250: We're Doing a Show
30 Nov 2017Our 250th Episode Spectacular!
Episode Description:
- Keyboard imprints on laptop screens
- Marco is no longer case-liss
- Follow-up: Fingerprint gloves 1 2
- Thanksgiving follow-up: What about the Nintendo Switch?
#askatp- Thoughts on Super Mario Odyssey (via Starsasumi)
- Robotic vacuum cleaners (via Maroš Žofčin)
- Marco's editing approach (via Erik Neu)
- High Sierra "root" security issue
- Post-show:
Sponsored by:
Chapters
- Intro
- Keyboard imprints on screens
- iPhone X cases
- Follow-up: Touch ID gloves
- 250th Episode Spectacular!
- Sponsor: Away (code ATP)
- John loves laptops
- Our Nintendo Switch review
- Sponsor: Eero (code ATP)
- #askatp: Super Mario Odyssey
- #askatp: Robotic vacuums
- #askatp: How much gets cut?
- High Sierra “root” bug
- Sponsor: Hover
- macOS annual releases
- State of Apple bugginess
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Casey on Cars
Intro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So John, I’m curious, do you realize how much of a Boston accent
⏹️ ▶️ John you have? I do not have a Boston accent. You don’t even know what a Boston accent is. You’ve watched too many
⏹️ ▶️ John of the stupid, what’s his name, Matt Damon’s friend.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know what a Boston accent is, and I know you don’t have a standard one, but you do have some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of one. And I don’t think you know this. I don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know during this podcast I misspoke and said some word that sounded like it has a Boston accent because
⏹️ ▶️ John I like bailed in the middle of a word and changed to a different thing and it ended up coming out I recognize that I did
⏹️ ▶️ John that in this episode yeah that was not me doing a Boston accent that was me totally misspeaking
⏹️ ▶️ John and like trying to rope it back in the middle of a word in this weird sound coming
⏹️ ▶️ John I do not say that word that way I heard myself do it too but I have a New York accent for as far as I have
⏹️ ▶️ John any accent that’s why people complain about how I say Mario that’s not a Boston thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look you live there you can’t you can’t deny that it’s going to have an effect on you
⏹️ ▶️ John no it doesn’t I’m not one of those people. I’m not one of those people who picks up the accents from my surrounding. All my kids
⏹️ ▶️ John speak differently than me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don’t pick it up like a hundred percent, but like you definitely have some slight Boston
⏹️ ▶️ Marco influence in your speech. I don’t think I
⏹️ ▶️ John amount. You’re so wrong. Zero amount. Ha ha ha
⏹️ ▶️ John ha ha. I’m having some sort of weird access issue for the last two days trying to get to Daring Fireball. Like, it’s not a DNS
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, because I think it’s going past the DNS stage, but it’s just taking forever to load.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I started to load a page before I picked up your call, it’s still loading, the progress bar, it still has a white
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it possible that it’s because your computer is slower than, like, my phone from last year? That’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I can’t load a demanding site during Fireball with all its widgets
⏹️ ▶️ John and gigas. Widgets and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey old are you? What is a gigas? How old are you?
⏹️ ▶️ John What is a gigaw? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the hell do you spell that?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m very sure. G-E-E-G-A-W.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it was officially removed from the dictionary 30 years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A showy thing, especially one that is useless or worthless. And also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s usually G-E-W-G-A-W. A goo-gaw.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That’s what I said. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought you said gee-gaw.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you’re right. I did. All right. Well, then maybe gee-gaw isn’t a word.
⏹️ ▶️ John what is it an alternate spelling?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think so because I looked up Giga and ended up with Google. Yeah. Oh, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I guess it’s just an autocorrect thing because it’s usually Google’s apparently it’s usually plural.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow, this is already taking a turn for the unexpected.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s important to get things like this, right? Oh, man, Webster has it. It’s a less common variant of Google.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want to do this first time a follow up because I really don’t want to hear any more whining about the new MacBook Pros. Gentlemen,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll be quick. It’s a quickie. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quickie. Okay. It’s yeah, I’m sure that once you bring up a complaint about the MacBook Pro, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey totally going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John a three second endeavor.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanted to put the news quick in there. I promise.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guarantee that it won’t be great. I’m already punchy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You have a holiday party? No, I’m not. I should be. That’s the problem, especially given this first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey item of follow up. I need a holiday party.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Look, until the laptops are fixed, we’re going to keep talking about them. Hey, you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They’re not all they’re not all bad anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 60% of them don’t have keyboard failures apparently are fine yeah but they were all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know that reference John don’t care, I’m already punchy, so let’s just get it out of the way.
Keyboard imprints on screens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re starting with follow-up ladies and gentlemen and apparently John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey his complaint about a 2016 or 17 MacBook Pro will be and I’m quoting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Very quick. I guarantee it. So look at the timer. Look at the elapsed time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s go buckle up kids What’s going on John?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got one of these at work. Remember so I use it every day. So I have occasion to Have complaints. Anyway, I noticed
⏹️ ▶️ John this today I very rarely you do anything with my laptop or work except keep it closed and plug it in to
⏹️ ▶️ John other devices But I was in a lot of meetings today and I had the laptop open and the lighting was just right
⏹️ ▶️ John and it occurred to me that still in 2017 Apple is making keyboards where
⏹️ ▶️ John the keys touch the screen when you close it and that’s been true Years and years and years and years
⏹️ ▶️ John has it ever not been true as Apple ever made a keyboard where the keys don’t touch the Screen well, guess what finger grease
⏹️ ▶️ John is on the keys and now finger grease is on my keyboard in the shape I’m my screen in the shape of my keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John In the long list of things that we want Apple to correct, I believe that it is possible for Apple to make a computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop computer, when you close it, the grease from your fingers on the keys does not come off onto the screen and you don’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John a greasy outline of all the keys on the keyboard on your screen. I believe that’s possible. We have very low profile keys.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re all about thinness. That’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think they did. I don’t know if they still do. On my original
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PowerBook G4, the aluminum PowerBook G4, that was my first Mac, I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heard about this problem. And back then, when you had the matte screen, it was a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easier for a permanent imprint to develop because you couldn’t really wipe off the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coating very much to clean it. And I had heard about this, and so I decided as a policy that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would carry the laptop in the backpack such that the screen lid was not facing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my back. It was facing the other way. Carrying it this way every day to and from work and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never had that problem. that computer never developed the imprint
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the keyboard on the screen. And my theory was that in a perfect layout of the laptop, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a desk, the screen and keyboard don’t actually touch. But if there’s any flex
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s squeezing the laptop a little bit from, from the sides, like in a bag, any flex
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is enough to push the screen against the keyboard inside there, because it’s such a tiny little gap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I imagine over time that gap has only gotten smaller. So, it’s possible that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while sitting on a desk, it doesn’t press against it, but that if you have it in a bag or in a certain kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stand that stands it up or anything that would possibly apply pressure to the outside of it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like books next to it in a bag, that might compress it just enough to make that contact happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m sure that’s what’s happening, but I’m saying, you know, we got the butterfly keyboard how many years ago, Casey? We can make a keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John that like collapses into the case and gets out of flex distance? I don’t know. It’s an area of potential improvement
⏹️ ▶️ John not just for this laptop, but you know we do have very low profile keys I figure like just that
⏹️ ▶️ John gap should be getting bigger and not smaller because nobody likes greasy keys on their screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, no you’re asking them to make even lower profile keys Please for the love of God do not solve this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem in this way
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole just move the whole keyboard down You can make high keys, but then have them sink into the keyboard magic.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know no one’s used laptops. They’re bad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They’re not bad. Oh my God. The butterfly keyboard was 1995. I’ll put links in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually noticed it was either today or yesterday that on my beloved MacBook Adorable, which I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey change in any way. I actually would, but don’t tell them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Anyway, I noticed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that on that machine, I generally hold it, I don’t know, by maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the hinge or I don’t even remember and it’s not sitting next to me so I can’t like demonstrate to myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I was holding it in such a way that I felt like it was giving a little bit and I think I was putting a little bit of pressure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey toward the center of the screen, which is not something I normally do. I don’t like to mess with the LCD,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it just so happened that I gripped it in such a way that I noticed that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I put pressure on the center of the LCD, roughly where the Apple logo is, while
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s closed, I can feel it give enough to come into contact with the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part of the case. So it’s just like you’re describing, John, where clearly the screen is now impacting the keys.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t recall ever having a laptop that did that, and I’m probably wrong, and I bet all of them do it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was a very uncomfortable, very unnerving feeling that I did not like. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happened to me in the last 24 hours. I will also note, to go back a step to Marco’s strategies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to avoid keyboard grease, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knew for a long time, several super nerds that used to keep, I don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think they still come in the, in the Mac books or MacBook pros anymore, but it used to be when you bought an Apple laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know where this is going, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used to have this sheet of like not foam, but like some sort of foam, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey material that would be between the display and the keyboard. And I knew a lot of people that would carry that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with them and then put it in their device before they close the lid in order to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prevent any sort of scraping against the screen. And I always thought that was crazy until one day I noticed an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey outline of a keyboard on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco my screen and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, okay, that’s a little bit weird, but maybe not so crazy after all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, and people still do that. And there were even, there were third party like cloths that would fit it perfectly also that people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would do. That was a pretty widespread thing for a while. And I think it is still done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by about the same number of people that ever did it. But to me, that always felt too fit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like John having his phone in a pouch that has to take it out of this pouch before he uses it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a step too far for me. And with a laptop, that’s like, you know, having a piece of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cloth that I stick between the laptop keyboard and lip when I close it and then have to open it up and take it off every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time, that’s too fiddly for me. I would rather have the imprint of the keyboard than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to do that every single time.
⏹️ ▶️ John All I hear is that you’re too jealous of my incredibly clean phone, but this brings
⏹️ ▶️ John actual solution to this problem and the grand tradition of steganography. If they
⏹️ ▶️ John just made their screens touchscreens then the giant amount of finger grease randomly placed
⏹️ ▶️ John all over the screen would mask the shape of the keyboard which would still be there hidden in the information but you wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially if they coded it with whatever is coding the 10.5 inch iPad Pro screen which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so like this is the most fingerprint II iOS device I think I’ve ever had I heard they had to change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the coding for the Apple pencil like to make that work well and not wear it weirdly but whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever is different the 9.7 didn’t seem this bad the 10.5 iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it just is a constant wall of fingerprints it is hideous I wish I knew
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any way to prevent that besides using gloves or using one of John’s pouches
⏹️ ▶️ John stop touching your screen. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco use mind control or keyboard shortcuts.
iPhone X cases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, no speaking speaking of phone cases. I do have some follow-up. You are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still Casey lists, but I am no longer caseless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, yeah, I so as as winter is setting in here on the east coast in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these places that have winter unlike you Casey cold dry hands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That I’m getting on some at some of these days Made me feel a lot less secure about carrying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone 10 caseless First, I try there’s a there’s a vendor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I will put in the show notes whose name I have forgotten again. I keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kept reading this name that it’s basically I think it’s this I think it’s one guy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Brooklyn who laser cuts leather stick-on backings like from real pieces
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of leather. They’re really nice and they’re only 25 bucks, so like it’s not it’s not like a crazy crazy thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and I have one on my iPhone 4 and I moved it to the iPhone 4s when I got that because having like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a flat piece of leather on the back of the phone only. It does not cover the sides, and it has a cutout for the camera,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s it. But it’s just like leather with a hole for the camera, no logos,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just blank leather, and it’s high quality leather, so it feels really soft and nice. Having that on the back of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone 4 with the glass back felt awesome. It was fantastic, I was so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco glad it happened. I figured, let me try that again for the iPhone X.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I used it for a few days, and it does indeed feel good most of the time, but the iPhone X, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t have straight sides, and the 4 also had a little tiny rubber gasket lip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that ran around the glass on the back, so it kinda provided a little wall to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep the border of whatever stick-on thing you had on the back there clean and contained.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The new phones don’t have that. They’re so curvy and rounded on the sides that any kind of stick-on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that only covers the back, if it has any thickness at all, Like if it’s more than just like a vinyl
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sticker kind of thing, if it has any thickness at all, it kind of has to create its own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edge. And that edge kept getting like peeled up as I would just handle the phone. Like it just, clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not really made for this anymore. And so, as much as I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the feel of that, I decided like I need something else that provides grip. Went
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the Apple store and felt all the cases. And I actually like, they, props
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the Apple store, it used to be impossible to try out a case in the apple store. Then the stores
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had these like some sort of have like these tables in the middle somewhere where they would have like a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco box or rack full of cases that you could try on like with an employee’s help and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now they just have like the case like they have an example case on the little post that the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cases are like that the boxes for the cases are hanging on and you can just pick it up and stick it on the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you have in your pocket. You can even put it in your pocket, nobody arrest you, and then you can go put it back and decide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether to buy it or not. And so you can actually try out all the cases on your phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your hand, and in your pocket to see how they all feel, which is really nice. I got to give him credit for that. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tried the silicone case because that provides the best grip of all the cases,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but when it goes in and out of a pocket, I have a serious problem with the amount of friction that it has there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I may eventually go to that anyway, but I’m hoping I don’t have to. I tried the black leather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case, first I tried the red leather case. I tried like colors and everything. The colors seemed way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too aggressive to me because they come up around the edge. And so you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just seeing the color on the back of your phone, you’re seeing the color framing everything on your phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the time. And that to me, it just looked, maybe it was because I had just done it for the first time, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looked a little garish. I didn’t want like this bright red, you know, three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quarters of a rectangle around my content all the time. So I went with just the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple black leather case, the same one I had used for the 6 and 6S. It’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not incredibly happy with it, I gotta say, just because it still has the same problem of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco collects dust around the rim between it and the phone on the front. It does cover up a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what makes this phone attractive, like case design-wise. It does smooth out the camera bump
⏹️ ▶️ Marco completely, which is very nice, because the iPhone X has a very prominent camera bump, even more so than the previous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phones, and it really stands up far off a desk and makes it hard to lie flat. So the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Leathercase does fix that, but ultimately, the one thing I’m kinda dissatisfied with is just that it makes the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot bigger in the hand. And I know, Casey, you didn’t, did you ever use yours caseless?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have very, very, very, very briefly, but I am way too scared,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially since I didn’t pony up for AppleCare this time, I am way too scared to do it with any sort of regularity.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so it is almost exclusively lived in the weather case, in the leather case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I do quite like the leather case. I’ve used leather cases on and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off for most of my history with iPhones. I feel like this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one, I am particularly, I don’t know if I’m looking, what word I’m looking for, frustrated,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey annoyed, displeased, but one of those negative adjectives, because I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m getting way more pocket lint around the sides than I’ve ever had before. That’s probably me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being completely bananas, but it just seems that way. And I think because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the phone is a little bit thicker to begin with than the 7, which in and of itself, fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But then add to your point, the leather case on top of that, which is not thin. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by comparison to the 7, which I’ve been handling, you know, once or twice a week for various
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reasons, trying to get like old data off my phone or whatever, it feels way thicker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than my 7 does. And if you recall my 7, I did not use a case on for the first time in forever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I did get AppleCare and ended up breaking the screen and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AppleCare or not, this one I just don’t trust myself because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I will break it without question. So that is many words to say, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the leather case, I have often used the leather case and I feel like it’s the best option
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve seen, but I don’t really love it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I was thinking about trying out like one of those dbrand skins that MKBHD likes a lot. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those on my, I tried one of those on my 6 and my 6 Plus back when I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experimenting with those. And they were decent, they were especially good values because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re really cheap. It was like 12 bucks for the whole phone or something like that. It’s a very good price, very good value.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I don’t think they look particularly good. I think they look a little bit cheesy and tacky. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the main problem I had it just didn’t provide that much more grip than just the bare phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think what I’m probably going to do is use the leather case on and off like when it’s cold and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my hands are all dry and slippery, but then most of the time when I don’t need it for that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason just use it bare again because it’s so much more pleasant using it without a case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It definitely is. And remind me, you do or do not have AppleCare on that? I do not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you are a brave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco soul. No, I mean and look, I admit it’s a risk, but it’s also $200
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plus the fee to replace it if I drop it, plus there’s a limit on how many times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can drop it. And it’s like, okay, let me see if I ever actually drop it. And if I start dropping it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much that I think an extra $200 a year is a good deal, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will change my policy. But again, right now, like because I’ve never dropped and broken a phone so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far, it’s not a good policy for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I mean, really the only clear obvious answer is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to just put it in a little baggie every time you every time you’re done using it. I mean, why else? Why would you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do anything else? It’s the only logical
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey screen clean.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh my God. Don’t have to worry about scratching on stuff in my pockets. It’s only when I’m outside the house.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Not when I’m in the house. See,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me, like the screen would even, or the little pouch that John has to drop his phone in and out of, that to me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would increase the risk of dropping it. because that’s one more thing that you have to put it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into. And what if you slightly miss the edge of the pouch and it falls off?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, that could happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve never dropped my phone, but if you are prone to dropping, this probably increases your chances of dropping.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one more opportunity to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco miss something. Right. And on the way out, too. It’s like, here’s one more thing you have to take the phone out of. Maybe if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you reach into your pocket, you pull it out and maybe you forget that it’s in there and it accidentally slips out the bottom of the pouch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s so many Conditions where I think that’s actually increasing your risk of damage
⏹️ ▶️ John It probably is but like I said, it hasn’t happened to me
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey All of my phone drops
⏹️ ▶️ John are when I’m clumsily trying to get it off of like my nightstand It’s not in a pouch and totally
⏹️ ▶️ John just because I’m not awake or it’s dark or I’m being careless That’s the main place. My phone falls
⏹️ ▶️ John is off of my nightstand onto the rug or hardwood floor next to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh Yeah All right, so we were ostensibly doing follow-up at some point,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? We got derailed with Marco’s case, Woz.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we’re always ostensibly doing follow-up. My
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pro follow-up was quick.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, I think you’re right. Are we ever really not in follow-up?
