189: The Museum of Pristine Apple Hardware
29 Sep 2016Casey goes to the Apple Store, Marco touches buttons, and John stays home.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- OWC iMac RAM update
- Headphone jack remote issue: solved!
- Assistive Touch in East Asia
- iCloud backups on iOS 10 now include passwords?
- Bluetooth and volume control (PDF)
- Why are there three audio chips in the iPhone 7? (You won't believe what we found! The full story at 11.)
- McLaren, technology, F1, and the F1
- John is hypercritical, but is he a hypocrite?
- macOS Sierra
- iPhone 7 Plus "Fauxkeh" Portrait Mode
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
- Post-show: Museums and pocket policies
Sponsored by:
Chapters
- Pre-show: Messing with dials
- #marcowasright
- iPhone 7 home button
- Misc. small follow-up
- The third iPhone 7 audio chip
- Assistive Touch follow-up
- iCloud backups now include passwords?
- Sponsor: TrackR (code ATP)
- Neutral: McLaren is awesome
- Pristine Jet Black iPhones
- Sponsor: Fracture
- macOS Sierra first impressions
- Sponsor: Igloo
- iPhone 7 Plus Portrait mode
- Ending theme
- Post-show: The museum
Pre-show: Messing with dials
⏹️ ▶️ John Let me just take a pause here so I can adjust my level some more. I keep messing with my dials. It’s killing me. All right, this is sounding better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why are you doing that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to yourself? It’s the worst. It’s two dials. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John volume dial and a mix dial. And like every time I think I have you at the right volume, then I talk and either
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t hear myself or I’m blasting my eardrums out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the rule of audio stuff is once you get it working, don’t touch it. Never touch
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t touch the dials, but somebody or something touched my dials and now I have
⏹️ ▶️ John to. And the worst thing about these dials is they’re tiny little dials don’t even have markings
⏹️ ▶️ John on them. So even if I did like take a picture of them like there’s no there’s not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah my next suggestion was gonna be like I actually earlier tonight I yesterday I had to change one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the settings on my audio interface so today as I was setting up for the show tonight I went and looked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at my picture that I keep of it set up correctly and I adjusted the knob that I had changed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco earlier to match the photo of my correct setup. It’s something I I highly recommend if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the ability to have an audio interface where it has knobs with lines on them to show you where they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, so you can actually basically save and restore state in the most manual way possible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you remember what this microphone looks like, the one I’m using. It has these tiny little, almost like a little,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re horizontal, they’re inside the device and only the little curved part of them is peeking out, and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no markings on them. It’s no good. The only thing I take pictures of in that way is how cables are connected in the back
⏹️ ▶️ John of my AV setup and how things are arranged on shelves. I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that all the time. Okay, the cables make sense. The shelves, like, first of all, how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often do things get moved on your shelves that this would even be a problem? And second of all, who cares?
⏹️ ▶️ John Surprisingly often enough, I mean, like what I recently did was flipped one of my shelves, I had these big wooden shelves that were like bowing and I wanted to flip
⏹️ ▶️ John it over, right? And so I have to take a shot of the shelf so I know where everything goes, then
⏹️ ▶️ John take everything off, then flip it over, and then put everything back on.
#marcowasright
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I went to the Apple store twice actually, once to buy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some dongles just to have them, even though I haven’t really needed them yet for $10 a pop, why not buy a few? So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I bought three to sprinkle around the house slash cars. And I briefly looked at the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey matte black, and I don’t remember if this was before or after the show, I want to say it was before the last show. And it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty, but I prefer the aesthetics of, I’m sorry, the jet black. It was pretty, but I prefer the aesthetics
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the matte black. So the jet black, definitely a good looking phone, prefer the matte. But then I think it was during
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show that you guys, or at least you, Marco, and I were talking about it and you asked me or somebody asked me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it felt any tackier and tackier in the sense of like stickier, if you will.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it occurred to me, I didn’t really pay much attention to that, which is kind of crazy. I don’t know why I didn’t think about it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I went back to the Apple store and spent about 45 seconds there. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I grabbed the one Jet Black demo unit that they have.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I tell you what, based on feel, there is no question that is the one to get. Without a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shadow of a doubt, it feels so much better tackiness-wise, stickiness-wise,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you will, than the Matte Black. I still think the Matte Black looks better, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, night and day, the Jet Black feels so much better. And you are absolutely right. So hashtag Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, I finally got one. I’m wrong about so many other things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, you can’t win them all.
iPhone 7 home button
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sort of kind of speaking of last we spoke You seemed like you were starting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to warm to the home button Have you completely warm to it? Are you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back to giving it the cold shoulder? Where are you standing with the home button?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s fine. You know, it’s What when I when I go back and use an old phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, it feels old. It’s like thanks a lot Apple you ruined buttons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But so I suppose that means I like it. It is a little bit annoying that it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has become that it took something that was reliable and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and made it just a little bit less than reliable and and that’s kind of I mean this is you know the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the motto of so many other things or like that this is like the the modus operandi of like so much of the progress we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made in these areas recently where Like yeah, you made the old thing better in a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of ways, but but you know worse in in some other You know smaller maybe or less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco important to most people way, but anyway overall I like it But I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I I do find it unfortunate that it has become a little bit less reliable than a regular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you find yourself running into that often because I definitely have had a couple of time well, maybe more than a couple but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Every once in a while I will find that I think I’ve hit the button and the phone does not agree But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty darn rare it but from the way you’re talking it sounds like it’s somewhat common for you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean I just hit the button a lot You know to me like this is one of the problems I have with the force touch trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on on the max is that The force touch trackpad took something you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you were one of the people who clicked in the bottom area of the trackpad And I recognize the force touch is better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you have you can click anywhere on the surface But if you if you were one of the people who came along the old track where the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buttons used to be below it so So you’d hit the button with your thumb and you’d point with your index finger or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or usually your middle finger I guess. And then when they removed the buttons, they made the whole thing hinge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that way so that you could basically leave your hand the same way it always was. You could leave your thumb
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pushing down on the bottom area where the buttons used to be and have that click and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still move with your index or middle finger. So if you were one of those people who came along,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the old button felt great because you were already clicking always in the bottom area anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you’re one of those people, which of course I am because we’re all ancient, comparably to people who like you snapchat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff, so like if you’re one of those people the old one was incredibly reliable. Like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the idea that you would ever, assuming you don’t use touch to click, the idea that you would ever like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidentally click on something on the trackpad or or think you’re clicking but not have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually clicked, that literally would never happen with the old ones. And with force touch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trackpads that sometimes happens. Similarly with the new home button on the phones like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really hard to accidentally hit the home button on the old phones like if you mean to hit it you’ll hit it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and with this one like you can occasionally accidentally push it where you meant to maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just touch it or you meant to you know grip it a certain way or you can accidentally triple click
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you meant to double click or single click or vice versa you can accidentally trigger Siri if you didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to you can actually this is frequent one accidentally trigger reachability by, you know, by if you think you’re pushing it or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think you’re holding it or think you’re double pressing it, but you actually just double contact it. I guess whatever the ability thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. So basically they took something that again was a mechanically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generally reliable thing and made it do the wrong thing maybe 1% of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time. For me, it’s very frustrating when an input device doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco respond 100% of the time correctly because we use input devices so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much on these computers and and we use them to command them to do things that if like if you hit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you hit the keyboard if you hit the same key over and over again and every like one out of 40
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times like the H throws out a J instead like you’re the well this this is the worst keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever like why why would you tolerate that right I feel like I have a very very high standard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for how I expect my input devices to be how reliable I expect them to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it does annoy me when we make progress, but at the cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that reliability that we used to have and anything less than a hundred percent reliability for me is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco annoying and it does not that’s not to say that I won’t just deal with it like when the new laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come out forever from now whenever the whenever the new laptops come out I’m probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna buy one even though it’s almost certainly going to have the same force tux track pad we’ve had and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just gonna have to suck it up and deal with it and it’ll be fine just in you know just like I’m probably never going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mention the home button being unreliable a little bit on the iPhone 7. I’m probably never gonna mention it again because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just gonna get used to it and I’ll just be a little bit annoyed whenever it doesn’t work but then just move on with my day right but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are losing something here by making things that were a hundred percent reliable 99% reliable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that that’s all but but overall I’m okay with it. I like the idea that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John never gonna mention it again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah that’s that’s That’s maybe I shouldn’t guarantee that seems very unlikely, but you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just just again just to restate like the the summary here Overall, I like the new button.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do like the Taptic engine a lot overall And and when I when I go back the old one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does feel old so you know they got me right and I’m sold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, it is a little annoying that it can’t be that it can’t be a hundred percent reliable
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t know about this home button because I still haven’t tried it but as for the trackpad I continue to say that you
⏹️ ▶️ John will eventually look back on the mechanical ones and think they’re barbaric and I would add that for most people
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe not you but for most people I’ve seen and myself included using the mechanical one whether it was the button
⏹️ ▶️ John or the one where it didn’t have a button but the whole thing slanted not a hundred percent reliable very frequently
⏹️ ▶️ John attempt to click and not actually click if you’re if you’re not using tap to click happens to me every once in a while
⏹️ ▶️ John I see it to happen to people all the time. So it’s not as… there’s more
⏹️ ▶️ John to the reliability than just like if you successfully actuate the mechanism you
⏹️ ▶️ John will you will do a click. I mean because that’s true of anything. You successfully successfully activate the mechanism
⏹️ ▶️ John on the non-moving button you will successfully get a home button press or whatever. It’s just a question of
⏹️ ▶️ John do people sometimes go for it and fail to do it and the answer for those real buttons is yes. I mean
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe the percentage was different for you but it’s it’s not as if anything is 100% reliable
⏹️ ▶️ John when it comes to translating intention and hand action into like
⏹️ ▶️ John the desired result.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I, I gotta say, I almost never run into problems. Like I said earlier, a couple of times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new home button, because I’ve hit it in such a way that maybe I’ve hit solely the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the quote unquote button itself. And I haven’t had any contact with the ring around it, but very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rarely do I have any problems with the home button. and I cannot remember a time where I’ve had an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unintentional fire or a lack of fire on the Force Touch trackpad. So you must be a trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wizard in a bad way because you are the only one that can find these issues. Well, not the only one,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the only one I’ve heard of that has found these issues. So congrats, I guess?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John really sure where to go from here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, you still don’t have a Force Touch trackpad other than the one you use for podcast editing, right? The Magic
⏹️ ▶️ John Trackpad? That’s right. So I think that’s also influencing you because we have one of those Magic Trackpads too, and I hate trackpads
⏹️ ▶️ John in general, I don’t really like that magic trackpad either, but I think once you get the new laptops that we’re assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John They will someday release and it has the trackpad That’s I think it’s when your real transition is gonna be because I was wondering
⏹️ ▶️ John like why is your opinion of this not getting better? And yet the only thing you’re using is that thing? I find that thing frustrating in that
⏹️ ▶️ John very frequently I’m I’m trying to press anywhere on the thing to make it click and it just doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John it It feels like I’m pressing against a wall that doesn’t move I know it does a little vibration thing and you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it eventually works, but I just it feels so much more awkward to me to
⏹️ ▶️ John press it anywhere in a way that it doesn’t when I use the four star trackpads on the big laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, look, like the the home button turns out after you use it for like a day,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you completely stop noticing it as as a thing that is different, except for when it is the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. But overall, it is really not a substantial problem at all. And in some ways, it’s a benefit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it is not a if you don’t yet have an iPhone seven, the home button change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not a good enough reason to not get one, if that was your only reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven Connelly What I would say, yeah, I mean, I prefer it now. And as we spoke about last episode, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hated it for the first, I don’t know, day or so. And then I’ve quickly come around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and now I freaking love it. And like you said, the little taptic touches that are throughout the OS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like on spinners and things like that, I really, really like them. I think they’re really well done. I’m looking forward to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those little taptic touches kind of proliferating through third-party apps as well. So
Misc. small follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, listener Sid sent me an email, and I think this went only to me earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey today. They had the same weird issue with their iMac,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with their 5K iMac and OWC RAM. And apparently they had gone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back and forth with OWC trying different sticks. And then just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recently they sent an email to me, forwarded an email to me from OWC.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it said a few things, but most interestingly, this is from OWC, we have recently located
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a coding fault in these modules and are currently refreshing our stock in order to rectify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. I don’t know what a coding fault is in terms of RAM, maybe one of you guys do, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems that something genuinely was broken with the RAM and they’ve recognized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it and they’re trying to fix it. My computer had been up, I think 10 or 15-ish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey days before I installed Sierra. It’s been eight days since then. I wouldn’t call that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an absolute victory for my replacement sticks, which I did get from OWC. But certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all signs are pointing to good news. And so I just thought that was kind of interesting. Do you guys have any idea
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what a coding fault would mean in terms of RAM?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, there’s probably some kind of like timing and stuff like, you know, RAM, obviously everything, every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco component in a computer is now way more complicated than it used to be or way more complicated than we think it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like there’s probably, you know, a RAM stick could have firmware for all I know. Who knows? I mean, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, RAM has all these like tight timings and controllers and everything in them. So, you know, it could be it could be lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of things like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. John, you don’t have anything to add, I assume?
