191: The Failure Mode of a Train
13 Oct 2016Dash developer dispute, Dropbox dissatisfaction, and DSLR delight.
Episode Description:
- Dealing with DNS trouble
- Follow-up:
- Greg Koenig on the ceramic iPhone
- Apple and Dash developer-account termination
- Dropbox shenanigans
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
- Post-show: Marco is a'waffling
- Canon 5D Mark IV
- Marco's lenses mentioned:
- Modern giant, heavy, expensive, but awesome lenses (no experience with them):
- Leica Q
- Casey's camera setup
- John's Sony a6300
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- Betterment: Investing made better.
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Chapters
- Pre-show: Handwriting
- DNS trouble
- Follow-up: Sierra iCloud sync
- Follow-up: Casey’s headphones
- Ceramic iPhones are unlikely
- Sponsor: Betterment
- Dash developer drama
- Sponsor: Pingdom (code ATP)
- Dropbox dissatisfaction
- Sponsor: Indochino (code ATP)
- Dropbox alternatives
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Marco Waffling
Pre-show: Handwriting
⏹️ ▶️ John We didn’t get to talk about this in the show, but the most important revelation of Casey’s video of him sending me the dollar is just
⏹️ ▶️ John how terrible his handwriting is.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Like my handwriting is bad. But
⏹️ ▶️ John So here’s why it’s extra awful. Like my handwriting is like chicken scratch. I have terrible handwriting, right? But yours is
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible, but then it has this extra flavor. And the extra flavor is it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John and you do unconventional things. You connect letters in ways that other
⏹️ ▶️ John people don’t. So it’s not just like you’re sloppily drawing the letter shapes. you decide that two letters should
⏹️ ▶️ John be connected like in ways that are not normal. So it’s just hard to parse.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re like, is this even English letters?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t even know what
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you’re boy bad
DNS trouble
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco was saying before the show that he was having a little bit of troubles with the live stream
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I didn’t understand why for a moment until you started explaining to me what’s going on and then I realized, oh yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m having similar problems but manifesting themselves in different ways. So why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t you tell the listeners what’s going on?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, so as you might have noticed, the tweet that announced that we were going to be live, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time duration that was in that tweet, normally it’s like, we’ll be live in 45 minutes. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to start the live stream about a half hour or a little more before recording.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And today the time interval was seven minutes or eight minutes. I forget which one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the reason why it took so long to set up, I was here at 830. I was here at the 30-minute
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mark trying to get it going. And I realized all afternoon and evening, Hover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been going through this massive DDoS attack that has taken down, among other things, their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco DNS servers. Marker.org is hosted by Hover, or registered at Hover, and I use their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco DNS. Marker.org’s VPS is what hosts the IceCast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco server that powers this livestream. I basically spent the last half hour trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first see if I could get it working just by IP address, but that was going to be tricky because of various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco virtual hosting things, and then eventually I just created a whole new hostname. Hover didn’t register.fms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a while. I actually don’t know if they do yet. I think they might now, but for a long time they didn’t register dot FMS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So ATP dot FM is registered at Gandhi dot net. So I quickly ran over there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco created a new domain name live dot ATP dot FM, hopeful hope that that propagated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in time, you know, to be requested by anybody. And fortunately it did. I created that name like 840
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and basically move the whole thing over to that and and it’s pointing to the same IP point of the same server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and basically required only a very quick creation of a new virtual host on the market or server to just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recognize that hostname and give it the little like tiny little HTML page that basically embeds the audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco player. And that all worked and it was great and there we go. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now we are streaming from live.atp.fm instead of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco marker.org colon 80808080 or whatever it was. And it actually appears
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the DNS outage might actually have just ended but oh well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey People are starting to tweet at me saying, oh your site’s down, your site’s down, your site’s down. moment I was like, oh, did I get fireballed?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s exciting. Or something like that. And then I thought, no, this was just a link post. I wouldn’t be fireballed for that. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it occurred to me, oh, no, this is a much greater issue entirely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it really says a lot about how little I blog anymore. That my site has basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been up and down for like the last five or six hours, whenever this started. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got in total one tweet about it. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m so glad that I have not had to deal with stuff like that in my various server administration stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s got to be hell to deal with, to deal with DDoSes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven Connelly Yeah, I can’t imagine. Especially, I mean, imagine if you’re Hover, where you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hosting DNS for so many people. That’s your business to some degree. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, God. No, thank you. I’m glad that’s not my problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Steven Connelly I’m curious, for the people in the chat who are recommending different DNS providers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess I don’t know this, I probably should know this. Isn’t your registrar like the top authority?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like, like if somebody had a totally empty cache, suppose my registrar is still hover,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but suppose I host the DNS somewhere else, like CloudFlare or whatever, if a new request goes to fetch my DNS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has no cache information at any at any stage of the way, is it first going to go to my registrar to see who the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco NS is and then go to the NS? So like, basically, like, would what I have to change my registrar in order
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in order to prevent this from being from ever hitting me again. How would
⏹️ ▶️ John you, how would it know to go to your registrar?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t well how does it, I don’t know, how did how does DNS actually work at the very low level? I have no idea. You
⏹️ ▶️ John should read one of the O’Reilly books on DNS and bind or something. My
⏹️ ▶️ John vague recollection and the only way that occurs to me now as I think about it, which is probably informed by my
⏹️ ▶️ John vague recollection, is if you’ve got no information you can’t start by going to the name server for that
⏹️ ▶️ John domain because you don’t know what the name server for that domain is. So So there’s a set of root name servers that
⏹️ ▶️ John handle requests, that shouldn’t handle requests at all, because there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John so many layers of caching in between. But if you really started from nothing, there’s a set of root name servers
⏹️ ▶️ John for.com and.net and.whatever. And I don’t know who those root name servers are, and I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John if there is a more complicated system in place that makes this old information obsolete, because I read this book in the 90s.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that is my recollection.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and all the people in the chat seem to be supporting the fact that basically, if you don’t use your registrar’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco name servers that your registrar is not involved in looking you up for DNS in any way. That it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goes up through the ICANN and ARIN maintained master servers and stuff like that, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you were saying. So it sounds like I can stick with Hover for the registration and just move the DNS somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else. So that’s good. I think I might do that, just to move it somewhere smaller, basically. It’s time
⏹️ ▶️ John for you to run your own DNS server. Hey, why don’t you write your own DNS server? It’s a thing that people
⏹️ ▶️ John have done before. Just ask those people, they love it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, actually, it’s funny you bring this up, and I’m not trying to be funny. One thing that I’ve wondered,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I keep meaning to ask you, Marco, but I keep forgetting about it, and this is a perfect opportunity.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When you were building Tumblr and you were giving people subdomains,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weren’t you? Well, maybe not you personally, but I’m saying Tumblr was giving people subdomains.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How did that work exactly?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Excellent question. So the problem as as you know, but our listeners
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might not, you know, basically the idea is if you have some giant web service and you try to have people like hosted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remains there. So basically pointing their DNS to you if they’re hosting a sub domain like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco www dot kclist dot com, they can point that to a C name and a C name
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can just be like, you know, host dot square space dot net or whatever. And and then that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco host dot square space dot net can lead anywhere that square space wants it to. It could lead to a whole bunch of load balancers. it can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be geographically distributed, it can it can be moved around between hosts or servers if it needs to. It’s great. The problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that the very root entry so like, inside of www.caseylist.com, if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just Casey list.com with no www, that can’t point to a C name that has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be an A record for it to work. And an A record he needs to be an IP address. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you basically have to have a special kind of IP address that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco route to different servers as needed or you could like if you just have that as a load balancer. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are very advanced routing things you can do to make that not crazy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they’re not easy. And they are limited when you get when you only have when you have the IP instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of instead of like a C name. What we did for the first couple of years, Tumblr
⏹️ ▶️ Marco started out at Rackspace. It started out with one server at Rackspace. And then eventually it grew to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three servers at Rackspace and then it was like, oh, Rackspace is ridiculously expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We will never be able to afford to scale here. So we very quickly moved over to what was then called the planet, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is now today SoftLayer. We had already started telling people to point their their names at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this one IP that we had at Rackspace. It was just our like master server with the load balancer on it. When
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we moved to the planet, we kept one server at Rackspace for a long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. I had to be at least two years into intertempers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like insane growth where if you had looked at our DNS help page before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a certain before like you know six months into the service your domain would have been pointed there which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is many of our very large users being proxied through I forget whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was squid or crap what’s that HAProxy yeah so it was either squid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or HAProxy running on this one rack space server for years proxying all this old traffic. And eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they shut that down, I think. But it was years and years into the service. And then when we were at the planet, we basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had some kind of floating IP that their routers could assign to anything within the data center. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made that a little bit easier. And I’m sure with like GeoDNS, you might have more options. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know enough about it to say. Fortunately, by the time Tumblr needed to care about stuff like that, I was gone and it wasn’t my job anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that was all for me redirecting my own domain to Tumblr, right? So how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does something.tumblr.com dot com work, though?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that’s just a wildcard virtual host. The web servers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally just had wildcard virtual hosts. And so the PHP app that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get the inbound request would just look at what the host name was and then dispatch it from there. That’s cheating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was expecting this super long and involved answer, and that was super simple and boring. I’m disappointed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all right. I’ll forgive you this once.
Follow-up: Sierra iCloud sync
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We should probably get into follow-up proper. I think I have all of the follow-up this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week, which is making me very uncomfortable, to be honest. But we’re going to roll with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John If I’m here, Casey, and you’re here, doesn’t it make it our follow-up?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I am the one who put all of the three bullets into the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show notes, which is, I think, a first. And I’m not feeling too comfortable with this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, in reality, isn’t it always basically John’s follow-up? Basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But here we are. So anyway, a friend of the show, Steve Troughton Smith, put up a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Twitter poll, I don’t know, a week ago, maybe a little over a week ago. It says, listening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the latest HBFM, I’m curious, did you turn on desktop and documents iCloud sync in macOS Sierra?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did and I’m happy with it. Now, Steve is a very prolific iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey developer and hacker, so you have to consider that when you consider the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of person that is likely to follow him. And the poll results as we record, 30%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes and I’m happy with it, 4% yes and I regretted it, 29% no, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the winner, 37% hell no, which I just thought was kind of interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, so thanks to Steve for putting that up. I don’t believe in the official
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Twitter client, thus I cannot create polls.
⏹️ ▶️ John I love seeing the empty space where a poll should be as I browse Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yep. obvious. Sometimes you can
⏹️ ▶️ John sense like this must be a poll, but this tweet doesn’t make sense. Oh, well, I’ll never see it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I continue on my way. Yep. So this obviously this is not a scientific poll, whatever. It’s just Twitter stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, the fact that most people have been scared away from this feature, like I said, if it
⏹️ ▶️ John was a bunch of nerds following, uh, you know, a nerdy Twitter account, it makes sense that they would be the people who are
⏹️ ▶️ John reading reviews and becoming or listening to our podcast and being scared away from the feature. So that’s why the vast majority
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, no, I did not enable this feature. And that’s why hell no wins because these people are afraid of the future because they’ve read scary things
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. The other possibility is even you know, even if they did the things they read about are in that scary,
⏹️ ▶️ John they may be in a situation like me where they know they’re now a liar that they have a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of files or they have some very large files. And I think even if it works for most people, I
⏹️ ▶️ John know I’m at the edge of the envelope here and I probably shouldn’t enable it. But if you just look at the people who
⏹️ ▶️ John did enable it, most of them are happy with it. Right? So 4% Yes, and I regret it isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t that big a number. And of course, the people are happy with it maybe they’re happy with it now you know wait a year to see how happy they
⏹️ ▶️ John are because you know all it takes is one thing that goes awry and you become you know upset about but anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah it’s really difficult to get a read on these things without an actual an
⏹️ ▶️ John actual study controlling for all the variables especially when nerdy people like us ask about it because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a self-selecting group.
Follow-up: Casey’s headphones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted to also briefly touch on my headphones. Last week we had talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how my beloved but ancient and adorably crappy headphones had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kicked the bucket. Well, sort of. They weren’t cooperating well with my work laptop with Sierra, which is the laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they’re pretty much always connected to. And I had solicited suggestions for alternatives
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and promptly ignored every single one of them because guess what headphones spontaneously started working again?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The old crappy adorable headphones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, I was very excited about this I did do a pre PRM reset which I didn’t have a chance to do before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show of course This was I was shotgunning and just trying everything under the Sun to try to figure out how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to make them work again And I’m not entirely clear what it was that did it for sure I think I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rebooted at least once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that what shotgunning means that’s like trying two headphones at once
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah something like that I know it’s just yellow shotguns. They spray a bunch of little pellets everywhere at least that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my understanding Don’t email me. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hear from gun people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, I know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Please don’t email me. I’m so sorry. God. I’m so sorry. Anyway, so I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to quickly cover a handful of options if you’re in a similar scenario that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I heard a lot of responses from. The first one, the Motorola S305, these links
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will all be in the show notes. Those are the ones I used prior to the ones that I am currently using.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I loved them, except that the battery went to crap pretty darn quickly. I used to be able to make it through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an entire day very fast. And by, I don’t know, maybe six months or a year after getting them,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could no longer make an entire day with the S-05s. There were a lot of suggestions for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plantronics Backbeat Fit, which have the behind the neck head bone or head
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bone. Wow. The behind the neck, um, uh, brace, if you will, that I had been requesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I’m too prissy to have my hair squashed. Uh, but those were also kind of sort of earbuds.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And to me, if I’m going to go earbuds, I might as well just go AirPods. Battery, potential battery issues be damned.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But those were very, very popular. Very, very popular response. I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost going to buy our next set, which is the Kinevo, Kinevo,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. Quinoa. BTH-260V2. It’s pronounced acai.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Quinoa. What was that commercial? It was from, it was some football, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey food commercial. Anyway, point being the Kinevo BTH260. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an older version, I don’t recall the model, name, number, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that did not support aptX, but this pair apparently does. And this is what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was about to buy when my old Bluetooth headphones came back to life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then a lot of people suggested various kinds of earbuds,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey earbuds but with shoulder neck harness things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those things always look horrible to me like they those always look like the worst of all of all worlds basically it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you have this like you have the the discomfort of earbuds and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all the crappy sound that usually goes along with them and but you don’t have like the tiny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know tiny little size or wrap around the phone kind of cable like you still have this big block of battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and crap that you have to deal with and it’s just like I don’t I don’t get why anybody likes those please don’t write in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I completely agree with everything you just said. There are very, very many different flavors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this. A particular example I’m putting in the show notes is the LG TonePro HBS750.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And again, these will be in the show notes. I completely agree with you. The thought of having this thing resting on my shoulders, yet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also having earbuds seems like the worst of all worlds. Not for me, but definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on paper, it sounds like it would be good because presumably it has forever long battery life. particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey set is also aptX compatible, etc. etc. The final recommendation, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m actually looking into because they just seem very interesting to me, is bone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey conduction headphones. And the way these work is you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these things that sit pressing against your cheekbones and they vibrate your cheekbones,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which vibrates your head and the things inside your head, hopefully kind of in a not dangerous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way. And a lot of people wrote in to talk about that and I’m actually looking into that as well. So the Aftershocks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Trex as an example of that, that’ll be in the show notes too. So if you’re in a similar situation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can look at all those or just try to find an ancient pair like I have and do whatever magical incantation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash sacrifices I did in order to get them to work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m curious, you know, because of my whole like inability to comfortably wear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything in-ear, I don’t really know the answer to this, I’m curious for all these like like really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tiny in-ear Bluetooth things what do they do for remote control commands things like volume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and play pause and skip back skip forward do they have buttons somehow for that like how do they do that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well and that’s why the Plantronics backbeat fit are a popular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey choice I think because they have those bars that rest on your shoulders or those those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey orbs that rest on your shoulders that that I presume have oh excuse me I’m sorry I’m getting myself backwards
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me try that all over over again. So that’s why the, the Plantronics backbeat fit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is popular is because they’re earbuds, but with like panels on the outside of the earbud, if that makes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any sense at all. Um, and so the buttons are on there and additionally on those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shoulder harness see things, the LGs, and I think a few people had recommended Sony’s that were similar design,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those, I think have the buttons on those little like shoulder pad things or whatever they are that rest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on your shoulder. So I guess that works for those. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t speak for any like true to form earbuds. And I did get a lot of recommendations actually.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I can’t recall which one was the most popular, but a lot of recommendations for just straight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up earbuds that have the cord behind you. But if I’m gonna go that route, I’d rather have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the ones I have today that just kind of rest on my ears. I’m not a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey big earbud fan. Although that being said, the more I hear about the AirPods, the more I think they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my holiday list. because it sounds like they’re the best possible solution
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in that they have almost enough battery life if I listen all day long. Oh, Jaybird
⏹️ ▶️ Casey X2, as all said in the chat, I believe those are the ones that everyone and their mother had recommended.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, so I think the AirPods are probably the best bet because if I ever get up from my desk for like any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reason, I can pop them back in the little Tic Tac holder and that’ll probably give me enough juice to get through the rest of the day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So hopefully Santa or the equivalent, I guess Hanukkah
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Harry, if you will, will be good to me this year and maybe I’ll come up with a set of those.