Follow-up: Touch ID gloves
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my word. All right, so who added this glove thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John I did, because remember we talked about the Kickstarter for those like Touch ID fingerprint
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey sticker things you can stick on your gloves?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m like, who knows if that’s even a thing? Well, we got a report that it actually is a thing, of course,
⏹️ ▶️ John in Japan. You can buy them for $7. What do you mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course, in Japan? What’s that supposed to
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the old 80s or 90s stereotype that Japan is living like 20 years in our future and everything is awesome
⏹️ ▶️ John there, which is not actually true, but it’s the old saw from back when I was a kid when Japan
⏹️ ▶️ John was gonna take over the world because they could make better cars than us. All right, good save. Still can.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco True. Not California.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, God, you’re the worst.
250th Episode Spectacular!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh wait, is this episode 250? Yeah, it is. Yay! Oh, this is our 250th
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Spectacular.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. What are we doing? Happy whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John is it. We’re doing a show. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my god, this is the most ATP moment of any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP moment. We’re lucky we remembered it like not too far into the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John I totally, I was not pretending not to remember it. You did mention it like a week or two ago, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I would not have thought to, I mean, Marco should think of is he sees the episode numbers when he does like
⏹️ ▶️ John the like writes out the files and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well and i thought about it earlier this evening when i recorded the ads but because i put them in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco folder called atp 250.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s this week and then i promptly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey and she forgot tv
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John loves laptops
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron Lenard writes, I agree with most of your points, oh God, on the 2016 MacBook Pro 15 inch, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll make one point of exception. I would not want to live without Touch ID that was introduced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this model. I’m a consultant and have to use one password constantly, oh I remember those days, throughout the day to access client
⏹️ ▶️ Casey systems. I have some RSI issues from time to time in typing and using a fingerprint versus constantly typing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have my very long and complex master password is life changing to my workflow and efficiency. The one feature
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offset, this one feature offsets much of the criticism that I share regarding the other issues.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that makes sense. I’ve never used a computer with touch ID. Um, if you recall the most modern
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laptop I have is my MacBook adorable. The one I use for work is that piece of garbage that some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like popular Apple blogger recommended recently. That’s like 13 years old. Oh, it was Marco. That’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, so anyway, so I have a 2015, uh, I think it’s 2015 MacBook Pro. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only ever used touch bars for like 30 seconds at a time in the Apple store. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know what this amazing future is where you can use Touch ID, but it sounds pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you know what sounds even better? Face ID. I want that in my
⏹️ ▶️ John life. That’s exactly why I put this in here. It’s like, yes, Touch ID is great, but really, what you really want
⏹️ ▶️ John is Face ID. Because then you don’t even have to put your finger up and your face is always right there in view of the camera
⏹️ ▶️ John and touch Id and laptops will be so much better our face id and laptops will be so much better than touch id
⏹️ ▶️ John And as someone who has touch id You know, obviously I don’t use it because it’s in clamshell most of the time But even when it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not in clamshell like when i’m carrying it around for meetings and have to unlock it because you know I like all work laptops. It locks
⏹️ ▶️ John instantly if you like glance away from it for two seconds um It is and I don’t know if this
⏹️ ▶️ John is the fault of touch id. I don’t think this is the fault of touch id I think it’s the fault of all the evil software that enterprises make you
⏹️ ▶️ John put on your computer to make them crappier But god you open that thing up and I
⏹️ ▶️ John put my finger on that touchpad And it’s like a long time before that computer does anything why probably has something
⏹️ ▶️ John to do with Active Directory or Wi-Fi certificates or? God knows what it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John doing, but all I know is it’s not reading my fingerprint and unlocking the computer Same thing when
⏹️ ▶️ John I disconnected and connected from my really awesome some super duper Thunderbolt dock thingy that lets me have one
⏹️ ▶️ John cable that plugs in to power this whole thing of peripherals. That’s great. Part that’s not great
⏹️ ▶️ John is I plug or unplug that cable. I might as well go for a drink while my computer does
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey something. I don’t know what it’s doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes I get a beach ball. Sometimes I don’t get a beach ball. Sometimes it remembers my clicks and replays them a minute
⏹️ ▶️ John later. Sometimes it doesn’t remember my clicks and replay them later. It just like you’re it just like
⏹️ ▶️ John it says to me, you’re not going to use me for a while because I’m doing something and I maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s wrong for me to always blame Active Directory. But I do pretty much always blame Active Directory because I don’t I was
⏹️ ▶️ John not formerly on the Active Directory network with my old computer and now I am and everything is worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One thing I found which probably is not going to be helping your issues here, unfortunately, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I first got my wonderful but used 2015, it would occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fail to wake up from sleep and I thought this was a High Sierra bug. But it turns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out that it’s just a 15-inch MacBook Pro 2015 bug that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seemed to exist before High Sierra and it has to do apparently with PowerNap. If you disable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PowerNap, it completely stops. This problem just goes away completely. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also noticed sometimes that it would seem to be running and warm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while in my bag charging. So very obviously like a power and app related problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I also as part of the attempts to diagnose this problem disabled hibernation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because what every MacBook Pro does since the 2012 model is the 2012 Retina model,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not the 2012 non-Retina. Because back then when they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco introduced a radical new design, they also updated the previous design with the new components.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, since 2012, Retina MacBook Pro and forward, one of the reasons why they now get such
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better standby battery life is that after a few hours of not being woken up, if they’re not plugged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in, they go into full hibernation, which PCs have been familiar with for a long time, which basically means they write the contents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of RAM to a file on disk and fully turn off. Then when you boot it up, it has to like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of wake up from that deep hibernation by reading that hyper file back into RAM, and that’s why it takes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit longer. You might see a little bit different progress bar boots up. This is slow and crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you are leaving your computer unplugged from battery for two weeks it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very helpful but if you plug it in like every day and you’re just leaving it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco closed for a few hours then this is very annoying and so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disabled that and by the way once you disable it you can also delete the hibernation file which can get you back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in disk space the amount of RAM you have which is nice look up on every Mac forum since 2012 on how to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this since I disabled both power nap for the weird bugs and the hibernation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with whatever like the pseudo PM set command is to do it it wakes up way faster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from sleep like because what you’re describing John that happens that’s happened for to every MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for quite a while I did notice during in my time using the touch bar versions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was always way worse on the touch bars so whatever it’s doing waking up from sleep or hibernation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever it is whatever it is, something seems to be extra long or delayed or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blocking or waiting for something on touch bar models. That was worse when they first came out. Subsequent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software improvements have dropped that delay somewhat, but they still do it. Are you are you on high Sierra yet?
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re just gonna let subsequent fly by. Okay, I guess it’s only bezels.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Subsequent whatever. Yeah, I know.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a Yeah, no, I don’t think I don’t think it’s hibernation or power nap. Although I like I routinely disable those as well
⏹️ ▶️ John for usually for the for disk space reasons. Like I’ve been doing that ever since, ever since the RAM got so big that it started
⏹️ ▶️ John to eat a chunk of it. But I come to think about it, maybe I didn’t do that on my work Mac, but I’m sure it’s not hibernating. Like this is me,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I close it and then 30 seconds later I open it. Like it hasn’t gone into hibernation at that point, right? And it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen is inert when it’s coming out of hibernation. Some things work and sometimes I can click and bring an application to the
⏹️ ▶️ John front, like before the beach ball appears, but then eventually it stops responding. Power nap I haven’t looked into. Because again,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, power nap should only happen like, oh, your computer’s been asleep for a while. it’s gonna check email or some crap or do local time
⏹️ ▶️ John machine snapshots and I haven’t disabled that and I’m sure my computer is doing that
⏹️ ▶️ John if it would ever go to sleep I think I have it set never to sleep because it’s plugged in a battery power but maybe there’s some other weird
⏹️ ▶️ John interaction where if powered app is enabled at all it does some weird thing you just wake it up so I’ll try both those things to get back to you
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t like having to do this voodoo I like to just open the computer up and I mean the screen turns
⏹️ ▶️ John on immediately and it seems you know it seems like it’s ready to go in terms of of like
⏹️ ▶️ John the mouse cursor moves, like it just, I don’t know, it’s like golf is a good walk spoiled,
⏹️ ▶️ John like laptops are a good computer spoiled. Like just
⏹️ ▶️ John they work fine, you walk up to them, you wiggle the mouse, you hit the keyboard, like you’re there, you just go and
⏹️ ▶️ John the computer’s like, yes, I’m here, use me now, and the laptop’s like, I don’t know, I don’t know about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s what makes Touch ID worse, is because your finger’s there, and it’s like, can I lift my finger? When should I put my finger down? Should
⏹️ ▶️ John I wait for the little animation on the touch bar saying touch ID here, has it already authenticated me and I’m just waiting, that’s often
⏹️ ▶️ John the case. Sometimes it’s already authenticated. I give up, I take my finger off and I’m like, come on computer, what are you doing? And then it unlocks,
⏹️ ▶️ John like based on a finger that was laid on there like 15 seconds ago. I don’t like laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re right. When I am in a car, in the passenger seat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I need to do a little bit of work, I like bringing my iMac and my inverter.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing to apologize for. Sorry, I blew it. God, I’m getting too old.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When I’m on an airplane, you know what the best way to use a computer on an airplane is? 27-inch iMac. Hell, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s where I like to use my desktops.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What I’m learning over time as I get old and more like John is that I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rather just not use a computer in a car and just wait until I get back to my 27-inch iMac. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hope somebody out there is face-palmed. I literally just face-palmed. I hope somebody else
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out there is face palming as bad as I am because you guys man the combined
⏹️ ▶️ Casey age of the two you is approximately 134 years old. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, actually the real answer. I mean the thing that both Marco I think everyone agree on iOS devices like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t have problems on iOS devices. Imagine if you took out your iOS device like your iPad and hit the power switch and had to
⏹️ ▶️ John wait the amount of time I have to wait to use my laptop. It would be like is this thing broken right instantly like face
⏹️ ▶️ John ID touch ID. It’s like ready to go instantly immediately. of this whole like,
⏹️ ▶️ John let me wake up and do whatever I’m doing and put a beach ball, there’s no place to put a beach player. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if an iOS device does that it seems broken. And, you know, it made more
⏹️ ▶️ John sense like well iOS devices, you can only run one application at a time and they’re highly optimized. And but at this point, iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John devices have faster CPUs than Macs are doing are multitasking or doing they’re still RAM starved, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re, they’re full fledged machines. And it’s just something, something in the
⏹️ ▶️ John remember when there was an effort a while back to this was a public marketing effort
⏹️ ▶️ John or just something that people would say behind closed doors or whatever that trying to make the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John experience like the iOS experience like when you just open it up and it’s ready to go. Actually, that was on stage wasn’t it didn’t Steve Jobs
⏹️ ▶️ John say that at one point like the MacBook Air is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was based it was a it was a story that had gotten out of Apple that that apparently Steve there was a famous meeting where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Steve walked in and dropped a MacBook Air on the table and had like an iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and turn the iPad on from sleep and just comes on and he’s with the MacBook Air like, why can’t this do that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that. There you go. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John So who knows if it was real or not. But anyway, I endorse that idea that iOS devices
⏹️ ▶️ John feel so much better because there’s so much crap that is just unacceptable on an iOS device. And
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac, we’re still suffering under the burden of, you know, this older behavior that I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop users just live with and just think it’s the price of using a laptop and I don’t like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, you know, the job that a laptop has to do is way more complicated. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of that like waking up from sleep delay is stuff like checking USB peripherals and you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like that that iPads don’t have to worry about. But a lot of it is just legacy stuff they could get rid of if they really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried. But you know the Mac is not in a position where it’s getting a lot of effort for the most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought that Macs hibernated every time they went to sleep. just kept the memory powered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on until that until the battery had dropped like quite a bit or was at a dangerous level or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like that. I thought they always wrote the contents of RAM to disk every single time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I hope that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not true. Again, I routinely disable it on the laptops that are in my house just to save the disk
⏹️ ▶️ John space. But if that’s also a benefit, I’ll look into it. I’ll I’ll make sure it’s off on my work one and see how it goes.
Our Nintendo Switch review
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Last bit of follow-up Dan Lear writes in this is with regard to our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thanksgiving list from last episode Nobody’s thankful for the switch I’m surprised the switch didn’t make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyone’s list despite how much time you’ve talked about Zelda Mario Kart stardew valley and playing with friends and family, etc
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me it was Both an omission by accident and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somewhat deliberately. I still do use my switch from time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John to time. I still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, so So some I think John put this in the show notes and he cut the key piece that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which was I believe Dan had said basically is this because it was a fad or because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you just don’t or you just didn’t think of it. And for me it’s kind of both right like I didn’t think of it at the time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but even if I had I don’t know that I would have said it because I don’t use my switch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey near as much as I did when I first got it and I do still like it and I’m glad I spent the money on it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s very rare I find myself picking that up in the evenings but I’ve also been just super, super busy for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quite a long time now. But you know, when my, my family gets together, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, really Aaron’s family, a couple of my in-laws have, have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey switches. And so we’ve been, you know, generally speaking, bringing them with us when we have a family function,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we’ll play like a couple rounds of Mario Kart or something like that. So I am thankful for it. I definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it. But that is what, how, what is the top four etiquette? That’s my number five or tied for for number four or is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this my like my seventh place tie for number one? I
⏹️ ▶️ John wonder your 17 honorable mentions. That’s what it is. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of my 17 honorable mentions. That’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But what about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the two of you guys?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, for me, I should have put the Switch on my list and I simply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forgot about it while making that list, which is funny because I played it like an hour before and played
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it again the next day. So yeah, the Switch has been fantastic for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, as the audience knows, I am not much of a gamer at all, most of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time. I usually get into like one game a year, maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll be into it for like a week or two, and then I’ll stop, and then that’ll be it. And because Tiff, my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wife, is a gamer, we usually have all or some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the current generation game consoles in the house, ready to go. And I just, I hardly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever touch them, because I just don’t care that much. The Switch has changed that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s really good. And this isn’t about a console, this is about the games. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nintendo was in such a bad place with the Wii U, they were in such a rush to get this out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they didn’t have time to mess it up with getting too far up their own butts about what they were gonna do about some gimmicky hardware thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They just made really great games for a really convenient system. And there’s no other gimmicks about it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s great. It’s just so, so great. And in particular, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Tiff and Adam really enjoyed Zelda together. I really enjoyed Mario
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Kart and Sonic Mania. We all have been really enjoying Stardew Valley.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s so many more games. Like, I’ve bought games on it that I haven’t even run yet just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I heard they were so great. I bought them thinking I’d play them and I haven’t even had time because I’ve been too busy playing all the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great games. Like, there’s a surplus of amazing games for it that we haven’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had a chance to play all of yet. that’s how many great games there are. And so to have all this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a mid-priced system that’s very practical to have in your life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it can be both portable and stationary, although honestly I don’t like the portable version of it because the screen’s too small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the controllers are too skinny and they give my- You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have problems with the portable thing, you don’t say?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh, yeah, and the input device, surprisingly. But-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, the jokes write themselves,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also, I honestly, I do wish it had an HDMI port.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Good grief. I need to start a holiday party.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, just playing it as a home console for me, like it’s just great. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such a great system with such great games. The Switch, I am happier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the Switch than any video game or video game system at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the last decade. Did you like your Sega consoles more? Yeah, but those were more than,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my one Sega console, my Genesis. But that was a long time ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the Genesis was current, which was in like 1993. Yeah, totally.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, I’m not trying to mess with you. I’m saying, you know, to the best that you can remember how you felt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you were 11, do you feel like the Genesis provided you more joy than the Switch does? And obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s a tough question because you’re a very different person now, But if you had to choose only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one, you know, in their current time, so I’m not asking you to choose the Genesis over the Switch today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, what do you think you would do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I need another year with the Switch to really know. It’s a little too early. So far,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they’re probably pretty close to each other in that way. Like, it’s just so damn good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And honestly, like, I’ve had an Xbox, like the first one, I was gonna say an Xbox One, but that’s something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else now. So I had the first Xbox, which I got pre modded with a mod chip, so I could like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rip games onto the hard drive and install XBMC, which is now plex basically stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. That’s kind of where it all started and so like you know. So I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I had a we the first we not the stupid you sorry john.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had the PS three and four and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a three sixty and I had a lot of fun with some of of those, but none of them were as good as the Switch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just game library wise. So I’m very much enjoying this, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody who used to have fun with games, but has maybe fallen out of it like I did,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give the Switch a try, it’s really fun. John?
