219: Million Dollar Lunch

28 Apr 2017

iPhone rumors, Overcast Watch updates, yet more Uber shenanigans, and John’s first international travel.

Episode Description:

• ATP WWDC Live at AltConf! Monday, 5 June at 5 PM PDT. Get tickets here, and hurry in case they sell out!
• Follow up:
  • APFS compression?
  • WWDC lunches are probably about $40 each (via David Carlton)
  • Connected #139 where Casey discusses Plex
• Touch ID moving to the back?
  • Revisiting the iPhone 7 Taptic home button
  • Touch ID is capacitive
• Overcast improvements
  • M4A chapter support
  • Forecast
  • Watch support 1 & 2
  • Apple Design Awards
• Uber is über-gross
  • IOKit
  • UIDevice
• Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
• Post-show: John travels to 🇬🇧
  • Midwest Express
  • John forgets something
  • ...but has a workaround
  • Walt Disney World

Sponsored by:

• Squarespace: Make your next move with a beautiful website. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
• Eero: Finally, Wi-Fi, that works.
• Fracture: Photos printed in vivid color directly on glass.

Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

1. Follow-up: APFS compression
2. Follow-up: WWDC lunch prices
3. Follow-out: Plex
4. Sponsor: Fracture
5. WWDC ATP Live at AltConf
6. iPhone rumors
7. Taptic home button, redux
8. Sponsor: Eero
9. Overcast chapter fix
10. Overcast Watch playback
11. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
12. Uber scandal of the week
13. Ending theme
14. Post-show: A Siracusa abroad

Follow-up: APFS compression

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Then I re-grab it and go dum dum dum dum dum dum dum. Anyway, max speed should be higher.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, as usual, we should start with follow-up. And as usual, we have APFS-related

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey follow-up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco How do we have this every

⏹️ ▶️ ^John week? I swear to you, I’m not like intentionally trying to make this a streak. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just happening naturally.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Is this like the Bell Lobby, like influencing us? Like what is going on here?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Who knows?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But LibertyRPF from Twitter writes, APFS doesn’t support compression yet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey What if on Mac OS, you’ve run something like clusters to compress everything at the file system level? What do we make

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of that, john?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I hadn’t thought of this before. So there are a couple things about this. This was a tweet, right? I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I also most agree, my recollection is that ABS does not support compression,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I would not like Am I sure about that? Maybe not maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like it actually does have built in support for the HFS plus compression,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they just never say anything i don’t know but anyway assuming it doesn’t support compression which is my my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John recollection at this point uh it is true that on max

⏹️ ▶️ ^John um even if you never run any third-party utility a whole bunch of the files that like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John come with the operating system and stuff are compressed on disk right and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hs plus is native compression feature they added many releases ago and just when it gets read from the file

⏹️ ▶️ ^John system it gets re-inflated to its normal size and it’s all transparent to you know the rest of the operating

⏹️ ▶️ ^John system is just it just takes up less room on disk right so the apfs conversion thing on ios

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyway is like leave all the data exactly where it is and just make new pointers to it and blah blah don’t like move anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John around i have no idea if ios uses the hfs plus compression feature

⏹️ ▶️ ^John um but i know max do and also on the mac there are third-party utilities that can wander over the rest

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of your file system and compress stuff or tell hfs plus basically oh this file right here make it be compressed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on disk and you know you could write your own little programs to do this right. So on a Mac,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is very likely, in fact, almost certain that, you know, one or more files are compressed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now, if a Mac is going to have the same sort of in place conversion to APFS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that iOS devices have, you have kind of a weird situation where it can’t just leave all the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John data exactly where it is, because if APFS can’t decompress stuff, it can’t just leave that data as compressed, because it’ll be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John scrambled garbage. After, you know, AVFS points to it and says, here’s the file data and you go to read it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s compressed garbage. AVFS has to either know how to decompress that on the fly, just like HFS+,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which seems to me to be the easiest solution, because then you don’t have to worry about all these issues that I’m about to explain.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Or you have to expand those files to their uncompressed version, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John means you need to find space for them, which means you actually have to copy the data someplace else and shuffle things around and now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it becomes suddenly a way more dangerous operation than it was before. And And in the worst case scenario, someone’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John got tons of stuff compressed with HFS plus compression, and their disk is almost full, and there’s literally no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John room on the disk to expand everything, because if you were to expand everything, it would exceed the capacity of the disk. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m hoping that I’m either just misremembering or APFS has support

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for HFS plus compression just transparently included, and it just hasn’t been brought up, or they told me

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I forgot or whatever, because that would certainly simplify things. But if that’s not the case, it’ll be very interesting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to see what happens with the Mac rollout of APFS.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I wish maybe someone in the chat room knows, I wish I knew if iOS also uses ATRS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Plus compression. I would imagine it would too, because I don’t see any reason it wouldn’t do it, or it may

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be bad real life, I don’t know. Chat room says that iOS does have support. Support, sure,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but like, do all the OS files compress like they are? Not all of them, but I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If you get a phone from a store and just take it out of the box are a bunch of the files on the formerly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John HFS plus disk compressed, if you had done this like a year ago, I don’t know. Anyway, it will be an adventure.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m still waiting for the Mac rollout of APFS because converting on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all our phones was boring except for the apps that broke.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Fair enough. All right, boo.

Follow-up: WWDC lunch prices

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Moving on, we got some very interesting feedback via David Carlton

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about WWDC lunches, which is the topic that keeps on

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} giving. I love this so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey much. He linked us, I actually love it as well, he linked us to the GDC

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Boss Lady blog by Megan Scavino, Scavillo, excuse me. So she writes with regard to the Game Developers Conference,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the other recognizable change this year is lunch. We reduced the price of conference passes by the cost of lunch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That boxed lunch that you all know and love and wish you could consume five days a week all year round is $40 a day,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey she writes. I’ll give you a minute to stop choking on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey your Doritos. Ready? Yes. $40 a day for sandwich, chips, apple cookie, and water soda.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I could not make this stuff up even if I wanted to. We decided to give the attendees a choice this year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Spend as much as you’d like by buying from one of the many on-site concessions or nearby food repositories or pre-order and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey pay for the $40 a day meal. It is now your decision. I trust you will make the right one.” And the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey catch here, which I didn’t explain, is that GDC apparently, at the time of this writing, was happening at Moscone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So holy smokes, $40 a day for that disaster.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I mean, this is… The story with conferences and things like this is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco any kind of exhibitor of conferences, or if you’re going to set up a booth at a conference, you’ve probably gone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco through a lot of this crap. doing anything inside of a big conference hall usually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco involves dealing with ridiculous exclusive contractors

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and exclusive vendors and possible union politics and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what you think these things should cost they cost way way way more than that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so this is like you know food service exclusive provider for Mosconi provides

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco these lunches and Apple pretty much has to pay whatever their price is is because they aren’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco allowed to bring in food from anybody else into Moscone. It’s that kind of arrangement usually. It’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you’re setting up a booth for a small trade show and you need a Surg strip, you can’t bring your own

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Surg strip. You have to use their Surg strip installed by one of their licensed people to install it, and it’s going to cost

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you $400. It’s that kind of thing usually at these large venues. So I’m not really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco surprised to hear this. It’s sad, and if you ever book one of these things it probably makes you angry,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it’s not surprising.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Even when you’re not in a conference center like it at work. We have you know food they bring in they try to bring like healthy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John food, so you have like apples and bananas and stuff and When they first started doing this I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John heard someone throwing around the idea that each one of those apples was two bucks Which you know doesn’t seem like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John too much But on the other hand you just look at the giant pile of apples feel like oh that adds up And that’s this is in a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John non conference center environment so in general, but just getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John large amounts of stuff in a place where it normally wouldn’t appear, whether it’s apples in offices or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John box lunches in a convention center across the lot. And then, yeah, all the exclusive contracts and the unions makes it really expensive. And remember

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this $40 thing, this post was from many years ago, right? It was like seven years ago? Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So it’s probably like a hundred bucks now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So if you do this math, $40 a day times five days at WWDC,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey actually, I guess it’s four because they don’t serve, do they serve lunch on Fridays?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Yes, they do. They never stay late enough.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, they do. 5,000 attendees, which doesn’t count for all the Apple people,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that is a million dollars on these godforsaken lunches.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Holy cow. Yeah, that’s the thing. It’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when you have these kind of special venues and special deals with everybody and restrictions on you doing anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco else, I mean, they can charge kind of whatever they want. By the way, see also weddings and hospitals.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, it’s bad.

Follow-out: Plex

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, so I think that’s it for follow-up, surprisingly. This is a miracle. I don’t know what to make of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I have some alternative topics we could put in follow-up, copyright 2011, John Syracuse, but—

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think you actually did pretty well defending Plex on Connected.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, well, yeah, that was intended for follow-up here, but I actually did a guest spot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on Connected earlier this week, and we’ll put a link in the show notes. If you don’t listen to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Connected, our dear friend of the show, Federico Vatici, slandered the Plex name,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and in not the latest episode, but the prior one, and this could not stand.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And as such, I was planning on a probably 15 or 20-minute follow-up section,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or really a follow-out, copyright 2015 or 16, Jason Snell,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey built upon the work of copyright 2010, John Syracuse.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Anyway, I was— It’s a derivative work.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, it’s a derivative work.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} I had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey planned on doing some follow-out with regard to Connected and their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thoughts on But I was asked, probably out of desperation because Mike was not in town,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I was asked to guest on the beginning of the latest episode, which I will put a link in the show notes, like I said. It’s at the very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey beginning of the episode, and I kind of talk about what makes Plex awesome and why it’s not nearly as hard to use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as you would expect. So if you’re at all interested in that, I do encourage you to check it out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But yeah, because of that, our follow up in this show, including follow out, is pretty much done.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I will say, since we’re talking about Plex anyway, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} will add- Oh, here we go. This is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey how we always

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} quick thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that I don’t think you guys really covered enough that I wanted to point it because I was also a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Plex skeptic for years. Casey would always bug me about how great it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and why don’t I do this and tell me all the great things that well you know if you had Plex you wouldn’t have this problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} right now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and and one of the great values to me of Plex in a world where we can stream

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pretty much everything we want all the time and that is when you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco children and the children really want to watch a specific thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, at a certain time that they do that every day, and if this thing is not available for kids,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s going to cause problems for the parents. And there’s lots of times in life to teach your kids

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they can’t always get what they want, but a lot of times you don’t want to have that discussion right now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You just want to give the kid the TV show they wanted to watch so you can go wash the dishes or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something. sometimes internet connections go down,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sometimes iTunes freaks out and won’t authorize anything, sometimes things break

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the online world. And it is really, really nice when that happens, which is rare, but when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that does happen, it’s really nice to have Plex running in your home

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and everything you need to play the media you wanna play is on your local network and DRM

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco free. And that means there is no reliance on your Fios being out or not out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There’s no reliance on the Apple DRM servers authorizing you to watch what you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco paid for or not. It’s just playing a file off a network share and it just works.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that’s really, really nice when you need it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep. And if you have friends, which also have Plex servers and accounts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and whatnot, you can stream from each other. So I’ve been amassing a collection

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of Daniel Tiger and Paw Patrol and things of that nature. And so these are probably beneath Adam

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at this point. But hypothetically, if Adam wanted Paw Patrol and it isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on Netflix or iTunes is down or whatever the case may be, Marco can hop on Plex, tell Plex,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey don’t look at my local server, look at Casey’s server, and he can stream that directly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey from me to him, which is really awesome. And so once you’ve built up a kind of quote unquote

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey network of a few friends that all have media, It’s actually kind of your own

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey personal Netflix. It’s really phenomenal and really, really cool.