Ceramic iPhones are unlikely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, last piece of follow-up, and this I think will be a little bit more shared. A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey friend of the show, Greg Koenig, had written a post earlier today about why your next iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey won’t be ceramic. And if nothing else, it’s a great post because it includes a screenshot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of one of my favorite movies of all time, The Hunt for Red October. But what Greg goes through in this post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is why he thinks that this is probably not going to be a thing. don’t know Greg,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he is I think a co-founder or one of just a handful of employees of Luma Labs and they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make the Luma Loop, which is the camera strap I have on my big camera as we speak.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that was not comped. Well, it was a gift, but it was from family. So somebody paid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actual money for it. It’s really great. I love that thing. And so Greg manufactures stuff for a living. That’s what he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does. And his point, which he had a very long essay and it’s worth reading
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every bit of it, but If I were to quickly distill it down, he said, Apple’s a hardware company and machined
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aluminum is their primary platform. At peak production, Apple’s manufacturing roughly a million iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a day. So for Apple to bring a whole new long cycle time process online, the sort of thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that ceramic would require, they would need warehouses with tens of thousands,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or excuse me, thousands of machines already squared away and ready to rock with thousands more machines
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being built. The machines that are building the iPhones, there would need to be thousands of those. And there would probably need to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be—those machines would be needing to be built to add to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey collection that’s already ready to rock. So in his perspective, there’s no freaking way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is going to happen anytime soon. And it’s really worth reading all of it because I am way over simplifying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, but you should check it out. We’ll put it in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and just to say, but also it’s like, in order to get the machines and tooling and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set up to produce ceramic iPhone cases at the scale needed to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco produce enough iPhones to meet demand. They could theoretically do it, but not only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would it be way, way, way more machines and space and money and people than what they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, but the gist of it was, if they were even preparing for that, you couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hide that amount of investment and effort. That would take years to build up if they were going to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. You would see that. You would see people talking about it, noticing it in expenditures.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’d see sources in the supply chain talking about it and leaking information and Apple acquiring companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or staffing up, you know, in certain ways. Basically, it’s like it would be such a massive undertaking and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like stuff, money and people that they really couldn’t hide it.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re disguising it as a car development program. You know, all those billion dollars
⏹️ ▶️ John to go make it a car. Who would believe that? Anyway, so for the past, I think for the past
⏹️ ▶️ John for a long time now I think, Apple has to have been internally looking for
⏹️ ▶️ John their next material after machined aluminum. Because the machined aluminum age began with the
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Air, the aluminum age began slightly before that, but once they settled on the machined aluminum, they
⏹️ ▶️ John had a nice situation where so many things they made started as a block of aluminum
⏹️ ▶️ John and these computer controlled milling machines would carve out what they wanted. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they do that for so many products. And that’s good because then you’ve got a solid
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to invest in, a thing to become good at. They buy all these machines, the machines get faster, so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John Part of the thing that Greg was talking about in the post is exactly how long does it take to go from
⏹️ ▶️ John raw material to a part. And ceramic takes longer than machining aluminum because you’ve got to do the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John baking process or molding and all sorts of other stuff. But anyway, looking for
⏹️ ▶️ John the next material, there’s a lot of research in that. I mentioned last show about carbon fiber,
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of ceramic, different things with plastics. I don’t think they’ve found
⏹️ ▶️ John what their next thing is going to be, but surely they are looking for it, because they’re looking for something that
⏹️ ▶️ John is like a net win over aluminum. Aluminum is pretty great. It has some
⏹️ ▶️ John good things going for it. It removes away heat. It’s easy to machine to high tolerances. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s sort of a known quantity. They can mess with the formulation of the aluminum as a Greg points out and not have to
⏹️ ▶️ John replace the machines Right because they can all still mill they’re going to change from six thousand six thousand to seven thousand
⏹️ ▶️ John series aluminum They could still use all the same machines But it’s got downsides too. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John radio transparent it bends Scratchability if you’re gonna have a high gloss
⏹️ ▶️ John finish that haven’t sorted that out or whatever. So anyway, I Feel like during all this time and when we’re in this
⏹️ ▶️ John aluminum and glass age Apple has to be looking for what the next thing is eventually presumably they’ll find it
⏹️ ▶️ John and And when they do find it, there is going to be, you know, a long ramp
⏹️ ▶️ John up into switching over. I don’t think, you know, as this thing points out, if what he’s saying about the time
⏹️ ▶️ John required to manufacture it, I don’t think they can use ceramic unless they solve that problem. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John time is one of the problems they can’t really fix, right? So if they decided some
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of ceramic combined with some other material, like ceramic, like he says the end, ceramic at the outside
⏹️ ▶️ John and or something else inside, if they decided this was a thing because it has more desirable qualities they have
⏹️ ▶️ John to get it down to the point where they can manufacture it as quickly and easily as aluminum or
⏹️ ▶️ John within that ballpark because they’re not going to go backwards by like a 2x or 10x manufacturing time they just can’t sustain
⏹️ ▶️ John that and I think he’s right that if they have made that decision there’s gonna be such a long lead
⏹️ ▶️ John time and that you know we’ll all know about it but as discussed last week like the next one’s gonna be glass
⏹️ ▶️ John glasses a thing they already know about they already did with the four in the forest there’s glass in the current phones that you know whatever that’s the rumor
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a big change they’ve done it before it’s a existing material if they were going
⏹️ ▶️ John to do anything with ceramic and the watch was a trial run don’t even think about it until like after
⏹️ ▶️ John you have two rounds of this glass phone the whatever and the whatever s or you know actually i’m totally
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey off the rhythm now because they kept the phone the same
⏹️ ▶️ John and realize this is not uh an s generation is actually the seven even though it looks the same as the success
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway we’re all confused now. But yeah, I still think that somewhere out there in our future
⏹️ ▶️ John is Apple’s next material. Remember the liquid metal rumors? He mentions them as well. They bought that liquid metal
⏹️ ▶️ John company and they had, you know, they made the sim. I think they made the SIM extractor tool of liquid metal.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not really a big return on investment for that company, but that was another possibility. Can we can we make
⏹️ ▶️ John can we like injection mold metal and come out with a part that has all the fine details
⏹️ ▶️ John already on it because it’s liquid metal and it flows and it’s like plastic. But you get, you know, Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John none of those things have won yet. I think the ceramic watch tells us that, of all the
⏹️ ▶️ John possible future materials, maybe ceramic had enough promise to say, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if we’ve eliminated it as a possibility for our phone, we can make a cool watch out of it, because as Marco pointed out,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not an unknown material in the watch world, and they can give it a try. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the requirements for a successor to aluminum on the phone are
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty stringent and it could be that we have to go through
⏹️ ▶️ John a whole series of generations of this glass phone before we even look at, you know, carbon fiber
⏹️ ▶️ John or plastic that doesn’t look like plastic or whatever else they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do. So speaking of phones, have you made it to the Apple Store? I don’t recall.
⏹️ ▶️ John I still have not. I’m solo parenting again, so like I just haven’t had time to
⏹️ ▶️ John be running around and going to stores. I still have not actually made it to the Apple Store. to eventually because
⏹️ ▶️ John my wife is finally starting to look at like watches and bands and stuff and complaining about the combinations
⏹️ ▶️ John that she would like to exist that don’t and complaining about the
⏹️ ▶️ John colors that seem not to exist anymore. And so on. Anyway, that probably means I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ John to end up in an Apple store at some point with her looking at watches. And that’s that has probably will
⏹️ ▶️ John get me there to mess with the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. I’m curious to hear what you think. After you go and do it. So my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey co worker Jamie has a jet black. I have a matte black. Every time I look at my matte black,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am convinced that it is, I think in my personal estimation, my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey favorite iPhone ever. I just think it looks amazing. And I love it to death.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then for some reason or another, I’ll grab Jamie’s phone and then I’ll wish so badly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it was even a half as tacky, as sticky as Jamie’s shown is because man
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that jet black is so nice to hold. I still prefer the aesthetics of the matte but gosh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that jet black is so nice to hold. Have you considered pine tar? Yeah that might be the fix right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll tell you what too like so you know now that we’re a few weeks in like my jet black one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know how many times I’ve looked at the back? Zero. I looked this morning just like it was like it was upside down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the bed I was doing I was getting dressed and I noticed I’m like you know how does how does the back look now after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few weeks of use. And I look and it’s like, there’s like three fingerprints on it, but it’s not that bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like I hadn’t, I hadn’t just wiped it off or anything. This was just like, like organic discovery of the back of this phone and in the wild.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like there was, there were a few fingerprints on it and that’s fine. And there’s a few small scratches that you can see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in certain light and they’re fine too. And it doesn’t matter at all. But every single time I pick it up and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hold it, which is constantly during the day, I am so glad it feels as good as it does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah. I can understand that. I don’t know. It’s, it’s a tough call. I think to To be honest, Jet Black
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or Matte Black, it’s kind of a win-win. I mean, because I think the Jet Black absolutely wins on comfort.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think the Matte Black wins on aesthetics, personally, although it’s a close call. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a win-win no matter how you slice it. Yeah, I’d agree
⏹️ ▶️ John with that. Before we move on from the materials that your phone is made out of, assuming the glass rumors are
⏹️ ▶️ John true and they do the glass thing, what do you guys think is the most likely successor
⏹️ ▶️ John material to aluminum and glass? Oh, golly. Like after that? Yeah, like
⏹️ ▶️ John after whatever this next one is, however long the glass era lasts, assuming the rumors are true. Because I
⏹️ ▶️ John have to think that Apple continues to look for the next material and they will find it eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not going to be aluminum and glass forever and ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think we can say for sure, I mean on an infinite time scale, but I don’t think we can say for sure that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they necessarily have to replace aluminum. I mean there are certain things in the world that just end up being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made of certain materials for a very, very long time just because that makes sense. For physical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco characteristics or for manufacturing ease or for cost or availability or scale or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else, there are certain things that always end up being made of that material. Airplanes are made out of aluminum
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because there’s lots of reasons for that. There’s nothing saying that’s going to replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aluminum for airplanes unless there is. Please, airplane nerds, don’t tell me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Let me believe one thing. I mean
⏹️ ▶️ John there is like if your airplane example is a good one because for a long time airplanes were made of metal until
⏹️ ▶️ John people started working carbon fiber into Airplanes into actual airplanes that you know like and so
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s not like they’re all made of carbon fiber now But that became a viable material for important
⏹️ ▶️ John parts of airplanes Whereas you know in the beginning of our parents lives that demonstrate didn’t even exist It wasn’t using airplanes
⏹️ ▶️ John at all and aviation is really slow to adopt new materials but slowly but surely
⏹️ ▶️ John basically over the course of our entire life suddenly carbon fiber is part of the formula of making up a plane
⏹️ ▶️ John I think phones are less conservative than airplanes and especially since
⏹️ ▶️ John You know airplanes have the constraint that they have to like Transport something otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ John why they even exist whether it’s people or cargo right but phones the form factor of a phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John I I mean in some respects until it is sending images, you know into it directly into our brain It has to have something that
⏹️ ▶️ John we can look at, you know, assuming we don’t go to glasses or something but everything else about it
⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of up for grabs like Aluminum, you know if
⏹️ ▶️ John if the electronics for a phone fit into something The thickness of a credit card aluminum
⏹️ ▶️ John is not the material for you because once you get to the thickness of a credit card You can’t make that out of aluminum anymore
⏹️ ▶️ John because it will bend and stay bent and so it’s a non-starter period you cannot do it out of aluminum
⏹️ ▶️ John right so if we get to that in our lifetime which I think is reasonable we’ll be old men
⏹️ ▶️ John but you can keep making these things thinner and smaller thinner and smaller and lighter weight and new screen technology
⏹️ ▶️ John and so on and so forth we can get them pretty thin and once they get to a certain thinness you can’t use
⏹️ ▶️ John aluminum anymore so I and and then you probably don’t want to use glass because it’s just too fragile
⏹️ ▶️ John so you have to go to a material that’s bendy and bounces back Um, and you’d probably want to also go