⏹️ ▶️ John I totally forgot about the Switch, but if I had remembered it, I wouldn’t have listed the Switch, for actually for a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of the same reasons Marco mentioned, because I never used it in portable mode if I can help it, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John ergonomically doesn’t fit me ergonomically. I never take the little joy cons off of
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I just leave it on there. I only use the pro controller with it only hook it up to the TV. And
⏹️ ▶️ John in that, you know, in that way as a console, I don’t think it’s like it’s not it’s not my favorite.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t have listed it as a thing that I’m thankful for, because I think the the pro controller is not as good
⏹️ ▶️ John as the GameCube controller, or maybe not even as good as the Wii U pro controller.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the fact that it’s this weird portable thing that I have to put into a dock and hook up to my TV and it just
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t, you know, it’s compromised by the fact that it needs to be portable. I wish it was more powerful, blah, blah, blah, all my
⏹️ ▶️ John complaints, typical complaints about Nintendo console. So if I listen to something, what I would listen is the games. And specifically,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would listen to Zelda, which for me is head and shoulders like the other games are great. Like I love them. But Zelda is
⏹️ ▶️ John the most important Nintendo franchise for me. And this was a very significant Zelda game, breaking
⏹️ ▶️ John with the past in lots of very interesting ways. I just thought it was an amazing game. Probably still
⏹️ ▶️ John not my favorite Zelda. A lot of people ask me that. You know, as much as I love it and, you know, it does so many
⏹️ ▶️ John things so much better than every other Zelda has ever done them. It falls down in a couple areas, but that’s what I would have listed.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would have listed Breath of the Wild as the thing that I should have been thankful for. I just, it just slipped my mind.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s funny to me that you guys are lamenting the portability
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it because, holy smokes, almost all of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fun I’ve had with the Switch is because I’ve been in some sort of group setting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Some of the most fun times I’ve had with the Switch has been the handful of times that we played Mario Kart together at work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’d all gather around a few tables or something and sit there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and play Mario Kart against each other. Like you know, all the great parts about a LAN party
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back in the day where you can shout and yell at your friends and you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey call them terrible names and whatnot because they’re sitting right next to you. And you can do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of that without having to, and here I’m telling you how old I am, without having to lug like a 50 pound
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John friend’s house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m not trying to say you’re wrong. I’m really honestly not. saying I’m surprised
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you guys don’t really favor the portability at all,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because that is, like I said to you about my family and certainly at work from time to time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and even at WWDC, I organized on Beacon, I think it was, I organized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little get-together for playing Mario Kart. And to me, those are such fun
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times, and they really define the Switch to me in a way that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no other Console I’ve had has really worked and you know, everyone’s allowed their own experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m just super surprised
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean I would love the portability to be to work out better and more often for me and I occasionally will like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll take it to Like, you know if I know I’m gonna be like sitting in a doctor’s office waiting room for a little while like I’ll take it sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but It’s just like using the joy cons is just very uncomfortable for me They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re clearly made for much smaller hands It’s probably made for like children and teenagers to be able to comfortably use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I just I can’t like it hurts my hands to use it for more than a few minutes and I also like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I’m also accustomed to playing on a giant nice OLED TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with like you know speakers and everything sitting on the couch with the pro controller the portable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience is like the screen is noticeably crappier you know I don’t get my wonderful OLED black
⏹️ ▶️ Marco levels it’s it’s a very very small screen for old people like me and John and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people with broken eyes like you Like it is a it’s a really small screen compared to it most modern TVs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so to me like it just doesn’t it doesn’t work as well in portable mode And I’m like I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably the only person in the world like Normally Nintendo’s portable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consoles. They eventually get like you know mini version their new versions I’m the only person I think in the world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanting the switch XL to actually basically get really fat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I want a Switch that doesn’t have detachable controllers, that basically has controller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wings that are approximately the shape of a pro controller, and the whole thing gets bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to accommodate a screen closer to maybe an iPad mini size. Like that’s what I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like. I don’t think they’re going to make that because no one else wants that except me and maybe John,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but ultimately the portability, it’s just too small to be comfortable for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want it to be thicker. I want it to be a GameCube.
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a non-portable console without a screen on it that’s like four times as powerful.
⏹️ ▶️ John But again, that’s not what people want. The main appeal of the Switch, to be clear, for most people, is exactly what you said, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, it’s the same game, portable and on your TV and it works great in both places. That is the main appeal. But
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco and I just happen to be oddballs, both in the camp where we want to play it sitting on our couches and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that. And we’re happy with it there. It’s not like I have, you know, my complaint is that it’s not powerful enough and it’s compromised
⏹️ ▶️ John by that but you know I enjoy the games like Breath of the Wild was an amazing game
⏹️ ▶️ John especially given the power of the console.
Sponsor: Eero (code ATP)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Eero. Finally, Wi-Fi that works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Go to Eero.com and use promo code ATP at checkout to make overnight shipping free to the US and Canada.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wi-Fi has always had two problems for most people. One, it doesn’t reach your whole house. There’s always like weak
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zones or dead zones or it doesn’t reach the back room. And two, it’s usually really hard to set up, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for non-technical people. Eero solves both of these problems. So at number one, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know as we do, that no matter how many antennas you stick on top of a router, it’s never going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to cover your entire house perfectly. You need multiple access points. You need to be broadcasting that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco signal from multiple different little boxes around your house, not just one somewhere like in the basement or in the middle somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Eero solves that problem perfectly by having multiple radios. So they have two different models. They have the standard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Eero base station, and this is now the second generation one. It has a much faster radio, much faster throughput,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they also now have these little beacons that you can plug in at different points around the house to help
⏹️ ▶️ Marco broadcast more wifi signal. The beacons are these little flush things, they sit flush against the wall just in an outlet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It looks kind of like a big nightlight, and in fact they even built in a nightlight just to help you out and make it a little more useful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can plug them in anywhere. Everything is now faster, longer range, better performance. So they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solve the coverage problem better than anything else I’ve seen. And then they also solve the ease of use problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also better than anything else I’ve ever seen. This is one area, if you’re a nerd and you’ve used multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco access point Wi-Fi systems before like I have, you will be shocked how easy Eero is to set up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is really quite something else to see. And it’s so easy, I can easily recommend it to any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of non-technical friends or family you might have if you need to help them with their Wi-Fi this year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Check out Eero, you will be shocked how easy it is and the performance is wonderful,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially with this new second generation hardware. The new beacons are small, discreet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and very, very flexible. You can put them pretty much anywhere and they have the nightlight built in.
#askatp: Super Mario Odyssey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Check it out today. Go to Eero.com. That’s E-E-R-O dot com. And use promo code ATP at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco checkout to get free overnight shipping to the U.S. and Canada. Thank you so much to Eero for sponsoring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we should move on to Ask ATP. And conveniently, we have a Switch-related question. Star Susumi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, Have you guys played Super Mario Odyssey? How do you think about it? You know, what do you think of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it? And I have not in that’s no small part, because I haven’t really touched my Switch very much recently.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But let’s start with Marco. Marco, have you played Super Mario Odyssey?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not yet. I’m still spending all my Switch time in Stardew Valley, and behind that I also have, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mario Rabbids game, and I still have to finish the last few zones of Sonic Mania,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s so many games! I can’t keep up! But I’m also a little bit concerned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I might not like Mario Odyssey, because people are saying it’s almost like a cross between Mario 64 and Zelda?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is not true. Okay, because I I didn’t I never liked the way the Mario
⏹️ ▶️ Marco series went 3d very much Like it was really cool at a time like for Mario 64 But like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I always like the 2d ones a lot better and Zelda’s not really my kind of game like the kind of you know Big adventure RPG
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of thing. So John should I be playing Mario Odyssey?
⏹️ ▶️ John If you don’t like 3d Mario’s super Mario Odyssey is a 3d Mario. I like 3d Mario So I like
⏹️ ▶️ John a super Mario Odyssey and in the pantheon of 3d Mario’s I don’t know where I’d
⏹️ ▶️ John put it. I really liked Galaxy as well. Galaxy was very different and had, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John more of a twist on the typical Mario formula, even if it was more constrained by being
⏹️ ▶️ John on little planets and doing stuff. Mario Odyssey is a little bit more of a return
⏹️ ▶️ John to conventions of, well, it’s just regular 3D Mario with a little bit more open world, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Mario Odyssey is so unashamedly wacky. In some ways, I feel like it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s sillier than I want it to be. Like I take Mario more seriously than this game does.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in other ways, it’s highlighted to me exactly how much, how much more I like some of the other franchises.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like Zelda is my number one. And I think even Metroid has been elevated to potentially the other franchise that I’m more
⏹️ ▶️ John excited about. But as far as Mario games go, if you like 3D Mario
⏹️ ▶️ John games, you’ll like this. For Marco, maybe something that will keep him interested in is they do have tons
⏹️ ▶️ John of nostalgic pandering to the people who are fans of 2d Mario but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John if you really don’t like 3d Mario I’m not sure that’ll be enough to keep you interesting but I would say just like
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly play it like and let you know let Adam play it and just watch
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s it’s just such a fun game it’s such it’s so unashamed to say there’s no rhyme or
⏹️ ▶️ John reason why this is here it’s just because it’s fun and there’s lots of fun things to do and explore and play
⏹️ ▶️ John with and you can kind of go at your own pace and it’s very very gentle and it’s not particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John punishing except for a couple of checkpoints that are a little farther back than I would want them to be
⏹️ ▶️ John so I say you should definitely get it because I think your family as a whole will have fun with it whether you will spend
⏹️ ▶️ John more than a little time with it, I don’t know.
#askatp: Robotic vacuums
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, MZ writes, do you use robotic vacuum cleaners? If yes, what brands
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and use cases work for you? And if not, why? I have never owned a Roomba or anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it. I would guess that if I were to get one, I would get a Roomba because marketing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I’ve never used one and have never really felt a need for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have experience with Roombas here and there, but not a lot of experience and none of it that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was so compelling that I thought I must have one of these. I don’t know if they’ve gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better meaningfully since then, but the limitations they had back then were basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, they wouldn’t really get everywhere, they wouldn’t really be able to go on all surfaces
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and rugs and everything, they would occasionally get stuck and complain in some kind of happy song. I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least the newer ones will go back to their base and charge themselves, which is nice. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just seems like a lot of trouble and noise and expense and hassle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and one more electronic thing to manage to solve a problem partway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s like, well, you still have to vacuum if it can’t do the whole house effectively. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not it. Maybe these things are better than I remember them, or maybe they’ve gotten better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But my limited experience with them is not compelling.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve never had one and I’ve never thought about buying one just because it just doesn’t seem like it can do the job. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can see how big they are like these little pucks. I’ve got more crap in my house than fits in there. I
⏹️ ▶️ John see how much is, you know, in the clear the clear bagless container of my thing when I actually vacuum, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, the entire first floor of the house. That’s not going to fit in a room, but room can’t empty itself. And so, yeah, it
⏹️ ▶️ John just seems like it looks like a fun novelty. And if you have them just sort of let you go
⏹️ ▶️ John longer between actually vacuuming. I can see that. Or if you have a house where you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have pets that are going to attack it and or feel attacked by it, which is another factor in having an autonomous thing
⏹️ ▶️ John wandering around your house, but nope, never tried. I put this question in there just because I thought maybe Marco might have it now
⏹️ ▶️ John that he’s got all his little light switch clappers and all his other home automation stuff, but I guess-
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Clappers? You’re still, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re still resisting the robot invasion of our homes. Clap
⏹️ ▶️ John on, clap off, clap on, clap off, the clapper.
#askatp: How much gets cut?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And finally, this is for Marco. Eric New writes, what fraction of total audio gets cut by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco for the finished podcast? So I will say to set you up, Marco, that we record
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at about nine o’clock in the evening, our time, and typically end between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 1145 and midnight. And we are recording pretty much that entire time. Now that may or may not be us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey acting like we’re recording, if that makes any sense. Like we may be kind of a little more casual and not really expect some of of that to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go on the show, but I give Marco an MP3 each and every week that’s roughly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two and a half to three hours long. And the released episodes are anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from an hour and a half to like two hours,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually. Yeah, it’s more like 145 to 215. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that’s the simple answer. So Marco, what’s the real answer?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it’s basically if you figure out from what you said, we do usually record for about two and a half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hours. The finished episode has six minutes of ads, plus the theme song, which is about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a minute long. So you figure I have about seven minutes of added content that isn’t part of the live recording.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And a two and a half hour show, so that’s about two hours and 37 minutes of total content before cutting,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then the show is about 1.45 to 2.15, so you figure I’m cutting maybe 20 minutes. Now, that’s not like an even 20 or 30 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco throughout the show that I’m cutting. it’s mostly like cutting the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first like two or three minutes of the call where we’re just like setting up, you know, Hey, is john here, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, is Casey here, you know, setting up like the crap that nobody ever wants to hear about and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after we have decided we’re done recording, we’re talking about, oh, let’s pick some titles and then maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell the live listeners, oh, next week we’re going to, you know, we’re going to be recording on Tuesday instead of Wednesday. So like, you know, bookkeeping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the end of the show, we’re just kind of like, you know, kind of like casual talking at the end, but it’s not good enough to be in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show. That’s what most of the cutting actually is, is the beginning and the end. And don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worry, you’re not missing much. I cut it because it isn’t very interesting. So, you know, the released
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of the show contains almost everything that we actually say that is actually part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the show as we hear it live.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Almost everything that’s in the show is in the show, is what he’s trying to say. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if it’s a show where John talks a lot, a A lot less is cut. If it’s a show where I talk a lot, a lot more is cut.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can always fix it in post, right? I do. Moving on.
High Sierra “root” bug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there was a little bit of a kerfuffle earlier this week. We’re recording this on Wednesday evening and,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, and there has just been released a, a patch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a rather unique bug that, uh, has sprung up in high Sierra. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I never actually tried it, but my understanding is if you go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into system preferences and I think into security, and then you click the lock and hit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enter and then enter the username root and an empty password and try that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you might have to do the stance a little bit, but eventually you will get to the point that suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have set the root password on that High Sierra installed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Macintosh. And that is a problem because if you’re not familiar, root is basically the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God account on any Unix-based system. And so if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can finagle root access to a computer, a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac I should say, then you basically can do anything you want.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is a bit of an issue. And there are a little bit, you know, I think most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people have a little bit of a problem with the way in which it was publicized, which was via tweet, which is not terribly responsible,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but we don’t know what happened before then. Maybe it was responsibly disclosed. Somebody then eventually had discovered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that about two weeks ago, this was posted in Apple’s own developer forums,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is kind of amusing. Um, and Patrick Wardle has done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a deep dive into why they think this happened. Uh, but that’s kind of the setup.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, John, I presume you particularly have many thoughts on this. So do you want to kind of fill in some of the blanks here?
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. By the time you hear this, this will have all been solved for everybody because, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, there was about a day, day and a half between when And this was a widely
⏹️ ▶️ John publicized on Twitter and when Apple put out the fix for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And not only has Apple put out the fix, like if you have high Sierra and you go to software update, you can get the fix, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John will start. They say starting later today in their message, which means they probably already have done this. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to forcibly push this fix out to everybody running high Sierra. Like you won’t have to run software update.