⏹️ ▶️ John I got no idea what a coding fault is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. All right. At least I’m not alone. That makes me feel slightly better. All right, moving on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We also got word that from Scott O’Reilly, among other people, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the headphone jack issue that he had reported in 10.00 has been fixed in 10.00.2.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you recall, if you had your, I believe it was only with the dongle, is that right? Or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generally speaking, it was with the dongle. You had some headphones, like perhaps the older earbuds, plugged
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into the lightning to headphone dongle, and you paused something and let it sit for five or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more minutes, then the buttons on the headphones would not allow you to unpause them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or unpause the playback. And so Scott O’Reilly has reported in that this is now fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So good news. Cool. I’m excited about that. Eduardo Pellegrino wrote in to talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to us about how volume works on Bluetooth. So I don’t know, Marco, do you want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to take care of this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, we’ll go over it quickly. Basically, we were discussing in previous episodes about the question of whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bluetooth was re-encoding the audio to be sent over the air between the phone and Bluetooth headsets.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the issues raised if you tried not to re-encode the audio was that we said you probably couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change the volume. Eduardo Pellegrino wrote in to basically tell us that with any modern Bluetooth peripheral, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco digital signal is at full amplitude and the volume control is being applied only at the headset.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The volume level is negotiated between the phone and the headset. There’s all sorts of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco involved in the AVRCP spec. Almost every, in almost every case of modern Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headphones, the signal’s being sent at full volume from the phone and the headphone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco itself is applying the volume reduction or whatever to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that shows you could be sending the AAC more easily, but the important part of the volume thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is we’re talking about how sometimes you can just, like the volume, you control the volume on your phone, it changes on your
⏹️ ▶️ John headphones, that’s actually working in the opposite direction. And that when you do that, it’s the headset
⏹️ ▶️ John and the phone negotiating that when they press the volume buttons on the phone send
⏹️ ▶️ John a signal to the headphones like the phone is controlling the headphone volume the headphones are not controlling the phone volume
⏹️ ▶️ John you know what I mean right like when you press that button you’re actually sending a signal to the headphones to say oh back
⏹️ ▶️ John over at the phone they said they want the volume lower and then the phone the headset the Bluetooth device itself
The third iPhone 7 audio chip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then, we’ve already heard word that there are three digital-to-analog
⏹️ ▶️ Casey converters in the iPhone 7, and we weren’t really sure why. We got some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feedback with a theory. Marco, do you want to talk about this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This was, I think, my favorite thing I heard this week. We got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an email back, and it was from somebody who wanted to remain anonymous, but it seemed like they kind of had this as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco known information, not speculation. there are basically three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio chips in the iPhone 7. And we couldn’t figure out what the thermal was for. And we’re like, well, maybe they’re using it like just for convenience,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for cable routing, whatever else. So this person wrote in to tell us that what it’s actually used for is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Taptic Engine. It seems like it might just behave like a speaker coil. You know, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you have like the coils that move the stuff around inside to make the field vibrate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The commands that the phone is sending to the Taptic Engine, it seems like it’s doing it via
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio signaling. just it’s not a speaker it’s just a vibrating you know weight or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is in there but isn’t that like that that to me that sounds really cool like it’s that’s such a brilliant hack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like does that is that what you guys assume that meant to
⏹️ ▶️ John know that’s what I assume the Taptic Engine always was because it’s basically a speaker without the cone when you have a speaker it’s the thing moving
⏹️ ▶️ John back and forth but there’s no paper cone or whatever moving air so that’s what it always looks like it looks like a big
⏹️ ▶️ John magnet coil of wire type thingy
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah and so if you think about like you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like how how the the phone would drive that, it’s basically sending it like MIDI notes almost. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever you’re feeling, the phone’s going like, ah, ah, ah, ah, and then like, instead of being a cone that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco providing that sound, it’s just vibrating the thing inside at probably like one or two fixed frequencies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just like dealing with the timing and the strength and everything. I think that’s really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I never thought of it that way, but that is super awesome. And is there some difference in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way the Taptic Engine is working that maybe the new one is much better and that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you don’t get that control and that API for the 6S Taptic Engine? Because isn’t that the case that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 6S Taptic Engine you don’t get any control over as a developer but the 7 you do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, basically. Or at least the 6S you have very little control and the 7 you have basically full
⏹️ ▶️ John You should look at the 7 to see if it has an audio thing for
⏹️ ▶️ John the Taptic Engine 2. Maybe it does. Or it could be that the old ones are just basically on-off and the only way you get different
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of vibration themes or sequences is by going on off in different frequencies. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John this one, if you could dig through iOS, maybe you could find like the audio samples that they send to the virtual
⏹️ ▶️ John speaker that is the Taptic Engine rather than just going on off, on off, on off, just send tones or frequencies
⏹️ ▶️ John or sounds. That would be a good jailbreak hack if you could play music through the Taptic Engine and see what it does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey floppy disk performances of the olden days. Oh, that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, but you could like feel a song, you know, you probably at least feel the basic rhythm, you know, because like it basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like a like a fairly imprecise and different output type of speaker.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s pretty cool. I think this is a really cool thing to learn.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m curious to see if they give us any more control over time. I can’t imagine that they would, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey man, would that be neat to be able to do, you know, have some more fine-grained control over it.
Assistive Touch follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AssistiveTouch, so we’ve been talking about this quite a bit and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s been a couple of new theories as to why I guess this is happening. John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you want to talk about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is just a couple that we left out in the last discussion of why assistive touch is so prevalent
⏹️ ▶️ John in East Asia. And one idea was that
⏹️ ▶️ John the parts that are in the iPhones in that region, sort of in the non United
⏹️ ▶️ John States Europe regions are the cruddier parts. Now I can understand
⏹️ ▶️ John why this would be something that happens in like when you’re selling into
⏹️ ▶️ John you know markets that you sell less in, that you make less money in, and if you have parts
⏹️ ▶️ John that are not as good you might sell the cruddier ones into the market where you make less money. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John seem like a thing that Apple would ever do. It seems to me that Apple has a certain quality control procedure
⏹️ ▶️ John and they just apply it to all their products and that’s that but but who knows maybe they know better than I do
⏹️ ▶️ John but this also sounds like one of those things like so many companies have done it that they just assume everybody does it I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John sure if it’s true of Apple but that would explain like you know we our home buttons are worse than yours
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially like I live in Thailand and it’s our home buttons break more than yours do because we get the crappy home
⏹️ ▶️ John buttons and you don’t setting aside that like you know the iPhone 4 was bad for everybody right so
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s one idea. Another idea I heard put forth is, it’s really humid here and
⏹️ ▶️ John humidity destroys our electronics sooner than yours. Like, all this going towards the notion that
⏹️ ▶️ John empirically, home buttons do not last as long in this region of the world,
⏹️ ▶️ John either because they’re getting cheaper parts or because they’re getting the same parts and they get messed up by humidity. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John both of these sound like things that sound plausible, but don’t really,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t really make that much sense to me because I can tell you in the United States, at least we have plenty of humidity. Just ask Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ John We have we have places that have lots of humidity and you don’t hear about people in Louisiana and Georgia
⏹️ ▶️ John having home buttons that fail more often than people in Arizona. Right. So I don’t think that’s it. And the cheaper parts
⏹️ ▶️ John thing only Apple knows for sure. Right. It’s not like they’re going to admit this, but it just doesn’t seem like a thing that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John would do. I think they have, you know, for all their suppliers have quality control standards and they just apply
⏹️ ▶️ John them universally. If they don’t meet the quality standards, they, you know, send them back around and
⏹️ ▶️ John recycle the things and try again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it makes sense.
iCloud backups now include passwords?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we’ve gotten word that in iOS 10, iCloud backups,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or really restores, I guess I should say, now include passwords. Now, if you recall, and I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d first heard this from Marco years ago, but all three of us had recommended that if you’re going to backup your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone, the most reliable or maybe perhaps easiest way to do it is to backup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with iTunes and ensure that you’ve checked the encrypt backups checkbox.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so this password protects your backups, And then because it’s password protected, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feels like, oh, in this case, I guess we can include like wifi passwords and things like that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the backup. If you don’t encrypt your backup, then the backup will not include wifi passwords and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things of that nature, which makes sense. Now, apparently in iOS 10,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iCloud backups and restores now include passwords, which is excellent. I didn’t know that was a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have to learn to read the code of the notes, the show notes. What are the show notes actually say? They don’t say
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 10 iCloud restores now include passwords, right? What does it say? I see a
⏹️ ▶️ John mark at the end of that sentence. iOS 10 iCloud restores now include passwords?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco a question mark at the end
⏹️ ▶️ John because I have heard this as well. None of us have actually confirmed it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve seen a couple of tweets to that effect. I’ve not tried it myself, but in theory,
⏹️ ▶️ John they now include passwords. I was hoping one of you knew for sure if you had done it. But anyway, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, but I’ve heard this independently several different times now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I know. I didn’t go and look it up on Apple site and I haven’t done it myself. So I don’t want to tell people, hey, don’t worry about
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Just use iCloud. We’ll have everything. But it seems like fingers crossed this will be the last update where
⏹️ ▶️ John we where you have to hear the spiel from everybody who is on a tech podcast saying, oh, make sure you do
⏹️ ▶️ John an encrypted iTunes backup. And I like this because I hate iTunes backup. I hate the fact that I connect my
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and have the times it says, oh, fail to connect a device or backup fail for some reason that you can’t control and just reboot everything
⏹️ ▶️ John and cross your fingers. I hate it so much. Really? Yes, it’s the worst.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get a newer Mac because I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John any. This is on
⏹️ ▶️ John the 5k iMac. This is a 5k
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey iMac with an iPhone 6s plus. This is what I’m doing
⏹️ ▶️ John with my wife’s device and my kids devices. It’s completely inscrutable
⏹️ ▶️ John and I kind of know like when it can’t connect to the process on the phone and they’re just messed up you just have to like reboot them both
⏹️ ▶️ John and just get it’s just it’s the worst and half time it fails in the middle for some reason it’s like well I couldn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John it sorry and it’s always after like 20 minutes of incredibly slow transfer over USB 2 speeds from this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I hate it so much. So I’ll be very happy to have this be an iCloud thing that is as
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible as iCloud restore is where it takes forever to your apps to come back and everything. At least in
⏹️ ▶️ John my experience it runs unattended. So I could start the restore and then go to sleep and leave it plugged in and
⏹️ ▶️ John wake up and hopefully it will be done. Whereas now with iTunes it’s like make an attempt, come
⏹️ ▶️ John back in 5, 10, 15 minutes to see if it failed. If it has, do a bunch of rain dances, make another
⏹️ ▶️ John attempt, I really don’t like iTunes interaction with iOS devices at all. Never really liked it and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just getting worse. That’s so weird to me because I almost never have any issues with iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey backups. And I have heard, although I’ve not seen this with my own eyes, I have heard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey numerous people complaining and moaning about how terrible and flaky iCloud backups are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, backups and restores. And I mean, it doesn’t mean you’re wrong. It doesn’t mean I’m right. It’s just surprising that your experience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems to be the opposite of everything I’ve heard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, we have a lot of friends and at least two of the hosts of the show are early adopters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who like to buy things on day one. And on day one, sometimes the iCloud servers get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overloaded or the App Store servers get overloaded and things don’t quite work reliably. And so, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we, day one people, will usually have more reliable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experiences with iTunes backup and restore in that case, because we’re avoiding all those day one server hassles.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whereas John, who buys phones when they’re three to four years old, once he’s really sure that everything is safe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about them, by that point, everything has calmed down with the servers and he doesn’t run into those issues.
⏹️ ▶️ John The main reason I would say for people to, if iOS 10 iCloud restores
⏹️ ▶️ John now have passwords in them, as we think, the main reason to do it is to save SSD space.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because the backups are big. They’re not the full size of your storage, because of various app
⏹️ ▶️ John thinnings and maybe not transferring purchases or whatever. But they’re big enough that if you have a family
⏹️ ▶️ John full of iOS devices, and you have a single Mac with a regular person size SSD, you are wasting a huge
⏹️ ▶️ John amount of your SSD space. Now you’re not wasting right, but you’re using a huge amount of your SSD space for
⏹️ ▶️ John device backups. Say you get a family with a bunch of 128 gig devices, and
⏹️ ▶️ John you back them all up to a single Mac that you said, Oh, I’ll just get the 500 gig SSD,
⏹️ ▶️ John you will use all of your space for iOS device backups. I’m not you know the cloud is not a perfect
⏹️ ▶️ John backup and that cloud can be hosed to and if you really care about the Stuff that’s on your phone have multiple backups so
⏹️ ▶️ John on and so forth But it always annoys me when I run like disk inventory X that ancient program
⏹️ ▶️ John that still works or any other programs that show you like the tree map of your Hard drive with you
⏹️ ▶️ John know area on this little area of the rectangles representing size And I see the giant thing
⏹️ ▶️ John for you know mobile backup or whatever that folder is I think do I need all those backups? How many backups
⏹️ ▶️ John do I have and I just you know you can go to go and iTunes and delete them and thin them Out, but they take up a lot of room. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I will be very happy when I can sort of Allow iCloud to be
⏹️ ▶️ John my main backup for my thing and only backup to my Mac periodically as like a Belt and suspenders
⏹️ ▶️ John type thing like once every few months and only keep one backup not keep not keep like backups
⏹️ ▶️ John You know seven recent backups just one in an emergency because for the most part most of the data that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John on my phone should be elsewhere. All the photos go to PhotoStream, PhotoStream goes to Photos, Photos
⏹️ ▶️ John gets backed up in 17 million places because of my crazy photos and backups, so those photos are fine. Everything else, like
⏹️ ▶️ John notes and stuff like that, is in theory backed up locally on my Mac because they’re syncing to the same accounts and back to multiple Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I feel like I still have multiple backups and I’m totally ready to not waste my SSD space
⏹️ ▶️ John with iTunes backups as soon as I can.
