or whatever.
John:
uh yeah that's how it's supposed to work but you are literally sending your password over the internet to the server and you will be shocked or maybe not shocked depending on how much you've been involved in this how many servers decide to just take your password and store it in plain text in a database which then gets breached and now someone has thousands and thousands of passwords and you would think well maybe you know fly-by-night websites have plain text passwords but surely nothing important or secure like a bank or
John:
or a healthcare company, and you'd be wrong about that because some of those have the worst security.
John:
I mean, they're not supposed to, and often there are laws dictating that they shouldn't, but look at the history of data breaches where you'll just be incredibly shocked that a cybersecurity company or something has plain text passwords stored.
John:
It's still a problem.
John:
Like the WDC video does a good job of going to this.
John:
Like having a system where trust is between you and your hardware device and your trust is never between you and any random server is way better because there still has to be a trust relationship.
John:
Like you trust Apple to securely implement all the things that they implement on their devices and you trust them to defend their hardware and software against hacks and bugs and so on and so forth.
John:
But that's way better than having a trust relationship with every single server that you log into and just hoping that none of them get breached.
John:
And while it's nice that all of our web browsers now have a thing that lets you know, hey, there was a security breach and we found one of your passwords in it.
John:
I'm sure a lot of people here have gotten that message in either Safari or Chrome, right?
John:
Where it'll tell you when there's been a data breach, right?
John:
But that's, I mean, that's kind of like, you know, closing the barn door over the horse's left.
John:
Well, you gave your passwords to a thousand websites and some percentage of them were breached and some percentage of them held their passwords in plain text and you reused pastured a couple of times because you were lazy.
John:
And now just to let you know, FYI,
John:
All these accounts are compromised, so go in them and set up new passwords for them.
John:
That's not a great experience.
John:
It would be much better if we just had sort of one, I'm not going to say one password, but one secure way to do things, which is unlocking your phone or signing into your Mac or whatever, as protected to the degree that we feel comfortable with.
John:
Again, deciding which one of the authentication methods you want to use and how secure you want to get.
John:
Do you want to have a four digit passcode or do you want to have a 20 digit passphrase?
John:
Do you want to use face ID or not?
John:
Do you want to use touch ID or not?
John:
All that stuff.
John:
Have that be sort of the linchpin of security and have it work everywhere.
John:
Right.
John:
So your Macs can do that.
John:
Your phones can do that.
John:
Your iPad can do that.
John:
Yes, you have to have one of those devices with you then to sign in.
John:
But it is that's like I said, that's the same thing with our modern with best practices in modern passwords.
John:
It's not like you have memorized the extremely complicated password to all the thousand sites you log into.
John:
You probably only have one or two passwords memorized, if that, depending on how good you are with password hygiene.
John:
Right.
John:
And so in the WDC video, they show a little demo of what this looks like with a demonstration app.
John:
And it's basically it looks very similar to like signing with Apple, only it's not that you sign in by giving them like an email address or username or whatever you want to pick.
John:
And that's it.
John:
There's no other step.
John:
You're like, great, you're signed in because the device does the web auth, you know, public key passing back and forth and
John:
authentication and all that other stuff.
John:
When this session was made, one of the limitations of it was like, okay, well, that's great for you.
John:
But does that mean each individual device needs to sort of register itself at the site?
John:
And that used to be true.
John:
And part of this FIDO announcement from earlier in May was like, oh, they're going to...
John:
Add a system to the specification that allows your credentials to be synced among devices.
John:
And so once you sign in with one device, you're signing with all devices, sort of like what Apple does with iCloud keychain syncing.
John:
And this is a consortium with Apple, Google, and Microsoft, which I feel like is probably sufficient to make this technology spread across most of the web because with those three companies behind it,
John:
uh everyone else will probably follow along and i think you know so signing with apple is great uh if you trust apple if you're super into google sign in with google is great no one should ever sign in with facebook but anyway the sign in with services i think people prefer those just because it's like oh i don't have to remember another password but as we talked about last time now you're putting all your putting all your trust on this other party that might not even care about you and your accounts or you know like it's
John:
it's a little bit there's a second party in the trust relationship just having it between be between you and your device and that's the only trust relationship well you know you and your device and a device vendor is a lot simpler and you've already chosen that relationship by buying your device you don't have to then enter into another arrangement and remember like like we talked about in the ask adp question when i signed up for this service did i use sign in with apple did i use sign in with google or did i use a username and password right
John:
I think you'll probably might still have to remember this, but I think it'll probably try the web auth thing if it exists at all.
John:
And then if not, ask you for username and password.
John:
Anyway, I would love for this to be a real thing because I hate managing passwords.
John:
Everybody hates managing passwords.
John:
The security of this seems probably about equal to best practices now.
John:
Like, I'm not going to say it's like...
John:
tons more secure.
John:
I think the session goes a little bit overboard in pitching on how much more secure this is.
John:
It depends.
John:
It is equally secure as someone using all of the best practices of password hygiene, but nobody does that for every site.
John:
So in practice, it's more secure because you don't have to do anything to get these benefits.
John:
You just use it and there's no way not to get all of these benefits.
John:
And you also get to use all the sort of
John:
password recovery flow stuff that you know that's built into like you know your your device and your apple id and all that like that stuff just has to be implemented once essentially by your platform vendor and apple's already implemented all of that like there's so much stuff around you know
John:
Your Apple ID password and I forgot that Apple dot com and backup codes and multi-factor authentication and biometrics and all that stuff that already exists and be able to just leverage that to say once I've done that once I can now sign up for sign into.
John:
any service anywhere on the entire web and the entire internet without ever having to pick another password that is the world i want to live in so i am totally rooting for this thing and i like the fact that there is a multi-company alliance trying to make this happen and i really hope this year wwc 2022 there is a another session about this in the in the past season uh or in the move beyond password session they said at the end that this is
John:
the first step in a multi-year effort to move beyond passwords and it was basically like here's a bunch of apis but they're all prototypes maybe this year we'll have a more concrete set of apis that you're allowed to use in production and then maybe the year after that they'll sort of start rolling out the applications and maybe the year after that we'll all be signing in everywhere without ever having to pick another password
Marco:
I hope so.
Marco:
I mean, as somebody who has tried to get rid of passwords on numerous occasions in numerous different ways, every time I've done it, I have learned about some shortcoming of my system that just having passwords would solve.
Marco:
Because we all think, again, this is one of those areas where everyone thinks they have some idea to get rid of passwords, and it always contains the word just.
Marco:
Why don't we just blank?
Marco:
And that's a wonderful phrase that usually suggests that the person does not understand the full complexity of the problem.
Marco:
And in reality, passwords, as you were saying earlier, John, passwords actually have a lot of benefits compared to all of these systems.
Marco:
Like, for instance, once you get into the realm of having multiple people who might need access to the password for something, many of these systems become much more complicated or break down.
Marco:
Um, whereas some, you know, like one password is great.
Marco:
Like earlier today, um, you know, as within our family, we're multiple people who often needs to share passwords for something.
Marco:
And, uh, there was something that, um, our kid had a password for that I had set up like, like just on my phone one day I'd set it up.
Marco:
And so it was only in my one password, um, you know, vault, which is like their, you know, data silo.
Marco:
And, um,
Marco:
And Tiff was asking for it.
Marco:
And I was able to just go on my phone and open up one password and move it to our shared family vault.
Marco:
And then seconds later, Tiff had it on her phone and she could help Adam set up his thing.
Marco:
And once he's old enough to manage all this stuff himself, we'll be able to just move all that stuff over to him.
Marco:
And that becomes very easy.
Marco:
When you have families or businesses, any situation where multiple people need to share a credential...
Marco:
or you need to send it to somebody.
Marco:
You know, look, I mean, the three of us host on the show, you know, we have some shared, you know, social media accounts and stuff that we all can log into.
Marco:
And the way we've done that is we just, you know, one of us generates a crazy password in our password manager, and we just send it to the others in some secure way.
Marco:
And then we can all log in then for services that don't support, you know, multiple user accounts for the same access thing or whatever.
Marco:
So that's just, it's, that's one of the many things where, you know,
Marco:
passwords actually really help a lot.
Marco:
And passwordless systems or systems move on beyond passwords make a lot of that stuff more difficult.
Marco:
And because of that, I think passwords are going to stick around for longer than we think.
Marco:
Because there's a reason they've stuck around this long, and it's not because they're great.
Marco:
It's because they're really versatile, and they enable a bunch of use cases and kind of fail-safes that we end up actually using quite a lot in reality.
John:
I mean, the thing you described of putting into a shared vault, if Apple got its acts together and realized how families work, you can imagine iCloud Keychain working exactly the same way.
John:
There would be a family iCloud Keychain because, hey, Apple already has an organization called a family that has multiple members.
John:
Apple knows about that.
John:
It is a thing that exists.
John:
It would be, you know, like it makes sense for them to eventually expand iCloud Keychain to be family aware, family savvy.
John:
You would say back in the system seven days.
John:
I hope they do photos first, but still, this is definitely a solvable problem because, like, in the end, like, if you look at this from a programmer's perspective, what's actually happening here is, like, you know, 80s, 90s, when was PGP?
John:
The 80s, the 90s, this is not super advanced technology.
John:
Public key encryption has...
John:
It existed forever.
John:
It's a great example of how somebody did some clever math a long time ago and came up with the system.
John:
And it is very clever and has very good security and sort of security that you can scale to your level of comfort.
John:
It's really neat, right?
John:
So why don't we use it everywhere?
John:
The reason it's not used everywhere are the non-technical aspects.
John:
How do I implement this in my operating system in a secure way across all my devices?
John:
How do I get it implemented across the entire industry?
John:
How do I make all the websites or whatever that I'm signing into implement this system and building up the standards around this?
John:
You know, I'm not going to say very basic math, but building up the standards around this well understood thing, public key encryption.
John:
Building that up and building the infrastructure and making the WebAuthn API and making a JavaScript API for it and building into web browsers and building into the OS and having a way, a secure enclave and everything.