⏹️ ▶️ John to something that’s lighter. So I don’t, you know, it’s reasonable to say though,
⏹️ ▶️ John that you could say in the next 20 years, it’s aluminum glass, that’s it, or just glass and whatever they sandwich between
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Is that what you’re saying? You can’t envision anything in the next like 20 years or so that’s not aluminum
⏹️ ▶️ John glass or some combination?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I don’t really know enough about materials and the science behind them and the status of current technologies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like carbon fiber is a great example of, you know, that might be it. I don’t know. know carbon fiber is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now it’s it’s not used in in mass quantities and in a lot of places because of various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like newness and cost issues and things like that but I don’t know enough about it to know whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s likely to be overcome in the next few years I really don’t know carbon fiber I think would have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many of the same advantages of ceramic in that I assume it’s radio-transparent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I assume it can be very thin and light and strong based on the little I know about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it seems like it could be really cool, but I don’t know if they can make enough of it. I mean, if you think about where you might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see it first, certainly the iPhone is a very high-profit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very high-profile, prestigious device. But it wouldn’t surprise me if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you saw carbon fiber first appear in something lower volume that could maybe sell for even more, maybe a MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro. Maybe you see a MacBook Pro lid casing or bottom casing, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe even the entire case made of carbon fiber. I have no idea. But that would be a place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you could actually really use more of a weight savings, and you could charge more and have more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a profit margin to kind of cover the cost of it. And you wouldn’t need to make as many of them as you would make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the iPhone. So I think if they’re going to use something like carbon fiber, probably going to see it first somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else, not in the phone. But I really I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have no idea. I was going to say carbon fiber as well, but I am not confident in that idea
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I thought that carbon fiber is just a nightmare to work with. Doesn’t it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey splinter really badly? I guess that’s fiberglass, which I am not recommending.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m just saying. I just thought it was a nightmare to work with.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think carbon fiber does shatter though. Isn’t that one of the problems?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe that’s it. It’s an interesting thought exercise for sure, but I think this is three blind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey men leading themselves around in a circle. You know, I don’t, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco said, I don’t know anything about materials really, so I’m not sure what’s even reasonable. What would you say, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John I basically agree with all the things that you touched on. Like I was thinking the exact same thing as Marco in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John like, that’s what I was getting at with the credit card type thing. Aluminum is great right up to the point where you start
⏹️ ▶️ John reaching a certain minimum thinness and then you have the bending problem, right? Because aluminum is
⏹️ ▶️ John not all about springing back. And we have a good analogy
⏹️ ▶️ John in the car industry where for many, many years, cars were made of steel
⏹️ ▶️ John and then more exotic cars incorporated aluminum parts, which were weird and harder to manufacture. Don’t you remember like when
⏹️ ▶️ John we were kids, like Audi had aluminum cars and it was like, oh, but those are a nightmare to do bodywork on because everyone knows
⏹️ ▶️ John how to do steel and aluminum is harder to work with and all the sorts of reasons that like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, mechanics and body repair people would tell you that aluminum cars are pain in the butt. fast forward to today, aluminum
⏹️ ▶️ John is everywhere. It is trickling down the car line. Uh, it’s not just on exotic supercars anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s on exotic supercars these days, exotic supercars are essentially entirely made out of carbon fiber. Like the, like Kona,
⏹️ ▶️ John Seg one has carbon fiber wheels for crying out loud. Um, and you say, okay, that’s fine for carbon
⏹️ ▶️ John fiber for exotic cars, but carbon fiber, just like aluminum before it, but I feel like we’ll be trickling down. And like
⏹️ ▶️ John you said, on cars very often, especially on very expensive, cars, it’ll be aluminum
⏹️ ▶️ John and steel, but on the lightweight model, they will replace certain parts
⏹️ ▶️ John with carbon fiber. Very often the roof, the hood, things that are thin, not really load bearing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but very large, like Marco was saying with the back of a MacBook Pro. Um, and I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John cars, you’re not supposed to touch them to anything, so they shouldn’t be bending, but MacBooks, if
⏹️ ▶️ John they make them really thin, like think of the current MacBook, that’s starting to press the limits of bendiness. If you want to go
⏹️ ▶️ John much thinner and you probably will be able to considering like that the iPhone is probably faster than the current MacBook and the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone is a really small that a10 is really small if you want to go much thinner
⏹️ ▶️ John and you want to make a more lightweight version of that that’s more resilient making the top case of a MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John out of carbon fiber starts to make sense and because carbon fiber I think is inevitably going to trickle down the automotive
⏹️ ▶️ John ladder in our lifetime it’s just the way the industry goes there will be an ever-increasing
⏹️ ▶️ John expertise in dealing with in manufacturing carbon fiber. So that’s that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John my number one pick for the successor because things will get thinner. It has the advantage of radio transparency
⏹️ ▶️ John is really light, it’s really strong. The difficulty is you can’t like machine find details into it, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John more of a pain to deal with. But like, hoping that the rest of the manufacturing industries,
⏹️ ▶️ John starting with aviation and supercars and coming down to regular cars or whatever, we’ll, we’ll start to work out the details
⏹️ ▶️ John of a carbon fiber manufacturing process that makes it viable in a way that it is not now that makes it
⏹️ ▶️ John viable for manufacturing phones. Well, the chat room says carbon fiber is not radio transparent,
⏹️ ▶️ John so I don’t know. That may be another thing that they can tackle. They could always just have antenna
⏹️ ▶️ John lines smoothly etched into the carbon fiber like they do with the aluminum today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway. There we go, ceramic antenna lines inside a carbon fiber plate.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, yeah. Problem solved. And
⏹️ ▶️ John ceramic, the reason we were even talking about that is because Apple introduced this really shiny phone that scratches really easily, and we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, Oh, well, it would be nice if it could be smooth, but also not scratchy. And then that’s how we get into the whole carbon
⏹️ ▶️ John fiber thing. Oh, carbon fiber shatters and chips and so on and so forth. All of these
⏹️ ▶️ John all these different properties, I feel like within the realm of metals and ceramic and even plastics,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s my second pick, by the way. Carbon fiber is my exciting pick. My boring pick is as
⏹️ ▶️ John you get really, really thin, you know what? For something the size of a phone, not necessarily the size of a laptop or something
⏹️ ▶️ John the size of a phone. maybe not the big phone plastic
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of desirable qualities plastic we know all about plastic it scratches more easily than the
⏹️ ▶️ John hard metals it will shatter eventually but it bends and springs back and can and can take a beating
⏹️ ▶️ John and you still got the problem of the screen floating out there we haven’t even been talking about mostly just talking about the back of the thing I don’t see any anything
⏹️ ▶️ John other than glass for the front of the thing until the whole thing is a bendy piece of plastic and then you can’t have it be glass at all because
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole thing is like a rope you could roll it up or whatever and you can’t make that out of glass and then we just have to accept
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s plastic and they’re so cheap that if you get it scratched up you just go to the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Store and they give you a new one for 50 bucks or something but we’ll be dead then so don’t worry about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We respond to this week by Betterment.
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Dash developer drama
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Betterment.com slash ATP. Betterment. Investing made better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s been a brouhaha. There’s been a kerfuffle. There’s been… I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of adjectives. So there’s been a thing. And Apple and an independent developer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are kind of sort of duking it out. And that’s not usually happy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for anyone involved. And particularly for those watching from the the sidelines because oftentimes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this has pretty big implications on your own business. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m trying to think that there’s so many angles to this story and I’m trying to figure out the best
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way to summarize and we’ll put links in the show notes to MJ Sy’s summary post.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s two of them and they’re really good, Michael Sy’s. But the super,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey super quick version and then we’ll add details in a moment is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this This gentleman, Bogdan, and I don’t have his last name in front of me, but anyway. Popescu.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He had released many apps, maybe, but certainly, indisputably, was the author of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an app called Dash, which I actually haven’t used, which is probably criminal because from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco everything I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever heard, it is phenomenal. And I don’t say that sarcastically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What do you use, the built-in Xcode documentation like an animal?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, Safari usually, because I don’t trust the built-in stuff search abilities. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I get it. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, yeah. So I will be the first to admit I’m missing out on this. And, and again, I am not trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be sarcastic, genuinely from everything I’ve ever heard from anyone who has ever touched Dash, it is phenomenal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, all of a sudden his developer account got shut down. Maybe. Uh, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit up for debate, but all of a sudden gets shut down. He kind of tries to talk to Apple. Doesn’t really get a lot of information
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of them. Eventually starts posting about it. So now people, other independent developers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Marco, for example, are starting to say, Hey, this doesn’t feel right. What’s going on here. Eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he gets in contact with Apple. Things seem to be making forward progress. Then Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey goes to the press and says, well, he’s getting booted from the app store because he’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done some really nefarious stuff. Meanwhile, Bogdan is thinking, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought we were still in the midst of a dialogue, what’s going on here. So then he escalates and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes his own post again, links will be in the show notes, writes his own post that includes, among
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other things, a roughly 10-minute phone call, recording of a 10-minute phone call between him and an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey representative, which I’m not sure that was the most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey morally sound choice, but I can understand why he did it. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since all this has happened, the armchair archaeologists have been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey digging into what’s going on and whether or not things are awry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it seems to be that the disconnect is there were two accounts that were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey linked in some way shape or form. The method of that link and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how tenuous that link was is up for debate but it seems clear that there is absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a link between two different developer accounts and one of the accounts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems like everyone involved isn’t debating that it was involved in some kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of shady practices, trying to buy good reviews for their own apps, trying to put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad reviews for competitors’ apps, and just generally being shady.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now Bogdan’s perspective is, hey, I opened that account for a relative of mine. I did it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using my credit card, because in other countries, having a credit card isn’t necessarily a given,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it sort of is in America. And after that, I walked away.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They’re the ones that are doing all this nefarious, terrible things. I’m not. I’m just collateral
⏹️ ▶️ Casey damage here and that’s not fair. So there was some back and forth, like I said, between Apple and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he, Apple apparently wanted him to write a blog post saying basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, Apple just got confused, but we’ve straightened it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. It’s all good now. And then he allegedly would have been allowed to get back in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app store. This is before he escalated with the phone call. and I believe before Apple escalated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by going to the press. So there’s a lot of other avenues here. The armchair archaeologists
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seem to have found a lot of different ways that point to all the shady apps actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having been him as well and not some other relative. And we can go into that if need be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But this is one of those situations where everyone seems wrong, everyone seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, and nobody’s clear what the real story is, which makes it very interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And, uh, many people have joked that maybe serial season three will be about this, but,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but, um, but it’s hard to make heads or tails of it. And, and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not sure if I had to choose sides who I side with. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think the reality of the situation is I kind of side with both inside with neither all at once, which I know is kind of a cop-out,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that’s really how I feel. So let’s start by asking before we get into our opinions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this, is that a relatively okay summary? Did I miss any really important points?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you got it. I mean, I think your characterization of what Apple wanted him to do in that blog post is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not quite there, but close enough. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, John, any other thoughts? I was going
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, some of the… It’s not clear.