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⏹️ ▶️ John Last week we talked about the rumors of Apple investing in and or buying McLaren and whether we thought
⏹️ ▶️ John that was a good idea or what Apple would get out of it. And we got a lot of feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John about it and I would say the vast majority of the feedback was telling us that we don’t understand what an awesome
⏹️ ▶️ John company McLaren is and that Apple would be happy to have them. common threads there are pointed
⏹️ ▶️ John out is, did you know McLaren has an F1 team? And
⏹️ ▶️ John really technically advanced. And computers and engine control units and telemetry
⏹️ ▶️ John data from all the F1s, like basically the idea that Formula One is a very high
⏹️ ▶️ John tech thing, McLaren is a high tech company, it’s not a bunch of people with greasy overalls slapping together cars,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re a tech company. A second angle on that is, you know, they’re not actually even a car
⏹️ ▶️ John company. They’re basically a technology company, just like Apple, and they happen to make cars. Their manufacturing
⏹️ ▶️ John expertise in terms of pushing the limits on new materials and how to build
⏹️ ▶️ John cars in new ways out of new materials was touted by many people. Other people also pointed
⏹️ ▶️ John out a BMW and their carbon fiber stuff for their electronic cars
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything like that. So in general, and I don’t know if every single one of these emails was coming
⏹️ ▶️ John from like the town in England where they’re based or where are they, in Scotland or England, I don’t even know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, it’s obvious none of us follow F1, so you got us there. We do not
⏹️ ▶️ John follow it, and I think in general it’s not nearly as popular in America, kind of like soccer or football, if you will.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, forgive us, we’re American. Right, we don’t know about F1. I do know a lot about McLaren,
⏹️ ▶️ John though, and most of the things they were saying about carbon fiber and the technology and all that stuff, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s all true, but I still go back to what I said on the last show, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John investment partnership, yeah, totally. There’s a million companies they can invest have partnerships with and there’s certainly things they can get
⏹️ ▶️ John from them and from every other company that they’ve in the audio industry that might have something they could build something
⏹️ ▶️ John for them or whatever but in terms of buying them outright that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a whole other story like I thought of this way it’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John like when I was talking about Nintendo half of it is I think it wouldn’t be a great idea but the other half of it I have to admit is that
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it would be a shame to buy McLaren and not let
⏹️ ▶️ John it it continue to do what it has done for most of my life, which is no, not most of
⏹️ ▶️ John my life, but since the 90s or whatever, like they make supercars, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John I like that they make supercars and I don’t want them to stop doing that, even though that may not be the most important business
⏹️ ▶️ John or their main business or their area of expertise or whatever, you know, whatever aspect you think that is not an important part of their business.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s not interested in selling 200 $300,000 cars, I don’t think, right? Maybe, maybe johnny I will
⏹️ ▶️ John have the Apple car edition that will be expensive made of solid
⏹️ ▶️ John But I don’t want someone to buy McLaren and stop it from doing what it does and I bet the people who
⏹️ ▶️ John like f1 don’t want Apple to buy McLaren and say Yeah, we’re not doing that f1 thing anymore Right if they only
⏹️ ▶️ John want them for their expertise in car telemetry and engine control units and manufacturing stuff then
⏹️ ▶️ John just partner with them But I don’t want them to buy them because I feel like what McLaren is doing does
⏹️ ▶️ John not fit with Apple I can imagine Apple ever wanting to do and so you either buy them
⏹️ ▶️ John and just let them continue to be McLaren Which is weird like a beats kind of thing But it’s not with not as much synergy
⏹️ ▶️ John because beats is closer to Apple’s business than what McLaren does Or you just partner with them
⏹️ ▶️ John So and then and then the other part is that the mass manufacturing a lot of people like they know how to build things They’re great at it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John those supercars are not built in the same way as Toyotas You cannot build hundreds of thousands
⏹️ ▶️ John of cars the way that they build the p1. You just can’t it’s a different technique now It’s great that they’re advancing the state
⏹️ ▶️ John of the art and finding new ways to build things There are a hell of a lot people more people doing things with their hands
⏹️ ▶️ John and when building a McLaren car than there are when building a Honda or Toyota and And
⏹️ ▶️ John many people are like apples need to buy company like that Yes, they can just partner right but that’s but that’s something Apple doesn’t know how
⏹️ ▶️ John to do it They know how to make lots of computers and lots of you know, they know how to help other companies make lots of computers
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they know how to invest in machinery that Foxconn can use to build their computers, but But Foxconn
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t know how to build cars and Apple doesn’t know how to build half the stuff. That’s why they outsource it. So again, if you’re going to outsource or partner
⏹️ ▶️ John and have somebody, one of these, you know, builders, the Magna company, build your stuff fine. But
⏹️ ▶️ John buying outright just doesn’t seem like a good idea. So let McLaren be McLaren is what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Makes sense to me. A lot of people wrote in that very, very enthusiastic about McLaren. A lot of F1 fans
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are also nerds, it seems. Did you know they made a car called the F1? I did. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, I’ve heard it’s very
⏹️ ▶️ John nice. People who have never listened to Neutral and don’t know, like, we don’t know F1, but we know McLaren.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or maybe Marco doesn’t. What?
⏹️ ▶️ John know they made the F1.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know anything about McLaren or F1.
⏹️ ▶️ John never heard of the McLaren F1? Of course
⏹️ ▶️ John Why would I? You’ve never heard of the Millennium Falcon? I mean, that, yeah. It’s the car that did the Decalceron 12 parsecs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That doesn’t even make sense. No, you have heard of the McLaren F1, which is the one that had three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seats and you drove in the center seat. You know what I’m thinking of.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, but that sounds like a terrible car.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was like the greatest car ever made, but you were close.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I mean, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coming from a Ferrari fanboy that the McLaren F1 is the greatest car ever made.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, that’s why I was disappointed in the P1, because that’s why they didn’t make a success for so long. How can
⏹️ ▶️ John you follow that up? Well, the mini-neutral, the McLaren F1 as a supercar
⏹️ ▶️ John made to be, one of its important goals was it was going to be the fastest. Not just the quickest, but the fastest.
⏹️ ▶️ John So top speed was a big deal. They usually don’t do that these days. And Bugatti Veyron did a little
⏹️ ▶️ John top speed stuff as well. But in general, supercars are staying away from the top speed because once you get up into the high 250
⏹️ ▶️ John mile per hour things, it becomes a real aerodynamic and power challenge, which is why the stupid Veyron has this
⏹️ ▶️ John gigantic gasoline sucking engine, 16 cylinder engine in there. But the F1
⏹️ ▶️ John was, it was quick, not as quick as modern cars, obviously, but it was quick, but it had a very high top speed. I think it was up
⏹️ ▶️ John in the 250s. You sat exactly dead center in it, which is something that always annoyed me about like supercars. if
⏹️ ▶️ John this entire car is about performance, why am I sitting off to the left? Right? Like it should be like a
⏹️ ▶️ John race car where you sit in the middle. You did in this one. It looked great. Um, and it was just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was just the epitome of like, let’s make the best car in the world. Like what Apple, not Apple, then you should do some
⏹️ ▶️ John company, some computer companies have done. Let’s make the best X in the world. Like in every
⏹️ ▶️ John possible way, it can be the best in terms of like, let’s say that’s the best performance car. Is it faster than every color of the car?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes. Is it quicker around the track than every other Yes, it’s better looking than every other car. Yes, like it just aim for the
⏹️ ▶️ John top And it was on the top for a really long period of time and the successor the p1
⏹️ ▶️ John is not the same thing. But anyway It’s kind of like the SR 71 of the car
⏹️ ▶️ John world where for a brief moment They made the best car in the world and everyone recognized it and said yep. You
⏹️ ▶️ John did it and that’s why they go for huge amounts of money now, they also had
⏹️ ▶️ John a Unfortunate Tension for killing their owners
⏹️ ▶️ John and are destroying themselves And a hail of carbon fiber because it very rich people get essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John the best car in the world but that’s reputation precedes it that is more car than they can handle and they
⏹️ ▶️ John Go out in a blaze of glory Drive carefully.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See I’m looking at this car and it like McLaren is is is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco company that makes cars that are are exceptionally well regarded by everybody else in the world,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but yet I look at them and just immediately forget about them. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would have asked me before this conversation started to name supercar brands, I would have forgotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about them. They don’t even cross my mind.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they made the F1, which is like the best supercar ever made, right? And then today, they make a line of
⏹️ ▶️ John cars that look like fish, fine. But they’re really good supercars, right? The
⏹️ ▶️ John P1 and the 650 and all the other, like, the old unfortunate name was MP12 4C,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the hell it was. I think that’s right. They have terrible names, but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John good supercars. Like, they’re not bad. They’re right up there with the whole rest of them, right? That’s why when they did
⏹️ ▶️ John like the various car challenges, it was like the P1, the 918, and the LaFerrari, right? They’re right in
⏹️ ▶️ John there. They’re the top three. They’re one of those other cars. And you may think they’re forgettable because the styling
⏹️ ▶️ John is interesting, but the, and the F1 does look a little bit dated, But it’s an old car. It’s from the 90s. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, maybe the problem is just that I don’t really care as much as most car enthusiasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do about supercars. Like to me, a supercar is just like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great, it can go really fast. It is completely impractical for any use ever and costs a billion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dollars. And you drive it 10 miles and it needs a $5,000 clutch. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t really know why I should care about this world.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s just not into supercars. Alright.
Pristine Jet Black iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ John To bring this back to tech topics, I don’t know how Mark was going to edit this. Speaking of my
⏹️ ▶️ John potential pristine jet black iPhone that I was speculating about possibly taking out
⏹️ ▶️ John of the case and then carefully putting in my clean room wearing my Intel bunny suit into
⏹️ ▶️ John a leather case where no part of it that is not exposed to the outside
⏹️ ▶️ John will get damaged if I’m very careful with it in theory, a couple of people made snarky
⏹️ ▶️ John comments like, isn’t it like like getting an iPhone and then never using the home button, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t matter because you’re never going to use the home button. What good is a jet black phone that you keep pristine if you
⏹️ ▶️ John never see the jet black phone because it’s always in a case? And I hope these aren’t long time listeners to the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would hope that people who are long time listeners like you two who are always here know
⏹️ ▶️ John is not analogous. Why is that not a valid analogy in my specific case? We’re saying, oh, John
⏹️ ▶️ John says, you know, you shouldn’t If you never use the home button, it doesn’t matter, but he’s doing the same thing with jet black phone. Why is that not the case?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought that was amazing feedback, and I was disappointed we didn’t think of it during the show. Same here.
⏹️ ▶️ John You guys can’t figure it out. Switch your brains from that mode to the other mode and say, assume that
⏹️ ▶️ John it is not the case, as I can tell you that it’s not. Why?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, with the new home button, it’s irrelevant because it doesn’t move, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, like why is it not the same as my jet black iPhone situation? That’s me specifically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, because there’s a huge difference in effectiveness here. The people who are not using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the home button will actually succeed in their goal. But John, you will not succeed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in not scratching the jet black. It is impossible
⏹️ ▶️ John that I don’t know if that’s the case. We’ll see. But no, no. See what they were trying to say is the absurdity of look, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re never going to use the home button and you’re never going to sell your phone, that was the whole thing. Like I was saying, if you’re not going to resell it, because obviously it retains
⏹️ ▶️ John resale value by not breaking the home button. If you have a pristine home button, maybe your phone is worth more later. So there’s value in that. But if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John never going to resell it and you’re never going to touch it, what the hell do you care if it works? So with Jet Black, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John never gonna see it because you’re always gonna keep it in a case, what the hell do you care if it’s scratched up, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t understand why people don’t know me from now and you two are always making fun of me about this. When I’m done with
⏹️ ▶️ John my phone, I’m not gonna resell it. What’s gonna happen to it? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John go to the Museum of Pristine Apple Hardware and there is value in a Museum of Pristine
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Hardware for the hardware to be pristine. Why do you think I’m protecting it in the case? Not just so I can go to sleep
⏹️ ▶️ John at night thinking it’s safely in its const there. It’s when I’m done with the phone, it’s gonna come out of that case
⏹️ ▶️ John and be a beautiful pristine object along with my other Apple hardware and stuff. Now, you could say,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like many people do, that
⏹️ ▶️ John all that junk in your attic will never be displayed in such a beautiful way, deserving of, but you have to, like, that’s my
⏹️ ▶️ John plan right now. So it has value in my plan, right? Whether it has value in actuality, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can argue with, but it’s not a knowledge of that. Now, if someone’s preserving the home button because they’re never gonna resell it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then when they’re done using the phone, they’re just gonna press that pristine home button once a day for pleasure, then they
⏹️ ▶️ John have a reason to do it as well.