John:
It's taken us so long to get to the point where we can assume that modern hardware, phones, MPCs will have something on it, whether it's the TPM module or the secure enclave will have some way on it to securely store private credentials.
John:
That's not just like a file on a disk or something like we have a way to do that in devices finally.
John:
And it seems like we're finally getting to the point where we're going to have the plumbing in the operating system and the support for it in the web browsers.
John:
And then it's just a matter of getting the websites on board.
John:
And I think websites will want to get on board with this in the same way they've got on board with the sign in with this because they're all about reducing friction.
John:
If they can make it easier for you to sign up for an account at their website that makes fewer people run away screaming when they say, oh, I have to make an account.
John:
Oh, never mind, right?
John:
If they don't have to go through that process, if it's just literally like one click with an auto-filled email address or something, they're going to want to use it too.
John:
So I feel like we're kind of finally getting to critical mass.
John:
But that last little bit of like, but what about the...
John:
weird use cases like a family apple what are we going to do then passwords might be passwords might be superior then it's like just please just do the obvious thing and make iCloud keychain you know work with families and have a family keychain and share their credentials because what are you sharing there's private keys and there's public keys and those are just little bits of information you can put them in text files it's you know as long as we have a secure place to store them you can have the private key be shared among all members of a family
John:
And it's problem solved.
John:
Like, it's not rocket science.
John:
It's not a huge amount of data.
John:
It's not gigs and gigs of data.
John:
It's not an unknowable, unsolvable problem.
John:
But if they don't do that, you're right, Mark.
John:
I was going to be like, oh, well, I don't.
John:
Well, I signed up for this.
John:
Like, imagine if Netflix used this, you know, Fido, you know, Pasky's and iCloud keychain.
John:
You sign up for Netflix and you're like, your wife's like, oh, I want to sign into Netflix.
John:
Like, oh, well.
John:
I guess you have to sign out of your account on your laptop and sign into my account on your laptop so you'll be signing with my Apple ID and then you can use my passkey.
John:
And she'll be like, why don't you just give me the password?
John:
Well, there's not passwords anymore.
John:
What do you mean there's not passwords?
John:
Yeah, they use a different... You don't want to have to have this conversation.
John:
It's terrible, right?
John:
And I know Netflix doesn't want you to share passwords anyway, so maybe Netflix loves this.
John:
But either way, if they just implement iCloud Keychain, a family-shared iCloud Keychain...
John:
You don't have to have this conversation.
John:
You'll do exactly what you do with one password, which is you drag it from your individual one into the shared family one.
John:
Done and done.
Marco:
Well, that's if it works.
Marco:
I mean, you know, like I think the the password sharing example is a really good window into the potential pitfalls of this in reality.
Marco:
You know, we we often design technology in a way.
Marco:
that is quickly defeated by post-it notes and emailing files to ourselves and other low-tech hacks that tons of people end up doing because the cool, complicated thing that we developed doesn't work well enough or is too hard or has some kind of use case where it falls over where the post-it note wins.
Marco:
And when trying to do something as lofty as replacing passwords...
Marco:
We're going to have to really make sure it works really well and is really easy and is really versatile.
Marco:
And that's hard to do while maintaining security.
John:
I mean, that's why I think this multi-company alliance gives it hope because it's a standard that, you know, it's not just Apple devices, not just Microsoft devices.
John:
Apple, Google, Microsoft all do it.
John:
People will get in line because they own, well...
John:
What is Microsoft?
John:
Anyway, Apple and Google own the two most important platforms, right?
John:
iOS and Android.
John:
And Apple and Microsoft own the two most important desktop platforms.
John:
And that pretty much covers all of your bases.
John:
If they implement all of this stuff, it's only a matter of time and polishing to get it to work.
John:
And because it has to work across all these different platforms, it doesn't mean there's no room for innovation.
John:
So if you look at the Apple things, like they're making APIs and the various OSs that do this.
John:
And Apple chose to make the APIs such that you, like, basically...
John:
Throw up an authentication thing and you give it a list of possible authentication methods that you want to support.
John:
And it still gives the user the choice.
John:
Do you want to do, you know, the passkey sign in thing?
John:
Do you want to use your username and password, in which case all your autofill stuff works?
John:
Right.
John:
Do you want to sign in with Apple?
John:
Like maybe it's annoying that there's this big list of things, but it's a cascade and a hierarchy that as someone writing.
John:
I suppose a website, but certainly if you're writing an iOS app or a Mac app, you can present the authentication, you know, kick off the authentication flow and you don't have to write any of that.
John:
Apple's got an API that does it all.
John:
You just tell it what methods you want to support and what their priority order is and it will put up a UI and deal with all that stuff.
John:
And that is another great way to,
John:
let apple be apple and make like a better user experience and make it easy for developers to implement this so you don't have to write all this code yourself and also make it more secure but if under the covers it's the same exact standard that's supported in google and microsoft and google usually does a good job of these apis too especially on the web then you can be sure that anywhere you go you'll be able to use this system to log in as long as you have with you a thing that has your private key in it essentially and
John:
I think that's usually been the pushback.
John:
Like, oh, what if I don't have my phone or what if I don't have access to my Mac or whatever?
John:
Or, you know, I can just type in my password.
John:
But like, I really hope that's not the case for people, because if you feel like you can sit down in front of any computer with nothing but the clothes on your back and sign into any of your accounts, your passwords are not good.
Marco:
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Bye.
Casey:
Hey, so do you think Apple really wants us repairing our own phones?
Marco:
This whole thing.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I don't know what to make of this.
Casey:
Like when I'm in a grumpy mood, I feel like, oh, Apple's just a big pile of jerks and they hate everyone.
Casey:
When I'm in a more happy mood, I'm like, well, you know, Apple's just trying to make sure people do the best job they can repairing everything themselves.
Casey:
So what am I talking about?
Casey:
A friend of the show, Quinn Nelson, RelayFM alumni, I think at this point, and a prolific YouTuber, he put out a couple of videos where he got the tools and parts and whatnot in order to do a, I believe it was an iPhone mini screen and battery replacement, if memory serves.
Casey:
And
Casey:
they and apple sent him all of the tools he needs to do this and the parts and i don't remember how much parts cost but i think he needed to pay between 50 and 100 deposit to rent the tools to rent the tools and he came or he got shipped something like 80 pounds worth of tools two humongous pelican cases with 80 pounds of tools in order to do the to do these repairs and
Casey:
And, you know, the cynical take, which is what The Verge put up.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Yeah, we do have a link we'll put in the show notes.
Casey:
The cynical take is Apple's just making this difficult for everyone.
Casey:
They're doing this to be jerks because they're jerks.
Casey:
They're jerks from the top to the bottom.
Casey:
They're jerk, jerk, jerky, jerk, jerks.
Casey:
And that is a take.
Casey:
That is a take for sure.
Casey:
I don't think that's what this is, but maybe I'm grading on too much of a curve here.
Casey:
So what do you fellas think about this?
John:
It was 97 pounds, not 80 pounds, because he did the screen and the battery, so you get more tools based on what you do.
John:
If you recall from past programs when we talked about this, that Apple's going to come up with a self-repair program so that anybody could do a repair to their phone, which previously Apple...
John:
didn't let people that you've been authorized apple repair or whatever thing or you can go to an apple store but it's like hey joe schmo off the street you want to replace the battery on your phone
John:
Well, feel free.
John:
And, you know, they have this plan to do it and you're going to get genuine Apple parts and blah, blah, blah.
John:
Right.
John:
But now the program is actually actually here.
John:
People like Quinn have done it.
John:
And, you know, it's it's not, I guess, what people expected.
John:
I guess, you know, like this article that Sean Hollister wrote in The Verge, we kind of expected to get in the mail like a little baggie with a battery in it.
John:
And then like some tools like iFixit toolkit or something, you know, just like a.
John:
Something to pry open your iPhone and like some screwdrivers with the weird tips on them.
John:
And that's basically it, right?
John:
But no, that's not what they send you.
John:
They send you the same tools that they use in Apple stores to do these repairs.
John:
And tools are big.
John:
Tools are heavy.
John:
The tools are weird.
John:
In fact, Quinn has a second video where he...
John:
He says breaking into Apple's tools where he opens up Apple's tools.
John:
They all have these security labels on that they tell you that makes it so you can't open them up.
John:
But he does open them all up to see what these tools are like on the inside.
John:
And all right.
John:
So the Apple are jerks side of this, I think, has a little bit of merit to it.
John:
But part of it is also like.
John:
So if you want to replace the battery in your phone, this is how Apple does it, right?
John:
It's like, I don't want to pay Apple to do it.
John:
I want to do it myself, right?
John:
And Apple is saying, okay, well, if you want to do it yourself, we'll let you do it the same way we do it.
John:
Because we think, I mean, this is the way to do it.
John:
Because if you gave it to us, this is what we would do.
John:
So if you're going to do it yourself, you should do it the same way.
John:
Only now you get to do it instead of us.
John:
So here you go.
John:
And that involves a bunch of these tools.
John:
And it kind of, I mean, part of what I think it makes you realize if you're on the receiving end of this is if you don't repair iPhones for a living as your job, you probably don't need these tools.
John:
But if you don't repair iPhones for a living as your job, should you be repairing iPhones?
John:
Should you be doing this?
John:
It's kind of like the difference between like a do-it-yourself mechanic.
John:
I'm going to change my oil.
John:
I'm going to change my brake pads.
John:
Versus, you know, I'm going to, you know, change the timing belt on my car as the as your car repairs get more invasive.
John:
You know, I'm going to replace the head gasket or whatever.
John:
You start needing more sophisticated and very expensive tools like eventually you might need a lift for your car.