Sponsor: Fracture

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WWDC ATP Live at AltConf

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco FraktureMe.com slash podcast. Thank you very much to Frakture for sponsoring our show.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We also have some show

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey news. We do. We very much do. This is super exciting. I’m very pumped about this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Tell us what’s going on, Marco.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco All right. So we are doing a live show at WWDC. So on Monday,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco June 5th in WWDC week, We are doing a live show at Alt

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Conf. Alt Conf is this community-run conference that happens across or down the street

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from WBDC. It’s happened for three or four years now, at least. It’s been a while.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And the way Alt Conf works is the conference is totally community-run.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s free for the most part. You can pay optionally if you want to, to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco priority in line. But otherwise, free and there’s you know great diverse

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco talks and it’s really a great event for the community. Anyway, we wanted to do a live show this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco year and they had this great thing where they invite the community to come

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know use their venue and bring talks and content to Alt Conf. We

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco decided to take them up on that offer and we contacted them this past week and arranged it pretty quickly actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and so we are doing a live show in Alt Conf and it’s going to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco separately ticketed, mostly for the purposes of just capacity management, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the tickets are just five bucks. It’s basically just to make sure that people actually are serious when they book

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco them, so we know how many people are coming, so we know how big to make the room. And then we’re working on maybe we can donate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that money to something useful. And then the show is going to be Monday from 5 to 7

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco p.m. So the idea here is to be after the WBDC State of the Union address,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which usually runs until 4 or 4.30, but before anybody’s dinner plans or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Jim Dalrymple’s beard bash or other things that might be happening on Monday night. So 5 to 7 p.m.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco live show, WBDC Monday, June 5th at Alt Conf. Go to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is it altconf.com? It is altconf.com, okay, just checking. And yeah, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we look forward to it. It’s going to be, you know, it’s not going to be like any kind of outrageous thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco where we have like Tim Cook on or anything. I don’t, I mean, we could try, but I don’t think we’ll get him. Just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a hunch. But I’m looking forward to it. We’re gonna just, you know, we’re gonna basically just do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this in front of a live audience of between 100 and 1,000 people, depending on how many people respond to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco room. I do expect to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stream it live.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey When you say that, you mean audio only is your expectation?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yes, audio. I don’t think we have any kind of video setup. I do have the audio setup

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to stream it live if internet connectivity holds out. And that’s a huge if at Conferences,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so I don’t want to guarantee it. Because basically I will be trying to get some kind of connection

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out of a very, very full room in a venue I’ve never been in, in a city I’ve never been in.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So it’s hard to predict whether or not I will be able to maintain an audio live stream, but I’ll do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my best. Otherwise, we look forward to it. So yeah, if you want to come, go book a ticket now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We will put the link in the show notes. And so, yeah, thanks to Alt Conf for working with us on this because,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, what we wanted to really was just like, we wanted to do a live show, but we didn’t want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to go through like the massive ordeal and hassle and risk of booking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a whole venue ourselves. It’s a ton of work to do that. And I highly respect the podcasts that do that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We did not have that in us. And we could barely get t-shirts for sale.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So we found a great arrangement with Alt Conf that worked out well for all of us. and we hope to see you there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep, it’s super exciting. Most of the three of us are very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey excited about it, so please, if you are interested at all in doing this and you think you will be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there, please go ahead and get yourself a ticket, buy a ticket, and do it now, just like the t-shirts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John To be clear, the live show that we’re doing, like it’s a live show, you can come see us live, we’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gonna try to stream it, and the main thing that will probably prevent streaming is the fact that if the stream craps out,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Marco can’t fix it because he’s on stage, so oh well. But we’re also releasing it as a regular episode.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This will be our regular WWDC episode.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Oh yeah, good point.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John In most years, we just record this in Marco’s hotel room or whatever. We’re releasing this episode, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just don’t feel like, oh, I’m not going to WWDC, I’ll miss this one. You won’t miss it, it will be that week’s episode. You just won’t get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to see it or hear it live. That’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Excellent point.

iPhone rumors

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So the news this week, it’s been a little while since we’ve spoken to each other, I’ve missed you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey too deeply, but one thing I might be missing soon is Touch ID in the front of my phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because there have been some very interesting hardware specs and photographs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that have leaked that indicate the Touch ID sensor in the supposed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey iPhone 8 may be on the back of the phone under the Apple logo.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And the internet is not happy about this from what I can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey tell. I don’t really know what I make of it yet. I’ve never really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey used a phone with the fingerprint sensor on the back. However, pretty much anyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that I know that has used an Android phone with any regularity has said that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s fine. In fact, some of them have even said they prefer it, even having had used both.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So I’m kind of whatever about this. It’s not something I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I want, but I think I can roll with it just fine. I, you know, I feel the same way about this as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I did about the lock button moving from the top to the right-hand side of the phone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Not really something I want. I’m sure I’ll get over it. And that’s exactly how it turned out. Not really something I wanted.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I got over it pretty quick. So Marco, how do you feel about this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m kind of the same way. I’ve never used a phone with it on the back, and I think I’d get used to it. It would be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fine. But I think on the front would be better. And I think it’s more interesting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that we don’t seem to have a clear picture yet and that maybe Apple doesn’t seem to have a clear picture

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yet. That is more interesting because it’s getting pretty late in the year for these kind of decisions to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not be made yet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I got a point of clarification that we needed on this because in the beginning Casey said the Touch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ID sensor is on the back under the Apple logo and that actually can be interpreted multiple ways.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Oh, yes. Which is a way that has been suggested.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what he was referring to is that you’ll look at the link we’ll put in the show notes to 9to5Mac or whatever that shows

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a picture of the supposed part leak. So if you look at the back of an iPhone, there’s an Apple logo on the back,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but the Apple logo is towards the top of the phone, right? When he says under the Apple logo, he

⏹️ ▶️ ^John means go down about an inch from that and pretty much dead center in the back of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phone below the Apple logo, like lower down on the phone than the Apple logo. There’s a circular

⏹️ ▶️ ^John opening and that’s where Touch ID would be. A lot of people suggested, hey, if you’re going to put something on the back of the phone,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John why don’t you make the Apple logo also the Touch ID sensor? Obviously, the problems there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are that it’s not really shaped like a circle. And you know, it might be hard to get a sensor that kind of fills that area and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still looks nice and blah, blah, blah. And maybe it’s position wrong. Maybe you actually do want it more towards

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the center instead of high up. And so it’s all sorts of aesthetic and functional decisions that may make them not want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to put the Touch ID sensor literally in the Apple logo, but the parts leaks show there’s a cutout

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the Apple logo and then an inch lower there’s a circular cutout for the Touch ID sensor.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So what are your thoughts on this, John?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I mean, these these parts leaks, we’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John getting into parts leak season. And I have a hard time dismissing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these as complete fakes or ridiculous things, because they’re starting to look

⏹️ ▶️ ^John starting to look pretty real to me. At the very least, a real thing that was made

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by somebody for some purpose, probably Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Some people in the chat room are saying there’s no way Apple will do this, they’ll never do this because it’s not an Apple thing to do. I totally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John disagree with that. Apple would 100% do this. Whether they are going to do it or not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I guess, you know, as every week advances, these rumors will either cement or they will just go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John away and we won’t see it anymore. But remember, this is the phone we’re talking about that’s supposed to get rid of the chin and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John forehead more or less and make the screen go from top to bottom edge to edge much more so than it does

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now Leaving no room for even the completely immobile touch ID button on the iPhone 7

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There won’t even be room for a non moving button. I’ll just be screen everywhere And so, you know the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John earlier rumors were like, oh, it’ll be screen everywhere And in fact the home button and touch ID will also be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the screen You can kind of see how they could put the home button in the screen because we already have a home button that doesn’t move

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? And there’s a little indentation for it, which is better than being no indentation. And that’s another sort of ergonomic issue

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of like, how do I find the home button if there’s no little indentation for a thumb to go in? I just feel for the middle of the phone, or maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the whole bottom of the phone is like a home button. And I just force press somewhere near the bottom and it takes me home,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever. But the touch ID sensor, the rumors were supposedly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, oh, it turned out to be harder than they thought to get a touch ID sensor inside a screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because the screen has lights that come out of it than the touch ID sensor. You know, it’s like sensor and screen are not the same things. How do they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John combine them in a way that the touch ID sensor works? And all these recent part leaks are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John part of the narrative. They’re like, oh, they couldn’t get that to work this year. So instead they’re putting it on the back.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you know, people have Android phones with touch ID sensors on the back and they’re saying like, it’s fine, it’s whatever. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John obviously if you put your phone down on the table, now you can’t unlock it unless you put it face down. But then when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you unlock it, it’s no good because you can’t see the screen anyway. Right, you know? one disadvantage

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that people talk about with it being on the back. But otherwise, ergonomically speaking,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s probably better, easier to hit the Touch ID on the back than it is to hit Touch ID at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the very, very edge of your phone. You know what I mean? If you had to pick where is the best place

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to put a fingerprint sensor on a featureless rectangle, you wouldn’t say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John let me put it on the very, very bottom edge, because you kind of got to shimmy your hand down, and you kind of pinch in it from the edge.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you could certainly get a more secure grip if the touch ID sensor were somewhere in the middle, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John My main reservation about the thing being in the middle

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is since I’m someone who’s had a case on all of my iOS devices,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John putting something that you can’t put a case over on the back

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is somewhat of a problem slash disappointment for me. I am not one of those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people that has ever had a case that has like a circle cut out so you can see the Apple logo. I found those cases

⏹️ ▶️ ^John absurd and just comical and sad. I don’t need a cutout

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to show the world my Apple logo. And in fact, if you get an Apple case, they have their own Apple logo on the case

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} indentation.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John People will still know it’s an iPhone. It’ll be fine, I swear. But not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just for those sort of aesthetic and like image reasons, I don’t like the cutout. But mainly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t like the cutout because the cutout that will inevitably have to be there on any case for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an Apple iPhone with the touch ID sensor on the back is that that basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John becomes a lint collecting belly button for your phone. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} it’s another place for grime and crap to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} inside there. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re gonna be sticking your grimy fingers in there constantly to unlock your phone and any grime that’s on there is just gonna get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wedged into this little thing that will literally be a grimy, linty belly button for your phone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s not good, it doesn’t look good, it doesn’t feel good, It makes the Touch ID sensor farther away from you because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now you gotta dig your finger into the little belly button to find the Touch ID sensor. The thicker your case is, the worse

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s gonna be. Think of battery cases. How the hell are you gonna get a battery case? It’s gonna be a super duper innie belly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John button where you gotta poke your finger up there and it’s gonna be a mess. If

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you don’t use cases on your phone, whatever. Like it’s then, it’s no big deal, right? These are all non-issues. But I do use

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cases and I don’t want to stick my finger into a little hole in the case and fiddle around on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a linty belly button. So that’s mostly making me either A, hope this is not true, or B,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hope that by the time, you know, because I have a set, I’m not gonna get this phone, I’m gonna wait another year and get the one after that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Hopefully, by the next phone, they will have started out whatever issues with Touch ID on the front, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, I don’t want to worry about this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think having it on the back is worse enough than having it on the front, that if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we were forced to, like if there was no way to keep it on the front while having the screen go

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco edge to edge, like if there was no way to put it under the screen, I would rather just still have the chin

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like you know make the bezel smaller. You don’t need to make the screen two to one. You can keep it being 16

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by nine and not do like the Samsung like you know 18 by nine or two to one thing because no one really needs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it to be taller necessarily like just keep the keep the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco chin like I don’t think we need no one’s really asking to have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that go away if the cost is going to be losing touch ID to the back.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, Johnny, I like symmetry. I mean, I know you got a chin on the iMac and no forehead, right? But on the phone, though,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I feel like that silhouette is so iconic, you know, of the like, even like Apple’s little outline

⏹️ ▶️ ^John graphics that they give you for iPhone that you’re like, you’re not allowed to use in your app or they won’t let it in the app store. That is basically a rounded rectangle

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with a little rectangle exactly dead center in the middle. And that’s basically, you know, hieroglyphics for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPhone or for smartphone at this point for Apple to come out with an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPhone with asymmetrical margins, like a chin, but very little forehead, because they’re trying to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pull on the edges. Like, you can pull on the sides a little bit and shave a few millimeters, right? Oh, edge to edge screen,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John especially if they do like a rounded screen on the edges, like so many of the past Android phones.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s a lot. When you see them side by side in people’s review videos, like the iPhone design,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the side bezels really stick out compared to these newer bezel-less

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ones, like the S8.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} like the… Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it’s only a few millimeters here. It’s not like you’re getting back like a full inch if you took off the chin

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and forehead. But that matters. Like, I’m saying like, if you just, if you keep most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the chin, you don’t even need to keep the whole chin, just keep enough of it for a Touch ID sensor to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There’s like two millimeters on top and bottom of the Touch ID sensor. Go look at your phone right now. There’s not a lot of room above

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and below.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m holding it right now. There is some room, about as much room as the side bezels, and also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco does it need to be that big? We don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Maybe they can get over the smaller one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think it needs to be that big

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well, but regardless like I’m saying like you know this is all about trade-offs right like that we this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has been like a theme of our show is like is apple making the right trade-offs in its physical designs of things and and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think the the trade-off here is like touch ID in the back is not that great

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and if if you keep it on the front basically like it you know it solves a lot of problems. If you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can’t get it under the screen which I mean I don’t know a lot about screen technology but getting it under the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco screen without having it be like a visible different spot on the screen when the screen showing an image

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sounds impossible that sounds really really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hard that’s not impossible I feel like you know I feel like the rumor wouldn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John been around so long if it was literally impossible I think the tech is sort of kind of there to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sort of kind of pull this off to some degree

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} but otherwise it would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John never be discussed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But you think that like that there’s a way to put something like to put some kind of like optical, you know readings