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macOS Sierra first impressions
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we didn’t get any time to talk about it last week, but macOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sierra is out. It’s a thing. And I have installed it on my iMac. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not installed it on my work computer because we got the standard, oh, God, oh, God. coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for months, but we haven’t tested any of our software with it,” message from work. So, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so it’s not on my work machine, but it is on my home machine. And so far, so good. I really like it, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Luke Denny Glowing endorsement from KZ List right there. Jared Polin All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. Are you running it on your iMac, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. Jared Polin Okay. Marco No. Yeah, basically, normally, I have jumped to things like this quickly in the past.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In almost every case I have regretted it because something that I use breaks. Often
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s audio related or related to some kind of hardware driver type of app. People have reported
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issues with Fujitsu ScanSnap software, which actually wouldn’t impact me because I have that running on my Mac mini server.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not on my main computer, but I do have audio running on my main computer. I have external audio devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I edit with Logic. We’ve heard various rumblings from people at Jason Snell that this has had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco occasional problems during the beta period and it might not still be fixed. So basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the question is, and this will probably get into hopefully John’s review of it, but the question for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me is like what’s new in Sierra? What is worth risking things breaking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and dealing with the inevitable instability that almost every point zero release of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS brings? And in iOS, you know, the differences are larger and also I’m an iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developer and so I feel like I need to pay more attention there and use the betas and get my app ready for the betas and everything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On OS X, I never ever run the beta Mac OS on my main
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer. If anything, I run it on my laptop and even then I don’t usually do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So basically, I have to look at the features that are new and I have to say, you know, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco among these features am I just dying to use that will make it worth the period of potential instability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up front for a new OS release? And in Sierra’s case, it’s just not compelling for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The features people are talking about, the changes, the improvements, are just things that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either I wouldn’t really use or that would be nice, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not sure it’s worth it yet. So I’m not saying I’m never going to upgrade. I’m probably going to upgrade within the next couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of weeks, but I kind of just want a point one to come out or just to hear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from people that these issues that were in the betas might be fixed or whatever else. not enough here for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me to be an early adopter of it but I’ll upgrade soon enough. John,
⏹️ ▶️ John what are your thoughts? So I’ve got two incompatible computers. My work computer and my home computer
⏹️ ▶️ John in theory aren’t supported. In practice my home computer runs it fine because I’ve ran
⏹️ ▶️ John the betas all being on a separate drive. I’ve waited long enough to hear
⏹️ ▶️ John if there’s anything disastrous and there wasn’t so I upgraded my wife’s iMac while she’s away. Surprise!
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh jeez! It’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I also control all the backups. So don’t worry if anything was wrong I just would have restored from one of the umpteen backups.
⏹️ ▶️ John I made And it would have been fine, but it’s it’s fine. I did the only
⏹️ ▶️ John scare I’ve gotten so far I don’t even know I can blame us on Sierra because it’s one of those things that occasionally happens
⏹️ ▶️ John Where you get a dialogue asking for a password and you enter the password and you get another dialogue that
⏹️ ▶️ John says like Keychain system could not be found or something like that, you know keychain You’ve got all these different you get
⏹️ ▶️ John your login keychain and system keychain all of this stuff Keychain corruption is like one of the worst things can happen. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John such a pain in the ass. You just, you can wipe it all out and just type in the passwords if you have them someplace else,
⏹️ ▶️ John like in 1Password or whatever, but it’s just so annoying. And you just want it to be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John just go back to working state. So anyway, once I saw that dialogue once, I’m like, nope, that means reboot. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John I rebooted everything and it’s been fine. Which is the worst kind of problem to have. Who knows what it was. Very often when you update
⏹️ ▶️ John the OS, it updates the bundled apps and sometimes they don’t, they have different signatures or whatever don’t look
⏹️ ▶️ John up the same, can’t get access to the same keychain items, they want to be reauthorized. Like this is a thing that I’m kind of used to
⏹️ ▶️ John by now. But other than that, which only happened once, everything else is mostly fine. Also, her
⏹️ ▶️ John computer is the one with the real family iPhoto library. So I wanted to, I wanted it to do its thing
⏹️ ▶️ John with the photo searching so I could actually use that. And so I had, I was motivated enough
⏹️ ▶️ John to upgrade her computer. And like I said, it’s fine. I’m kind of in the same situation as Marco with mine,
⏹️ ▶️ John only actually even worse because I have unsupported computers. In both situations I have to
⏹️ ▶️ John ask, do I want to risk like, you know, oh well
⏹️ ▶️ John if a point update comes out and I run the updater and then it hoses my thing and I got to go through some little dance to get it back because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s unsupported, do I want to deal with that? And what is there in the operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system that makes me feel like I’m missing out essentially? Like if I feel like I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John use something, like today I downloaded a developer build of an application
⏹️ ▶️ John and had the little circle with a line through it on it and I realized oh this must be uh this must
⏹️ ▶️ John be Sierra only that’s the type of thing that makes me go you know what I should upgrade right because I want to be able to run
⏹️ ▶️ John the new software um or the features like if everyone’s like oh picture picture is amazing it’s you
⏹️ ▶️ John know I use it all the time and you know like our tab documents and all these applications didn’t previously support them
⏹️ ▶️ John now magically do because of os uh you know ns document uh features right if I feel like I’m missing
⏹️ ▶️ John out on what everyone else is doing, I probably will bite the bullet. But at home, I’m motivated not to upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ John because I might screw up my audio, you know, like my podcasting setup here. And at work, I’m motivated not to
⏹️ ▶️ John upgrade because in any way that I screw up my work computer is a delay in doing my work, and my work doesn’t go away while
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m futzing with my computer. And it’s not like I can stay at work an extra three hours when I’m wrangling the kids,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though my parents are here. Just, you know, I have to get back. So I don’t know what I’m going to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John I may, I mean, like, I’m not really waiting. Like, I feel like I’m not missing out, missing out, because I, the 5k iMac has it and whenever I do
⏹️ ▶️ John photo stuff I use it like I’m I’m seeing all the features and of course I used all the beta so it’s not a mystery to me and I like don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John what it is but on the other hand I couldn’t give you a review of it at this point because I’m not using it every day on the two
⏹️ ▶️ John main computers that I use my home computer and my work computer I don’t know I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John I might by the time I bite the bullet maybe they’re on their point two or point three or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure I will eventually I’m very bad at resisting these type of things even though I’ve got it on maybe because I have it on the
⏹️ ▶️ John 5k iMac that I’ll see it over there and realize like things are nicer or I just want this thing that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John over there. It’s not over here, even if it’s just like some new feature in the terminal application or something, I’ll probably upgrade, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t done it yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Good talk. No, I mean, I I’ve been using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it at home and I like it. Um, I think the thing that I, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interact with most that I like the most is probably some rudimentary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey support for new messages features like the big emoji, the inline. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have rich content stuff. So if you say paste a tweet and messages, it’ll actually go and expand that tweet for you kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Slack style. I have been using the watch unlock. The first two times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I used it, I had a 50% success rate. Since then, it’s been nearly 100%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey success rate. But that being said, it takes longer than it takes me to type my 10 or 15
⏹️ ▶️ Casey character password, which is a little bit of a bummer. But maybe that’ll get better in the the future if I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really that in that much of a hurry I can certainly just type my password but
⏹️ ▶️ John do you think it’s because you have the old slow watch that’s taking a while or is it just like inherent in the you know like
⏹️ ▶️ John what are you waiting on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s because it’s just trying to figure out if the watch is close enough physically close enough so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably I dug into this or maybe somebody told me about it but I guess it’s doing like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey round trip time of some sort of packet or communication between the watch and the computer to make sure you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are very physically close to it. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco someone was Craig Federighi on the talk show live. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay. So anyway, so point being, it takes a little time for that computation or that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe not the computation, but that round tripping to be computed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m not saying it’s like a CPU intensive thing. It’s just it takes time to send a little bit of data, see how long that takes, wait
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and just wait for it to come back or whatever the mechanism is that’s making this work. Um, but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is fairly reliable, but I haven’t, um, but I, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey haven’t been able to say that it’s much quicker than, than just typing my password.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was one of the features that was making, by the way, before you get off the watch unlock, that was one of the features that was making me think, Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s going to be the one that’s going to make me install it at work because it work. I don’t know if you do this Casey, but in most corporate jobs, they
⏹️ ▶️ John want you to lock your computer whenever you’re not sitting
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in front of it. And I do like just out
⏹️ ▶️ John of habit, like I’ve always locked my computer the second I get up and we have an unfortunate culture
⏹️ ▶️ John at work that is fading a little bit of if you do leave your computer unlocked when you get up you are punished for
⏹️ ▶️ John it by your co-workers who will email everybody something embarrassing from your email account.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that is inappropriate and should not be done and rather you should just remind them that they should lock their computer. But
⏹️ ▶️ John in practice what actually happens is much worse. Anyway, I always lock my computer
⏹️ ▶️ John which means that every time I come back to my desk I have to unlock my computer even if I’m just getting up and walking one desk
⏹️ ▶️ John over I have to you know I’m typing in my unlocked password over and over and over again and so I thought maybe this will
⏹️ ▶️ John you know get me to wear my watch again and you know save me from typing my password
⏹️ ▶️ John many times but even before I heard your story I was like come on now this is based on the same tech as handoff which never
⏹️ ▶️ John works and it can’t possibly be fast and I’ll just be sitting there
⏹️ ▶️ John in front of my computer like the same way when you’re yelling things to Siri and it’s not understanding you it’s like at a certain point
⏹️ ▶️ John it would have been faster if you just typed and typing always works so I will just continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to type my password that work makes me change on a ridiculous interval and I
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t reuse any of the last 100 passwords I used
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco must be different than the
⏹️ ▶️ John last password in 17 million different ways
⏹️ ▶️ John bright side we can upgrade to see our at work because everything we use is now upgraded to work
⏹️ ▶️ John with it including the terrible antivirus software that we run So yay for work.
⏹️ ▶️ John What, what anti-virus are you running? Symantec antivirus.
⏹️ ▶️ John antivirus slash kernel panic causing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re using Sophos, I don’t know how you pronounce it, but S-O-P-H-O-S.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if that’s the problem. A coworker upgraded to Sierra either before the IT
⏹️ ▶️ Casey department warning or perhaps in spite of the IT department warning. And he was telling me that our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey god awful VPN, which is Checkpoint Security VPN, that the VPN software, by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way, hey, guess what, includes a firewall that, hey, guess what, prevents outgoing L2TP,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or outgoing VPN connections, outgoing connections, not incoming, outgoing connections,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not that I’m bitter, prevents airdrop from working, which by the way, I have very rarely had airdrop issue. Well, I shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say very rarely. I’ve had a comfortable success rate with airdrop, but it blocks that as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, so I install our VPN software on command like an animal because it’s easier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do that than have half of the things I want to use not work when it is installed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, not that I’m bitter, this software apparently hadn’t been updated for Sierra,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but this coworker that did upgrade to Sierra found an installer. This is the same sort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of thing like with Cisco. You have to go spelunking into the deepest, darkest part of the website
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the vendor in order to find an installer DMG, but eventually they found one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and supposedly it works. So I’ve been debating whether I wanna be that guy that doesn’t listen to the IT department
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and just install it anyway. So far I haven’t, but we’ll see. And the reason I haven’t, I think, is because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Marco said, there’s nothing that, I was gonna say impressive,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that’s nastier than I mean it. There’s nothing that’s really pulling me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to immediately want to install
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it. compelling that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not necessarily compelling is a great word yeah that’s not necessarily a bad thing but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s certainly not a great thing either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay first of all let me tell you guys how to deal with your workplaces oh sure go ahead oh here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John if people who you work with are animals the correct answer to when somebody leaves their computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unlocked and they shouldn’t is not to email things off their computer that is barbaric the correct answer is to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change their desktop wallpaper to fuck to something funny or shocking and then put a bunch of windows over it so they don’t actually see it for a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until they hide a window and then bam. Okay, Casey, just ignore the IT department. Do what you want. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I didn’t realize it was that easy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it is. That’s, that’s it. I mean, come on. That’s how jobs work, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Totally. I got I’m trying to be a nice guy right now. But man, I’m putting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey holes in my tongue.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, so I was gonna say for upgrading the thing I think makes most people do it in the end
⏹️ ▶️ John is they’re not able to do something with their computer that they want to do. Now the thing they want to do might be frivolous.