⏹️ ▶️ John We have the rough timeline of events from the outside, but because Apple is so
⏹️ ▶️ John tight-lipped about everything, I still feel like we don’t really have their
⏹️ ▶️ John side of the story and they’re never going to give it to us, right? So we it’s kind of like we have the black hole that is Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John and then we have a leak of their private communications with this recording and then we have
⏹️ ▶️ John the discussion for the developer but Apple’s never Apple’s not going to for instance like you characterize for like oh then
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple went to the press with this thing that said this thing like we have no idea if that
⏹️ ▶️ John statement was written and distributed through the bureaucracy before that call even took place.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple’s not going to clarify. They’re not going to go, Oh, by the way, you may think you’ve heard this, but really, actually, this is that they’re not going to tell
⏹️ ▶️ John us. It’s like none of our business what goes on inside their company. And also, I feel like the communication,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, their public communication to all the different sites. If you look at it, my recollection is that
⏹️ ▶️ John basically it doesn’t tell you the details to let you know all the nuances
⏹️ ▶️ John that the developers blog post went into, but it also doesn’t say anything
⏹️ ▶️ John that is false from the perspective of apple with their terminology which well i’m sure we’ll get into later like
⏹️ ▶️ John from apple’s perspective this is their rule system this is these are the set of rules they matched on this particular
⏹️ ▶️ John set of behavior they took this action and that’s what they’re distributing and apple was basically putting
⏹️ ▶️ John that out in response to the original kerfuffle about uh oh
⏹️ ▶️ John no a developer is getting squished again and so i would say that like it’s difficult to know
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s difficult to know apple’s side of the story like Like we can get the developer side because the developer not only is free to say
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever he wants to the public, but seems very willing
⏹️ ▶️ John and do whatever he feels like the public, which fine, but Apple is totally unwilling to do that. So I still feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like we are all at a disadvantage on the outside in terms of knowing what the real deal is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I mean, I think trying to figure out all the details of what happened is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco productive for any of us, possibly even them. Because we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weren’t there, these are private communications for the most part, we have seen very little of them, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t really know this developer well. We use his app, but none of us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know him to know for sure how complete he’s probably being. Who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we also don’t know if Apple’s being complete and truthful in their statements. We have no way to evaluate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these really. So all we can really do is try to judge this—or first, we can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just ignore it, which is one valid option. I think the community’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco initial reaction was, hey, this looks like a mistake because this app, before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we knew about the second account with all the other crazy apps, this app is really good and has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of legitimate five-star reviews. What need would this person have to buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fake reviews or to get suspended? It seemed ridiculous. And so we were all yelling last week on Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, this doesn’t look right. Can somebody at Apple look into this again or explain this. Like that was the main
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gist of everyone’s demands last week when this blew up.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the reason anyone was talking about it all is because he made an initial blog post that said,
⏹️ ▶️ John you might be wondering what happened to the dash. Here’s the deal. I’m not sure what’s going on, but they said my account is pulled
⏹️ ▶️ John and I can’t appeal the process. And like, so that’s how, that’s why we knew about it at all. Because he went to
⏹️ ▶️ John the public and said to explain why his apps are suddenly not available, right? Because people use his app and it’s popular.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s That’s the main thing I think we can take away from this entire thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John how the Apple developer community reacts to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because this reaction doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s the context of all the past history. So when we all collectively
⏹️ ▶️ John saw this story from a developer, and the reason we saw it is because we all travel in
⏹️ ▶️ John developer circles online and read developer blogs and anyway. And we saw that because
⏹️ ▶️ John of the past history of app store rule enforcement
⏹️ ▶️ John and policies that don’t seem right to developers,
⏹️ ▶️ John or the history of conflict, the history of arbitrary decisions that don’t make any
⏹️ ▶️ John sense or that are punitive to developers in ways they shouldn’t be or honest mistakes
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. That context is why we had this reaction, because this
⏹️ ▶️ John event is not a thing. This event just highlights, hey, how does the Apple developer community feel
⏹️ ▶️ John about Apple and the App Store at this moment in time? Are they inherently suspicious? Do they give Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John the benefit of the doubt? Do they give developers? And like, it so clearly showed that the
⏹️ ▶️ John current context, despite positive changes, is that we will all readily
⏹️ ▶️ John believe that the giant faceless bureaucracy that is the Apple App
⏹️ ▶️ John App Store, uh, can and does do things that are, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John best case mistakes or worst case like just wrongheaded decisions. Right. So that’s that I feel like was, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, part of it, Margo, you’re right. Is that like, this is a good app and we kind of like, you know, do
⏹️ ▶️ John virtue transfer, like application good, therefore developer good, but just not a valid transfer. But you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it just didn’t seem like if you’ve got a quality app that people like, uh, that you’re known for, what
⏹️ ▶️ John reasons do you have to like cheat on interviews or anything even before we knew that but like
⏹️ ▶️ John just seemed like all right and and but but i really think the most important thing is that the apple should take away from
⏹️ ▶️ John this is that people’s developers still don’t trust that we are
⏹️ ▶️ John going to do the right thing and that when they see anything that even looks like one of those past
⏹️ ▶️ John situations where we’ve been in the wrong or done something that was not productive they will immediately believe it so
⏹️ ▶️ John that you know they’ll know they have made progress when a similar event happens and
⏹️ ▶️ John the reaction from the developer community is not immediate suspicion that Apple has screwed a small developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah and and I think you know in Apple’s credit though this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ability to totally terminate somebody’s developer account is probably used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every day for lots of different fraudulent accounts that are trying that are you know conducting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fraud or spam or scams or something like that they probably terminate developer accounts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every day. And I can’t think, I mean, maybe I’m wrong. Please let me know if I’m wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t remember a single previous instance in the eight years of the App Store where it seemed like someone’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developer account was terminated wrongly. Has that ever happened that we learned about?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, the equivalent is like, we’re rejecting your update even though you’ve got a crasher for some annoying
⏹️ ▶️ John reason. Yeah, they didn’t terminate your developer account, but effectively, it’s the same thing in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John terms of- No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, this is more severe. this is much more severe.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is, but see, the reason I think you don’t see people complaining about termination is because I think you’re right, the
⏹️ ▶️ John termination happens all the time, but it happens to known bad actors, and it’s part of the cost of doing business to known
⏹️ ▶️ John bad actors. Bad actors get their accounts terminated all the time, they just open a new one, that’s their business, is open
⏹️ ▶️ John up a new account, do something against the rules for as long as you can, when your account gets closed, open
⏹️ ▶️ John up another one, that’s their entire MO, that’s the life cycle of the fraudster on the
⏹️ ▶️ John app store. is right. And so of course, they’re not going to complain about it. Why would they? That’s just like how the system
⏹️ ▶️ John works from their perspective. So I think this is just, you know, the the
⏹️ ▶️ John the legitimate developers have the review problems or whatever, and they’ll get shut down. This looks like a crossover
⏹️ ▶️ John of those two worlds, the world over there where no one ever complains, but everyone knows Yeah, you’re gonna get shut down in like a week or two, but sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re slow about it. You can make a lot of money in the meantime. And then this world over here where it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John historically, sometimes Apple reject your legitimate application and be frustrating or whatever. But eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll get through it, except for the people who are like, you know, apps of this type are no longer allowed, period. And they just have to stop development.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s also very similar in terms of like, Oh, we don’t want you to make launcher apps for a couple of years or but I don’t know. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a good example. But that where Apple categorically decides that this type of application isn’t allowed anymore, even
⏹️ ▶️ John though we had previously allowed it. But this is like crossing over of and because and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not that much of a crossover, because there is, like you said, everyone agrees there’s some kind of fraudulent activity on an account somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John The argument is whether that fraudulent activity should mean that this other account gets closed, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the meeting of those worlds. The only question is, is that meeting,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, you know, is it legitimate to do collective punishment because the accounts use the same test devices
⏹️ ▶️ John and the same credit card number, which from Apple’s perspective is the only way they have to tell. They can’t see what’s on the other side of the computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So, you know, all they have is data and their data says same test devices, same credit credit card number, same
⏹️ ▶️ John legal entity. And from a legal perspective, like
⏹️ ▶️ John not from a practical human perspective, but from a legal perspective, that’s how the Apple ID system works. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John how developer thing works. They want information about you to connect to, essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John to connect to an entity that they can sue or that is legally representing. And so if you
⏹️ ▶️ John use all the same information that they use to establish what the entity is for multiple accounts, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all the same entity. That’s the whole point of you doing this. Like if Marco has multiple, don’t you have multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John your various? Yep. Like, right. But that’s like, if they
⏹️ ▶️ John were all, you know, separate or combined, like that’s how things work in the business world. We don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John care what physical person is sitting in front of the thing. They just care what the legal entity is and where the liability lies, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, the more human side of it is, what if you do live in a country where it’s not easy to get credit cards
⏹️ ▶️ John and you do a favor for somebody and you’re not a lawyer not thinking about the fact that now you essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John are legally vouching for the activities of this other account, right? I think Apple would be entirely in the right and probably
⏹️ ▶️ John totally in their legalese somewhere that says, Hey, if you use all the same legal and contact
⏹️ ▶️ John information for multiple accounts, you are legally responsible. Like, you know, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve essentially absorbed the liability for this other person. It’s as if you started a company
⏹️ ▶️ John and then, you know, your friend came in and wrote all the code, but then you published as the legal entity,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re legally responsible, not your friends. Like, Oh, I didn’t write all the code. He did. It’s like, doesn’t matter. That’s not how the law works,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? For the most part, I’m not a lawyer. Um, and so in this situation,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple probably could have just said, These are the rules. This is the data is irrefutable.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t argue it. Uh, you know, we all agree on the facts here, and so therefore your account
⏹️ ▶️ John is closed. Um, but that’s not what Apple did. What Apple did instead is tried
⏹️ ▶️ John to communicate with this developer to work things out because they’re and here’s the next question
⏹️ ▶️ John all right so the Apple works of the developers how to work things out does do all of us here in the peanut gallery
⏹️ ▶️ John and the Apple developer community do we immediately suspect that the only reason they were working it out is
⏹️ ▶️ John because this person made a blog post
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well that this happened beforehand so here’s well here’s here’s what happened and this is I think if I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at this whole situation if I can point to two things that I would say were were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad moves. I think one was Apple’s bad move and one was the developer’s bad move.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Apple’s bad move was when they first started detecting all of this fraud on the other account.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They did consider the fraud account and the Dash account to be logically linked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they both were made by the same credit card and they both used some of the same test devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they considered that enough of a correlation to consider them logically linked. And I think that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that alone right there considering account and account logically linked for the purpose of fraud detection based on the same credit card being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used and the same device being used I think that’s a reasonable assumption I think Apple was totally fine to do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the error that Apple made that that I would say was probably the the the one big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big mistake that is Apple’s fault in the way this was handled is that when Apple detected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fraud on the other account they only contacted that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco account’s email address to talk about and try to fix the fraud issue. And only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they were like issuing the warnings, basically, they only contacted the fraud one, not the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one that was logically linked to it. But why
⏹️ ▶️ John do you think that’s a mistake? Like you think it’s a mistake because it seems like unfair or whatever. But I think like from,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, policy wise, I think it is a reasonable policy to have that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the like who’s responsible for the actions on the account? Well, the responsibility
⏹️ ▶️ John of the actions of the account ties back to whatever legal entity, you know, as we define it as the information
⏹️ ▶️ John you enter when you make your Apple ID, right? If that’s their policy, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John they see fraudulent activity, and then they also have a policy that says that this fraudulent activity, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John all of the accounts that are tied to that same legal entity get shut down. I don’t see anywhere where
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s any specific need to carefully communicate with each one of them to give each one of
⏹️ ▶️ John the connected legal entities a chance to explain or something. That is a nice thing to do, and we all think they should do
⏹️ ▶️ John it in this case. But policy wise, like, you know, as many
⏹️ ▶️ John people pointed out, if you get shut down by like PayPal or eBay or anything like that, like no one’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to give you a nice phone call, ask you to like explain yourself to them or whatever to make sure everyone gets a separate
⏹️ ▶️ John communication in case they’re separate people. And so like it’s, it’s asking Apple to
⏹️ ▶️ John foresee the situation as described by the developer that actually was two different people and we were just sharing a credit
⏹️ ▶️ John card and I had no idea what was going on in this account for years and so on and so forth, whatever. But like, I think it is a reasonable policy
⏹️ ▶️ John for a business to say this is just how the rules work. If you don’t like it, you you developer have made
⏹️ ▶️ John a mistake by legally vouching for someone and you have no idea what they’re doing. They’re committing
⏹️ ▶️ John fraud over years, you have no idea about it. That’s your bad. That’s not our bad. We can just shut them all down. Right? Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was getting back to what we thought about this when we heard about it is like, Why is someone on the phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John because we heard the phone call that he put up, why is someone on the phone trying to work it out with this person? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly because, do we think it’s because this is a popular developer
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s a developer who’s popular with other developers because they make a developer tool? Is that why
⏹️ ▶️ John someone from Apple is bending over backwards? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John what makes this one different versus if this had just been one of those
⏹️ ▶️ John fraud developers who got their account closed or whatever. You think Apple in all those cases for fraud is on the phone with each one of them saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, let me hear what you say about it. Oh, we’ll try to get you your account back. I don’t think that’s happening. And the reason we think that
⏹️ ▶️ John is part of the anger of like the old app review guidelines that were like, never run to the press that doesn’t help.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, remember that old one that I think they’ve removed?
⏹️ ▶️ John The guidelines. That was Steve Jobs style snarky. We don’t like it when you badmouth us in public
⏹️ ▶️ John type of thing. That’s where the root of all of this is coming from. And there’s always coming like when we see this, at least
⏹️ ▶️ John for me specifically, I see this I think Apple is bending over backwards a
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re trying to be nice but be a little bit because this person made a blog
⏹️ ▶️ John post and presented their side of the story and Apple feels like this is you know
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t like looking bad they don’t like looking like they don’t want to be the bad guy but in cases where they
⏹️ ▶️ John do something like close an account and they just never hear anything about it and nobody blogs Apple you know feels okay
⏹️ ▶️ John about it I was like I guess we weren’t the bad guy so like the removing of don’t run to the press is removed partly because
⏹️ ▶️ John it recognizes that like that’s the only way Apple has to tell whether something they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John done might have been inadvertently meaner than they would want to be right
⏹️ ▶️ John the only way they can tell is if there’s public outcry you know because they’re not they don’t know every single developer or whatever like
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t ask the entire infrastructure at Apple to know every single app and to know
⏹️ ▶️ John what dash is and how popular it is and this is a good person I can’t do that for every is too much right and
⏹️ ▶️ John so I think this signal the public outcry and complaining on Twitter and
⏹️ ▶️ John other developers looking at it askance and thinking maybe it’s something we’re here is actually an important feature of
⏹️ ▶️ John the system as it currently exists quote-unquote working and I’m glad that guideline was removed by
⏹️ ▶️ John saying don’t run to the press because I think it’s an essential part of the process at this point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah unfortunately it is but anyway so so back back to what happened here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I honestly don’t want to spend a whole lot of time on this because I think it’s not that very productive. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if we can summarize, basically, you know, I think Apple, I disagree with you on like on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them notifying multiple accounts. I think if they’re going to shut down an account, which is a severe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco action, they should notify it beforehand. And so after the termination
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the first round of blog posts, somebody from Apple called the developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the developer recorded this, which in California is illegal. developers in Romania where it’s legal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The gist of it was that the Apple guy was trying very hard to work this out. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell that they wanted to work this out. You know, Apple wanted to make sure that the correct
⏹️ ▶️ Marco story, in their opinion, was told. So they suggested maybe he could write a blog post.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they basically wanted two key facts to be in the blog post.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco These accounts were linked, so Apple was not mistaken to suspend it. There was fraud on the linked account
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and he was working with Apple to unlink the accounts and get back on the App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they went over this back and forth a few times and it sounded like the developer was not very happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the phrasing of this, about the part that Apple didn’t make a mistake. And then he says
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he submitted this this draft post, which he later posted on his website. He said he submitted that to them. You could tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the call though that again there were there was definitely friction. He definitely did not seem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happy about what he what he was being asked to to agree to. And then a few days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco later Apple tells the press, this was indeed justified, there was lots of fraud on this account,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we tried to work it out with a developer but couldn’t reach a resolution, and that’s it. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think if you can if you kind of try to like connect the dots between those two things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like he and Apple couldn’t agree on what what was what he was going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to how he was going to present these these facts of the case or how he was going to word things. It seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple most likely got whatever he submitted to them, decided this was not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be resolvable, or basically decided negotiations were over and this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was not going to work out, and then the statement to the press was basically them shutting the door. We’re only hearing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of a phone call. We’re not hearing what was before or after this part of the call. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know any of the communication that happened separately from this call. So things could have been more tense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and hostile than what’s shown here. And what’s shown there is slightly tense and hostile from the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developer. So I don’t know if Apple was in the right or wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to close the door on this when they did. But that certainly seemed like that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what happened. And based on the two conflicting attitudes in the phone call,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s very likely the case. That they just decided this was not going to be resolved,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they were not going to reach agreement. Because from Apple’s point of view,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they want to make sure that they control the narrative here. And it was very clear from that recorded call, from the Apple rep on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that call, Apple wanted to make very sure that everyone knew that they didn’t just slip up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and suspend an innocent account, that there was fraud that was linked to this account.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so they wanted to make very clear that that was the story that got out, that the the facts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were very clear, Apple did not just mess up. Because that would be really bad if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just messed up and suspended an account that had no connection to any problems whatsoever, because that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a very severe action. And clearly, running the App Store in eight years, and this is the first time we’re hearing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a bad developer account suspension, clearly they do a pretty good job and they’re pretty careful most of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time when taking that action. So they clearly wanted to make sure that fact was out there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that there was indeed real fraud, it was indeed linked to this account and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically that they were going to unlink the accounts and let this developer move forward. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think they were actually being very reasonable there and through whatever reason whether it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco communication or attitudes or whatever it was they couldn’t work it out and and that sucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there was a good post today on that Renee Ritchie wrote I think on iMore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was basically like how do we move forward from here and the gist of it was basically like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look, we all know the facts now, like let’s just like Apple should just reactivate, hit, you know, the good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco account, just reactivate that account. Like that’s how we move forward is like everyone basically suck it up, stop talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it and just reactivate the account because that’s best for everybody. Cause like the other side of this is like, you know, this is a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app and it’s out of the store for this reason that probably shouldn’t have happened, you know, or at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, like this app and this account probably didn’t deserve it. Assuming the developers telling the truth and this was some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relative and not just like him with a different account, you know. Um, and And secondly, this really sucks for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the customers of this app, because if you bought this app like I did in the Mac App Store, you can’t even re-download
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Like when the developer account is suspended, the app is gone. It doesn’t show up in your purchases tab,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t show up in searches, it is gone. You can’t re-download it. And that sucks if you bought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. So it does kind of suck the way things are left now, even though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can look back at what Apple did, and I think Apple was in the right, based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on just the little bit that we can know, and the little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bits and pieces that you can pick up. I think Apple did pretty much the right thing the whole way through here, with the exception of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not notifying all the accounts before termination. But besides that, I think Apple was in the right, and they seemed to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco handle it very well, and they seemed to put in way more effort. I mean, the guy on the phone was saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Phil Schiller was personally involved in trying to get this solved, and I believe that, knowing the way these things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work, I believe that. And so the fact that you could have somebody like Phil Schiller trying to get this fixed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Apple devising this way that they can resolve this and get back in the store, and presenting it to the developer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that sounded very reasonable. It really did seem like Apple was going above and beyond to try to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fix this, and they really didn’t need to. It’s nice that they did, and I hope that if I ever am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the wrong end of this, I hope they do the same thing for me. But it’s really, really above and beyond. They didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do this. They didn’t have to give this guy a way back in. They didn’t have to call him and offer this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of olive branch and say, all right, look, if you can just agree to these few statements, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can get back in. They didn’t need to do any of that, and they did it all. They really obviously wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to solve this in a decent way. And again, through whatever reason,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they could not reach agreement with the developer on something that I think—honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the developer made a huge mistake in the way that he handled that and I think he should have just said what they wanted to say because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wasn’t it wasn’t bad or incorrect.