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or scanning sensor in a screen that also is showing pixels such that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you showed like a Solid color rectangle on the screen that you wouldn’t see the outline

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of that Touch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ID is an optical is it? I don’t know I don’t know if I knew how touch ID worked I could have a more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John informed opinion about this But but I don’t but anyway, like I would But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the rumor has been around so long, and I haven’t seen a single story that say, you dummy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s impossible, stop talking about this. Which leads me to believe that it is possible, it’s just a question of how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much worse is the sensor. You know, how less clear an image or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a sense of your fingerprints does it get. So I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feel like it’s possible, if not now, then eventually. But you know, if not this year, then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever. But getting back to the idea of leaving the chin and getting rid of the forehead, like, you know, you can pull in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John margins all you want. Bottom line is, if the margin above is not the width of the margin below, you’ve got an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John asymmetrical phone. That’s weird to me. Now they did make the fat nano. So never say never,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple has been known to make some pretty awkward looking iOS. So that was an iOS device,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John awkward looking handheld battery powered devices. So who knows what they’ll do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I first I personally think that would be an ugly iPhone, it would be the equivalent of the fat nano,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even more so than the thing on the back. And so I think it is more likely that the front will be nice and symmetrical,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the touch ID sensor will be on the back if they really couldn’t get it any other way. Or, like the final thing is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s got top and bottom margins that are both equal, they’re both slightly smaller than they were before, they pull in the sides a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bit, and you know, there’s your phone. People would still like that, it would be a new form factor. It’s not like the iPhone 7

⏹️ ▶️ ^John form factor again, it is a new phone, especially if it has, you know, steel, you know, that steel,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shiny chrome edge thing, sort of reminiscent of the first iPhone and the stainless steel back

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you know, all the other things, it would be a new form factor, people would accept it as a new phone. It just wouldn’t be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, Oh, I thought this one was only going to have screen on the front, but instead, it’s still got a chin and a forehead. But oh, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I agree, I certainly would not complain if touch ID was pretty much exactly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the way it was. It’s just the only difference is that the bezels were slightly smaller. But we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We’ll see. I’m pretty much nonplussed by this regardless. Whatever ends up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey happening happens, and that’s fine.

Taptic home button, redux

⏹️ ▶️ ^John By the way, I think this is a good time to revisit while we’re on the topic of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the buttons on our phones and everything to take another pass at Each of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John us saying look how we feel About the non-moving iPhone 7

⏹️ ▶️ ^John home button after using it for what a year now or whatever it’s been Because I had occasion

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to use my wife’s phone recently and she’s got a success and that button moves and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They I start off as like other buttons. It’s weird you get used to it it’s not quite the same or whatever and now I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at the point where when I use an iOS device where the button actually moves it feels like junk and I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John handle it and I am like fully

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} converted.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I am fully converted to the non-moving button which does not feel like the old button like it’s not like oh it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now it has fooled me it doesn’t but all I’m saying is the way it feels now is the way I expect my phone to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feel the little wiggly shake even how it works when my phone is sitting on a tabletop like all those little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John haptic movements and whatever my hands have just accepted that that’s how your phone feels.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And when I use phones that don’t feel that way. And when a thing like presses in on them, it feels junky and crappy to me. So I am

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a total convert this which makes me gives me some hope that I will eventually be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a convert to and you know, an in screen completely smooth, no border thing I could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be wrong, it could be that I need a little circle to feel with my thumb, right? No matter where it is, which is another question, by the way, they put touch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ID in the back, is it a little crater on the back? Or is it totally featureless? And if it is a crater, that’s kind of weird,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because you’d have the Apple logo and then a little then a little greater belly button below it. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I I’m here to say that I feel like I have unbeknownst to me completely converted

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to not just tolerating the non moving home button, but to saying I like the non moving

⏹️ ▶️ ^John home button better than all the moving home buttons I’ve ever used.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I could not possibly agree with you more. The only time I dislike the non moving home button, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey static home button is when I try to unlock my phone when it’s resting on a table, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey whatever magic the haptic taptic, whatever feedback does in order to make you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey feel like you’ve clicked a button, it’s either completely muted to the point of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey figuratively speaking, silence, or just very, very, very soft and almost

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey muted. And that annoys me, but in hand, I have no problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with it. And I believe I’m on the softest setting. I’m going to have to come back to it because I don’t remember

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey offhand, but I think I’m on the softest feedback setting to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I mentioned the table thing. It may be because I have a case like it does feel different when it’s on the table.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I have now come to like that feeling also better than pressing like the home button on my wife’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John success that’s also sitting on the table. It is totally weird and it is different than when it’s in your hand. But I like it better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because it’s just what I’m used to, right. And when I press it, and it moves in, it feels like I’m breaking the phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and opening up this weird gap and like, you feel so clunky or whatever. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have been in the situation. And maybe it is the case that it makes a difference that like gives it that extra cushion or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John margin for the haptics to do something like where you press it in. And like, imagine if you press

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it in the haptics didn’t go off at all, right, that would feel broken on the seven, right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so sometimes I feel like if you’re if you’re on a very flat table, a very hard flat table with no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John case, and you try to do it, maybe somehow the haptics have no had nothing to move or vibrate.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that feels a little bit more broken than it does with the case. So it could be the case is helping me like my home button more.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But either way, I’m willing to, you know, I, I like it. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like it better, even in that scenario.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So do you are what setting are you on in terms of

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} just going to look that up? Where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} In

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey general, general, home button, everything in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco general. That’s, that’s why it’s aptly named. It should just be called settings. You go to settings and you go to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco settings. No, I’m with you guys. I totally agree. I the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very first probably three or four days. I hated it. I thought this is a huge step backwards.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I said as much here and somehow between now and then I’ve turned into

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not only liking it, but like John liking it more than the old buttons and the old buttons

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now feel weird to me that has not happened with force touch trackpads or the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco new keyboards on the Mac books, but that has definitely happened with the force touch home button

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the phones. And I also would go a little bit further and say one of the great

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things about the iPhone 7 is that new Taptic Engine second generation that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has enabled, because it’s like a much more precise Taptic Engine that can do a lot more stuff and has like a whole sequencer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the things it does. And so that has enabled all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the little tiny haptic feedback things throughout the interface. And now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that I’m accustomed to that in so many system standard apps that use standard controls and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco standard haptics and everything, when I go back, when I use like an iPad that doesn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Taptic Engine and nothing gives me those little taps with everything, it feels like something’s broken.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It feels like, what’s wrong? Is this some kind of primitive piece of glass? Like it makes a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco huge difference. So I also am a very big fan of haptics and especially

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the, you know, the new Taptic Engine. I look forward to, you know, seeing them added to more apps, including

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably my own once I get around to it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Speaking of haptic feedback and things that feel broken, Marco, is my brief complaint about Overcast things. I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really long lists, really long playlists, and when I try to drag something from way, way down at the bottom to way, way up at the top,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the maximum scroll speed as the little haptics fire off is way too slow, and I just sit there holding it and going,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum. And then, of course, Overcast refreshes the list, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it yanks the thing that I was holding in my hand out of my hand and drops it into the list wherever it was. Then I re grab

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it and go dum dum dum dum dum dum dum. Anyway, max speed should be higher. All right. The

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco second thing is my fault. The first thing is the first like this is just the the standard behavior

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of UI table view.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I know but I believe in you. I believe you can you can change the default behavior and make it make it go faster.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Given what you’ve done

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if I have to do anything else to you I table view I’m just going to move to

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} you I collection

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco view like it which some people speculate that maybe collection views will replace tableview.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I saw that article. Tableview is for suckers. It’s all collectionview now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well there’s a bunch of things that tableviews still do that collectionviews don’t or that you’d have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to write it yourself. But I think I’ve probably crossed the threshold after which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve done so much work to hack tableviews that maybe doing it in a collectionview would have been less work

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco after all. So probably next time I redesign this interface, if that ever happens, I’m not looking forward

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to that. But if that ever happens, I will probably do collectionview

⏹️ ▶️ ^John instead. Go over a higher max scroll speed. It can be, you can ratchet up, it can be like slow in the beginning and then you’re holding and then it goes faster

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and faster, you know, like the same way that flick scrolling kind of does where you can get it up to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John speed because really long lists, like there’s just no recourse. It’s just, and. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there is a shortcut. If you start playing an item near the top and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the items near the bottom that you’re trying to move all the way up, play next, play next, play next, play next, that’ll move them all immediately.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Hmm, I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} even think about that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} All right, that was just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey an aside. It’s funny you bring up the taptic, haptic, whatever feedback because as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey an aside, the other day I had a few minutes to kill at work and the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey app that I work on, we have a scenario where there’s like a bunch of cards

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey across the bottom of the screen and you can slide the cards left and right and some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey will come from off screen onto screen and then go back off screen again. And this is like the perfect

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey moment to use that feedback And that tap, tap, tap is you’re scrolling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey through the cards and they’re coming on and off screen. And I tried to get it to work just right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I couldn’t get the math right such that when like the card was at the midway point off

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey screen, it would fire at the exact right moment. It was very wonky. It was probably my fault, but I hope to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at some point go back to finish that up because it really does work phenomenally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey well when you get it right, but getting it right is kind of tough. So yeah, I’m in full support of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey third-party app developers putting that everywhere they can in their apps because it’s super cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The only bad thing about haptics right now is that we really don’t have a lot of control over them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} options

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that we have are really coarse. And from what I understand, the way it’s implemented is basically a sound

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco synthesizer, treating the tapping engine like a big low-frequency speaker. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so apps in theory could have much more creativity and options over

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the feeling and even possibly direction, if that’s a thing, you know, like side-by-side directions

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the haptics. That’s not yet exposed in the API, but maybe in iOS 11

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or the future, maybe they will, because I would love to do like some custom stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there that just isn’t possible right now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, completely agree with you. All right, anything else on these iPhone 8 rumors?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think at this point there’s so many crazy rumors. We know so little, it’s hard to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco comment intelligently on much of it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, has that ever stopped us before?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And by the way, the 9to5Mac article that we’re gonna link that has like the parts leak thing, the parts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John leak was like a drawing, which is, you know, always the best part, at least like measurements on them and stuff like that. It’s good, I actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John took a screenshot of that thing because those are so easy to verify, like they’re down to the, you know, thousandths of a millimeter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We can verify those when the real phone comes out. If it’s exactly those dimensions down to the thousandths of a millimeter, was probably a legit leak. If

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re not, then that was just totally made up stuff. But anyway, the 95 Mac article has a picture of like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here’s a part looks just like that. So my schematic is just a rendering of the schematic. Like the schematic is the supposed leak,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not this thing that looks like metal. And the thing so don’t don’t be fooled by thinking someone found a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John metal thing and took a fuzzy picture of it. It’s just a rendering.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Also real time follow up the touch ID hardware as it exists today is capacitive, which I did not realize

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I thought it was optical.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, so I think it’s just like a really, really high density capacitive layer, like higher

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco precision than the touch sensor on the whole multitouch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco screen, I assume, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I mean, the whole thing of the capacitive layering, there’s two aspects. One is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John layering thing, where you can make screens out of a series of layers, and one layer is the part that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does the capacitive sensor, and the other layer is the part that that has the color elements

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the light up bits, especially if it’s an OLED screen. Isn’t this the new iPhone supposed to be all OLED and everything?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So then you reduce the number of layers because you don’t have a light emitting layer and a filter layer. The little pixels

⏹️ ▶️ ^John themselves emit light. But either way, you have to have a bunch of things that emit light and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in between the light emitting things, you need the sensing things. And the light emitting things don’t have to fill

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the whole area because there’s light bloom and everything. So the actual light emitting areas can actually be very small and have mostly empty

⏹️ ▶️ ^John space them. It’s just a question of trying to like, either weave that together, or layer it over each other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John such that, you know, the, the, the capacitive thing is has this fine mesh that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put over the light of things, but you don’t notice the mesh because it’s super fine, or you put it below the light up things like again, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just making up random words for tech here. But like, it seems to me that it should be possible

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to make a layer cake that works in some way. The only question is, how much worse

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does it work than the existing touch ID, which is which still still has like, whatever, this is a layer of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sapphire or glass over the capacitive sensor, right? So it’s still, there’s still some distance, just no light being

⏹️ ▶️ ^John emitted from it. And especially if they just darken that area of the screen when you hold your finger on it, when it’s expecting touch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ID or whatever, like there are ways around a lot of the limitations that make me think it is feasible

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if not this year then surely in a few years.