John:
lifts are expensive are you going to do everything on jack stands probably not you're probably not going to drop the engine out of your car with jack stands so now all of a sudden you need a lift and you need all these special tools and especially if you have a bmw where there's a special tool to remove every single piece of the freaking thing which bmw will sell you for a million dollars because you can't use regular wrenches too soon too soon too soon you see that they have a tool for everything it's like oh the belt tension loosener thingy well bmw sells a tool for that for 300 but you can also try to use this wrench anyway
John:
You can do simple repairs to your car with simple tools.
John:
But as the repairs get more invasive, you can't.
John:
You have to buy more expensive tools.
John:
And the tools get very expensive.
John:
This is setting aside the weird DRME stuff of, like, you need a weird computer thing to interface to it.
John:
I'm saying just, like, purely mechanical repairs.
John:
Think of even cars before the age of computers in cars.
John:
Eventually, you needed expensive tools.
John:
As it turns out, a lot of the things that you have to replace in phones, it's fairly invasive because they're pretty well sealed and they're really small and miniaturized and it's tightly packed.
John:
And so to do almost anything, there's no equivalent of changing the oil on your phone, right?
John:
There's no easy job.
John:
There's no changing the brake pads on the phone.
John:
You have to crack the thing open and they're not put together in a straightforward way, especially Apple's ones, because they're made as small as they could possibly be and they're made to be waterproof.
John:
and all this other stuff, right?
John:
So I feel like these super expensive, big, heavy tools is telling you this is probably not a thing you should be doing because this is the way to do it.
John:
Like, it's telling you, like, you shouldn't try to do this with just, like, a flathead screwdriver and, you know, some sweat, right?
John:
That's the wrong way to do it.
John:
You'll break something.
John:
It won't work well.
John:
Like, just you probably could pull it off, but here's the right way to do it.
John:
And by the way, as you can see, Quinn, when he uses these tools...
John:
Kind of like a mechanic.
John:
If we give you a hojillion dollar snap-on set of tools, right?
John:
And a lift and all sorts of, and, you know, an impact driver and all, like all the things, just we give you a full garage filled with like $70,000 worth of tools.
John:
now can you repair the car and you're like well i've never used these tools before i don't know it takes skill to use the tools if we give you the same tools that apple uses to repair your batteries it doesn't mean suddenly you know how to use them it doesn't mean suddenly you have the experience to know exactly how you know what happens if you put it in the lead a little heater thing and it still doesn't want to come apart because it's winter time the phone was a little bit colder than you thought and how much you can put it back in and how hard you have to pull on this connector to disconnect it but without like ripping it and where you have to be careful to pull vertically up where it's not in it like
John:
That comes from experience.
John:
The same way it comes from experience of knowing how to rebuild an engine or something or do an invasive repair on a car.
John:
Just because you have the professional expensive tools doesn't mean you know how to do that.
John:
Again, sending the message, are you sure this is a thing you want to be doing?
John:
And so you could say, well, Apple's being a jerk because they should just sell me the battery and say good luck.
John:
Or they should just sell me the battery and a $20 iFixit toolkit with a couple of plastic spudgers in it and say good luck.
John:
That's all I want from Apple.
John:
And they're being jerks by requiring me to rent these tools for $50.
John:
I don't want these tools.
John:
I can, you know, I can replace my head gasket with just a flathead screwdriver and a 10 millimeter wrench.
John:
I don't need all this fancy stuff, right?
John:
I can drop the engine by just putting logs under my car.
John:
I don't need I don't need an engine lift.
John:
I don't need anything.
John:
Just just sell me the genuine Apple battery and give me permission to do it.
John:
And I'll figure it out myself.
John:
And Apple doesn't do that.
John:
They want to give you the official tool.
John:
So that's the only way I can look at this and say that Apple is not giving people what they wanted for the people who wanted to just say, look, just give me the official Apple part and I'll figure it out on my own.
John:
But I think those people would be very unsuccessful and sad.
John:
They're also probably going to be unsuccessful with the fancy tools.
John:
But in both cases, I feel like if there's not a thing that you do for a living over and over and over again, it's probably not something you should try to do.
John:
But on the flip side of that is Apple's giving you the tools that uses to do itself.
John:
And it's giving them to you at what must be a loss because the $50 you pay to rent these tools surely doesn't even cover the shipping because it's like in Quinn's case, it was 97 pounds of tools in these giant Pelican cases, which themselves probably cost $500, right?
John:
And then who knows how much the tools cost.
John:
It's not like the tools are particularly fancy, but they're all custom.
John:
It's not like you can buy one of these tools anywhere.
John:
It's something that was built just for Apple.
John:
It's the exact specifications of whatever specific phone you're repairing.
John:
So if you say I'm repairing an iPhone mini, they will send you tools with little sleds and pieces exactly size to the iPad mini down to every nuance of where the, you know, where the antenna lines are on the outside of it, where all the buttons are, like the tools are accustomed to the specific thing you're repairing.
John:
There is no way that Apple is not losing money allowing you to rent these tools for $50 for seven days or whatever it is.
John:
And they put like a $1,200 hold on your credit card for the tools.
John:
There is no way that $1,200 covers the tools.
John:
It probably barely covers the Pelican cases, right?
John:
So in one respect, they're like...
John:
Like Apple is letting you do this and people are getting the cost of like, well, at this cost, I pay this much for the battery and I pay this much for the tool rental.
John:
Right.
John:
And of course, the labor is free because I do that myself.
John:
But at that rate, it's practically the same price as bring it to an Apple store.
John:
And then Apple will be like, yes.
John:
And then if you do it in an Apple store, people who change your battery on your phone are people who have changed 100 phone batteries.
John:
How many phone batteries have you changed?
John:
How successful do you think you will be changing your very first iPhone battery on your iPhone with the same tools Apple has as the person who's changed 100 of them?
John:
I'd probably rather the person who changed 100 of them change my battery rather than trying to do it myself.
John:
Because the people who do it themselves are like, I'm going to save money and time.
John:
You're not going to really save money, and I don't think you're going to save time either.
John:
Again, if they just sold you the battery and gave you a flathead screwdriver and said, go nuts, you're just going to break your phone.
John:
That's just what's going to happen.
John:
So I don't know what else Apple could have done here.
John:
If Apple just sold you the part and said, we want no part of this, but you can buy an official battery from us, it seems like that's the type of thing that could be abused.
John:
But within the bounds of the way we know Apple wants to act like they want everything to be good and proper, I think they did the best they possibly could with this program.
John:
But in the end, the program is basically like a teaching tool to teach people this is not something you want to do.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I think both sides are right in certain ways.
Marco:
It is very clear that Apple wants you, if you're going to tackle a self-service repair, they want you to do it using the best tools that you can and using their tools.
Marco:
And they're basically treating you like a temporary authorized service provider just for yourself.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
On the other hand, it is very clear that they are trying on some level to make this look like as ridiculous a process as possible.
Marco:
I don't think that's necessarily 100% malicious.
Marco:
It's also not 0% malicious.
LAUGHTER
Marco:
But I think the most likely explanation for how incredibly over-the-top this situation is where they're mailing you 80 pounds of gear, clearly, as John said, clearly at a loss.
Marco:
There's no way they're making money from any part of this.
Marco:
They're clearly losing money each time they do this.
Marco:
What I suspect is probably the case is that when they designed all these phones that are out there that are being able to be serviced by this program,
Marco:
I don't think most of them were designed with a self-service program in mind.
Marco:
Now, I don't know why they created the self-service program or when they decided to do it or if it was in response to certain threats of legislation or whatever it might have been.
John:
It almost seems like it's something that you would implement to be compliant with like a lawsuit settlement.
John:
Like you have to have a program like this.
John:
Therefore, you can say, OK, we have one.
John:
No one should use it, but it exists.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
I think that is very likely.
Marco:
It's very likely that this was created for some reason other than we designed this from the start to be an economical thing that we could have people do in their homes by having us send them a kit or whatever.
Marco:
Now, I think it's a very reasonable thing to expect that you should be able to self-service certain things because, yes, while this kit demonstrates you should probably just bring it to an Apple store and have them do it for $60 or whatever, that's assuming you're in a place where you can easily get to an Apple store.
Marco:
And so I think the main value of this is going to be in places or situations where you can't get to an Apple store or any authorized reseller.
Marco:
And there's lots of places around the world where that's the case.
John:
Yeah, but in those places, like you're still stuck with getting a very big shipment that may be a pain for you to ship back.
John:
So that's one thing.
John:
And the second thing is you're still then stuck with a bunch of tools that you don't know how to use.
John:
Again, with the big fancy garage scenario, if you give me $100,000 worth of tools, I can't suddenly repair a car.
John:
I've never used these tools.
John:
They're complicated tools.
John:
I don't know what to do with them exactly.
John:
And even with the best instructions, fumbling through my very first, you know, invasive surgery on a phone or a car is not going to go well.
John:
So I like no matter how far you are from an Apple store, like mail the phone out.
John:
Put the phone in the mail.
John:
It's easier than putting two giant Pelican cases in the mail.
Casey:
Well, yes, but if you have one and only phone, what are you going to do?
Casey:
Put the phone in the mail for a week?
John:
You're just going to break your one and only phone when you get the tools, and then what are you going to do?
John:
You won't even be able to call Apple to tell them that you broke the phone with it.
John:
I mean, this gets back to what Marco was saying with like, okay, so these phones are clearly not designed.
John:
But the self-repair, not designed, I don't think the Emperor had Chewy's in mind when she designed her phone.
John:
I messed up that line.
John:
It's close.
John:
I was close.
John:
I just watched the movie.
John:
I don't think the Emperor had Wookiees in mind when they designed her.
John:
I think that's pretty close.
John:
Yeah, these phones weren't designed for self-repair.
John:
And famously, Apple has been making its products less and less...
John:
let's say less and less modular over time i mean it kind of it started it came to public consciousness with i think the uh what 17 inch power book was that the first one that did not have a first apple laptop that did not have a replaceable battery as in like you could take it out and put another one in not like replaceable as in you open up the guts but like uh i don't know a removable battery
John:
um the battery was just sealed up inside and there was quite a bit of outrage about that what if i'm on a long plane flight and i need a second battery i can't i have a dead battery in here i can't take it out and put in a fresh battery it used to be i could buy three batteries and keep them in my carry-on bag and one battery died i would take out that battery and slap in another one i'd be good to go and now you've just destroyed that made these laptops much worse right um
John:
Fast forward many years, and all of Apple's laptops have sealed in batteries.