⏹️ ▶️ John You won’t have to check for updates. You won’t have to click a button. It will just go out on and you don’t need to reboot either.
⏹️ ▶️ John It will just go out onto your computer And that’s a mechanism that Apple has used a couple times in the past
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the only one that I could remember and I think the one that Jason Snell could remember as well
⏹️ ▶️ John as the NTP Bug with their the time server thing that they also pushed
⏹️ ▶️ John out But they had it’s I’m assuming it’s either the same exact or very similar to the mechanism they have
⏹️ ▶️ John For pushing out updates to malware, which they also do without you having to do anything
⏹️ ▶️ John behind the scenes without any other updates It’s like they’ll push the malware updates. And I have no idea when those
⏹️ ▶️ John are happening because who would know? I guess you could just diff the malware definition file and see when it changes. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, if you’re listening to this now and you’re using a Mac with High Sierra and you’re connected to the network, this problem
⏹️ ▶️ John should be solved for you. Unless of course the fix causes problems, which for some people it has. Apparently it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John possible for the fix itself, which was rolled out in a day, to cause problems with
⏹️ ▶️ John doing file sharing. And there’s a fix for the fix, which Apple also has a tech note for that you can run some other command
⏹️ ▶️ John and that will fix their fix, which is why usually fixes don’t come out 24 hours after
⏹️ ▶️ John a problem was discovered. The root cause stuff is interesting. It’s difficult, the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that Patrick Wadrell wrote up, because he doesn’t have the source code to all parts of the operating system,
⏹️ ▶️ John so he’s like disassembling it, which is a heroic effort to, you know, disassemble often without any symbols to try to figure out what the
⏹️ ▶️ John heck is going on. Has he updated that thread? I don’t know, but anyway, what it looked like when I read
⏹️ ▶️ John this post earlier today was that it was, the programmer making the
⏹️ ▶️ John classic mistake of getting confused about what the return value means from a function.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s multiple schools of thought and multiple cultures on what return values
⏹️ ▶️ John mean in terms of what indicates success or failure. The sort of unique system call kind of way
⏹️ ▶️ John is zero indicates success and anything that’s not zero indicates some form of failure. But
⏹️ ▶️ John there are also whole other swaths of whole other API’s in other domains where a true
⏹️ ▶️ John value or one or some or a Boolean or something like that indicate success and a false value
⏹️ ▶️ John or zero or undefined or whatever means failure.
⏹️ ▶️ John And those are those conventions are opposite of each other. And it can be very easy when you’re programming to get confused about which is which,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially if you’re in some kind of domain of like your own code that you wrote, where
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not sure what convention it’s following or whatever. And if you get that return value wrong, then you may proceed
⏹️ ▶️ John as if something has failed when it succeeded or vice versa. And you can read the the root cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s you know it’s a it’s a series of things that stem from that where
⏹️ ▶️ John you know max come by default with the root account disabled and this thing accidentally enables it and it
⏹️ ▶️ John enables it and sets the password to whatever you wrote in the text box which is an empty string and then from that point on if you try
⏹️ ▶️ John to log in again with the empty string it succeeds the second time because the first time it enabled both enabled the account and set it to empty
⏹️ ▶️ John string it’s just you know typical with these type of bugs lots of things have to go wrong for
⏹️ ▶️ John it to fall down. But I’m assuming the fix was fairly straightforward, but apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John not because it borked everyone’s file sharing. Who knows? Maybe it had to do with applying the fix without restarting,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is not something that normally happens with security updates. Or maybe it does. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. I don’t keep track of like when you get a security update and software update, does it require a restart all the time? Not
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time. Yeah, maybe not for all of them. I guess it depends on what it’s patching. If we can just kill a patch a daemon and then kill it and it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John auto restart itself. Anyway this is a bad one this is pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ John as bad as a local exploit can get and it was it was a local exploit that was remotable because if you
⏹️ ▶️ John have screen sharing enabled like the local exploit suddenly becomes a remote
⏹️ ▶️ John because the exploit itself is that it allows you to log in as root with no password
⏹️ ▶️ John if the root account is disabled. I also believe that the fix they push out disables
⏹️ ▶️ John the root account again and maybe they had to do that just because they’re afraid everyone enabled it. You know, by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John the workaround for this was, oh, enable the root account and actually set a legit password, which is why I thought
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m totally invulnerable, not the least of which was I’m running El Capitan. But anyway, I always I
⏹️ ▶️ John always enabled the root account on all my Macs and I always set a password on it, you know, because I use the root account to do
⏹️ ▶️ John Unix stuff. So even though Mac ship with the root account disabled, one of the first things I do is enable it and set
⏹️ ▶️ John a password and do all that stuff. So I thought I didn’t have to worry about it, but I actually checked my wife’s computer and for whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John reason, I guess it’s because when we got it as a new computer I never did any of the Unicy stuff over on it, she did have
⏹️ ▶️ John the root account disabled. Anyway, this update, the fix, will re-disable the root account.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you don’t want the root account disabled, re-enable it, set a strong password on it, and you’ll be back.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, this is a bad one, and because
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a fairly terrible error and a one day 24 hour turnaround time on the fix
⏹️ ▶️ John and all sorts of other things lots of people are attaching various levels of significance to this
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a lot of threads going around revisiting you know Apple’s quality control is it going downhill
⏹️ ▶️ John this never would have happened if Steve was alive blah blah blah I guess we can
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about that in a little bit but the one thing that’s brought to mind immediately and I didn’t spend much time googling this so
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe I’m misremembering it but almost this exact same bug was on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John back in the days when Steve was running the show and I believe it was like on the lock
⏹️ ▶️ John screen like on your laptop or your desktop or you get the screen lock and says enter your password to
⏹️ ▶️ John unlock the screen and all you need to do was type a whole bunch of characters in the
⏹️ ▶️ John in the password field until it like overflowed some buffer and caused the screensaver to crash unlock the screen for
⏹️ ▶️ John you and I think you can even hold down I think you could even hold down the return key and it would still do the same thing
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget I may be misremembering maybe people can tell me if I’m misremembering but um that’s the thing with
⏹️ ▶️ John security it doesn’t you know it doesn’t matter how silly the mistake is silly the programming mistake is right
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s in just the wrong place it your whole security edifice falls down
⏹️ ▶️ John so I I actually don’t think this security error is indicative
⏹️ ▶️ John of any larger problem it It is just one more, like this specific one. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it is just one more pebble on the pile. And what we should be doing is counting
⏹️ ▶️ John the pebbles, not saying this one pebble. Because this one pebble exists, it means therefore this is the world’s biggest problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John The real problem is how many pebbles are there and is the pile getting smaller or bigger over time? That’s what people
⏹️ ▶️ John need to talk about. And I suppose this pebble is a little bit bigger than normal, but it was also fixed much quicker than
⏹️ ▶️ John normal and it’s kind of understandable. I don’t know. Anyway, the question that most
⏹️ ▶️ John piqued my interest I saw come up about this I forget if it was in a slack or on Twitter or whatever but I want to ask
⏹️ ▶️ John you to to see what you think is someone was asking is this a fireable offense
⏹️ ▶️ John and if so who should be fired
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t I mean if it was put there intentionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey sure yeah it was like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know it’s the NSA paid some engineer to go inject a weakness sure but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was probably not what happened here like this the nature of this bug from little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we know about it from mostly from that disassembly, it doesn’t seem like it’s that kind of bug.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Unless it was intentionally done, I would say, no, this is not a fireball offense. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, this is software. People make mistakes all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This really honestly could have been a single line of code mistake,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if that’s all it was, then it’s just part of doing the job. And for the John,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m with you. Like, you know, people look at me to amplify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of Apple rage these days because I do that sometimes, but I don’t think this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is alone, you know, in isolation. I’m not freaked out about this. Like, yeah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bad security bug. It got fixed. That’s what’s supposed to happen. Any OS, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS, where Apple puts all their resources, you know, any OS has occasional security bugs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this magnitude and if it’s being properly cared for, they get fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Simple as that. That’s the nature of very, very complex modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software. You’re going to have problems. As long as they get fixed, everything’s working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as it always does. So this particular bug I don’t think is a sign of anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big. I think it was handled as well as it could have been handled although it is a little worrying how long ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people were talking about it on the forums and nobody seemed to notice but you know it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco security bugs like that like who knows if the right people saw that either like people report
⏹️ ▶️ Marco random bugs all the time and random odd behavior on forums all the time but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people also report so much garbage on forums that nobody can keep up with everything that’s posted and who knows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if somebody describing you know like on the forums like if you read the post that were allegedly describing this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem like if you’re some Apple employee who’s just skimming through these posts like you don’t know what the conditions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were on that person’s machine. Like maybe something weird was going on with their software and some other way. Like maybe it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your bug necessarily. So like, it’s hard to know when you’re just coming through forum posts, what’s what people are actually talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if this is a real issue that you need to worry about if it’s your bug, or if it’s like some weird thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they did, or that they’re, they’re recalling badly or describing badly, you know, so like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t see anything about this bug that is cause for massive concern on any kind of real scale.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see lots of other ways for concern for Apple, but this is not one of those things. And to go back to the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco question you asked, once again, to summarize, no, as long as this was done unintentionally, this is not a fireball
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offense. This is just developing software.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, I agree. I don’t think this is fireball unless it was a deliberate backdoor. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think that it was. And I’ve seen some people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are really up in arms about the fact that on Apple’s own dev forums, this was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reported and nobody noticed. Now, you know, I was, you know, cracking wise about it earlier, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reality of the situation is like, look at radar. So as much as I also crack wise and lament radar,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, that is a, a never ending, just tidal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wave of new information that Apple as a company needs to sort through. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you look at radar, which has a fairly high, in my opinion, cost of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entry in terms of like, who’s really going to file a radar, not any normal schmo, it’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be a super nerd developer who actually is silly enough to spend the time doing it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you think about this insert, just insurmountable wave of information coming off radar,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is Apple’s internal bug, well, internal slash external bug reporting tool, and then amplify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that like by several orders of magnitude and that’s the, that’s a forum. So there is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no way that anyone. Like, I can’t imagine anyone’s cruising the forums, looking for reports of security
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vulnerabilities. Like that’s just not a thing. So as much as I joke about how it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reported on Apple’s own forums and they should have noticed, like, no, they shouldn’t have. And, and they’ve turned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around a fix as quickly as possible. I wish they QA the fix a little better because up until a few minutes ago, when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of you mentioned it, I didn’t even realize the fix needed a fix, but. But they’re trying to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right by everyone and trying to get this right as quickly as possible. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think, to my eyes, and maybe it’s easy for me to say this because I’m hugely biased
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a developer, but I feel like, yes, the root cause of this was a developer making an oops.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But this to me is more, I’m more alarmed by the QA process
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than I am the developer that made the oops. this seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the sort of thing that I feel like it should have been caught in quality
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assurance and clearly it wasn’t. And that’s the thing that scares
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me a little bit. But somewhere, I guess they made a statement to several outlets, including iMore,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t have it in front of me, but they basically said that they’re going to provide a write-up of what happened. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you know what I’m talking about? They said they were going to do basically a postmortem and talk about it, if I’m not mistaken.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have the Apple statement in the notes, but it doesn’t say anything about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are auditing our development process to help prevent this from happening ever again. I could have sworn they said they were going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk about it publicly, but I guess not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they just did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough. That’s probably the extent that we were going to hear about it. But honestly, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unless it was intentional sabotage, I don’t think the cause for this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be very interesting. It’s just, yeah, somebody messed up. Like the go-to-fail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bug from a couple years back, that was most likely a random copy and paste
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a bad merge. It’s possible that somebody maliciously put that there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for NSA purposes to make it look like an accidental bug. That’s possible, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a lot less likely than just somebody messed up. Because it’s software. People mess up all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time. That’s why you have to have systems in place to be able to update things and patch things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know it’s going to happen. And no matter how many tests Casey writes for you, it’s still going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey you’re still going to have bugs. Well done.
⏹️ ▶️ John asked about the firing thing just because it was a sentiment that I saw a lot of people discussing
⏹️ ▶️ John and it seemed to me that a lot of the discussion centered around people arguing
⏹️ ▶️ John about who should be fired, like, oh, the programmer who made the mistake should be fired. And no, the quality assurance should be fired. No, actually
⏹️ ▶️ John neither one of those people should hard should be their manager no it should be tim cook like you know who is ultimately responsible and
⏹️ ▶️ John how do we make people accountable uh and it was you know kind of a uh a test last
⏹️ ▶️ John trick question for you two but you both got what i think is the right answer um but you both write software so i think that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John but like when people are angry about something like you don’t have to be
⏹️ ▶️ John particularly technically savvy or into the details of computers or a program or anything to understand how bad this bug is
⏹️ ▶️ John you know because it’s just it seems like one of those bugs that if if we saw it in a movie, we’d be like, that’s ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s so fake. Couldn’t they come up with a better looking bug? It’s just comically,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, just like, just hit return a second time
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and now you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as bad as when Windows 98 would have a login password up on screen. You could just hit cancel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it just proceeded with the login.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, someone showed the old video of the Windows 95 one where you could hit the question mark to get the help screen and eventually navigate
⏹️ ▶️ John your way to the open save dialog box and just open my computer with like a right click.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s lots of things. At least that one was a little bit complicated, but yeah, this one is ridiculous. But
⏹️ ▶️ John for all situations, again, excluding intentional sabotage, which is I think the only reason that
⏹️ ▶️ John anybody, anywhere in Apple should be fired for this is intentional sabotage.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or gross negligence. I think intentional, based on what I’ve seen of this specific bug of like what it looks
⏹️ ▶️ John like from the disassembly of the code, it’s not gross negligence. It’s a common, it looked like
⏹️ ▶️ John a common mistake, easy to get. Even you know, the QA people shouldn’t be fired, you know, Craig,
⏹️ ▶️ John Federico, you shouldn’t be fired. No one should be fired for this. And the reason no one should be fired for this is like, it’s not just about software. I mean, it’s something
⏹️ ▶️ John you experience is offered just because software is a realm where even the very best practitioners make
⏹️ ▶️ John mistakes all the time. That is the nature of the work, right? Which is often the source of ridicule. But if you’re an actual programmer,
⏹️ ▶️ John you understand why. But put programming aside, in any sort of group
⏹️ ▶️ John effort, any environment where someone would be fired for an honest mistake like this, regardless
⏹️ ▶️ John of the impact is not an environment that that is not a safe environment for people
⏹️ ▶️ John to grow and improve their skills like you have it’s a it is a hostile organization,
⏹️ ▶️ John you should never want to work for someplace that would fire you because you made an honest mistake in a book like
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not your fault. And it’s not like the quality assurance people’s fault. Now if you make a series
⏹️ ▶️ John of these errors, eventually, yes, executives should be fired or you know, changed or whatever. But like an individual
⏹️ ▶️ John contributor in any part of the organization who makes an honest mistake, shouldn’t be fired for that honest
⏹️ ▶️ John mistake, just because that one happened to be in just the wrong place, right? That’s not an environment that makes people
⏹️ ▶️ John feel safe to learn and grow. And it’s the organization’s job to make sure people
⏹️ ▶️ John in roles that are suited to their skills and that they’re supported and that they’re you know, that they have
⏹️ ▶️ John the correct training and knowledge to get up to the next level do the next thing. Like that’s the organization problems. It’s not the individuals
⏹️ ▶️ John problems. So in any group of people, if you’re in an environment where you’re like, we’re going to be the best because if anybody makes any mistake,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re gonna immediately be fired. Your team, you will fire everyone on your team and you will only have the worst meanest
⏹️ ▶️ John employees who are only good at carefully not making mistakes and you will have crap people. So like, I,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it entered anyone’s mind at Apple that someone was going to get fired over this. Even in the worst
⏹️ ▶️ John moments of anger, again, unless it was sabotage. And unless it was like, this is the fifth one of these, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, in you know, and even then, like, if it’s the fifth one, like you should have rotated the person out of that position after
⏹️ ▶️ John the first or second one instead of leaving them there. So then maybe it’s some some manager should get fired. But this is a
⏹️ ▶️ John this is not a long series of these terrible security errors or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So no, I don’t think anyone should be fired for this. And I skipped over the developer
⏹️ ▶️ John forum thing. That’s that’s kind of a fun one because Apple’s developer forums if you don’t hang
⏹️ ▶️ John out there, if you don’t hang out there, you might most likely hit the developer forums
⏹️ ▶️ John when you do a Google search for something and you find all the other poor souls posting to the developer forums of the exact
⏹️ ▶️ John same problem that you have. But my understanding of the developer forums, which may be outdated, but I think it’s still current,
⏹️ ▶️ John is that it’s a place for Apple’s customers to go and talk to each other
⏹️ ▶️ John about their stuff. It’s not the genius bar on the web. Like it’s not a place where you go to ask Apple for help.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although Apple people are sometimes there and may sometimes be helpful. That’s not like a support channel for
⏹️ ▶️ John you to get your thing fixed by Apple. It’s for Apple’s customers to talk to each other. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like Apple, someone from Apple is not their job to read every single
⏹️ ▶️ John post there. And what it also means is that my impression is a lot of the people who are posting there
⏹️ ▶️ John are people who are not that into computers as a hobby, they just want their damn computer
⏹️ ▶️ John to work. And they end up going to Google and trying to say I can’t get my computer work where someplace I can talk about this and they
⏹️ ▶️ John end up landing at the Apple developer forums, they can go you can go there from the Apple website, find your way there or whatever, like it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a venue for people of all kinds to talk about their computers, it is not a super
⏹️ ▶️ John nerd hangout, right? Which means that you get a lot of people with very basic problems and
⏹️ ▶️ John other people trying to help them who may not know all the intricate details. And if I have to admit, if I had
⏹️ ▶️ John read that thread and saw someone suggesting, here’s what you can do to fix, you know, someone was locked out of their computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m locked myself out of my computer. How do I get in and fix it? And like, you’d see a whole bunch of people suggesting
⏹️ ▶️ John things. And like one of them would be like the correct solution of like, if you really have forgotten your password, you can reset it in single user mode and
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, blah. But there’ll be a bunch of other people suggesting other things. And if I had read that thing of like, oh, just
⏹️ ▶️ John go here to this thing at the lock icon type root and hit return, you get right now I would have thought that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna work. Like it may
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey be it worked for you because you
⏹️ ▶️ John have some weird but like, it just it’s obviously someone who’s confused and they’re trying to be helpful. But yeah, I would honestly
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t take it seriously because there’s so much crap so many people other like, you they’re not they’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John being nice people like here’s something try this have you tried that this worked for me once right and i if
⏹️ ▶️ John i had read that i would never in a million years have thought that’s actually legit like that will
⏹️ ▶️ John actually work i wouldn’t even have tried it i wouldn’t even thought about trying it and i bet if an apple employee read it
⏹️ ▶️ John they’d be like yeah if only that worked like you just type root and hit return with no password yeah nice
⏹️ ▶️ John try turns out in this one case that actually did work and that’s terrifying
⏹️ ▶️ John slightly um and the real scary thing is the person who wrote that up, Gruber just posted a thing about it,
⏹️ ▶️ John because the thread continued from there, saying, where did you hear about this? He’s like, Oh, I heard it in some other forum. So who knows
⏹️ ▶️ John how long his exploit has been out there and whatever dark corners of the internet that people have known that you could
⏹️ ▶️ John do this in High Sierra. And it’s only because certainly weeks later,
⏹️ ▶️ John but possibly even longer, who knows they this has been there since the original release of High Sierra, maybe it’s been there since the
⏹️ ▶️ John betas and people have known about it, only because it got Twitter publicity, a day or two ago,
⏹️ ▶️ John did Apple rush to fix it. And I don’t really blame Apple for that,
⏹️ ▶️ John because like I said, if I had read this in the forums, I wouldn’t have believed it either. It just sounds ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and to add to your discrediting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of needing to take forums seriously, whenever I search for a problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with my Apple products or software, I almost always come across a forum
⏹️ ▶️ Marco link or to Apple support forums. And I don’t think I can come up with any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better example of a worse ratio of usefulness to times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see the page that is non-zero.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The results are usually so useless and terrible because it is just random,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco semi-lost, under-informed people trying to help each other without any help from Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That like I think Yahoo Answers has a higher hit rate for me than Apple support forums.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not fair. It’s not as bad as Yahoo.