Sponsor: Eero

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We are sponsored this week by Eero. Go to Eero.com, that’s E-E-R-O.com to learn more.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Now look, we know how Wi-Fi usually works. You buy a router with a whole bunch of giant

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco antennas on it, thinking you will finally cover your entire house, and you’ll finally have coverage

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in those two or three back rooms where you never had coverage before. And in practice, you get that big router

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco home, and every time it says it’s going to have the best range, and it doesn’t cover those rooms. Wi-Fi

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has been broken for so long because we rely on single routers. Eero has come out to change

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that. Eero is a system where you plug in one of these routers as your main one, but then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you buy more than one. You can buy a two-pack, a three-pack, whatever amount you need. They cover about a thousand square

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco feet each, so the typical American home, you might have two or three of them. And the app that it comes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with helps you set them up in a really effective way, and it It just blankets the entire house in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fast, reliable Wi-Fi. Way better than a single router ever could.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And again, as I mentioned, the app is super easy to use, tons of great features, and they’re updating it all the time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and the performance you get is way better than you get out of a traditional repeater or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco range extender setup because they actually create a backhaul mesh network separately from the main network

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to communicate with each other and to form that huge mesh of Wi-Fi coverage in your home.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I highly suggest you check out Eero, and don’t just take my word for it. Do your own research, read reviews,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and you will see for yourself this is a solid product with an incredible reputation that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’ve built up so far. It’s been covered in the press, it has amazing reviews on Amazon and stuff. So check it out.

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So check it out today. Go to Eero.com. Eero.com to learn more.

Overcast chapter fix

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Highly recommended. Thank you very much to Eero for sponsoring our show

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So there’s been a lot of motion in this This thing called

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey overcast. I don’t know if any of you are familiar with with this but apparently

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the developer of overcast has been very busy and getting work done and has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Tweeted the overcast account has tweeted found a fix for m4a chapters they’ll return in the next version.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey MP3 chapters continue to work great, they’ll be easier to create soon. So there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a fair bit to unpack here. But let’s start with M4A. What’d you do Marco?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So last episode I described the problem that I was facing where basically the Apple low-level parser

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would only recognize chapters in MP3 and M4A files

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if they were named with.mp3 and.m4a extensions. And when Overcast downloads a file,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it doesn’t know the type yet until it starts downloading it, at which point I already am saving

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it to a file and would rather not move it for streaming reasons in any way. And so the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hack I was doing before was that upon playback I would temporarily create two sim

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco links to the un-extensioned file, one of them with.mp3 and one of them with.m4a, have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple read those for the metadata parser and then take the metadata from there. I had mentioned

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that that was no longer working with stability

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on APFS and in 10.3. Sometimes I would get crashes around those sim link creations or deletions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so to avoid these crashes, I switched to my own metadata parser,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which only supported mp3, and said, well, I’ll figure out some other solution for m4a later. I have to fix these crashes now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And the solution I came to was just name all the files dot m4a.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And because I have my own parser now for mp3

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco chapters so and my parser is as smart as I want it to be and I decided to build in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the smarts that say who cares what the file is named just parse and look at these first bytes and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can tell what format it is anyway so so my parser

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is now responsible for mp3 streaming and I use apples again for m4a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is on the files all of which are now named dot m4a.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s both extremely clever and completely bananas all at the same time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The perfect incarnation of file name extensions, highlighting the fact that the name of the file has no bearing whatsoever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the format of the data it contains. And it’s an absurd system and Marco is like it’s like a satire

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of file name extensions that you know what I’m just naming every file line for a because that crap is meaningless except to the stupid

⏹️ ▶️ ^John API. It’s too stupid to know what the hell kind of file is being fed and doesn’t let me specify and it just figures it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out by parsing the file name.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Especially like almost all formats, almost all modern file formats, even stuff as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco old as MP3, you can usually tell what format it is by looking at maybe the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco first 12 bytes of the file at most. You know, some files you can tell with even less. So the file

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco command does. Right, like it’s really easy to detect it. Like an M4A always looks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the same and it’s super easy to see it. MP3s can look two

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco different ways up front, but they’re both pretty easy to parse and detect. I wrote code

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to do it, and I’m not a super crazy file engineer. I just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco looked up the specs for these formats, and oh, well, this format has these bytes up front, and this one has these. Done. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco isn’t hard. And JPEG and PNG, those are like eight bytes at the beginning, too. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco super easy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Sometimes they begin with the letters JPEG or GIF, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco literal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ASCII

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco text. JFIF, but anyway, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah, yeah. J fifth joint something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John international photo

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco interchange format it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really matter all right so it also in this tweet you you had said

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey mp3 chapters will be easier to create soon tell me more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ask again later hmm look you all know I’m making forecast the only question is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when it comes out so once coming out? I don’t know probably soon.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Oh yeah?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m trying to I’m putting out some overcast fires first but yeah probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John soon. It’s been a long time coming I think it’s been more than a year since this since more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than a year since you were willing to talk about this program on the podcast in public and who knows how long before that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is this this has been a heck of a gestation for this program this program that people have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John already been using to to do it for its intended purpose for a long time now you just haven’t gotten around to the point where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you polish it up for release, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There are a few little things I want to work out, but they’re like minor UI issues. For the most part,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it should be coming soon.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And for those who don’t know, Forecast is a thing that’s been charitably in private alpha

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that Marco wrote in order to break a podcast into chapters and do so easily

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and quickly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And people in the chat are asking about pricing. The honest answer is that I still

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco haven’t quite decided for sure, but I’m leaning towards just making it free, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not open source. And there’s lots of reasons for this. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ll talk about it once I release it, if I go this way, but the gist of it is basically, I don’t think the market

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is going to be big enough to make it worth charging money for. Because when you charge

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco money for things, you have to support it in a very different way. And there’s overhead

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to that. I just don’t think it would be worth it because I think the market for it is going to be pretty small.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, I don’t think it’s worth charging. At the same time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco open source is tricky when you’re talking about entire apps. Libraries and components, sure, that’s easy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco When you’re talking about entire apps, though, you have a lot of problems with people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ripping it off and uploading it to the App Store under their own name. It’s a big problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when you open an entire app and do stuff like that. I don’t really want to deal with that and I think the value

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of open source is much higher at the library level than at the entire app

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco level.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s fair.

Overcast Watch playback

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, so you’ve also been busy with your Apple Watch and we kind of made

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a mention of this earlier, but it turns out your Apple Watch does have a purpose after all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yes, for testing my Apple Watch. Who knew?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} It’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I did a big watch update. We had kind of alluded to this months ago and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the truth is I’ve been working on offline watch playback for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco months now. It has taken a very long time and there’s lots of reasons for that and it wasn’t the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The only thing I was doing during that time, I did all of 3.0, it was originally slated to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a headlining feature of 3.0. There are lots of reasons why that didn’t happen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The main reason is that the state that I had it in at the time 3.0 was going to ship,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it just had too many weird limitations and bugs. I decided it was not a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good idea to make a big deal out of this feature, to have it be a headlining feature

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of this major update of my app and to have it not work very well. That didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seem wise to me. So instead, I pushed it off until later,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco figuring maybe something will change in watchOS in the next versions and I can do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it then. And there were some other factors involved that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco influenced this as well, but suffice to say, it took a very long time to do because the way I did

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it, in order to get podcast playback on the Apple Watch, there’s a bunch of major hoops you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to jump through. One of them is just the data transfer. The watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has very limited resources in all kinds. That includes bandwidth, that includes storage

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and processing power. And the API for it is very limited. So there’s certain things that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can’t reliably do. One of the things is that you can’t reliably just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco feed any arbitrary podcast file off the internet and expect it to work.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco limitations in its API, certain things it just doesn’t play or doesn’t play very well, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco certain formats and bit rates use way too much power and it actually becomes like a noticeable load on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the watch that you want to avoid. There’s also issues like if you’re transferring it from the phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then you have a serious problem of bandwidth and a transfer speeds. You know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just it take it could take out an hour to transfer a podcast file to the watch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seriously? if you don’t compress it yeah it could take a long time

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because they you know a lot of times transferring over Bluetooth sometimes it’ll use Wi-Fi if it can but it’s kind of vague as to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when and whether it will do that so you can’t really count on that so basically it’s a huge

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco challenge to get the files to the watch and then once they’re on the watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there were there are massive challenges around there’s only a few different ways to play audio on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco watch watch OS 3.2 You added a couple of big

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things. Before that, which is most of my development, the APIs that were there,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there were three different ways to play audio files, and all of them had fatal, massive problems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for playing podcasts. One of them, you couldn’t set the start time of the file. So if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you started it, and then you closed it, and you wanted to start it again, you’d have to start from the beginning or somehow

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have the watch splice the file. of my prototypes, I actually had the watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco splicing AAC files every 15 seconds so that you would so that it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would be able to like look and play this huge playlist. It was I tried a lot of things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it was it was a large period of trial

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and error. Let’s say that one of the API’s that you probably seen before

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it could you could present a sheet that that has the file, but it only has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the seek back and forward by five seconds at a time, and there’s no way to change that you I s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco O. That is pretty bad also that it does allow a start start time, which is fine. But if you sort of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco work out her background, then it stops playing. Eso And then there was a different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one. The WK Audio file player a private, which is what which is what the current story version as we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco speak, uses, and that has tons of problems and shortcomings.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it’s bizarre things. And by the way, I have filed bugs, I have been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in contact with Apple about all these different shortcomings. So I’ve done my duty there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But I don’t think they have a lot of resources to devote to audio playback on the watch, honestly. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seems like this is a pretty rarely used thing and their resources are probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco elsewhere, like iOS 11, you know? So anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one of the issues with the WK Audio File API is like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things, like if your app is in the background and you initiate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a player, that player will just never play. If you go to, it has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some integration with the now playing glance. So if you go to the now playing glance and hit next

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco track, whatever was playing will never play again. but there’s no way to tell in the API.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So you go back to the app and the API says, I’m still playing. Yes, I’m playing at 1x.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But then you just notice if you pull the time, actually you say you’re playing and you say you’re playing at 1x,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but the timestamp is not going up. So in the version in the store right now, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have things like timers that pull every so often and check to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco see, is the timestamp going up as it should? If not, tear down and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco recreate the entire player. There are so many limitations

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and weird bugs with the current one. What happened

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in 3.2? Well, first of all, 3.2 made it possible at all to use this API because they added a set timestamp

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco method on that so that you could start a file from the middle. And then they also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very quietly with no comment, except in the release notes, they just they added the ability to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use AV audio player. I’m like oh yeah it’s like well then why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bother with all this crap? Yes let me use that! And I should point out too as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco far as I know I don’t think I can actually move my entire core audio stack onto the watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yet. Some of core audio is there I don’t know if enough of it is there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or if I’m maybe missing things like audio toolbox and some of the little accessory things. So I’m not I don’t think I can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco actually move the entire thing over yet. But AV audio players is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good enough to do everything except smart speed and voice boost and it has everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco else I need. It has a pretty good speed engine. It has you know it has all it is an in-process API.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The only reason I wasn’t using it before in the version that’s in the store right now is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there it wasn’t backgrounding for me reliably enough at least. Like it would background

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sometimes and other times. And I realized yesterday you had to set different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco background audio flags in different places for that one than you did for the original WK

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco audio player. Once I set those it works perfectly. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with some with a few bugs along the way, but it’s suffice to say those are all fixed now as of about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco two hours ago. It works perfectly. The version that is currently awaiting Apple’s approval

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is this new version with AV audio player. It’s going to be awesome. I should point out a few other things that I hit along the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way. One of the things I did early on that took some time but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was worth it, as I mentioned, none of these methods on the watch support smart speed or voice boost.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you’re accustomed to listening to overcast with smart speed, listening to anything else seems kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of broken. It just sounds wrong. You can do basic speed ups on the watch,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I don’t have the low-level access to the audio stream to be able to do smart speed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What I did instead was on the phone. I experimented and found something fast enough eventually.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m actually transcoding the files in the phone. If you have smart speed enabled, it bakes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in smart speed. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey kind of bananas.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, whatever settings that you would play the track on on your phone, if you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it say, you know, play at smart speed at 1.25x, then it will play on the watch at 1.25x and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’ll have smart speed baked in. I’m not able to do voice boost yet, and this is due

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to some low-level implementation details. Basically, if I run this through an audio graph,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is 10 times slower, and it transcodes at about 12x real-time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If I don’t run it through an audio graph and just process the samples raw, it runs at about 110 or 112x on an iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 7. So I can transcode, you know, 100 times faster than real-time by not using

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the graph. So doing it through the graph is just too slow to really ship that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and so there’s no voice boost yet. I have not yet written my own voice boost that doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use a combination of audio units. I plan to, but I haven’t yet. That’s a low-level thing that’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be a fun project someday, but it hasn’t happened yet. So that’s why there’s no voice boost, but there is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco smart speed because smart speed is a combination of C functions, not audio units.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So anyway, long story short, when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you send a file to the watch, the phone transcodes it. It It transcodes it also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco down to a lower bitrate. I did a whole bunch of testing to figure out what is the best