John:
And of course, Apple's phones have sealed in batteries, which wasn't always the case before.
John:
You used to be able to get a feature phone or a dumb phone or whatever we call them these days.
John:
You used to be able to swap the batteries.
John:
Sometimes you had to open up the whole back of the case, but you could take out a battery and put in a fresh one.
John:
Yourself at home, it was pretty easy to do.
John:
Right.
John:
And so there have been a couple of projects to say, wouldn't it be cool if a modern smartphone was like that?
John:
I had to look to Google for a bunch of these because I didn't remember how long ago they were or what they were called.
John:
There is a bunch of them.
John:
We'll put a link in the show notes to a CNET article that actually has a roundup of seven modular phones.
John:
Apparently, a lot of people have made a run at this idea.
John:
uh because it's an intriguing idea imagine you know picture an iphone but imagine like it was modular where the back was a bunch of little lego pieces and you could pick which camera you want and how much ssd space and how big the battery is and a bunch of different modules that you could slap on the back so you could a you could sort of build your own phone like you build your own pc well i care a lot about the camera so i'm gonna be expensive one but i'm willing to sacrifice uh storage so i'll buy a small storage module but i want a really big battery so i'm gonna buy the big battery module and
John:
you know or apple used to do this on its laptops or you could get a laptop or you could either you'd had two removable slots and you could either put two batteries in one battery on the left one battery on the right or you could just put a battery on the left and the floppy drive on the right depending if you needed a floppy drive or not like a modular smartphone the one people may remember is project aura from google that was in 2014 i never would have picked that i thought it was you know more recent than that but apparently it was a while ago
John:
And the reason you haven't heard most of these is because I don't think any of them shipped.
John:
I may be wrong.
John:
I know someone did ship a modular laptop and I forget the name of that one, but not sure any of these modular phones shipped.
John:
And so this idea is it's very attractive.
John:
Because then you wouldn't need a self-repair kit.
John:
Like if you could just snap the battery out, like a little Lego piece off the back of your phone, A, you could change batteries real easily during the day, which would be a game changer for people with giant battery cases and backup batteries and recharging their phone every fair moment.
John:
But if you could just like slap off a little piece of your phone and slap on another one, that would be amazing.
John:
And B, you really would let people sort of customize and hot rod their phones and specify them according to their priorities.
John:
Yeah.
John:
If someone, all they care about is battery, they'd fill the whole back of their thing with battery and, you know, even take the camera slot thing.
John:
It's like, I don't need a camera.
John:
I just need battery all day because I'm on a construction site or whatever.
John:
You know, like you could really customize these things to the extent allowed by the size of the form factor, obviously.
John:
But then people could choose to have a really thick phone or really thin phone and so on and so forth.
John:
But of course, the reason this doesn't exist is because doing that, this is kind of a naked robotic core thing.
John:
every time you put like little cases around each one of these components, each one of the Lego blicks bricks has to have its own little case.
John:
And then the cases have to have little connectors and the connectors have to have little places where the connectors connect.
John:
And then those have to be seated into something that needs to be a superstructure that adds layers and layers and layers and millimeters and millimeters and millimeters to the phone.
John:
And it becomes, uh,
John:
thicker heavier more complicated probably delicate because these connectors need to be small just because it has to fit in a smartphone and problem prone hard to make waterproof now you get dorito crumbs underneath the little thing you try to slap in your ssd and the dorito crumb gets in the way and it short something out and it's just way more complicated than a completely sealed thing like our smartphones right but hey it would get rid of this whole self-repair thing
John:
So this hasn't worked.
John:
And I think it was either Dithering or the talk show, one of those Gruber vehicles, where they were discussing these projects and saying, yeah, that's never going to happen.
John:
So people keep trying.
John:
It sounds like a good idea, but it's just not going to happen.
John:
And you know, when someone says never, what happens?
John:
The ghost of Infiniti Online comes out and says, did you say never?
John:
You can't say never.
John:
Never say never.
John:
What it made me think of is this.
John:
So, yeah, we don't have the tech to do this now.
John:
It's a cool idea.
John:
People have tried.
John:
Kudos for trying.
John:
But we're not quite there yet.
John:
We just we don't have the tech for it.
John:
Right.
John:
But phones are not going to phones as a as a thing, like you hold it in your hand and it's got a screen on it and you look at it and stuff.
John:
There are limits on phones.
John:
A phone the size of, you know, like the head of a pin is useless.
John:
You can't see anything.
John:
The screen's too small.
John:
A phone the size of a dinner menu, not particularly useful, even if it folds, right?
John:
There is a limit to handheld phone size things.
John:
So to the extent that we continue to have things that we hold in our hands, the size and form factor of phone has reasonable limits.
John:
At a certain point, kind of like we always talk about with like audio and to a lesser extent video,
John:
We get to the point where technology is sufficient to max out the form factor.
John:
So we can make audio and distribute audio over the internet that is good enough for everybody's human ears.
John:
Human ears are not changing particularly quickly.
John:
Technology has caught up with them.
John:
If you want to, you can stream lossless, extremely high bit rate, totally saturates the ability of any human ear over the internet in real time.
John:
We can do that.
John:
We did it, right?
John:
Everything else after that, there's no point in making that any better, right?
John:
If that fits within a particular constraint, it's fine, right?
John:
At a certain point, the technology to make a phone-sized thing with sufficient computing and display prowess to be a phone-sized thing...
John:
We'll have enough headroom to support crap like this, to support a superstructure, a little shell around everything, all the little connectors, because the parts of the phone will have gotten small enough that we have that excess capacity to do that.
John:
This has already happened with existing phones with us having the excess capacity to, you know, make the batteries bigger because the computer parts are smaller.
John:
If you look at like the original iPhone or any, any, or like a Palm device or whatever, it used to be that the computer parts of it were way bigger compared to the rest of it.
John:
But now if you open up an iPhone, it's just basically a battery in there and like the tiniest little logic boards you could ever possibly imagine.
John:
And that trend continues over time, right?
John:
So at a certain point,
John:
You will be able to make a compromised phone where you sacrifice absolute maximum computing power or whatever, because you can always make a better phone without all this crap, but you will be able to sacrifice it and still have an okay, decent phone while being modular.
John:
like that day will eventually come i'm not saying it'll come where it's like you have infinite computing you don't have to worry but you always have to worry about there'll always be a trade-off but eventually the trade-off becomes so small that no one cares anymore because what you're constrained by is a phone size thing this gets back to the blog post i did a while ago about like making the imac thinner and people were all pissy about it little did they know but that we would get the 24 inch imac that's so insanely thin anyway
John:
They were complaining, like, what's the point in making the edges thinner?
John:
You got rid of my optical drive.
John:
People don't remember.
John:
This was a controversy.
John:
But anyway, people were mad that they got rid of the optical drive, and in exchange, the edge of the iMac was a little bit thinner.
John:
It's like, who cares about that?
John:
I never see the edge.
John:
Why not make it thicker and put the optical drive in there?
John:
People got over it.
John:
But in that article when I was writing about it, it's like, you think you don't care about thinner, but that's because you're thinking about from one generation to the next.
John:
But...
John:
If you don't say like, well, I don't care that this iMac is a little bit thinner, but instead, fast forward 10 or 15 years.
John:
And, you know, I use the phone example.
John:
I don't care about the iPhones getting thinner.
John:
It's done.
John:
Don't make them thicker.
John:
So the battery lasts longer.
John:
It's OK, fine.
John:
But if you don't continue to pursue making your phones thinner, you'll never get to the next sort of step change, which is imagine that your iPhone was as thin as a credit card.
John:
now i mean you may say that that sounds incredibly uncomfortable i wouldn't hold that but if you drop a credit card on the ground are you afraid it's going to crack no of course not it flutters to the ground like a leaf it does not crack when it hits the ground can you imagine a phone that you could drop with the same confidence that it's not going to break that you can drop a credit card but you will never get to a phone that thin if you don't pursue thinness ever if you just say this is as thick as it has to be right
John:
So same thing with the modular phone.
John:
If you say, well, we're never going to be able to do that, right?
John:
At a certain point, if you can make that credit card thin phone, then you can make a iPhone 13 thickness thing that is modular.
John:
And that may seem like a clunky battleship where you're sacrificing all like, oh, I like my credit card thin phone.
John:
Why would I want that big battleship?
John:
Ah, but it's modular.
John:
Like at a certain point, you have enough overhead because...
John:
You're, you know, as thin as you can make it, you're not going to make it the size of a pinky nail because that's a useless phone, right?
John:
The phone size stays, you know, whatever size we decide is okay for phones, that's going to stay more or less constant as long as we hold things in our hands because too small is crappy and too big is crappy.
John:
and within that size of all the components continue to shrink we will have sort of a peace dividend to spend and i would love to see that peace dividend spent on making a modular phone sometime in the next few decades when we can do this because a modular phone solves a lot of problems for customers
John:
And I think it solves a lot of problems for manufacturers because if you could swap parts that easily too, Apple can sell you parts.
John:
Apple can sell you parts upgrades.
John:
You can customize them.
John:
Like, I mean, leave it to Apple to find a way to make this more expensive instead of less because consumers are like, great, now I'll be able to save money by only buying the parts I want.
John:
And Apple's like, great, now I'll be able to upcharge for every little part of this thing.
John:
Like, I believe in Apple's ability.
John:
I mean, look at the Mac Pro.
John:
It's not, they made a modular Mac and is it the cheapest one where you can customize the parts?
John:
No, it's the opposite, right?
John:
I don't think this will hurt Apple's ability to make money.
John:
But boy, it will be so much easier for everyone involved if you could swap pieces out really easily.