⏹️ ▶️ John with Apple support from things. And here’s what the Apple here’s what I get from Apple support forums. One I find out if my problem
⏹️ ▶️ John is common because if there are a million repeated threads with people having the same exact problem, I am reassured
⏹️ ▶️ John in some way right there like okay now I know you know if I don’t find any matches in the Apple support forums
⏹️ ▶️ John and like I probably have bad hardware or something like that. But if a million people say that they have this problem that
⏹️ ▶️ John tells me something and two I get to see the the weeks or months of people suggesting
⏹️ ▶️ John basically everything under the Sun have you tried resetting your PRM? Have you signed your
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco built-in your desktop?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on one foot right every solution that has ever worked for any problem gets to look get suggested for
⏹️ ▶️ John Right and and people reply I tried that and it didn’t help me I tried that it didn’t help me and Very
⏹️ ▶️ John often there is one it says I did that and it finally worked and at least that gives me It lets me eliminate
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff that I know won’t work because I see everyone keep trying this and they’re not working and then If something does work for
⏹️ ▶️ John one person sometimes I can back solve to figure out what really solved their problem because obviously that thing didn’t because
⏹️ ▶️ John someone be like well I did That exact same thing and I didn’t solve it like it is super noisy but here’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that has up or Yahoo answers fewer trolls, right and
⏹️ ▶️ John Much more specifically relevant to my needs needs. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ John there is the signal to noise is not great, but there is value to be had there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now granted, if you find yourself in the apples or forums, you are probably desperate. You’re probably that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the bottom of the barrel. But I thank all those people who spend all that time talking back to it and forth
⏹️ ▶️ John to each other to try to solve problems because every once in a while, just looking at the shape that they’ve traced
⏹️ ▶️ John around this problem of all the things they’ve tried, I can find my way to a solution that actually works for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love so user Raxel broth in the chat said Apple support forums. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem you are experiencing doesn’t exist slash. That’s the way it’s supposed to work slash. Here’s a copy pasted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solution that indicates I didn’t read your problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fantastic summary. True. That is
⏹️ ▶️ John true. And Apple people do occasionally post there, you know, one more thing before we leave this topic
⏹️ ▶️ John about like what Apple could do to fix this. Like in in the grand scheme of things, like any
⏹️ ▶️ John any solution that that takes the form, uh, program
⏹️ ▶️ John better or or let’s be smarter or let’s write fewer bugs is
⏹️ ▶️ John not a solution. Right. That’s because if you look at, if you do a postmortem and any sort of bug or problem,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like in the future, we should be better programmers and that one, then we won’t make mistakes like this. That’s not a solution.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. So, uh, much to Marco’s chagrin, the solution to all these things involves process and testing
⏹️ ▶️ John and quality assurance and and systems and you can’t have too many of those because then you paralyze
⏹️ ▶️ John your entire organization with a spiderweb of bureaucracy but you got to have a certain amount and bugs like
⏹️ ▶️ John this where there’s not that I’m saying this is a GUI bug but there’s there is
⏹️ ▶️ John a the way this is exploited is through GUI even if the problem was actually in a library
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere very often go through you know don’t get tested well because
⏹️ ▶️ John the underlying libraries are tested to show they do everything they want but this glue code that calls into the libraries and checks the return
⏹️ ▶️ John value. That code path may only be exercised by someone using the GUI and writing good
⏹️ ▶️ John tests that, that automate the use of the GUI. There are tons of tools that do it, but it is the
⏹️ ▶️ John hardest kind of testing to do. And I’m sure Apple does a ton of it. Like they have to, they have to do a ton of it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if there’s going to be one area of testing that is very difficult to be comprehensive in and to keep up to date
⏹️ ▶️ John and to not even have a good concept of like coverage for it’s GUI testing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s, you know, it’s not I’m not saying they don’t have to do it, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what would it fix this problem if they had an automated fuzz testing on this exact sort of flow
⏹️ ▶️ John of like you click the lock icon in any system preference and you try to get in. If they had
⏹️ ▶️ John something goes fuzz testing that flow, one of the things in the fuzz test would have been root empty password and hopefully the fuzz test
⏹️ ▶️ John would have done that multiple times or something like that or any other sort of like triggers on the code path to make sure you’re along
⏹️ ▶️ John the right lines and to do preconditions and post addition, root account is disabled. For us test login root account
⏹️ ▶️ John is still disabled. Like, there’s so many tests you can see that would have caught this. And again, if the postmortem says
⏹️ ▶️ John I know exactly the test we can write right now, the book friend this exact bug from ever happening again, that’s that doesn’t solve
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem either. You got to go much deeper than that. And to say, how do we prevent problems of this kind from happening,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would imagine that the because the the functional surface area of the Mac operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system is so incredibly vast. If you were to put a percentage number on how many code paths
⏹️ ▶️ John are are executed as part of the surely massive amount of automated testing
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple does in the Mac operating system, the percentage would be terrifyingly small, especially when compared
⏹️ ▶️ John to the incredible coverage numbers that people who get to write like faceless libraries do, you know, like, what
⏹️ ▶️ John is the coverage doesn’t look like on a small, tight, well maintained, really important
⏹️ ▶️ John library, especially involving the kernel or security. You can test that thing to death. Like you can
⏹️ ▶️ John just put it in a little black box and torture it for it like the file system, the amount of testing they did on APFS,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure was astronomical, where you could just have that thing grinding hour and hour, day after day,
⏹️ ▶️ John random iOS, just and then like stop it every 300 hours to see if the file system
⏹️ ▶️ John is hosed in any way and like put auditing and tracing in every single step of the process and just run that for months
⏹️ ▶️ John and months and years and years. That’s how you update a billion phones without anybody noticing that you changed their file system, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John that same kind of testing for the entirety of an operating system, especially exercising the
⏹️ ▶️ John GUI, the GUI that changes a lot is really, really hard. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s, you know, what’s gonna the actual solution to this, if you keep like, not five wine,
⏹️ ▶️ John but 17 wine, it is more money, more time and more money in
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac OS, because any solution you come up with about like, let’s change our procedures in some subtle way. It’s not as if they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not doing assessing because they because they’re lazy or don’t feel like it. All these things, things, tape
⏹️ ▶️ John people, and people cost money, and it’s time. And so I hope that the outcome
⏹️ ▶️ John of this is to dedicate more resources towards automated
⏹️ ▶️ John and manual testing of the Mac operating system, because that’s the only way you’re going to catch more bugs.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not going to write fewer bugs by everyone suddenly becoming a better programmer.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just have to catch more bugs. I hope that’s a solution here.
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macOS annual releases
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco also the general bugginess in many ways of High Sierra, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was ostensibly a bug fixing release or a refinement release of the OS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think more clearly than ever shows that the annual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco release cycle that Apple has pushed for for all their platforms for the last few years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that this is as inappropriate as ever for Mac OS. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the annual release cycle makes tons of sense for iOS where it’s in this hyper competitive space and it’s moving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quickly and it’s still, you know, a relatively younger, although not by much, now operating system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But on Mac OS, like it seems like the faster they go on Mac OS the worse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the quality problems get and no one on the Mac is clamoring for this to be updated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every year like no one on the Mac if anything people like please stop touching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this because you keep breaking it so I really I hope that at some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know I I know what I asked for with the Mac is often unrealistic and unlikely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to happen with with modern-day Apple, but I really think the annual release
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cycle, if it even makes sense for iOS, which it probably does, it definitely does not make sense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Mac OS, and also it’s making Mac OS worse. The Mac is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so deprioritized in the company now, and I’m not even going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to argue right now whether that should or shouldn’t be the case. Not for this episode. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is so deprioritized and seemingly de-resourced in the company these days,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that by having it on a very aggressive release cycle to keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up, I guess, with marketing features for everything else they’re doing, you’re dooming it to being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more buggy over time. You’re dooming it to having rush jobs done. Even this ostensibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bug-fix release of High Sierra, they did major changes. Like the new Windows server’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge thing. I think my LCD font rendering disabling checkbox is still broken,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even in 10.1.1.1. I’m hoping they fix it in.2, but I’m not holding my breath
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that one. There’s so much about High Sierra that has been broken, and Sierra
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly wasn’t that much better before that. It wasn’t that long before that that we had Discovery.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What was that? Was that El Cap? Or whatever came after that? I lost track of all these mountains.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you can’t have a very aggressive software release schedule and also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have it be like a low priority that you’re going to not give it a whole lot of staff and time to to develop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things well on it. The amount of resources that Apple is devoting to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac OS can’t keep up with a one year release cycle and maintain quality. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to either dramatically increase the priority of Mac OS in the company, which I think is very unlikely, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slow it down and only do it every two years like they used do because they what what they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing right now is resulting in more bad software.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was just thinking that if they actually did go to a two-year schedule, it’d be like they don’t even care enough about the Mac to update it every year,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is, you know, it’s double-edged sword and I kind of understand why they do yearly one. I continue to believe that they can successfully
⏹️ ▶️ John do yearly releases if they scope them right and you know, the end, like I said, they
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like they do have to put more resources towards it. But if they went to two years I’d
⏹️ ▶️ John be fine and in the past they weren’t at two years they were like accidentally at like 18 months and this sort of bumpy schedule
⏹️ ▶️ John like whenever they got around to it they kind of spread out I got a graph and one of my old reviews of the time
⏹️ ▶️ John between releases but this year cadence has been you know that’s that’s been their decision that they’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re going to meet the yearly schedule on their tool for meeting the yearly schedule to adjust scope and I think they
⏹️ ▶️ John have been adjusting scope pushing things out of releases but I think there’s always a temptation to
⏹️ ▶️ John put things in releases that are just barely like, do you think it’s ready to be in the release? Or do we have to
⏹️ ▶️ John boot it out? You have to make that decision months ahead of time. And you have to kind of make a call and human nature is to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the team can make it if they work really hard. And it’s, you know, I think it’s going to be in. So let’s let’s leave it. Let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John leave the new Windows Server in like it only crashes on a few GPUs. And I’m sure they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey have that worked out by the
⏹️ ▶️ John time it releases. And it turns out they don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey worked out by the time
⏹️ ▶️ John it releases. And it’s like, maybe, maybe we should have kicked that out. But on the other hand, you could say, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you keep kicking it out like this, like it’ll never be so ready to go that you feel like you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. And if you never updated it, you’re going to be an HMS plus situation. So at some point, you have to actually ship and the only
⏹️ ▶️ John way to find all the real bugs is to put it out into the real world. And that’s, you know, that’s the nature of software and management. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the job Apple has before it. But I do think that High Sierra
⏹️ ▶️ John does not live up to its billing as a Snow Leopard type
⏹️ ▶️ John release, even though Snow Leopard had more bugs than people think it did that their memories are fuzzy on that but like that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John live up to the memories of snow leopard type release where it is a refinement of Sierra that just
⏹️ ▶️ John makes everything better and faster it was a refinement of Sierra and it did make things better and faster
⏹️ ▶️ John but the small number of things they changed like
⏹️ ▶️ John they had some bugs of their own and lots of long-standing bugs didn’t get faces just tech that is what it could boils down to like this
⏹️ ▶️ John is the thing a lot of people are pointing out and all their complaints about bugs and That’s why I pointed the pile of pebbles and the pile of pebbles
⏹️ ▶️ John getting bigger. You have to pay down your tech debt. You have to address
⏹️ ▶️ John it and say that bug that Marco’s been having for, you know, two releases about his Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ John randomly disconnecting. I know it’s a pain in the ass to figure it out. It’s unreproducible and he’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John filing bug reports, but you just got to figure that out because if you don’t, it will just linger there forever and it will
⏹️ ▶️ John linger there forever alongside the new bug that you added as part of whatever new feature you added and the pile
⏹️ ▶️ John of pebbles gets bigger. You got to at least keep the pile of pebbles at like a manageable size. We’re not saying you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to drive it down to zero. It’s software, right? You’re never going to drive down to zero. But if you allow them to accumulate
⏹️ ▶️ John and that pile gets bigger every release, people become disillusioned, right? Because there’s always new bugs and your old
⏹️ ▶️ John ones never get fixed. And it’s like, why are you even releasing new operating systems? And that’s when people say, let’s go to every two years or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. So I think it is possible to do an every year release. But if if if it
⏹️ ▶️ John is easier for Apple to go to every two year release, then they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, the way I look at it is like, you know, imagine like on a smaller scale, like imagine like me as a single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developer. Imagine if all year I didn’t really touch Overcast. I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing other things. I was too busy to work on Overcast. And every summer, I gave myself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one week to make a new big point version of it. And then I could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco release it, fix bugs for two days, and then I wouldn’t be able to work on anymore until the next summer. Of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco course, the quality would go down. Of course I’d have to rush to get things in there, and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did would be half-baked. I wouldn’t have time to fully bake it. I wouldn’t have enough time afterwards to fix bugs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bugs would just sit around forever until the next year, when I couldn’t fix the old bugs. I’d have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make new features for the new marketing push. That’s a pretty good scale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco model of how MacOS feels.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It feels like most people are not able to, or allowed to, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco allocated to work on it most of the time, and what time they get on it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems to be limited to marketing features and not fixing bugs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think your pebble pile analogy is great, and I think it’s pretty clear that we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going in the direction of accumulating more of those pebbles over time, not fewer. The pile is just getting bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time, and that technical debt is not being paid off at a fast enough rate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The saddest part about this is that nobody is really asking for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac users don’t need a new OS every year. We really don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m still on Sierra because High Sierra is so buggy I’m a little scared to switch to it. I only have it on the laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not my main computer. Part of the reason is, why? Why should I switch to it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The sales pitch for High Sierra seems to get worse every day. Why should I upgrade exactly. Why is Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forcing this upgrade down my throat with these notifications that pre-downloaded to my system and everything? Apple’s pushing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, really hard to force people to update to High Sierra when it’s still in a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buggy state, which that alone shows pretty bad judgment on Apple’s part. What’s in it for me as a user?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not much. The only thing I gain from it is certain things work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better when all your stuff is on the new OS. Things like certain hand-off features or iCloud syncing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features, AirDrop, calendar Sync doesn’t actually work anymore for me, thanks a lot. For the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most part, the main reason, the main motivating reason I have to upgrade to High Sierra right now is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s the newest OS, and my other stuff is starting to slowly break because my computer is not on the newest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS. That’s it. There’s nothing about High Sierra that I actually want, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it comes with is all these bugs and all these half-baked incomplete features like my loss of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my LCD font smoothing thing, and that might get fixed in the next version, but it might not. As a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco user, all this stuff, they’re changing radically, and all these costs we are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paying and all these big bugs and new subsystems being rewritten in ways that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are almost as good as the old ones but broken. I didn’t ask for that. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do want Mac OS to move forward, and I really hope that the Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still has a roadmap ahead of it. But I don’t want it to be done sloppily, badly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and rushed out. rather it be done slowly and right and to have fewer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesome things in each release, if that’s even possible, than to have it be done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco half-assed and rushed and then have really buggy software come out every year and have my system break
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for four months every year in the fall.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the most attractive aspect of the two-year plan is the part that people probably don’t think about
⏹️ ▶️ John as much, but what that would mean is, imagine like High Sierra didn’t come out and we’re still
⏹️ ▶️ John on Sierra, right? What that would mean is that Sierra point releases would continue for
⏹️ ▶️ John another year. It would be you know, 1012 610 127 1012 810 12, nine
⏹️ ▶️ John and all those point releases all those patch level releases. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not replacing the Windows Server in one of those, right? They’re probably not changing the file system, but who the
⏹️ ▶️ John hell knows that it on 10 to or whatever on iOS, right? But the nature of those point releases tends
⏹️ ▶️ John to prevent Apple from doing any big changes. So what what does everybody doing in those releases, you know what they’re doing in all
⏹️ ▶️ John those point releases, you know, as that number gets bigger and bigger, and even goes into double digits, as it has in
⏹️ ▶️ John the past, they’re fixing little bugs. That’s all they’re doing. Like, that’s all the like, there’s usually no, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, security fixes and bug fixes. And the bigger that number gets, the sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of, we all assume, the more stable and more mature the operating system gets, that kind of also makes
⏹️ ▶️ John the big release harder, like when I think it was like tiger or something, like 10, 411, or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you get Yeah, someone already said in chat room. When you get up that high,
⏹️ ▶️ John the challenge for the 1050, at least for the next major version release for the next like newly
⏹️ ▶️ John named cat or California place release is so much higher because it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John we have enjoyed this period of peace and stability. Like we’ve we’re up into we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John up into the double digits on the last number in our versions and everything is good. And like every little
⏹️ ▶️ John like that team that is doing those point releases, you know, I don’t even know if it’s a separate team or whatever. But those people like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John running out of bugs to fix, like they’re knocking things down. They’re like, you know, oh, you haven’t some obscure problem with your Bluetooth,