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco low bitrate way for spoken audio to be heard on a watch. Obviously there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is some quality loss, so it’s just a question of balance, of how do I balance this? Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the bigger the files are, the much longer they take to transfer to the watch. For

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me, a whole bunch of testing with HEAAC and AAC, and even things like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some of the newer formats, the Ogg, what is it, Opus? I don’t know if it’s, sorry if it’s not officially

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Ogg, but it’s from those people. The new Opus format, and there’s a whole bunch of other stuff, and that would have been harder

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to decode because the watch doesn’t support it. Anyway, I did a whole bunch of crazy stuff. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco transcoding to that on the phone, on demand, baking in smart speed. It also has a few other cool optimizations.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco For example, if you are halfway through a podcast and you say send to the watch, it only sends the second

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco half, because there’s no reason to send the part you already listened to. Anyway, here’s all my secrets,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s how you do it. And it’s a whole lot of work, but now I finally have offline watch playback,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and with the version that will hopefully be approved in the next day or two, it’ll be way, way better, because it’ll move

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to this newer API that’s way more stable, and has speaker output and everything else.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, it’s been quite a trip. Oh, not to mention the whole system of syncing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco between the watch and the phone, that’s a thing. You have to sync your progress and not lose stuff, and not have stuff clobber itself

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco during sync and everything else. It’s been some, quite a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lot of effort. And all of this is for a feature that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco relatively nobody will use. And it’s hard to justify this, but there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a few reasons why I thought it was worth it. Right now, according to my analytics, something like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco half a percent of people are using it or something like that. And I haven’t done a great job of promoting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it, so a lot of people don’t know it’s there yet, but there’s not a lot of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who are gonna use this feature. But it was a very high demanded feature. And it’s the kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of thing where you might decide, so what I’ve done is while testing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this, I have paired my favorite walking headphones to my watch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so it kind of forces me to use my watch more as the podcast player because I don’t wanna unpair

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and repair my headphones back to my phone every time I leave to walk the dog. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve kind of gotten into this habit over the last week or two, and really gotten into this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it is pretty cool, I gotta say it. It is pretty nice. It’s not as good as using a phone,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but you have to carry a phone. And for a lot of people, people have been begging me since the watch came out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This has been one of the top featured, one of the top feature requests for Overcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco since the watch came out. Because a lot of people either can’t or don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco want to bring their phone certain places where they can bring their watch. It’s a very common request, for example,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in certain kinds of exercise, like jogging, where a lot of people don’t want to carry their phone, or it’s too clunky, or it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in some kind of inconvenient like arm thing, or backpack, or something else, then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they want it to be totally on their watch. So I understand that. I’m probably never gonna run in my life, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I understand the people who do. It matters a lot to a small

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco number of people. That’s the kind of thing I enjoy doing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s never going to be worth it by the numbers, but I do enjoy doing it just because of how much it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco matters to that small number of people. The fact is, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco business-wise, it might also be a safe bet. It might also be a good thing to do because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple likes it, for one thing. It probably makes my app more likely to be featured by Apple in the future.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Maybe it increases my chances of getting an ADA. One can hope. I never really think I have a chance at that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I really want one. One can hope, right? I also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think that it’s the kind of feature, kind of like when people buy SUVs, and like, what if I need to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco haul something someday? And they never haul anything, right? But I feel like if you’re looking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at podcast apps that are out there, and you might think, oh, I want that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even if you never end up using it, or you hardly ever use it, that might have still helped me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, get that sale or get that person to use Overcast instead of something else. So I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for a lot of reasons I think it is probably worth having done. It did take a lot longer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than I thought it would and a lot more work than I thought it would and it’s not done either. Like there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what I have now is a system where you still have to manually send episodes one by one to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the watch and they still take forever to transfer and I’m not entirely sure I can never

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really fixed the taking forever to transfer thing. I’m, you know, that might just have to like wait out the hardware advancements.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But like, you know, sending one by one to the watch is also not great. People have requested things like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco automatically send episodes of this podcast or this playlist to the watch. And that has its own challenges

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and limitations. Like for instance, I don’t really know how much space I have to deal with. And if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you tell people, you can send this playlist to the watch, I’m going to design this feature for my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco playlist, which might have like 15 podcasts on it at most. And then somebody like John is going to use it and they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going to try to sync 400 audio books to it. And they’re going to be mad when it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} work

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because there’s not enough space in the watch, which I can’t even tell as the programmer. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doing anything more because of the constrained nature of the watch is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going to be harder than doing those same things on the iPhone. It’s also going to be like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco massive UI challenges, right? Like people are already asking for things like chapter navigation on the watch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s really hard to fit a good UI that is both attractive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and usable on that watch screen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Everything people want me to do with this feature is going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be hard to do, basically. But I think I finally got the basics nailed down in this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco update that hopefully we’ll be shipping around the time this podcast comes out, the 3.1.2 update.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everybody will have that now and it’s gonna be great. And I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kinda glad to have it finally be done and now I have a reason to use my watch again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, so have you been using the watch for anything other than podcasting?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, you know, I use it on my dog walks. So, you know, I still prefer mechanical watches

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco greatly for general use and general wearing. But the Apple Watch is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as the entire world plus Apple have figured out over the last, you know, year or two, whatever it’s been, The Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Watch is pretty good for fitness stuff. And so I am quite enjoying on my dog walks being

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco able to track the time and distance that I have gone and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get a nice cool GPS map of it if I ever want that. It will probably remain my like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco taking walks watch, but for other times in my day, I prefer mechanicals

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for other reasons.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Did you get a Series 2? You mentioned the GPS, are you saying because you have your phone with you that’s why you get the GPS trace?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, I actually did get a Series 2. I got a Series 2 this past spring, or this past

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco winter, while testing this, because the build, run, debug loop on the Apple Watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is so incredibly slow, because the hardware is really basic, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when you’re doing build and run, and build and run and debug, it’s all going also through your phone, and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to the watch over Bluetooth or whatever. It’s very, very slow, to the point where changing something on the watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and building and running might be a 45-second long cycle. And when you’re doing a lot of that, that time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really adds up and really gets annoying. So, after like a day of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco trying all these deployment methods on the watch, I went to the Apple store and got a Series 2. Because I asked Underscore,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is it faster? And he actually, of course, he timed it. Of course he knew exactly

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} to the second.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it was something like 20 seconds faster on the Series 2. I’m like, done, sold. Because if you can save me 20 seconds

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every single time I’m building and running on the watch, that is going to add up. And it did.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I do have a Series 2. I’m very, very glad I got the Series 2 because the difference

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for development was immediately and incredibly apparent.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So what Series 2 did you get? I know you’re just getting it, oh, I just want something that’s faster for me to do my builds on, right? But then did you go,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John okay, well, since I’m buying one, which one do I want? What color do I want? What bands? Like, what did you get?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I did go through a lot of that debate because I’m like, I’m just getting it for development. I should just get the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco aluminum basic cheapo, the cheapest one I can get. you know just get down I should even cut every fiber of your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco being screams out no right well and in theory I don’t even need the series too I could have gotten this series

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one same processor same speed just you know no GPS

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} no

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco GPS and not not super waterproof so I could have gotten that but once

⏹️ ▶️ ^John again your inner Marcos is no

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well here’s the thing oh here we go so I’m accustomed to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now wearing nice watches the reason I got into

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} nice you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John need to have a watch that lets you live in the style to which you have become accustomed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The reason I got into nice watches is because I fell

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in love with how the Apple Watch made me feel when I looked at it on my wrist.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That is why. When the Apple Watch first came out, I obsessed crazily

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco over which bands to get, which color combinations worked. I went over this for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco weeks. I was agonizing, like, oh, will this band be more convenient to latch or this one or whatever else

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and so it mattered a lot to me and I and I really enjoy the way the steel watch looks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I and I really unfortunately don’t enjoy the way the aluminum ones look the aluminum ones

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to me look a lot like a phone on your wrist the steel ones

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t look like an analog device by any means but I think the steel ones are very attractive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I decided after much agonizing that I wanted a steel one again the only way to get a steel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one was to get the series two you you can get the Series 1 in steel. So I got the Series 2 and I got the steel.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I have it on, I think I came with a Milanese, that was the only one I could get in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stock, which I immediately sold. And I’m just using my old sport band with it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It makes me a little sad that you haven’t decided to come crawling back to the Apple Watch, but you know, to each their own, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what you like.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, I mean, it has, no question, it has a lot of utility. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it also has a lot of things it’s not so great about. And like, man, I’m telling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you, when I’m wearing it now, like for this testing, these testing periods, every time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I turn my wrist to look at the time, it doesn’t show. Like every time, it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, oh, let me exaggerate this motion again, or let me tap it, and it’s just like, oh, come on. So yeah, like when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’re accustomed to regular watches, the Apple Watch has a few things about it that are very annoying. Mostly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the delay when looking at the time. And so it’s fine, you know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco All the utilities of it, things like notifications all day and stuff, I don’t really care. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco turn off most notifications. I don’t like having a lot of them. So most of that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff is not of much use to me. And the fitness stuff, I don’t usually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have much of a fitness regimen. When I do, it’s extensive dog walking. So I’m using it now for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that. For most things in my life, I don’t have the kind of lifestyle that benefits

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco heavily from the Apple Watch’s good things, and the Apple Watch’s bad things irritate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me. Did you get the Earth Day badge? I did not. I did get,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reminds it about the Earth Day badge, on Earth Day, but I hit dismiss and did not get it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I didn’t get it because it was disgusting weather over here, I didn’t get that one. I did get the Turkey

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Day one, but I did not get the Earth Day one. Did you, John?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} No.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Fair enough, and you haven’t put your watch on in months, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} assume?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I wore it on vacation or at the whole week. Why did you wear it on vacation? That’s it’s what I do I do it when I travel.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well and I will say it is a really nice travel watch because it sets its own time zone and you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have your boarding passes showing on it and everything else so it is kind of nice for that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And walking directions in the city to be able to like tap on your wrist tell you which street to turn down instead of have to constantly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John take out your phone. Yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} that’s true yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the main downside for me is then you have to bring its separate charger and I’m trying to minimize the chargers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that I I bring on trips, and that’s usually a really easy one to let go of.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. Anything else on anything watch-related?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Hopefully not. It’s been a lot. A lot of Apple Watch stuff the last

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco couple of weeks, but…

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You’ve been working a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Yeah, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco proud of you. Well, and like this whole, like the whole transcoding engine and baking in smart speed, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco work was all done months ago, and I’ve just been sitting on it waiting for a chance to use it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and waiting for basically waiting for the watch APIs to both get better and for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me to figure them out. which both had to happen for this to finally be released, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here it is.

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Uber scandal of the week

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Make your next move with Squarespace. Ah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah. Yet another tick in the Uber

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is gross box. It seems like Uber has been using private

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey APIs to read iPhone serial numbers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and or they were doing this anyway, a couple of years ago, they were reading iPhone serial numbers, reporting them up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to their own servers. And thus, this allowed them to track

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey installations between deletes. So you could install Uber. It would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey look at your phone’s serial number. Let’s call it 12345. It’s the same combination I have in my luggage. And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you would delete the app. You could then reinstall it later. It will see that the serial number is still 12345.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And it would say, ha ha, this is user ABCDEFG. And so allegedly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they were using this for fraud prevention, which is a legitimate explanation,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think, but it just feels super gross. And so the story

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey goes that Tim Cook called in Travis Kalanick, Kalanick, whatever his name is, the really skeezy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey um, head of Uber and basically said, if you don’t get rid of this post haste,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we’re going to pull you from the app store. And guess what happened? They got rid of it. I don’t think there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that many interesting things to discuss here, but perhaps one of you has some thoughts that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thought

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yet. I mean, to me, the main interesting part here, I mean, you know, we know this has been talked to death on other shows, so we’re not going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to spend a lot of time on it. The interesting part to me here is not necessarily the horrible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things that Uber did, because Uber is always doing horrible things. I urge anybody out there to stop using

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. I’ve been using Lyft since one of their other recent scandals, and it’s great. It’s totally fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the same or better so just use Lyft or something else you know it’s fine. Stop using

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Uber. Anyway one of the cool things about this that I thought was worth

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mentioning is and first of all all these holes that we know of are now patched.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Iokit is a weird framework. There’s all sorts of stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on your phone that apps should not have access to. Things like the phone part

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of it. There’s a reason why apps can’t dial your phone for you without interaction or read

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your phone calls or anything. All the stuff that iOS must wall off from apps

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a private framework. The way iOS is structured,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with the exception of jailbreaking, which ruins everything, but regularly in your phone, apps