⏹️ ▶️ John So from outside of this again looking at like oh when we all heard the story what do we all think of what does that say about how we view
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple now sort of at the conclusion of this I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple kind of got a positive result here like because
⏹️ ▶️ John in the beginning we’re all like oh Apple’s doing something bad in the App Store again and we’ve seen that story so many times and we’re immediately
⏹️ ▶️ John suspicious right by the end of it especially for any developer who is paying enough attention
⏹️ ▶️ John to like read all the details that we just discussed and read the blog post by the end of it I think most
⏹️ ▶️ John legitimate developers come away thinking if this happens to me
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like Apple will give me a legitimate chance because I
⏹️ ▶️ John first of all I think most developers understand that
⏹️ ▶️ John the developer made a mistake here, like not a mistake, but like that essentially by by by tying
⏹️ ▶️ John himself legally to the other account, he is he is essentially responsible for it. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m hoping that most developers would understand that, like that if you use your credit card number
⏹️ ▶️ John and your test device, maybe that’s not obvious to anybody. But after the story, I guess it is. So maybe before the story, you could say no. But now
⏹️ ▶️ John understanding like, you know, you see that they were tied to that. And yet, despite that, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John made an effort to to try to make things right and i think that whole
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is comforting to developers who feel like you know developer legitimate developers who would never
⏹️ ▶️ John do anything wrong like that but like if i find myself in this situation where i have you
⏹️ ▶️ John know unintentionally gotten myself entangled in the way their idea either i didn’t understand or i trusted somebody that i should never
⏹️ ▶️ John trust it but you know this happens to everybody right will i just be sol
⏹️ ▶️ John or will i be be able to will Apple be reasonable with me and the
⏹️ ▶️ John with the exception of the fact that it’s not clear that Apple would have been engaged at all if he hadn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John quote-unquote run to the press which really just means put a post on his own personal blog and have a popular app like
⏹️ ▶️ John with the exception of that what I still think is a concern like hey what about my obscure app nobody loves my app like they love dash when I
⏹️ ▶️ John post on my blog no one will even notice maybe I would still be SOL right but with the exception
⏹️ ▶️ John of that caveat I think Apple’s actions are essentially reassuring legitimate developers
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple will try to be reasonable. Yeah. And what Margo said is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if, if the goal of this developer was to be able to continue his business,
⏹️ ▶️ John his business of selling software and his popular application, he made bad choices. You can I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can decide Do you do you want to be right and be like righteous and be like, I refuse to admit
⏹️ ▶️ John to even any kind of wrongdoing or being linked or you know, Apple’s being on for or do you just want your account back because
⏹️ ▶️ John they weren’t asking him to say anything that’s not true. They weren’t asking him to take blame for anything that he doesn’t have blame for.
⏹️ ▶️ John They were 100% believing his story, taking it at face value saying, okay, great, you gave
⏹️ ▶️ John an account to somebody else or whatever, we’re going to get your account back. All you all we want you to do is to make it clear
⏹️ ▶️ John like Marco said that the facts of the situation were what they were. There was a reason
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple to do what it did. And that everyone involves like not to make it seem like Apple made
⏹️ ▶️ John a terrible mistake, but we all worked it out and then have Apple come out of it as a bit, which I think is totally reasonable. And he
⏹️ ▶️ John just he made bad choices. If his goal was to get his business back, he he could have gotten it back,
⏹️ ▶️ John doing things that are reasonable, telling the truth. They were allowing him to write whatever he
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted, as long as he hit those two key points, which everybody involved in the conversation agreed on. And he didn’t do it. Did he not do it
⏹️ ▶️ John because he was just too proud or stubborn or thought it was he would
⏹️ ▶️ John end up, you know, coming out of it looking bad or whatever, who knows, but like, if his goal was to get his business back,
⏹️ ▶️ John he blew it. But I still think like outside of this, that most of our maybe, you know, Marco could answer
⏹️ ▶️ John because he’s obviously the only you know, one with a application on the App Store of any significance that’s specifically
⏹️ ▶️ John tied to him and has a long experience. Do you feel reassured by the outcome of this
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple would be reasonable if you found yourself in this situation? Or is it neutral?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or do you feel worse that like it that you know that you didn’t realize this could happen, but now you think it could happen to you? to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, I think you nailed it. The reason Apple cared so much about this was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they know how bad it would be if it appeared that they were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capriciously suspending developer accounts for no reason. That would be terrible for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their reputation among developers. They knew how important it was to make sure that the official story
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, which was true, was that Apple did not make a mistake in detecting this fraud and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suspending this account. That was not a mistake on their part. They did not mess up. They were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not being capricious. They actually detected real fraud on a linked account that was really linked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a way that is substantial. They wanted that story to be true. This was not just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them being wrong. The way they handled it, as I said, I think they handled it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very well, better than they had to. Because of those two things, yes, I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good about this. You can say, as a developer working on the App
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Store, there’s always a certain minimum level of App Store BS that everyone has to put up with, mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around the reviews and the policies and everything else. But it really, in the grand scheme of things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that BS tends to be, most of the time, consistent and easy to work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco within for most developers. It’s a known quantity. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually capricious or dangerous, about to kill your business at any moment, unless you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things really close to the edges of the rules, which most people aren’t and don’t need to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For the most part, Apple as a gatekeeper does pretty well as gatekeepers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go. The whole concept of a gatekeeper to begin with is problematic. Sorry, Merlin.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is challenging to get that right, and there’s always going to be dysfunction and problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by having any gatekeeper. if you’re going to have a gatekeeper, I think Apple does a pretty good job
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it, possibly even a very good job of it. And as a developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on these platforms, I am reassured by this story that Apple really does care to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things right and to make sure that they’re doing right for the community as much as they can. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I consider this a positive thing as a developer. I consider it a bit of a pain in the butt as a customer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Dash, but otherwise, I consider it a positive thing as a developer.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why you should never buy your Mac apps in the Mac App Store. Once again, we learned that lesson.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Exactly. If it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John available outside the Mac App Store, buy it outside the Mac App Store. You’ll just be happier, which is a problem for
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple. It’s ironic that this is exposing… This is something they can fix, Apple internally. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, when we suspend a developer account, shouldn’t we still allow the L apps to be downloaded? They can fix that internally.
⏹️ ▶️ John That seems like something, if they cared about the Mac App Store at all, that that they would fix. But yeah, it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of sad that they’re kind of highlighting the problems with the Mac App Store by doing the
⏹️ ▶️ John right thing and detecting fraud and canceling accounts.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey so Marco tell us about Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mmm here’s the thing Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is making questionable choices in in recent times.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was a thing a couple weeks back where Dropbox was basically discovered to be hacking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac accessibility apps database. This is actually, I believe it’s fixed in Sierra, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically Mac OS X has a certain separate security level for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accessibility related apps and this allows apps to to see way more system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco events things like capturing keyboard input and stuff like that. Basically if you are an accessibility app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can basically see and intercept and track everything happening on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system. Things that are considered secure, you can still, you know, you have access to them. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most apps would not be able to do things like log every keystroke that’s ever typed in or things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, right? And so Dropbox, in order to achieve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain features or something, Dropbox was forcefully injecting itself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the list of apps using a prompt to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prompt you for your password that looked like the system password box
⏹️ ▶️ John it was the system password box. That’s why I put this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco thing in the show notes. Was it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, okay. Yeah, so like, I had this before Marco started getting crangy about Dropbox, I
⏹️ ▶️ John had an item in the notes that is actually still below there about Dropbox’s accessibility quote quote unquote hack,
⏹️ ▶️ John because the first stories about this were like, so this observed this is the observed behavior, which everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John agrees is crappy. The observed behavior is Dropbox. It wants you to turn
⏹️ ▶️ John on accessibility. But if you say no, it will,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, and take and take it out. The next time it comes up, it will just try to put itself back. Like if you go to the system preferences
⏹️ ▶️ John and remove it, right, and then you just reboot, like it’ll be back again. And so that is user hostile behavior,
⏹️ ▶️ John because the user disabled it. And And then unbeknownst to them, maybe you just launch it again and it puts itself
⏹️ ▶️ John back. And so the question was among the people who first saw this behavior, who were probably not
⏹️ ▶️ John programmers or particularly technical, was like, it must be saving my admin password
⏹️ ▶️ John because I entered my admin password to allow it to do this stuff. But then when I went to system preferences and turned it off,
⏹️ ▶️ John the only way that it could be possibly turning it back on automatically, which is this user hostile behavior that they
⏹️ ▶️ John observed is that it must have saved my admin password, which would indeed be horrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John anybody who knows anything about you know Mac OS 10 or whatever the hell it’s called
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and you know whatever knows like
⏹️ ▶️ John they would never save your password that is the stupidest possible way to get the thing they want
⏹️ ▶️ John because once you’ve entered your admin password they don’t need your admin password anymore
⏹️ ▶️ John right and so yeah so they don’t save your admin password which would be and and you can’t totally discount
⏹️ ▶️ John it because we all hear about these websites saving people’s passwords in plain text so never never overestimate
⏹️ ▶️ John the security intelligence of people writing code but Dropbox is a big company and it’s really hard for
⏹️ ▶️ John me to believe they do something I don’t they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly I would have believed that I hit by the time I read the story it was already discovered they weren’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saving the password but I would not rule out that they would try
⏹️ ▶️ John well but why never they wouldn’t know because it’s a matter of competence because Dropbox has a lot of money and they have smart developers right
⏹️ ▶️ John and the reason I think it’s not a matter of competence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a matter of respect
⏹️ ▶️ John no no no it’s not it’s not it’s a matter of competence because to do the thing they want to do, which we all
⏹️ ▶️ John agree is user hostile. They don’t need your password more than once. Once they enter it, like what they actually did
⏹️ ▶️ John is they just make setuid executables. Like everybody knows that anyone who’s done any Unix hacking, like as soon as you’ve got root access,
⏹️ ▶️ John the first thing you do is make setuid executables, setuid shells so you can get back. Like it’s just like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve given them your admin password. They’re like, la-da-da, do-do-do, check the
⏹️ ▶️ John setuid bit on these CHO. Now I have setuid root executables done and
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t need your password anymore right and so that that is you know that is the what
⏹️ ▶️ John they use and it doesn’t matter like every time you give an app an admin password you are essentially saying by giving
⏹️ ▶️ John you this admin password you now have free reign of the whole system not just momentarily but because once they give
⏹️ ▶️ John it to you you can immediately make a set uid uh executable as whatever and just like you
⏹️ ▶️ John know it’s all over and the the system integrity protection protects against that because it’s like oh even with root access
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t modify these files or whatever But anyway, that there’s that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John they were competence, like, the best way to do this user hostile behavior is not to store their passwords.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re like, they’re smart, they’re not going to do that. And they’re going to do it the smarter way to do this user
⏹️ ▶️ John hostile behavior, right? The second aspect of the part that’s the hack part is like, once you have that
⏹️ ▶️ John access, it still doesn’t mean you have to go directly to the SQLite database and start mucking with it. Because that’s like using private
⏹️ ▶️ John API. So it’s like Apple’s like, you don’t know what the structure of our database is just because you look in there and see a bunch of tables and
⏹️ ▶️ John columns and think you know how to hack it, that’s not a public API, that’s not guaranteed. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the same reason they don’t want you using private APIs. You’re not supposed to even be looking at that stuff. We reserve the right to change that at any time.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that is the quote unquote hack part of it, is that don’t directly access our databases
⏹️ ▶️ John behind the scenes, we provide APIs. You have to use those. You can’t just go sneakily find what the underlying
⏹️ ▶️ John storage is and directly mess with it. So that is, I don’t know why they were doing it that way. Maybe it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the easiest way to secretly do it behind the scenes, but it’s terrible. And they were signing themselves up for a maintenance headache because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like once you use a private API like that, whether you know it or not, you’re now on the hook to track every little
⏹️ ▶️ John change Apple does to their internals instead of just tracking their A P I diffs because at any moment in any point release
⏹️ ▶️ John they could totally change the structure of that database and your Apple blow up and it’s totally your fault because you’ve screwed things
⏹️ ▶️ John up. So that I would say is the best example of them doing something that’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ John good developer practice. But the initial story about them changing your password was totally
⏹️ ▶️ John a misunderstanding of the fact that they don’t need your
⏹️ ▶️ John password. They would never do that because it’s dumb. They have everything they need and more. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. So anyway, however they were doing it, Dropbox was really inappropriately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hacking the TCC database, the accessibility database, to inject
⏹️ ▶️ Marco themselves forcefully even if you remove them. So that to me is like offense number one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, you know, this is not good and this is… They’re eroding trust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I have in them and the ability and the willingness I have to run their software on my computer and give them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco access to literally everything on my computer. And then…
⏹️ ▶️ John Although before we move on from that, their defense of this as LinkedIn, I think probably have the Hacker’s News
⏹️ ▶️ John link that the developer talks about, their defense is actually plausible as a I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John you still you can still say like this is not socially acceptable behavior, especially among tech savvy
⏹️ ▶️ John users. But I can see where a company like Dropbox can get into a situation where it thinks this is
⏹️ ▶️ John the right thing to do. And it’s basically that when you install an application, if they have these one time prompts
⏹️ ▶️ John that you answer, quote unquote, the wrong way, like you didn’t understand what the hell it was, you just hit cancel or whatever. And
⏹️ ▶️ John now you don’t have like some kind of finder integration that you expected from Dropbox, right? It can be
⏹️ ▶️ John a legitimate support issue that enough people click the the wrong box on that one time setup thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re like Dropbox doesn’t work. When I see it on my friend’s computer, there’s these little badges or these little whatever, like whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John features accessibility is providing is not working Dropbox is broken. And I can imagine that being
⏹️ ▶️ John a popular support request. And if they have to walk people through Oh, like go to the thing, go to accessibility,
⏹️ ▶️ John click the little lock icon, go to like, to basically re enable it. And then the the
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of cutting the Gordian not solution becomes, know what users
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t handle this it’s too complicated they don’t understand what we mean by accessibility they don’t want to type in their admin password they’re scared
⏹️ ▶️ John by why don’t we just like if they ever enter their admin password put a little insurance
⏹️ ▶️ John but this bury some setuid root executables in our bundle and soon as they enter a min password put them there
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know what if it accidentally gets turned off by a point release or an OS update or whatever so
⏹️ ▶️ John we won’t hear from people saying hey Dropbox is broken again why don’t we just turn it on like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s paternalistic it’s like they won’t even know we do it. We’ll do it behind the scenes. They won’t see any UI.