⏹️ ▶️ John All my friends are using tabs on all their windows and I see them doing it and they’re all
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about tabs and I don’t have them on my windows because I don’t have Sierra that includes the new tab window
⏹️ ▶️ John manager, right? That’s a frivolous example. A more concrete example is everybody’s
⏹️ ▶️ John using this new Twitter client, and I’m going back in time here when there was Twitter clients, everyone’s using this new Twitter client but it’s Sierra
⏹️ ▶️ John only and I can’t use it, right? If you feel like you’re not able able to do things
⏹️ ▶️ John with computers, then your computer, you know, you’re into computers as one of your hobbies. And everyone else you know in the computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, your little computer circles is doing this cool thing and you can’t do it because your operating system’s old. That
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like in the end is what makes people in our circle upgrade. Sometimes right off the bat, there’s things to that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the other one is maybe you could say, even if I was the only computer user in the world, this one has such nice
⏹️ ▶️ John performance improvements that I want it. Don’t think Sierra has that, at least. Apple’s not touting it. Again, I didn’t test
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I didn’t review it, though. there are a lot of good reviews out there. But performance increases are not a
⏹️ ▶️ John big selling point. I’m sure it’s better in many performance measures and there’s huge performance improvements across the board, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is always in the back of my mind as a reason to upgrade. Because anyone who writes software for a living
⏹️ ▶️ John knows what it feels like to ship a new version of your software
⏹️ ▶️ John that you realize is so much better than the version that your users out there are using.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the old version is a piece of crap. It’s like, do you realize how much code I deleted? You don’t understand how I refactored this. You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John understand how I changed this code path from being like 17
⏹️ ▶️ John levels deep in subroutine calls to now just being like two. And this used to be called every 10
⏹️ ▶️ John milliseconds and now it’s called like once a second and just everything is so much better about it. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John disgusted by the idea that anyone could be using it. Well, operating systems like this are filled with that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I get the warm fuzzies, real or not, of give me the new version of the
⏹️ ▶️ John software Because I know there must be things about this that are just better than they were. And now sometimes they also break crap
⏹️ ▶️ John to see discovery D or whatever. But,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco uh, in general,
⏹️ ▶️ John I want the new version of the software. Well, I think I’m a little bit weird in that, in that respect, but I think most of the reason people
⏹️ ▶️ John upgrade is. Everyone’s doing the thing and I can’t do the thing. And I will get to that point. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco will too, but we’re both not there yet with Sierra.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s fair. I mean, I don’t have anything bad to say about it. I don’t, I don’t, I hope I don’t sound too negative.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not that I have anything bad to say, but I can’t say that I’ve found any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey features that have really changed the way I use my computer so far. The watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unlock is the closest, but I’m not relying on it. The one thing that I think I really do like, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do miss on my work computer, like I said, is having those like rich texts or those rich previews
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in messages. Those are really, really great. And I wish I had that on my work computer. But other than that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s nothing really that’s knocking my socks off.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, it’s not rare for all of the three of us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to beg and plead for, um, for Apple to just kind of take a breath and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey try to improve reliability. And I mean, it seems stable so far. I mean, I’m only a few days in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, but it seems okay. Uh, the one thing that I will tell you that I have been scared to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey though, and doesn’t really solve a problem I have anyway, is this, um, iCloud,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, drive. Hey, we’ll move things to the cloud on your behalf. Don’t worry your pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John little face.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ve got you covered.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looks like a, from everything I’ve heard, this is a dumpster fire. Like this is no good.
⏹️ ▶️ John I should have saved this clip. And in the tradition of now, and this is my new thing now, I look up stuff in old podcasts and make overcast
⏹️ ▶️ John timestamp links. So Marco better never make that site go down or at least add me back somehow.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I was thinking like we talked about this before and how we’re all scared
⏹️ ▶️ John of this feature and everything. I’m like, when was that? Turns out it was the WWDC show. Like as soon as they announced
⏹️ ▶️ John this feature, that very day, we walked back to the hotel and recorded an episode and it was like, no, no.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like we’d never touched this operating system. We’d never even seen it in action. We’d just seen slides promising
⏹️ ▶️ John this feature that like, we will take your documents and desktop folder and magically sync them across to all
⏹️ ▶️ John of your Macs if you want us to. Like, no, don’t do that. It
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco will not turn
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey out well. That’s bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. I’ll find the audio clip of saying that in no
⏹️ ▶️ John uncertain terms. And a lot of people who have reviewed Sierra have said
⏹️ ▶️ John this feature has all sorts of problems. Now one category
⏹️ ▶️ John of problems are even when it’s working perfectly, as far as anyone can tell,
⏹️ ▶️ John it does things that the user doesn’t expect in ways that scare people. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John as in, where did all my documents go? when it’s working correctly it does some some has some strange behaviors where
⏹️ ▶️ John rather than just merging things together as soon as you turn it on or if you turn it back off or whatever very
⏹️ ▶️ John frequently everything on your everything on your desktop is on the people notice because people know what’s on the desktop but or they know like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re a messy desktop person you have icons everywhere if you saw all those disappear it doesn’t matter if like
⏹️ ▶️ John the files aren’t actually gone you have that moment of panic and you’re like where’d everything go
⏹️ ▶️ John or if everything disappears from your documents folder you open your documents and there’s nothing in it, doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John matter at that point whether that data is actually gone. All that matters is that people briefly think it
⏹️ ▶️ John is, and that makes people hate you, Apple. So don’t do that. So it does do that. It has a thing where it moves
⏹️ ▶️ John your actual files aside and then uploads them and then pulls them back down from the cloud and tries to,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure why it does that. Certainly things like Dropbox or Google Drive don’t have to do that to function.
⏹️ ▶️ John They just badge your icons and slowly make them, this one has successfully uploaded, a
⏹️ ▶️ John merge conflict. Like, Dropbox does like the dumbest thing that’ll possibly work with like renaming your files, but
⏹️ ▶️ John at no point does it delete your crap. At least I haven’t tried the project infinity thing, but the regular one doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s that. And then the other aspect are just plain bugs where it’s supposed to do the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John where it moves aside your files and puts them up to the cloud and pulls it back down and merges it all together. But many people
⏹️ ▶️ John say, actually, it didn’t do that. And when I tried to turn off the feature, my files went away. And since they hadn’t been successfully upgraded,
⏹️ ▶️ John I couldn’t get them back and I had to restore from a backup or it started trying to sync them but then all of a sudden
⏹️ ▶️ John numbers couldn’t open my spreadsheet file because of that wonderful error that I was getting from pages where it says can’t open file
⏹️ ▶️ John because reasons sorry and you can never open it again and I had to just like turn everything off and
⏹️ ▶️ John delete all my files and restore from backup like it is not a successfully launched feature every single
⏹️ ▶️ John review and every person I’ve heard who has used it has had some kind of issue now that maybe there’s millions of people
⏹️ ▶️ John using out there with no issues I don’t know but that there are enough people reporting problems that I absolutely positively
⏹️ ▶️ John cannot recommend that anybody listening to this podcast use that feature even if you only have five files even just
⏹️ ▶️ John just don’t use it because it’s not worth it’s not worth the risk it’s weird it works strangely and apparently it has bugs
⏹️ ▶️ John and there are other solutions that do similar things that are proven to be more reliable
⏹️ ▶️ John Dropbox Google Drive even plain old regular iCloud Drive maybe but giving
⏹️ ▶️ John your documents folder and your desktop to this, places where people store tons of stuff, I think is
⏹️ ▶️ John a very bad idea. And honestly, at this point, based on how it launched, like I was saying that W3C half-snark
⏹️ ▶️ John but half like predicting like based on past history this is gonna be disaster. But who knows, they could have pulled it off, you know, prove me wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, I probably said at some point in that big rant. They have not proved me wrong. And
⏹️ ▶️ John given that that’s the case, I have to now think, was Sierra crying out, like was
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac operating system crying out for this feature? Like they already did iCloud Drive, which is like, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John we can do Dropbox too. And in general, it’s not as good as Dropbox, but like, I feel like they tick
⏹️ ▶️ John that checkbox. Like, hey, if you buy a Mac, we give you everything you expect from modern computer, including a cloud-based
⏹️ ▶️ John drive that syncs, that you pay more for more. Like, they give you that. They have that. I think I think it’s important for them to have
⏹️ ▶️ John that. And I’m glad they’re finally going to that instead of what they were doing before with the documents in the cloud and everything like this is better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do they need to also add, by the way, we’ll transparently sync your documents and desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John because desktop is a place that people love and people feel comfortable with and safe and if you make that feel remotely unsafe that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible betrayal and the documents folder can potentially change
⏹️ ▶️ John contain a huge number of things i should go look here i want to see how many documents
⏹️ ▶️ John i have in my documents folder you want to take a guess while we’re waiting for the calculating size to finish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh geez i mean do you because you carry it over between installs right so this is like years and years and years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of accumulated documents and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John i wish it had have been carried out. I was thinking the other day about all the computers in my attic and how like they probably don’t work anymore because the capsule all
⏹️ ▶️ John exploded but I was thinking like maybe I can salvage stuff from the hard drives because hard drive sizes have gone on that hockey stick type
⏹️ ▶️ John of curve I always imagined and it’s never quite paid off for me but I always imagined that I would
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to take every document I had on my 5 megabyte hard drive and put it on my 32
⏹️ ▶️ John megabyte hard drive and every document out of my 32 megabyte hard drive and put it on my 100 megabyte hard drive and like you know just
⏹️ ▶️ John basically bring everything along with me forever and ever because I could take all the documents
⏹️ ▶️ John on every single computer in my attic from like the 68k era and put them on you
⏹️ ▶️ John know in a tiny little folder on my SD because storage space has gone up so much that there’s no reason I just can’t have everything
⏹️ ▶️ John that I have but it hasn’t happened that way like I’ve gone through discontinuities where
⏹️ ▶️ John I upgrade to a bigger computer but don’t bring over every single file because they’re not relevant anymore like all my
⏹️ ▶️ John all my confabulator themes and my icon collections for 32 by 32 icons and stuff like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve kind of left those behind. I want to go retrieve them because I feel like the total size of that is only gonna be like a couple
⏹️ ▶️ John gigs or something, and it would be great to have all that, but in practice I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of that old stuff, and it’s kind of a shame. Anyway, my thing just finished. I
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna guess how many files are in my documents folder. Oh, jeez.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would guess easily 100,000. Margo?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d go a little lower. I’d say more like.
⏹️ ▶️ John price is right, $1, $1. I’d say more like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco maybe 20,000.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My documents folder contains 1,897,958
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one per Chrome tab? Can
⏹️ ▶️ John pointing, like checking that checkbox on this computer and saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh yeah, no, sure, iCloud, go ahead with that. Like there’s virtual machines in there,
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple virtual machine files. There’s huge numbers of things there. My Dropbox doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John contain that. I’m not insane. Like, even if I had like a one terabyte, like. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the documents folder is essentially where everything, and this doesn’t include, you know, movies are mostly on my
⏹️ ▶️ John Synology and photos are mostly in my photos library. So the movies and photos libraries have really pared down, although there is
⏹️ ▶️ John some old crap in there, like iMovie things I made of the kids and everything. But documents, like
⏹️ ▶️ John that is, that is potentially limitless. Like that’s where, for most normal people, now that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John puts everything in your library folder and everything. Documents should contain all of your documents.
⏹️ ▶️ John And maybe you don’t have 1.8 million of them. Fine, whatever. But it’s enough that I wouldn’t say,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, go ahead, sync this with your unreliable syncing system, I’ll assure it’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John So as I was saying before, this is the type of feature I’d be like, did we really need this feature?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is this a net win for the Mac as a platform? Reputation? Like it must’ve taken a lot of effort to make this feature.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s complicated. It’s hard to do well. You spent that time and money and what you got out of it was a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that makes people not trust you in the same areas They didn’t trust you before and it’s not making a better product if you could have taken
⏹️ ▶️ John that that time and energy and put it towards something else I Think it would have been
⏹️ ▶️ John a better use of your time or maybe just dedicated to this and say look even though the first one’s gonna Be crappy we’re gonna work on it until it gets better
⏹️ ▶️ John which you know it’s Apple’s credit They have been improving the cloud stuff slowly But surely the trajectory is the correct direction
⏹️ ▶️ John the slope just isn’t particularly high and there are lots of backsliding So I know this is not a if
⏹️ ▶️ John I had written a Sierra review. I would have spent a long time sort of condemning
⏹️ ▶️ John This feature specifically and everything surrounding it and how Apple can’t get his act together on this going off into like
⏹️ ▶️ John My usual rants about why is this such a fundamental? Incompetency
⏹️ ▶️ John for the company and even though I’m proving there why are they improving slowly? Why can everybody else do this so well?