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can’t call into private frameworks. They just technically can’t. There’s no way to do it. They’re walled

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco off from apps. IOKit is technically not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one of these. The role of IOKit in iOS is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mostly to read data about the hardware. And a lot of things that are in the UI device

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco API are just thin wrappers around UIKit calls. Things like reading the screen brightness

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco level or the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} system… Thin

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wrappers around IOKit calls. Sorry, yeah. Or the system battery level or things like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that. Just information about the hardware. This is where things like the UDID

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco used to be, although now that’s no longer available. And Apple is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pretty good about any way that you have to uniquely identify

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco phones, Apple has been slowly getting rid of. Iokit, for whatever reason, as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I said, it’s not in that walled off area where the rest of the private frameworks are.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So it actually is callable. But you aren’t allowed to. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco undocumented, at least on iOS, and it’s officially forbidden. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Uber is doing all sorts of tricks to avoid being detected. So I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there are two angles of this that are worth talking about.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} One

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is, is it possible for Apple to prevent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the use of private APIs on a large scale? The way that they usually prevent it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is during app review, they have some kind of special testing environment where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if an app calls a private API during app review or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if it has a private API symbols like literally in the app so if it has like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco name of a private function in the code Apple can flag that and they will reject it automatically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for that but there are ways to get around this one of them is if you can load the module

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dynamically or you can you can not have the name of the function in the code you can have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a a scrambled string that in code you unscramble at runtime

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and then call that. That’s usually how these things are done. And again, this doesn’t work for calling super

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco private framework stuff, but it does work for calling private methods on public things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or for the framework of IOK, which is this weird kind of middle ground where it is kind of technically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco public. Anyway, do you think there is a way for Apple to ever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fix that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of the halting problem thing where can you tell me here is this program

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can you tell me how this program behaves you know in the general

⏹️ ▶️ ^John case no not really but all these things you’re talking about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all you need to do I think is do enough so that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if something gets through your system it was clearly done intentionally and like in the in the uber

⏹️ ▶️ ^John case one of the other stories about about this is that the way they were getting around it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have all these secret ways of dynamically loading the code and all that other stuff, but just to be safe,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t do that when the GPS detects that you’re somewhere within Apple’s campus. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they geofence the Apple campus and say, when you’re inside this perimeter, don’t ever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John try to do this sneaky thing. Only when you’re outside this perimeter, somewhere else on earth, then do the sneaky

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing to call the private ABI. So in that case, trying to detect, hey, is the program

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doing that? Like in general, no, there’s no general purpose, computable, reasonable time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way to figure that out or at all, actually, you know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because it literally isn’t calling the bad API. And you know, then you have to detect, how can I tell if it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doing something that lets it know when it shouldn’t do the naughty thing that it’s doing, you know. But again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you just make the tests hard enough so that if it is doing that, someone can’t say, oh, we just did that by accident, that was just a bug,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? You know, I didn’t mean to do that at all. It’s so clearly intentional. Like at the point where you’re putting scrambled

⏹️ ▶️ ^John strings or assembling symbol names out of a bunch of scrambled data spread all over your program,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? Like there’s no way you can explain that away. Versus say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John oh, I just called an Apple API and the Apple API called a private thing that access some file outside the sandbox and it’s totally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not my fault and that happens all the time. And Apple be like, oh yeah, I can see. Eventually you can convince Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was not doing anything intentionally bad. This is just some, you know, something that you didn’t realize was actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John happening in your code and I’m doing the right thing, and let’s just all get through it. So I think that’s all they need to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do, and that’s probably what they’re currently doing, and I think that’s probably sufficient.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I was thinking too, the environment that they have in AppReview that automatically detects

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whenever this boundary is crossed that your app is calling something private that it shouldn’t be,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what if they could deploy that to iPhones? And maybe not to all iPhones, because I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco assume there’s some degree of overhead involved here that maybe would make it too power

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco inefficient or too slow. But what if they deployed it to, say, a large group

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of Apple employees’ phones? That would probably catch a lot of things in popular

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco apps. So whatever environment they have to detect these things in App Review, spread

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that out wider. Maybe they have a whole bunch of virtual iPhones in the cloud that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco simulate using apps and they track them on those. They could do all sorts of fun stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think you just override GPS to get rid of the geofence. Once you’re running this faked environment,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you just hard code the GPS to be Antarctica or something and you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all set. Right, exactly. And change the IP and everything else. So anyway, I think expanding

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that virtual environment would be one way to do this. Whether they, that like tripwire

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco environment, whether it’s just Apple employees or whether it’s simulated things in the cloud or whether it’s both or who knows.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think they could do a lot there. The second thing I wanted to talk about the Uber thing though, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think is probably more interesting, is the dynamic here of this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco large app violates a rule in a pretty big way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like, obviously, you know, knowing it willfully violating it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco blocking out Apple’s campus area so they wouldn’t see it, you know, evading

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco detection, do it like it obviously like this was not like, oh I accidentally called this hero number function, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no This was like willful violation and malicious intent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to, you know, evade these rules that are there for very good reasons in order to evade

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people’s privacy. Like it’s really bad and, you know, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I did that in Overcast, I would be kicked out of the App Store immediately and there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would be no recourse. I would be lucky if I was even told the reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and that would be it. I’d be gone, but if Facebook does things like this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in their app, which they do, and they get caught sometimes, and they say it’s a bug. Oh sorry

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we left the audio session running. It’s a bug that we are running constantly in the background when we are in use.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know Facebook does it all the time. Twitter has Twitter has all sorts of awful things with you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know tracking apps that are installed and everything. Apple’s locked on most of them, but and then you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know you then you have Uber doing crazy crap like this and again and and their crazy location

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff, oh we need your location all the time now, and all sorts of crazy stuff. If a big company

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco breaks a rule, even in the most brazen, outrageous way like this, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get a meeting with Tim Cook, where Tim Cook calmly expresses his disappointment in them,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and sternly

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} tells them, like, you’re going to stop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doing this now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like that’s certainly a stern warning, but that’s awfully special treatment. That is being

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco incredibly generous towards this company that is literally defrauding

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you. Like it’s like, they’re doing really,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s no way to read this charitably, right? Why wasn’t Uber just kicked

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out of the App Store? And I think the answer to that is interesting. So like, I have some theories.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s a question of like who needs who more right and I think the answer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is yeah okay I think Apple could afford to do that you know I think I think uber needs Apple more than Apple needs uber

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but you do have to think about it just for a second like you know how many customers would Apple lose

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by doing that like it’s probably not zero you know so that’s something you have to think about right

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it would be even worse if that was Facebook you know like if it’s so like There are these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco big companies that Apple actually doesn’t wield complete power over.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That there is some power in the other direction as well. And Uber is big enough that I think it’s one of those.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Facebook is certainly one of those. Facebook is probably the biggest one, actually, when you’re talking about iOS apps.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Except maybe YouTube or Google Maps would also be pretty high up there. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Facebook, I think, is probably the biggest. So there’s that angle of, like, Apple maybe can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kick out some… out some they’re like too big to fail they’re like too big to kick out right also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if somebody like Facebook or uber got kicked out of the App Store they’d probably sue Apple and what would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be the result of that lawsuit would they bring up any trust would Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be at risk of maybe having to give up some of their control over the App Store

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for any trust concerns or for other legal concerns like would they be at risk of giving up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app approval

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t think uber would sue Apple. I don’t see anyone suing Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for this. Like, I hear people talk about it sometimes but there are big problems

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with that. First of all, Apple has more money than you. Like, whoever you is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Apple has more money than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you. Right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in general, it’s good when people have a lot of money, you want to sue them and get some of that money. But it’s bad if you’re going into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a lawsuit that may turn out to be like this long running thing because you will run out of money before Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does. And second, the suit for the case for antitrust on Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John grows weaker by the day as Android is like 80% smartphone market share and growing, you know, worldwide.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s really tough to make that sell. And third, the whole app store agreement,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everything is I feel like pretty ironclad and doesn’t leave any room and your only hope would be to say

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah, but it’s a special situation because Apple has a monopoly on X, Y and Z. Like it is, it’s so difficult. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feel like there’s almost no legal recourse. The best way you could go is maybe defamation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because Apple had to say Uber was doing a naughty thing and they could say, no, we weren’t. Apple is, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever, whatever the equivalent of defamation for companies is, probably maybe it’s the same thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I don’t see the antitrust as being a concern. I see this like the first thing you said, that the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John similar situation that I think we’ve all experienced in some way directly or indirectly in the US anyway has been

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fights between cable companies and channels, right? Where there’s some disagreement about how much it’s gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cost to get HBO or ESPN on the cable package. This is going back in time a little bit back when people still had cable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And there would be this this standoff in the same way that there’s a standoff between Tim

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Cook and Uber or whatever. Like again, Facebook is totally the biggest one. Say Facebook does nasty things. Why does Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not get kicked out? Why do they get like a stern talking to? Because it’s a game of chicken. It’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know that we can kick you out of the store, and we know that you know that if we kicked you out of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John store, it would be disastrous for us and our platform, but we might just do it anyway to teach

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you a lesson like temporarily, and so they’re just staring at each other, you know, waiting to see who twitches first.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And with the cable companies and the channels, very often it gets to the point where it’s like, sorry, you know, Comcast is no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John longer gonna have ESPN, right, or is no longer gonna carry Yankees games on this channel,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever. And then it’s a PR war between the cable company

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the channel to say, call the cable company and tell them you demand to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get the channel back. And the cable company says, call whatever and tell them that you demand to be more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reasonable because we can’t pay, you know what I mean? And that game of chicken usually doesn’t last that long. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what always ends up happening is the channel comes back to the cable carrier in most cases if it’s an important enough

⏹️ ▶️ ^John channel. Because in the end, an iPhone without Facebook is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a bigger problem than an iPhone with a Facebook that violates the rules every once in a while and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then you yell at them and you catch them and they fix it, right? And the people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t know who to blame. Why can’t I get me a SPN anymore? I turn on the TV, I can’t get the channel anymore. I’m gonna change cable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John providers if I can at all. If I can’t change cable providers, I’m just inarticulately angry. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if I can change providers, if that’s the one channel that was the most important channel to me, I’m gonna change providers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John People would change phones if they couldn’t get Facebook. It’s like you can get an iPhone, but oh, I heard the iPhone doesn’t have Facebook anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They will get a different phone. That’s the kind of power Facebook has. Does Uber have that power? Probably not as much.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s much smaller. There are alternatives, yada, yada, yada. But that’s the whole relationship

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here. So I don’t think you need to bring in threats of lawsuits or other things into it. I think you just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John need to look at the power dynamic of customers want the app, the app makes your phone more valuable. If your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phone doesn’t have the app, it’s totally a PR war. And you imagine like Uber no longer on Apple phones.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And maybe that’s not a big deal because people would have all the alternatives. But if even for like a week they said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John guess what, Facebook no longer on Apple phones. That story would last like three years

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of people saying I was gonna get an iPhone but I heard they don’t have Facebook. Three years ago I heard they don’t have Facebook. I was like, that was just for two weeks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s like, well, no, too late. It’s already out there. I got an Android phone again. So yeah, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does not want that to happen. And speaking of relationship between Apple and important software companies,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Software companies at various times when Apple has been not as rich and powerful as it is now, have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John been even more, have had even more influence over what Apple does. The best,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John most recent example is Apple’s entire modern operating system plan

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to get away from classic Mac OS to do something to replace it with something else was essentially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John squashed by Microsoft and Adobe, two companies saying, yeah, we’re not going to make apps for that. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple said, well, there’s no, whatever plan we thought we had that we thought was all awesome. And we had a cool

⏹️ ▶️ ^John code name for it. But it’s, you know, forget it. Because if Apple and Adobe aren’t on board,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and we can’t convince them, there’s no point in us even doing this, because a Mac that can’t run

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Microsoft or Adobe software is pointless. And so they didn’t. And they scrapped that plan,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Rapsi plan, and said they did Mac OS 10 with carbon, and I got those guys on board.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that’s like, one of the biggest, important decisions Apple ever made the life of the company at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stake and who essentially ended up being you know having a veto power of what Apple does

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to third party software companies with really important application and these days I feel like Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and to Facebook and you know Google slash YouTube and then a few other people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to a lesser degree have veto power over a huge number of platforms and there is you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Android I feel like has more power because if if you can’t put your application on Android and that’s 80%

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the world smartphones, that’s a big problem. And then an apple apple needs these applications because they’re a smaller

⏹️ ▶️ ^John percentage. And the whole point of their phone is you get the best stuff and you get it the soonest and if they take that away, that’s a problem. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not surprised at these sort of two people yelling at each other and you know, being naughty

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and getting caught and going around in circles. I don’t see any way that’s going to change unless the power dynamic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John changes. And in the meantime, if the power dynamic is not like that, and you are just Marco with one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John application, you Apple doesn’t have to play those games with you they can just shut you down and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s that’s the way it is and makes perfect sense and it’s no sense getting upset about the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John double standard just learn to be smart and hide in the rocks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you’re a little mouse all right when the asteroid

⏹️ ▶️ ^John comes you’ll be the one to survive and it turns out okay well not you specifically probably you specifically mouse

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will be dead but there will be other mice that live it’ll be fine well this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco took a turn thanks to our three sponsors this week, Squarespace, Eero, and Fracture,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and we’ll see you next week!