John:
And we're not going to be able to do that until we have until the guts of a phone size device are so small that we have so much room left.
John:
We don't know what to do with it.
Casey:
Yeah, this whole modular phone idea, it sounds very clever and interesting, but yeah, in reality, I can see a thousand and one ways why it would be no fun, at least today, not on an infinite timescale.
John:
I mean, obviously we'll probably all be dead, but maybe your grandchildren, when they have their hyper podcast, they'll be talking about the latest modular phone.
Yeah.
Marco:
holo podcast sorry not hyper podcast holo podcast thanks to our sponsors this week memberful collide and new relic and thanks to our members who support us directly you can join atp.fm slash join we will talk to you next week
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M
Casey:
So I would like to posit that or propose that there are some very special episodes in the John Syracuse of podcasting universe, in the pantheon of John Syracuse of podcasting.
Casey:
One of them is the video game controllers on Hypercritical.
Casey:
One of them is the windows of Syracuse County on this very program.
Casey:
But the most recent was preparing the way for your refrigerator on Reconcilable Differences.
Casey:
We are not going to have one of those episodes today.
Casey:
I'm not trying to say that.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
You are preparing the way once again, and I am on pins and needles.
Casey:
I want to know, what are you up to, John?
John:
I'm really preparing the way, but also... Are you sure?
John:
Yeah, I'll explain why.
John:
I mean, what I'm doing is a weird thing that I haven't ever really done before, but I'll explain why.
John:
But anyway, before I jump to that, I first want to do a brief bit of Casey-style whining about my Mac Studio.
John:
All right!
John:
Patented TM Casey-style whining.
John:
Um...
John:
I did order a Mac Studio at some point in the past.
John:
I waited too long to order it.
John:
I was punished by having to wait a long time for it to arrive.
John:
Poor me, right?
John:
So my Mac Studio did arrive recently.
John:
It's sitting in a box at my feet right now.
John:
My keyboard that came with it, the little Touch ID extended keyboard, that came real quick.
John:
I just put that aside because I don't really have any computers I can use it with.
John:
And then the Mac Studio finally came.
John:
And remember, this is going to be my wife's replacement computer.
John:
She's replacing her 5K iMac.
John:
But I haven't even opened the Mac Studio box yet.
John:
I probably should just to make sure that what I expect to be in there is in there.
John:
Yeah, and to make sure it works.
John:
Yeah, well, so here's the problem.
John:
Well...
John:
We don't have a monitor to hook it up to like for her to use.
John:
Right.
John:
Obviously, I have old monitors in the attic.
John:
I have my PlayStation monitor that I could use just test to see that it boots or whatever, which I should probably do.
John:
Right.
John:
But we don't like she can't set it up and use it as her computer because we don't have I mean, we could, but she would be downgrading.
John:
I could give her a non retina 27 inch monitor.
John:
I have one of those.
John:
And I think that's really her only choice.
John:
Don't think I have a lot of other monitor options for her, but I don't think she would like that.
John:
And she certainly wouldn't like, even if she could have my PlayStation 5 monitor, which she can't because I use it to play games, she wouldn't want to downgrade to 4K.
John:
Like it's a smaller screen, right?
John:
So she just continues to use her 5K iMac, which is protesting by making noises, right?
John:
Because it knows it's going out.
John:
um but in theory the apple studio display that was supposed to come with this was going to you know follow it shortly behind by maybe a week but then i got a message from apple i got well first i got an email from apple that said i forget what it said it was like a bunch of our friends got it was like apologizing for the delay something it was like something non-committal just saying like hey
John:
We're sorry about the delay.
John:
We'll let you know what the deal with your thing is ASAP.
John:
And that was followed a couple days later by, oh, by the way, remember that thing that you ordered that we said was coming in this date?
John:
Well, now it's really coming in this date.
John:
So what they did was they moved my studio display shipping date from...
John:
the very large range of May 9th through the 23rd.
John:
And they said, yeah, forget about that.
John:
Actually, it's going to be June 22nd through the 29th, which if Apple hits its window will be approximately three and a half months after I ordered it, which I think is a record for anything I've ever ordered from Apple, not pre-ordered.
John:
I didn't pre-order the Apple studio display.
John:
I ordered the Apple studio display, ostensibly a product that Apple was then selling to customers at the time.
John:
And I ordered it and now it's going to come three and a half months.
Marco:
after i did that so that's not great is this the first time that an apple product like where you were given a date and it said it would definitely arrive in this range and then later on that date was pushed back i've never seen that happen i mean it's it doesn't it happens rarely but i think this is the longest date i've ever personally gotten of like from the time that you order then it said this is when it will arrive that's a big gap and i'm
John:
I mean, I could probably pull a Marco here and like go to an Apple store and like, you know, stalk them and say, can I get a studio display?
John:
Do you have any in stock or whatever?
John:
Because there's no options on the display.
John:
It's just, it is what it is.
John:
But anyway, I just wanted to, you know, let people know that I do have a Mac studio and yeah, I should probably just open it up and make sure it works and boot it or whatever.
John:
Plug it into your TV or something, you know, just put it, plug it into something.
Yeah.
John:
yeah so what else i have with this i have a uh i have the same thing that stephen hack got a 3d printed uh like sort of cage or sling where you can attach a mac studio to the underside of your desk did you see his pictures of his setup oh yeah it looks really good actually yeah it was basically like a big bracket that just you you stick it below your desk
John:
I mentioned in the past thing where you could buy a thing from OWC or something.
John:
It was really made to hold two Mac minis, but it actually perfectly fit a Mac Studio as well because Apple doesn't have any new ideas how to make computers.
John:
It's just a series of rounded rectangles of various heights.
John:
But this one is custom made exactly for the Mac Studio, so it exactly fits it.
John:
And so if the fan annoys me, I'm ready to bolt that thing to the bottom of my life's desk and give her more desk space back.
John:
So we'll see how that goes.
John:
So I have those pieces here.
John:
Speaking of preparing the way it's like, I've got this computer set up.
John:
My original intention was let the boxes build up until they all arrive.
John:
And then ta-da, here's your new setup, right?
John:
And then start with it on the desk.
John:
And if the fan is too annoying, put it underneath, right?
John:
But now it seems like I'll have to open up the studio and hook it up to the 4K monitor and make sure it boots and then just shut it down and put it back in the box and wait some minute.
John:
Anyway.
John:
so there's that that's not ideal but at some point i will be able to give some kind of judgment on the mac studio fans but not this week because it's still in the box uh but what casey was referring to another form of like sort of things arriving in my house and me getting ready to do stuff with them is the long-awaited replacement of my television
John:
Maybe not that long away in this program, but I wrecked this.
John:
Merlin has been haranguing me for many years now that I need to get a new TV before I die.
John:
For those who don't know my long TV history, I'm super into TV tech.
John:
I talk about it on the show a lot.
John:
Always waiting for the right time to buy a TV.
John:
Uh, the last television I bought was one of the very best plasma TVs you could buy right before they stopped making plasma TVs entirely.
John:
And that TV is 1080p.
John:
So that's how old my TV is.
John:
I have a 1080p plasma television.
John:
It was and is a very good 1080p plasma television, but it is 1080p plasma television nonetheless.
John:
No HDR, no 4K.
John:
You know, it is what it is.
John:
It doesn't have any blooming, though.
John:
That's nice.
John:
So I was waiting for, you know, better TV tech to come, and then OLED came, but then OLED had a bunch of problems, and it had burn-in, and brightness wasn't that great, and I was just waiting for the next
John:
leap in panel tech and they came out with like the fancier panels that get a little bit brighter and some people put a heatsink on the back of them like yeah i don't know about that and then they came out with the quantum dot oleds and like this seems like the tech that i'm waiting for it has fewer compromises assuming they're pretty good and not too expensive i'm going to get one so that remains my plan the embargo just lifted i think like two days ago on the tv i want to buy the sony a95k
John:
um so people have reviews out of it now and i'm watching the reviews still can't order it it's supposed to go on sale in june um and then kind of like the mac studio who knows when i'll actually be able to get one delivered to my home because i mean again we didn't say this but like the mac studio business and the studio display and this is all covid supply chain stuff i'm sure because apple is very good at building products and shipping them to you and it's not like they're selling 700 million mac studios
John:
It's just, you know, it's hard to make new products and ship them to people.
John:
I assume that will also be true of this new fancy television.
John:
But in theory, when this TV comes out in June, I'm going to buy it.
John:
So why am I talking about it now?
John:
Well, so the refrigerator preparing the way is like, oh, I have to do a bunch of stuff to my home to get ready for the refrigerator that I ordered to be able to arrive and be placed into my home.
John:
which sounds like it's not that involved, but feel free to listen to that episode to see exactly how involved it is.
John:
But that's not what the deal is for the TV.
John:
The TV, there's the part of the project that Casey's doing now with Fiber, like the researching part of the project, which...
John:
You know, as as the story goes, which I've been continuously doing since like 2013 or whatever.
John:
And I got my last plasma TV.
John:
Right.
John:
I'm always doing that part of the project.
John:
That is an ongoing project.
John:
I have a running Talio.
John:
If I had to buy things today, here's what I would buy.
John:
all right the depressing thing about that part of the project the research part is that over the past year or two it hasn't changed i did one last pass like a couple weeks ago to say let me revisit this because i have all you know all the things i need to get and i need to get a lot of things because yeah you got to get the tv right but nothing in my setup works with 4k my receiver doesn't work with 4k i don't know a 4k blu-ray player like just there's no you know my hdmi cables are not rated just
John:
expect high enough to be able to support hdmi 2.1 like i need all new stuff right so i gotta research all that and i looked at it again and i'm like it's been months since i looked at this is there anything better i think i where did i complain about the blu-ray players was it on here on rectus i forget rectus all right but anyway uh if you don't know blu-ray players like as in things you buy that you stick a plastic disc into everyone's just decided they're not making them anymore
John:
Not that they're not making them.
John:
You can go buy one in a store.