⏹️ ▶️ John relative to Apple. I don’t know. All I know is that my worst fear with Sierra was that it would be on by default
⏹️ ▶️ John and I would somehow have to like install with like the Ethernet cable unplugged to make sure that it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco anything and then just
⏹️ ▶️ John like stop it but apparently it’s not on by default and I just got to be really careful not to be fooled by the wording
⏹️ ▶️ John into activating this feature.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah I mean this this thing this kind of thing worries me because you know not you know not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only the the reliability issues and and perception and reputation of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your customers and potential customer data loss, if this goes wrong or thinking it went wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But overall, and I’ve used this rant before, so I’ll be brief,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it worries me how little the Mac is getting attention these days, not because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it really needs a ton of changes. I mean, it is a mature platform and I wouldn’t say macOS is done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and needs nothing else. And I wouldn’t even say that it doesn’t need anything big because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it could use big improvements. Things like modernizing the AppKit framework to be more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like UIKit or allowing more code sharing there. Cellular data monitoring and being able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John have cellular Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have that, which the fundamentals of that are all there, but bringing it up through all the apps would require
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little more work. Stuff like that. That stuff exists, that can be done. That can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be improved. I’m not sure it ever will be anymore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because when you look at where Apple prioritizes resources, it seems like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially in the most recent years, they are prioritizing resources in basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where the money comes from. And iOS gets the most resources. And that’s probably a smart move. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, if you look at it objectively, that’s probably smart. It does kind of suck for those of us on the Mac side who we care a lot about this platform,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though, and the Mac doesn’t get a lot of attention anymore. What I worry about is not the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will just kind of stagnate forever, but that it will get updates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with new features like this weird iCloud desktop document sync thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are actually bad. Like that it will get this kind of like drive-by updates that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it isn’t a high enough priority to really do this well and knock out of the park and give it the resources it needs to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be good, but they basically use the Mac as kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, it’s something to support the marketing messages and everything else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their other services. Or they kind of like give it lip service updates where they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assign a small amount of resources to it occasionally to update something or add a new feature,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they’re not giving it enough to really do it well. So it isn’t just the Mac OS will stagnate,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s that if Apple starts being a little bit careless and cavalier with some of these new features,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’ll actually get worse. That is what I’m worried about. You know, if they just ignore it forever, that’s also really unfortunate,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I would I would not be happy but happy about that either. But if they actually start being less careful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with updating it, that is actually worse than not updating it. That that’s a that’s a little concern
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they’re making it worse. Like I think they’re this is like an unforced error. Like they,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no reason that they had to add this feature and they added it and it’s not good and using it makes the experience work.
⏹️ ▶️ John But overall, the OS is still better. Like if you just think pretend this feature doesn’t exist. Everything that you were using before
⏹️ ▶️ John is at least the same or presumably more efficient. efficient and faster or whatever. And they fixed a whole bunch of bugs
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff like that. And they have added useful that like the picture in picture type of thing was not technically that
⏹️ ▶️ John impressive, but it makes a big quality of life difference for people who like want to just watch a video. This is I mean, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John this is exactly what they were doing, like identifying what is the thing that people do all the time that we can make it
⏹️ ▶️ John easier at the OS level thing that people do all the time is they have video playing in some window,
⏹️ ▶️ John usually a web browser window, but web browsers usually, I don’t know how people do them but mine are basically like sheets
⏹️ ▶️ John of paper right that proportion but that’s not the right proportion for video so they take one of the web browser windows and
⏹️ ▶️ John either they resize it or if they can’t tolerate doing that because they’re like me and don’t want the default window size to change they
⏹️ ▶️ John like scroll it have you know drag it half off the screen so just the video is showing but then there’s like the
⏹️ ▶️ John ad banner on the top and they try to you know you’re trying to get it so you can just see the video part and not all the stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John ads around it in the browser Chrome and have it off to the side but still do the other stuff you’re doing in your work
⏹️ ▶️ John or if you’re full screen you can’t even do that. You have to put the video on a second monitor or something. Picture-in-picture totally solves that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Something they can do really easily, something they can build into one of their bundled applications that really makes quality of life different.
⏹️ ▶️ John Same thing with the tab windows, which is a lot of people want tabs. We can build it into our default controls.
⏹️ ▶️ John A bunch of applications get it for free if you don’t want it. You don’t have to have it. If you’re a developer and you don’t like it, you can opt
⏹️ ▶️ John out of it, but it’s the same tab control we’ve been using in Safari. It’s debugged code for the most part,
⏹️ ▶️ John and people like tabs. Like, those are the things they can do on top of make it faster. Now
⏹️ ▶️ John what I’m looking for at this point is like fix the tech underpinnings, you know, improve that stuff, make it faster,
⏹️ ▶️ John make it more efficient with memory, new file system, which they did and you know it’s just a developer build in this one, but like all
⏹️ ▶️ John that stuff they’re doing that stuff excites me and I think makes the product better. Adding features,
⏹️ ▶️ John adding big features like desktop and document sync that don’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again I don’t think it makes the operating system worse if you don’t use them, but it’s an unforced No one asked
⏹️ ▶️ John you to do that and now you messed it up and if people do look in that part They feel bad about you and they feel worse
⏹️ ▶️ John about your operating system. So You know on the bright side the new desktop background looks really good. So
⏹️ ▶️ John like that’s the most that’s the most compelling new feature of Because what do people say like when my wife
⏹️ ▶️ John comes home? The only reason she will know that I upgraded is there’ll be a different picture of mountains in the back She really liked the the LCAP
⏹️ ▶️ John background picture like the default one. She just kept that that was a really nice background, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John you know to Apple’s credit. I like how they do this, you know, we upgraded didn’t change it It kept the old one, but I like this
⏹️ ▶️ John year once I change this year And I think it’s the only thing should notice and like what is that funny color icon up in the right? I still have not
⏹️ ▶️ John spoken to the computer. Oh, yeah, neither of I not use Siri at all But I suppose
⏹️ ▶️ John I might at some point in the future maybe I Completely agree with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you. I don’t I feel I don’t mean to come across. I don’t think any of us mean to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come across across negative about any of this. I don’t know. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to speak for you guys necessarily, but I’m not negative about it. It’s just the headlining features
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are features that fix problems that I don’t have. I don’t feel like I’ve ever really wanted to speak to my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer to use Siri in that way. I don’t think I’ve ever really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted my stuff mirrored in the cloud transparently.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Picture-in-picture does sound very appealing to me. To be honest, I just keep forgetting that’s a thing in Sierra now. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iMessage stuff is great. The watch unlock, it is very good. I wish it was a bit faster, but it’s very good. It’s very freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool. And maybe in a month or a week or two or something like that, maybe I’ll find that feature
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I say, oh my gosh, I can’t live without it. But just only a week or two in so far,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t found that feature yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John And speaking of things that people predict will not work and actually don’t work
⏹️ ▶️ John because the predictions are right. Things, I mean this is having to do with watch
⏹️ ▶️ John and lock as well but things that are related to airdrop, handoff,
⏹️ ▶️ John or related synchronization without wires technologies between iOS devices and the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John have always been a little bit weird and have not really gotten less weird and the one
⏹️ ▶️ John that I think of in Sierra is the clipboard sync between iOS devices and Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John which totally sounds like an awesome feature. But you just know, you just know based on past
⏹️ ▶️ John experience, like you’re excited for the feature then you’re like, oh but that’s not actually gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John work reliably. You just know it’s not gonna work reliably and everyone who tests
⏹️ ▶️ John it says it works most of the time but sometimes it doesn’t and you don’t know why. And like yep that’s exactly how
⏹️ ▶️ John all these features work. Handoff, AirDrop, Universal Clipboard, Sync, all of them
⏹️ ▶️ John I totally expect to work most of the time but sometimes not work for inexplicable reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can’t do anything about and that never change year after year after year. And that is the word,
⏹️ ▶️ John like Jason Snell has great three paragraphs, which is like a three paragraph, concise Jason Snell style version of
⏹️ ▶️ John the seven pages I would have written with exactly this sentiment. I tried to tweet a
⏹️ ▶️ John quote from it, I’ll try to read it here, it’s like, he’s frustrated with the cloud sync feature or whatever of the documents, and
⏹️ ▶️ John he says, what’s going on? I don’t know. This is a feature without an interface, so there’s really no way to debug it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes it worked and that’s pretty cool. And then sometimes it just doesn’t work. That’s frustrating. Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly, so many Apple features recently, specifically related to this technology. We just know, they’ve been out for
⏹️ ▶️ John years. It’s just, it’s gonna be like that. And it’s not the end of the world. Like if it doesn’t work, it’s not like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John losing data. It’s not, you know, it’s not the same as the documents saying that, you know, you’re also what your clipboard
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t sync or whatever, but it’s like, why? What is stopping this from working reliably
⏹️ ▶️ John almost 100% of the time? The first one, fine. The first few years you’re working out the kinks or whatever, but are we
⏹️ ▶️ John just now resigned to the fact that anything that has to do with, like, syncing the clipboard, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John is, especially for small clipboard items, even if you have like a size limit, that’s as basic as you can get. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ John look, there’s a wireless feature that we have that uses Bluetooth or Wi-Fi or whatever the hell magic we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John using to hand off that data from a Mac to an iOS device
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s sitting on your desk. Is there some technical reason why that can’t eventually, after
⏹️ ▶️ John several years, become reliable enough that we don’t talk about, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John that it almost never fails? Apparently the answer is no. And I’m like, just don’t make any
⏹️ ▶️ John more of those features. If you can’t make the ones you have work, if you can’t make clipboard sync work, forget about any
⏹️ ▶️ John of the fancy ones, right? And the thing is like, handoff when I was testing that in my review,
⏹️ ▶️ John it worked pretty reliably, but because it’s a beta, the one time out of a hundred that doesn’t work, I’m like, oh, it’s a beta.
⏹️ ▶️ John But three years later, you’re like, is this a beta? Like, I don’t know why it’s not working again. As Jason said, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no interface. There’s nothing for you to look at, nothing for you to debug. There’s no way you can make it work, aside from like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, let me just reboot and cross my fingers or something. Incredibly frustrating. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like that’s, you know, whatever that problem is, that is bad for Apple’s image.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s bad because we won’t use the new features if they don’t work and people will abandon them. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John bad that Apple needs to figure out like, why can we not make this work? If there’s some technical reason, don’t make any more features like
⏹️ ▶️ John this. But if there’s not, figure out what it is that’s causing this to continue to be a problem. Especially
⏹️ ▶️ John it gets worse for things like universal clipboard. Cause like I would totally use that feature. I want that feature. That would be a feature
⏹️ ▶️ John I’d be excited about. But it’s, you know, everyone has used it and tried it. Said
⏹️ ▶️ John I was really excited about this feature too, but sometimes it doesn’t work. And I just eventually come to not rely on it and frustrates me when
⏹️ ▶️ John I need it and it doesn’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, this is the one time where I will say, I am an airdrop unicorn.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It always works for me. And I feel like the, what makes it always work for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me is kind of a few luxury that have being a work at home person first of all i have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my my one mac and my one phone and occasionally to spawn that are involved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a small number of devices i set them all to except from everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is a very very important if you don’t set at least the receiving one if you don’t have the receiving on which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is also is my mac to accept from everyone i found it works way less often uh…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and obviously there are certain situations where you probably shouldn’t have it set that way. For me, AirDrop works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great and I use it all the time. Almost always I will use it to send a photo I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just took from my phone to my iMac because it’s faster than iCloud Photosync and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe, maybe it’s on, it’s from a phone that maybe doesn’t have iCloud Photo Library set up like a developer phone, sending a screenshot or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like that. Uh, it’s great. I use it all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I wouldn’t say I’m a unicorn, but I’m a horse who is stuck
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a little unicorn thing to his head, You know, so it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco like wearing like a horn hat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, pretty much. I say that what I mean is it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work all the time for me and gosh when it doesn’t work it is so frustrating but it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does work pretty darn often for me. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am pretty satisfied with airdrop. I agree with you that I see things appearing and disappearing from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my dock all the time from handoff. I almost never use it but it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be working well enough that things are appearing constantly. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t really have any complaints about those features. I’ve yet to try the clipboard sync,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’ve heard a lot of mixed reviews about it. But I hope it works because that’d be another one that would be great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That would compel me to upgrade, say, my work Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. I mean, I would also like that would be a major feature for me too. And when they announced it, I thought, oh, finally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is great. Yeah, but the reports that I’m hearing so far, not only that doesn’t always work, but also that’s a little bit slow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that I like that’s the kind of feature where if you’re going to have that feature, it has to be fast and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reliable. If it’s if it’s only one or neither of those things, that’s that’s going to make it hard to really get into
⏹️ ▶️ John Didn’t somebody say also that it doesn’t work with at least whatever clipboard history thing they were using, like that
⏹️ ▶️ John it wouldn’t, it wouldn’t add to the history. Like I, I use clipboard history all the time. And if this feature
⏹️ ▶️ John kills my clipboard history, that would be a reason for me not to upgrade because I’m the most exciting new thing I got my Mac recently is
⏹️ ▶️ John the Payspot beta for the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’ve already had
⏹️ ▶️ John it, you know, I’ve been using various clipboard history things on the Mac. The one that I had settled on before is
⏹️ ▶️ John Jumpcut, this open source thing, which is really ugly and silly, but it’s very reliable and small, and I’ve been using it. I
⏹️ ▶️ John switched to Payspot, which is much fancier. I’m like, oh, this is probably too fancy, but I really like it. I like that
⏹️ ▶️ John it feels like it’s going to be a more supported product than the open source Jumpcut, and it certainly looks nicer
⏹️ ▶️ John and has some interface niceties, but I need that feature. Like my use of a Mac, it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like Windows Shade used to be, or all those other things, you come to rely on them. At this point, a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John without clipboard history would feel broken to me. So if Sierra breaks my clipboard history, I’m gonna be really sad
⏹️ ▶️ John and just be looking for ways to find a secret plist thing that I can set to make it not do clipboard,
⏹️ ▶️ John universal clipboard stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, as far as I know, I don’t think it actually breaks clipboard history locally. I think it just, I think the things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are remotely brought in from the other devices just never actually, they don’t actually hit your clipboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they don’t get pulled until you paste, I think. They’re saying like it doesn’t go to Yeah, it doesn’t actually transfer
⏹️ ▶️ John it when you copy or paste it when you copy rather it’s when you paste on the foreign machine that it says Oh, actually, I want to pull
⏹️ ▶️ John it and maybe that’s why it’s unreliable because it’s not doing it at the time you initiate it has to then
⏹️ ▶️ John go back to the phone and say, Oh, give me that thing that you said you had for me and the phone’s like what I’m totally doing something different now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hang on. I don’t know. I don’t know what the problem is. And here’s the thing about these type of features like like airdrop or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if you’re dutiful and you’re like, I’m gonna file bugs on this. It’s impossible to file a bug. You’re this one time it didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John work. And I go, you know, you could send all the system reports you want and give them all the information
⏹️ ▶️ John and try to give them like logs and I was just like, I don’t know why it didn’t work. Like, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it’s not, it’s not reproducible, because you try it again, and it works fine. And you’re like, what were you doing differently
⏹️ ▶️ John that time? Like, I don’t know. So it’s, it’s the worst kind of bug to report. So incredibly frustrating as a developer, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I can’t fix your thing. If the people who are developing universal clipboard or handover, like they can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John fix my thing if I can’t explain to help to make it how how to make it fail and if it always 100% succeeds
⏹️ ▶️ John for them and all their automated tests and everything like I don’t know what to tell them but it’s you know
⏹️ ▶️ John people out in the world are having it fail and there’s nothing they can do about it and the people who write
⏹️ ▶️ John the software I’m not sure there’s anything they can do about it you know I need give me a failing test
⏹️ ▶️ John case give me a reproducible bug otherwise it’s just you saying this bad thing happened once and I have no idea why Bye!