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now the show is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh it was accidental. John didn’t do any research,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the show notes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at atp.fm,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and T. Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Accidental, tech podcasts so long

Post-show: A Siracusa abroad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John, you have made a long trip. You have gone on a grand

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey adventure. Would you call it a tour? You could call it a grand tour, actually.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I would love to know, John, what did you think of Britain?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So unfortunately for you, I came back from the UK and did another podcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where we talked about all this stuff, and that was last night. Oh, who got to you

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} first?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You got scooped. You got scooped by Merlin. Merlin did? We did breakdance

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we talked about travel stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, fortunately we can probably release faster than they can.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah. There you go See that that’s a spirit.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Anyway, I What do you wanna know? I covered I can cover different stuff, I suppose.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Okay, so how was how was the plane travel? You went direct from Boston to Heathrow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yep. It was fine. It was a we go got very lucky I’ve been lucky on my flights recently

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not really bumpy at all straightforward I we went to British Airways and we didn’t go like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fancy class, but we didn’t go like the cheapest one It’s like whatever one is in the middle as far as I can tell it is exactly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the same as the cheapest seats except for You have slightly more legroom, which I appreciate it because I got long legs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But yeah, it was nice there was there was USB ports in the back of the seats Which I hadn’t seen before which is you know convenient

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the way back. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever flown a 747

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Did you stare out the window for six hours or whatever it took you to get there and back?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s what I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do do. Oh, my God. So so your poor wife is just sitting there basically doing your own

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John She’s not suffering. She she was playing Sudoku and watching movies the whole time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Time flew by from the way that she’s like, I didn’t even notice that six hours just flew by. She’s obsessed with Sudoku lately.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So she just like if you were if you were to take movies, everyone’s like this person is just staring at these numbers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And she would do that. Occasionally she would move or twitch in some way, but mostly stare at the numbers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Indeed, indeed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Fair enough. All right. So you traveled to Heathrow. What were some of the highlights? How about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this? What were your favorite things that you participated in?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, even before we got there, the food I had on British Airways going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to London was the best airplane food I’ve ever had. With the possible exception of Midwest

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Express’s fresh baked chocolate chip cookies, which anyone who even remembers what Midwest Express

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was knows that that was a good deal. And they had metal silverware for crying out loud. west

⏹️ ▶️ ^John express r.i.p. unless they’re still alive in which case sorry but i haven’t flown them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in years um but yeah the you know everything’s relative it’s airplane food right

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but the airplane food on the way out was like you know full english breakfast

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing but imagine like the airplane version of that and it was passably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John edible which is a hell

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} of a thing glowing review

⏹️ ▶️ ^John especially the eggs you know what eggs are like on planes like why even bother like I expected them to just be like a complete

⏹️ ▶️ ^John write-off but but I ate them um and on the way back it was uh

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bangers and mash type thing so first of all

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stereotypical British type food and like I’m gonna say both of them are better than WWDC

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lunch easily

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well they also cost you more than 40 dollars

⏹️ ▶️ ^John oh god they I don’t know how you want to factor out how much it costs in these plane tickets how much of that was paying for that meal but anyway

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there was a lot of food there was variety and every part of it was way better than I thought

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It would be for airline for modern airline food like I don’t know what like old style like in the 60s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John airline food was Like real food, but like for all my life with the exception of Midwest Express airline food It’s just been grim.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so this was you know better than grim. So I was happy about that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Okay,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so you stare out the window for six hours. You don’t play any Zelda or anything like that You’re just staring out the window.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can’t I can’t look at the screens. I can’t watch a movie All I can do is listen to podcasts, which is exactly what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I did. I forgot to bring as I as I tweeted I forgot

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} to bring my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lightning to a headphone adapter, which I only realized literally as I’m going to let me get all my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff plugged in.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So what did you end up doing? You use something Bluetooth? So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uh, well, so I figured out why I did it. First of all, like, this is not the first time I’ve flown

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with my iPhone seven. I’ve had it since like launch or whatever, whenever I got, like, it’s not the first time I’ve done. I’ve flown with my iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seven before, and I’ve remembered to bring the adapter. I think the problem is I flew with it. I brought the adapter

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because you’re worried like when you first get the thing oh I’ve got I’ve got a phone with no headphone jack I gotta remember I gotta think about this it’s a front

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of mind you know I gotta I gotta worry about it right and then you do it and you remember it and you bring it and you’re like your brain’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like well you’ve solved that problem now you never need to worry about your phone again uh but you do because every

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time you fly you have to make sure the adapter’s in there so anyway now I have two adapters one of which is permanently in the case

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with the Bose headphones with my Bose noise cancelling headphones so problem solved there um on the way out what I What

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I did was I took my earbuds, which I had with me because I know I’m an overpacker, like my lightning earbuds that came

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with the phone. I put them on my ears and I put the noise canceling headphones over the earbuds so I could have noise

⏹️ ▶️ ^John canceling and also

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} podcast.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s right. I’d forgotten about that. Oh my God, that is absolutely preposterous. But that actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ended up working.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, totally worked.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s awesome. What did you guys do the first day? So you arrived, what time of day did you arrive?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We had like a morning flight so we got up and on godly hour got up like 4 a.m. to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get our flight out and but anyway by the time we get there it was by the time I think we got to the hotel it was like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dinner time I think I don’t know exactly like you’re so scrambled up from the flying but

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} anyway

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the whole day was shot all day

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} because you’re going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to go east what do we do for the various days we did like all the touristy stuff you can do in London you name some touristy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing you can do in London chances are we did it

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Tower London.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. What’s that? Churchill’s War Rooms.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Did you like that? It was fine. Oh, John.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Poor

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Tina.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John British Museum. We saw Big Ben, Parliament,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Westminster Abbey, Windsor Castle. Like, we did all the things. We

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had fish

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John chips.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Tell me how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John amazing the fish and chips were. I don’t like fish and chips, but Tina would like it. Oh my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey god, bless America or god save the queen, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like fish. I got, but I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} got a… I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like fish either, but I like fish and chips.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I got a pretty good pub sandwich made with sausage. A lot of things in England have sausage in them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I like sausage and so I had them and they were good. We ate at a lot of different restaurants,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had all sorts of different kinds of food, got to see some people that we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John both know in London. Yeah, it was fine. It was nice. kids weren’t with us, and I guess this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John isn’t clear to everybody, we sent the kids away to their grandparents. The Marco move.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s a good move. Yep. This is the first time we’d taken a vacation without our children since

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they were born. So it’s first vacation without

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} children.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John First vacation period that wasn’t visiting family

⏹️ ▶️ ^John since our honeymoon. Because it’s like we had our honeymoon, which was just like a vacation, not to visit family with just the two of us. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then after that, pretty much every vacation we took was somewhere to go, you know, visit one of our families, go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John somewhere with the family, and then the kids were born and every vacation at the very least is with them. So… So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you haven’t had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a vacation? Yeah. Well, well, this is kind of, this thing is supposed to be our 20th wedding anniversary

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing. Our 20th wedding anniversary is this summer, but we like, you know, fitting it into the schedule and when the kids off

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of school and camp and all the other vacations, this is the time when it fit in basically. So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John um, so yeah, it was nice. It was, it was, uh, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gonna say it was mostly relaxing, but we did so much walking.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} It’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the most, the most exercise and walking I’ve done in a long time. Like, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I posted the, uh, the pedometer plus plus graphs of what we did, but like on the second

⏹️ ▶️ ^John day we did like over 30,000 steps and over 15 miles and the average was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John over 10,000, uh, steps for each day or not, not 10,000, sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ten miles for each day. And I had my watch and I was counting my steps that way,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I had my phone in airplane mode so I didn’t have GPS, but my wife had her Series 2

⏹️ ▶️ ^John watch and her phone with an actual data plan on it so hers is more accurate and her numbers were even bigger than mine. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we were all going to the same places. So we did a lot of walking and I’m an old man and the bottom of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my feet hurt.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You poor baby. Sounds like a

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} great

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco vacation. No, I just like, I love, first of all, it’s kind of mind-blowing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to me that you’ve taken zero real vacations, you know, ever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I’m trying to picture like, are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you able to suspend, and I say this in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the most loving way possible as a friend, are you able to suspend being you enough

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} enjoy a vacation?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I am awesome at vacations. I am better than most people at vacations. I have no problem relaxing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m better. Here’s what I’m better at. My idea of vacation is relaxing and doing nothing. People who

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want to have a vacation where it’s like, we got to go. We have a plan. We got to see this. We got to see that. I’m the opposite of

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John those people are not good at vacations where they’re like, we have to do and see every possible thing there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is to do and see. And we have a schedule. We got to wake up early and like wake up early. That’s not a vacation. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my vacation is where you do nothing in a beautiful place. That’s my ideal vacation.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} So this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a compromise vacation where we’re going, we’re traveling somewhere. I don’t like to travel, but it’s not that big of a deal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s not that long of a trip. And we’re doing touristy things, but we’re trying to do them at a relaxed pace. And I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have to worry about kids complaining the whole time. So we can kind of do whatever the hell we want to do and be like, you know, a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lot of it was like, let me do all this walking because we’d like go do this thing. And then we just say like, well, what else is near here?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And we, you know, find someplace to eat near here, and then go do that thing. And we just like, it’s like a random walk through London. It’s just all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John different places and all big. We went to the Regent Street Apple Store. We went to every park

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in London we walked through at some point or another. And it’s just nice being able

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to just say, what do you want to do next? I like not having a plan and just saying vaguely speaking, there’s lots of interesting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things you might want to go see, but let’s just go wander to them. My ideal vacations are the vacations we take

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actually with our kids and my side of the family on Long Island where you just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sit on a beach all day for a week. That’s my ideal vacation, but other people don’t like that. Marco is coming around

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to it. But yeah, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} have indeed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco come around to it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think both of us have because Marco and I during the run of the show, I think we’re going tit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for tat on who hated the beach more. And I think that the both of us have since been converted.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, yeah, it basically happened like over the last like year and a half or so.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ve always loved the beach. And a lot of people hate it, not just because they might hit the beach, but it’s just like, what are we even doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here? Who wants to sit in the sand all like what what are we doing? I don’t understand what we’re doing. It’s just like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just relaxing in a beautiful place, even with the kids and with the family. The kids just go off and run and do the thing they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do. It’s a little bit more stress of me, like making sure my children don’t drown, you know, when we go to the ocean.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} That’s kind of a bug.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, but other than that, that’s my ideal. Being in a familiar place with good pizza

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and bagels and just having no plan except to go to the beach every day and then come home and have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a delicious dinner and then eat Brian Mayer pies and just, yeah. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’ve done that every year for many, many years. I’m not deprived of that. I get that all the time, right? And so this was more of a vacation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of like a more in a more traditional sense. And then we went to Disney with the kids, which was the let’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do a big family vacation with the kids and just sacrifice whatever our happiness

⏹️ ▶️ ^John may be. We both love Disney too, right? So it wasn’t that big a deal. But anyway, got to have the two kids. Got to make sure they’re happy. This

⏹️ ▶️ ^John vacation is mostly for them. This one was for us, but mostly for my wife. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so yeah, we’re not We’re not big vacationers, but every once in a while, we try to do it. And I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sure this will be the thin end of the wedge of like, let’s go on different vacations. Like this is building up to like, when we’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} both

⏹️ ▶️ ^John retired

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} and our kids are gone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and she’s dragging me all over the globe. So, you know, I’m preparing for that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Was this your first international travel?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ve been to Canada. Does that count? No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really, no.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} I’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to, not just like Canada, like just over the border, but I’ve been to Newfoundland. I’ve been to the easternmost

⏹️ ▶️ ^John point in North America, Still doesn’t count. I’ve been out on a boat past the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John easternmost point in North America next to an iceberg, so that’s pretty exotic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I do like in the chat room, a listener, Seagrin, made an interesting distinction.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco He said, doing all kinds of stuff is traveling. Doing nothing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is vacationing. I think that’s a very, very good distinction. What