⏹️ ▶️ John the entire team’s going to spend the next two months just looking at that problem because we have no other bugs to fix, right? We’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John on the glory team doing the next version. And you hope those are synchronized with what’s happening in the future
⏹️ ▶️ John or ice release. But inevitably, when the point zero comes out, it’s always less stable than the other one, because that’s the one that
⏹️ ▶️ John has the big subsystems replaced. And I’m all for big subsystems, subsystem replacements. I love it, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is why I just want them to add more money and time and developers and still do it that way. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if we did go to the two year schedule, I think we would have at least one year of peace and prosperity
⏹️ ▶️ John where, you know, the chicken in every pot and people’s bugs are getting fixed and just, you know, the point releases come out and
⏹️ ▶️ John we just blindly install them knowing that it’s just one more bug fixed and one more performance
⏹️ ▶️ John improvement and everything gets great. Uh, and so I, I would, I could do with a, a run
⏹️ ▶️ John of, of a double digit, uh, at the end of the version numbers to see what that’s like again because
⏹️ ▶️ John those are good times.
State of Apple bugginess
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t disagree about the two-year schedule thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t understand why two years or a lengthening of major releases
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has to be the answer. I feel like just different choices,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even on the same cadence, would be okay. I don’t think it’s fair for us to conjecture
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about what is or is not important to Apple internally, but certainly from the perspective
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of an outsider, like me, it seems like Apple doesn’t value
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bug-free software either the same way that they did or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as much as any of us would like them to. And I feel like this is starting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to gain a little traction. I feel like I’m noticing friends and family rolling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their eyes and saying, oh, well that’s Apple, you know, and this is more than just, oh, you know, screw you autocorrect. And this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more than just hating on Siri, which I’m becoming more and more interested in as time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I really feel like Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a dumpster fire. But be that as it, and I don’t even have an Alexa to compare to. I just, just using Siri has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been more and more frustrating over time. But anyway, I feel like my, like my family
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is starting to, to get frustrated with things that are problems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are software problems that are coming out of Apple. And I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from an outsider’s perspective, it appears as though the institutional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey value is way heavier on new shiny, and I think you guys are both saying this, is way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heavier on new shiny than it is on boring but useful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stability. And in the same ways, you know, we said last week, you know, Jenkins is not sexy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, a bug-free software to most developers, especially younger ones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not terribly sexy, but to us old people, and now I’ll call myself old bug-free software
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or as close as you can get, of course, is super sexy. And I want a lot more of that in my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey life. I want to write it better and I want to consume it. And it just feels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Apple hasn’t cared about stability
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as much as they appeared to in the past. Now, why is that? It could be any number
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of things. Maybe it’s that they’re spread thin, not necessarily in terms
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of people, but there’s just a lot more going on in all of these OSs, like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot more stuff, like take a silly example, like handoff, like handoff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a thing where you can have a device nearby and your two devices will talk to each
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other. I think via iCloud and say, and my phone will say, Oh, I’m looking at such and such URL,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then my Mac will say, Hey, I see your phone is physically nearby. And it’s looking at such and such URL. Would you like to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey open that here? Like that in and of itself does not seem that inherently complex
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and in many ways is very, very useful, but that’s adding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a complexity that none of us had Apple us, you know, anyone a few
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years ago and I don’t know. I just feel like as the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OSs have been getting more and more and more involved and more and more and more complex,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there has not appeared to have been a commensurate interest or increase in interest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in stability and quality assurance. And it’s getting to the point that just a week or two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, I wish I remember what I was doing or what happened, but I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a fleeting moment, like, I can’t put up with this anymore. And I want to say it was something on my phone and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really really really wish I remember what it was and for a Fleeting moment just for a second. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought I can’t put up with this anymore. This shit never works
⏹️ ▶️ John Let me tell you what you might have been thinking of because it’s exactly the last time I had this thought My wife’s been unlocking
⏹️ ▶️ John her computer with her series 3 watch because she’s got a high Sierra. She’s got a 5k max She’s got a series 3 Apple watch
⏹️ ▶️ John and doing the watch unlock thing and she liked it until it stopped working And why did
⏹️ ▶️ John it stop working beats the hell out of me? HDMI CEC might as
⏹️ ▶️ John well be might as well be because that’s type of thing like so that feature was introduced a while ago and it was tweaked for High Sierra
⏹️ ▶️ John right and this is example of the complexity of the case he was talking about it’s a complicated thing it is multiple operating
⏹️ ▶️ John systems multiple devices multiple wireless radios and all sorts of crap like it is ferociously
⏹️ ▶️ John complicated a complication that never existed in the old world there was like one computer that wasn’t even networked right let
⏹️ ▶️ John alone you know this your watch and people walking around and radios bouncing and trying to judge distances
⏹️ ▶️ John an authentication system, like so much opportunity for things to go wrong, right? But it’s a feature
⏹️ ▶️ John they chose to introduce. And I can understand it being buggy when they first put it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if this is going to be a feature that you have, like you say, you know, that you were going to ship
⏹️ ▶️ John this feature, you have to be committed to keep working
⏹️ ▶️ John on it until it works basically all the time. Because otherwise, why have the feature because features that don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John work all the time people give up on like Casey, whatever feature you were trying to think of, you’re just like, I give up, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is not that, you know, they’re very difficult to debug, you’re not sure what to do, you don’t know why
⏹️ ▶️ John it isn’t working. And at a certain point, you’re like, well, just forget it, then. Because if it doesn’t work
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time, I don’t want to be sitting there and wondering why it’s not working. But it’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it gives me like the message that watches it in range or try again, or whatever. It’s like, I’m sitting right here, like I always
⏹️ ▶️ John do. What’s a problem maybe I reboot both things and it’s like no I’m not gonna reboot I’m doing stuff I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to reboot the computer I don’t want to reboot my watch I don’t want to sign out of iCloud and you just give up on it
⏹️ ▶️ John that feature might as well not exist right it is either going to work enough that it is
⏹️ ▶️ John usable or it’s not going to and that bar is not met by a lot of things maybe Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John is one of those things for a lot of people is like I talk to Siri sometimes but she annoys me and doesn’t give me answers. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so I just don’t talk to her anymore, or I only have her set timers or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John do some sort of limited thing. And that’s, that’s the kind of failure you mentioned stability before
⏹️ ▶️ John and valuing like bug free software, and that’s kind of failure doesn’t show up in easy metrics. I think Apple software, and I mentioned this
⏹️ ▶️ John before, is much better about crashing and leaking memory than it has been in a long time, because those
⏹️ ▶️ John are easy things to measure. But these other kinds of bugs that are just kind of like, frustrating,
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing crashes, is no data loss, but sometimes it doesn’t work for inexplicable reasons, and it makes you abandon
⏹️ ▶️ John the feature. That’s really difficult for it to show up in Apple’s metrics, you know, because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is not as obsessive as some other as every iOS app is about
⏹️ ▶️ John tracking every single thing that you do as a user, like it’s not tracking your every motion and recording your screen and reporting it back
⏹️ ▶️ John to Apple, they are sending back crash reports and stuff like that. But and occasionally, they’ll ask you for system
⏹️ ▶️ John reports for bug things. But if people give up on a feature, and don’t end up using it, Apple probably
⏹️ ▶️ John has limited reasons, limited knowledge of that, or if they do not know about it, they don’t know what the cause is. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I would love to tell Apple, hey, Apple, we’re about to give up on ever trying to unlock a computer or other watch because it suddenly stopped working
⏹️ ▶️ John and I have no idea why. And that’s that’s a failure that, you know, probably
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t even show up on customer sat because you’re like, well, I couldn’t unlock my watch before and for a day or two, it worked. And it was
⏹️ ▶️ John cool. But now it doesn’t. Oh, well, I’m back to the status quo. But I think it’s a pretty massive failure to say, look, if you’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to have that feature, you got to make it work all the time. Just like typing your password in the text box works
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time, right? The watch has to be like that too, or just don’t have that feature or have a way to debug it or figure
⏹️ ▶️ John something out. But that that’s one of my major sources of frustration.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Coincidentally, watch unlock has been reasonably bulletproof for me, but, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t debate anything you just said. Like if that happens to be your bug bear, then yeah, you’re absolutely right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As you were talking, I thought of a couple of examples of when this was infuriating to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The first example, I’m trying to figure out how much depth I want to get into here. The first example was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I went for a run on Thanksgiving morning, and I did that in part because it was a day that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would normally go for a run if I hadn’t just recorded ATP. But beyond that, I wanted the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey neat little badge that you get if you do 5K walk, run, etc.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And when I did my 5K run, I never got my badge.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it turned out after talking to a lot of people, some inside Apple, some not,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it turned out what had happened was I had set my watch and phone to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey localized to Australia. And the reason I did that is because I want to be able to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey day-day slash month-month slash year-year like it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and still have everything else be the same like dollar for example now unfortunately I get metric in a lot of places
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m not here to debate metric versus Imperial which is weird because that’s one of my favorite pastimes, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But nevertheless I had my phone and watch that to metric excuse me. It’s set to Australia
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so Understandably and understandably it makes sense that I didn’t get an American
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thanksgiving thing on on, on a phone and watch that were set to Australia.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now I still disagree with it, but I understand it. Like if I’m standing in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey America, the thing has a, both of these devices have a frigging GPS on them. They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know where I’m standing. They know where I did that run. I can go into my health
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app right now and see the route I took that run on. So to me, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a stupid decision, but I can understand it. Nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I finally figure out, okay, that’s why. And then I set my devices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to America because I hear it’s getting great again. Can’t see it, but that’s what I’m told.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so I set it to America. It stings. I set it to America and the 2017
⏹️ ▶️ Casey badge shows up reasonably quickly. But the 2016 badge, which I had also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey earned from a walk, is nowhere to be found. And I learned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that if you just wait, it should magically appear. And guess what happened?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just waited and then frigging magic happened and it magically appeared.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like iCloud is a thing. Why is this not in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iCloud? Like why, why
⏹️ ▶️ John is this a thing? The Apple Watch is the Nintendo Switch of Apple’s devices, like super important
⏹️ ▶️ John data that people care about, like not actually real world important, but like important to
⏹️ ▶️ John people kind of like, you know, like you’re saving Zelda, right? In the grand scheme of things, it’s not important, like you’re not going to
⏹️ ▶️ John die from it, right? But to people who have sunk, you know, 100 hours into Zelda, it is
⏹️ ▶️ John super important. So those stupid badges on the Apple Watch for your achievements in the grand scheme of things, nothing’s going to happen
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to you if they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gone. But people are so angry if they go away. And so how does Apple protect what
⏹️ ▶️ John is perhaps the second most valuable piece of information they store first being their actual
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey data, but the second
⏹️ ▶️ John most valuable one being their stupid achievement badges? Oh, we’re not going to back that up. Oh, yeah, there’s a million things you can do
⏹️ ▶️ John to lose all that information. No, no, we don’t care about that at all. Same thing with Nintendo switch like no, no, you can’t back up
⏹️ ▶️ John your data. No, we won’t start in the cloud. Just if you and if you switch dies, yeah, you lose all your saves.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s such a dumb
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think like it stems from just I mean, Nintendo was inexcusable. has a history of doing stupid things, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, like, I don’t think they understand exactly how seriously people take those badges. Yeah. And
⏹️ ▶️ John how, how angry, how unreasonably angry people are when they lose their badges.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was me. I spent half an hour running. Well, ostensibly because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to get healthier, but also because I wanted that friggin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco badge. Yeah, you won credit, damn it. You worked hard for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. I wanted my treat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Max got his treat. I want my treat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, the point is, is that it’s a stupid thing, just like John said. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, maybe it is, maybe those activities or achievements rather are synced via iCloud, but why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did it take like 24 or 48 hours for that junk to magically come from the cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it actually is synced. I
⏹️ ▶️ John on device and I think they’re getting like Nintendo, they are getting better about it. Nintendo has actually
⏹️ ▶️ John said they are working their way towards sane cloud backups, which is should have had from day one. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think Apple will eventually work on this, but judging by how long it’s taken them to not deliver
⏹️ ▶️ John the iCloud message sync that they advertise for iOS 11. And again, another source of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John not just people caring about the contents of it, but just you know, baseline functionality, people expect that on
⏹️ ▶️ John all your devices, you see all your conversations that you’ve had anywhere, I think that has never been true about iMessage
⏹️ ▶️ John that they promised to make it true. Your achievements, your your silly achievements on
⏹️ ▶️ John your Apple Watch, they should be as bulletproof as your family photos. They should be everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should be able to throw your watch into the ocean and get a new Apple watch, put it on and all your achievements from all your past Apple watches
⏹️ ▶️ John should be there to show that yes, you had a 28 day streak of meeting your goals in 2015.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, why shouldn’t it be it’s such a small amount of data, and Apple should know how incredibly important
⏹️ ▶️ John it is beyond all reason to the people who do them like that’s the whole point. And that’s why they’re giving them the shiny little 3d
⏹️ ▶️ John things. It’s a silly token that we know will, you know, it’s like it’s like free to
⏹️ ▶️ John play gaming Like they’re exploiting human foibles to
⏹️ ▶️ John make you exercise more. And them being carefree with not preserving them
⏹️ ▶️ John with the same vigor that they preserve your family photos just shows a disconnect, like a misunderstanding of
⏹️ ▶️ John how, in one hand, they know how humans work, so they’re gonna make the system. On the other hand, they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John understand how important it is for them to keep this stuff in sync.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, I couldn’t agree more. The other example I had, and this, this one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could very well be a hundred percent on my shoulders, but. Thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a consumer and not thinking like a developer, it sure doesn’t feel like it is. And the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m having, and, and I’m the only one I think that I’ve heard complaining about this. So it’s maybe it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is me, but the problem I’m having is I’m getting to the point that I feel like I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey incapable of typing on my phone anymore. I just can’t do it successfully. I cannot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get a friggin sentence out on my phone without having a thousand typos. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey driving me insane. And half the time it’s autocorrect, doing something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey increasingly bananas as time goes on, which is why I think maybe it’s this weirdo machine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going well. Yeah, it’s really not. And I understand the thought process. It makes sense. It’s a clever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey idea, but I don’t think the execution is going well at all. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and again, I don’t know if it’s just me, maybe I just have fatter fingers than I’ve ever had despite all this wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey running I’m doing. Maybe I’m exercising my fingers as I’m running, so they’re getting fatter and fatter with muscle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Who knows? But whatever it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, whatever it is, I feel like I cannot type on my phone anymore without a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey billion typos. And it’s getting to the point that once we got SMS on the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is a great example of something that made my life demonstrably better, I mean that genuinely,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once I could send not only iMessages, but SMS from my Mac. It was amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the reason it was amazing was because I could talk to my, all of my in-laws,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey none of whom have iPhones, I could talk to them and send them text messages from my Mac on a full size keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it was magic and it always worked. And to be honest, to this day, it’s still almost always works.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that is an example of a feature that I think is very complex because the only thing that can send this SMS as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey far as I’m aware is my phone. I mean, it’s, but it’s very complex, but it works and it’s almost bulletproof.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, it’s gotten to the point with my iPhone that if I have to type more than like a one or two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey line text message, I’m going searching for the nearest Mac. So I can type it with a physical keyboard because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know at least then I’ll be able to do it without ripping my hair out. And I apologize if it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, but it’s a very clear example of a time when I thought about throwing my phone out the window or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really for fleeting moment thoughts to myself. So how bad are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those pixels these days anyway? And like, that’s, that’s a problem. I’m a super fan. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part of my living is talking about how much I love Apple. And I’m thinking to myself,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh God, maybe I should just, maybe I should put this aside. And you know what? The healthy thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do would probably be for me to try a pixel and realize that I’m just being a big baby and that really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really life is considerably worse on the other side, unless it isn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But who knows I know am I crazy on this like do you feel the same way I do
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s funny that you mentioned SMS on the Mac because I I have
⏹️ ▶️ John one person that I Talked to that I doesn’t have an iPhone that I have to send them as SMS to and I
⏹️ ▶️ John always do it from my phone because I can Never remember if you could do it from the Mac and every
⏹️ ▶️ John time I went to go check I’m usually at work like when I need to send SMS is this person every time I went to check at my Mac I