⏹️ ▶️ John It will cut down on our support requests. That I think is the headspace that they get into. It’s not particularly nefarious.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re just trying to solve a support problem. But they eventually they wrap themselves up and not
⏹️ ▶️ John to where they think they’re actually doing people a favor by doing this. Whereas we all realize
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve gone too far in the hopes of like, let’s make it a smooth experience for most users at the expense
⏹️ ▶️ John of being sneaky. And it’s the wrong thing to do, but I think it is not done
⏹️ ▶️ John because they are malicious or bad developers. I think it’s actually done because they’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John make the experience better for everybody. Like, why don’t we just solve this? Why are we bothering users with this crap?
⏹️ ▶️ John Why don’t we just make Dropbox? People just want Dropbox to work like Dropbox. We have the technology. We can just make
⏹️ ▶️ John it work. And that’s, I think, where they went wrong in that feature.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, the thing is, like, if you’re going to, you know, basically, it’s the attitude that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of developers and platform owners have of like, we know better than our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco users, so we’re just gonna do it for you. Or we’re gonna do things the way we think are right for you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you just have to go along for the ride because that’s gonna be best for you. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a place for that. And there’s lots of places where that is the most pragmatic or the correct solution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or position to take. But as a user, I wanna make sure that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever software I am granting that level of control to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to make sure that I agree with their judgment in general and their technical abilities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and their way of doing things. And if I start doubting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody’s judgment or integrity or skill, then I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t want them making decisions for me and doing things behind my back and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having access that I don’t believe that they need and things like that. That becomes a trust issue, it becomes a security
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issue and lots of other potential problems. So my problem with Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here is that accessibility hack I think shows poor judgment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that is irresponsible the way they did that. So did Apple, which is why Apple made it impossible by putting the accessibility stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into system integrity protection in Sierra. And Apple is one such, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is one of these companies too. Apple, in many ways, Apple’s implied
⏹️ ▶️ Marco position is basically, we know best, we’re going to do this for you, and you’re not going to have control. And if you’re an Apple customer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a user, you have to basically decide, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do I trust Apple with this control, and do I generally agree with their judgment,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, in order to give them this control happily without problems, right? And a lot of people who don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple products, who don’t use Apple products, the reason they don’t use Apple products is because they don’t want to give Apple that control. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t agree with Apple’s decisions in those areas. Or they don’t trust Apple to have that level of ability. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s fine. My issue here with Dropbox is they make decisions like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In their beta channel, which is still in beta, granted, but in their beta channel,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they recently, quote, tested a toolbar that was injected into Finder windows,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is like this giant toolbar, which it looked like malware. It was injected in the bottom of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco window. And it’s like, no, that’s not okay like that why who thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was a good idea
⏹️ ▶️ John well that but that’s just a bad feature being rolled out to baby I mean everyone you know you try it on a beta user and all you just
⏹️ ▶️ John go oh that’s awful right but like the the specifics of injecting you will eventually get to this I think later
⏹️ ▶️ John but like the origin of Dropbox is that it was basically a hack see on the finder yeah do all
⏹️ ▶️ John the little badges and the icons like that is that is the product we all fell in love with is what was the one that didn’t like literally
⏹️ ▶️ John inject itself into the finder process to do this like the worst kind of hack the worst
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of totally unsupportable unsupported hack. And I think a lot of the reason I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, that’s the app we came to to start using and we liked it and we like
⏹️ ▶️ John the badges we like you know that gave you some reassurance green checkmark it’s think little blue thing it’s not like right, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s Dropbox and they didn’t have that feature. It would have been a lesser product. And
⏹️ ▶️ John because the people who did it were clever enough to get it done in a way that didn’t suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ John cause the finder to be crashing left and right. And we’re able to chase Apple as they
⏹️ ▶️ John updated the Finder and keep it working and so on and so forth, to the point where Apple eventually said,
⏹️ ▶️ John Dropbox is so popular and badging things is the thing that people actually want to do. We’re going to add an official
⏹️ ▶️ John API for this. They finally did the hack sees past in the grass thing that I talked about all those years ago. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John look at what people are using. If you don’t want them to use a disgusting hack to use this feature,
⏹️ ▶️ John make an officially supported API. And I’m pretty sure I’m some I’m sure people will send send us email from wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m pretty sure that Dropbox did eventually adopt that official API rather than continuing
⏹️ ▶️ John their hack because Dropbox doesn’t want to do that hack, they would love to have a supported API. Presumably,
⏹️ ▶️ John if the support API does everything that Dropbox needed to do this, of course, they would adopt it. And I think they
⏹️ ▶️ John have in the later versions. That’s not really the system working like,
⏹️ ▶️ John but during all that time, we were all like, yay, badges and Dropbox icons is great, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s not so much that they added a hack for this is that you could say the fact that someone
⏹️ ▶️ John thought this was aesthetically pleasing and appropriate UI, it
⏹️ ▶️ John poor judgment, which I’m on board with you there, right? That it looks like I think of like those
⏹️ ▶️ John Internet Explorer toolbars, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John guy you just like that shows poor judgment. But the fact that it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John a the fact that it’s injected, it’s like, well, you know, origin Dropbox was founded
⏹️ ▶️ John on on ill-advised code injection, probably not on the wall in their headquarters. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, fair enough. Anyway, so Dropbox, in my opinion, has shown
⏹️ ▶️ Marco poor judgment recently and questionable technical decisions. There’s also there’s some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco performance issues, like Dropbox appears to monitor all file system activity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some way, like not just in their folder, but in the whole system.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I have some things to say about that as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Okay, go ahead about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ve been doing that for freaking ever. From the very beginning, DBFS EventD has been there slurping from the
⏹️ ▶️ John FS Events firehose and being just as unfunctional as it has always been. This is not a new thing. Whether it’s ill-advised
⏹️ ▶️ John or not, it’s like maybe not from the very, very beginning, but for many, many years,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you were to look at top and see DBFS EventD grinding up your things, especially if you had a slow spinning disk
⏹️ ▶️ John and especially if you have a small number of cores, that is not a new development. Now, you can say
⏹️ ▶️ John a preponderance of things have been bothering me about Dropbox and all of a sudden I know I noticed that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John eating up my CPU cycles and they shouldn’t be drinking from the FS events firehose and they should be using the officially
⏹️ ▶️ John supported FS events API and doing the diffs themselves and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is a legit complaint, but it’s not new. So I think for you personally, thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John about why you’re at your end of your rope about Dropbox that can be a contributing factor. But just
⏹️ ▶️ John because you may have become aware of it recently doesn’t mean it’s not something that has been a constant for many years. That’s fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Totally fair. But anyway, so with these problems that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m finding with Dropbox, I started thinking, could I remove Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from my life? Could I switch to something else for the roles that I use Dropbox for? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how difficult would that make my life in working with other people, basically? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is an interesting exercise. I started realizing that a lot of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way I work and the software I use is tied very closely to Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now. And I don’t even use it as much as a lot of people I know. Like a lot of geeks I know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they put all their photos in Dropbox, all their text, everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually use Dropbox pretty lightly compared to many people I know. But even then, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco started thinking, how would I move off of Dropbox if things finally pushed me over the edge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decided, because I’m not there yet, like I’m not saying right now I’m leaving Dropbox period. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know that I don’t know that I’m going to be doing that yet, but I started thinking like what what if Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco continues going down a path I disagree with and and I decide that I want to leave like what does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that look like? What do I go to first of all?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right well before you explain your conclusions why don’t we talk about something that’s definitely unequivocally
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’ve been trying to figure out if there’s any alternatives to Dropbox that I could switch to and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how that would look, how that would work, what I would have to move or change about my workflows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or setups to really achieve that. And I use so much for Dropbox. I have my one password
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sync is there, I have a couple of text apps that sync to it. My entire blog engine is based on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dropbox syncing and editing a bunch of text files that are in a Dropbox folder. And the way I edit my blog
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my phone is by using Dropbox syncing text editors. So it would be non-trivial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to switch off. But not to mention, one of the biggest things about Dropbox is shared folders.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The three of us on this show, we have a shared folder. That’s how John and Casey get their audio files
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me after each show. That’s where we put any kind of shared files, things like artwork and sound effects.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s so many people, when you’re working with small groups of other people, especially if they’re nerds like us,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you will almost always have Dropbox shared folders or Dropbox share links involved in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work group in some way. So it really is not trivial to switch away. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there aren’t a whole lot of solutions on how to switch away. Assuming you want the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of thing, there’s, I don’t know, five or six different things you could do. There’s not a ton.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The ones I got the most recommendations for are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what used to be called BitTorrent Sync and is now called Resilio. And then there’s also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-File, that’s S-E-A file. There’s not a lot about it out there, but people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who use it tend to love it, apparently. There’s not a lot in the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of apps for iOS and stuff or anything like that, but people seem to love C-File.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I might try that as well. I didn’t really get a noticeable amount of recommendations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for any other solution. I’m curious, have you guys ever tried any of these other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that can do Dropbox-like functions? No, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what about the Synology Cloud Station, or whatever they call it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, I did want to try that as well. I’m a little, I worry about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, because it is probably a fairly small audience thing, I worry, again with that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I worry about things like app support. That’s why, if I’m gonna try one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a world without mobile devices, where I’m just syncing between two computers, I would probably try C-File, because that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like it is the best regarded in that way. But because we’re in this world of mobile, and you need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like apps and stuff, I think BitTorrent Sync, or excuse me, Resilio, is probably the one to use, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that seems like the most popular alternative that is roughly what I’m looking for.
⏹️ ▶️ John I go with the bigger names. Like I’ve used- Like
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, voluntarily and involuntarily. I use box at work did not like but it is very
⏹️ ▶️ John dropbox like just imagine dropbox but worse
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Great, that’s what I’m looking for.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah Google Drive, obviously Widely supported
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s available on mobile. It works more or less like dropbox. I do use that voluntarily
⏹️ ▶️ John Both at work and at home And if I feel like if I if I was going off dropbox for whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John reason That’s probably where I would go because it is very widely supported I already you know
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m in to the Google ecosystem pretty well. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I haven’t had any problems with it. I can’t say I’ve exercised it as much as Dropbox. Basically I don’t run Google
⏹️ ▶️ John Drive unless I need it. I launch it. I use the web UI a lot and if I wanted to be on my Mac I
⏹️ ▶️ John launch it do whatever I need to do and then quit it. So obviously I’m not giving it the same workout the Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ John does. But that seems to me the most obvious well supported reasonable alternative.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have no idea how it behaves in terms of niceness to your system. I know lots of
⏹️ ▶️ John Google stuff annoys me by when you give it your root password at some of your admin
⏹️ ▶️ John password at some point and it gets admin privileges. It installs all sorts of little watchers
⏹️ ▶️ John to make sure that all the Google apps are kept up to date, which is kind of nice, but also kind of creepy when like this
⏹️ ▶️ John dialogue pops up asking you to update a Google app that you haven’t launched in like a year and a half. And you’re like, what is that? Has
⏹️ ▶️ John that been running on my system, trying to make sure Google Earth is up to date that I haven’t launched in forever, like go away,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever their keystone process like I don’t like that. But you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, maybe that’s what’s keeping me away from those and on Dropbox, which I feel like Dropbox is more understandable. I
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of know what it’s doing. And you know, in finer detail. But anyway, that seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like the most obvious alternatives, you might want to give that a try. It depends on what your main objection to Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ John is. Is it like ugly Is it installing weird crap in your system? Is it performance?