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you do and what we like to do now on the beach is vacation, where we just do nothing in a beautiful place, as you said.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And doing all kinds of stuff in a different place, that’s traveling, right? Traveling is like you want to see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as much as you can see, and so you are waking up early and going and doing this and that all day.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I kind of like that distinction.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, you’d call Disneyland a vacation, though. People say, I’m going on a Disney vacation, and Disney is one of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the main places where people are

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John oh, gotta wake up, gotta get in this line, gotta do this, gotta see all these things. But they still call it a vacation, not traveling,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because where are you going? You’re just in Orlando the whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I have, I will say this, I have never been to Disney. It is not the kind of thing that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think I would enjoy. However, just from the way other people describe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it, I would never describe that as a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John vacation. It’s more fun than you think it is. I mean, you should go at some point

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when Adam is like the right age of like, he’s not gonna be melting down constantly, but he’s also not gonna be too

⏹️ ▶️ ^John old for it. Like find that age that is the right age for that and just take one family trip there. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is more interesting and more fun than you think it’s going to be. Not gonna say that you’re gonna think it’s the most awesome place

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you love it and you would do it all the time, but it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as bad as you think. It sounds like more of an event. You know, it’s like we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just finished, our kid’s birthday was this past weekend, and so we just finished having

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a large party and arranging all the logistics and everything else. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from the way that I’ve heard friends, including both of you, talk about Disney vacations,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it sounds like it’s like hosting a party times a thousand like all the stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you have to like do and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John play it’s the opposite it’s the opposite of that you don’t have to worry about all that crap

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Disney takes care of like it’s it’s it’s like like you’re like Adam’s party

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was for Adam that’s what Disney is trying to be for you you’re Adam in this scenario and Disney is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you and Tiff

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} they are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John taking care of all the crap and making sure your needs are met and just like you just show up and be like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Ah, where’s my cake? Where’s my presents? Like, that’s Disney. That’s, that’s what they’re trying to do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, let me let me build on this. So I have been begging to talk about that’s not fair. I have wanted to talk

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about Disney on this show for a long time. But so Disney is so intent on you having

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a good time and not having to worry about anything, that if you stay

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on campus or in the parks, I forget the technical term that Disney uses for it. But if you stay Stay at a hotel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that Disney owns that’s on the Disney property. On property? I guess, yeah, I think it is on property. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so if you stay on property, if you book with any amount

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of advance notice and you’re flying into the Orlando airport, you can do this thing called Magical

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Express. And what happens is when you go to JFK or wherever you would go, Marco, you deposit your checked bags.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey They have a special Disney tag on them. you arrive at the Orlando

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey airport, you go to where the magical express buses are. You tell them what hotel you’re staying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at. You board a bus. You do not go to baggage claim. You go to your hotel, you check

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in, you presumably get your room, unless it’s silly early in the morning. You get your park tickets

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and then you freshen up and go to the park. Your bags are still nowhere to be found. You go to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey park, you do amazing things, have a tremendous time, have a lot of fun.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Especially you Marco because you would go at the bananas time of year when nobody else is there Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey maybe not once he gets in school, but in terms of like jobby jobs, it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} a problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey He’s in school Yeah, I forgot about

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} that. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey anyway But the point being you go and you have fun and then when you return to your room

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey poof like magic There’s your bags all Collected all the way from the Orlando

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Airport and placed conveniently in your room just for you That’s how serious they are about you not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey having to worry about stuff now with

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} that said I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would be worried the entire time whether my bag was actually going to be there when I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John got there. That doesn’t work for control freaks, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} there’s something for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everybody in that, like, if that’s not the experience you want to have, you don’t have to. Like, just in general, like, everything about the park

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is set up to make your life easier, and they understand by now what is annoying about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John being in a hot place with a kid who might be cranky and, you know, what makes rides, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everything about it is nice looking and fun and clean and cheery and, you know, it’s all artificial

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s all park, like, I’m not saying it’s, you know, the beach is better, that’s what I’m getting at, but you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know going in that this is what they’re going to be trying to be doing, you think it’s not going to work on me and it’s just going to be miserable, and it still just kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of works on you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah. So the impression that I have gotten from listening to you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco guys and Merlin talk about Disney vacations,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the degree of planning and required expertise

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about the way that these things should be done is that mostly just you guys being you guys and not the way it actually is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s half and half yeah it’s kind of like there’s a certain personality type who says that like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like it’s you’re the type person who doesn’t want to be worrying about where your bag is if you’re also the type of person

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who wants to go Disney and be like I don’t want to go to Disney and not get to do all the super duper special things that I want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do like then yeah you got a plan ahead for it and do all this stuff but if you just go to Disney you’re like whatever I’ll just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do what let’s just walk around and see something that’s It’s interesting that it has a short line and especially if your kid doesn’t know enough

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to know like I want to go on X and you know if they just like wandering around starry I just like you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’ll work out fine. You are enough of a planner that I think you would do it a little bit ahead of time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Luckily there is an entire industry of people whose only job is to plan your Disney vacation for you. That

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sounds awful.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh God that would be so much fun. Are you kidding?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s another situation where you can throw throw a little bit of money at a person and they will just do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everything for you and tell you where to go and what to do. And it’s not that much money, especially once you see how much the bill for everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at Disney is in the grand scheme of things, it’s not that much money. And it’s another example

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of like, like you being the Adam and just having these, you know, other people take care of everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for you, everything in Disney, it’s basically like being rich for poor people, as Disney

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for you, right? Because like, for the rich people, like everything, everyone takes care of your every need.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you just wake up and people have your clothes ready for you and cars whisk you from place to place and private jets

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and helicopters and your food is served to you and just everything is you know you know what I mean no one’s gonna get that experience unless

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have a tremendous amount of money like billions billions of dollars right and also you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know are the type of person who can tolerate a living like that um Disney is like you don’t have that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much money but if you have a little bit more money to you know if you have enough money to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John throw what seems like a lot towards us we will try to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John give you the you know three degrees of magnitude less severe incarnation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of that like if you’re never gonna go to a hotel where they treat you where they’re like oh okay you know they’re at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your beck and call if you’re never gonna be able to afford that hotel you can still go to Disney where reasonably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nice people will try to be nice to you and like that’s it’s like well this is close as I’m gonna get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and and it’s nice and everything here is nice and everyone here is trying to be nice to me I mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think what’s the unreconcilable differences I had an episode about the sustainability of Disneyland.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It was

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} a long

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time ago. I did some podcast like that is the thing where you see like can can people keep us up? How can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John employees actually be nice for that long a period of time? Can you actually get that many people to be nice to obnoxious

⏹️ ▶️ ^John American tourists for that long? Like is it even is it sustainable? Like surely the cracks will show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I’m sure it is not now like it was in its heyday, but it is still nicer than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you will be treated at most places that are not Disneyland for the same amount of money.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah. And the thing that is with regard to planning, I think John hit the nail on the head that it’s kind of, it depends

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on what kind of person you are. So I am super type a and I want to plan everything down to the second.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And if I want to, I can do it. And. And so I can get fast passes way in advance so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I can figure out what rides I’m going to ride, which day at what time, which if you’re not a plan to book

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey your restaurant six months in advance. Yep. And I can book my restaurant six months in advance, literally six months in advance.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And if you’re not a planner, that sounds like work, and it sounds

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} miserable. And the fact

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the matter is, you don’t have to do those things. If you’re a AAA member, which we have been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for forever, and it’s like 100 bucks a year or something like that, they have travel agents. That’s the only travel agent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ever used. Wait, first of all, they’re still AAA. Second of all, they’re still travel agents? Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey yeah, absolutely. And you can go to a AAA travel agent and say to them, look, I’ve never been to Disney. Where do you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey find

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco them? Behind the record player? I guess maybe you, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ve never had a problem finding a travel agent, but anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Oh my God.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So I’m really being serious though. And you can go to a triple A agent and say, look, I’ve never been, we’ve never

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey been to Disney. This is, these are the two things we want to do. We generally like to take

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it easy and not have like that many booked activities. Can you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just figure out a vague arrangement of things to do for us? And they will make that happen. I mean, hell

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I would do it for you just because I think this stuff is fun. But the point is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} so just like John

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fun. Oh my

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} gosh.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I mean, well, in the whatever it is that you like about Vegas, if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if you and Tiff were to go to Vegas by yourself, so you don’t have the social aspect of your friends

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey being there. Whatever it is you like about that, accepting the gambling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and maybe the booze because booze is less of a priority.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s like that, but not as nice and without the sleaze and the smoke.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s with certainly without the sleaze certainly without the smoke I would debate whether or not it says nice, but you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} having

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey much more humidity. Yeah, that’s true less heat more humidity You Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are probably doing a different kind of Vegas than I would do and so it probably Disney probably would be less nice as compared to the Vegas

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ve done It’s considerably more nice But in any case it’s it’s a similar thing and in you if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you were willing to Pony up the money for a Disney meal plan up front you can eat You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know two or three meals a day and not have to worry about what they cost you don’t have to worry about You know where you go

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because they all take the meal plan basically, so it’s it is a phenomenally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fun time and I Genuinely cannot wait to take Declan there because seeing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it through his eyes. I think would be worth the price of admission Which is tremendous?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, that’s that’s the big thing about it like you would go there and like no matter how much you like it You would it would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be a vacation for Adam which is why you’re playing it based around what age you think he’s most able to enjoy it to its

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fullest. And kids, kids love it. Kids love Disneyland, right? Even if your kid is not indoctrinated in the Disney

⏹️ ▶️ ^John world and doesn’t know all the characters, just everything there is fun for kids of the right age. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you will enjoy the vacation because you will see how much he is enjoying himself, even if you and they will make you enjoy it more.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like I think one of the most fun things we did on our vacation, if you’d asked me before to predict what that might be,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would not have called it the way I did. we had dinner in the big Disney

⏹️ ▶️ ^John castle you know the big one you see in the you know the big Disney castle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know whatever it’s called a great one that’s in like the intro to the movies Cinderella’s castle

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} yeah yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah it’s little you know but the real-life one and it’s a restaurant in there where you could have dinner

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I don’t remember if I talked about this on rectifs or here that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have a giant thing where I complain about the food of Disney at some point

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} no but now I want to know yeah there’s a lot to go to that I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like what I’m getting at is I didn’t enjoy it because of the food. I enjoyed it because it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know it’s first of all eating inside the actual real Disney castle is cool. I grew up my whole life seeing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Disney castle and pictures of it and you know the logo of the beginning of movies and all that stuff like and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Walt Disney and the whole thing like so the Disney castle has some meaning for me maybe it doesn’t for you but it for me it does

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right and I’m eating inside it and that’s cool and second that like many of the places

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where you can book dinners there they have like people playing the Disney characters coming around from table to table

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to you know say hi to your kids and stuff and my son was a little old for it and a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shy my daughter was super into it she likes seeing you know jasmine and bell and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John snow she knew who these characters she’d seen the movies there are people dressed as them and she had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a blast she got to have a meal and got to pick off or pick the different foods that she wanted to have that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sounded fancy to her and the people come around to the table and you know luckily I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one at least one of my kids is not terrified and shy of like characters that come around the table and she had a blast

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I had fun because she had fun and we were in Disney Castle and that was that was a good memory

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that I would not have predicted would have been as much as we went there with no kids probably not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but we after he put it this way after we came back from the vacation my wife and I were talking about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe we would go on a vacation without the kids there because in

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} some respects you have fun

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah fun with the kids but in other respects you realize you’re limited to what you can do because kids have you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they they run down and eventually you know that adults are able to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do things that may bore the kids or sustain like but you know every every night we were

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there we were like in bed by the time fireworks off which by the way we saw fireworks outside our balcony literally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John every single night and it never got old and they weren’t our fireworks they were actually distant fireworks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever but but anyway if you’re there and as adult you can go out at night and see the firework you stole

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco someone else’s fireworks? Is that like pirating the fireworks?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Wow, there’s plenty of it’s just infringement because the fireworks still exist over there even though we see them. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} We’re not actually taking them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Anyway, we had a good time and we were in thinking about like we should come back ourselves because we could have we could have even more fun

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with just us without having to worry about like keeping the kids happy and they’re making Star Wars land

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so maybe we will go back for that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So wait, tell me about what made the food so crappy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We don’t have time for that. We don’t have time. I don’t want to… you can leave it list if you want to see it but like

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} oh i

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey want to hear about this the accidental food podcast returns yeah not just be every

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey after show i’m ready my body is ready so we’ll just ditch atp entirely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and turn it into the into afp

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} which is like picky food podcast pf picky eaters podcast but if it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey AFP. It’s the Apple File System Podcast and Accidental Food Podcast.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Although PepTalk is a good name for the podcast if it’s a picky eater podcast.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We get Pepto-Bismol to sponsor. The Pep Boys. It’ll all work

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey perfect.