John:
In fact, they're incredibly inexpensive, but they're not making new ones.
John:
They're like, we have a Blu-ray player.
John:
The last Blu-ray player we made was in 2017.
John:
We're just going to sell that 2017 model basically forever because it's done.
John:
There's nothing new we need to add for it.
John:
And so if you look at the very fanciest, best Blu-ray player from Panasonic or Sony or whatever, it's the same one they were selling a couple of years ago.
John:
Like, yeah, it's fine.
John:
We don't need to make a new one.
John:
And that doesn't happen with computers or, for that matter, televisions.
John:
Every year, new televisions come out.
John:
They may look similar to the old ones and use a similar panel, but every year they make a new one that's slightly better than the old one.
John:
But Blu-ray players?
John:
No, we don't do that anymore.
Marco:
So when I was researching Blu-ray players, it's like... I should send you mine.
Marco:
I have this, like, incredible Oppo HDR Blu-ray player.
John:
Oppo doesn't even make Blu-ray players.
Marco:
I know, but it's a really nice one.
John:
They stopped making them because it's like, you know, it's not even worth our time to make.
John:
They were one of the best makers that had all these fancy features and stuff like that.
John:
So they just stopped making them.
John:
And the problem with that is since they stopped making them, new standards came out.
John:
Like your thing doesn't do HDR 10 plus probably because HDR 10 plus didn't exist when it was made.
John:
i know it does hdr but it probably does whatever the first version it probably does hdr 10 right or like or you're going to find one that does hdr 10 hdr 10 plus and also dolby vision right like it's hard to find ones that that work with all the latest specs because people just stopped making them a couple years ago because there's no i guess they decided it's not a big enough market so now you can find a blu-ray player of like 75 like like they're so cheap right
John:
But they don't support all these fancy standards.
John:
And if they don't make new ones and a new standard comes out, they're not going to support it because this is the same model for me.
John:
Anyway.
John:
So, yeah.
John:
Blu-ray player I found.
John:
I said, is there a better Blu-ray player available?
John:
No.
John:
There's not.
John:
So the research is, like, stabilized, right?
John:
Receiver.
John:
I need a receiver that does 4K, right?
John:
That does HDMI 2.1, 4K, 120 hertz.
John:
Like...
John:
there was there was this bug in the firmware of the first round of ones that supported this and they they all couldn't do 4k 120 which was sad so like well the next year's model they'll fix that but there basically was no next year's model this is like it's mostly because of covid like i was waiting for them to fix this in the next year's model and next year came and they just kept selling the same ones with the same bugs in them it's like what the hell they're not going to make new receivers anymore a couple of receiver companies went bankrupt and their businesses were bought by other people or whatever and
John:
So, yeah, so when I did my receiver research, like the last round of this I did several months ago, I had two possibilities.
John:
The leading contender was out of stock then.
John:
And I'm like, well, I'm not going to buy now any.
John:
Probably like six months from now it'll be in stock.
John:
Nope.
John:
Still out of stock.
John:
Six months ago I was looking for a thing and it was not available anywhere.
John:
Today, still not available.
John:
This is the current model of a thing.
John:
Like you just can't buy it.
John:
again it's probably supply chain also that model turned out had a really big fan in it so i had a a backup choice that didn't have a fan that had similar features and i did research on that is there anything better available nope what you researched a couple minutes ago exactly the same right
John:
uh and then tv stand why do i need a tv stand this is a long sad story but basically i have a very narrow piece of furniture that needs to put my televisions on if the television has a central stand fine if the television has little feeties at the way at the edges of the tv does not work for me because the edges of my tv are wider than the piece of furniture and for years decades who knows how long hd tvs had central stands and
John:
and then as soon as i was in the market to buy a television they all said nope we're putting the feet at the edges and so the new fancy sony one that i want feet that span the entire thing in fact there's even they even put a picture in a manual that says don't put this television on a piece of furniture that's not as wide as a tv because it will fall down and break and it's got this hilarious picture of the tv falling over and like lightning bolts coming for whatever right so i have to buy a third party stand right you can all these things are like arm mountable or whatever and you can buy just a stand that has the same mounting hardware on it or whatever
John:
So that's all the stuff that I need.
John:
Uh, and I've done all the research for it and the TV is probably coming out soon.
John:
And the normal thing for me to do would be wait for the reviews to come out to actually confirm for my trusted reviewers that this TV as advertised actually is worth buying and is actually really good.
John:
Right.
John:
And then after I see the reviews, order all the stuff, have it all arrive, tear off my old setup, put in my new one.
John:
But the reason I didn't employ that strategy this time is I'm making, I thought I was just making another pass on my stuff.
John:
Let me just make another pass on all my things.
John:
Let me do catch up on the research and get depressed that nothing has changed, right?
John:
And when I did that pass, I'm like, the main thing was like my main receiver choice not being available.
John:
I'm like, really?
John:
That's still out of stock?
John:
And what I thought to myself is, all the old rules don't apply.
John:
Don't assume that if something's out of stock, it'll be in stock later.
John:
Don't assume if you can buy something today, you'll be able to buy it next month.
John:
So I said, this other receiver, like my backup choice, I should just buy that now.
John:
Because what if I wait until June when the TV is available and
John:
And they said, oh, sorry, out of stock.
John:
And they're all gone.
Casey:
That's a good call.
John:
And then it's like, well, when are they going to make another one?
John:
It's like, I don't know.
John:
Wait till next year or something.
John:
So I just started buying things.
John:
I'm buying things for a TV I don't have.
John:
I bought the TV stand.
John:
Not that I really love this TV stand, but I spent a long time looking at a million different crappy TV stands, and I got the least crappy one, which is still crappy, mind you.
John:
I wish I could have a central stand.
John:
My central stand in my plasma is beautiful.
John:
But no, so I got my crappy stand.
John:
I got my receiver and my Blu-ray player.
John:
And my receiver is from like a year, two years ago.
John:
My Blu-ray player is like three or four years ago.
John:
And I ordered these things and they're sitting in my house.
John:
I half assembled the TV stand because I can't assemble the other part of it because it attaches to the back of the TV.
John:
The receiver is sitting in the box.
John:
The Blu-ray player is not sitting in the box.
John:
We've got two in a second.
John:
but I don't even have a TV yet.
John:
But for all, you know, all the people complaining that I, you know, I'm never going to buy a TV or whatever.
John:
Well, now I bought all the stuff for the TV.
John:
So now I feel like I'm pretty committed.
John:
I feel like I'm going to buy a TV.
John:
Otherwise, I mean, this stuff's probably going to be outside its return window by the time I, you know, decide to buy a TV or not.
John:
So,
John:
that is happening and the the other sort of side project i had on this aside from you know the research project the casey part of the project where i just do the research that and like i said casey with you talking about you doing the spreadsheet with like the uh different prices of the various setups i feel like this is the project just making these spreadsheets and doing comparisons you can make some graphs and you can do a presentation and i feel like that's the project you don't actually have to buy anything your house is fine it may end up being that that's the case you may
John:
It sounds like it's going to be more work than the installation and certainly more time.
John:
And same thing with me.
John:
If you add up the time I've cumulatively spent watching reviews of televisions and researching stuff, it is way more time than the time it's going to take to install this stuff.
John:
But one of the things I learned in my research is this Blu-ray player, the one I decided to get that had the least worst set of features and the least worst age of all the other stuff...
John:
i did by the way so oppo's gone right but there's also like this french company that people say it's kind of like the new oppo and they have this weird i don't even know what the brand it is it's all super expensive stuff and it looks kind of like oppo maybe they bought some of the assets of oppo but like its interface was so janky looking i just couldn't do it and i don't know anyway i i bought a panasonic blu-ray player just because it's you know it's fine um
John:
but everyone said that they got it like oh the fan is super loud and annoying right and you know me and fans like like my first my receiver has a fan in it which just i was lucky the backup receiver didn't so you know the one with the fan wasn't in stock so i bought the one without a fan so i'm fine i'm like the blu-ray player has a fan and granted i use my playstation 3 as my blu-ray player now which is incredibly loud yeah surely this is gonna be surely this is gonna be quieter than that but still like when i get an old new setup i want it to be all you know smooth and south but luckily
John:
In my research of, like, you know, I always want to see the inside of these devices, see what the guts look like.
John:
You find these forums where people are, like, cracking their, you know, hardware open either to solve a problem or to, you know, update something or whatever.
John:
And in this case, I found a picture of the inside of the Panasonic Blu-ray player showing the fan because someone had a little project where they replaced the fan with one of those quiet PC fans, right?
John:
You know, by, like, a little... I forget the name.
Marco:
Not to a...
John:
I don't think that was the brand, but it was a similar like sort of PC enthusiast brand.
John:
And so somebody did this project and they posted it on a web bulletin board.
John:
One of the greatest things on the Internet that everyone should continue to use.
John:
All the AV nerds are on literal web bulletin boards, just like you remember.
John:
Right.
John:
And they said, here's what I did.
John:
And it's a bunch of pictures like here are the parts I bought.
John:
Here's the process.
John:
I open the thing up.
John:
I took this thing out.
John:
I bought this little connector and with, you know, mostly with like links to go buy the same things.
John:
And if not links, then with part numbers that I could find.
John:
So maybe like three or four months ago, I ordered all those parts again, thinking, well, these, these parts are cheap and I don't know if these links are still going to be good.
John:
And I don't know if these SKUs are still going to exist.
John:
So I purchased all the parts that were listed just to have them, and they were sitting on a shelf for a while, and it's mostly like the fan.
John:
The connector needed to connect that fan to the motherboard of the Blu-ray player, which is different than the connector the thing comes with.
John:
I think that's about it.
John:
And so now I have the Blu-ray player.
John:
And so while I'm waiting for the TV to be available to purchase, I'm like, oh, now here's a fun little electronics project.
John:
I can take this brand new Panasonic Blu-ray player that just arrived and immediately crack the thing open, yank out the fan and put in the new one.