⏹️ ▶️ John would bring up messages on my Mac at work and I would find it signed out and I would enter
⏹️ ▶️ John my correct password to sign in and it would just say nope sorry I couldn’t sign you in sorry
⏹️ ▶️ John error failed couldn’t sign into iMessage and the only fix to this
⏹️ ▶️ John is for me to restart my Mac once I actually reset my PRAM but then I realized it was probably just
⏹️ ▶️ John the restarting of it that did it that’s how desperate I was but but anyway this is another one of those things of like hey does iMessage
⏹️ ▶️ John work on your Mac yeah most of the time most of the time like I send and receive messages on when the messages
⏹️ ▶️ John application on my Mac at work back and forth to my wife, you know, it’s nice to type on the big keyboard, just like Casey, right? Here I am doing
⏹️ ▶️ John messages. But every time I think, Oh, I should try SMS from here too. And I bring up messages.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it just get the little the thing pops up and says, and wants me to sign in and has like, you can skip this process. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I realized I am permanently signed out again, something having to do probably with hardware IDs
⏹️ ▶️ John and VPNs. And the fact that it’s on Wi Fi and ethernet at the same time when it’s plugged into the dock,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t I’m like all sorts of guessing about what could possibly cause the iMessage to be confused. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, I restart, I log back in, usually restarting fixes it, and then I get a notification on every single one
⏹️ ▶️ John of my devices that says, you just signed in with your Apple ID to iMessage on blah blah blah, you know that message
⏹️ ▶️ John that on all my devices, which makes you think it has it has reprovisioned a new private and public key for that one computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the type of thing that like, you know, messages, it’s a thing, it’s there, it works. I’m not abandoning
⏹️ ▶️ John it because the utility is still too high, but it bothers me that it’s not as reliable as AIM on ADM
⏹️ ▶️ John was for like a decade.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, in your defense, SMS relay is like its own dance that you have to go through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on each computer and iPad and whatever iOS device that you wanna do it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on. So like I actually wrote a post in late 2014, which we’ll link in the show notes, as to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey song and dance you need to get through in order to turn this on. And this is just for SMS, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John not iMessage. does it just
⏹️ ▶️ John proxy through your phone? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey not actually correct.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that sucks. Oh, why? Well, maybe that’s this is the this is the answer that I can never get to because I was permanently
⏹️ ▶️ John always permanently signed out of messages. But it’s I’m good to know that this is must have been what I was forgetting about
⏹️ ▶️ John this, right? That it actually does. Yeah, that’s a bummer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You should read my blog, john. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And I remember you’re horribly blurred out screenshots, which you should never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever do. I was looking at this right now and gagging. Actually, it’s funny you say that I was just looking at it and going,
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, this before as a thing that people don’t appreciate doing Mac OS reviews for so long
⏹️ ▶️ John that I didn’t have blurred out screenshots. And you know how hard that is? It’s really hard.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, I don’t doubt
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It’s really hard because personal information is everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but yeah, but the point I’m driving at is, you know, in some of these things, like I forget how complex
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they are and how reasonably bulletproof they are in SMS. Like this is happy Casey, right? Like SMS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey relay is an example of that. It has to send my SMS to my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because as far as I understand my phone is the only thing that can actually issue an SMS to my carrier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and This stuff works. I use it all day every day and it works great. It is almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flawless but if I actually want to send an SMS from the friggin device and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sending them for if I want to type a Text message on my iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It only gets through without typos Maybe one time out of three and it’s driving me insane
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if you can blame the autocorrect that aside from the silly can’t type the letter I think I know they have had some wonkiness
⏹️ ▶️ John with it But you sure it’s just not a new size of the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey because you know it very well Maybe size it could
⏹️ ▶️ John be your thumb reflexes are off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it could be but I feel like I What it feels like and again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is maybe all in my head, but it feels like The way they that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the accuracy checks on, on key presses either got less
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forgiving or, or, or I don’t know, something happened like two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or three, maybe even four versions of iOS ago. And I used to type really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accurately, like around the time of the six. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was like the six S or something like that, where everything took a turn. And all of a sudden
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just could not type anymore. And it’s just been getting worse and worse. worse and you would think like between the six S and my seven,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would get better. And yes, I agree with you that when I go to the 10, maybe that it would,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would have a moment, you know, I would, I would have to retrain myself a little bit. And I think that that’s some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it, but I feel like just the way. The way it detects my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey key presses it used, even if I was wrong, it understood what I was doing in like the five
⏹️ ▶️ Casey S six era. And now it’s either less forgiving or it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey changed the way things work and I have not been able to retrain my brain. I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey able to retrain my brain on the home button but I can’t retrain my brain on the keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John You need to turn to my mom and just start pressing that microphone button and talking to your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Transcription is really
⏹️ ▶️ John good. That’s the only way she types into these things. She talks to it in a very stilted artificial sounding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. Well, thanks to our three sponsors this week. Hover, Away, and Eero.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we will talk to you next
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was accidental. It’s accidental And you
⏹️ ▶️ John can find the show notes at atp.fm And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M The anti-Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to Accidental, tech podcasts so long.
Post-show: Casey on Cars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And episode 250 is when it all took a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turn. What a great episode Spectacular that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was can we talk about anything that makes us happy? You know when I’m getting fired up about things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then you know, it’s bad. Yeah, it’s something is not
⏹️ ▶️ John good Yeah, our after show is only one thing Casey on cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh Yeah, that’s a thing that that turns out that I completed my video So if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you haven’t watched it help I put I put a link or I will put a link in the show notes I have released
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Casey on cars episode 1 Which is on the Alfa Romeo and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey response has been exceedingly positive which I am super thankful for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, I think that I’m still only within my own audience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there was a comment that came through. Let me I’ll have to see if I can find it really really quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I may not be able to. But there was a comment that somebody wrote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in that seemed clear to me that it was someone outside of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my audience. And they were like, this is garbage. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, here we go. BMW is a copy of an Alfa already 40 years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think this person is not a native English speaker. And you Apple headphones just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show how much you know about quality. Okay. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Apple headphone? Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AirPods? So basically because I thought an Apple product, much less AirPods,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were sufficient for this video, obviously I don’t know what I’m doing. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obviously we’ve talked this to death, we don’t need to go back into it. I understand the foibles, or many of the foibles of the video,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but if you hadn’t heard me talk this to death, that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the sort of comment that an obnoxious YouTuber would write, And thus, I think that particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey individual may have come from outside my audience. But everyone else, even like the pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey critical ones from, I could tell it was somebody who knew who I was, right? They would say, oh, you know, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really does have crappy audio and you got to fix that. But you know, whatever. Like that, that to me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sounded like it was my audience, whereas this one did not. So anyway, as we sit here tonight, it’s over 10,000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey views, which is super good for several reasons. One of which is you can start monetizing once your channel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gets 10,000 views, which is excellent. So I am in automated review last I looked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway with YouTube. So hopefully they will let me monetize soon. Um, and I don’t know if I’ll ever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make any real money off of this, but it would be nice to make more than zero and we’ll see what happens. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John once you click that monetization button, you’ll find out that there’s a brief clip of distant music, copyrighted music in
⏹️ ▶️ John the background, and you’ll immediately be demonetized by machine and everyone strike against your account. And then you’ll have the real YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John experience, which by the way, I have had, I think I already have one strike because copyright
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff. Nice. Yeah, my channel is still under review as I write this. But yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the response has been really, really, really positive, and I’m really, really, really appreciative
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it. And the general response has been, oh, this wasn’t near
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as bad as I expected. In fact, I think Mark Wood said that to me privately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco somewhere. Yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think I chose more gentle words. But yes, that was my opinion of like, I was expecting it to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way worse because it was your very first video of this type and you don’t have a history of making videos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this and so like right I thought I was really thinking it was gonna be a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more painful and it wasn’t painful at all like there was some audio that was bad, but you know we knew, but you already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco warned us about that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and and the fact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like you know the bad audio like yeah it does detract from those scenes, but it’s you still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can watch them and enjoy what you’re saying like it doesn’t like totally ruin it it just it’s noticeable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the video overall like it was great because you actually nailed the writing and the commentary.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s very kind of you. And that’s what we’re watching for, you know, like that’s, you know, you you had said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in our last talk about this on, you know, on our last after show, you had said like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you think you had something here with the story and everything, and I didn’t know like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether that would come across in the video because it takes a certain degree of skill and sensibility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of doing videos to have what you’re saying or what you’re trying to say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come across, but it did. You did it. It worked and it was really good and like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know as I said to you, I think privately and in my tweet mini review about it like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, there are some things that could be better about it, but like for a first video it’s incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good like it’s way better than I would have guessed. It’s way better than my first video was by a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mile. And yeah, I think you have something here. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether it reaches other people or not, or whether one random YouTuber said something bad about it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t need to care about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need to care about now is making this a thing you do if that’s what you want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You might decide it’s not for you, that it’s too much work or whatever. I hope you don’t, because it turns out, I think you’re good at this, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you can be even better with more experience. And if this is a thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want to keep doing, I will reiterate what I said last time, which is find a reason to keep doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Find other cars to review. Review your cars that you already, you have like seven cars in your garage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Review your dad’s cars. Go to Cars and Coffee and talk about cars there and talk about why you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are excited to see certain ones and why they are interesting. Because anybody who’s ever hung around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you in real life knows that you are basically always hosting a car show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey No matter where you are, no matter what you’re doing, no matter who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re with, you will point out a car on the road and be like, oh, that’s one of those. And you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco explain, and you are enthusiastic about it, which is step one. And then step two is you will explain why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s interesting or what’s cool about that car. You have the ability, if you want to record yourself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on video talking about a car, you can do that in lots of different ways and times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your life for lots of different kinds of cars that have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty wide diversity of what makes them interesting. And you don’t have to do only new cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don’t have to do only high-end cars. You don’t have to do only European sports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cars. You can review the used minivan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that your friends might have or something. You can review any car you come across, any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car you might have access to for a few days. Whatever you need, you can do that, and I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you should. And your job right now is not to have this one video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get tons of views and then eventually, you know, hundreds of cents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of income. That is not your job for this. The job of this video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is A, to get you starting making videos, and B,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to start your YouTube channel. But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not… It isn’t meant to get big yet. Getting big takes time. Getting an audience takes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. Getting an audience worth monetizing takes time. Newsflash, you’re going to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey this video. Oh yeah, oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know. Even if you get approved for monetization tomorrow, it has already had most of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco views it is likely to have because that’s how YouTube works. That’s how most things on the internet work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And YouTube rates, it’s funny, when podcasters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see the view counts on YouTube videos, we’re just like, oh my God, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to get on YouTube. When YouTubers hear about the CPMs we charge for podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads, they run to us, oh my God, we have to get a podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because YouTube views are worth so little. They do have lots of them, but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth nothing. So you know, this is not going to be a money-making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco venture for you, probably for a long time if ever, But your job
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now is to have a creative project that might eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco become a money making venture, but you should only keep doing it if you enjoy the creative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco project part of it, because that’s all it might ever be. And if it is a money making venture,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not going to be a life changing amount of money for a long time. It might be like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I don’t even know what to expect with, because I don’t know what kind of numbers you might expect. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a meaningful amount of money to have a meaningful effect on your life and whether you can go indie full-time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which you totally should, and things like that, is you need to be making thousands of dollars a month from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think thousands a month is unlikely for a while, especially if you’re gonna only release one video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a year. I think tens to hundreds a month
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is where you’re probably gonna start if you keep it up. And then if over time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you build up a bigger audience, then you can start talking about real money, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s a long way into the future. Right now you need to focus on, is this a thing you wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep doing? And if it is, keep doing it. Start making more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car videos. And they don’t have to be big productions like this. They can be small ones. It can literally be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you walking around cars in Coffee Weeks, you do every weekend anyway. It can literally be that and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give a 45 second overview or a two minute overview of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one or two cars that are there that are interesting and tell us why.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I totally hear you. My intention is to do Erin’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car next and I’m starting to contemplate what do I have to say about Erin’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car. For those that maybe fast forward this section, usually she has an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost brand new 2017 Volvo XC90, which is a big, slow, well, reasonably slow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SUV. It’s probably faster than John’s computer. Everything is. I mean, our phones are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyway, I think the idea is to do that next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for several reasons. One, I have access to it. Two, it’s kind of the polar opposite of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Alfa Romeo. And three, I’m telling myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to try to get that done by the end of the year. I don’t think I’ll succeed, but I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to try. We also have some other big things happening at the end of the year, so that’ll really throw a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco wrench in things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But… Yeah, newsflash, you’re getting nothing done by the end of the year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I know. But… Don’t worry about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. I’m setting a goal of myself. I’d like to spend the next week or two coming up with kind of the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe literally, the storyboards, because that’s one of the regrets I have with Yale Formeo is I never spent enough time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really thinking about, until it was all over, really thinking about what I wanted to say, so I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of filmed everything and hoped I could make heads or tails of it after the fact. Obviously, I think I did an okay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey job, but it would have been better if it was more deliberate. But anyway, I want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey review Aaron’s car and see what I can make of that and see if I can make something interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of that because an Alfa Romeo is rare and interesting to begin with. If
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I drove up to you or to Underscore and borrowed a Model S, that’s interesting just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it’s a Tesla. I’m hopeful that I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still be interesting with a more run-of-the-mill car. And granted, a brand new Volvo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SUV is not strictly run-of-the-mill, but compared to an $80,000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alfa Romeo, it’s considerably more run-of-the-mill,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? This is like me going to borrow a 75D and like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, this is now the consumer-level accessible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know what I mean. You know what I mean. But yes, your point is fair. point is fair. Um, so anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll see what happens. Um, I, I hope to stick with it. One of the, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d like to hear John’s thoughts, although I’m scared to, uh, I’d like to hear John’s thoughts in just a moment, but I thought it would be interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to note that a couple of the things that I expected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or that I, that I found most unexpected really were that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the little portions I put in of Declan and Aaron seemed to resonate almost more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than anything else. Um, which is not a bad thing, it’s a good thing. But what occurred to me only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because a whole ton of people said it to me was nobody else really pays attention