⏹️ ▶️ John But I would say that doesn’t help you with the social aspects of it, the sort of network effect of like, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re all using Dropbox and you’re over there in Google Drive. But Google Drive is pretty well supported
⏹️ ▶️ John on all mobile platforms, has a really nice web UI and does the job.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, and there is one little saving grace with Dropbox, with having to use Dropbox if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t want it software running, is that they do have a pretty robust web interface. So you can,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re forced to work with Dropbox people and you don’t want to run Dropbox yourself, you can actually get a lot of it done with that web interface.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not all of it, but you can do a lot there.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think also with both Google Drive and Dropbox, which as compared to
⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud Drive, which is apparently not in the running here.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, I was gonna mention that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the glorious thing about this is that no matter what we think about Dropbox and Google Drive,
⏹️ ▶️ John this may be not true, but I think we all still have the feeling that if I quit Dropbox,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s out of the picture until I relaunch it, right? That you can quit it. If it is a third-party application, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John quit it on your Mac, and then, so if you were to quit it, you’d be like, all right, well, Dropbox is not in the picture anymore,
⏹️ ▶️ John right, whatever evil it was doing before, whatever annoyance it was having,
⏹️ ▶️ John and for the most part, both of them respect the thing of launch when I log in, yes, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t automatically turn that one back on, and so you can turn off Dropbox and have some confidence
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s not messing with you anymore, as opposed to iCloud Drive, which there’s always this suspicion
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know, some part of the system is doing stuff behind the scenes and you can’t just quit it if you want it out of the
⏹️ ▶️ John picture, like, but you haven’t brought this up before, but like the idea of a expanding Xcode with its thousands and thousands
⏹️ ▶️ John of files and you don’t want a
⏹️ ▶️ John event that you’re grinding up one of your cores from Dropbox observing every single file system event,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can quit Dropbox. And then you’re like, that won’t happen anymore. If iCloud Drive was doing the same thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John which hopefully it isn’t, you don’t have that option, except for maybe unchecking the checkbox and it saying, you
⏹️ ▶️ John sure you wanna remove all these, having all your documents on the desktop disappear or some other weird thing. When
⏹️ ▶️ John you quit Dropbox, A, you can quit it, and B, nothing happens to your Dropbox folder. It stays however it was
⏹️ ▶️ John when you quit, which is, I think, reassuring.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, iCloud Drive, a few people also recommended that, and it seems like while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people have issues with other iCloud things, especially things like the Sierra,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco documents and desktop sync stuff, it seems like iCloud Drive is pretty good for most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people. Most of the reports that we got from it were very positive, and a lot of people said that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they stopped using Dropbox and just use iCloud Drive now. So I might consider that. iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Drive still kind of bothers me, though, in the way that it’s not just a folder. Like, it looks like a folder in Finder,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but isn’t it kind of not, isn’t it kind of weirdly all over the
⏹️ ▶️ John place? It’s in like a library mobile document. So I would just caution again, fine, but just don’t use it with Pages
⏹️ ▶️ John or any of the iWork applications, because apparently it makes it so you can’t open or save any of your files.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, yeah, see that’s kind of like, what is great about Dropbox is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the way it’s implemented is so conceptually simple. It’s like this, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a special folder on your hard drive, you can see where it is, it’s a regular folder full of regular files, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s this thing in the background that runs that keeps it in sync with that same folder on your other computers. Like, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is great. And I’ve compared in the past, one of the things I like about that is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it kind of has the failure mode of a train rather than the failure mode of an airplane. Whereas like if an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco airplane fails, it crashes and you die. If a train fails, it just stops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moving. Everything is still there, you just kind of stop moving. And that’s kind of how I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel with Dropbox. If Dropbox as a service has any kind of issue,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which it does, it is not perfect. I’ve seen its issues many times as somebody who uses a blogging engine based on Dropbox.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If Dropbox fails, all my files are just still sitting there on my drive. If Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has some kind of catastrophic error and it wipes out all my files, like some kind of huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sync problem, and it deletes all my files, those are just files in this directory. I can just go to Time Machine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or my backups, and I can just get the file off the backups. So the ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in which it can fail are pretty low-key, safe things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I can easily recover from as a responsible computer user who has backups. Whereas with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of these other solutions, they’re a little too smart or a little too abstracted and I don’t have that kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of luxury. Some of them do work that way, but many of them don’t. That’s why I was thinking of something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like BitTorrent Sync, again, knowing very little about it, because it seems like that was probably going to be more like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I wanted. But in reality, I’m probably just going to stick with Dropbox for a while,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but taking a few steps out the door, like keeping one foot out the door, in a way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which is how I prefer to do most things with services I commit myself to. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to, at some point, start moving things off of Dropbox. I’m going to move 1Password Sync out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it. I’m going to stop adding anything new to Dropbox that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco require its integration. Start sending around links to people to just download
⏹️ ▶️ Marco files instead of having Dropbox-shared folders necessarily, don’t invest into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photos there, things like that. Just kind of like putting Dropbox at a bit of a distance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and starting to move out of it slowly. Because I think they’re showing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough bad judgment over time here that I think the time will come that I will want to move off of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I kind of want to be ready for that. And that’s easier said than done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I definitely take issue with some of the shady things that have been going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on. But I do think that, especially if you take the Hacker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey News comments as actually coming from an engineer and an engineer that is to some degree,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obviously unofficially speaking for the company, it doesn’t seem like any of this was really malicious, it was just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either ill-advised or perhaps, you know, they weren’t as smart
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as we hope they were or whatever the case may be. But I don’t know, I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dropbox is fairly essential to me getting my life
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done. I was going to say work, but just my life. So it would take quite a lot for me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to want to walk away from it. And I am not at that point yet. And I think I’m further away from that point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than you are. And that’s not a bad thing. That’s not a good thing. It’s just a thing, but it’s certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worth keeping an eye on. And certainly, you know, we were talking earlier about, you know, what is everyone’s perception of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after this whole kerfuffle with Dash? And what is everyone’s perception of Dropbox after this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey came to light? And I feel like Dropbox, which used to be kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of like a panic level, can do no wrong, in my mind anyway, can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do no wrong. Generally speaking, it’s really good code that seems to always work, et cetera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It doesn’t seem quite so cut and dry to me anymore. And that’s too bad, but you know, even the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Betterment, Pingdom, and Indochino. and we will see you next
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental John didn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, 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-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ John check the podcast so long
Post-show: Marco Waffling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What are we doing in the post show you want to talk about your cameras?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we got more Marco waffling This should be a new we should put a capital W on that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here. We come a lot falling
⏹️ ▶️ John Is the category of things where Marco? decides on
⏹️ ▶️ John a direction for his life like a example would be I like BMW cars and then
⏹️ ▶️ John the Turn after that is I like electric cars, right? And then we assume there will be some point in the future
⏹️ ▶️ John perhaps distant future or if Marco starts waffling electric cars So this one is that’s how
⏹️ ▶️ John I would define this This category of thing. I don’t know Marco Waffling doesn’t have a good ring
⏹️ ▶️ John to it We got a we got a workshop that name get a composite But anyway, the current round of Marco Waffling, which by
⏹️ ▶️ John the way, it sounds like it’s a bad name, but we’re just joking really what it is is Marco being
⏹️ ▶️ John willing to revisit decisions. He’s made in the past when the conditions change Which is an
⏹️ ▶️ John admirable thing, but it’s much more fun to make fun of him about it and use the word waffle because it’s funny So anyway, the
⏹️ ▶️ John current one is cameras. You know, for years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I used SLRs. They gradually fell out of favor as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just didn’t want to carry them anywhere. And then I got this little tiny Sony RX1
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it could basically see in the dark, the sensor was so good, and it had an amazing little prime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lens on it. The limitations of that camera with both things like autofocus speed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the old RX1, there’s a new one that’s better, but this is the first one. autofocus speed sucked, the battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life sucked, and I wanted a little more versatility in the lens selection, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a little bit better performance. And it wasn’t small enough that I was actually carrying it many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco places because it was still a camera that couldn’t fit in my pocket. So, about a year ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I switched to the new Sony a7R II, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was my first mirrorless, but it’s still an interchangeable lens camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s an amazing camera in many, many ways. The a7R II is in many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways the best camera in the world right now. However, it is not perfect.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s not perfect in some fairly large ways. And over the last year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have thought I can get by this and I can get used to this and I’ll get faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the main reasons the Sony a7R II is not perfect are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number one, and this is a huge one, which I’ll describe why later, battery life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And ever since the beginning, I mean, I made fun of the fact that the camera, the battery life is so bad that it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ships with two batteries in the box. It is the first time I’ve ever bought any electronic device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that includes two of its own battery because everyone who uses it will need
⏹️ ▶️ John one. I wish mine came with two batteries, it’s like 50 bucks for that little turdy battery.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, and I’ve lost two of them. Anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the battery life is terrible. You’re lucky to get through a day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using it. And you can only get through a whole day if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are very, very careful and you kind of baby the battery. The second problem with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is that it is pretty slow. Turning it on, it takes a few seconds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to kind of boot up and get itself oriented. shot to shot time, if you want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco review the pictures that you’re taking with it, it is very, very slow. It takes a few seconds after it has shot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before you can really review them. If you want to review a picture and zoom in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to check, to make sure that you focused correctly or that the right thing was in focus and you wanna zoom in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and check, that takes a long time, like a few seconds delay. Writing the pictures to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco card takes a long time, which is partly because they’re so large, but also partly because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the image processor just slow
⏹️ ▶️ John just to provide some context here by the way you I’m sure you’ll get to the context eventually but my
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony which I’m sure is well not sure actually is it is it actually slower and all those things that you described with yours because mine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yours is yours is almost a year newer and also shoots much smaller photos so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet yours is probably a lot faster
⏹️ ▶️ John well I was gonna say I totally believe that this is slower than the thing you’re actually comparing it to which you’ll get to in
⏹️ ▶️ John a moment but it’s the fastest camera I’ve ever so like the world when you go from the world of like
⏹️ ▶️ John three digit price cameras to the world’s four digit price cameras. I was amazed at how fast this thing turns
⏹️ ▶️ John on, how fast it boots up, how fast it does everything. So everything’s relative but anyway continue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The result so this camera it has the most amazing sensor I’ve ever seen. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it might even be one of the best testing full-frame sensors in the world by by like testing metrics like the DxOMark
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. It is an incredibly awesome sensor. It can basically see in the dark with very little noise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dynamic range is ridiculous. it has an incredibly advanced autofocus system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The main problem is just that it’s so slow and that the battery life is so bad. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the battery life manifests itself in interesting ways that I hadn’t necessarily foreseen, foresaw,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I bought it in first, and even when I bought it, I knew the battery life wasn’t gonna be great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But there are certain ways this is a problem. So for instance, it has Wi-Fi,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’ve never used it because in order for it to be convenient to use, you have to leave the wifi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enabled in some way and then eventually launch an app and everything. And to get reasonable battery life out of this camera,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to do things like keep it in airplane mode. So I’ve just never used the wifi.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because it’s just, I have all these settings to maximize the power consumption. Also, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re shooting throughout the day, because it’s mirrorless, if the camera is on, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s ready to go, one of the two screens is always on. Either the one that’s in the electronic viewfinder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the one in the back. a screen is always on if the camera is ready to shoot. Unlike
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SLRs, well, in SLRs, if you have the back screen on, that’s one thing, but in normal mode with SLRs, you’re shooting through the optical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco viewfinder, there’s no screen on in that process. There might be the metering sensor, it might be active depending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the mode it’s in, whether it’s certain things you’re asleep or not, but basically, there’s no screens that are on. So a DSLR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is just ready to shoot, but not actually shooting a picture, uses very little power, and that’s one of the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why DSLRs get so much better battery life than these large full-frame but still mirrorless cameras that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have lots of processing demands but very small batteries. So for the Sony, in order to save
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery life, I often need to flip it off when I’m using it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I’m not gonna be shooting for the next couple of minutes, I’ll just flip it off. Because if you don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you move around and the camera bounces off your chest or off your side as you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco walking around, it’ll detect, it’ll think your eye’s up against it so it’ll turn on the EVF screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or then it’ll think you’re not against it, so it’ll turn on the back screen. So there’s basically, there’s always a screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being on, and the sensor being, you know, capturing the data and showing it to the screen. So the power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco draw of these things is incredibly high in just like walking around mixed shooting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use. And so you basically have to keep them switched off when you’re not shooting to save the battery. So that means
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that every time you wanna take a shot, if it was off, you gotta turn it on, you gotta wait for it to boot up again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s like a few seconds lost there. And because of that, I have often missed shots. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as my kid is getting older, he’s getting faster. This is the thing that happens, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m learning this.