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Since we’ve spoken last, the iOS 10.1 beta has been released,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which includes the portrait feature for the 7 Plus.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this portrait feature basically is doing a faux
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bokeh. Gosh, I watched that video on how to pronounce it and I’ve already forgotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is. The answer is, however we say it, is wrong. So continue.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, fair enough. So anyway, so it does the foca is what we’ll call it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so what it does is it does a background blur behind the person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or in some instances object that you’re taking a photograph of. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a write-up on this from Matthew Panzarino, and then there’s been plenty of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put out by Serenity Caldwell. Lex Friedman has been posting pictures to Instagram that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty sure are using this feature, although I have not confirmed that with him.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I got to tell you, at a glance, at a glance, they look pretty darn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. Under inspection, even for me, and I don’t have the most discerning eye,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some of them Some of them still look good, and some of them just look like they’re somehow wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even if I can’t put my finger on them. I probably have the least discerning eye of the three of us,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Marco is the person who I think is closest to a quote-unquote real photographer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How do you feel about this, and what are you thinking about this feature?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Magnus You know, my thinking has evolved as I’ve thought about it more and as I’ve seen a lot of the people’s pictures.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Before we could really only see Apple’s pictures, and now that they’ve released this beta, now Now anybody with a plus, with a 7 plus,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can make their own. And so lots of our friends have it, we’re seeing these pictures all over the place. And ultimately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they look pretty decent for what they’re doing. Now what they’re doing is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco replicating an SLR. However, if you view these photos on a phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’re doing a casual look, like reading through an Instagram feed, or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kids are using these days, then they look pretty good. And if you compare
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to SLRs, and quote real cameras that are generating real background
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blur using the actual properties of the optics and the shape of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aperture blades and everything else to really generate the nice, pleasing looking blur
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the various shapes of the circles and everything. If you compare it to that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not even close. Like the real optic version of this looks way nicer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and doesn’t have a few of the artifacts the fake one does that photographers will notice. Things like the blurry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edges around subjects that the Foca mode has. But if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have your SLR, just use your SLR. For all the other times,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for either you don’t own an SLR or you do have one but it’s not with you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of amazing that a phone can generate pictures that look this good. Now Now that being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the regular pictures from both the iPhone 7’s cameras already look fantastic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the fake blur effect is literally just like, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like an Instagram filter. It’s like you can take very good pictures without it, but if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want this kind of look you can fake it with this kind of software effect.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a really good looking approximation if you don’t look too closely or if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re skimming by. It’s really nice that it’s there because it’s better than it not being available at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, if you really want something to look really good with that look, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a real camera doing it optically will look way, way better. But in practice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the modern world, it doesn’t really matter.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I’ve gone the other direction from Marco because he’s coming around to like, oh, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not as good as it could be, but it’s better. Like, The more of these pictures I see, the more I’m convinced
⏹️ ▶️ John that certainly I would never willingly do this and the more I’m convinced that nobody else should do this
⏹️ ▶️ John either because I they look really They look really bad to me. Like the only time I feel like I
⏹️ ▶️ John can get any value out of them is if there’s a picture where The background is really
⏹️ ▶️ John busy and would detract from the intended subject matter And in this case the terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John blur they apply Helps emphasize the part of the picture that i’m supposed to be looking at but it always looks
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible to me Like I’m not an expert in photography. I don’t even know what it is that I’m seeing
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s different, but it looks wrong and bad and like someone messed up my picture
⏹️ ▶️ John by, you know, blurring parts of it. And one of the questions a lot of people had about this was,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it’s using the other camera to take an out of focus picture and using that for the background. According to
⏹️ ▶️ John Panzerino’s article, or maybe it was a tweet or something, that’s not the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computed blur. And that would have been awesome because if you think about,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and somebody could theoretically make a third party app that tries to do that, although I think. I don’t think the cropping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will work out. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mapping information is not exposed in the API at the moment. And I don’t know if it ever will be. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’d have to kind of do that yourself, which is not an easy task. But you could theoretically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the wide lens focus basically right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in front of itself so it has the maximum background blur, and then have the telephoto lens focus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco correctly on the subject and kind of combine the optically blurred picture from the wide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lens with the telephoto lens’s regular picture, somehow detecting where the edges are. You could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco theoretically do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they would match with the distortion, right? All the lines, you wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to combine them with each other unless you somehow distorted the pictures from the cameras.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because the lenses are making straight lines like in a fence and curved.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can do it, you know, it’s math, right? But it’s difficult to get them. Anyway, they’re not doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re doing the depth map. They have nine layers of depth information and they blur it. And like, I don’t know why it looks bad to me,
⏹️ ▶️ John but what it looks to me, like it looks like they blurred
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff in the picture. And sometimes it’s easy to know why it looks bad. Like we saw a couple of pictures uploaded by friends where
⏹️ ▶️ John their head happened to be next to something that was a similar color to their hair and the blur like crept into their head. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, that’s just, you know, like obviously it’s not gonna be perfect. you can’t expect to be perfect in all conditions. But even the
⏹️ ▶️ John ones where I was like, oh, that looks pretty good, something about it looks wrong to me. And I would say that if you took a picture
⏹️ ▶️ John with an optical camera of the same thing with the same focus settings, I would also say it looks wrong. Like I’m not even
⏹️ ▶️ John saying it looks wrong because it doesn’t look like it would be, maybe I’m not even detecting things like, oh, if that was with a real lens, it would look different.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it would look the same with the real lens, but that you wouldn’t set it up that way. I don’t know. All I know is I’ve had
⏹️ ▶️ John a camera that can reliably do this for a short period of time. I’ve taken plenty of pictures of blurred backgrounds and I
⏹️ ▶️ John love all of them better than every one of these pictures I’ve seen. Now, it’s not to say, like Margo said, if you like it, use it, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, and I’ve seen a few of them on Instagram and sometimes I think this does help isolate a subject in a way that I
⏹️ ▶️ John find more pleasing, because very often, if you take a picture with one of these things with like, that everything is in
⏹️ ▶️ John focus, it makes your pictures look bad, because it’s like the background that you don’t want people to see is just
⏹️ ▶️ John as prominent as the thing you want them to see, and this helps with that, but I am not
⏹️ ▶️ John a fan of this at all. Now, this is their first try. There’s no reason they can’t get better.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t think they should remove this feature and if people like it more power to him but I personally don’t like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well and it’s it’s never going to look right to people who are who notice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the flaws and I mean in I think you’re right in noticing it doesn’t look right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s lots of reasons why it doesn’t look right. The biggest by far is the edges
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the in focus subject where they meet the background blur in a real optical version of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the entire subject is sharp right up to that edge. And in this one, it looks kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, hey, I’ll make a reference for you, John. You know how in the original Star Wars where they had like the Vaseline
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under the speeder? I do know that part. The photos look like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody put Vaseline around the edge where the subject meets the blurred area. It just, it looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a badly, messily blurred thing. And the reason why is because the depth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco map information is just not incredibly granular. It’s not very precise. They have, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they said something like six slices of depth that they can reliably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John identify and… There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John nine, but it’s not just the slices. Like I’m looking at a panzerbine, I always got a picture of a little girl and she had like wispy hairs
⏹️ ▶️ John coming out. It’s not that the depth map doesn’t have enough layers, it’s just that it does… the depth doesn’t detect those
⏹️ ▶️ John hairs. Like light from a camera will do the correct bouncing off those things and the hairs will be pin sharp if
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re in the plane that’s focused. But the blur doesn’t know the hairs are even there because the blur
⏹️ ▶️ John has to say, well, the The head is close to us and the fence behind it is far away, so
⏹️ ▶️ John keep the head in focus and blur the fence. But it thinks the boundaries of the head end way before those wispy hairs.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the wispy hairs melt out into a big smear of someone who’d like to use the finger smudge tool
⏹️ ▶️ John in Photoshop and went pfft. And like, it’s just clear as day that like, it shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John be like that. But I don’t even know if that’s, I mean I can see that. When people say, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if I had to pick it out, like you know, in a multiple choice and find them that’s how I would find
⏹️ ▶️ John them but I don’t even think that’s the thing that looks wrong to me I think the completely clear totally not
⏹️ ▶️ John even near the in focus subject like in the clear can be safely blurred doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John look blurred to me in a way that seems right like it just it just feels
⏹️ ▶️ John like like they’re standing in front of a blurry picture of the place where they
⏹️ ▶️ John were and so it’s like it was like a composite like it took a picture without the person there they applied a blur to it
⏹️ ▶️ John then they took a picture of a person against the green screen and they composite them onto it and or they printed out the background
⏹️ ▶️ John picture and put it on a big mural and they’re standing in front of it. I don’t know this. It’s just you know, it’s got
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it’s uncanny valley. Whatever it is. It bugs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. Well, and part of the reason why I mean, you’re right. I mean, first of all, that whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco custom blur optimization or whatever blur algorithm they’re using, it doesn’t like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blurred areas of the photo. All the edge detection aside, the blurred areas of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the photo do not look like the actual optical blur from a camera lens would look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that if you did it with the same picture side by side. So that’s obviously a big part of what you’re seeing, Johnny. And that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is a very real problem that I’m not sure they really easily can solve. Um, or at least if they did, it might be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not able to be done in real time on current hardware, whatever it is they, that is not being solved well. But also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we’re kind of being sold a, this bill of goods like, Oh, you’re going to have this awesome background blur,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, with this nice portrait and everything. Well, this is only a 56mm perspective.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can get, I mean sure, you can on a full frame camera you can get decent background blur with like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an f1.4 55-ish mm lens, but if you actually want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get like strong background blur for a portrait, you actually need a longer lens to really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it well. Like you need like an 85 or my favorite a 135. It is incredibly impractical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the pictures you get from it, when you can actually like stand in the right distance from your subject to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get them in the frame because a 135mm prime is incredibly hard to use with moving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subjects. But the ones you get that work from it will be your favorite pictures you’ve ever taken.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, you need actually a longer lens to get the amount of blur
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that makes portraits look good most of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know I thought that there was a really good take on this and it was Mike Hurley who had said it and I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was on the last episode of Upgrade so I’ll link that in the show notes. And his point was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I can paraphrase, I’m not going to get a DSLR or anything like it, and I’m certainly not going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey carry one with me. And for me, this really might, this is giving me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a way to make these pictures that look so beautiful to my eye, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have to carry that big, heavy, expensive camera. I can use the thing that’s in my pocket always. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, it may not be perfect, but it’s a crap load better than what I’m used to. And But for that, I love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And you know what? I think if I were in Mike’s shoes, I would say the exact same thing. This is not enough for me to want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to give up my Micro Four Thirds camera and the couple of lenses I have for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I think for anyone who just wants to take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a pretty shot with the camera that’s in their pocket, whether or not they, like you said, Marco, whether or not they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a DSLR or something big, I think it’s a really great feature. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, there’s a lot that we can nitpick about it and have nitpicked about it, but I still think this is a really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great next step toward taking the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cameras to the next level. And I really applaud Apple for it. And for a beta, it seems like it’s working really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And again, like the, I think the democratization argument here really can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be overstated. Like here, I mean, yes, this is a very expensive phone for, you know, bought by privileged people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever. We are now, you know, Apple is putting in the hands of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the people who buy this phone a photographic capability that while it is not as good as an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SLR and will never be as good as an SLR, it kind of gets in the ballpark. And especially for,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, most photos these days are being seen by people who are scrolling through social media feeds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you might be, you might stop on that photo for two seconds, like at most, you know, like so all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fine details that bother people like me and John and people who know how these photos are supposed to look.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most people who are seeing these photos aren’t noticing those details and they’re just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enjoying the photos. So this is giving like millions, literally millions of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ability to post better looking photos to their friends and family on Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff and people who would never have have otherwise bought and carried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around an SLR with a a really fast prime lens. So that that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a pretty cool effect of this, even though the pictures annoy people like me and john, that is an overall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think overall, this is benefiting the world for this to exist.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I agree. And well, I mean, Apple will find out because they’ll have the usage data. If this is a feature that people are using,
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously, they like it and adds value to their phone, right? I personally think that the the dual cameras the ability
⏹️ ▶️ John to non you know, to non optically zoom when there’s enough light for it to use the
⏹️ ▶️ John or to optically zoom non digitally zoom there’s enough light to use the other camera i think that will have a larger
⏹️ ▶️ John effect on people’s satisfaction with the camera than this but apple will know because this is an opt-in
⏹️ ▶️ John thing it doesn’t do it to you automatically you have to use it um so if they see huge numbers of people
⏹️ ▶️ John using it then using it is obviously successful whether i like it or not but um we’ll see you know
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s another one of those things where where we have to like watch the non-tech people who we
⏹️ ▶️ John know to see, casually see, like, are they using that feature? Or do they even know it exists? A lot of it
⏹️ ▶️ John could be like they’re not using it because it’s not obvious in the UI or something. I’ve met so many people who think they have to
⏹️ ▶️ John swipe the little line of words in the camera UI, and show them that you can just swipe anywhere and it changes, it
⏹️ ▶️ John changes their life. That’s just a non-obvious. Another mystery meat interface from the people who brought you iOS 7.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, that’s what will bear it out. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think potentially it could be a big factor in making people
⏹️ ▶️ John more happy with their camera because now they can do a thing that they couldn’t do before. But I’m not sure people will keep using it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mostly because you can’t just leave it on all the time because it will ruin perfectly good pictures if you leave
⏹️ ▶️ John it on all the time. It can only be used in certain environments where you know you’re actually going for it. If
⏹️ ▶️ John you leave it on all the time it’s just gonna mess up everything. So we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Tracker, Fracture, and Igloo. And we will see you next
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM
⏹️ ▶️ John you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, Auntie
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John ♪ Are you accidental? ♪ ♪ Accidental! ♪ Why
Post-show: The museum
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s do some titles. You know the Museum of Pristine Apple Hardware is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe the Museum of Pristine Apple Hardware?