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to what their families think or how these cars work for like regular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff or anything other than one driver. And I was just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey telling the story of this is what I did. I put a car seat in it, I drove my family around in it. And I didn’t really think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of of it as like a formal statement about what they thought. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seemed like a lot of people hung on to the fact that I was talking about more than just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, the meathead, petrolhead, whatever, more power, more power.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the other thing that I thought was interesting was part of the reason I put it on the Lyft, which was actually at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my dad’s house, part of the reason I put it on the Lyft was because that’s something that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most car reviewers don’t do. Savage Geese does it generally speaking, but most car viewers don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do that. And since I have access to it, I thought, okay, I’ll do that. And I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get as much of a response off of that as I expected, which is fine. And I was actually talking, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking to a friend about this and the friend had said, you know, if you were looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for content to cut, the lift might’ve been the first place to look because you talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how there’s really nothing that’s interesting to see under the car. And then you talk for, you know, a couple of minutes about,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, all the stuff that’s under the car. And so it’s either, you know, pick a story and maybe you should have just cut
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And during the editing process, I wasn’t planning on talking about this, but something that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just occurred to me during the editing process, I was trying real hard to get it closer to 10 minutes. I landed at about 13
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a half and it started after my first cut at about 15 and change. And I was able to get it down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some. I don’t know if you knew this, Marco, but it turns out when people talk at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one X, that’s like really friggin slow. I would like try to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make a point that I felt like was two sentences and I would look at it in Final Cut Pro and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it looked like it was like 30 seconds of talking or something like that. It was just insane how much time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it took for me to talk. Like I, oh man, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was tough. Yeah. Try to get a three-page marketing brief into a two-minute sponsor read.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, exactly. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was weird in that sense. But I really enjoyed the process and I do plan to do more of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And by saying this publicly, I know I’m not going to get this thing done by the end of the year, and at that point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll have a new kid, which means everything stops for like six months. But I’m hopeful that I will be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey able to find the time, since I’m going to be taking some time off work, when the new baby is asleep
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for ten minutes at a time, I hope to find the time to be able to put together something about Aaron’s car,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’ll be a good next step.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will throw in one more thing here. You mentioned that people commented
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and liked Aaron and Declan’s role in the video and that you put a car seat in it. And I think, first of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all, I don’t watch YouTube for cars, so I don’t know if this is a common thing, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a feeling you’re probably the only reviewer who put a car seat in this car in your video.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s the only one I’ve seen. That doesn’t mean it’s the only one, but it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only one I’ve seen. Right, but and so secondly, I too, I mean, and I was just assuming this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is maybe because I know know your family, but I thought like the parts of Aaron Declan, especially the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look of displeasure that Aaron gives you, those I laughed my ass off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at that point. Those humanize the video because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need a human, like this is one of the things that made Top Gear so successful, you need a human
⏹️ ▶️ Marco element. You can’t just talk about specs and just hear engine noises and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know show the car over and over again. People care about other people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what makes videos interesting. That’s what makes podcasts interesting. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people will come for the content, but they will stay for the people. And the people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the personalities and the humanity in it are what builds and keeps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an audience. And so, that’s not something you should ever shy away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from. If anything, you should try to figure out how to add more of that. Like part of the reason why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the writing of this video was so good is because it was a lot about you and your humanity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about your identity with cars and the stick shift and everything else. That was a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco major part of your theme of this video. And that’s interesting because you’re a person and people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like other people and their stories and their emotions and their personalities.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s an element that you should have in all of your videos. And you should definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not try to minimize cut out those segments. If anything, you should have more of those,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least if Aaron doesn’t kill you first.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I was doing a real disservice to Aaron because there were only a couple times I filmed with her
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the car and the only thing that I thought was particularly useful or interesting was this kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of snarky comment from her. And for anyone that’s met her, like, it is clear that that is not,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, I don’t think anyway. It’s not her normal, you know, she’s She’s not normally snarky. She’s usually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey super nice and super effusive. And it was just so funny to me because this was just like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I just thought it was hysterical. So I apologize publicly to Erin for kind of not putting her
⏹️ ▶️ Casey best foot forward, but I thought the moment was worth it because it was so funny. And yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree. I didn’t realize that playing the family hand, which I was doing just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of because it’s part of it, was going to play so well. And so, you know, if possible,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll probably play it a little harder further, whatever the analogy is I’m looking for, the turn of phrase I’m looking for.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll probably do more of it next time. But all right, John, lay it on me. Where did I go wrong?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, Margaret did his video. I told him everything that was wrong with it, and then he never made another video. So I don’t know if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Spoiler, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John why. Well, anyway, I could go on like that about yours, but I think, like, in the
⏹️ ▶️ John interest of time, like, well, one thing— I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s where I went wrong is I didn’t have an interest in
⏹️ ▶️ John In the interest of time, I’m just going to give you a couple of highlights. But I do think that because the YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John comment section was mostly populated by friends and people familiar with the show and the background and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there was less terrible people
⏹️ ▶️ John totally. And I think actually the sort of the wisdom of crowds of all the people kind of got,
⏹️ ▶️ John they hit most of the major things in aggregate, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So but anyway, the three I would highlight is in no particular order.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you did you write down the script for this at a time?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I started like storyboarding and I mean that literally, I think I put it on like an Instagram
⏹️ ▶️ Casey story. So there’s nothing I can link to. But I did draw like little boxes and storyboarded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it a bit on like, on one of the last days I had the car. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in retrospect, I think if I were to do this again with like a borrowed car like this, I think I really need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to take one or two days off of work and spend one day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like thinking about in storyboarding, what I want to film and spend the next day actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey executing on it, because what I did this time was, was like I said earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically just film everything I could and hope that I can. You know, piece something together afterwards. And there were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a few places where, even though the video as it’s posted right now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does have a bit of a story arc. I had to like bring certain pieces
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forward or back and make them slightly awkward because the video I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had. I, I needed to use it to fit. So as an example, I started talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the transmission, if memory serves a little earlier than I intended, because that was the moment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I had gotten in the car and I knew enough to know that I wanted to have Jason Kamisa of Motor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trend shut his car door in his video and then have me shut the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car door to be the transition back to my video. But because that arc
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t play exactly when I wanted it to, it ended up making the story arc a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little bit awkward.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, what was it to say about the, the, the script specifically, not so much about the video, which I got to a second, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John script part, as you noted, like it’s, you take a surprising amount of times to say things, And so when you write
⏹️ ▶️ John for television or movies, you can’t write naturalistically. You have to
⏹️ ▶️ John compress meaning and compress everything down because you don’t have enough time
⏹️ ▶️ John for people to speak the way they normally speak, unless you’re making a specific genre of movie
⏹️ ▶️ John where that’s the whole shtick is that people actually are naturalistic. But it takes just so
⏹️ ▶️ John long. You have to, everyone has to say everything that is essentially like, I took what a normal person would say
⏹️ ▶️ John and boiled it down and these three paragraphs become one extremely well-crafted
⏹️ ▶️ John sentence that conveys all of the plot points, all of the character notes,
⏹️ ▶️ John all of the foreshadowing, and all of the nuance in this one line. And it’s a pain to write like
⏹️ ▶️ John that because that’s not how we talk. So I would suggest
⏹️ ▶️ John try, I mean maybe this won’t work for your process, but at least try to see if this is a thing that works for you to actually
⏹️ ▶️ John script it ahead of time. And when you script it, you can’t even write it like a blog post, you have to write it like a video,
⏹️ ▶️ John what I’m getting is that writing, writing for video is different than writing for your blog, and it is way different than speaking. And I think that will let you
⏹️ ▶️ John get things tighter. If you want to use inspiration for someone who’s process you probably are familiar with and listening to podcasts,
⏹️ ▶️ John just think of gray and all the time he spends wordsmithing his narrations for his videos and how tight they
⏹️ ▶️ John are, you know, because he’s just getting rid of needless words, compressing the idea down, finding a way to get in
⏹️ ▶️ John and out. And he does talk quickly to second thing is, as many people pointed out in the
⏹️ ▶️ John comments. I know you’re more enthusiastic about cars than the person I see in this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey video talking about cars. Many people said that,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I mean, I mean, the thing is, you’re more enthusiastic on this podcast about cars, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s just, you know, being on camera or whatever. I don’t know what the solution is there. I have no idea how to do it. But that as a viewer,
⏹️ ▶️ John that definitely comes across. I’m like, Casey cares more about cars than this. Not that you seem nervous because you didn’t seem relaxed,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like maybe too relaxed. You need to get worked up. Coffee.
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is, you need way more footage, which I know sounds terrible, because I’m watching
⏹️ ▶️ John this video, I’m like, oh God, this must have been so much work. I’m looking and I’m like, oh, how many hours? I watch it and I can see how many
⏹️ ▶️ John hours you’re putting into it. And yet, what I think when I’m watching it also is, you need so much more
⏹️ ▶️ John footage. And you can tell that if you ever do like a graph out, like just pick, you know, go to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John a crappy DeMiro video or a Harrison video or any car video that your
⏹️ ▶️ John favorite thing is, every time they’re talking about anything, they
⏹️ ▶️ John never talk for more than three words before cutting to another angle of the car. And it’s not always like, how
⏹️ ▶️ John can I show what I’m talking? I’m talking about the gear shift. What am I gonna show except for the gear shift? You have to cut to something.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you’re talking about, as many scenes with you standing in front of the car and just talking, you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to cut to 900 different things during that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Driving on a
⏹️ ▶️ John road in the sunset, driving in the rain, pulling out of the drive, like, and you don’t think about it, but go
⏹️ ▶️ John watch another video and like, see how many times they cut to, sometimes a completely unrelated
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. And why does that work? Because unlike, like when I watched this video, it felt a lot like I was listening to you on a
⏹️ ▶️ John podcast where you were a little sleepy. Cause I know what you sound like on podcasts. You sound like this when you talk about cars, but on podcasts,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s nothing to look at unless you’re staring at Marco’s ever-changing chapter art, which hasn’t changed that often. So don’t stare too much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But- Well, except when I embedded a video in the theme song that nobody noticed.
⏹️ ▶️ John I noticed it. A lot
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco of people noticed it. No one else
⏹️ ▶️ John noticed it. No, they tweeted about it, didn’t they? I was excited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by it. No, they really didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, well, wait, what did you do? I did. The reason
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I look for it is because someone
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey someone else mentioned it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it was someone in a slack mentioned it and I and I went and dug it out because I didn’t notice it. I don’t look at the chapter either.
⏹️ ▶️ John But someone said, Hey, did you? I like what you did with that. You know, the video and the whatever chapter. And then I went
⏹️ ▶️ John and looked at it because somebody said it might have been someone in slack. But anyway, when you’re watching a video
⏹️ ▶️ John and listening to you talk, your eyes are like, Come on, feed me to what do you got for me? you got for
⏹️ ▶️ John not that you’re not attractive standing in front of a car, but they need to be fed. And so if you have to cut to completely
⏹️ ▶️ John unrelated footage of the car driving down a road and going around a curve and going past
⏹️ ▶️ John the high and going past low and a drone flying over the car and pulling into the driveway, like that has nothing to do with what you’re saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the eyes need to be fed. And you don’t think about it. But like I said, go go pick your favorite car video
⏹️ ▶️ John and pick a section where they’re just talking about something and they don’t have any actual appropriate footage like they don’t have anything
⏹️ ▶️ John more to show you and watch how many times they cut to just unrelated footage of the car driving. And when I watch those videos,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, this is a pleasant thing for my eyes to do because while I’m listening to your words, I’m also looking at, oh, I haven’t seen
⏹️ ▶️ John the car from that angle. Oh, look at that. Oh, that’s a pretty tree. Like your brain needs to be fed in a way that
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t need for podcasts or whatever, because it’s all sort of going on in your head, or maybe you’re doing dishes, or whatever. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think those are the those are the major those are the major things, much more footage and much more cutting, more enthusiasm
⏹️ ▶️ John and write like you write for TV or movies, not like you talk in real life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s all completely fair. And one of the one of my goals for the next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video, be it Aaron’s car, something else entirely is I need to do better about, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, B roll of outside the car. I need to do better inside the car too. But particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I need way more to your point, you know, if the car driving down the road and that’s a little scary,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? Because I don’t have any roads that I can think of where I can set up like an expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey camera or a GoPro or something like that and be 100% confident that it’s not going to get knocked over or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. And it’s just a huge amount of work. Like the
⏹️ ▶️ John footage you shot for this is already a huge amount of work and there still wasn’t enough. That’s what I’m saying. Like it takes so
⏹️ ▶️ John much effort to make like one second of, you know, one minute of podcasting. You just talk for a minute to make one minute
⏹️ ▶️ John of video. You have to shoot video for what seems like hours unless until you become good at it. And I don’t know the solution, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like, that’s, you know, that’s what it like, make the video half the length and shoot seven times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and, you know, that’s also why, like, a lot of times video involves multiple people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it’s really hard to shoot good video by yourself. It’s possible there are ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to work around that. But it’s, it’s way harder, and oftentimes requires way more either leaps of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco faith or fancy equipment or something to achieve certain effects or outcomes that like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco normally would just take multiple people to do so you can do it, but like you know you the example
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like you leaving a camera while you drive past like on a tripod like yeah the better solution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is to have another person at that camera and even even it’s even if it’s on a tripod have them running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the camera so that you can just drive by or have them drive in the car drive past you and you run the camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a reason why video tends to take a lot of people to do at a professional level and yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I would just echo you know most of the times that I totally agree with the having a lot of footage to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cut to was a huge issue for me when I did my crappy laptop video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it like I didn’t have enough footage to cut to and I kept trying to shoot more and I just didn’t really I just couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get enough I wasn’t laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John are less dynamic than a
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah because what the car things shoot to is they just shoot two pictures of the car driving and I find
⏹️ ▶️ John like when I’m I was so much more conscious of it after watching Casey’s video that I was like scrutinizing all these other because I do watch
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of car reviews on YouTube. Like, how do they do it? Let me look at it. And the thing is, they just show me the car.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m like, every time they show me the car, I’m looking at it because it’s a moving picture. Like in the magazine,
⏹️ ▶️ John the same way I look at every single picture of like the interior of the car in the magazine and look at the picture of the wheel
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m always, you know, pinching to zoom on my paper magazine and it doesn’t get any bigger and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco being frustrating. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m staring at those photos. I want to see as much, I’m not there at the car. You know, I don’t, the whole point of this video
⏹️ ▶️ John review is I don’t have this car. I don’t even see this car in real life. I only see it in the video, so I want to see it as many different ways
⏹️ ▶️ John as possible. And I have no objection to listening to a personal story unrelated to what I’m seeing on
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen, but also seeing this car from a bunch of angles and how it looks and how it sounds and how it feels
⏹️ ▶️ John and what it’s… the sound of the blinkers inside. What does the parking brake sound like when you pull it up? What is it?
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, all these sorts of things that, like, you could shoot and you’re like, but I don’t have any place in the video where I
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about that. It’s like, don’t worry, just put it in there somewhere. I mean, you try to make it fit, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you need to feed your eyeballs. what needs to happen.