⏹️ ▶️ John The most dangerous game,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. Exactly. So basically, it is causing me to miss a lot of shots,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s causing me to not use certain features very well. And these aren’t the only examples, but basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in short, I’m not able to use the camera its full potential because I need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to baby the battery so much. It is a lot more inconvenient than I expected to have a battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life that’s this bad compared to SLRs which I used for years beforehand. An SLR,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can leave it on all day and it won’t be a problem at all. It’ll be in a certain low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power mode and if you lift it up and half press that shutter button it is on in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a half second and ready to go. It’s so fast for an SLR to exit the on but idle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco state. Bam, it’s right there. It’s so fast. So, and you can, and when it’s in that on idle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco state, it uses so little power, you can literally leave it there for like all day or even days, and the battery won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco die. It’s incredible like how big SLR batteries are and how long they last relative to a mirrorless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe a month after I got the Sony, I had picked up our old 5D Mark II, because TIFF still uses the 5D Mark
⏹️ ▶️ Marco II most of the time. So about a month after I got the Sony, I was already getting used to it, and I picked up the 5D Mark II, and I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the largest, heaviest dinosaur I’ve ever felt. This is crazy. I am so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco glad I moved to mirrorless, et cetera. Now, a year and a couple of months in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now that I am more accustomed to the limitations and annoyingness of this particular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mirrorless camera, and to some degree of mirrorless cameras in general, this past weekend I picked up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tiff’s camera to take a few shots, because she had my favorite lens mount on it, the 135 millimeter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Canon F2. We wanted to take a quick shot outside. I picked up Tiff’s camera, and I took a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shots with the 135 of my kid being cute in a pumpkin patch. I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flew on it. It was like night and day. And I thought, having been out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco practice with that camera’s control scheme for a year, and it being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an eight-year-old camera compared to my awesome high-end new Sony, I thought this would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be slower, I wouldn’t be able to get things in focus, because the focus system is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco primitive in the old 5D Mark II compared to what we have today. You know, I thought the picture wouldn’t look as good because there’s so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lower resolution, the sensor is so old and crappy. And the reality is, not only did I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fly on the controls, but I nailed tons of shots very quickly because it, like, just shooting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with an SLR, especially a good SLR like the 5D series, is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much faster than a full-frame mirrorless. And I know there are smaller, non-full-frame
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mirrorless cameras. There’s lots that are in the APS-C sensor size range with a micro four thirds size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco range. And because these process smaller sensors with a lot fewer pixels,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they often are a lot faster. And it is also possible, I know, to make a full frame camera that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, very fast, because at XOXO I was able to briefly use a friend’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Leica, is it the Q, the one with the fixed 28 millimeter lens? Whatever it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was one of the Leica $5,000 mirrorless things. and it was amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how incredibly fast and responsive it was. That’s what I noticed immediately about that camera. And honestly, I don’t love the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a fixed 28 millimeter lens being the only lens in a camera, even though that’s technically what the iPhone is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, so the Leica Q is not probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me, but wow, was it nice to use a fast camera again. So I used that at XOXO about a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco month ago. Over this weekend, I used TIFF’s XLR, or TIFF’s SLR, XLR,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m in the audio world too much. I basically realized that, oh my God, I really love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a fast pro handling camera. Like, as I was talking a couple of weeks ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the difference between pro hardware and non-pro hardware, one of the things I was describing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about pro stuff and the concept of cameras is like, pro stuff is not only durable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and made to tolerate extreme conditions better and usually has better service,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also pro stuff just handles faster and it has more controls. It doesn’t always necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to be the smallest. It doesn’t always necessarily have to be technically the best by certain measures,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it has to be like reliable and fast and have easy accessible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controls that you can like use without looking and stuff like that. That’s what ProGear is. And I just realized that I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love pro cameras and that the Sony in some ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t a pro camera in the ways that I am considering here. Not in all ways, of course.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And certainly, technically, it is shockingly good, like in the picture quality that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get out of it. And the optical quality that you get from the amazing Sony FE lenses is also fantastic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think I might switch back to SLRs. Because here’s what happened in the meantime. Canon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco released the 5D Mark IV. And the 5D Mark, so the main problems I had with Canon before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that one of the reasons that I wanted to jump to Sony in the first place, Canon was falling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way behind on their sensor technology. Their sensors were really not competitive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the amount of noise at high ISO levels in low light, and they were really not competitive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in dynamic range, in things like the amount of detail that you can recover in shadows of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco picture. Basically what happened with the 5D Mark IV, they didn’t become class-leading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in those areas, but they got very close. Sony, and therefore Nikon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cameras that also use Sony sensors, they are still ahead in high ISO noise levels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and in dynamic range and in resolution in some levels but the the new Canon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 5d mark 4 came very close to these levels and in my opinion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in most in most ways probably close enough it also has a fast autofocus system it has insane battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life it has pro controls pro durability it is giant and heavy but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want one so TIFF’s getting one it It arrived about a half hour before the show started.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t had a chance to unbox it yet and try it yet. Ask me again next week. But basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tiff is getting one, and I’m going to play with it. And if I end up liking it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I might get one as well and then sell the Sony gear. But we will see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not see this coming. Neither did I. It really required
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me to have the Sony for long enough to get to know its flaws and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to to have the Canon again in my hands and to see just how incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesome a pro-grade SLR is when you haven’t used one for a while and in the ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the Sony annoys me and it is giant I mean no it is still huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it is heavy and the lenses are bigger and heavier but it is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compelling to answer expressly in the chat asking basically asking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what about Nikon SLRs. And I rented a D750 about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a year and a half ago before I decided to get the Sony. I was kind of figuring out which of the various Sony-censored
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cameras do I want. And of course, the D750 and D810 were on that list
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to try. And the main reason that I chose against the Nikon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one was that the Canon controls just kind of get along with me a little bit better. And Tiff has said the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same thing. She also prefers the Canon control and layout and maybe that’s just what we’re used to, who knows,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably, right? But, you know, there’s something there. And secondarily, that Nikon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had some holes in the lens lineup that we liked. And Canon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is doing really well with their lens lineup recently. For a while,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their lenses were, you know, they’ve always been great, and great to pretty good, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But they were getting a little bit long on the tooth in certain ones. And in the last couple of years, they have released
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a handful of incredible new lenses. One of which I ordered with this 5D Mark IV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to try, the new 35 millimeter F2 IS. And I mean, if I ever want to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the zoom again, the new 24-70 2.8 is shockingly good. If I want to go faster on the 35 eventually, even though it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giant and heavy, the 35 1.4 is shockingly good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a whole bunch of basically modern Canon lenses that are amazing. The Canon 40mm pancake
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is incredibly small and light and short and incredibly good and cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost nothing. I mean, there’s a lot here. So Nikon definitely has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best sensors that are available in SLRs because they are Sony sensors but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think Canon wins me over for lenses and control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco layout. And because the Canon sensor is now close in the qualities that matter to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s That’s kind of what’s keeping me here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So tell me again why you’re not really considering micro four
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thirds. And I’m not saying that it’s the best option, but it seems to me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a novice photographer that only kind of understands.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s smaller than a full on SLR. My battery life, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the problem of, oh crap, I haven’t charged this thing in forever and now I really need it and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nearly dead because I’ve used my camera a ton and the battery lasts forever and I just don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it, right? You know, it’s like your cell phone back when you would go a week between charging it. It would be that day that you’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be like, oh crap, I completely forgot to do this last night. Anyways, battery life lasts a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It starts up pretty darn quickly. It does have the problem of one of the two screens always being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, if not both, which is a little frustrating. But again, the battery life is great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Wi-Fi is super easy to turn on and off. The app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Olympus has for your phone does a perfectly sufficient job
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of tracking your whereabouts if you tell it to. It doesn’t do it automatically, but you go into the app,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you tell it, hey, start tracking where I am. And then when you’re done, you get on the Wi-Fi, which again is very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easy, and you have the app send that geo data to the camera, and it’ll geotag
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all your photos. I mean, in many ways, it seems like it would be a good fit. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what gives you pause, just that you haven’t tried it and you’re familiar with the Canon?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and so first of all, the 5D Mark IV also has GPS built in. Oh, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super nice. Some of the reviews were saying, like you can leave it, there’s like two modes. One of them is like kind of a more continuous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one and one of them’s kind of like a lighter or lower power one that just kind of less periodically updates the GPS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that is apparently pretty nice in the battery. And so not only can it geotag your stuff built in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it also automatically sets its clock, which is awesome, because one of the long-standing annoyances with anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who tries to use a separate camera that’s not their phone, and then mix those photos into their libraries, is that if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your camera’s clock is off by a little bit, or by a few hours if you travel, that sucks and it messes up all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your stuff, right? So anyway, so built-in GPS and Wi-Fi, and in a battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can probably handle it, right? Because it’s a large camera with a large battery,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that can probably handle it. There is perfectly valid reasons to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go with smaller cameras. There are great reasons why most people should go with smaller cameras.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most people also shouldn’t roast their own coffee. Most people shouldn’t be waiting for Mac Pros.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And most people should not have the 15-inch MacBook Pro. Most people should get a smaller MacBook Pro than the 15 inches.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, however, am a picky Apple. I have learned this about myself, as everyone else did long before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did, But basically, because I am a picky apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know myself now well enough to know that if I get anything that is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the biggest, best, most pro option for something, I am likely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be frustrated by its limitations.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that’s not always true. You don’t have a P85D or P90D, you have a 90D.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, so there are cases, and by the way, I still stand by that decision. I love my car, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plenty fast enough, and I love the amount of range it has. And I love I didn’t spend 20 grand more for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So all those things are great. So this isn’t true in everything that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy or use, but in certain areas that I care strongly about, things like the computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use, the camera I use, I have learned basically that like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for cameras, there is the iPhone, which handles a lot of my photography needs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s always in my pocket. So there’s the iPhone, it’s amazing for a lot of things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s camera is very good considering it’s a phone camera. That being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is not as good as a regular camera. My thinking is, if I’m going to carry a regular camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all, and this is part of the reason that led me to the Sony in the first place, being like the largest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mirrorless camera that’s out there. If I’m going to carry a camera at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all, I don’t worry about carrying a camera that can fit in my pocket anymore. Because cameras that can fit in my pocket
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are usually not any better than the iPhone. And so the iPhone solves that role for me. What I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is either the iPhone or a camera that I will carry separately, in which case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want it to be the best camera that it can possibly be. A long time ago, when we first bought our 5D Mark
⏹️ ▶️ Marco II in 2008, I first tried a full-frame camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that ruined me forever. And now, if I’m going to carry a camera that is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my iPhone, I want it to be full frame. And while the smaller sensors have made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tremendous progress in recent years, and there are lots of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing cameras that have micro four thirds or APS-C sized sensors,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full frame is still a step above in areas I care about, in noise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in quality, in optics. Full frame cameras have a lot of advantages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because of that much larger sensor size, that these smaller cameras just won’t match. And there are downsides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it. There are major downsides. Obviously, cost is a big one, size is a big one, and as mentioned earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speed is a big one because now you have these giant sensors that take more battery life to power,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then they have to have more electronics behind them to convert all the pixel data, and they have the image processor dealing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with way more image data because it’s way more megapixels and stuff like that. So there are downsides to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full frame. But generally, if I’m going to be shooting with anything that is not my iPhone, I want it to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the opposite extreme. I want it to be the best it can possibly be. And for me, that’s a full-frame SLR.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that makes sense. And I mean, to kind of come to your defense for a moment and argue with myself,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Micro Four Thirds that I have, I don’t have any pancake lenses for it. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a, I think it’s a 25 millimeter, if I remember right, that I use most often, but we just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey picked up, as we’ve talked about on and off, this 35 to 100 millimeter zoom, which I know zooms
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not for everyone, as you were talking about earlier, but I happen to like having the option. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tell you what, with that zoom lens on, this camera is not small. I mean, it’s already not small
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the Prime, but it is really not small with the zoom. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not sure that I’m really saving that much over a full-on DSLR. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, it’s certainly smaller, but it’s not night and day by any stretch of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco imagination. Yeah, and the Sony has the same issue, where there are a few,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a small number of small prime lenses for the Sony FE mount that are great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the one I keep on the camera the vast majority of the time is the 35 millimeter F2.8 Sony Prime. It’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you want more light intake, or if you want a zoom that is not horrible,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does get very big and heavy very quickly because that’s just what it takes. If you have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full frame sensor and you need a lot of light to hit that in a way that doesn’t suck,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you wanna have a zoom lens to have the versatility of that, you’re gonna have this giant, heavy piece
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of glass on there. So the size benefit for mirrorless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cameras, I think, mostly only holds if either you’re willing to give up a lot of quality and have a really crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zoom, in which case you can make them smaller, or if you’re using primes and not even very fast primes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that does represent a lot of my usage. Certainly, I mean, the 35 prime is what I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on there, as I said, most of the time. And so that combo is quite small. And I was thinking, I thought actually like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I’m going to switch back to SLRs, I still might keep the Sony and just keep that 35 millimeter prime and have that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like my small setup if I ever need that. But like really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once you have large glass on there, the size of the body matters less and actually becomes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes harder to use. Like if you have a big imbalance between like a giant heavy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lens on this tiny little mirrorless body, it actually can be harder to handle. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, I’m ruined forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even know what you’re talking about at this point. I mean, you are probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one nice set of in-ear monitors away from just going completely off the deep end. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, the good thing is I’ve already like, my audio deep end, I already did that years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I got my crazy headphones, I’m set there. My crazy headphones are not even as crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as they could be or they were. Like the headphones I ended up with were not the biggest, heaviest,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most expensive pair that I ever owned or tried. And the headphones I have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have since been succeeded by multiple new models that replace them. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have not even had the desire to try them because I like these headphones so much. I haven’t even tried the replacements. So like, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is how I am with things. Like, you know, I’ll go crazy with something for a while, but then I’ll kind of get settled for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like once I find something really nice that I like. John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are you still liking your camera?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m watching the upgraded model that has been announced.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, that sucks. I might trade it. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know if it sucks, because I also found out that it’s actually bigger. I’m like, all right, well, how much bigger? Is it two
⏹️ ▶️ John millimeters bigger, or is it bigger in a way that I’ll notice? So that’s the only wild card there. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if it is not that much bigger, and if the reviews say that it’s basically my camera, but better in
⏹️ ▶️ John such and such ways, I’ll probably sell this one and get that one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because it got bigger because it added in-body image stabilization. And that, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was a similar size increase as when they went, as when the A7 series went from the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular A7 to the A7 II line. So I expect the size difference to be substantial and I expect you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to like it. However, you might want it anyway because of the stabilization being pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool. Now that being said, sensor stabilization is not as good as having it in the lenses,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but when you have a lens that doesn’t have it, it’s nice to have.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was thinking of stuff like, oh, first of all, I think all of my lenses have it at this point, or do
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey all of them?
⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s see, I just got the, I know my portrait one does, does this
⏹️ ▶️ John one? Maybe it doesn’t, maybe my pancake one doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the other thing is it has a touchscreen. And so that could be good, and it’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John weird that this camera doesn’t have one, or it could be bad and the touchscreen UI could be even worse than using the little hat thingy.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m gonna have to, like the iPhone, I think I’m gonna have to see this in person and hold it and see what it’s like. And the only
⏹️ ▶️ John reason I’m considering trading up is like I can reuse my lenses. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna buy that lens that my wife took on vacation, so we’ll have three lenses, and then just swapping out the body.
⏹️ ▶️ John Suddenly the body is the least expensive part of my camera setup. Shockingly for someone who,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is my first camera that even has lenses. Now I’m in the lens ecosystem,
⏹️ ▶️ John and so I can swap out the bodies, and hopefully someone will be willing to buy my 6300 if the time comes,
⏹️ ▶️ John but yeah, I’ll check it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, in all fairness, like having more money being spent on the glass than the body is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generally the right thing to do. Like if you have to allocate funds somewhere between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those two, usually the lens is the better use of the money because not only can they last between multiple bodies,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they like, I’d rather have a great lens on a crappy camera than
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah, like if I’ve looked at the performance This is not I don’t expect
⏹️ ▶️ John that any other aspects of it are gonna be phenomenally better I think the price actually is
⏹️ ▶️ John has gone up a surprising amount So it’s not a slam dunk that I’m gonna end up thinking that this is better
⏹️ ▶️ John enough to justify that I think went up like 500 bucks or something. So I don’t know. I might still went
⏹️ ▶️ John out and just keep this camera But we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see I do want to quickly talk about video There’s a couple of chat talking about video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Sony is way better at video, no question. And this is kind of like, ever since the 5D
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mark II, that kind of introduced high-end video capabilities to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what were previously photo-only SLR categories, cameras have basically been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco focusing a lot on video features because that’s what the market is demanding. And so you basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have video abilities creeping into and in some ways dominating the development
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of cameras, the features that go into them, the reviews, what their reviews say about them, how they sell, things like that. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mainly shot video on my camera, I would stick with the Sony line because I think those have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco proven themselves to be the best regular cameras that also shoot video, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video purpose. However, I learned in the course of owning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this camera that I hardly ever shoot video on my camera because my iPhone does a better job of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know this is not true for pros, if you’re actually doing a professional video shoot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine, use a good camera, use a good everything. That’s not what we’re doing here. What I’m doing is shooting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video of my kid running around, and for that purpose, the iPhone is better, not only because it’s always in my pocket,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also, the iPhone is way better at auto exposure, auto focus, the built-in microphone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is way better at cutting out noise and crap. So the video I get out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my iPhone is substantially nicer in general to watch, even though it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is less technically good as the video I get out of my fancy cameras.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So therefore, my camera use is only for photos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and videos are shot on the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m the same way. I know it’s not exactly the same thing because my camera only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shoots 1080 and the iPhone will shoot 4K, but especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the 7 and the optical image stabilization that’s in there, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was stupefied at how good the OIS is. We went pumpkin picking this past
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weekend, and at the particular place we do that, you get on a trailer that’s towed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey behind a John Deere tractor, and they tow it, you know, that you ride out to where the pumpkins
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are, and then you eventually get a ride back. And as you can imagine, in a dirt field, you know, it’s bumpy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as crap. And I took a couple of short videos on this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trailer, on the back of this tractor in a field in Virginia.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it certainly looks like things are bumpy, but I can assure you that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it looks way, way less bumpy on this video than the reality
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the situation was as I’m like boinging all over the trailer behind this tractor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I could not believe my eyes at how good this image stabilization was.