John:
And so I did that project this weekend.
John:
You know, I did open the thing up, which was a bit of a challenge.
John:
Like I'm opening it up.
John:
I'm like, oh, it's got just plain old Phillips head screws.
John:
How hard could it be to open a Blu-ray player?
John:
But of course, everything has to be put together in a weird way these days.
John:
But luckily, and I should have done this before.
John:
Luckily, the person who wrote the Web Bolton board post had a little sentence or two about how to take it apart.
John:
I'm like, thank you.
John:
Thank you for saving me from trying to figure it out.
John:
Because you undo the screws and then it still doesn't come apart.
John:
And you're like...
John:
does this slide out or is that part of this or whatever anyway eventually figured it out open the thing up without breaking anything which is you know a good start i removed the existing fan i did but actually before i did this i plugged it into the wall to hear what the fan sounded like like is this actually noisy or should i just not even bother with this right so i plugged it in turned it on put a disc in it did all the things
John:
as soon as you plug it in it does that thing where it cranks it probably does this just to start the fan but it cranks this fan up to like max speed for a second goes like that right and then it settles back down to its idle speed and when it does that you can hear that if this fan was going
John:
anywhere sort of above like the midpoint of its speed it would be not just not particularly loud but like annoying because it's a very small fan small diameter fans this is probably the problem with the max studio as well small diameter fans make an annoying noise and have to spin faster to move the same amount of air and this is a small thing because as you can imagine a blu-ray player is very sort of slim so it's got a very small diameter fan i don't know how many millimeters but it's small all right and so i heard what it sounded like oh i'm like okay i can see how someone who has a very quiet setup could hear this fan and it would be annoying
John:
Still way quieter than my PS3, but I can hear how it would be annoying.
John:
So I'm like, okay, I'm gonna do this project.
John:
And the good thing about this project is you take the old fan out and it's not damaged.
John:
It has a connector on the motherboard.
John:
It's got a little like two or three pin connector.
John:
You just take it out.
John:
So worst case scenario, if I botch this project, assuming I don't destroy the Blu-ray pair, I can just put the original fan back in.
John:
So I take the fan out.
John:
But the new fan that I have to put in, it's like a PC fan and it comes with a PC connector.
John:
But then I bought the other connector separately.
John:
So now I have to cut off the PC connector and then sort of connect the new connector by soldering together the wire.
John:
So I got like, believe it or not, I did not have a functioning soldering iron in the house because my dad's ancient one, I don't even know where I did it.
John:
It's probably broken by now anyway.
John:
So I bought myself like the world's cheapest soldering iron.
John:
Oh my God.
John:
And I bought what I hoped would be lead-free solder, but it wasn't.
John:
Great.
John:
And then I got to reuse my soldering skills.
John:
I was thinking about this when I was looking at all the instructions that come with it or whatever.
John:
I guess people didn't think about lead when we were, because another thing I saw recently, like the Gen X is the most lead poison generation.
John:
You know how much soldering I did with lead filled solder as a kid, inhaling the lead fumes from it.
John:
I just, that couldn't have helped me at all.
John:
I don't know how many IQ points I left from, from doing soldering.
Marco:
So actually wait, if anybody knows, I'm curious, um, because you know, my wife works with a lot of solder for stained glass creation and, um,
Marco:
she and i raise this point of like hey is breathing in all this lead a bit of a problem and she did some research and i believe the conclusion i'd love to hear if anybody knows for sure i believe the conclusion was actually the lead is not being vaporized like the temperature is not enough to actually you know make the lead become airborne um but please let me know if that is uh incorrect
John:
I mean, as they say, the chat room, the flux is in the use with the lead is not that great.
John:
But the main problem is you're handling it like it's getting all of your fingers and everything.
John:
Right.
John:
And so you have to wash your hands and make sure you're not touching food that you then eat like it's not.
Marco:
And to be clear, like and she's really she wears gloves and she's working in like under this ventilation fan thing.
Marco:
So like, you know, all that's pretty well covered.
Marco:
But yeah, I certainly I would love to know what the risks actually are if anybody knows.
John:
and we talked about that when with like apple getting lead-free solder and all its things and the challenge is lead-free solder is not as good in terms of performing the job that solder is supposed to perform yeah she tried it found the same thing out yeah and so apple had to like apple apple did do this they're like it's gonna suck for us but we're gonna figure out a way to without making our products unreliable to use lead-free solder so kudos for apple for doing that i was hoping that i was gonna get lead-free solder because i'm just soldering three wires together so who cares but i didn't i got the lead kind and anyway
John:
So I did some soldering.
John:
I soldered together these wires that the, well, they didn't mention the person who did this, like that the connector has a much thinner wire than the fan.
John:
So I'm, you know, the connector wires are like little tiny angel hairs.
John:
I don't know what gauge they were, but they were very thin.
John:
So I'm soldering these very thin multi-strand wires to these slightly thicker multi-strand wires, very delicately soldering them together.
John:
the cute little soldering kit that i got extremely inexpensive this is one of those no name like brand amazon crap things or whatever it's just it's hilarious what they give you like they give you like a little stand to put the siren in and they give you a little sponge to like dampen it off and the sponge is like the thinnest most insubstantial thing that could technically be called a sponge it's like who manufactures it was it was like as thin as a piece of paper i kid you not like imagine a sponge as thin as a piece of paper when it's dry
Marco:
hilarious like it was like a doll set anyway I can't believe like how we're just sorry for the brief derail here but like we had you know this like one of those leaky shower ones because I guess when the plumbers put it back it's the outdoor shower and so in the winter you got to take it take the whole thing down so it doesn't freeze and break
Marco:
Um, and the, the plumbers when they put it back or when they took down at some point lost a little gasket that goes into it.
Marco:
So getting a plumber to come to your house out here is, is not easy or fast.
Marco:
Uh, and certainly not, not inexpensive when it does happen.
Marco:
And so Tiff decided, let me try to fix this myself.
Marco:
And so she goes on Amazon and orders, you know, you can't just get a gasket for the, we also can't tell.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So she ended up getting this like case of like a huge assortment of rubber gaskets for like $11.
Marco:
I have no idea.
Marco:
There's so much super cheap stuff on Amazon.
Marco:
In one way, it's nice in the sense that if you need some kind of special tool to do something or some kind of home repair or something, you no longer have to rely on some professional who's a gatekeeper to all the special tools.
Marco:
You can just go on Amazon and order your own special tool for no money, basically, and it'll be at your house in a couple of days.
Marco:
On the other hand,
Marco:
If you want high quality tools, they're increasingly difficult to find because they decreasingly exist.
Marco:
The entire middle and upper end of the market has been gutted because everyone just goes on Amazon or whatever and buys whatever is cheapest when they need something.
Marco:
And so there's very little market for high quality anything anymore.
John:
You have to know the right brand.
John:
Like for hand tools, you have to – I mentioned Snap-On before.
John:
There's a couple of like German brands you have to know.
John:
For scissors, you have to know the weird Japanese brands that like make the good scissors.
John:
And they're out there.
John:
But for – and I'm sure there's an equivalent for soldering iron.
John:
But I didn't do that.
John:
I got the cheap one.
John:
And the nice thing about the cheap one is – so it's this little adorable kit that comes with all sorts of stuff.
John:
um it came with a little tiny baggie of shrink tubing right uh heat shrink um that's nice stuff or whatever so i don't have to buy that separately as well you know it came with like a it came with this hilarious thing that they call a wire stripper that honestly i don't know what it really is luckily i had wire strippers but it tries to give you everything you'll need but i was happy to get the little baggie of heat shrink tubing because i don't want to order a separate because to your point it's like you can order like three pieces of that you have to order a bag of 5 000 right right so
John:
I had that experience.
John:
I was trying to, for one of my son's electronics projects, buying like a bunch of electronics components.
John:
So I needed like a five, five, five timer, but you can't get one of those.
John:
You got to buy, you know, seven of them.
John:
And we had to buy a breadboard and you can't buy one of those.
John:
You have to get a pack of four breadboards.
John:
And I wanted to buy a bunch of little wires.
John:
You can get one wire.
John:
You got to get a giant package.
John:
I needed like two capacitors.
John:
Well, here's a set of 500 capacitors in all different sizes.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So we have a lot of excess electronic components.
John:
But anyway, I did this, did this surgery, connected everything together.
John:
Beautiful solder joints, heat shrink tubing.
John:
I didn't have a heat gun and it didn't come with one, but I just used like a, you know, butane lighter to do that.
John:
Like the old days use a match or whatever.
John:
Uh, beautiful job.
John:
I plug it in, hook it up, bring it over, bring it over to the outlet to plug it in, to see how it goes.
John:
Uh, it gets plugged in.
John:
I turn it on and the fan doesn't spin.
John:
oh no what did i do well my first mistake my first mistake was and this is what happens when you do you have a project that you've like looked at too long right i found this blog post like a year ago and then like a few months after that i bought all the pieces and then when i was going to do it today it's like well i've seen this post a million times i bought the pieces i know exactly what i'm doing i don't need to reread the instructions right
John:
But as soon as I saw that fan not spin, suddenly my brain said, hey, dummy, remember when you read the instructions for the 17th time and you noted for the 17th time that there was an instruction that pins one and three were switched?
John:
Oh, you didn't do that, did you?
John:
I just connected the red wire to the red wire, the white wire to the white wire, and the black wire to the black wire.
John:
And that should work because that pins one and three are switched on this.
John:
I'm like, oh, no, I don't have to undo these solders.
John:
I did.
John:
I spent all this time, you know, making them all precious and delicate and beautiful.
John:
But then, you know, this is we're having a tiny bit of experience dealing with electronic connectors coming.
John:
It's like, well, pins, you know, connectors that go into like little, you know, plastic clip on things that go onto motherboards.
John:
You know how those work.
John:
It's a piece of plastic and there's a bunch of bent pieces of metal that slide into them.
John:
You can usually remove the pins and move them around and stick them back in.
John:
without breaking the connector.