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess that’s my favorite of the ones you picked. How do you two not have that
⏹️ ▶️ John on like a front of mind of lists of weird things that I do that I collect all this Apple hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John and try to keep it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Because it’s a weird thing John. My books that are all on my
⏹️ ▶️ John shelf that like don’t have the bindings broken that are all in beautiful condition that are displayed out like that like it’s the same thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean just the list is so long I’ve lost track of some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John objects on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when people were tweeting that stuff at me I was tweeting back at them I’m like you tell me like if you listen to the
⏹️ ▶️ John show like you shouldn’t this is not a secret that I do this like that’s why they left it unsaid like
⏹️ ▶️ John why do I care that it’s pristine if it’s in a case because it’s not gonna be in that case forever it’s gonna come out
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gonna join the join the collection like the people’s like oh what are you you get how
⏹️ ▶️ John much money to hear you have your iPhone 6 like what do you mean
⏹️ ▶️ John leaving the house it’s going and this one is also pristine on the back to this case is probably going to the
⏹️ ▶️ John garbage because the leather thing is totally destroyed now the phone inside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beautiful and actually I will say I part of the reason I convinced myself to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get jet black is that I thought like you know what is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the the canonical color of this generation and I I thought, when I look back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my closet at my row of old iPhones that I keep there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all lined up as if they’re on a bookshelf, I thought, what do I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see there once this phone goes there? Next year, whenever I retire this phone, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably next fall, what color would look best to represent this generation of phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my little tiny museum of well-worn Apple hardware?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I thought Jet Black is the only choice. That is the phone that will define
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this generation of phones in my future phone archive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I feel like it’s the same thing. In all Apple’s advertising, this is the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even though I really doubt this will be the most popular model because of all the scratching
⏹️ ▶️ John and people don’t like other colors that are more exciting than stupid black one again,
⏹️ ▶️ John the one they’re pushing is like this is it this is the iPhone the iPhone 7 equals jet black
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know I mean I’m I’m guessing you know I mean because there are two new black colors then it’s you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know it’s probably gonna be split between them but people really like the color that’s new that
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah only only Apple knows these the breakdown of these numbers but we’ll see like in my
⏹️ ▶️ John experience I think most people find black boring like I’m amazed that I don’t see more
⏹️ ▶️ John black phones in all generations of iPhone and iOS devices we’re all buying the black ones for whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John weird tech dude reason compels us to buy the black ones regular people are not so
⏹️ ▶️ John excited about black
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well and honestly if they only released the other black I wouldn’t be that excited about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it either like if they only released the map because I’m kind of tired of just like black geek hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John not that tired says the guy with the closet full of black shirts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just ordered more black shirts today if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you’re tired
⏹️ ▶️ John of it, you’re not expressing it outwardly in your clothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s… clothing’s different. But just like… like I think… I think the new matte black
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, as I said, I think it looks a little bit dated, honestly, and it looks like a little bit too much like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new geek black gadget that looks like every other geek black gadget. But the jet black looks so different because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, you know, that new finish that like nothing else has in the gadget world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that, I think, really elevates it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s every shiny piece of black plastic ever made, including the iPhone 3GS. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it doesn’t look like plastic though. It looks more like plastic than metal.
⏹️ ▶️ John It looks like scratched plastic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, maybe a little. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know. I’ll look up there and see this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Boy, I do have a lot of scratches. What’s interesting, almost all of the scratches on mine are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the lower third of the case. I wonder
⏹️ ▶️ John why that is. You’re going to learn where you rub your phone against things. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like Marlon where his phone pokes through his pants pocket makes the little hole is the the
⏹️ ▶️ John most Friction intensive area.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean the I mean the pants I’m wearing they still have the the Wear line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the pocket of the 5s shape Which should give you some idea how the age of these pants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like yeah I can date my pants by the by like which phone shape it has worn into the pocket
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I never, I still don’t, I mean obviously my first phone was a six and it’s big and not that I’m afraid
⏹️ ▶️ John of it bending, although I kind of am, but I feel a little bit of pressure in my pocket when I put it in any of
⏹️ ▶️ John my pockets and so it just doesn’t go in my pants pockets. Only goes in my jacket pockets ever. I mean I’ll put it
⏹️ ▶️ John in my back pocket when I’m walking around the house knowing that I’m not going to sit down, but it’s like that’s in
⏹️ ▶️ John short term memory. That’s in like the little M1 in the calculator. You have a phone in your back pocket,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that is top of mind
⏹️ ▶️ John as soon as the phone goes in my back pocket and it comes right out of my back pocket I never sit down with it in any of my pockets
⏹️ ▶️ John it just feels uncomfortable even if it wasn’t gonna bend I wouldn’t want to do that because it would feel uncomfortable to me to do that so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what what else is in this short-term memory this
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s high enough in there that I’ve never actually done it I’ve never accidentally sat down with my phone in my pants
⏹️ ▶️ John pocket so like as soon as I put it in there like whatever you know whatever the highest priority like the
⏹️ ▶️ John the the registers in my mind like this that’s not an l1 cash it’s in a register like you have
⏹️ ▶️ John a phone in your pocket
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such a nerd Wow and what do you when you bring your phone out in the summer what do you do like when you’re not wearing a jacket
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where do you put it
⏹️ ▶️ John if I’m going somewhere in the other kind of thing about it so I will put it in my shorts pockets I wear
⏹️ ▶️ John shorts in the summer because the shorts aren’t jeans they’re on jean shorts right there just they’re looser right And so
⏹️ ▶️ John that and they have big they have bigger pockets, and I will do that So we’ll go to the store or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John with it in my and I will sit down with it because they’re only front pockets on My shorts. I will sit down with in my shorts pockets. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John not in jeans, so I guess it has to come up If it did come up I probably what I would do is
⏹️ ▶️ John put on my back pocket and just be walking around and as soon as I sat down take it Out of my back pocket and just hold I don’t know how
⏹️ ▶️ John they come up I don’t my clothes are very utilitarian. I don’t wear anything
⏹️ ▶️ John Nice enough that I’ve had to worry about this. It’s just scrubby shorts in the summertime and
⏹️ ▶️ John all the rest of the time jeans and then I have some kind of jacket because I’m always freezing and the air conditioning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow my phone goes to my right front pocket
⏹️ ▶️ John even even with the six size you’re able to pull that
⏹️ ▶️ John must have looser jeans than I do probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I’ve been doing it just fine I did the front left pocket which is the standard pocket for people who are over about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the age of 30 all right are your phones bent no not at all nope I never had that with any with any of my six
⏹️ ▶️ Marco series someone at work
⏹️ ▶️ John I noticed their iPhone and I’m like do you know your phone’s bent? I feel bad telling people this like first I was more like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco tell people their phone is bent.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I thought like I thought I had seen it but maybe it was. People bend it. I think it was
⏹️ ▶️ John a 6. It’s like not bent a lot not a big deal but enough that I can spot it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mine I’m pretty sure is not bent. I’ve dropped my was thinking also about the caseless thing. I’ve dropped this phone
⏹️ ▶️ John plenty of times like onto carpet on to like you know wooden floor or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John from reasonable height from like nightstand height or whatever that’s why the corners of my case
⏹️ ▶️ John are nicked up and I’m like does that affect my caseless decision would it have broken my screen on any
⏹️ ▶️ John of those falls if it didn’t have the leather case would it have dented the side of it like Christina Warren or whatever the hell she did with
⏹️ ▶️ John it have a huge dent in it cuz I don’t know I’m so paranoid with like so
⏹️ ▶️ John someone was asking about like oh the self-polishing thing I tweeted a a picture of my little, I think you guys have seen my little,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not microfiber, but it’s like a velvety kind of synthetic cloth
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’ve got it in a leather case and then I always put it in that pouch when I’m traveling. And
⏹️ ▶️ John even though it’s in a leather case and in the pouch, it still never goes in the same pocket as my keys.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh no, I mean that should be illegal to put it in the same pocket as keys. I mean, that’s, no, this is the whole reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why the correct pocket, if you’re over about the age of 30, is the left front
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pocket. Because what happened to a lot of people, myself included, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we first developed our habits before phones were a thing. You know, like when we were in high school and college and stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we developed the habits of having your keys and wallet, and since most people are right-handed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most sensible place to put those is your front right pocket. And then when phones came out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only sensible place for them to go was still in the front pocket for easy reach if you’re a front pocket person at all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but your front right pocket was already taken with your wallet and keys, and you didn’t want to scratch up your phone, so you put your phone in your front
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, no. You do not put your wallet in your front pocket. That is barbaric.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If your wallet is too big to fit in your front pocket, your wallet is too big. You’re a country
⏹️ ▶️ John boy. If you put your wallet in your back pocket, that’s easier to steal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s why on the rare occasions I’m in a place where I fear for these things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apollo Robins could be around every corner. I did just listen to that Reconcilable Differences.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, you are right, Marco, for those who use keys, but we are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this new amazing world of keyless entry automobiles. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I got my BMW, I flip-flopped, and the phone went from left pocket to right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pocket, keys went from right pocket to left pocket, and that is far and away the better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way to do it if you have a car that has keyless entry and keyless start.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I kicked my keys out of the right side too once the iOS devices started coming in, mostly because
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t trust my malcoordinated left hand to successfully extract my phone without dropping
⏹️ ▶️ John it onto a hard surface. So totally the keys, but I don’t, you know, drop the keys, whatever. Keys went to
⏹️ ▶️ John the left. And this is, I’m talking about jacket pockets for the most part, because I don’t put either one of my pants pockets. Keys went to the left, phone on the right, wallet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, I just developed a very, you know, agile left hand, because that’s just where,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, first when I was really young, it was like a Palm Pilot, and then eventually it became
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a phone. That was what was in the left pocket. And so I’ve always been a, like if I’m using my phone one-handed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s my left hand, even though I’m right-handed. And this, like people who don’t do this, this blows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their mind that anybody would do this with their non-dominant hand. If you’re not dropping it, it must work. I don’t drop it, that’s just the habit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve developed. And I hear, like, we will definitely hear from other people who grew up the same way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like everything was in the right pocket, then my phone just came around, they just kind of went in the left pocket because that was available.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, we’re gonna hear from these people. there are dozens of us, dozens. What is
⏹️ ▶️ John What about lefties? What about those people? Let’s just flip everything.