John:
And so I did that with some very pointy, very, very pointy tweezers that came with the stupid soldering kit, lifted the little piece of plastic, slid out pin one, lifted the other little piece of plastic, slid out pin three, swapped them, shoved them back in, pins one and three swapped, no resoldering needed.
John:
I was so excited.
John:
I'm like, ah, I've solved my problem.
John:
Didn't have to resolder.
John:
It was my own stupid fault.
John:
But anyway, so then I plug it back in, plug it back into the wall, turn it on,
John:
The fan kind of feebly spins.
John:
It doesn't look too good.
John:
I looked at the voltage on it and the amps and everything was the same as the existing fan.
John:
And I had tried the fan with like an iron ball battery beforehand and it was super quiet, but like it's feebly spinning.
John:
And you know what else?
John:
It's making a terrible noise.
John:
Oh, God.
John:
What the hell?
John:
You're the quiet fan.
John:
I tried you before outside of the box.
John:
You weren't making noise.
John:
And I was like, well, maybe the problem was that when I screwed it in, am I bending the case on the fan and it's rubbing on the edges or something?
John:
So I unscrewed it and it's just like...
John:
at very low speeds and at certain orientations this fan makes a terrible noise and i feel like it's just not getting enough voltage because there's probably variable voltage going to the thing and though the fan is right there's like a start voltage and a regular voltage i don't know you know i
John:
I think the star voltage was the same as existing fan, but either way, whatever, whatever stuff was coming through the wires, the Blu-ray player was putting out was putting this fan into a speed where it was kind of like noisy and crappy.
John:
But the worst thing is if you stop the fan with your finger, cause I still have the whole case.
John:
So if you stop the fan with your finger, it does not start again.
John:
oh that's bad yep yeah and so I'm thinking that the person who did this post I you know kudos to them thanks for the instructions and everything but I'm wondering if they're saying it's so much quieter now it's like maybe it's because your fan isn't spinning it's really quiet when the fan doesn't spin at all I bet
John:
So that was very disappointing, and I was reminded of the phrase, you know, the medical, you know, cliche, the surgery was a success, but the patient died.
John:
I feel like that's what happened here.
John:
The surgery was a success.
John:
I accomplished what I intended to do going in there, but the patient died.
John:
So out came the supposedly quiet fan, and back went the old fan, and I will just...
John:
Live with the fact that it is slightly noisier than apparently the whole internet wants, but for as far as I'm concerned, it's way quieter than the PS3 was, so I think I'll be fine.
John:
So, yeah.
John:
And now I put everything back in the box.
John:
So, am I preparing the way?
John:
Not really.
John:
I have a bunch of boxes with crap in it.
John:
uh ready to go still no monitor for yeah i have no monitor i have no tv i have a half built i have a half built stand i have a receiver in a box i have a blu-ray player in a box i have a keyboard i have a bunch of hdmi cables a bunch of fancy hdmi 2.1 48 gigabits blah blah blah blah by the way buying those on amazon is quite an adventure trying to find ones that are not scams or whatever it's like
John:
There's this whole certification program where you can scan this little QR code with an app that will tell you if it's really certified, blah, blah, blah.
John:
But I feel like it's kind of like extra virgin olive oil where what it says on the package doesn't really matter because who knows what you're getting.
John:
I'll let you know how that goes once I get everything hooked up.
John:
But I'm aided by the fact that I don't plan to connect my PS5 to this TV.
John:
So honestly, 4K 120 hertz doesn't really matter that much.
John:
But I do want to have a setup that in theory could support it.
John:
if i ever decided to do that like if i wanted to carry my ps5 over there or when the ps5 slim comes out i put the big ps5 in that room and use it for like the next uh uncharted style game that comes out which i do which i would want to play on a tv but but yeah i'm kind of on this in-between phase when the time does come i should probably take pictures of it just to show you the nightmare that it's going to be removing all my av equipment and putting in new stuff but for now it's all in boxes waiting patiently hopefully not growing mold
Casey:
It's an adventure, John.
Casey:
This is one heck of an adventure.
John:
I'm excited about it.
John:
I'm excited about all this new equipment I got.
John:
I'm just sad that I can't use any of it yet.
Casey:
Oh, man.
Casey:
I mean, there's nothing stopping you from plugging in the Blu-ray player or the receiver, right?
John:
It's a 4K Blu-ray player.
John:
I don't have a 4K TV.
Casey:
A little down sample.
John:
I don't have any 4K Blu-rays.
John:
Well, they are.
John:
I mean, you could start buying those now, though.
John:
I will.
John:
Like, I have a bunch.
John:
As you can imagine, I have a list of ones.
John:
Actually, no, it's not true.
John:
I do have the 4K Godfather whatever thing that came out.
John:
I did pre-buy that.
John:
Sorry.
John:
Yeah.
John:
i don't know how many times i bought the godfather movies but yeah whatever the most recent cool 4k uh blu-ray thing there's only certain movies that i care enough to get on blu-ray because a lot of most of the stuff i own in streaming versions or whatever but you know streaming is not as high a bit rate as blu-ray so the handful of movies that i really really really care about i want to have on plastic discs at uh
John:
the highest possible quality the godfather definitely qualifies as do a handful of other movies so i will eventually get them um i mostly just wanted to have a blu-ray player that's not a ps3 so i can use my non-4k blu-rays and all that other good stuff and then i honestly don't understand why you wouldn't go ahead and plug in the receiver and the blu-ray player get used to it live he'll use what you've got well i see that's the thing like plugging in the receiver like you don't understand like
John:
doing that process of taking my existing receiver out and putting this new one in, that's like heart surgery.
John:
Like I'm not going to do that for funsies.
John:
Like I need to, what I need to do is tear everything to the ground, remove everything, go back there, find like in Merlin's, what Merlin always says, find all the cables behind my TV that have not been connected to anything for several years, right?
Marco:
Pull them all out, start over.
John:
Get all that stuff out of there.
John:
Vacuum, clean everything out, remove all of the cable ties and all the routing and everything and just,
John:
start fresh and i want to do that when i have all the pieces i don't want to do like piecemeal because really by pulling that receiver out would be a nightmare especially since my a lot of my speaker cables they don't they're they're sized to fit let's say there is little coils of slack i did give myself whatever they call like a little coil of extra slack or whatever but that coil of slack is neatly coiled with ties around it so really there isn't is there slack then there's no slack if it's tied up it's
John:
And it's so hard to get behind there.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So I don't want to even want to think about touching that setup until I have all this stuff available.
John:
I just really hope that the TV is what it's supposed to be like the reviews so far so good.
John:
But, you know, I want to see like the final reviews from my trusted reviewers who like to bring it through all the testing things.
John:
And if it looks good and then I can that I can actually order it and it will arrive.
John:
And it's not like this Apple Studio display where it's going to arrive in three months or something.
Casey:
The struggle is real.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
This is why you don't replace your stuff for 10 years.
John:
Yeah, but I am excited about it because this TV is going to be pretty sweet.
John:
The stand is going to be pretty ugly.
John:
I'll definitely send you pictures of it.
John:
The only one good thing about the stand is...
John:
It's like a vertical piece of metal.
John:
Like I try to get this simple as possible.
John:
This is a big vertical piece of metal, but it's wide enough that I can hide cables behind it.
John:
My current stand on my Panasonic Plasma is this beautiful, shiny, solid piece of like forged aluminum in a V shape.
John:
I've complained about this before.
John:
And it's like a V of aluminum.
John:
And you have to hide all the HDMI cables along the little edges of the V, right?
John:
There's no thing blocking the cable.
John:
So you can't just be like, ah, the tables come down from the TV.
John:
You don't have to see them.
John:
Every cable needs to be like, like in a cartoon where a cartoon character will hide behind like a rake or a shovel or something.
John:
Well, they'll contort their body to fit the exact shape of the skinny thing.
John:
All of my cables are...
John:
pinned to the legs of this v one you know some cables coming down one side of the v some cables coming down the other and then quickly you know snaking behind the tv so they're not visible and it'll be nice to have something to actually block the cable so i can just stick a bunch of them on the back of a piece of metal and you'll never see them
Casey:
Or you could just not care about cable management.
John:
No, that's not possible.
John:
And speaking of cable management, I almost, this is the thing I almost did like this weekend.
John:
I was like, when the shipping delay came, why don't, this is getting into Casey's own, why don't I just get a 4K monitor to tide me over?
John:
I'll get a 4K monitor.
John:
Here's my thinking.
John:
I'll get a 4K monitor.
John:
My wife can use the 4K monitor on her desk with her new Mac Studio, and she'll grumble a little bit, but she'll know that her 5K Apple Studio display is coming soon, and the whole deal would be I'd get a fancy 4K monitor for my PlayStation 5.
John:
I'd move my existing 4K monitor on my PlayStation 5 to be my wife's 4K monitor, and then when the Apple Studio came, I would take the lesser 4K monitor and let my son use it with the PS4 Pro upstairs and swap out his PS4 for PS4 Pro.
John:
So I have this whole plan about how I can excuse getting a 4K monitor.
John:
And then I refresh my 4K monitor research and realize the choices have not changed since last year.
John:
And there's no good HDR 4K monitor available for a reasonable amount of money.
John:
And the non-HDR ones are only so-so.
John:
And my top pick had a very skinny aluminum stand that you can't hide cables behind.
John:
The Eve Spectrum has this really elegant Apple-like stand that's a single vertical skinny stick.
John:
It's like the thickness of a pencil made of like solid aluminum.
John:
Very elegant looking.
John:
It's like, where am I supposed to put the cables?
John:
There's a power cable.
John:
There's an HDMI cable.
John:
I can't fit.
John:
Like they would have to be like stacked behind each other exactly.
John:
And there's no clips or anything for it either.
John:
So in every review, it's like this beautiful, elegant stand.
John:
There's two giant thick scraggly wires just randomly coming down from behind the screen.
John:
Poorly thought out.
John:
Always give people a place to hide their cables.